I thought that instead of everyone having to create a separate post for their first impressions, it would be more convenient to create a single post for this discussion. I'll post my own here soon.
I thought that instead of everyone having to create a separate post for their first impressions, it would be more convenient to create a single post for this discussion. I'll post my own here soon.
The site is lacking breadcrumbs so it's hard to orient oneself. It's hard to follow what section of the website you're in as you dig deeper into the content. Any plans to add breadcrumbs (or some alternative)?
The site is just too slow to load, IMO.
Also, echoing other users who said it's too hard to find anything. I have no idea how I would, say, scroll through the chronological archives. (And there should *be* chronological archives. Think standard features available on a blog, or Reddit, or StackExchange -- chronological archives, per user archives, search, etc.)
I don't like the whole "load more" thing. Having discrete pages is definitely preferable, it doesn't end up with some godawful amount of stuff displayed at once, and more easily allows one to skip through. (One problem with old LW was that if you wanted to, say, look through all of a user's comments, all you could do is page through; there was no way to skip to the end. We need more stuff like that. Right now it seems we have even less.)
Edit: Also the interface is too hard to read. The old interface was colorful and readable; this one just all blends together. I like the new bars on the side, but where's the old Reddit-style alternating colors? And why are the names, points, times, etc so small? (Not to mention the *buttions*! The reply button is *tiny*!)
Edit again: Also when you up
It's a bit weird that I can't find this post by sorting posts by new, but I can see the comment made to it among the recent comments.
Basically, the post is hidden the comments to it are not.
I really like the design and the concept as explained in the strategic overview. I think this has a lot of potential, but I think that there is still a significant amount of work to do.
Firstly, it is really annoying to always have the recommended reading up the top. You should be able to collapse this panel and it should stay collapsed if you are logged in.
You can only see the last three featured posts, there does not seem to be any way to go back in time.
Recent posts is extremely clumsy. Clicking on the title should open it up to a full page view. Instead, you have to click load more, which only loads a couple more, making it take much longer for you to browse backwards in time than in the current Less Wrong. I'm not a fan of infinite scrolling, but this is infinite scrolling without the scrolling!
The current Reddit allows you to view the highest rated posts in the last day, week, month, three months and year. These options are useful as they allow you to quickly catch up on what has occurred since the last time you visited.
There is no way to easily browse people's profiles. This is a big issue if we are going to make posts first go to individual's profiles.
Meta p
(Editing things in as I think of/come across them.)
When I go to my user page (https://www.lesserwrong.com/users/philh), there seems to be no way to access the comments on the link posts that I've made.
I agree with Chris_Leong's bullet points, but the specific one I was going to make myself was this: "Recent posts is extremely clumsy. Clicking on the title should open it up to a full page view." More precisely, there should be a specific page that I can go to for just recent posts.
There's no way I can find to see a user's comme
I accidentally clicked on the "Submit" button at the bottom of one of the HPMOR chapters instead of the next-chapter link. (Anyone who has looked at any of those pages will, I think, appreciate how easy this is to do.) The result is that that chapter now has an empty comment from me. I think the "submit" button should do nothing (or maybe not even exist) when the comment text is empty. (Perhaps also when it's whitespace-only.)
Notifications are more than a little weird, and not really in a good way.
On old-LW, if I want to know what I need to be responding to, I can go to my profile page and see everything I've posted recently together with others' replies, or go to my inbox and see just the replies (along with PMs, and unfortunately without context, but of course there are links).
On LW2, my profile page shows only my own posts and comments, so I look at notifications. That means clicking on the little bell icon at top right, which drops down a sort of menu-like thing s
First, I'm seconding a couple of things. There should be a comment box.
And please don't have huge pictures for static material at the top of the home page. There's a lot to be said for tabs with words on them at the top. I realize three lines for a menu is fairly standard these days, but it still leaves me feeling as though the site is a puzzle which has to be solved.
In the spirit of experimentation, I tried out the numbers on the strip under the comment space. Being able to change font size and line spacing probably has its uses, but the o
What's required to have my posts that I make to my own blog be automatically posted here? That's a thing the new site can do, right?
Magical scoring might work well to filter through large amounts of content and only promote the best, but right now there is not a lot of content. I'm curious to look at all the things people have posted, and there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to do that. In particular, I want to know which writers I already like are signed up to LW 2.0 so I can subscribe to them, and I don't have any way of distinguishing "this writer hasn't signed up for LW 2.0" from "this writer has signed up for LW 2.0 but none of their posts have made it to the front page."
For me the grey is unnecessarily hard to read. Especially when it comes to skimming the first line of a post in the "Featured post"-list and "Recent post"-list, I feel like it's harder then necessary because of the low contrast between the font and the background.
It got me to readjust the angle of my monitor and that made it a bit better but it still seems an unnecessary impediment to me.
It appears that there is no way to insert an image into a post, which is a fairly nice feature that appears to be still supported on the backend, since old LessWrong posts still have their images.
Separately, and more important, the way links are displayed currently makes it hard to tell if a link has already been visited. Also if you select text you can't see links anymore.
Firefox 57 on Windows 10.
A RSS feed for new posts is highly desirable - I don't generally go to websites "polling" for new information that may or may not be there unless e.g. I'm returning to a discussion that I had yesterday, so a "push mechanism" e.g. RSS is essential to me.
My own four cents:
Visually this is a noticeable improvement. Cleaner design. Larger body text with reasonable max-width. Less UI "noise". I haven't messed around much with the interface; there are probably other positives. Only significant visual regression is the lack of alternating colors on comments.
(a few people have noted that the new visual scheme isn't all that site-distinctive; I'm not sure if I like it that way or not)
I see posts from names I haven't seen on LW proper in a while, which is a good sign. Content is king.
Is there any way to tell whether a comment has been edited? That is a feature of Reddit, Facebook, the old LW, etc., and seems valuable as a way of catching some kinds of bad behavior (and, occasionally, for keeping track of what's happening in a conversation).
Never used old LW much, but I'm a longtime SSC reader. I read the goals and strategy and hopes this project succeeds. My impressions so far:
-Everything's very minimalist; it seems very trendy and a little pretentious (though I suppose this is a matter of personal taste). A bit of color could help things like usernames to stand out. A bit of clutter at the top, in the form of a permanent header or sidebar (as opposed to the current, click-to-view menus) might help with site navigation, loading times (I don't do web design, but this seems
On old-LW, my username at top right is an ordinary link, so I can use it to (e.g.) open a new tab showing my profile without leaving the page I'm currently on. (Example scenario: I'm writing a comment, I think "I'm sure I said something relevant a little while ago", so I want to go and find that earlier comment to see. I don't want to leave the page I'm on, though, I want it in a new tab.)
On LW2, it's a magic thing that provides a drop-down menu. That makes it easier to create a new post, edit my account info, or log
Speaking of hard to find things, the only way I found this thread was that a recent comment was from this thread and I clicked on the comment. I'd been emailing in my issues as I found them.
My basic first impression is that this is a solid foundation but the site is too slow and has some quite serious bugs (e.g. attempting to move one of my blog posts to main killed all the content on that page on both attempts, one of which was fixed by admin and one of which wasn't), and the sorting/finding systems need a lot of conceptual work.
I'm excit
When posting a link post, instead of a text post, it is not clear what would be the result. There is still an option to write text, which appears strictly as text right after submitting, but when the post is viewed (from the search bar) only some portion of the text is visible and there is no indication that this is a link post.
It would be much more comfortable if editing of a post could be done only using the keyboard. For example, when adding a link, apart from defining a keyboard shortcut, it should also be possible to press enter to submit the link. I
I'm reading on a smartphone. The font and layout are great. I'm super excited by the "codex" section nervou because I always wanted to read scc most important parts but had no good strategy for approaching that.
I have trouble jumping to next article in the codex after finishing reading one of them: can't find any navigation button for that, so I end up navigating back to the list of all articles in the book and manually selecting next one. This is a bit complicated by the fact that I can't distinguish articles already read f
Impressions:
I'm not sure how to create meta posts or community posts for that matter.
I get very annoyed when I create a link at the end of my input and I can't just press right arrow at the end to get out of the link when I want to create none link content.
(The following is an issue in many places on the site. I'm just giving the most visible example.)
Suppose you go to the front page and have a look at, say, the latest-comments section. If you hover your mouse pointer over any of the comments, you'll see a highlight around a box containing the comment and its metadata, and it seems like the whole box functions as a button that takes you to that comment in its context. (So, e.g., clicking on whitespace within the box does that; and your pointer changes shape as it does when hovering over a link or a
I seemed to have to switch on notifications to get back to lesswrong normal (being told if people comment on your stuff etc)
Many broken links in the Codex.
Searching is fast and awesome and I love it.
Initial pageload is very slow: nearly 2.5MB, requiring 14.17s until DOMContentLoaded, 1.5MB of which is a single file.
I clicked on the comment box that said 2 comments on Toggle's recent post, and got directed... to the top of the page, instead of the bottom, where the comments are.
There's still something about the comment-reading experience that's unsettling. I think boxes for the comments, rather than just the left bar, would help?
A few mostly-superficial first impressions:
1. When I go to my profile page, among the things there is a selection of ten "recent comments". These range from 7 months ago to 8 years ago. The older ones aren't super-highly-voted-for or anything like that. Even if the import from LW 1.0 has pulled Main but not Discussion material, which would certainly lose a lot of my comments, there is something really weird with the selection here. There's also no way to choose how those comments are sorted, which might be OK if it were something simple
Feedback on the mobile site.
Using Chrome on a Nexus 6P running Android 8.1.
The suboptimal:
It is not uncommon for a comment to begin by quoting something. For me right now (Firefox on Windows, but a brief look suggests that this isn't browser-specific) the front page / profile page comment lists remove the distinctive formatting that quoted material gets, so it looks exactly as if the quoted material was written by the commenter. This is unfortunate (especially when there are upvote and downvote arrows right next to that material...).
It looks to me as if not all formatting is lost in these lists; I don't know what makes quoting different.
[No idea whether anyone is actually still reading this...]
So far as I can tell, there is no facility for commenting here on linkposts. That is, a linkpost really is just a link; if you click on the "comments" icon you get taken to the far end of the link; there's no expectation, and no possibility, of discussion here on LW.
I guess that's a deliberate decision. (The idea being, perhaps, to avoid fragmenting discussion of any given thing, and if LW2 takes off to avoid sucking oxygen from other people's blogs.) Maybe it's a good
The comment box is still horribly unusable because it is still doing its stupid quasi-WYSIWYG thing where entered Markdown gets converted to terrible-to-manipulate rich text. Seriously, this is a really bad idea that makes the sites much less usable. Just either have plaintext input with preview so you can see how the Markdown comes out (my preference), possibly with optional rich-text input for those who prefer that for some reason. But the current way just makes me hate commenting here. There was nothing wrong with the way it worked on the old site a...
Minor problem: Markdown doesn't seem to work in profiles. I copied over my old profile from LessWrong (with some small modification) but the Markdown doesn't work now.
(Note, this is a much smaller problem than the horribly confusing Markdow/rich-text-editor-cobbled-together-thing that's currently used for writing comments...)
Well I just visisted LW 2.0 for the first time in a while and the new comment editor... I'm sorry but it's really, really bad. Markdown that is automatically converted into rich text, or automatically displayed as rich text, or whatever is going on... how does one work with this? How does one edit this sensibly? I have no idea. I mean I'm sure some people want a rich text editor, let them have it, but for the rest of us please let us just turn this off. And just write in Markdown so we have full control over what we're doing. Idea...
How is it that this post uses a sans-serif font? Are some users able to pick a font? No one should have that power. As far as I could tell, the literature seems to say that the only thing about fonts that affects their readability is their familiarity, how much text the reader has previously read in this font.
You can use a serif font as the site default if you really want to, you probably should use a sans-serif font because that's what people are mostly used to reading in most venues, but if you encourage authors to switch between them you are doing ...
First of all, thanks for making this all! :)
One suggestiong: coudl we hvae a sepll-ckecher for the cmmonent box?
When i subscribe to a user, what happens? Does that affect the magical sorting algorithm or what?
I have no idea where else to ask this, so I do it here: Where can I find an introduction to how the site works? Where can I ask questions about site mechanics? LW had the newbies thread, the open and stupid questions thread and the wiki. While I recognize a lot of part here on LW 2.0 some seem different and I'd like to have a place for it. I would be willing to write a post for it, but I'm not sure whether I overlooked something and/or just add to the confusion.
I'm not the biggest fan of how large the recommended reading is. I understand the incentive to drive people to read the sequences, but the images and text are the single largest presence on the landing page. I could understand if it was at the bottom, or perhaps in a non-existent sidebar, but as it stands, they feel a little imposing. The font is pretty good, and the interface is clean, but I'm afraid it might be a little too clean - there aren't very many colors on the page to hold your attention. Also, it might be a good idea to add the fu
The comment font has a weird lowercase 'w'. It is larger than the surrounding letters. Now that I have noticed it, I can't stop being distracted by it.
Some things I wonder:
1) How much effort did it take to make this site?
2) How much effort will it take to get this site up to acceptable quality?
3) How much effort would it have taken to fix the problems with the old LW?
4) How much effort was spent evaluating other forum software? What was wrong with those systems that meant it couldn't be used instead of this?
I've noticed an antipattern in a few old jobs where people have found problems with existing systems and instead of fixing them invested huge effort into reinventing a square wheel. I can&#x
bug: Highlighting new comments isn't working for me. It says "Highlighting new comments since Today at (current time)" which it totally useless. I want to see the comments since I last visited the page.
bug2: Currently, I can't see what I'm typing because it's underneath what I assume is the rich text editor toolbar thingy
bug3, or maybe I'm going crazy: I'm sure sometimes the page layout has shifted under my feet, so I page down and what comes next isn't what was after what I'm currently reading, and what I&
Bug: "Daily" lists some posts as having been made on Friday; these posts appear briefly then disappear by the time the page has fully loaded. I think it might be because right now it is Thursday in my time zone?
ETA: "Daily" is now working properly. It is still Thursday in my time zone.
ETA2: Now the bug is happening again? I am confused.
I am ecountering some kind of error when opening the links here to rationalsphere and single conversational locus. When I open them, a box pops up that says "Complete your profile" and asks me to enter my email address (even though I used my email to log in in the first place). When I type it in and press submit, I get the error: {"id":"app.mutation_not_allowed","value":"\"usersEdit\" on _id \"BSRa9LffXLw4FKvTY\""}
This reply showed up, then disappeared. I scrolled up to see that it said "All comments loaded", then scrolled down again and my comment was there.