Main section vs. discussion section

post by ShardPhoenix · 2012-03-06T05:37:31.090Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 13 comments

(The following may only apply to me. I mention it to see if anyone else has had the same issue).

For a long time I have been only looking at the Discussion section and promoted main page articles. Just now on a whim I checked the non-promoted main page articles and found there were a whole bunch of them, some potentially quite interesting, that I had missed. My expectation based on past experience was that all reasonably good articles from main would be "promoted", but perhaps this has changed. If this has been going on for a while I've presumably missed quite a bit of content. Perhaps it should be made easier to find/notice these? It's a bit weird and awkward that there are 3 different non-uniform ways of finding posts.

13 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Grognor · 2012-03-06T07:53:46.135Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I never understood why it's completely impossible to go from the front page (or indeed nearly anywhere) to the New posts in Main (as opposed to just Promoted posts in Main) in less than two clicks.

Of the set {promoted posts, new main posts, discussion posts}, I actually find promoted posts to be the least useful on average, since it's so god damned full of meetup posts.

comment by Alex_Altair · 2012-03-06T06:56:35.231Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree. It's probably not optimal to fracture the Main page into 'promoted' and 'new'. Also I wish the drop-down menu included 'promoted' and 'new' instead of just 'posts' and 'comments'.

comment by [deleted] · 2012-03-06T12:40:16.578Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I switched to using r/all a while ago.

Replies from: Oscar_Cunningham, rhollerith_dot_com
↑ comment by Oscar_Cunningham · 2012-03-06T14:09:27.617Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

lesswrong.com/r/all/recentposts has a more compact list.

Replies from: RobertLumley, curiousepic
↑ comment by RobertLumley · 2012-03-06T15:16:19.328Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'd appreciate it if the font size on this were increased. Or just changed to look exactly like Discussion.

On a separate note, I like that I can automatically refresh the Discussion section by just clicking the giant bar that says discussion, instead of trying to find the F5 key on my keyboard, which I'm not necessarily using.

↑ comment by curiousepic · 2012-03-06T17:42:10.454Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm sure this has been answered before, but it's a tough search. Exactly what does the "#v (#c)" notation represent?

Replies from: arundelo
↑ comment by arundelo · 2012-03-06T18:50:01.393Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm pretty sure v is upvotes minus downvotes and c is number of comments. These are not always up to date.

comment by RobertLumley · 2012-03-06T14:07:33.688Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree. I almost exclusively read discussion, because it's easier to read.

comment by shminux · 2012-03-06T20:13:41.500Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It looks like the site usability changes are very low on the list of priorities of whoever is responsible for it, so I would not expect any.

Replies from: matt
↑ comment by matt · 2012-03-15T18:16:34.622Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Are you even trying to win?

comment by [deleted] · 2012-03-06T15:44:38.867Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I always look at the side-bar in main. It shows non-promoted posts and they come at a sufficiently low rate that I don't miss anything even if I couple of days pass between consecutive visits.

comment by Xachariah · 2012-03-06T14:07:02.226Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Wow, I've been here for quite a while and I didn't even know that section existed. It simply never occurred to me that there would be three parallel tracks for posts, and one would be not at all advertised. Thank you ShardPhoenix, you've changed my LW habits.

(I also upvoted you, but I figured words of encouragement help more than an incremented number.)