They help with recognition of people and social aspects, but it's not clear that either of those things are things we want here. I mean, one of the preference options here is to turn names off.
I think there's a potential that this would be a positive change, but there needs to be a lot of groundwork establishing that direction as positive.
They help with recognition of people and social aspects, but it's not clear that either of those things are things we want here.
There could be configuration options for those that share your sentiments - but I think thumbnail images should be on by default - especially when viewing user pages.
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!