LessWrong 2.0 Feature Roadmap & Feature Suggestions

Nice!

Two thoughts:

1. What about adding a small link icon next to the time that is the link to the comment. Having the time be the link is pretty hard to discover. Facebook does it this way, and it took me a pretty long time to consistently remember, and rediscovering was really annoying.

2. I think the idea of displaying the linked comment at the top of the page is cool, but I also find it a little confusing (like I instictively think “where’s the rest of the discussion” for a quick sec). I also almost always click the “Show comment in full contetxt” link. Given this it seems to me that brining the user directly to the comment in context might be best. Maybe the comment could be highlighted in some way so that it was easy to see which comment was linked to.

This is confusing. I clicked through the link to the above comment and then tried to find the link to take me to the full context, but I couldn't see it!

Harvard Law Review also has a pretty classy way of doing footnotes (example post).

Yeah that would be really great. Medium does this kind of well. Chris Olah's blog also has this feature (example post), but it’s implemented in a pretty hacky way using Disqus.

It would be cool if you could highlight some text in a post, and there was an easy way to create a comment that quoted that part of the text. Maybe you could even show some sort of visual highlight on that text in the post if the dicussion is high quality (measure by come combination of Karma and lenght?).

One UI for this I could imagine (for non-mobile wide-screen use) is to have the post and the comments appear in two columns with the post on the left and the comments on the right (Similar to the Mac OS X Finder's column view.) Then when the user clicks on a comment the appropriate bit of the post would get highlighted.

In fact, I could see doing a similar thing for the individual comments themselves to create a view that would show the *ancestry* of a single comment, stretching left back to the post the conversation was originally about. This could save a fair amount of scrolling.

I've been thinking about adding a content block in posts that allows for comments starting at that specific point. That is a bit easier than general inline commenting.

Not sure how to do the formatting though. We might make it collapsible, or give it an internal scroll-bar where you can scroll through the comments, similar to what Google plus does with their comments:

http://www.giphy.com/gifs/xUPGcBQeJW4RS9Lp04

You mean, something similar to Medium comments?

I don't think this is working for me. I just made a bunch of comments last night, and got a couple replies since then. When I visited the site today I only noticed people had added comments when I saw then in the recent comments section.

How's this supposed to work?

For example, writing public event summaries. These could be short, and would give a highly visible sign to assure others that the meetup is still happening (and give them a bit of the flavor of it).

A thing I'd be worried about here is people being ashamed that their meetup is just a social club or something, or in general optimizing for doing things that sound good rather than are what the participants want to do.

An alternative would be to focus on "communities" instead of meetups.

This is the basic idea; a consideration to keep in mind is that there's both passive new users ("hey, I just moved to Austin, are there any meetups nearby?") and exciting events ("hey, we're hosting a HPMOR wrap party!"), and you want to handle both cases well.

Now, maybe the thing to do here is have something like findable communities (basically, what's on LW is a geolocation and a link to Facebook/whatever else you use) and then location-based pings (either based on IP or them letting us have their location), which the community owners can create. But I don't really want LW to be prompting users to allow us access to their location all the time.

The current plan is to seed the karma system with a set of highly trusted users, and then do something similar to Eigenkarma. Which would both ground the system in something, and allow for dynamic karma allocation.

StackExchange has a bunch of badges and gamification and so on; it seems to me like a similar thing should happen here. (There should be a progress bar that gets fuller as you read the sequences!) In particular, we want reading through the sequences to more rewarding than commenting in open threads (which is currently how I would expect a new user to get karma).

This seems much easier to do if sequences are a top-level content type, and also means that anything we do to get people to read one sort of long-form text we can apply to others trivially.

I do think that adding the ability to automatically keep track of what posts you've read in a sequence is quite valuable, and encouraging you to continue reading in a sequence as you interact with the page.

One of the big problems I see with many discussion platforms is that they make it very hard for old content to still be actively read by its users, I generally want to improve on that on the new LessWrong. Sequences seem like one way to move in that direction.

Very nice!

Some comments on the design, pro and con:

Cons

Grey text

Grey text makes it harder to read than plain black. If you want to reduce contrast, consider instead making the background off-white (either #fcfffa or #f9fff5 would be fine — 99% or 98% lightness of the same hue as the theme color green).

Post visual separation

A bit hard to detect when one post ends and another begins, on a skim. Some possible solutions:

1. Add border to posts (on class "comments-item", add border: 1px solid #cbd6c2, padding: 4px 6px); or,

2. Add background color to posts (on class "comments-item", add background-color: #edefeb, padding: 4px 6px); or,

3. Greater v-spacing of posts (on class "comments-item", set margin-bottom: 30px)

Bugs (?)

• The hamburger menu only closes with another click on the hamburger menu (best practices is for a click anywhere else on the page—outside the menu—to close it)

• Upvote/downvote buttons and vote count appear twice on each post (above and below)

• When adding a link in a comment, hitting Return/Enter in the link URL popup does not cause it to close (i.e. does not have the effect of hitting the Submit button) (Mac OS X 10.9, Chrome 60.0.3112.101)

Miscellaneous

• Mini-hamburger menu on each post has just one menu item (Subscribe); consider simply having a Subscribe link on the post itself, in small text

• Hamburger menus considered harmful in general; consider substituting an on-hover drop-down (achieves the same effect, but with fewer clicks)

Typography

• Line spacing ("line-height" CSS property) of body text of posts (not comments) is too large (more than 1.8); consider reducing to 1.5 (with the short line length—which is good!—this should be more than sufficient to ensure readability)

• Conversely, line spacing of body text of comments is a bit too low (1.25); consider increasing to 1.35

• The bold weight of the body-text font is barely distinguishable from the regular weight. This is, unfortunately, an uncorrectable feature of the "ET Book" font; no heavier weight is available, as far as I can tell. Consider using one of these free alternatives:

  • Alegreya

  • EB Garamond

  • Crimson Text

  (or something else; in any case, the kind of font is just right, but this particular font family happens to have this flaw...)

Comment editing UI

• Consider adding something to visually distinguish the comment currently being written, from surrounding comments; perhaps, a lighter, or darker, background (depending on whether you implement one of my suggestions above for visual separation of posts)?

  • The reason this is helpful is that, when writing a comment, I might scroll around the page—to the OP, or to other comments—to reference other people's words, etc., and then want to continue writing the comment. (Note that the Tab key does not take me to the comment editing field, which would mostly obviate this issue; this, I presume, is just a feature of how this editing UI is implemented...)

Archive browse feature

Or rather, the lack thereof. To be added in the future, I hope?

Pro

Almost everything else!

Typography

• The body text font is attractive and readable and the default text size is good for readability (on a 1080p desktop monitor, anyway) (but see Cons)

• The text column width is good

• Layout of comment blocks is attractive and uncluttered

• Overall typography is well-done

Layout

• Uncluttered and aesthetically pleasing visual design

• (mostly) excellent front page layout (but see below); puts the interesting stuff front and center

• Layout of post pages also solid; easy to navigate

• Seems like the layout will transfer quite well to mobile platforms (looking forward to seeing the design of the mobile version of the site!)

UI elements

• Well done on the redesign of the post sort order widget! This is spot-on

• Very nice comment composition/editing UI! I haven't been actually impressed with one of these for a long time; is it custom or third-party?

• The stripes to the left of the comments (indicating comment hierarchy) are quite useful

Performance

• Seems good so far; no major issues!

Extra bonus commentary

Front page layout

Here's how the front page looks on a 1080p screen…

Ok, nothing too wrong here...

And here's how the front page would look like on a 4k screen…

Hmmm.

Consider allowing the front-page content to occupy two columns, on wide viewports. (Perhaps, Recommended Reading and Featured Posts on the left, and Recent Posts and Recent Comments on the right?)

Navigation UI

Currently, when I'm viewing a post or comment page, and I wish to navigate to somewhere else on the site, I have to first go to the front page, then go from there to where I want to go. This is not quite optimal.

As an alternative to removing the hamburger menu (or transforming it into an on-hover drop-down), consider expanding its use; perhaps, for example, put a copy of the Recent Posts/Recent Comments/Feature Posts feeds in there?

In closing

Overall, good work on the redesign! Thumbs up :)

I was originally imagining something more like a list ("decision theory explained in six posts!"); having a DAG of post dependencies might also be possible (which would enable stuff like "okay, you want to read this post? We've put all the prereqs in order into your reading queue.") but it's not clear to me how much people would want to use it.

How... did you do that?

Yeah, that's my guess as well. Though we might be able to do something in between where you could visit a page similar to the "Recent Comments" page where you can see all prediction-polls that have been posted in both comments and posts. And maybe feature some of that on the frontpage somehow.

If it's a question of how everything is displayed, I think I agree that trees are better than floaty boxes.

The basic idea of the mockup is that you have a discussion that happens on three layers:

1. Top-level considerations, polls and comments

2. Discussion of these considerations

3. Summaries of the current state of the considerations and discussion

The considerations, polls and comments can be noun phrases or feelings, and if they get highly upvoted, a summary is strongly encouraged to include the comments and the comment thread below it.

The summaries will be prominently displayed at the top, to allow new users to get a sense of the current state of the discussion, and participate productively. It also allows users who just want a quick answer to the question of the thread to quickly get what they want.

Yep, that's part of the plan.