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helldalgo comments on Upcoming LW Changes - Less Wrong Discussion

46 Post author: Vaniver 03 February 2016 05:34AM

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Comment author: helldalgo 03 February 2016 03:12:36PM 22 points [-]

Per some recent discussions with Elo and others, I'm working on a mockup of some new Home page designs. The current one has the following issues:

  1. "About" is hard to find.
  2. The question "Why should I care?" isn't answered until several links in.
  3. There are potential good contributors who are probably being driven away from posting because the first link to the materials is a huge, intimidating list with idiosyncratic or academic titles.
  4. Who's going to look at the "Sequences" if they don't know what the "Sequences" are, already?
  5. There needs to be a "New User" section that is EASY to find from the landing page. Most of this content is already in the about page, so the about page also needs to be easy to find.
  6. The rationalist blogroll needs to be easier to find, to loop in the diaspora'd community.

I had my spouse and some friends look at it, because they fulfill a few conditions: They have never seen the site before, and they are the type of person I'd like to encourage to contribute (smart, good writers, thoughtful). Their feedback was discouraging. They all indicated confusion or intimidation. Several rationalist-adjacent people on communities like Tumblr avoid the site because it's confusing, intimidating, or both. I don't mind filtering for thoughtful, nerdy people. Less Wrong will do that by default. I do mind filtering people away just because they have a bad case of impostor syndrome.

Anecdotal: I avoided posting for YEARS because of all the reasons listed above. There are whole online communities who were interested in learning more because of EY's writing (mainly HPMOR), but felt that there wasn't room for them here. I'm not particularly unusual, and I'm not a bad member to have in the community.

Overall, the home page is full of Trivial Inconveniences: http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/

In the "Less Wrong 2.0" post on Main, I saw a suggestion that LW might have just been a "booster rocket" designed to get people where they needed to go. And that's fine, but I think it's a mistake to think that's all that was needed. It may have been a booster, but it only grabbed the people who were active during a period of a few years. It would be a shame to lose good community members on the assumption that a period of ~six years was "enough."

Comment author: Vaniver 03 February 2016 03:49:57PM 6 points [-]

Thanks for working on this! I've looked at redesigning the home page a few times but I don't have the design chops or the access to outsiders to do a good job of it, and so I'm glad that you're attacking this important problem.

It may have been a booster, but it only grabbed the people who were active during a period of a few years. It would be a shame to lose good community members on the assumption that a period of ~six years was "enough."

Agreed. I think that there's quite a bit of value in having a place for people just finding this rationality thing, that manages to plug them into both the things the community has built up over time and the things the community is doing now.

Compare, say, a booster rocket and a space elevator. The two serve similar but different purposes, and use very different mechanisms.

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