Proposed rewrites can be found here. Please suggest specific improvements in the comments!
Although long-time Less Wrong users don't pay much attention to the home page, about page, and FAQ, I suspect new users pay lots of attention to them. A few times, elsewhere on the internet, I've seen people describe their impression of Less Wrong that seemed primarily gleaned from these pages--they made generalizations about Less Wrong that didn't seem true to me, but might appear to be true if all one did was read the about page and FAQ.
The about page, in particular, is called out to every new visitor. Try visiting Less Wrong in incognito mode or private browsing (i.e. without your current cookies) to see what I'm referring to.
But the current set of "newcomer pages" isn't very good, in my opinion:
- Text is duplicated between the home page and the about page. There's plenty to say and link to without repeating ourselves.
- The first paragraph of the home page text has four links to Wikipedia articles and none to Less Wrong posts. These may be very good Wikipedia articles, but I tend to think that linking to actual Less Wrong posts is generally a better way to communicate what kind of site Less Wrong is than linking to Wikipedia.
- The home page text also makes references to the blog, discussion section, and meetups, which are already highlighted plenty in the brain image.
- I think the primary purpose of the about page should be to describe and link to lots of interesting Less Wrong posts. I think reading posts is probably best way to figure out what Less Wrong is about. If the smorgasboard of posts linked to from the about page is sufficiently varied and high-quality, I think that most users will be able to find at least a couple posts they really like. Right now this purpose isn't given much real estate. There is a sentence starting with the words "If you want a sampling of the content on the main blog...", but this sentence does little to describe the posts it links to aside from providing a few related keywords.
- There's also a lot of instruction on the about page regarding how to do basic stuff like create posts. Facebook and Youtube don't seem to think it's necessary to provide instructions on how to do basic stuff, so I don't think we need it either. (Just in case, though, it's mostly still all there in my rewrite of the FAQ.)
- Some of the answers in the FAQ make us look very close-minded (when in fact we're only a little close-minded). See Why is almost everyone here an atheist? and Why do you all agree on so much? Am I joining a cult?. I think it's possible to answer these questions in a way that's less obnoxious and gives a more accurate impression of what LW is like: 1, 2.
- I tried to link to various posts that are explicitly targeted at newcomers, like "What I've Learned from Less Wrong" and "What is Bayesianism?", but weren't being shown on the existing newcomer pages.
- I put a lot more stuff in the FAQ, on the theory that a long FAQ doesn't hurt much since folks can just read the answers to the questions that interest them.
- I deliberately avoided looking at the existing pages at first when writing my alternatives, to avoid contamination. My thinking was that being different for its own sake was good if we could reliably figure out which version was better in each case (e.g. overcome status quo bias). Please comment on nitty-gritty differences between the two versions, e.g. if you think I left an important sentence from the originals out or if one of the posts I linked to seems rather weak.
I certainly don't claim to speak for all Less Wrong users. If you have any thoughts, please comment here, send me a private message, or log in to the wiki and edit the candidate pages directly.
I'm especially interested in getting feedback on the FAQ, because I took the liberty of codifying some social norms that were previously implicit: see the section Site Etiquette and Social Norms, especially the bits about Discussion vs Main, politics, and "if you never get voted down, you're not posting enough".
If you think I codified the social norms incorrectly, or you've been thinking they really should be different, please comment! The FAQ seems like a good way to broadcast preferred norms, so I suspect this is an ideal thread to discuss them.
If you've got a suggested change that's nontrivial, I encourage you to create a poll for it here using comments as poll options or HonoreDB's system.
Getting Their Attention
As a new person, I dissected my experience of attempting to figure out what LessWrong was about and the decision-making process that caused me to join for you. I have a lot of stuff to say, and 99% of seems unexpected.
"I think reading posts is probably best way to figure out what Less Wrong is about."
I vehemently disagree.
People do a very, very fast assessment in order to determine whether the website is worth investing in. What I'm talking about is this: You come in off the search engine, or plug in the url after seeing it mentioned somewhere in an interesting enough context, or a friend tells you it's cool and to go check it out. Now you're at the home page. If it doesn't grab your attention in just a few seconds, you're gone. Obviously, people eventually need more information than that before they hit the join button, so there have to be different levels. First the front page has to immediately prove to the user that it's worth going deeper. Something significant has to happen (I have a really easy idea for this actually) before they even click a link. Here's why that is:
Am I going to click a link about a topic I've thought about already? No. I'm assuming your take on it is the same as the average take. So I will never see how awesome it is. Conversely, show me a link about a topic I've never heard of before. "What is Bayesianism?" for instance (I've heard of it by now, but didn't, before I found LessWrong). I don't have any reason to believe that this new word is the sign of something awesome. The world is full of a lot of links with words I don't know to things that are not awesome.
Imagine again that you're on this home page for a site you've never been to. It has links with words you already know (probably the same old boring crap) and links with words you don't already know (Is it any good, or am I going to waste ten minutes reading about the etymology of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?).
For these reasons, I had NO IDEA how awesome this site was the first few times I came here. I only joined because so many different people kept referring me over, that I kept "poking" at the site every so often, and eventually discovered something that hooked me.
Being hooked needs to happen on the front page.
Here's how to hook them:
Look at the website statistics and see which pages get the most new visitors to stay the longest. Not the ones that get the most visits from logged in users, but NEW users. "New Visitors" is the website statistic term you want. And the best ones don't just get a lot of new visitors, but they actually KEEP the user on the page. There are website statistics that will tell you how many seconds users stay on the pages. That's what I'm talking about.
Make a list. Of the list, select some on core topics that, together, do a pretty good job of giving the gist of LessWrong's culture. Or possibly, more importantly, the culture you guys want to be creating. Take the first paragraph of each page - which, theoretically has been composed by a person that's good enough at writing that they're able to hook an audience immediately - and rotate those on the front page. Show a limited number at one time. This prevents information overload. (Note: In order to ensure fresh content, and for really super duper extremely important search engine optimization reasons, this needs to be done in a particular way. I explained that in: "Home Page vs Search Engines")
If I begin reading a paragraph and it shows a new twist on the topic which I have thought about already, will I read the rest? Yes! But give me a link with a few words? No. To say enough to convince me that your site worth reading takes more than one sentence. The world is full of boring takes on things, so you have to prove that this place is awesome on the front page.
The best thing is, you already know what's going to hook the readers. The introductory paragraphs that are proven to work are sitting in your website statistics.
After an "ooh this is interesting" has occurred on the front page, then people may wonder "What is this about?" (Next Post)
I split it into several comments because the site told me that it was too long to post. Sorry if that's inconvenient.