I think the LW user interface in general is pretty terrible and ends up causing a lot of problems.
No kidding ! I still have no idea how to efficiently navigate and search long threads. There doesn't seem to be a way.
Trn is the best method I know of for organizing long discussions online. The bright green borders for posts added since the last time you refreshed a page are but a faint glimmer of the glories of trn.
Less Wrong would also be much more usable if it had some sort of advanced search. It would be great to be able to search by some combination of posted by, in reply to, boolean string (text with AND, OR, and NOT connectors) [1], links (the hypertext behind the link), and date range. The more posts and comments we accumulate, the more important advanced search ...
I noticed enough comments about topic recently that I wanted to run a quick poll about topics and discussion categories on Less Wrong.
Since being told others opinions might cause an anchoring bias, please take the poll here before reading further:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVJSTBTdk92UjhTWWp6U1dYSDltclE6MQ
My personal opinion at the moment (last chance to avoid having me influence your poll results) is that I want to reduce the number of people who feel that articles posted on Less Wrong are off topic and limit topical complaints. I don't want to do this because I think the complainers are wrong, because if they don't want to see something, they are correct to indicate it. But I feel that there are ways of handling this at a higher level that might be more effective than just up or down voting based on topic alone, and I feel like it would help increase the quality of discussion here to have better topical division.
I think the biggest problem with the current system is this definition for Discussion.
"This part of the site is for the discussion of topics not yet ready or not suitable for normal top-level posts."
The fact that Discussion is "not yet ready or not suitable" indicates to me that as a category it's not cutting apart topics well. "I'm making a draft about SIA and SSA that I want to put in Main" and "Someone made a new scientific paper about the OPERA Neutrino anomaly again." and "Is Twilight Sparkle a Rationalist?" Don't seem to mesh well under the same general discussion category, even though I would probably read the community discussion on any of them.
That said, I am open to arguments to establish why the Status Quo is worthwhile as well. And maybe the poll will result in a bunch of people voting for only Main and Discussion.
Please feel free to discuss anything relating to topics or discussion categories or the poll below, and thank you for answering the poll!