Main section vs. discussion section

39 Post author: ShardPhoenix 06 March 2012 05:37AM

(The following may only apply to me. I mention it to see if anyone else has had the same issue).

For a long time I have been only looking at the Discussion section and promoted main page articles. Just now on a whim I checked the non-promoted main page articles and found there were a whole bunch of them, some potentially quite interesting, that I had missed. My expectation based on past experience was that all reasonably good articles from main would be "promoted", but perhaps this has changed. If this has been going on for a while I've presumably missed quite a bit of content. Perhaps it should be made easier to find/notice these? It's a bit weird and awkward that there are 3 different non-uniform ways of finding posts.

Comments (13)

Comment author: [deleted] 06 March 2012 12:40:16PM 10 points [-]

I switched to using r/all a while ago.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 06 March 2012 02:09:27PM *  6 points [-]

lesswrong.com/r/all/recentposts has a more compact list.

Comment author: RobertLumley 06 March 2012 03:16:19PM 2 points [-]

I'd appreciate it if the font size on this were increased. Or just changed to look exactly like Discussion.

On a separate note, I like that I can automatically refresh the Discussion section by just clicking the giant bar that says discussion, instead of trying to find the F5 key on my keyboard, which I'm not necessarily using.

Comment author: curiousepic 06 March 2012 05:42:10PM 1 point [-]

I'm sure this has been answered before, but it's a tough search. Exactly what does the "#v (#c)" notation represent?

Comment author: arundelo 06 March 2012 06:50:01PM 6 points [-]

I'm pretty sure v is upvotes minus downvotes and c is number of comments. These are not always up to date.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 06 March 2012 02:17:55PM 0 points [-]

Ooh! Thanks.

Comment author: RobertLumley 06 March 2012 02:07:33PM 7 points [-]

I agree. I almost exclusively read discussion, because it's easier to read.

Comment author: Alex_Altair 06 March 2012 06:56:35AM 17 points [-]

I agree. It's probably not optimal to fracture the Main page into 'promoted' and 'new'. Also I wish the drop-down menu included 'promoted' and 'new' instead of just 'posts' and 'comments'.

Comment author: shminux 06 March 2012 08:13:41PM 6 points [-]

It looks like the site usability changes are very low on the list of priorities of whoever is responsible for it, so I would not expect any.

Comment author: Grognor 06 March 2012 07:53:46AM 19 points [-]

I never understood why it's completely impossible to go from the front page (or indeed nearly anywhere) to the New posts in Main (as opposed to just Promoted posts in Main) in less than two clicks.

Of the set {promoted posts, new main posts, discussion posts}, I actually find promoted posts to be the least useful on average, since it's so god damned full of meetup posts.

Comment author: Gabriel 06 March 2012 03:44:38PM 8 points [-]

I always look at the side-bar in main. It shows non-promoted posts and they come at a sufficiently low rate that I don't miss anything even if I couple of days pass between consecutive visits.

Comment author: Xachariah 06 March 2012 02:07:02PM *  3 points [-]

Wow, I've been here for quite a while and I didn't even know that section existed. It simply never occurred to me that there would be three parallel tracks for posts, and one would be not at all advertised. Thank you ShardPhoenix, you've changed my LW habits.

(I also upvoted you, but I figured words of encouragement help more than an incremented number.)