Hmm. I agree re. utility of drawing newcomers' attention to it. I'm still not sure opt-in is the best way to do that, when there are other measures that achieve this and bring other benefits (such as an improved "newcomer experience" - i.e. some kind of tutorial or page with suggestions) without any opt-out problems.
Put another way, if the goal is to draw newcomers' attention to something, then actually drawing their attention to it seems to me a better approach.
FWIW I don't feel strongly about participating in meet-ups either, but opt-out seems to be done wrong by so many organisations that I set the bar pretty high for what I'll agree is a reasonable justification. When all the purported benefits of an opt-out arrangement don't actually depend on it being opt-out, I am sceptical. :)
Sure. And I endorse skepticism in general.
A "newcomer experience" or "how to use this site" kind of approach through which all the bells and whistles are explained, so they don't have to be default-visible to get attention, seems like a fine thing. Upvoted that.
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!