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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)
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.
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!
Make the main LW site mobile-friendly, or implement a separate site version for mobile devices on http://m.lesswrong.com
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".
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.
Enlarge / stretch the green karma button whenever the number doesn't fit in (mainly on individual user profiles with karma > 1000).
Dupe.
Thanks for pointing out.
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.)
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.)
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).
The pop-up window you get when you click on a voting button before logging in always seemed ugly and discordant to me.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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".
Fix the bug where permalinks to a post - even new ones! - do not work when a post is moved between subreddits.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meteuphoric.
Nomination: Common Sense Atheism.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
It's cultish to say we don't have a consensus on this?
What about 'links to blogs which discuss similar things and/or use a similar approach to LW'?
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.)
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.
Measure of Doubt.
PredictionBook
Unenumerated.
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.
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.
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.)
Be able to edit posts from looking at your own comment page.
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.
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.
Event calendar.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Make text more readable - especially in comments, since you can't use Readability on them.
Threaded PM conversations. And received PMs appearing on a separate page in addition to the generic inbox that contains comment replies.
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)
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.
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.
Currently, the "Show more comments above" link on a comment permalink page stops working after some number of uses. This should be fixed.
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.)
In top-level posts, automatically replace "div" tags (which screw up the rest of the HTML) with "p", strip out all the font-specification crap that Microsoft Word and similar apps try to stuff in (the original font is good enough for everyone), and in general auto-simplify the HTML. This will save editors some work.
I request that we don't have a 'half HTML' markup language. If it is html that doesn't allow font formatting or layout handling then it basically is just not HTML and shouldn't pretend to be.
A far better alternative is to make the posts use full markdown syntax and a WYSIWYG editor.
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?
Might be easier to add "show upvotes/downvotes" & "show total score only" radio buttons to user configurations. That way those of us who want to see upvotes & downvotes in general don't have to click a collapsible link for lots of comments.
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.
Best suggestion on the page.
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.
Make a Welcome section that's clearly visible to first-time lurkers, and more helpful to them than the About page. PLEASE.
I think that the welcome threads are an important boon to new users, but unfortunately they're impossible to find as a lurker- the current fashion is to hope that someone notices that commenter X is new and says "Welcome to Less Wrong- check out the welcome thread!"
Unfortunately, there's a lot on the welcome thread that I think would be really helpful for someone to check out before they get to that point; and worse, much of the time a person's first comment is something that will get downvoted heavily for a reason they'd have known if they'd seen the welcome thread, and instead they end up in a flamewar and depart in a huff. THIS IS BAD.
I might expand on this idea with the general idea of, add a better "old-style website" portion to LW. Currently everything on LW is organized either blog-style or Reddit-style, which is not so great when you have things like important core pages you want everyone to be aware of - e.g. not only the sequences, but single-purpose threads (like the "best textbooks" thread) which, in the current blog-style format, might eventually be forgotten about and redone from scratch. Have a prominent "site map" style page that links to such things - the pages themselves can stay as blog posts, that's not a problem. Perhaps Eliezer and the other editors can have the ability to mark a thread for inclusion on this automatically, so people don't have to hand-code it in whenever there's something that merits inclusion.
To some extent the wiki acts as this, actually, but it's right now it's very hidden, not what a new user will automatically encounter. What if the wiki were the main page?
As an added incentive. I have committed to donating $50 to the hedonism fund (strictly enforced) of whoever's design gets used as the Welcome Page.
Have a second karma bubble, that only sums the upvotes and downvotes you've given that person.
Interesting idea, I'll up-vote it though it is not a top wish of mine.
If implemented I would like to see it implemented as a rollover on the karma bubble. Though interesting I don't think it justifies taking up real-estate.
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.
Also, please actually pay attention to these requests, and don't add stuff that you don't know the community wants without talking about it first. In my experience, site redesigns can easily lead to large amounts of drama over very minor issues. If we're trying to be rationalist we should keep that in mind and proceed cautiously.
This rationalist wants you to have a little faith in him :)
Faith earned.
Save the history of edited posts and comments, like a wiki; that would make it less of a problem to allow moderators or even high karma posters to edit comments (to fix broken links and formatting etc.), and would also reduce the occasional problem where a reply doesn't make sense any more after a comment is edited.
Also, don't allow deletion of a comment with replies.
Make a prominent "next" button on the sequence pages so you can easily go from one sequence post to the next post. There's currently a button but it is difficult to find and requires two clicks.
Address the “meet-up announcement overload” problem on the promoted feed.
See:
I'd be willing to code up a meetup-calendar site, though:
Here's another proposal for dealing with meetups: some sort of prominent widget that will show (only upcoming) meetups in chronological order, with links:
Upcoming Meetups
This would be better if it also used geocoding based on IP address to filter so it shows only nearby groups by default.
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.
Provide a solution for polling in posts and comments. Something more elegant than using multiple comments + a karma sink.
Please, please keep the color scheme. It is restful.
EDIT: removed other suggestions to put in their own comments.
Make colors user customizable perhaps?
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.
MathJax is one good option for implementing that.
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.
I want a preference (or a per-page button) to turn off collapsing when there are a lot of comments on a page. I don't care if it takes twice as long - I'd rather wait a minute than click "load more comments" 512 times so I can do a thorough Find for whatever I seek.
A "load all comments" button? That'd save bandwidth for most users but save you the time on those occasions you wanted to search content.
Yes, exactly.
Make it easier to skip around in user comment history - by month, for instance.
Have some way of seeing the most recent comments to a post even if they are answers to another comment (i.e. not just sorting top level comments) - something like the recent comments thread but for a single post.
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.
Show read/unread comments in different colors.
Have a "show all comments" option on posts which displays all of the comments hidden by "load more comments."
Have the possibility to watch certain topics (posts or comments) to get an orange letter when someone replies. This would be especially useful for top level posts you write (you don't get any notifications of answers, and have to go check), but would also be useful for special threads like the location (if I want to be notified when someone else says he's in France or something).
Upvoting the need for a notification when someone makes a top-level comment to a post you created.
To take playtherapist's suggestion and turn it into something that makes sense in context, there should be parent/context links on every version of a comment (currently these don't exist on user pages, just permalink).
Also, for navigational purposes, deleted comments should still have parent and permalink buttons.
Public tagging, possibly with a karma restriction for who's allowed to do it.
This helps develop consistent tags which can be very useful for searching. This works well for stackoverflow/stackexchange.
And on that note, I wonder if the discussion section would benefit from Stack Overflow-like suggestions of related posts. I love how ominous it is asking questions there: "Are you suuuuuuuurrre you think you've reeeaaaallly got something unique to ask?"
Since a lot of new people post in Discussions, it might be neat to use such a tool to show similar/related posts. At worst they get to read some other views on something similar, at best it might prevent redundant topics that someone thinks is unique.
Spoiler tags, or maybe black-text-on-black-highlight tags, to replace the current fallback of rot-13.
Add controls at the bottom of subthreads for collapsing the subthread, jumping to the top of it, or both. This makes it easier to navigate to the parent or above-sibling of a given comment without counting nested borders.
Fix this bug.
Indeed -- I had to independently figure that out the other day when a Discussion draft went lived. it also happened to a new poster who was being helped HERE.
Even without fixing the bug... a simply bit of text could go under the save button for the discussion template that says, "Save in the Discussion section = post! Copy this post and start a draft from the top level!" or something like that.
Or just fix the bug :)
Yes, please. (Since Eugine declined to spell it out, the bug makes it way too easy to accidentally post a draft when you intend to save it for later- in fact, the only way I know not to have it posted is to click "Hide".)
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.
One of my friends took a quick look at this site a while ago, and said that it looked like a cartographer community because of the banner.
Edit - please disregard this post
The banner must represent the map and the territory. I'm sure there's other imagery from the sequences that could be represented, possibly in rotation.
"Cartographer" was at one time considered as a synonym or replacement for "rationalist".
I just thought that people would be interested in the first reaction of a non-LW person to the site.
Edit: I totally want to bring that thread back from the dead and suggest 'intentional rationalist', but since it was two years ago it's probably lots too late.
Edit - please disregard this post
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)
When getting a link to an individual comment, instead of just showing the comment above, show the whole damn thread (or at least, all the parents). I'm tired of having to click on "Parent" a dozen times to understand the context of a comment.
We looked at doing this last year, but it's tricky due to another site feature - when a post's comment count gets large low vote comments threads get collapsed to "load more comments" links. It wasn't obvious (in the small time we put into it) how to make sure the comment you were permalinking actually appeared on the main post in its default state.
(It's obviously possible - just trickier than trivial.)
Simplify the top bar - I never use "Comments" or "Saved", and clicked maybe once on "top comments" and "top" by curiosity. Those kind of special links are good to have but don't need to be at such a prominent place, they could be at the bottom of sidebar (a bit like the "special" buttons in the wikipedia sidebar, random page and the like.
You could even have the "Recent Comments" and "Recent Posts" headers in the sidebar clickable, so you don't need those links in the top bar any more.
So the links at the top could only be "Main Page", "Discussion", "Wiki", "Sequences" and "About", reducing clutter a bit.
I use "Comments" regularly.
They already are clickable.
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.
Display negative karma when present for posters as well as posts.
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.
Make it possible to search a single user's posts.
Maybe have a markdown option for toplevels - this one throws new posters off regularly.
Do something about the "Help" link when writing comments.
A specific suggestion, change the link so it says "comment formatting", but definitely do something to make it clearly where to find the formatting help.
Add functionality to allow previewing of posts and comments. This would allow people to play with formatting without having to post horrible-looking things and then edit them while others might be reading and responding.
I had that issue a couple times. What I did was put this at the top of the comment:
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".
More details in the markdown help. Currently it only says how to do five things, so even people who find it aren't informed about how to do things like
skip only one line between paragraphs, or whatever.
The "Help" text should link to the Comment formatting wiki page that can give further instructions.
Some way to handle extensive footnotes, as luke noted. I'm fine with making them collapsible (and probably collapsed by default).
Provide separate discussion areas (subreddits?) for geographic subcommunities.
Google Groups and Meetup.com are currently used for this purpose by some, but this is not the most elegant solution. It sprawls LW content beyond the main site, requires learning how to use different interfaces, and puts us at the mercy of outside companies. The possibility of karma would also encourage more discussion among these groups.
Originally this was a separate comment; it's basically a rehash of childofbaud's comment though, so I moved to a reply:
Much stronger meet-up integration. Mailing lists shouldn't be offsite, they should be part of the site. Something like discussion section, but you put your location in as part of signing up, and gain access to a 'Location' section that operates the way that Discussion operates. Details are unimportant; the main part is that meet-ups need a more integrated system, the tools that meetup threads use (mailing lists, schedule-matching) need to be available on LessWrong, and being part of your geographically local group of LessWrongers needs to be opt-out, not opt-in.
I don't disagree about the benefits of integration and improvements to meet-up threads, but opt out is a fairly obnoxious way to manage anything. I don't see anything in those other benefits that requires (or even is improved by) opt out. I may be missing something though and am interested to hear why opt out improves them.
Any new arrangement should not be confined to one's profile location - consider travellers wanting to see if there's a meet-up coinciding with their travel.
The standard argument for opt-out is that it avoids the problem whereby newcomers don't realize the option is there, which seems relatively salient in this case.
Especially if the "Make it go away please" option is clearly labeled, I'm content with opt-out (speaking as one of the uninterested folk).
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. :)
I strongly recommend that people talk about what they like, so that there's some information about what shouldn't be changed.
At this point, there's favorable comment about the general appearance (and I like it very much myself) but there may be other things to hang onto as well.
A decent search system-- I'd very much like to be able to do searches which combine date range and/or poster and/or post/poster being replied to and/or string.
Another simple variation on the "marking things as read" idea: the ability to mark a post or comment as "don't care about this thread" so comments on it / replies to it don't show up in your recent comments.
People have already mentioned some way of marking comments as read. If that turns out to be too hard to implement, here's a simpler idea: The ability to set a mark time that corresponds to marking as read everything before a given time. And then - rather than autocollapsing everything from before then, as this is a crude tool - add a recent threads tool, that shows all comments from after that time which are not a reply to another comments from after that time - allowing you to just jump to the highest-level comments you haven't seen and read the thread, rather than digging back through Recent Comments to find them.
A lot of the suggestions here would require changes to the server software, but I have one that might be fixable by only HTML and CSS changes (e.g. by switching to a good old HTML TEXTAREA element).
Less Wrong has a bug that makes it almost impossible for someone in the habit of reading Less Wrong with large type to compose a comment without temporarily decreasing text size. The bug has definitely decreased the rate of my contributions. Specifically, at the larger text sizes, the rightmost part of the box into which the person types "goes under" and is consequently obscured by the sidebar. This screenshot shows the box going all the way under the sidebar and peeking out the other side. Although the screenshot shows Firefox, the problem occurs in Safari, too, and (for reasons unrelated to Less Wrong) Chrome is not a reasonable choice for a person who prefers or requires large type.
Drop the little skyline/boat grayscale image (mini-landscape.gif) that appears at the bottom of each top-level post. Original mention. Seems to have no purpose, and doesn't really fit the design theme.
It was an early draft of the map vs territory theme that became the site header, which we intended to finish but forgot about and published without further thought. Whoops.
Stop improperly presenting controls which immediately perform actions (Vote up, Vote down) as hyperlinks.
Allow users to read their own and others' comment histories more easily. This could be accomplished either by adding links to each page of a user's comments (rather than just the very limited "next" and "previous"), or by getting rid of the unpredictably-valued "after" parameter to allow easier URL hacking.
Example of the latter method:
http://lesswrong.com/user/Dreaded_Anomaly?count=10&after=t1_3uea links correctly to the second page of my comments.
http://lesswrong.com/user/Dreaded_Anomaly?count=10 redirects to the first page of my comments.
That's a database performance trick, which means that getting rid of it will increase database load.
What's happening is that, in order to jump a set number forward, databases have to perform the same query each time, but retrieve more and more records. It's like "jump to the start of this user's stuff, and read 10. Now go to the start, read 20, and give me the last 10. Now go to the start, read 30, and give me the last 10...." So performance gets worse and worse as you page through it, because each time the reads are repeating, and getting longer each time.
The "after" trick basically makes it so that every page is "jump to the spot given by the after tag, and read the next 10". Performance doesn't degrade as you get further into the list.
Alicorn's suggestion (of browsing by date) is probably easier to implement, in that the site could probably look up what "after" value to use, based on the date.
There's another reason we want this: Otherwise paging back through recent comments could end up skipping comments if new ones were posted in the meantime!
I'd like the expand/contract [-] button to be at the far left of the post such that they are left-aligned and you don't need to move your mouse far when closing a bunch of them. Someone suggested this for Reddit and they made the change that same day.
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.
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.
Also, it would be nice to have a preview option for comments.
Make it easier to read on a small device. This can be accomplished by making the width of the main column defined as a "max-width" in CSS and setting the viewport meta tag in the HTML.
Seconded. About the only way to make LW readable on my phone is by abusing the RSS feed, which is unfortunate because text-heavy content is otherwise a good match for small devices.
A micro-payment system so readers could contribute real money to an author as the ultimate sign of approval.
Bitcoin?