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.

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:

• 1) Meetup posts as discussion threads, please
• 2) Move meetups to the sidebar?
• 3) Do meetups really have to go on the front page?
• 4) Meta: Meetup Section of the Site

Provide a solution for polling in posts and comments. Something more elegant than using multiple comments + a karma sink.

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.

Please, please keep the color scheme. It is restful.

EDIT: removed other suggestions to put in their own comments.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Make it easier to skip around in user comment history - by month, for instance.

Fix this bug.

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.

Have a second karma bubble, that only sums the upvotes and downvotes you've given that person.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Threaded PM conversations. And received PMs appearing on a separate page in addition to the generic inbox that contains comment replies.

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.

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.

A prediction market in which you bet karma.

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.

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.

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).

Maybe have a markdown option for toplevels - this one throws new posters off regularly.

Some way to handle extensive footnotes, as luke noted. I'm fine with making them collapsible (and probably collapsed by default).

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.

Public tagging, possibly with a karma restriction for who's allowed to do it.

Make it possible to search a single user's posts.

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.

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.

Comment preview.
Seeing the comment as it will appear before you submit would be very helpful.

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)

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.

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.

Spoiler tags, or maybe black-text-on-black-highlight tags, to replace the current fallback of rot-13.

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.

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.

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'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.

Also, it would be nice to have a preview option for comments.

I find the nesting of comments within threads too subtle. I can't "see" the nesting and have to work at it.

In the context of programming languages the research (quoted in Steve McConnell's books I think) seems to suggest that indenting by 3 characters optimizes the ability to "see" the nesting. Currently it's one character only.

Increasing the nesting characters is not free of course as it leads to very deep indentation. But there are ways of displaying very deep nesting though eg displaying ! for every ten levels.

An option to display average karma not just total karma. This should probably count main page posts as 10 posts for this purpose.

It's now possible to check a preference to make your votes public. Currently all this does is collect your disliked and liked posts into two pages reachable only from your userpage; you cannot tell by looking anywhere on a post who publicly likes/dislikes it, and there is no support of the feature for comments. I would like this feature extended for people who prefer it.

I 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.

Have a "show all comments" option on posts which displays all of the comments hidden by "load more comments."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think the search box has trouble with deeply nested comments. That is bad.

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.)

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.)

Stop improperly presenting controls which immediately perform actions (Vote up, Vote down) as hyperlinks.

An easily accessible toggle to show/hide all karma.

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.)

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.

Display negative karma when present for posters as well as 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.

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

• I think that X.
• I disagree with your claim.
• Why do you think so?
• Actually I have changed my opinion.

which may be confusing if you don't know who has posted especially the last reply, it may look like

• User_1: I think that X.
• User_2: I disagree with your claim.
• User_3: Why do you think so?
• User_2: Actually I have changed my opinion.

The AK could simply number all participants in a thread starting from 1 each time the page is reloaded.

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.

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.

A micro-payment system so readers could contribute real money to an author as the ultimate sign of approval.

Have exactly the same markup for top level post than for comments (with possibly an option for editing the raw HTML or something).

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.

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).

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cycle comment thread background colours through at least three distinguishable colours; unobtrusive colours like pale blue, grey would be preferable.

(In the current system we alternate between two colours, and active sub-threads can have many branches; it's difficult to follow visually. Clicking "parent" links is something of a workaround, but breaks the flow.)

(Edit: cf Nancy's reply below)

Tentative: people get credited with a small percentage of the karma from the comments to their posts and comments. It would be a way of getting karma for inspiring good discussion.

Add an option to un-thread the comments, to allow them all to be sorted by karma or timestamp regardless of parentage.

• Add edit buttons to http://lesswrong.com/user/timtyler
• Add reply buttons to http://lesswrong.com/user/Clippy

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">.

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."

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.

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.

Be able to edit posts from looking at your own comment page.

Event calendar.

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.

• defined as a chain at least 3 comments deep, where comment n is the only child of n-1.

Have comments on the Irrationality Game thread not show up in the top comments.

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.

Use the whole screen. It's very annoying for lesswrong to show up as a narrow strip down the screen.

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.

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.

Auto-expand "article navigation" instead of hiding it by default, so it's not so unobtrusive.

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.

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.

Make the main LW site mobile-friendly, or implement a separate site version for mobile devices on http://m.lesswrong.com

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.

Fix the bug where permalinks to a post - even new ones! - do not work when a post is moved between subreddits.

Is there currently a rules page? If not, there should be a rules page and it should be readily accessible for new readers/posters.

Fluid width, please.

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.

Show read/unread comments in different colors.

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.

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.

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.