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Official Less Wrong Redesign: Call for Suggestions
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:
- One suggestion per comment.
- Upvote all comments you’d like to see implemented.
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!
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Comments (565)
Remove the links to Overcoming Bias.
A separate section for singularity related topics.
An option to have links automatically open in a new window (i.e. "tab" with the appropriate browser settings).
I can't begin to count the number of times I've clicked a link, read through it, closed the page and wondered where the lesswrong article I was reading went. Based on how exceedingly difficult a habit this is to break I would assume many (most?) other sites open links outside the current window by default.
The standard behaviour of links since the web began has been to replace the current page with the new one. This is a strong argument for not making this change. However, often one does want to open a link in a new window or tab, which is a strong reason for making this functionality available in a web browser. So strong, that it has been done: Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer all provide this by the use of modifier keys with the click, and you can choose whether focus goes to the new page or stays with the old.
I probably use command-click (open in a new window behind the current window) more often than plain click, but even so, I don't want any one site to make that behaviour the default. I still need all three (open behind, open in front, or replace) from time to time, and having the modifier keys work differently on one site does not benefit anyone.
Also, the Kindle's web browser is incapable of handling links that open in new windows. So tim's suggestion would make LW unusable on the Kindle.
Blogroll / Side Bar Section for Links to Rationality Related Websites. I love Overcoming Bias, but it seems a bit biased that Overcoming Bias is the only other website linked from here.
Reply to this comment with a comment for each website nomination?
Hmm... maybe with this feature new links could be added by users (presuming a minimum karma criteria), and then each link other users could vote up and down, so that the ordering of the list was organic.
You Are Not So Smart.
PredictionBook
Measure of Doubt.
Unenumerated.
I don't like this idea. The choice of websites to put on the sidebar is likely to be contentious. What exactly qualifies a website to be endorsed by LW? How should a website be judged considering the various PR implications of endorsing it? Also, who exactly stands behind the endorsement, considering that LW is a group blog?
What's more, LW members already have the option to put website links in their profiles, and the websites authored or endorsed by prominent LW contributors are thus already given significant promotion.
It's not that significant. I watch my site traffic like a hawk and I get almost no hits from here.
FYI, I just tried to click through to your food blog from the link on your wiki userpage, and it is broken, I think.
I think I've clicked on all profile links posted by people on the top contributors list at one time or another (and many others as well), but I guess I'm an exception then. What could be done is to make people's profile links more conspicuous and directly accessible, perhaps as a part of making profiles generally more informative for those who wish to make them so. (I think someone already mentioned the idea of merging them with wiki profiles.)
A website has a specific goal that it's trying to uniquely achieve, and a general goal that places it within a community of like-minded websites. Less Wrong's specific goal is to refine the art of human rationality, and its general goal is to raise the sanity waterline. If other websites are successfully raising the sanity waterline, it behooves Less Wrong to link to them.
I agree that there's genuine challenges in selecting which websites to link to, especially for a community blog. But a community blog, if it meets those challenges, actually has the greater potential to choose a good set of links. Less Wrong should strive to have a better set of links than its sister site, Overcoming Bias. These links matter. It's a standard feature of blogs, and for good reason. I've discovered many great websites this way. Unfortunately, never via Less Wrong.
While I think high-karma Less Wrong users deserve promotion, it's not the only criteria for which promotion is justified. If there's a great sanity waterline raising website out there, it should be linked to, whether or not there's a high-karma Less Wrong user running it. On my own website I link to Wikipedia's argument fallacy list and cognitive bias list. Without digressing into a debate as to whether Less Wrong should link to these lists too, I'll merely point out that with the criteria you're suggesting, such links would necessarily have zero value. I think JGWeissman's proposal would choose the appropriate value for such links.
What I dislike most about the idea is that it gives some sort of official collective endorsement to external websites. One thing I like about LW is that except for the institutions that historically gave rise to it (OB and SIAI), it has no official doctrine and official endorsements. There are issues of broad consensus, but they are never officially presented as such. Thus, even if I have some disagreements with the majority on these issues, I can always voice my arguments without the unpleasant feeling that I'm invading the forum as an outsider trying to pick arguments over matters of consensus. (Which would constitute borderline trolling even if I'm right.)
Now, if there is a list of officially LW-endorsed websites, and I think some of them are bad and I don't want to endorse them by any means, raising such concerns would mean picking fruitless and frustrating arguments with the majority. And frankly, I think it is quite plausible that some websites hit enough "applause lights" that they might find themselves on the LW endorsement list, even though their intellectual standards leave much to be desired.
If individual LW members wish to promote external websites, I'm all for it. They can post links in discussions, and by all means allow them to post links in their profiles more conspicuously and prominently than now, not just to their own websites but also to a list of favorite websites. But please don't insist on an official list of collectively endorsed links.
This strikes me as the most cultish-sounding thing I've seen here-- more so, say, than the boot camp.
This may be unreasonable on my part since I don't have specific blogs in mind, but really-- in the huge universe of blogs, no others are rationalist enough?
We couldn't even settle on science and math blogs which would be of interest?
I dunno Nancy. I mean you start off innocently clicking on a link to a math blog. Next minute you're following these hyperlinks and soon you find yourself getting sucked into a quantum healing website. I'm still trying to get a refund on these crystals I ended up buying. Let's face it. These seemingly harmless websites with unrigorous intellectual standards are really gateway drugs to hard-core irrationality. So I have a new feature request: every time someone clicks on an external link from Less Wrong, a piece of Javascript pops up with the message: "You are very probably about to enter an irrational area of the internet. Are you sure you want to continue?" If you have less than 100000 karma points, clicking yes simply redirects you the sequences.
It's cultish to say we don't have a consensus on this?
You've articulated some of the problems of a blogroll well. Perhaps the blogroll idea could be evolved into a concept that better fits the needs of this community, while retaining its core value and simplicity:
1) Along side a link could be its controversy level, based on the votes for and against the link. By making the controversy explicit, the link can no longer be seen as a straight-up endorsement.
2) Along side a link could be its ranking based on say only the top 50 users. This would let people explicitly see what the majority vs. the "elite rationalists" thought - an interesting barometer of community rationality.
3) Split the "blogroll" in two - all-time most votes vs. most votes in the last week/month. This would alleviate the problem of staleness that Nancy pointed out. This is also nice because the links could be for not just websites, but any interesting new article.
4) Allow discussion of any link. Comments could warn users of applause lights etc. This is perhaps why the current voting system works well for choosing top posts, despite the problems you point out with majority opinion. A poor post/link can never get past the gauntlet of critical comments.
You could generalize this to the point that ordinary posts essentially become a special case of an "internal link". Anyway, enough about a technical proposal - at this point I'm reluctant to push any harder on this. An impression I have of Less Wrong is that it's somewhat of a walled garden (albeit a beautiful one!) and that such changes would open it up a little, while maintaining its integrity. The resistance people have seems to be rooted in this - a fear of in any way endorsing "inferior intellectual standards". What we should instead be fearful of is not doing everything we can to raise the sanity waterline.
I wouldn't do this. The top 50 users by karma score are more likely to be members who make a lot of comments than "elite rationalists".
The controversy meter and using recent votes are good ideas (I wouldn't split it, use only the recent votes).
What about 'links to blogs which discuss similar things and/or use a similar approach to LW'?
You feel a good bit more strongly about this than I do. I would be inclined to look for a mild recommendation to head the blogroll-- "possibly of interest" or "frequently rationalist" or somesuch.
However, your arguments remind me of another reason not to have a blogroll-- they generally don't get maintained, which means that they're likely to include discontinued and inactive blogs.
I agree. The link to Overcoming Bias is a special case, because LW used to be OB, before the site split into two.
A way it could work:
Have a section of the site where people can submit suggestions for the blogroll. This should be structured, with fields for a title, a URL, and a free form comment explaining the submission. The submissions can be voted on like comments, and the top 5 by voting score appear in the blog roll widget. The blog roll header can link back the submission section.
Meteuphoric.
Nomination: Common Sense Atheism.
Remove "Popular" and "Controversial" from the "Sort by" menu that's above the comments - I'd bet 99% of users only use "Top" and sometimes "New" (Plus for some reason, on my phone it's always set to "Popular" by default, no matter how much I change it).
I never even noticed the 'Sort By' menu. Thanks for pointing it out!
I used "controversial" to find this comment. keep.
The ability to transfer Karma between users would be nice.
Ability to specify reason for upvote/downvote with a feedback note visible only to the person being upvoted.
More subreddits, so that each post and comment is more likely to be seen and voted on by the sorts of people who would like to see it and who know whether it is good or bad than by other sorts of people.
Yes, but not yet. We do not yet have enough people to overwhelm either Main or Discussion with new good content.
Not all of the people who would be making good posts if we had subreddits are making those posts now. Subreddits might nudge them if nothing else. Some people primarily interested in, say, existential risks are probably being driven away by all the off-topic chat on the recent comments page.
Next to a user's name, display average karma per post instead of total karma (Total karma could be available, but not put in such a prominent place).
That would give everybody an incentive to post fewer, higher-quality comments.
If I worried that much about karma, I'd be posting nothing but jokes.
Get rid of the "post saving" feature, which takes up screen real estate but is probably used by a minority (though some people here say they use it, so I may be underestimating). Or hide the "Saved" link in the top bar unless you have actual saved posts.
(You could also make saving an option that can be activated / deactivated in the options, but I don't think the "Save" link under posts is as much a waste of "screen real estate" as the link beneath the header, which is distractingly close to other useful links)
Add Atom 1.0 feeds. Atom 1.0 is much better specified than RSS, resulting in more consistent interpretations of feeds.
Often I'll see that someone made a comment in response to what someone said as part of a discussion. If there's an easy way to see what specifically they are responding to, without searching through the entire discussion, I haven't found it. I know that one can also click on the name of the person being responded to, but if that person does a lot of posting, it can also be difficult to find that comment. A feature whereby one could click some where and be taken to the comment being responded to, in the context of the discussion would be helpful.
Replace the funny markup with plain old HTML. I hate having to look up the link syntax every single time, because it is completely unlike every other site I use (maybe it's just like Reddit, but I have blocked Reddit because it is even more of a time sink than Less Wrong).
If it's possible, I've always thought it might be helpful to have a second karma score that's a function of karma vs. number of viewers of the full post. Or simply a counter for number of viewers.
Edit: This would be points for a post/article, not necessarily for comments or users.
I made a sugestion in the discusion section some time ago, but it never got much atention, so I'll link it here. Consider it re-sugested for this context:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/544/problem_noticed_in_aspect_of_lw_comunity_bonding/3uhk
background: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/544/problem_noticed_in_aspect_of_lw_comunity_bounding/
The order of comments displayed should be random, at least you should be able to state this in your preferences.
This way, all comments will get equal attention, each comment will get glanced at and voted equally, instead of the comments with most karma being first (and most judged) and those with least karma being last (and scarcely looked at).
Edit: This should, besides, apply to all levels of comments: So all the 'top-level comments' should be random, all the answers to one comment should be random and so on if you chose the comments to be sorted randomly.
It would be nice if the front page lists posts in order of their promotion, instead of order of their original posting.
Enlarge / stretch the green karma button whenever the number doesn't fit in (mainly on individual user profiles with karma > 1000).
10k is even worse. at 1k the numbers start getting obscured a bit but at 10k it looks like you are seeing the karma score but you're actually not. Gets confusing.
Dupe.
Thanks for pointing out.
I would like to just say that in Firefox 4, none of the vote links (for article or for comments) work at all.
Aside from that, I feel that Recent Comments and Recent posts sections are completely useless. (Why would I want to see recent comments. And there is a page for Recent posts.) That whole right sidebar is pretty useless overall, except your own user status.
They work for me in Firefox 4 (Ubuntu 11.04 32-bit x86 distro build).
I also use the recent comments sections often - in fact, it's how I found this comment, by way of seeing Swimmer963's in the recent comments section. I actually use the recent comments section more often than the posts lists; it's a good way to see what's being discussed, which is a reasonable proxy for what's worth reading.
I use the recent comments section all the time. If I've already read all of the recent posts, I'll click on the recent comments and see if there are any I want to reply to. That feature is one of the things that actually allows discussions to start in the comment threads.
Is the site any less functional without JavaScript? If so, inform the user via a <noscript> tag that displays a conspicuous message: "This site works better with JavaScript enabled".
Ability to hide all comments from a user. I want to be able to put people on ignore and just as importantly I want people to be able to put me on ignore. Arguing on the internet is often pointless and the cost of avoiding said pointlessness is not negligible.
I worry about the effect this would have on understanding threaded conversations with many participants, or I'd be in favor.
My thought was make ignored comments do the same thing as highly downvoted comments. You can click on them if you really want to.
It is certainly a more viable option than attempting to implement the ignore feature inside the brain of the person you wish to ignore. That doesn't seem to work to well.
I'd like to see the site move away from the blog frontend.
It should start with an overview of rationality, some articles, and maybe the blog for people who want to discuss things further.
This might be good for newbies on their first visit, but if retention is the ultimate goal, it would quickly become redundant for the regulars to click through a static front page to get to the new content.
The ABOUT link under the header already serves the purpose you suggest.
Some way to get HTML entities (i.e. stuff like ∈ and ⊆, not stuff like <b> and <i>) - or something similar - to work in comments.
The top banner is way too big. When scrolled to the top, content begins halfway down my netbook screen. Most is spent on what is basically a visual in-joke about map and territory. Look to Reddit for an extremely tight banner/navigation area. Reddit's content starts a finger-width from the top of the browser.
Automatic flattening of linear segments of discussion. A comment that is the only reply to its parent should be placed at the same depth as its parent. This will make long mostly-linear discussions easier to read and avoid unnecessary shifting-to-the-right-and-beyond (i.e. hiding and extension to a separate page).
(This probably shouldn't apply to comments whose parent comments have siblings, to more clearly separate sub-discussions.)
Yes, but the boxes around the comments should line up directly instead of being separated by a gap as different comments of the same level are.
Use the whole screen. It's very annoying for lesswrong to show up as a narrow strip down the screen.
Cycle comment thread background colours through at least three distinguishable colours; unobtrusive colours like pale blue, grey would be preferable.
(In the current system we alternate between two colours, and active sub-threads can have many branches; it's difficult to follow visually. Clicking "parent" links is something of a workaround, but breaks the flow.)
(Edit: cf Nancy's reply below)
Tentative: people get credited with a small percentage of the karma from the comments to their posts and comments. It would be a way of getting karma for inspiring good discussion.
Add an option to un-thread the comments, to allow them all to be sorted by karma or timestamp regardless of parentage.
Ask the designer to find a solution to multidimensional "karma". I think the two most common axes requested are "more like this / less like this" and "agree / disagree".
Agreed. Maybe they can come up with some convenient way to say "I agree with this and have nothing to add" that isn't anonymous like an upvote (see Agreement button).
When you receive a reply to a comment, you get a notification. But when someone posts a comment on a top-level or discussion post you made, you get no notification. It would be nice if you could at least choose whether or not you'd be notified when someone posts a new comment on a top-level post you created, I usually stop checking mine after a week.
Good request.
Current workaround: Google Reader and the RSS feeds of any post you wish to follow. I have a folder full of lesswrong feeds. (Most of them are obviously inactive so invisible.)
A prediction market in which you bet karma.
Karma Bounties
LW seems to reward actually doing things disproportionally little compared to talking about them. My suggestion for this are "bounty" pools for doing various things, and when anyone does them they are rewarded the karma in the pool.
More info here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/56p/do_meetups_really_have_to_go_on_the_front_page/3wfn?context=4#comments
Example: someone points out a problem with the LW Source, but rather than nothing happening unless some hero does it by themselves, there is a consensus reached in the comments and someone ends up proposing a bounty, then many people who might not otherwise have been interested give a bit of karma, and the pool ends up much larger than could be expected to gain from just commenting out after the problem was solved and asking for it. This motivates someone to do the change, then an admin verifies it and the pool is given to the person who fixed the problem.
Provide a free-form text box for users to enter "user profile" type data.
People who care a lot about what pronoun gets used to refer to them can say so; people who prefer to be handled via Crocker's Rules can say so; people who have particular interests can say so; etc.
Variant suggestion: Merge LW and wiki.LW account systems so that each user's wiki user page can be their profile page.
Excellent idea! Get people to actually edit the wiki!
Yes, that too. The need to create a separate account on the wiki is an unnecessary technical barrier to casual contributions.
Spoiler tags, or maybe black-text-on-black-highlight tags, to replace the current fallback of rot-13.
A micro-payment system so readers could contribute real money to an author as the ultimate sign of approval.
Bitcoin?
Witcoin.com is especially relevant since it is a micro-payment oriented news aggregator site using Bitcoin. I've used it. It's not too great (low traffic, lowbrow content), but it demonstrates that the concept isn't too terrible.
Have exactly the same markup for top level post than for comments (with possibly an option for editing the raw HTML or something).
What sort of changes are on the table here, and in particular, does this include nontrivial programming? The person you linked to appears to be a graphic designer, which would seem to imply that this project is limited to or at least focused on stylistic changes, ie changes to the CSS and the HTML templates.
While there are certainly improvements to Less Wrong that would make sense, I don't think any of them are HTML or CSS changes. I don't think changing the visual style of Less Wrong is a good idea, especially if it costs money that could be spent elsewhere.
Trike's behind this effort, so non-trivial programming is on the table… but, we (I) need to be convinced that the benefit is worth the programming effort. Your votes here are strongly persuasive but not decisive.
Remove DV links from a person's "past comment" page unless viewed in context.
(After the recent comment thread dfranke sparked, I lost a large number of upvotes from my past comments, which were previously almost uniformly weakly positively ranked. I assume my previous posts had not suddenly reduced in quality, and that someone had simply decided to go through and punish me. Making people view a comment in context - one more mouse click - would make this unconstructive action less convenient and less likely.)
If we do that, we might want to remove upvote option from that as well.
I recently attended a talk by Alexis Ohanian, one of the Reddit founders, in which he led the audience to believe that, on Reddit, votes on past comments out of context only appear to work, but actually have no effect.
I have not tested this on either Reddit or LessWrong.
An easily accessible toggle to show/hide all karma.
I hope the aim will be to preserve the beautiful simplicity (and color scheme) of the current site. Honestly I don't think it needs a graphic redesign at all.
Whatever graphic design changes are performed, users should be able to revert to something resembling the old layout.
I find the nesting of comments within threads too subtle. I can't "see" the nesting and have to work at it.
In the context of programming languages the research (quoted in Steve McConnell's books I think) seems to suggest that indenting by 3 characters optimizes the ability to "see" the nesting. Currently it's one character only.
Increasing the nesting characters is not free of course as it leads to very deep indentation. But there are ways of displaying very deep nesting though eg displaying ! for every ten levels.
An option to display average karma not just total karma. This should probably count main page posts as 10 posts for this purpose.
It's now possible to check a preference to make your votes public. Currently all this does is collect your disliked and liked posts into two pages reachable only from your userpage; you cannot tell by looking anywhere on a post who publicly likes/dislikes it, and there is no support of the feature for comments. I would like this feature extended for people who prefer it.
I don't expect many people know this, but the font for the logo is called "Minion".
Given the accusations about us being EY's cult, I strongly feel that the irony is too wonderful to give up, and request that this be left unchanged.
Add LaTeX support (I mean inline LaTeX, not this thing).
EDIT: Based on comments below, I think I misused the word "inline". What I meant was simply the ability to type LaTeX directly into comments and posts. How it gets rendered doesn't matter much to me; some legitimate objections have been raised, but I don't feel like hard math gets used enough on the site that this would get out of hand. Restricting its use to posts rather than comments might be a good compromise.
We have that hack for when someone needs it, and in actuality, people don't write any significant amount of math here. If it was needed, I expect there would be some use of the hack. Since there is almost no use made of it, I conclude that it's not particularly needed.
So it's a nice thing to have, but very low priority.
Though it's possible people don't use much math because the hack isn't very well known. Perhaps the best idea is to not add MathJax or anything, but just to make more prominent in the help section how to do this. If people then actually make use of it, then perhaps we should add MathJax or something.
Get the green score-bubbles to cover the entire karma score, so that all the digits are visible.
Reason: I found myself less motivated to comment on LW after I got a fifth digit to my score. I think this is because it feels (to some low-level part of my brain) as though my karma now increases ten times as slowly. If this is true for others with five-digit karma scores, we might be pulling motivation from good contributors.
Why do we have tenfold karma for front-page posts, anyway, as opposed to say threefold?
ETA: yes, front-page posts draw in newbies in a way that is probably undercounted with onefold karma, but it's my impression that the collection of LW's comments is a lot better than the collection of LW's top-level posts (at least post-Eliezer), and so maybe we should just be directing potential new users immediately to the (good) comments instead, somehow. It seems to me that by having length as a de facto requirement for top-level posts, we encourage posts that take a long time to make their point and that go off on long chains of independent steps that have mistakes in them that could be corrected if they were presented in smaller chunks.
Maybe do a weird scoring rule that turns upvotes into karma points?
Like, a 1 upvote comment is 1 karma, but a 5 upvote comment is 15 or something.
Provide a solution for polling in posts and comments. Something more elegant than using multiple comments + a karma sink.
Polling seems (IMHO) to work very well given the current tech. Unpack "elegant" for me.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039 -- example of how polls work on Hacker News.
It should be possible to put an entire poll in one comment, with machine-readable distinctions between different replies; and poll responses should not interact with pollster karma. (It might be nice if one got a karma point for answering a poll, to incentivize participation, but that's not so much an elegance matter.)
An +/- agree button partially fixes this.
Minimal, fast, lots of white space - like the current design. I worry that a new design would add lots of clutter and hurt the site's speed.
There's a lot of stuff that could be removed to improve the site - the "new", "top", "top comments" and "saved" links under the header, the top contributor and links to recent OB posts in the sidebar, useless choices in the comment-sorting menu ("Popular" and "Controversial"), the "Report" links on comments, etc.
Best suggestion on the page.
I hate when unpopular comments get deleted, and all the replies lose their context. One alternative: a "Retract" button that marks your comment as retracted (maybe changes the text to a lighter color), stops the karma loss, automatically contracts the comment and its replies (like a comment below score threshold does), but doesn't delete the content for those who are curious?
I can think of problems with this proposal, so I'm open to other suggestions as well.
It's better to just forbid deleting comments that have replies. There is a ticket for that on the issue tracker.
One thing I'd really like to see: make the total number of upvotes and downvotes visible separately instead of just the difference. That way controversial posts and comments will stand apart from uninteresting ones.
Perhaps a collapsible "karma details" section, so that users still have the option to see a single number for each comment?
Please, please keep the color scheme. It is restful.
EDIT: removed other suggestions to put in their own comments.
I like it too, but think that just a bit more contrast would be good. Not a lot, but a little. As it is, it feels bland.
Have a way to show a specific comment without showing any replies to it.
I wanted to email someone a link to a comment today, and realized that they would most likely be distracted by the ensuing conversation rather than contemplating the comment itself. This feature would be useful in such situations.
Children seem to be counted inconsistently - sometimes the root is included and sometimes it's not.
I have an anti-suggestion: no skinning or other proliferation of options. Someone asked for the current graphic appearance to remain as an option, but the designers and those officially approving the redesign need to have (justified) confidence in their decisions. If they're wrong, and everyone thinks it's dreadful beyond mere status quo bias, then they can roll it back and think again. If the general response is that it will more or less do, well, it will more or less do. Everything above that is a win.
Not sure if this is too late, but it was brought up at the recent London meet-up and it does seem no-one has suggested it:
Make the sequences actually readable as sequences - there are currently no forward links on the actual pages, which is irritating, and navigating them does appear to be an issue for quite a few people.
There are navigation links, but you have to click open "Article Navigation".
Make the main LW site mobile-friendly, or implement a separate site version for mobile devices on http://m.lesswrong.com
Provide an ambient visual cue on how old a comment is. First idea is to add a subtle color tint to the background of each comment, that goes by the logarithm of the comment's age from reddish ("hot", written in the last couple of hours) to bluish ("cold", written several months or more ago).
Old threads occasionally get new comments and get readers in via them, and the date strings in the comments require some conscious parsing compared to being able to tell between "quite recent" and "very old" comments in the same thread by glance.
Awesome idea!
Canonicalize URLs: at the moment, there are several different URLs referring to most pieces of content on Less Wrong. Sometimes it's as simple as one URL having a slash at the end and the other one not; in other cases you have a post that was actually posted in Discussion, but due to (I think) a glitch where Discussion posts as listed on userpages actually link to the post via /lw instead of /r/discussion/lw, and the former works anyway, causing two copies to be indexed in search engines, and the same for every comment posted on them. Preferably, every such piece of content would have a canonical URL, and any other valid means of accessing it should redirect to the canonical form via FOUND or MOVED PERMANENTLY, or at least specify the preferred URLs to search engines via <link rel="canonical">.
Anonymisation of user names in the Anti-Kibitzer instead of hiding them. Not seeing any identificator of the author makes it difficult to follow longer exchanges, and I often switch off the AK because of that. So, instead of seeing something like this
which may be confusing if you don't know who has posted especially the last reply, it may look like
The AK could simply number all participants in a thread starting from 1 each time the page is reloaded.
Provide optional notification of nested comment replies to the parent comment's author (beyond the initial reply).
Currently, if there is a reply to one of my comments, I receive a notice. However, if there is a reply to the reply, and so on, I don't. These grandchildren replies are often still relevant and of interest to me, however. Having the option of being notified of them would be nice.
(Alternately, this suggestion would solve the problem also, though that solution would require an additional step from the author.)
The pop-up window you get when you click on a voting button before logging in always seemed ugly and discordant to me.
It would be really convenient to have a superior searching method for comments. I have frequently wanted to refer to a previous comment of mine from months before but have found it difficult to find (as I would need to remember the post it was on, search for that, then search for the comment, or go back page by page through my summary).
As far as I can tell, the "Show more comments above" link currently shows the parent, and all sibling threads. I would like it to give the option of showing more ancestors, so that after I've gone to a comment I can see the entire discussion leading up to it.
Example: "Show more comments above: 1, 2, 5, All."
UPDATE: After reading the replies, I am less sure about this idea.
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Make the number of upvotes and downvotes a scarce resource.
Before you click 'Vote up', you will pause and ask yourself, "Does this post/comment really deserve it?" People will use them only on those that "really matter".
Everyone would get a fixed number of upvotes and downvotes a day. This number could be the same for everyone or based on a formula. (I.e. number of upvotes/day = number of downvotes/day = 20*log(Karma Score)) for Karma Score > 1). Something like that.
Unused upvotes and downvotes couldn't be carried over or saved for later. Every day, the counter starts over. It's use 'em or lose 'em.
Sounds like a lot of additional stress without a significant reward in improved content.
From my informal understanding of human psychology these changes will make karma much more strongly desired. I don't think a spiral around karma is what we want; much more importance on karma, in fact, and we might see something analogous to what search-engine optimisation is doing to internet content.
Incidentally, what is search-engine optimization doing to internet content? I've noticed machine-generated non-content scoring pretty highly on searches, is that what you're referring to? Or are there more subtle, pernicious effects I'm not entirely aware of?
This is a pretty good overview - in particular, the last paragraph under the heading "The Downward Spiral: Industrializing OBP Exploitation".
Great, thank you! That pretty much matches my expectations, but the specifics were quite interesting.
Is content designed more specifically to be liked by others really a problem?
Ability to display images in comments.
I needed this when Luke asked for feedback on a writing sample.
I'm confused about the difference between "Promoted", "New", and "Top". When I'm not thinking about it, I default to "Promoted", but then I miss good posts.
I would like to see "Promoted", "New", and "Top" condensed into a single tab with a sort function on that page that allows the user to decide how they want to view it.
Same goes for "Comments" and "Top Comments".
The "help" button on the comments should include a link to a more extensive help file; probably both the generic Markdown help file, and a more specific one here (there's a page on the Wiki that does this, right?). (Including the more specific one to remind people that e.g. HTML doesn't work, and how to do that hack to include LaTeX.)
Fix the bug where permalinks to a post - even new ones! - do not work when a post is moved between subreddits.
Is there currently a rules page? If not, there should be a rules page and it should be readily accessible for new readers/posters.
Fluid width, please.
User profiles? Click someone's username, and get taken to a page with some basic personal information, such as sex, location, homepage, etc. that the user in question can provide.
The site is very good the way it is; between the threaded comment format and the upvote/downvote feature, the technical design of this site makes it much, much better for having conversations than the typical blog commenting system. There isn't much that needs to change - at this point, it's more important to avoid screwing things up than it is to try to improve on what's already there.
In comment threads, the 'show more comments above' link appears even if the topmost comment shown is the first one in the thread. It shouldn't.
Add a control to each reply that collapses the whole comment thread. Label it "[--]". That way, when I belatedly realize I have wandered into a dead end, I can move on to something fresh without much scrolling.
As a new reader, I would very much like to have a method for marking how far through the sequences I am. A dot next to read articles, or possibly a timestamp of last access could work, as could a button at the bottom of the article labeled "Mark as read" that would display the article title differently in the main sequence page. I feel lost when I hop around on different computers as to what articles I've read and where I have seen them before, and simply saving read articles every time is unsuitable for this.
EDIT TO ADD: Based off of what other commenters have said, I feel like a clarification is in order. What I'm looking for is a way to mark the sequence pages I've read, so that when they're linked to in the newer articles I can tell right away if I've read that particular post. Hopefully, this would work for both backward-linking sequences AND new posts that also link to sequence pages. Perhaps a way to store the URL of a read page, link it to my account, and when that URL is displayed again within LW a new graphic could show up to the side of the link to show that it has already been read.
Trailmeme for the sequences has approximately what you want, I believe.
This is an awesome idea! I've been reading LessWrong for years, but I still fairly frequently click on links within articles that look interesting, read the first few paragraphs of the article linked to, only to realize that I've read it before (sometimes a few times before!)
This might be too hard to implement, but here is the system I would like: a way to mark articles as 'unread', 'in progress', or 'read'. This information would be saved and links to articles that you marked 'read' would change colour. (Of course, maybe I'm the only one absentminded enough to need this!)
Exactly! My problem is that I read an interesting article, and when I come to a link I open it in a new tab to pick up the context before continuing. When I haven't read the article I learn something new, but when I've already seen the linked-to article I can't tell until I'm into the second paragraph or so. Then, I have to re-read the original to get back to where I was.
Perhaps better reading comprehension techniques would fix this for me, but I suspect that a lot of new readers run into this problem.
That seems useful. It might be good to have a notes-to-self field, too.
Comment preview.
Seeing the comment as it will appear before you submit would be very helpful.
My workaround for this missing feature (when I care enough) is to PM myself with a URL like
A link to the markdown rules should be printed right above the comment box.
I entered <a href="example.com">...</a> on my 1st lesswrong comment because I thought it would turn into a link. It did not. I had to search Google for "lesswrong markdown" to find the rules since they were not very discoverable on the site itself.
The "Help" link below the comment box does that.
Thank you. Should the new design make it more prominent, or was I just too careless?
It may be good to change the text to something that makes its purpose clearer than "Help" does, maybe "Formatting help" or "Formatting syntax".
Chuck the Help link right next to comment and cancel.
Make text more readable - especially in comments, since you can't use Readability on them.
Have the Article Navigation work in the discussion section. Currently it only works on the main page, and if you try to use it in the discussion section it will take you to main page posts with the same author or tag.
Be able to edit posts from looking at your own comment page.
Condense and reorganize personal items.
I have difficulty navigating all of my "personal" things such as my comments, drafts, preferences, saved, friends, etc. These are scattered about in a not very intuitive way.
I think that when you click on your own profile, it would be nice if the side-bar changed to include links to the different things I mentioned above. To re-access the 'recent posts' I would have to go back to the main page.
The ability to sort my own comments/posts by recent vote activity. That is, if I suddenly get a 20-karma bump or drop in my overall score, I want to know what caused that.
Use case: If upvotes and downvotes reflect "I want more of this" and "I want less of this" reactions, it is helpful to notice when they happen and know what posts/comment people want more/less of.
Event calendar.
Currently, the "Show more comments above" link on a comment permalink page stops working after some number of uses. This should be fixed.
Provide some sort of view showing the source of your most recent karma losses/gains, something like the notifications on Facebook. It's annoying when somebody votes up/down ten of your 2-year-old posts and you register a karma change, but have no idea of knowing where it came from.
Possibly dangerously addictive, though.
An option for shared authorship on posts, showing the names of both users and splitting the karma gains between them. The karma could be either split equally or in a manner specified by the user posting it. E.g. Morendil could have tagged me as 20% responsible for his post on status, and I'd have gotten 2 karma points for each upvote.
Provide the option to "follow" or "unfollow" any topic, so that you get all of the comments posted to it into your inbox. (Yes, there are RSS feeds for individual topics, but adding something to an RSS reader is an inconvenience and clutters the reader.)
Provide the option to view the Discussion section with the topics sorted according to the newest comment. (In other words, each new comment to a topic "bumps" the topic to the top, like on most forums.)
It's possible this was already suggested, in which case I apologize, but: the ability to sort my own comments/posts by descending vote total ("popularity"), ascending vote total ("reverse popularity"), and descending (upvotes + |downvotes|) total ("controversial"?).
Use case: If upvotes and downvotes reflect "I want more of this" and "I want less of this" reactions, it is helpful to notice when they happen and know what posts/comment people want more/less of.
(EDIT: Split into two suggestions)
You gave more than one suggestion-- they're both reasonable, but I've been wanting to track recent karma changes for my posts/comments for a long time.
Automatically detect linear threads* and format them in a different way, rather than the current optimized-for-tree-structure way. The difference might be as minor as not indenting, but there are probably a few other things that could be done as well, looking at various forums and bulletin boards for inspiration. Another thing one will likely want to do is to make continuing in a thread-like fashion is easier and branching is harder.
Add support for BBCode in comments, as well as those instant buttons to add the markup that many forums and bulletin boards have.
HTML works for top level posts, but for quick comments it's to elaborate and powerful. The LW specific markup on the other hand is not powerful enough for many things, and suffers problems from being very non standard.
It's not LW-specific -- it's Markdown. (Actually a subset of Markdown since Markdown proper allows inline HTML.)
Oh...
Well, I have never encountered it elsewhere which means at least some users are unfamiliar with it, and I see no conflict that keep both from being supported and mixed.
Get rid of the "Report" link under comments and posts. Some possibilities, in decreasing order of preference:
Just remove it completely, and handle spam and other crap by giving the moderators a page where they can easily see the recent comments that got a lot of downvotes (if they don't already have one)
Rename it "Flag" so it doesn't get confused with "Reply" (I bet that happens more often than people reporting spam)
Remove it for any post or comment older than a day, or for any post/comment that has positive karma.
Give users an option in their preferences (on by default) to hide the link.
It's good to have an option for the "something is going on here that probably shouldn't, a human moderator should take a closer look" case, even if it's not needed that often. I've used it on some spammers and an occasional drive-by gibberish trolling.
Calling it "flag" instead of "report" would help with the confusion with "reply", but on the other hand it's less clear what "flag" means. Since most users can safely ignore the option anyway, this is probably a smaller problem than confusion with "reply", so supporting this one.
A vote for the flag rename.
It would be nice to filter out post X's comments from the Recent Comments view.
Use Case 1: I'm browsing recent comments, but post X is new since I last read LW. I would rather read all of post X's comments in context, and not have them swamp the recent comments page.
Use Case 2: I'm browsing recent comments, but a particular thread that I'm desperately trying to ignore has been inspiring hundreds of comments that I'm actively uninterested in.
Show read/unread comments in different colors.