Feature Wish List for LessWrong

FHI and MIRI both hold workshops that are logistically very expensive, both for the organizations and for the participants. Structurally a workshop discussion seems very similar to a LessWrong: you have one person make a short presentation about a topic or a question, then discussion ensues. It seems like a lot of resources could be saved if some of those discussions were moved online entirely, or if the participants had online discussions ahead of time to iron out some basic issues / common misunderstandings so that the workshop could focus on more important issues. We should ask what features would enable that.

I think one thing that would help is to have private posts that can only be viewed and commented on by invitation (by both username and email address so people can be invited even before they sign up to LW). I guess that people are often reluctant to post on LW because they're not ready for their ideas to be seen in public yet. For example their idea is only half-formed and it wouldn't make sense yet to take the effort of making it understandable to people outside a small circle. Or they're not sure the idea is correct and don't want to take a public reputation hit in case it's not.

I suggest having the option of making a private post public at any time, so productive discussions can be later viewed and joined in by the public, for example after the initial poster decides there aren't embarrassing holes in their ideas, or has had a chance to edit their post for public consumption. Each commenter should be able to mark their comment as private or inherit, where private would hide their comment from the public even if the opening post is made public.

I think the highest payoff-per-unit-effort changes to LW as it currently exists are in content discovery.

We have this massive pile of mostly-evergreen content, yet we have very few ways for a user to find specific things in that pile which interest them. We have the sequences, and we have some recommendations at the top of the homepage. But neither of these shows things which are more likely than average to be of interest to this specific user. With such a huge volume of content, showing users the things most relevant to their interests is crucial.

So, two main criteria for changes to be high-value:

• Content discovery needs to be on every post, not just the homepage
• Content discovery needs to be relevant, i.e. not just showing everyone the same things all the time

Now, I'm not saying we need a fancy engine for user-level recommendations; "related posts" would be much easier and probably more effective than an off-the-shelf recommendation engine. The ideal starting point would be a sidebar on every post containing (some subset of):

• Posts/comments which link to this post
• Other posts by this author
• Author-suggested related posts
• "Users who upvoted/commented on this post also upvoted/commented on..."
• Commenter-suggested related posts (would potentially help for forward-linking to newer versions of old ideas)
• "Similar" posts, as judged by some automated natural language model and/or hyperlink-based model
• Posts with similar tags (would require tag functionality)

... etc. Just getting a sidebar with one or two of these would give a good platform for extending functionality later on, and would dramatically improve visibility into our mountain of content.

Highlighting new comments is important. Currently, viewing a subthread breaks that feature; it shouldn't. (One way to handle this is to allow people to choose "highlight comments posted since an arbitrary date", with a dropdown list of times they've visited the thread in the past.)

Also, since we're migrating to another codebase, not every feature LW currently has will move over by default. So if you use something like the anti-kibitzer and would like to make sure it's still around, that should go on this list too.

Maybe this could be done by something else besides the core LW team, but I'd like to have an Android app for LW and EA Forum, that would give me periodic notifications for my inbox, posts/authors/threads I subscribe to, karma changes, maybe new high-karma posts and comments, so I don't have to constantly refresh many different pages on LW/GW/EAF to keep up with what's going on. Having to do that is really a pain when you're trying to use forum participation as a research strategy .

I've been thinking about writing this app myself, but thought I'd ask first to see if anyone else wants to do it.

I want to see a backlink feature, so people can find replies to a post that aren't in the form of a comment. Compared to the old LW, people now write more posts than comments, and some long replies that would have been comments in the old LW now appear as posts, but these are hard to find from the post that they're replying to. Please consider implementing this for external backlinks too if that seems worthwhile.

(Also, is this still the best place to submit feature requests?)

I very much like the idea of the Sunshine Regiment, as discussed by Vaniver, here:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/o5z/on_the_importance_of_less_wrong_or_another_single/di1g

As he's explained it to me, it sounds like it would need to be part of the code. From the outside, it would need to be a button on each post that would flag it as needing attention from a member of the SR. I feel like the flag should be visible to everyone, so that if things are getting out of hand, it can be put on pause until the SR takes a look at it, but it should not reveal publicly who flagged it. But maybe there is a better system for handling visibility and anonymity.

From the inside, it would need the features that Vaniver described, namely an issue-handling system for all the members of the SR to keep track of who's taking care of what, and which posts need attention. I'd think that SR should know who flagged a post, but maybe it could be anonymous to them as well.

(Or, maybe this has already undergone a more thorough discussion behind the scenes, in which case, you can just take this post as a vote in favor of SR support.)

Comments navigation sidebar

To the side of the main comments area, show an outline of the thread structure of all comments of a post (with each comment being represented by a box that shows just the author, time, and karma of the comment), and a sliding box that represents which comments are currently scrolled into view in the main comments area. The sliding box moves as the user scrolls the main comments area, and can be dragged for navigation, or the user can click anywhere on the sidebar to navigate directly to a comment. The sidebar can be independently scrolled if needed.

I think this feature will make it a lot easier to keep track of and navigate large comment sections.

I would like downvotes and upvotes to be both shown rather than mathed out against each other, and also them not be anonymous. I also endorse restricting downvotes.

I've written a bit about this, but I never finished the sequence and don't really endorse any of it as practical. Some of the comment threads may have useful suggestions in them, though.

Discussion quality is a function of the discussants more than the software.

I think we are better off using something as close to off-the-shelf as possible, modified only via intended configuration hooks. Software development isn't LW's comparative advantage. If we are determined to do it anyway, we should do it in such a way that it's useful to more than just us, so as to potentially get contributions from elsewhere.

What's the replacement plan? Are we building something from the ground up, re-forking Reddit, or something else? I've nosed around contributing a few times and keep getting put off by the current crawling horror. If we're re-building from something clean, I might reconsider.

Personally I have found downvoting to be one of the biggest problems with LW, and one reason I don't go to the effort of writing full posts here.

People will downvote something that you spent a lot of time putting together, and which may have a lot of merit, but which perhaps isn't perfect. I have found this is particularly true if you present a theory about something without enough "rubber stamp" hedging about how what you're saying might not be true.

Some things posted here are genuinely without any merit, or so riddled with sloppy thinking that they deserve to be on negative karma, but that doesn't apply to most things.

As a fix for this, I would make downvoting something a user has a limited supply of, like 1 per week, increasing gradually with the karma that user accrues. Perhaps the starting supply of downvotes should be 0/week until the user has submitted some content.

And of course we need to fight botting, but that seems obvious.

I'd like a bookmark function for posts and comments. Sometimes I see an interesting post or comment but I don't have enough time to fully understand or write a reply for it, so it would be nice if I could press a button and have LW remember for me to get back to it.

(I could do this using the browser bookmark feature, but I use a whole bunch of different devices and different browsers and don't have bookmark synchronization between them, plus it would be nice to be able to access my LW bookmarks when I'm not using my own devices.)

Speculative: don't necessarily force, but allow people to tag upvotes and downvotes, suggesting tags which are globally common or have already been used on this comment. (Suggested downvote tags: "incomprehensible", "untrue", "rude", "spam", "misread the parent comment".) Make the tags visible on each comment. Possibly, for each user, publish the list of most common tags they've received.

Votes shouldn't have equal weight, but a page-rank like algorithm should score votes by people who get a lot of votes higher.

Another 'Nice to have' feature would be the ability to easily share comments between LW, Facebook and a personal WordPress blog.

I'd like to be able to post something on my blog, automatically crosspost it to LW, and have the comments mirrored from LW to my site. That way I would get the reward of visibility for my blog, without having to deprive LW of content.

Make the comment editor floating or sticky once someone starts typing in it, so that it remains visible in the browser window as the user scrolls up or down to look at the main post or other comments.

Active moderation by a core of trusted, actively contributing volunteers who have the capability of removing/hiding content without having to justify all details of such decisions to the membership as a whole. Separate, moderator only discussion space where policies and meta issues can be discussed without detracting from the main content here (and general discouragement of extensive meta discussions in main and discussion forums). Capability and willingness of moderators or at least forum admins to remove, block or bar users if in violation of site policies.

With the right sort of moderators this can be done sensitively to the needs of the community (I write this as a moderator of an unrelated discussion site with about 400 comments a day, most on topic).

I'd like each user to have their own sub domain (I.e such that my top level posts can be accessed either from Anders_h.lesswrong.com or from LW discussion). If possible it would be great if users could customize the design of their sub domain, such that posts look different when accessed from LW discussion.

It would be helpful to have a few threads that are sticky, or otherwise easy to find. For example, the current open, welcome, and stupid questions threads. Today when I created that spurious welcome thread, I noticed a post made by a new user that seemed appropriate for the welcome thread and I wanted to link them to it. The link to the welcome thread at http://lesswrong.com/about/ points to a 2015 edition. I tried a few different searches in the Google search bar, then checked a few of the tags that customarily go along with the welcome threads. Then I got anxious that I was double posting, and checked again. So I finally posted it, and within two hours, before I was even aware that I'd double posted, the thread got two new users posting on it, even though the original had sat idle for over a week.

This makes me think that I'm not the only one that had trouble finding it. The Google search that's integrated into the site is great for searching based on content and popularity, especially for older content, but it's slow to index, and sometimes the title of the link is misleading (it actually finds the original January 2017 Welcome thread, but the link shows up as January 2016). It looks like the way to have found it would have been ctrl-F on the discussion page. If the standard, regularly-reposted threads were sticky'd at the top, or had links on a sidebar or something, this wouldn't be an issue. A search that allows to filter by date would probably also suffice, so long as it indexes quickly enough.

I hope this doesn't sound like I'm making excuses; I made a mistake, and I feel appropriately embarrassed (and even as I type that, I get the mental image of Vaniver looking at me critically and saying "But do you?"). I realize that this may be mainly a case of me being bad at searching for things, and if I'm the only one who experiences this, then we can probably just not worry about it.

BTW there are some annoying UI issues on mobile at the moment. As I'm writing this comment, the comment button is hidden unless I rotate my screen to landscape.

The upvote/downvote buttons are very hard to press due to being rather small.

I suggest a "I already replied" indicator for messages in my inbox. Also, flags I can set on certain comments/messages to indicate that I should reply to them with high priority. (These could basically work the same way as in a typical email client.) This could be integrated with the bookmark feature [LW(p) · GW(p)] that I suggested earlier.

Also, is it just me or does development happen rather slowly on LW? I've done some web development myself and it seems like on a codebase that I'm familiar with, it would take a few weeks at most to implement some of the feature suggestions that have been sitting here for many months.

I would like to see who up-voted me and the number of views each post gets. There should be a less time consuming way of putting a link in a comment. Once each month you should have the option of super-up-voting a post or comment and the number of super-up votes a post gets should be visible.

Wow, is this the newest feature-request thread? Well, it's the newest I easily find given that LessWrong search has very poor granularity when it comes to choosing a time frame within which to search...

My feature request for LessWrong is the same as my feature request for every site: you should be able to search within a user. This is easy to do technically; you just have to add the author's name as one of the words in the search index.

Preferably do it in such a way that a normal post cannot do the same, e.g. you might put "foo authored this post" in the index as @author:foo but if a normal post contains the text "@author:foo" then perhaps the index only ends up with @author (or author) and foo, while the full string is not in the index (or, if it is in the index, can only be found by searching with quotes a la Google: "@author:foo"

I don't know if this has been discussed before, but what's the argument against the standard response-bumps-thread model? You've got active threads falling off the first page while threads that haven't successfully started a discussion are just sitting there.

Thread-bumping also allows for the creation of long-term threads - threads that might not be worth turning into stickies but are worthy of being resurrected many times when somebody has something new to contribute to them. "Your Favorite Rationality-Related Books", just as an example. Somebody creates it, people throw in a few names, then it sinks off the bottom of the page. A few weeks later somebody reads something new and wants to tell everyone about it so they post to the Book thread. It jumps back up to the top of the page and more people who didn't see it the first time round add their suggestions, and it sinks again. Over months and years contributions build up until you have a really useful resource for people looking for a good rationality book. That's the kind of thing I mean by a long-term thread.

While I'm at it, other fora usually have discussion sections broken into broad areas of interest - say Economics, Ethics, AI etc. (maybe even Politics) - and people post within the appropriate section. That might be a model to consider.

Finally, I think that if people want LW to be anything like a community, you need to consider making some sort of space for people to get to know each other and bond socially. The open threads don't cover that, comments there are still expected to be related to the site's purpose. I mean a random chat space where people can go to bitch about the weather or argue about whether Kirk was a better captain than Picard. I honestly believe it would improve the quality of the real discussions too. Social bonds incentivize civility. If we were all perfectly rational discussants that wouldn't be necessary but none of us are. So why not take a tip from evolution?

In the short term, i'm open to the idea of allowing only upvotes on comments, but allowing both up and downvotes on posts.