1/16/2018 Update - Parent Comments, and Nearterm Horizon

post by Raemon · 2018-01-16T23:59:01.367Z · LW · GW · 6 comments

Contents

  Easy vs Hard Bugs
  Nearterm Horizon
  Moderation tools
None
6 comments

One issue I've ran into on the frontpage is seeing something in "recent comments", which is missing the context of it's parent comment. I got annoyed with having to click through the post just to figure out the context.

This was fairly easy to fix, so I went and added a "see parent" option for recent comments.

Easy vs Hard Bugs

I know a few people have flagged pretty substantial bugs (in particular with the editor, such as the weird way it forcibly parses markdown), as well as major features the site is still missing for parity with Old LessWrong (such as meetups). We haven't gotten around to those, so it may be frustrating to see "small quality of life" fixes like the Recent Comment thing rather than addressing those major issues.

This is mostly a factor of "easy things vs hard things." Generally each week we set some major goals for ourselves that involve a lot of thinking/planning, and we spend a few hours each day working on those. Then, in the evening, or on weekends, we work on easier things that just happen to annoy us a lot, that we're motivated to work on in our off hours.

In particular, changes to the editor require a major upfront investment of time. We do want to fix it but we'll need to set aside a couple days for it.

Nearterm Horizon

It also seemed helpful to clarify what's upcoming, with the overall plan is to reach feature parity with Old LessWrong. (Note: this is not a promise to get these things done in a certain timeframe, more of a "this is what we currently intend.")

• Notifications rework - Better styling, ultimately designing a notifications menu similar to wordpress that makes it easier to navigate the site. We'rue also fixing various bugs that make notifications unreliable (for example, unlisted or draft posts sometimes to show up in the notifications feed, even when you can't read the post).
• Meetups - some kind of minimum-viable-version of this, most likely similar to the Meta page in that it's a separate view you click on in the upper-left corner menu, see a list of meetups and click on them for more information. (Sometime later we'll flesh this out in a more fully-featured system that notifies people about upcoming meetups in their area, but we're wary of accidentally spamming people and want to take the time to do that carefully)
• Testing framework - We've been developing an increasingly complicated site without much in the way of testing. Last year we tried to set up automated testing but ran into several technical challenges. Last week we finally got a working test framework, and going forward will build tests for new features (adding tests for older features as we find time).
• Importing Votes and Views - We haven't actually imported the old karma scores, or people's page-views. The former is important both to make sure people's votes are weighted properly, and to grant certain privileges (see moderation tools below). The latter is important so people's historical views of sequence posts will be tracked. (This could, for example, let you know how much of R:AZ you've read, once we get that set up properly)

Moderation tools

LW2.0 has made a lot of progress in consolidating discussion. But we're stilling running into an issue, where many people still prefer to have their conversations on private blogs or FB where they have more control over the commenting experience. On a private blog, there's a clearer sense of ownership and responsibility for deciding the tone of a discussion.

We are currently planning to shift LW a bit in this direction. Users with a smallish amount of karma (around 50-100) will be able to moderate comments on their personal blogposts. Users with higher karma (probably 1000) will be trusted to moderate comments on their own front page posts.

(Front page post comments will still have to conform to some basic site-wide rules, but authors will be given more leeway to delete comments that don't seem helpful)

6 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.