First, I appreciate the work people have done to make LW 2 happen. Here are my notes:

1. Strong feeling - the links and descriptions of the Sequences, the Codex, and HPMOR (while good) should not be at the top of the page. The top should be the newest material.
2. Please please please include a "hide subthread" option to collapse a comment and all its responses. That is a dealbreaker for me, if a site doesn't have that feature, I won't read the comments.
3. Current LW has a really nice alternating color scheme for comment/reply. One comment will have a grey background, the comment below it will have a beige background. That is a key feature for visually parsing a comment thread.
4. I liked the concept of having a main section and a discussion section, where the bar for posting in the latter is lower. For whatever reason, people seem to get angry if you post something that they feel is low quality or not relevant.
5. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but somehow I don't quite like the default font. It may be that I like a different font for reading on dead tree paper vs on a computer screen?
6. It may be slightly evil, but the karma display on the right side of the screen makes the site more addictive, because people love to see if they get upvotes or comment replies.
7. It seems weird to allow people to upvote/downvote an article right from the home page, do you really want people to vote for an article without reading it?

I don't know if there is a Schelling point for providing feedback, so I made this thread.

Speaking for myself, my reaction to LW 2.0 could be summarized as: "This is so confusing and so difficult to figure out, that I'll just... leave it for later." Before I get to the individual complaints, here is the meta one:

If you want to change dozen things about a website, don't change them all at the same time. For the user, some of them will feel like an improvement, and others may feel like an opposite of improvement; but all of them feel like an extra cognitive burden. So even if of those dozen changes 7 are in the positive and 5 in the negative direction, the overall impression may still be negative. Also, consider loss aversion; people will be more annoyed by losing a feature they liked.

Now the details:

The font seems to be bigger, and the spaces between lines also seem bigger. (I didn't actually measure it; this is my impression from looking at the page.) As a result it feels like there is much less content on the screen, which makes it more difficult to perceive as a whole, reduces my efficiency of speed reading, and makes me push Page Down more often. In general it creates w... (read more)

Hi all,

I made a pair of Stylish themes (for use with the Stylish browser extension, for Chrome, Firefox, etc.) that address some of the appearance / usability / typography concerns that people have been mentioning, in this thread and elsewhere. Here they are:

Stylish themes for LessWrong 2.0

(There are two versions of the theme: the first version uses a serif font, the second uses a sans-serif variant. Pick whichever you like, they're identical otherwise.)

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/xI4ia

What these themes do:

• Better choice of body text font (more readable, especially on Linux and Windows machines, and on lower-end displays)
• Text color is black instead of grey (i.e. fully opaque instead of partially transparent)
• Alternating background colors for comment boxes (LessWrong 1.0 style)
• More clearly readable comment headers, especially commenter names
• Much more distinctive highlighting for activated upvote/downvote buttons
• Content column visually separated from contentless margins
• Removed all CSS transitions, which should make many parts of the page UI feel snappier (and be a little less hardware-intensive)
• Some other minor changes…

UPDATE: The latest version of the themes adds the... (read more)

As has been mentioned a couple times already...I don't know how I'm supposed to use the site.

I go there and then I'm just like "now what?".

1. It looks like there's different places I can go to read different subsets of all available posts. How do I know I'm not missing any posts?

2. When I go to lesserwrong.com, there's a huge section at the top of stuff I've already read and it's always there. I have to scroll below the fold to see new content.

3. So the first section I see when I scroll down is called "Featured Posts". What makes these posts featured?

4. Next section is "Recent Frontpage Posts". What's a "Frontpage" post? Am I missing some sort of non-frontpage posts by just reading this section?

5. Under the "Frontpage" posts heading there's a couple of links that look like they're supposed to filter the posts. Maybe I should be reading the "see all posts" link. Does that mean all "frontpage" posts and leaves out non-frontpage posts? I dunno.

I find it very difficult to find and follow discussions on the new site. The content is very slow to load for me (on various devices) and I've given up rather than trying to work my way down.

The scoring system doesn't make sense to me but this may just be a matter of getting used to it / users settling into some kind of routine. Anyway easy enough for me to select "most recent" and squint past the scores based on other users' ratings for now.

I'm also embarrassed by the term "Sunshine Regiment". I can see what you're trying to do but it has an incredibly strong negative impact on me whenever I see it.

You say impressions, but I'm assuming this is just the "things I want changed" thread :)

Vote button visibility and responsiveness is a big one for me. Ideally, it should require one click, be disabled while it messages the server, and then change color much more clearly.

On mobile, the layout works nicely, but load / render times are too long (how much javascript is necessary to serve text? Apparently, lots) and the text formatting buttons take up far too much space.

First time, non-logged in viewers should probably not see the green messaging blob in the corner, particularly on mobile.

I agree that some kind of demarcation between comments, and between comments and "write a new comment", would be nice. Doesn't have to be 2009 internet boxes, it can be 2017 internet fading horizontal lines or something.

I haven't posted on LW for a while now, but after posting to LW2.0 I got banned (till 2021) very quickly. My posts were also deleted. I was not told why I was banned, although I assume it was because I entered a fake email (I was annoyed that the new site required an email and not just a username). I asked why I got banned, and received no response.

Well, I'm sorry for using a fake email. I wasn't trying to spam, or sockpuppet or anything, but I think a 3 year ban without any sort of warning or explanation seems a little excessive. I'm happy to provide an email that works if required. I also considered setting up a new account with a real email, but I don't want it to seem like I'm sockpuppetting.

The "Daily" page seems to be the one that is most useful to regular users (it's the one I bookmarked), but it's relatively hidden. I think it should be linked directly on the top navbar or somewhere else on the front page instead of hidden inside the hamburger menu in the navbar.

One obvious thing I really like is that the site is responsive! On this current site, I can't read the text when I make the window half the size of the screen (13 inch laptop).

I posted there 3 comments and got 6 downvotes which resulted in extreme negative emotions all the evening that day. While I understand why they were downvoted, my emotional reaction is still a surprise for me.

Because of this, I am not interested to participate in the new site, but I like current LW where downvoting is turned off.

There's something about reading the new style that makes me uncomfortable, and prompts me to skim some posts that I would have read more carefully on the old site. I'm not too clear on what causes that effect. I'm guessing that some of it is the excessive amount of white, causing modest sensory overload.

Some of it could be the fact that less of a post fits on a single screenful: I probably form initial guesses about a post's value based on the first screenful, and putting less substance on that first screenful leads me to guess that the post has less subst... (read more)

Something I'm noticing: almost all the feedback in this thread is easy stuff. UI changes and etc are all pretty easy. The problem that I expect is that the dev team won't get to the easy stuff because the hard problem of making the page load fast will take their attention.

What are the plans for the Wiki? If the plan is to keep it the same, why doesn't Lesser Wrong have a link to it yet?

LW 2.0 is a good example of trying to fix something that isn't broken and ending up breaking it further.

My vision is not great and I simply cannot see the difference between quoted text and normal text in comments.