Leaving beta: Voting on moving to LessWrong.com

Wanted to share our thoughts on this so far (we're currently pretty uncertain about how to weigh a large number of concerns together, but agree that meetups should be discoverable and are a really important part of the LessWrong community, and I'm interested in thoughts on how to go about this).

Throughout most of the web, you're barraged with distractions. You can't read a blogpost without seeing links to related content, notifications, etc, hyperlinks that force at least a mild decision of whether to keep reading the current thing or switch contexts or at the very least pause to open it in a new tab for later.

And this adds up to a major cost to attention, which is one of our most rare and precious resources. And a major design philosophy of LesserWrong is, as much as possible, to not be doing that. Each page on the site tries to focus your attention on one thing (with a plausible exception for the frontpage, but at least there's a one-thing of "figure out what you want to read in detail")

This does make a lot of design choices harder – if you're not willing to bombard your user with lots of things-to-maybe-pay-attention-to, it's obviously harder to offer them the ability to pay attention to things they haven't yet considered.

Sidebars lean heavily into the "offer lots of other things to think about" mentality, which is why we'd like to avoid them.

We do plan to feature meetups in some more obvious-fashion on the frontpage, although it seems like this may involve some careful rework of what the frontpage is currently doing. This wouldn't address the use-case of "gets linked to a particular blogpost, reads it, sees on the side that there's a meetup in their city, goes to meetup."

We are leaning towards tweaking the header-bar to contain more information (something like "transform what is currently the hidden hamburger menu into a menu-bar with more discoverability), which'll help a bit, but it'd feel weird to me to use that particular space for "meetup in your area!"

It seems plausible that once you finish a given article that maybe it should show some things you might want to do next. (I think if this is put all the way at the bottom of the comments it'd be so obscured as to be mostly-useless, and if it's put above the comments, it's a bit differently weird)

There's a whole separate issue, where it's making some kind of statement about what LessWrong is when social hangouts ["board game meetup near you!"] are presented on the front page (and a different statement if the only meetups on the frontpage are more intellectual-leaning), and figuring out how to set the right tone for the culture is a pretty big question.

This is all to say "yes, we're taking this seriously, but also it's hard." Solving the issue requires a fair amount of background on how everything fits together so most simple solutions will probably not be sufficient, but I'm interested in additional thoughts people have on it.

Huh. That's not been my experience with Wordpress.

That's basically what I suggested with the defaults reversed, so yes.

Again, part of the problem, if you read my linked comments, is that the editor isn't WYSIWYG, it's worst-of-both-worlds. WYSIWYG rich text (with buttons always visible) would be an improvement, as would ordinary Markdown with no WYSIWYG component. I think the latter is preferable to the former, but either is an improvement, and allowing both is even better. I personally would have set the default differently, but that disagreement has no real relevance.

I would. WYSIWYG is a terrible editing paradigm, but some people like it, so I won't argue against providing it. Trying to mix WYSIWYG with markup-based editing, though, is far worse.

I further suggest that the plain option not be hidden out of the way. Make it selectable when commenting, and remember the selection. I wasn't even aware it existed until just now.

(edit: To be fair, I'm probably going to keep using greaterwrong regardless. Discount my opinion to whatever extent applies)

I would STRONGLY prefer that. I'm sorry for using strong language and I'm trying to be emphatic here, not upset or judgemental, but: I would describe the current state of the editor as "unacceptably broken" and "totally unusable (for anything at all complex)".

If you don't agree with me about "unacceptably broken", please reread the bug I filed about this: https://github.com/Discordius/Lesswrong2/issues/314 -- it's not just that automatically applying formatting is bad, it's not even just that it COMPLETELY breaks copy-paste and links that have underscores in them -- which would alone be reason enough to turn it off and leave it off -- the implementation of autoformatting also DOES NOT WORK RIGHT AT ALL.

We could just turn off automatic markdown parsing in our editor for now, and just have it do rich-text via keyboard shortcuts and the toolbar that shows up when you select text. And then we already have the option for a super-plain markdown editor that you can activate in your profile to replace the normal commentEditor. Would people prefer that?

I don't know about other people but I'm not sure what half of that means.

Okay, cool. As long as it's on your radar.

Can you announce that.

We're basically giving it a day or so of "make sure we've caught obvious bugs" and "get a bunch of meetups listed" and then will have a big announcement.

Also my meetup has several organisers who will want to post events. Is there support for that?

Right now it's actually both the case that:

1. I think you can add multiple organizers to a group (not 100% sure we shipped that but it was in the works), but, meanwhile:
2. There are not currently restrictions on who can post an event for a given group. (This is just an interim thing because implementing a robust permission system is a fair amount of work, but meanwhile we wanted to remove trivial inconveniences to getting events up and populated)

Can you also not ask for locations and instead ask people to input location?

We do plan to implement both options.

the top navbar that folds down as soon as I scroll up, covering the text I scrolled up to see, is a common web misfeature

That definitely gets my vote for my biggest irritant on this site. The first thing I did after creating an account is to look in preferences for a way to prevent the bar from ever appearing. I suppose I am in the habit of being able to use the up-arrow key to scroll the window up a little bit, reliably, so that once I've hit the up arrow key and the page changes in any way (and my browser is the app that has focus) I can assume the scroll happened after the briefest glance at the page, and I can immediately turn my attention to something else.

When I need to interact with the elements that now live on the bar, I would be prepared to scroll to the top of the page or (if I don't want to lose my place on the page) to visit LW2 in a new tab.

I'm also prepared to install a Chrome extension if that is the easiest way for someone to implement what I'm asking for.

Happy to answer questions sent to hruvulum@gmail.com.