Several times I've tried to find out what pronoun to use for someone with an ambiguous name, by looking through their comment history, and failed to find that information. It would be nice to have a quick way to get to someone's post on the Welcome thread, as a sort of profile, or at least regular account profiles that contain this information.
As it is, using "they" to refer to a specific person, guessing incorrectly, and posting a comment to ask which pronoun to use are all socially discouraged. Using names every time works, but is sometimes awkward.
This makes me wonder if there would be value in a top level post discussing the implications of social anxiety arising from lack of clear gender markers. I have an unverified hunch that gender-related privilege plays a role in this, too.
I'm not any kind of regular here but is "they" really discouraged? Why?
In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!