Sure enough, here is a concrete example of the kind of thing I was talking about:
I find it hard to follow the debate on Less Wrong. I think because it isn't laid out chronologically and you have to search for where the debate is going.
This person is of course referring to my debate with Rolf Nelson. Presumably, they are not logged in and are seeing the comment thread through the default "Popular" setting -- and are understandably confused as hell, just as I was the first time. I haven't checked, but knowing the way the Popular sorting option works, I'm guessing the first thing they're seeing is ChrisHalkides' comments, which despite appearing first in the comments are clearly written in response to other comments. (This, by the way, is a common phenomenon, even among people who know about the "reply" button on individual comments [which I don't think ChrisHalkides did, probably due to its graphical disguise]: very often comments will summarily reply to the whole discussion and not a particular comment, saying something like "Most of the discussion so far has focused on..." or "I would like to express agreement with several commenters who..."; seeing such a remark as the first comment is confusing!)
Default settings are what you see when you're new; they should be the setting most likely to convince you to stay around. Our best comments on any thread are generally the top rated ones.
I simply don't buy this notion that unless the very first visible comment is the best one, a new reader will not read far enough to see it. People expect comments to be chronological, and they don't necessarily expect the earliest comments to be the best. In fact, the information about the community that you're worrying about conveying by sorting the comments will be conveyed by the scores themselves: if a reader is unimpressed with the first few comments, they'll also see that those comments (probably) have mediocre scores, and they can scroll down to look for any high-scoring comments before passing judgement on the site. (As will be their tendency to do if they're already looking at the comments on a blog post anyway.)
People expect comments to be chronological
People who are accustomed to software patterned on BBS-style forums (phpBB, most blogs, 4chan) expect that. People who are used to software patterned on Usenet (Livejournal, Slashdot, kuro5hin, reddit) don't. And of course, both groups tend to see their own way as the intuitive way.
I agree that the change from text to icons was a bad idea. LW is overwhelming enough for newbies without mystery meat controls.
Following along from Louie's post and the discussion around it…
How should new visitors to Lesswrong see posts and comments ordered and filtered? (Assume we'll address the new visitors should be introduced to the site issue.) These will remain settings that are easily changed, but how should they start?
Current defaults:
Promoted posts, ordered by recency is our most prominent post list.
Comments are sorted by "Popular", which is Top with a very strong ageing of points (so recently voted comments rise to the top of the list, and very high voted comments fairly quickly drop away).
Options seeded in comments by me below, my karma balance at bottom. Please vote on at least one "Posts:" comment and one "Comments:" comment.