1/9/2018 Update - Frontpage Views

post by Raemon · 2018-01-10T01:37:22.901Z · LW · GW · 8 comments

Contents

  Responding to Gwillen
None
8 comments

A few people had complained that the frontpage views (i.e. "Curated Content", "Frontpage", etc) were still a bit counterintuitive.

I made a couple quick changes:

• make the buttons green, so that it's more clear you might want to click there at all
• add a hover-menu, which hopefully improves discoverability and provides some context.
• in particular, I hope that adding a hover-menu to the "..." more-options button gives it just the right amount of discoverability (i.e. enough that you can find it if you're looking for it or if you've been using the site awhile, but not a choice that newcomers are confronted with immediately)

Responding to Gwillen

Gwillen had asked a question in a non-meta thread, and this seems like a good place to respond:

People have the option to post either to personal blog or frontpage, right? Even people like me with not that much karma? So under what circumstances would a mod move a post from personal blog to frontpage? Might an author not object to that? I'm trying to understand whether I have a good model of the purpose of personal blog versus frontpage, and of what moderators can do, and what they normally do.

The exact details are still being fleshed out here, and the implementation will probably change over time as the site grows and moves from open-beta to launch-ready.

In general, the intent with LW2.0 is to focus on:

• giving people a place to develop ideas, and improve their ability to make intellectual progress over time
• design a system so that that the most important ideas bubble up into public common knowledge.

Right now, we want to make sure the site is usable, so we're making it easy for everyone to post to the front page, and only moving their posts back to personal-blog-space if they violate the norms.

As our userbase grows over time, this would eventually result in the frontpage being flooded with content of varying quality. So the rough plan is to gradually ramp up the requirements for posting to Frontpage (eventually limiting it to people with higher karma who have a clear understanding of the guidelines), with options to get personal blogposts moved to Frontpage when appropriate.

Right now we're erring on the side of moving posts from personal-blogs to frontpage fairly quickly. This may also change. (We've considered creating settings where users can flag if they want a post to be moved to frontpage, but this would add some UI complexity that isn't necessarily worth it)

The personal blogs serve a few different purposes. The one I'm most confident will remain is as a space to discuss ideas shouldn't be front-and-center for new users. (i.e. discussion of politics, discussion of community-qua-community that isn't relevant if you're just starting to explore the site, and calls to action that are trying to persuade rather than explain).

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