First, I appreciate the work people have done to make LW 2 happen. Here are my notes:

1. Strong feeling - the links and descriptions of the Sequences, the Codex, and HPMOR (while good) should not be at the top of the page. The top should be the newest material.
2. Please please please include a "hide subthread" option to collapse a comment and all its responses. That is a dealbreaker for me, if a site doesn't have that feature, I won't read the comments.
3. Current LW has a really nice alternating color scheme for comment/reply. One comment will have a grey background, the comment below it will have a beige background. That is a key feature for visually parsing a comment thread.
4. I liked the concept of having a main section and a discussion section, where the bar for posting in the latter is lower. For whatever reason, people seem to get angry if you post something that they feel is low quality or not relevant.
5. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but somehow I don't quite like the default font. It may be that I like a different font for reading on dead tree paper vs on a computer screen?
6. It may be slightly evil, but the karma display on the right side of the screen makes the site more addictive, because people love to see if they get upvotes or comment replies.
7. It seems weird to allow people to upvote/downvote an article right from the home page, do you really want people to vote for an article without reading it?

I don't know if there is a Schelling point for providing feedback, so I made this thread.

Speaking for myself, my reaction to LW 2.0 could be summarized as: "This is so confusing and so difficult to figure out, that I'll just... leave it for later." Before I get to the individual complaints, here is the meta one:

If you want to change dozen things about a website, don't change them all at the same time. For the user, some of them will feel like an improvement, and others may feel like an opposite of improvement; but all of them feel like an extra cognitive burden. So even if of those dozen changes 7 are in the positive and 5 in the negative direction, the overall impression may still be negative. Also, consider loss aversion; people will be more annoyed by losing a feature they liked.

Now the details:

The font seems to be bigger, and the spaces between lines also seem bigger. (I didn't actually measure it; this is my impression from looking at the page.) As a result it feels like there is much less content on the screen, which makes it more difficult to perceive as a whole, reduces my efficiency of speed reading, and makes me push Page Down more often. In general it creates what I call a "Facebook experience", where you keep pressing Page Down till your fingers hurt.

The font is blurry, and gray instead of black. So despite the text being larger, the smaller contrast makes it actually more difficult to read. Ironically, the only thing that should be less visible against the background -- the upvote and downvote buttons you didn't click -- is visible enough, so I have a problem to quickly see whether I did or didn't vote on the article.

The screen area containing the text is not limited, making it more difficult for my eyes to scan the lines. (Yes, this is a repeated topic in my complaints: it feels as if the page was optimized in various aspects to slow down my reading speed.) On LW1, the parts of the screen containing the text has white background, the sides have a light gray background; when reading the text I am barely aware that those sides exist. On LW2 the text is floating in the large ocean of white background; I am reading on a wide monitor, and my eyes are constantly jumping to the edges of the screen. (No, I am not going to change the size of my browser window to fit LW2; all other websites are okay with me keeping the window maximized.)

The new content is displayed in a what seems like a random order. Yeah, it can be changed. But then I will create a bubble for myself where what I see is quite different from what other people see, so I hesitate about that.

The comments don't have boxes, so it is difficult to see where one comment ends and another comment starts, or which comment replies to which one.

...I guess this is enough complaints for one comment. Trying to be a bit more constructive, I guess the easiest solution for my problems would be to create a CSS stylesheet which would try to make LW2 visually as similar as possible to LW1. Like, seriously, look at LW1, look at Hacker News, look at Slashdot, look at Reddit... all those websites use small fonts with sharp edges. It probably happened for a reason.

Hi all,

I made a pair of Stylish themes (for use with the Stylish browser extension, for Chrome, Firefox, etc.) that address some of the appearance / usability / typography concerns that people have been mentioning, in this thread and elsewhere. Here they are:

Stylish themes for LessWrong 2.0

(There are two versions of the theme: the first version uses a serif font, the second uses a sans-serif variant. Pick whichever you like, they're identical otherwise.)

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/xI4ia

What these themes do:

• Better choice of body text font (more readable, especially on Linux and Windows machines, and on lower-end displays)
• Text color is black instead of grey (i.e. fully opaque instead of partially transparent)
• Alternating background colors for comment boxes (LessWrong 1.0 style)
• More clearly readable comment headers, especially commenter names
• Much more distinctive highlighting for activated upvote/downvote buttons
• Content column visually separated from contentless margins
• Removed all CSS transitions, which should make many parts of the page UI feel snappier (and be a little less hardware-intensive)
• Some other minor changes…

UPDATE: The latest version of the themes adds these features:

• Visually distinctive highlighting for new comments
• Improved blockquote styling

I love that the attempt is being made and I hope it works. The main feedback that I have is that the styling of the comment section doesn't work for me. One of the advantages of the existing LessWrong comment section is that the information hierarchy is super clear. The comments are bordered and backgrounded so when you decide to skip a comment your eye can very easily scan down to the next one. At the new site all the comments are relatively undifferentiated so it's much harder to skim them. I also think that the styling of the blockquotes in the new comments needs work. Currently there is not nearly enough difference between blockquoted text and comment text. It needs more spacing and more indenture, and preferably a typographical difference as well.

As has been mentioned a couple times already...I don't know how I'm supposed to use the site.

I go there and then I'm just like "now what?".

1. It looks like there's different places I can go to read different subsets of all available posts. How do I know I'm not missing any posts?

2. When I go to lesserwrong.com, there's a huge section at the top of stuff I've already read and it's always there. I have to scroll below the fold to see new content.

3. So the first section I see when I scroll down is called "Featured Posts". What makes these posts featured?

4. Next section is "Recent Frontpage Posts". What's a "Frontpage" post? Am I missing some sort of non-frontpage posts by just reading this section?

5. Under the "Frontpage" posts heading there's a couple of links that look like they're supposed to filter the posts. Maybe I should be reading the "see all posts" link. Does that mean all "frontpage" posts and leaves out non-frontpage posts? I dunno.

I find it very difficult to find and follow discussions on the new site. The content is very slow to load for me (on various devices) and I've given up rather than trying to work my way down.

The scoring system doesn't make sense to me but this may just be a matter of getting used to it / users settling into some kind of routine. Anyway easy enough for me to select "most recent" and squint past the scores based on other users' ratings for now.

I'm also embarrassed by the term "Sunshine Regiment". I can see what you're trying to do but it has an incredibly strong negative impact on me whenever I see it.

You say impressions, but I'm assuming this is just the "things I want changed" thread :)

Vote button visibility and responsiveness is a big one for me. Ideally, it should require one click, be disabled while it messages the server, and then change color much more clearly.

On mobile, the layout works nicely, but load / render times are too long (how much javascript is necessary to serve text? Apparently, lots) and the text formatting buttons take up far too much space.

First time, non-logged in viewers should probably not see the green messaging blob in the corner, particularly on mobile.

I agree that some kind of demarcation between comments, and between comments and "write a new comment", would be nice. Doesn't have to be 2009 internet boxes, it can be 2017 internet fading horizontal lines or something.

Hi, over here at the LessWrong Survey team we've also been collecting reactions to LW 2.0:

https://lwsurvey.obormot.net/Reports/2017-EarlyReport1

https://lwsurvey.obormot.net/Main/ResponsesFromSSC

I feel like the site is not well laid-out. It's not easy to tell where to click to see the ongoing discussions. The grey font (as opposed to black, and also the post layout) and lack of clear demarcations is not visually pleasing (to me), and it's also not as readable as it could be.

One feature makes it worth it on its own: People are posting stuff without worrying as much about if it's "good enough" or fits the theme as well (suddenly we're getting posts from everyone again).

The site itself is kind of annoying though, so my main interactions are reading the article in my RSS feed, opening the page, voting, then closing the page.

I like the bigger font size, but agree that might be excessive (16px seems about right to me).

Commenting needs some serious UX attention. The comment box doesn't look like a comment box and the text is massive.

The front page doesn't make any sense. I understand showing top content for people who aren't logged in, but once someone is logged in, the front page should be new articles.

The site seems overly fancy with JavaScript load and whatever. Loading a page with nothing but text should be instantaneous but somehow manages to take several seconds.

I haven't posted on LW for a while now, but after posting to LW2.0 I got banned (till 2021) very quickly. My posts were also deleted. I was not told why I was banned, although I assume it was because I entered a fake email (I was annoyed that the new site required an email and not just a username). I asked why I got banned, and received no response.

Well, I'm sorry for using a fake email. I wasn't trying to spam, or sockpuppet or anything, but I think a 3 year ban without any sort of warning or explanation seems a little excessive. I'm happy to provide an email that works if required. I also considered setting up a new account with a real email, but I don't want it to seem like I'm sockpuppetting.

The "Daily" page seems to be the one that is most useful to regular users (it's the one I bookmarked), but it's relatively hidden. I think it should be linked directly on the top navbar or somewhere else on the front page instead of hidden inside the hamburger menu in the navbar.

One obvious thing I really like is that the site is responsive! On this current site, I can't read the text when I make the window half the size of the screen (13 inch laptop).

I posted there 3 comments and got 6 downvotes which resulted in extreme negative emotions all the evening that day. While I understand why they were downvoted, my emotional reaction is still a surprise for me.

Because of this, I am not interested to participate in the new site, but I like current LW where downvoting is turned off.

Hi all,

I made a userscript (for use with TamperMonkey or a similar userscript manager) that makes content on LessWrong 2.0 take up the whole browser window, rather than being confined to a fixed-width column.

Script to make the text on LW 2.0 take up the whole browser window

(Aside: a fixed-width, short-line-length text column is best for slow, in-depth reading, but it is sub-optimal for skimming or scanning for specific or new content, such as one might do when re-visiting an already-read post to skim for new comments, or when looking for specific bits of text or quote in a long post. So this userscript isn't meant to suggest that the current layout is wrong, but to offer an alternative option for folks who prefer it.)

Edit: I think the ideal case would be one where there was some sort of a widget (in the vein of the one at the top of this page) that toggled between full-width and fixed-width view.

There's something about reading the new style that makes me uncomfortable, and prompts me to skim some posts that I would have read more carefully on the old site. I'm not too clear on what causes that effect. I'm guessing that some of it is the excessive amount of white, causing modest sensory overload.

Some of it could be the fact that less of a post fits on a single screenful: I probably form initial guesses about a post's value based on the first screenful, and putting less substance on that first screenful leads me to guess that the post has less substance. Or maybe I associate large fonts with click-baity sites, and small fonts with more intellectual sites.

The editor used for writing comments is really annoying. E.g. links expand to include unrelated text, or unexpectedly stop being links.

I want a way to enter html and/or markup that I can cut and paste after writing them in an editor with which I'm more comfortable. Without that, I'll probably give up on writing comments that are more thoughtful than Facebook comments.

I presume the new karma system will be an important improvement. I'm unhappy that it's bundled with such large changes to aspects of the UI that were working adequately.

Trying the site right now from work using Chrome, Firefox, and IE 11:

• Firefox fails to load images for the magnifying glass used for "search" at the top of the page, and the "expand _ less" and "expand _ more" arrows. Otherwise it mostly works.
• Clicking the capitalized "LOG IN" on the home page does nothing on IE.
• On IE (but not Firefox) going to Codex briefly puts up the actual page, then it disappears and switches to a different page "Sorry, we couldn't find what you were looking for." The location bar still shows https://www.lesserwrong.com/codex. This page has a mixed case "Log in" at the top.
• Going to a featured post doesn't make it actually disappear, but it starts as a properly formatted post (title centered, uppercase LOGIN) then switches to one improperly formatted with the title on the left and the mixed case "Log in". It does not show comments, instead endlessly throbbing the o o o at the bottom of the page.
• Clicking the mixed case "Log in" produces the normal login box, which lets me type in a username and password and click "SIGN IN", except that it is too far to the right (going off the page if I don't stretch it) and I can't actually click the "SIGN IN". When I hover over it I get a slashed circle and clicking it produces no response.
• Neither Firefox nor IE produces the "hi, welcome to lesswrong 2.0" at the bottom right of the page, or shows a red number in the conversations icon there.
• Chrome has no problems.

Only Firefox is restricting any cookies (and I already unrestricted the one I need to log in).

Something I'm noticing: almost all the feedback in this thread is easy stuff. UI changes and etc are all pretty easy. The problem that I expect is that the dev team won't get to the easy stuff because the hard problem of making the page load fast will take their attention.

Interesting. I realize comments here may be selected for disliking the new site, so I'll just chime in that I'm pretty happy with LW 2.0 so far. I want it to be faster, but otherwise I'm pretty happy with its greater vibrancy and more scalable post promotion scheme.

What are the plans for the Wiki? If the plan is to keep it the same, why doesn't Lesser Wrong have a link to it yet?

LW 2.0 is a good example of trying to fix something that isn't broken and ending up breaking it further.

I can't get a rss feed specifically for featured posts right now can I ?

My vision is not great and I simply cannot see the difference between quoted text and normal text in comments.