Recent site changes

Recent site changes have generated more unhappiness than I expected.

I dunno. I'm pretty thrilled with the results. People usually only comment when they have a disagreement. When I write a big research post, almost every single comment is negative, and yet it gets 50 upvotes. So most people may appreciate the changes even if you only hear from critics.

Thanks for all your hard work, Matt! Try not to take the criticism too seriously. People get accustomed to something even when it's suboptimal, and then they complain when it's changed. But they'll get over it.

Also, please actually pay attention to these requests, and don't add stuff that you don't know the community wants without talking about it first. In my experience, site redesigns can easily lead to large amounts of drama over very minor issues. If we're trying to be rationalist we should keep that in mind and proceed cautiously.

— comment by JoshuaZ in the suggestion thread

I suspect much of the reaction is the feeling that many user suggestions and requests were ignored, while other actions were taken that users didn't necessarily ask for or desire.

I've gone through that thread to summarize all of the most popular suggestions. For now, I'm defining "most popular" as having > 10 karma so this list does not become even longer. (If anyone feels I've unfairly or incorrectly summarized a suggestion, please let me know.) Here they are in order, with their status as best as I can tell (Y for implemented, N for not implemented, ? for unsure).

Edit: The list takes up a lot of space when posted, so I'm hosting it here.

The totals are: 8 Y, 33 N, 7 ?. That's not a particularly stellar record. Now, personally I'm glad that some of these didn't get implemented (karma bounties and markets, for instance), but there are entire categories of repeated and similar requests that seem to have been ignored. Better searching and sorting for user comment histories appears at least 5 times. Making the commenting process better (previewing, better help function) appears at least 5 times. It doesn't look like these concerns were addressed at all; in fact, at first changes to the interface made double posting a frequent problem just as the option to delete posts was removed.

I'll second Unnamed's comment: there should have been advance warning of the redesign being rolled out, with a description of what would happen. As it is, the goals and scope of the redesign are unclear; the feeling I get is that this is something being done to us rather than with us or for us. My above analysis shows that users' feeling of being ignored is fairly justified.

Edit: In the interest of not being entirely negative, in general I think that the design looks nice (although I preferred the "map and territory" header), and I'm glad to see the meetup issue is being addressed thoroughly. Also, I appreciate that you've already addressed some problems that I and others pointed out.

A bare fact of this episode is that I'm feeling shellshocked, and have not enjoyed the experience of spending significant time and money trying to make LessWrong better. Unless my brain is built differently than others of my species this experience is likely to lead to spending less on projects like this in the future.

I find it funny that you almost need to apologize for having normal human emotions. Don't worry, I think no one holds this against you.

And if you need something positive to focus on, note that you're receiving positive karma for most of your interactions with the community.

Also let me say that the overall site design seems cleaner and better readable, I perhaps have one or two minor issues but overall you have indeed optimized LW. Since this is my favourite site online, let me give you a heartfelt thanks. :)

I know practically equivalent messages have been relayed by others, but I also know that our brains work in a way that makes a +1 less relevant than reading a new message with the same content.

My apologies - my first and second comments on the changes were both uniformly negative, even though I find the changes to have been a net positive. (Now especially that the number of comments is again visible on the index pages, I no longer have any major gripes.) From having both personally done and seen friends do similar projects before, I should have known to provide much more positive feedback from the onset.

In particular, I like the general appearance of the new layout, the karma bubbles being expanded (for the first time in ages, I'm aware of my own karma changes again!), and the highlighting of new comments. The highlighting especially is a great change.

Anyone putting in this much work in a project like this would deserve to have a page full of praise and positive comments in addition to polite, constructive criticism. I'm very grateful for you doing all of this, and have immense respect both for your work on the actual update, and on your calm and reasonable manner of handling the unfairly harsh reaction.

Matt,

I think you are doing a great job,in both implementing the changes and responding to the criticism. Though there have been some issues, that is normal for this sort of software upgrade, and I am pleased to note that my biggest concerns are reflected in the "immediately" section of your issues list. I'm sorry I haven't been vocal about my favorable opinions or my confidence that you can and will fix the problems. As a software developer myself, I know how discouraging it is when the users don't seem to appreciate your efforts.

Everyone who liked the update should perhaps vote up the post to cheer up our hard-working benefactors.

Woo! Comment #s are back. This pleases me, cheers for that :)

I think it would've helped if you had made a post about the changes when they were made, with a list of what had been changed and why and a clear statement that you were looking for feedback to modify or reverse changes that didn't work. That post would've been a place for people to give you kudos for all your hard work, and it could have encouraged a discussion that was more constructive and less antagonistic.

People naturally get put off when a site that they're comfortable with is suddenly different, and attention naturally gets drawn to the little annoyances. It can help to have a list of what's been changed to make it all more understandable, a promise that bugs and annoyances can be fixed, and examples of cool/helpful changes that help balance out the annoyances. A lot of that came out eventually in the discussion to the posts about the changes, but you missed your chance to set the tone right from the start and so the discussion had more of the feel of a user revolt rather than seeming like part of the process.

Thanks so much for putting all this work into the site. The fact that you're listening to advice, and even changing back things that you've put hard work into, will really go a long way to make LessWrong better. Thank you.

I find it amazing that none of all the extraordinary claims made on this site has ever triggered a similar amount of criticism than an almost completely irrelevant change to the layout.

Any thanks and complaints about the result of these changes aside, I want to unconditionally thank you for the hard work you've obviously put into making LW better. I'd like to help you feel more positive about your efforts: do you have an amazon wishlist? a tip jar? a favorite baked good I can send you? a novelty t-shirt you really want but feels just a bit too expensive?

Thanks for your hard work. I expect that once all the little snags get worked out this will be a material improvement over the old design.

Nobody is immune to various manifestations of status quo bias. Any change is likely to create controversies. The reaction is about as strong as I had expected before I knew what changes would be implemented. So, perhaps you made a mistake in underestimating the strength of criticism, but that is not much relevant to the quality of changes itself. Even if the changes were optimal (relative to the users' preferences), the reactions would not be much different.

That you are listening to the reactions is something which could be rationally assumed, and again, I don't think you were obliged to say that explicitly.

If anything, to ward off the status quo bias, I would suggest to wait two months and then survey the opinions and eventually make further adjustments. Two or three days of testing are hardly sufficient to determine the quality of the new design. Besides, letting people voice their opinions early on can trigger another bias.

Anyway, the new design is better than the old one and you have our gratitude. Or at least mine.

I wasn't sure of the right place to express it before, but thanks for all of the hard work you and the team have put into the redesign!

I trust the compliments more than the complaints, because there are more likely ways to negatively speak too soon than positive ones. The functional comments are probably of more value. I'll let you know in a week how I feel about the visual aspects, because I don't trust my judgment right when something familiar is changed.

People should also be aware of the relevant My Little Pony episode about design preferences, Suited For Success. Serious business.

As I get some distance from seeing things for the first time, I definitely had some huge status quo bias and didn't properly account for how I'd learn the new icons - and there's also the fact that my old browser cache caused big bugs for the first few hours I saw the new site, and that was the period when I made my comments about it.

I bet this sort of thing is very common, and can think of two ways to handle it. One would be not caring, since people will be fine with it in a while anyhow. The other would be marketing and laying groundwork, not like a discussion but more like a marketing campaign and an instruction manual. Hell, I bet there's a book on this problem somewhere.

Aaaanyhow, please don't feel blue because we're jerks. The new site's great, and it will keep improving. Well, hopefully :D

My suggestions for revoking-the-comment feature:

• Don't actually prevent voting, just limit the extent to which the comment can be downvoted. Say, no lower than -4. Or at least -2. Otherwise, allow voting. Maybe the community decides that it's actually a good comment! (Another variation: allow unlimited downvoting of a comment, but make it have no impact on Karma. It's probably an even better alternative.)
• Don't indicate that a comment is revoked by striking through all its text. It makes it hard to read, which is annoying. It also makes it impossible to add clarifying comments about why the comment is revoked in the same comment, without the clarification also getting tainted.
• Allow deleting comments without children. This supports the use case of reverting something posted by mistake or recognized as stupid on further reflection. (You already know this one.)

The comment counts are back on the list of topics. Huzzah!

Thanks for your hard work, and especially for the green borders on the comments added since the last time the page was viewed.

I think the mere fact of having unread comments highlighted in green more than makes up for the rest of the arguably worse changes (the old header is the only thing I regret (and frankly who cares, that's textbook bikeshedding), the other small changes are probably improvements).

As a fellow programmer who has to deal with usability and fickle users (though I make games and not websites), I can guess how you feel - it is annoying how people tend to freak out over small details that are obviously small and easy-to-fix bugs (like the cache issue), and weight a lot of impressions together to form one big "good or bad" feeling instead of analyzing each aspect independently. And people also tend to think that some changes like polls are trivial to implement, etc.

So overall, keep on the good work!

So, I have just discovered how useful the "new post glow" feature can be. Thanks for implementing that!

The nearby meetups feature is a great idea, but the current implementation creates a new challenge: All regular meetups are now making posts every time they have a meetup. This is more work for them, but more importantly, it's serious clutter on the discussion page.

Possible solutions: 1) Implement a calendar that can handle repeat events. 2) Add an option on the Add New Meetup tab which would allow users to either create a new post (what it does right now) or to link to another url (old post or wiki page). This would at least handle the clutter problem.

Can you change the roll out process? Maybe with a publicly accessible beta, and for bigger changes the chance to use the old version for a while after roll-out? My guess is that this is possible as long as the database is not changed.

In the two weeks since the site redesign, the front page has completely fallen off Google for keyword rationality. I would take a hard look at how the main page is being seen by search engines and optimize for a short list of keywords that matter. You can start by adding the phrase refining the art of human rationality to the title.

Currently, the only thing for me that is close to a dealbreaker is the issue about not being able to delete comments. If that ability is restored, I should be mostly complaint-free for the time being.

One feature that I would like to request, however, is the ability to more easily retrieve old private messages -- perhaps separate inboxes for comments and PMs.

Ooooh, looks like everything I disliked about the update has been fixed (last one sometime in the lest few hours it looks like), so consider any complaints I had withdrawn. This In now officially awesome and you're awesome for making it! ^_^

Thanks for putting in a lot of work and helping make the community better etc. etc.

Edit: Wait, what, now it's back to the bad colour scheme again?!

I feel that the main problem, perhaps the ONLY problem, is not among the ones you listed: The changes were made involuntarily, without any warning. What you should have done instead was somehting like making the changes, but have them as an alternate mode so that you could chose if you wanted to use the new or old design at first. Then, once you had sorted out almost of the issues you could do things like having the new design be the default for new users, changing everyone profile to it but allowing the option to change back, etc. Only once almost everyone is using only the new design should the option of using the old one be removed.

People react badly to being FORCED to change, almost regardless of what the change is, and this was basically a beta version which means it can't be UNAMBIGUOUSLY good.

There is really nothing mayor wrong with the design, just the way it was introduced to the userbase.

I'm really liking the meetup system. Good job.

Perhaps having a public test server would make it easier to get continuous feedback?

First off, let me say thank you for all the work that's gone into the site update by everyone involved! The three changes I like most are the new header design (especially the clear separation between Main and Discussion - the old menu was too cluttered), the nearby meetup section, and the expanding karma bubbles.

I had one question about how the nearby meetup list and Location. Is the meetup list supposed to sort by location somehow? If so, what do I need to put in my location? Thanks!

Something I would really like is for the main site and the "main" button at the top to go to the new posts page, not just the promoted posts. Something only gets promoted every few weeks, and I want to see all the new content, not just the best. I realize that I may be in the minority on this, so I won't mind if you don't implement it because you think it would be ill received.

Also, can the green glow around new comments be extended to posts that contain new comments? I can't always remember how many comments a post had at last glance, and I'd like to see where there are new ones.

Thanks for your hard work! I'm really happy with the changes for the most part, especially the green borders on new comments and your quick response to the request I had in the last thread about long usernames. As someone who's just barely a programming novice, I understand how hard making some of these changes would have been.

As for the stuff in the Google doc and this thread, it all looks like good ideas and I'm looking forward to seeing it implemented. My only real problems are missing the old header and missing the "comments" links that used to come with every post.

Here's my number one comment, and the one thing I'd want to see modified:

• With the current style, the "Upcoming Meetups" change has squeezed down "Recent Comments" and "Recent Posts" to the second page. This is disastrous for my participation in the site -- I expect a drastic reduction in my participation for the mere reason that I can no longer see at a glance if there's a new comment or a new post, that I might want to respond to.

Secondary comments:

• Keep "Vote up" "Vote Down" as icons, but move them next to the comments' score (to place them in context).

• Change the reply icon into the word "REPLY". Our brain is already in text mode after reading a comment, when we want to reply to it, the word REPLY needs stick out from the other icons, we don't want to have to be searching which icon is which.

• Keep the other icons as icons. (don't treat my suggestion for reverting "REPLY" as a suggestion to change ALL the icons back)

• Light green ought be darker. Light grey ought be darker. Don't force our eyes to have to distinguish between such slight variations of different white.

I think I just broke the meetup submission function. Sorry.

Feature request: it would be great if retracted comments were initially rendered "folded" like low-scored comments, and had to be explicitly unfolded.