Ways to improve LessWrong

Adam Zerner

I think it'd be a good idea to keep a list of the ways we'd like to see LessWrong improve, sorted by popularity. Ie. email alerts for new responses.

So if you have an idea for how LessWrong could be better, post it in the comments. As people up/downvote, we'll get a sense for what the consensus opinions are.

I think there's a pretty good amount to be gained by improving LessWrong.

I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (like email alerts for new responses).
Conversations here are actually useful and productive. Facilitating conversation should thus lead to more of these useful and productive conversations (as opposed to leading to more of an unproductive type of conversation). (Sorry, I didn't word this well; hopefully you guys know what I mean.)
Perhaps something big would come out of this list (like meet-ups). Perhaps rationality hack-a-thons (whatever that means)?

I'm not a good enough coder now, but once I am, I think I'd like to do what I can to make LessWrong better. I'm starting a coding bootcamp (Fullstack Academy) on Monday. By the end of it, I should at least be competent.

Note: I say "ways to improve" instead of "features" because "ways to improve" is more general.

I think it'd be a good idea to keep a list of the ways we'd like to see LessWrong improve, sorted by popularity. Ie. email alerts for new responses.

So if you have an idea for how LessWrong could be better, post it in the comments. As people up/downvote, we'll get a sense for what the consensus opinions are.

I think there's a pretty good amount to be gained by improving LessWrong.

I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (like email alerts for new responses).
Conversations here are actually useful and productive. Facilitating conversation should thus lead to more of these useful and productive conversations (as opposed to leading to more of an unproductive type of conversation). (Sorry, I didn't word this well; hopefully you guys know what I mean.)
Perhaps something big would come out of this list (like meet-ups). Perhaps rationality hack-a-thons (whatever that means)?

Note: I say "ways to improve" instead of "features" because "ways to improve" is more general.

Small suggestion: Mousing over the red envelope could tell me how many new messages there are.

Medium sized suggestion: A "what links to this?" button on posts.

Big suggestion: A search feature that only returns hits on posts, comments, and wiki pages, sorted by date or karma, filterable by author.

Multiple envelope images:
gray = no messages;
thin-lined red = 1-4 messages;
thick-lined red = 5-9 messages;
very-thick-lined red = 10-19 messages;
almost a filled red rectangle = more than 20 messages.