Go to lesswrong.com. See how the 'Main' link is bolded? Click on Discussion. Now Discussion is bolded, and we're in the Discussion section. Ah, so that means I must have just left Main. Let's go back by clicking on Main. Wait, why am I in a different discussion section now? I thought Main was what I saw when I went to the url!
I can't be the only person that is confused by that UI choice. I wasn't aware that 'Main' even had articles for months because of that.
Another UI issue: In Discussion, clicking the big LessWrong logo takes me to... Discussion. In Main (diiscussion forum, not front page of site), clicking the same logo takes me to the front page of the site. These really ought to have the same behavior.
The Sequences are one of the more important parts of LW, but actually getting there isn't immediately obvious. A "Start reading here!" link near the top would be tremendously helpful for new people.
Identify the important wiki pages. Then link them from the main page.
We have two kinds of content on this site: forum and wiki. They are different in principle: Forum debates are coming and going; we would like the best ones to be revisited later, but most of them are really not that important. Wiki pages are "timeless"; they are created to be useful equally now and in the future.
Our navigational tools already provide the right kind of visibility for the debates: we have the "Main" and "Discussion" pages, list of "recent posts" and "recent comments". But this mechanism is not fit for the wiki. The "recent wiki edits" is good for noticing spam, but otherwise the recent-ness is not an important feature of the timeless wiki article. Wiki articles should be made visible by their timeless importance.
This may be a typical mind fallacy here, but I almost never read the wiki. I am mostly not even aware of what useful things may be there. They don't get to my attention the way that discussion articles do. So I would like to have a better exposure of them at the main page (because I will probably not look elsewhere, unless something...
Only reset comments on a post as read up to the present after you've viewed it from a root-level URL. Clicking through comments in an RSS feed, opening a subthread page and having all the rest of the thread get marked read is a constant small annoyance.
I'm not sure the promoted tab adds value to the site. It's slow to update and (IMO) does a poor job of selecting the best posts. Now this wouldn't be a problem since we have top, but it being the default is rather bothersome.
More prominent link to the LessWrong Study Hall (where Pomodoro's are utilized to combat akrasia).
An exit strategy is usually overlooked in any project. "In the event of VARIABLE less wrong will close, and the resources will be distributed / destroyed / etc." All things end, but only some things end well.
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.
A karma change dif so that it would be easier to see which which articles and comments that one has written have gotten or lost votes.
This would make it easier to track conversations on old threads.
Make the upvote/downvote links easier to click on an Android browser. Whatever trick the browser UI uses to make regular links easier to click using the touchscreen doesn't seem to work on the image-based links on LW.
Rationality hack-a-thons. I'm not sure exactly what that would mean, but it could mean a bunch of things.
Email alerts for new responses. Eg. when someone responds to a comment you made, or a post you've written.
I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about this. Fundamentally in order to discuss improvements, it's necessary to identify the sources of pain. The largest problem (and/or existential threat) I can see with LW is its stagnation/decline, both in content, and in new insights generated here.
Charitably, I suspect LW was built with the assumption that it would always have great content coming in, so the target and focus of most design decisions, policies, implied norms, and ad hoc decisions (let's call all these 'constraints') was to restrict bad conten...
Toggleable unthreaded comment view for seeing exactly what is new after a given date, even in deep subthreads. Just show every comment in the order they were posted in as a new root-level comment in this view.
Or maybe just figure out a way to show even the deepest subthreads on one page, so they won't get hidden from Bakkot's helper script.
A Reddit style API so people can write bots for Lesswrong or do some extention themselves. Consider having a pool to reward programmers that implement certain features in this comment thread.
SSL support. I don't feel comfortable anymore having my internet traffic not encrypted.
I agree with the idea of having a “Recommended reading” list (or reviving the one we already have) but for the love of the flying spaghetti monster please call it something other than “list of things you should know if you consider yourself to be a rationalist”.
Medium-style side comments - http://aroc.github.io/side-comments-demo/#demo. More generally, I think that we could do some serious rethinking of how discussions are carried out over the internet. I wrote about it a little here, but those thoughts are very raw.
A more prominent link to Open Thread. Furthermore, break Open Thread into sections like:
Open thread summaries (which I'd be happy to write)
Skype/Google Hangouts/whatever meetups for people interested in [X]. It's lonely when the nearest meetup is prohibitively far away.
Have a list of who's working on/learning what. For example, I'm learning web development right now (pretty broadly; mostly JavaScript and the MEAN stack, but I'll also be learning SQL, RegEx, data structures, algorithms etc.). If there were a list of all the LW users who are doing the same thing, it'd be easier for us to connect.
This is reminding me of something I heard about, but don't know how to find-- a resource about informal but legal methods of hacking the government.
The example (and the only bit I remember) was about a woman who had an issue she couldn't get noticed by her local government. Then she got advice from someone who noticed that a politician who could affect the issue was in an uncontested election. So the woman with the issue signed up to be the opposition from the other party. The politician called her and said, "What do you want?" The woman has been active in politics ever since.
I know someone who posted up a Bounty on getting an app developed on bountysource.
https://www.bountysource.com/issues/1641268-app-doesn-t-exist
I contributed to it but I don't know if the link ever when public.
In case you haven't guessed, I'd like easier viewing on mobile devices.
A prominent link - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Listing_of_Rationalist_Houses. Make it easy for LessWrong users looking for a roommate to find each other.
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.
Note: I say "ways to improve" instead of "features" because "ways to improve" is more general.