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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)
Address the “meet-up announcement overload” problem on the promoted feed.
See:
I also posted about this a while ago. My recommendation is that there be a user preference menu shown when signing up (and editable later):
-=Menu=-
[ ] Show all upcoming meetups
[ ] Show only meetups in my area (reveals form for inputting area)
[ ] Don't show upcoming meetups
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
And what happens when we have a regular weekly or monthly meetup in every English-speaking city of more than two million? I've noticed that the regular meetups (LW/NYC, LW/Bay Area, LW/London, et cetera) don't bother to announce every meeting. New users have to know to look at the wiki page.
Maybe this proposed widget should include these regular meetups (with links to the relevant wiki page) for all events within the next three weeks.
Provide a solution for polling in posts and comments. Something more elegant than using multiple comments + a karma sink.
An +/- agree button partially fixes this.
I would like my saved articles to be in a collapsed format of just the titles.
I want to be able quickly navigate my saved articles, and see what I may have saved a long time ago, rather than going through multiple pages.
If other people prefer having a few paragraphs to remind them, then a "collapse, expand" button could be added.
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.
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.
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.
I reflexively select-all whenever I load a page on LW.
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.
I voted up even though anything that demotivates other posters at the low end of top-10 karma works to my advantage in this somewhat arbitrary race.
In the mean time, those suffering from this can check the "top contributors" sidebar.
There's a delay!
Fix this 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".)
Please, please keep the color scheme. It is restful.
EDIT: removed other suggestions to put in their own comments.
There's a lot of stuff in here I'd like to upvote, but as the OP mentioned, it would be best to split up suggestions into their own comments.
Editing.
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.
While I mostly like the color scheme, I think the gray on the sides looks kind of sad. I'd like to see it a bit darker.
Make colors user customizable perhaps?
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.
The "Help" link should open a wiki page in a new window, rather than showing some hard-coded stuff in a box under the comment. That way, it can be as long as it needs to be, and anyone can add to it. (I also agree that it should be renamed to Comment Formatting)
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.
I have a visceral negative reaction to all the random things people want to use "karma" for. Also I have no idea what The Nebulous Community (TM) wants to use karma for. It seems to be a "numbers go up people get happier" + anti-spam + anti-troll + "posts and comments have numbers why don't we sum them" metric. Do I have that about right?
I tend to treat it as an automated implementation of the Status system humans have but doesn't work well here due to Dunbars number type problems.
yep.
Tentatively-- a separate count of accomplishment points which are given for posts and comments about getting something done.
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/
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.
Posts, of course, can be previewed by saving them as a 'draft' before publishing to the discussion area or the articles area.
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?
Also, it would be nice to have a preview option for comments.
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.
Some way to handle extensive footnotes, as luke noted. I'm fine with making them collapsible (and probably collapsed by default).
I recently added some nifty JS to my own site to deal with extensive footnotes by floating them when the mouse hovers on a footnote link; eg. the footnotes in my Terrorism is not about Terror essay.
Of course, this Jquery stuff requires the footnotes to be actual hyperlinks to footnotes, which is a Pandoc Markdown extension, so this may not be a very practical suggestion, but would go well with a hidden/collapsed footnote/reference section.
Neat, but not very keyboard-friendly and a bit fickle for long footnotes.
I kinda like to think of footnotes as parallel text and use them that way myself, but I haven't yet seen a decent way to implement this. Platypope (link to random article to demonstrate it) embeds them into the sidebar, which kinda works, but again has length constraints.
It's no less friendly than it was without that JS; it's 'progressive enhancement' which builds on the existing textual hyperlinks, which means it ought to render fine (like before) in text browsers (like ELinks, which I use from time to time).
Mm, not fond of using that much horizontal space. Wouldn't work on LW because we are already using that sidebar for a ton of stuff. Might be able to fit it on the left though.
Oh man, I need to figure out how Platypope is doing that so I can steal the code. (Mouseover notes serve a comparable purpose.)
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.
I disagree; the current site design is decent enough, but falls over in terms of fitting on screens. See my comments and screenshot in http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=240#c4
So I'd like to suggest the graphic redesign make LW a little more visually compact. It doesn't have to be optimized for cellphones or as compact as a random page on http://www.gwern.net , but it'd be nice if it didn't take 2 screens to see one permalinked comment.
I agree that the single comment view has more boilerplate up top, but otherwise I'd say it usually fits on screens without any trouble.
I was curious about your comment so I took a look at the screenshot. You say in the bug report that you're using a "fairly small font" setting but the font is being rendered much larger for you than I see using default IE9 and FF4 settings. Plus your picture shows the page with a serif font while the CSS specifies sans-serif. I'm not sure if it's a browser issue or if you're using custom settings, but in a 1600x900 view (as your screenshot size is), I can see the full comment without scrolling.
Mostly I'd like to know if other people "take 2 screens to see one permalinked comment" because I agree that reasonably short comments should be visible without scolling.
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.
I had never even noticed the [-] button until you just pointed it out.
A separate section for singularity related topics.
A prediction market in which you bet karma.
Could you spell out what you mean by this?
See Prediction market. Presumably the currency would be your current karma score. He might not intend a full blown market, possibly just a system of organized betting. Robin Hanson is quite fond of this sort of system since it does a good job of tracking who is making good predictions and who is not, and aggregates the collective intelligence of markets to get better estimates on possible events. I'm not sure how well this would work given that karma is being constantly added into the system.
Yeah, I know what prediction markets are, but I'm not sure what James' proposal is, exactly.
There are lots of ways of setting up a prediction market, here is the simplest: Imagine that it will soon be objectively determined whether X=1 or X=0. There would be a separate section in LessWrong for karma bets. In this section you could offer a bet, i.e. I give you 20 karma if X=1 and you give me 10 karma if X=0. One would click on this bet to accept. The sum total of all your karma bets couldn't, at the time you made a bet, exceed your total karma.
An administrator would have to decide what events could be bet on, and which side won each bet. I would be happy to do this, although of course Robin Hanson would be the best person for this job. I don't have the skills to help you with the programming.
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.
Less Wrong does not currently collect the information necessary to determine number of viewers. The closest available approximation is pageloads containing the comment, but that doesn't give information about how much of the page the reader scrolled through, or how quickly, which would be necessary to determine what they actually looked at and read.
Does what you say apply to posts, or just comments? I mostly meant posts.
I would hope that enough LWers read entire posts to make an even imperfect implementation worthwhile.
It only applies to comments. Reading a post is a separate pageview, as long as there's some text below the fold.
It would be nice if the front page lists posts in order of their promotion, instead of order of their original posting.
An easily accessible toggle to show/hide all karma.
Isn't this already implemented, as the Anti-Kibitzer in the preferences section?
I suppose so, though I was envisioning a more convenient and instantaneous toggle for certain situations times when you think karma might be heavily affecting your judgement. Not a big priority.
Several times I've tried to find out what pronoun to use for someone with an ambiguous name, by looking through their comment history, and failed to find that information. It would be nice to have a quick way to get to someone's post on the Welcome thread, as a sort of profile, or at least regular account profiles that contain this information.
As it is, using "they" to refer to a specific person, guessing incorrectly, and posting a comment to ask which pronoun to use are all socially discouraged. Using names every time works, but is sometimes awkward.
I think the ideal solution to this is to have a field like "location" and "website" that one can fill in.
How about something for those of us who prefer anonymity..
Edit: I meant those of us who prefer anonymity but still want to post some personal information.
Don't fill in the field?
*nods*
The field should be a text box, not a radio button or a dropdown list.
Ideally, I'd like it to be labeled 'pronouns' rather than 'gender', but that might be non-preferred for signaling reasons.
Agree strongly with the signaling concern. Also, it helps prevent smartalecks filling in something like "second person" or worse "first person plural".
'Gender' isn't much better at dealing with smart-alecks or outliers, actually. If I'm in an odd enough mood on the day that's implemented, I might fill in the box with 'yes'. Or 'no'. Or 'blue'. 'Female' doesn't always suit me, and unlike with pronouns there's no obvious non-male non-female answer to that one.
If the field isn't filled in, then posters are still stuck with a situation where what's wanted isn't obvious.
Tentative suggestion: a text field in profiles for preferred pronouns.
Radio buttons might work best:
Is it? I wouldn't have thought people here would react negatively to that.
Auto-expand "article navigation" instead of hiding it by default, so it's not so unobtrusive.
Meh, that only makes sense for The Sequences, for "normal" posts it'd be a bit distracting.
Alternatively, you could rename "Article Navigation" to something more self-explanatory, perhaps "Navigate to Similar Posts".
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.
In particular, numbered lists are a problem, and iirc, so are linebreaks for poetry.
Maybe have a markdown option for toplevels - this one throws new posters off regularly.
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 have mixed feelings about this-- public voting has a lot of possibilities for drama.
On the other hand, possibility for drama = chance to work on rationality.
And it's an option. One can remain anonymous, currently and under the proposal above. If one finds it too dramatic to go public, one can unpublicize.
I meant that there could be drama between participants about what votes have been given. If there hasn't been, it either speaks well for rationality levels here, or means that most people haven't found that feature.
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.
I think the search box has trouble with deeply nested comments. That is bad.
Make it easier to skip around in user comment history - by month, for instance.
An option to display average karma not just total karma. This should probably count main page posts as 10 posts for this purpose.
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).
I've got the link syntax pretty much in my fingers now (except for not yet being able to touch-type square brackets), but it was a pain until I had it memorized.
The markdown for quoting and for emphasis is a lot handier than html.
Make this an option in user preferences maybe. I personally find Markdown much, much, much more intuitive than HTML.
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".
I would make a poll to determine the dichotomy, not leave it up to this (graphic?) designer.
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).
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.
Click "parent".
No, Alicorn. "Spy on son."
Mom, I keep telling you that you need to read the sequences. Many of my posts won't make much sense if you haven't, even if you do read the rest of the thread.
Alicorn was referring to the Parent link that appears under comments, which refers to the parent comment-child comment relationship. The reason you aren't seeing Parent links is because you're reading a user history page, rather than the comments feed or a comment permalink. If you follow the comment permalink from that page, you'll get a view of that comment and its replies, from which you can click Parent to go one step up the thread.
In case you didn't figure it out, I thought you were making a joke. As Jimmy pointed out, I don't see "parent", because I look at his history and don't read the sequences. I have been corrected.
Make it possible to search a single user's posts.
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's already possible to sort comments by timestamp rather than karma, but this might still be useful.
In the meantime, you could try sorting by "Old" or "New"; the menu can be found at the bottom of any post, before the comments box.
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.
The extropians list, in its early days, was a focal point for intelligent discussion about transhumanism issues, and I think it ended up being crucial in producing the thinking of both Eliezer and others like Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg. There currently is no such focal point anywhere on the internet, but a LW subreddit could be one.
Whatever the redesign is, I think it would be helpful if clearly marked section were added which consists of basic instructions on how to use the site's functions and what those functions do.
I would have found such a quick reference handy when I first started browsing the site.
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.
Not exactly a design issue, but still a matter of user experience: if a thread gets too deep and the site shows a "Continue thread" (or whatever it says) link, that link should load the rest of the thread into the current page using JavaScript, instead of sending you to a separate page to continue it.
(This may or may not be worth doing in an AJAXly way; it may work fine to just include the entire thread in the markup originally sent by the server, hide it with CSS by default, and have the link render it visible.)
How would you handle the increasing narrowness? Systems that enable really narrow comments are ugly to read. Livejournal's solution of drifting really narrow comments off to the right after the minimum width has been reached is really ugly and I don't know of any others.
Edit: Maybe the deep chunk of thread could float on top of the rest of the page somehow? (It'd have to be moveable and possible to scroll it alone)
Two separate links, perhaps?
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 often use "Old" so I can see things in the rough order they were posted.
Some of us use "Old" rather than "New".
Another one here who uses 'old', and it would seriously degrade my experience if that option were removed.
I also use "old".
Adding the option to not thread would be equivalent to being able to just see the most recent comments to specific posts.
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.
Have exactly the same markup for top level post than for comments (with possibly an option for editing the raw HTML or something).
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.
You can append "?context=100" to the comment permalink.
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).
RSS for the comment page can do that. Same for recent comments on a post. Still, actual html would be nice.
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.
There is a way: click where it says, "RSS feed for this page," then follow the directions to subscribe to the feed in whatever RSS reader you are in the habit of watching.
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.
They already are clickable.
I am ashamed to not have checked this.
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.
Add a how to use the site section.
It's possible that most of the difficult bits will be fixed, but on the other hand, new problems may be created. Perhaps the how-to should be a wiki.
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.
Make the Article Navigation controls less a buried add-on and more a coherent part of the overall site navigation facilities, since they are so irreplaceable for e.g. the important Sequences.
Reduce the amount of generic article boilerplate controls (which currently consist of LW heading/site nav/article heading/article byline/"You are viewing a comment permalink."/article footer/comments header/"You are viewing...") which appear on the pages for individual comments; use the freed space for more context, e.g. displaying the parent comment by default.
Add a facility to strip out font-related formatting (and otherwise simplify/cleanup HTML) from top-level posts, so that people can edit in their favorite WYSIWYG tools but avoid overriding the site styles.
Add a hierarchical categorization of tags so that it is not a jumbled mess in the sidebar.
Ability to have favourite users. Ability to give their posts and threads "personal karma". Similarly ability to killfile individuals, like you could in the old newsgroup days. (Or use "personal negative Karma").
Remove the links to Overcoming Bias.
Disagree.
They're not exactly prominent. It's perfectly common for blogs to link to similar blogs. OB and LW have a shared history and a similar approach; it's very likely that someone browsing the one will be interested in the other.
ETA: also, I for one sometimes actually use those links.
Use the whole screen. It's very annoying for lesswrong to show up as a narrow strip down the screen.
I prefer it this way. Really wide lines of text are difficult to track properly.
This could be added as a user preference, like it is in fanfiction.net.
I approve in general of people being able to manipulate stuff with preferences, but "like fanfiction.net" made me shiver.
FF.net does that, but they do it wrong. They do it as a fixed percentage of the screen, not a fixed max-width.
Does FF.net do anything related to usability right :)
Yes, they have a very simple interface. There are a fair number of sites that are hideously unnavigable just because the interfaces have so many options and are so colorful that it is hard to quickly move one's eyes over for what one is looking. FF.net keeps things simple.
...The text is readable against the background?
Score one for FF.net :)
Stop improperly presenting controls which immediately perform actions (Vote up, Vote down) as hyperlinks.
In the RSS feeds, show the parent comment's text along with each comment, so that it is possible to understand replies without necessarily visiting the regular site.
Add vote-up/down controls to the comment RSS feeds.
Add Atom 1.0 feeds. Atom 1.0 is much better specified than RSS, resulting in more consistent interpretations of feeds.
Allow comments and posts to be edited by other users, with restrictions, as in Stack Exchange. Build the expectation that this is used strictly to repair formatting and improve linking. It bugs me when someone posts malformed hyperlinks and they're there forever because the original poster doesn't fix them.
I'm not sure I want everyone to have this power. It could be a mod or editor power (editors can already edit toplevels and we have sworn to use this power for good, not evil).
The Stack Exchange conditions are that you have to be over a certain amount of “reputation” (karma) or have the edit approved by someone who is (or perhaps the original author — I don't know). I mainly think we should borrow the latter “suggested edit” mechanism — perhaps the original author or the site moderators would be allowed to approve edits.
Make tagging and browsing via tags an integral part of the user experience in such a way that hasn't been solved previously by a social news site...
What specific problems have you seen with tagging and browsing?
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.
Many sites have a hard time with this. It may be that it is just a hard thing to do.
I find searchyc.com very useful for searching Hacker News. Specifically, switching the results page to "sort by date posted" to find submissions and comments that were posted within the last week or 2.
The source code for searchyc however is not freely redistributable (open source).
The google groups advanced search would work as a starting template. I'd add choices for main vs. discussion and post vs. comment.
Add an option to un-thread the comments, to allow them all to be sorted by karma or timestamp regardless of parentage.
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.
Agree that the comment nesting is a bit too subtle, though of course we still want deep nesting to be possible, which means the main content well on the site should remain fairly wide.
I wonder if it would be easier to keep track if there were one or two more quiet pastel colors in the cycle.
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 also propose that the content be voted on. I think a lot of us have something to say about how the site is presented to newcomers and I'd rather it not be left to a single person. Perhaps a competition like the one for rational philanthropy, or even proper A/B testing.
Excellent idea!
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.
Trn or the equivalent. This would enable people to not see posts and comments they've already read unless they chose to, chose which other posters to see or not see, navigate comment trees.....
I suspect that if trn for the web were a Less Wrong project, it would also be useful publicity for the site, but this might be motivated thinking.
If trn is more trouble to code than it's worth, it would be nice to at least be able to just have recent comments for particular posts.
Public tagging, possibly with a karma restriction for who's allowed to do it.
This is an editor power. I haven't spotted an opportunity to deploy it yet - anything you think should be tagged differently?
I just checked the most recent top-level non-meetup posts, and most of them only have one tag. It seems to me that people's classification systems are sufficiently varied that letting people tag would accommodate the way they remember articles.
This helps develop consistent tags which can be very useful for searching. This works well for stackoverflow/stackexchange.
A micro-payment system so readers could contribute real money to an author as the ultimate sign of approval.
Like Flattr, or did you have something else in mind?
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.
This would have an interesting, and quite possibly net-positive, effect on discussions with trolls.
I'm not sure how well it would actually work in practice, but I'd kind of like to try it.
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.
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.
Currently, there is a way for filtering LW content to view only submissions from people on one's friends list (http://lesswrong.com/r/friends/).
This only displays original posts, though. I would like to see this extended to comments as well.
Spoiler tags, or maybe black-text-on-black-highlight tags, to replace the current fallback of rot-13.
Or built-in rot-13 switching in Markdown. (e.g. "%this text should be rotated%" -> "guvf grkg fubhyq or ebgngrq"). If this were deployed one could possibly even turn off spoiler hiding, and all text rot-13'd with this format would just display the original.
It should be easy to add built-in rot13 conversion as well:
Whenever you mouse over a rot13 section of text, it's highlighted in some way and the mouse becomes a hand. Clicking it will instantly rot13 it in place (and of course, clicking it again turns it back, since rot13 is symmetric anyway).
This is especially important because QuickRot isn't available for Firefox 4.
It would be very nice to see the first line or first few words of a collapsed comment.
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.
This, this, a thousand times this.
Does LaTeX support mean using LaTeX to generate images which are "transcluded" (inlined) into the text? This is better than using Unicode's math symbols? Really? Does Math Overflow have LaTeX support?
MathJax is one good option for implementing that.
Have a second karma bubble, that only sums the upvotes and downvotes you've given that person.
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.
Display negative karma when present for posters as well as posts.
Have a "show all comments" option on posts which displays all of the comments hidden by "load more 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.
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.
The dropbox file you linked to is not generally accessible. I can't access it.
It works now if you're willing to click on the thumbnail after clicking on my link.
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.
Have comments on the Irrationality Game thread not show up in the top comments.