An alternative way to browse LessWrong 2.0

I think that this is a great project and I'm happy that people have created it!

However... to be clear, I believe that you're trustworthy and am not suspecting you of anything. But I feel really uncomfortable about the thought of it becoming common practice that people independently make new mirrors of LW where you log in using the same credentials. I assume that you're not capturing our passwords, but will that be the case for every new mirror that someone might make?

Thanks!

Seems generally good to have friendly competition.

My actual favorite feature of GreaterWrong is the table-of-contents that get autogenerated for posts. That's something we've been planning to do for a while on regular LW but haven't gotten around to it yet.

I've been using this for a while (actually using the rss feed from it), but I don't know where I got the link and I had no idea it was a secret project. May you receive a 50% karma bonus/turn.

How is this engineered under the hood? Something like nginx->greaterwrongapp->LW2 API-> LW2 database? You note elsewhere in the thread that GW uses the same underlying database as LW2. I find it unlikely that the LW2 DB is exposed to the open net (at least it shouldn't be O_O), so something else is going on.

That you could do this at all suggests there's an API stable enough for third parties to use....which suggests a native client might be possible...which is of interest to me, but the last time I asked if there was a documented API I didn't get an answer.

(I see your link to GraphQL, but am unsure how it fits into the picture)

GreaterWrong now has a new feature—the theme tweaker—which lets you customize the appearance of the site in several ways: you can adjust brightness or contrast, rotate the color scheme, or invert any theme (creating a “dark mode” version of any of the themes).

You can open the theme tweaker by clicking the “sliders” button on the top left (just left of the theme selection buttons).

Some settings that I think look good:

1. Brutalist theme, inverted, brightness set to 70%
2. Grey theme, inverted, brightness to 70%, saturation to 30%, hue rotated to 205°
3. Default theme, inverted, brightness to 70%, saturation to 50%, hue rotated to 325°
4. Simple theme with contrast set to 110%

Thanks a lot for doing this! I’ve really liked some of the things you’ve been trying out on greaterwrong, and I expect over time the LW2 team can learn a lot from your experiments.

The post itself does go slightly against the frontpage guidelines, but given that this Is probably of interest to almost anyone surfing on LW2 (and I want to encourage competition with our UI), I will leave it on the frontpage for now, though other moderators can chime in and disagree.

This has some very nice features. I have to say I dislike some aspects of it aesthetically (which is not to say they're bad; my preferences are not everyone's preferences). I'll list those, with the hope that a comment consisting almost entirely of negative feedback won't be misunderstood as meaning I disapprove of, or dislike, GW as a whole.

The text on GW is rather large, while the text on LW2 is unusually small. I happen to prefer the latter. [I know this is an eccentricity of mine, and I would not be astonished (though I would be a bit surprised) if it turned out that despite my preference I read faster and take in more with the larger text. Most likely many people will prefer GW's text sizes, and more will benefit from them despite not preferring them.]

The titles in the GW article list are (at least for me on my browser) very very bold in comparison with everything else. To me they look downright silly. [My guess is that unless this is the result of some oddity of my setup, many others will feel the same way.]

The margin between comment text and the borders around the comments on GW is smaller than on LW2, even though the text is much larger. I find it uncomfortably small; doubling it would not be too small an increase. [My guess is that almost everyone would find GW nicer to look at and easier to read with wider margins there.]

The green border on new comments is extremely prominent; I personally find it rather distracting and would prefer something subtler, or maybe applied only to the left border. [I don't have a confident guess about how others will feel about this one.]

php style.css.php > style.css

Here’s some more features of GreaterWrong.com that weren’t important enough to make it into the OP:

• Many functions have access keys associated with them, notably the navigation tabs (Home, Featured, etc.) and the first three editor buttons (bold, italic, hyperlink). (Hover over them to see what key is bound to what.)
• Top-level comment threads can be collapsed by clicking the minus-sign button at the top right (and stay collapsed when you return to that post, but auto-expand if you navigate to a new comment in that thread)
  • The number under the comment thread collapse button indicates the number of comments in that thread
• New comments are clearly highlighted
• Click on a person’s username to go to a listing of their comments
• Automatically generated table of contents (for any post with header elements)

Edit: Added ToC to feature list (Raemon, thanks for pointing it out [LW(p) · GW(p)]!)

I love the feel of the site and would personally prefer to swap to reading GW. Two Question:

1) How does the RSS feed work for GW

2) Can anyone I should trust vouch for GW? Its a little dicey to log into this site with my lw password. By 'person I should trust' I mean someone I know or someone suffiently high profile (Ex Scott, Vanier) they have alot of reputation to lose if we get screwed.

Thanks for the great work! I'm using it more than the default UI already, and when you guys get the inbox implemented I'll probably switch completely.

Meta: State your preference.

I have a preference for the "orange on white" theme first over "brutalist" second. I'd like to like the dark bg theme but I prefer the less-bold headings.

What happens when I log in or create an account on Greater Wrong -- are they accessing the same user database?

This is great if for no other reason than that spell check works in the markdown editor when I write comments and posts!