Beta - First Impressions

The site is lacking breadcrumbs so it's hard to orient oneself. It's hard to follow what section of the website you're in as you dig deeper into the content. Any plans to add breadcrumbs (or some alternative)?

The site is just too slow to load, IMO.

Also, echoing other users who said it's too hard to find anything. I have no idea how I would, say, scroll through the chronological archives. (And there should *be* chronological archives. Think standard features available on a blog, or Reddit, or StackExchange -- chronological archives, per user archives, search, etc.)

I don't like the whole "load more" thing. Having discrete pages is definitely preferable, it doesn't end up with some godawful amount of stuff displayed at once, and more easily allows one to skip through. (One problem with old LW was that if you wanted to, say, look through all of a user's comments, all you could do is page through; there was no way to skip to the end. We need more stuff like that. Right now it seems we have even less.)

Edit: Also the interface is too hard to read. The old interface was colorful and readable; this one just all blends together. I like the new bars on the side, but where's the old Reddit-style alternating colors? And why are the names, points, times, etc so small? (Not to mention the *buttions*! The reply button is *tiny*!)

Edit again: Also when you upvote or downvote something, the green that it turns is damn near unnoticeable (especially on those tiny buttons on comments rather than posts). Please use something more distinct. (Also, voting is too slow.)

Also: I really really do not like the rich text editor. Rich text editors are a pain in the ass; their behavior is just too unpredictable, and doing things like adding and editing links is a pain (I notice URLs don't even automatically become links...). Could we get some Markdown variant or something similar instead? That would be so much easier.

It's a bit weird that I can't find this post by sorting posts by new, but I can see the comment made to it among the recent comments.

Basically, the post is hidden the comments to it are not.

I really like the design and the concept as explained in the strategic overview. I think this has a lot of potential, but I think that there is still a significant amount of work to do.

• Firstly, it is really annoying to always have the recommended reading up the top. You should be able to collapse this panel and it should stay collapsed if you are logged in.

• You can only see the last three featured posts, there does not seem to be any way to go back in time.

• Recent posts is extremely clumsy. Clicking on the title should open it up to a full page view. Instead, you have to click load more, which only loads a couple more, making it take much longer for you to browse backwards in time than in the current Less Wrong. I'm not a fan of infinite scrolling, but this is infinite scrolling without the scrolling!

• The current Reddit allows you to view the highest rated posts in the last day, week, month, three months and year. These options are useful as they allow you to quickly catch up on what has occurred since the last time you visited.

• There is no way to easily browse people's profiles. This is a big issue if we are going to make posts first go to individual's profiles.

• Meta posts currently don't appear on your profile.

• I keep running into problems on mobile (Android) with my words disappearing after I click submit in comments.

On the other hand:

• I am so glad to see a meta-section. Meta discussion is important, but you don't want it to overwhelm your object level discussion, especially since many people are bored by it. Creating this section allows as much meta-level discussion as is needed to take place, whilst avoiding these other issues.

Overall, the biggest changes so far have been internal or cosmetic. The biggest structural change has been the addition of meta as discussed above. People can publish on their own page without posting in main, but this is unlikely to get much use until there is a better discovery mechanism for finding people to follow.

(Editing things in as I think of/come across them.)

When I go to my user page (https://www.lesserwrong.com/users/philh), there seems to be no way to access the comments on the link posts that I've made.

I agree with Chris_Leong's bullet points, but the specific one I was going to make myself was this: "Recent posts is extremely clumsy. Clicking on the title should open it up to a full page view." More precisely, there should be a specific page that I can go to for just recent posts.

There's no way I can find to see a user's comments.

I'm not a fan of the comment textbox that doesn't look like a textbox.

I'm finding the font reasonably unpleasant in some vague way. I know this was hashed out in the strategic overview thread, but datapoint. (Firefox, OS X.) I think this is more true in comments than top-level posts.

Neither markdown nor HTML seems to work in comments, and URLs don't even auto-link. I don't mind the visual editor being there, but I extremely dislike having no alternative to it.

As a more minor thing, I also don't like the paragraphing; I often use the up/down cursor keys to navigate to the line between paragraphs, then left/right to move to the beginning/end of a paragraph; but I can't do that when there's no line between them.

It also doesn't seem to be possible to highlight text elsewhere in the window and drag-and-drop into the editor.

I tried to edit my profile to add a website URL, but it gave me a "schema validation error". The problem was that I hadn't put http:// in the beginning.

When I tried to log in before resetting my password (I came here before reading Vaniver's post on LW 1.0), I didn't get an error message, it just didn't do anything. The dev console told me I had no password assigned.

If I middle-click on the "LESSWRONG" in the top-left, it takes me to the front page in the same tab. That is not what I want or expect.

Ozy linked https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/gbNdc7gCXCy2ZWqXe/against-ea-pr from elsewhere. I'm not sure how I'd find it if they hadn't. It doesn't seem to be on their profile page or on the front page.

https://lesserwrong.com gives an SSL error page. https://www.lesserwrong.com (with www.) and http://lesserwrong.com (no SSL) don't.

The difference between a green and grey upvote/downvote arrow is very subtle.

I didn't get a notification for ozy's reply to this comment. (Maybe because it's in meta? I do have comment reply notifications turned on in my settings.) Also, the notification icon doesn't seem to change depending on whether there are any notifications.

Home/end in the editor scroll the browser, instead of going to beginning/end of line (ctrl-a/e work). This might be a mac thing? I just tested in the hacker news edit box, and that doesn't scroll the browser or go to beginning/end.

Comment scores seem to get updated live. I appreciate this. I'm not sure how I feel about comment threads being updated live. (I would definitely appreciate some kind of notification that there are new comments.)

Right now I'm finding this website a downgrade from LW 1.0. That's not a dealbreaker, and I know this one can be improved much more easily, and I'm still grateful to the people who are putting in the effort.

I accidentally clicked on the "Submit" button at the bottom of one of the HPMOR chapters instead of the next-chapter link. (Anyone who has looked at any of those pages will, I think, appreciate how easy this is to do.) The result is that that chapter now has an empty comment from me. I think the "submit" button should do nothing (or maybe not even exist) when the comment text is empty. (Perhaps also when it's whitespace-only.)

Notifications are more than a little weird, and not really in a good way.

On old-LW, if I want to know what I need to be responding to, I can go to my profile page and see everything I've posted recently together with others' replies, or go to my inbox and see just the replies (along with PMs, and unfortunately without context, but of course there are links).

On LW2, my profile page shows only my own posts and comments, so I look at notifications. That means clicking on the little bell icon at top right, which drops down a sort of menu-like thing saying "X replied to a comment on Y" for various X and Y. There's no indication here of what they said, nor of what comment of mine they're replying to, nor even when it happened. I could follow all those links, but perhaps I can do better: at the bottom of the menu-like thing is a link saying "All notifications". (It's not grey, unlike pretty much everything else on LW2, so it must be important!)

So I click on that, and get ... a blank page. (It has the topbar and the sidebar and the Intercom thing at bottom right, but no actual content.)

I guess that last thing is just a bug, but I'd like to put in a plea to make sure that once the bug is fixed the list of notifications is at least as useful as the corresponding features on old-LW, and suggest that it might be worth thinking whether there's a way to make the notification dropdown a bit more informative. (Perhaps add dates/times? First few words of each reply? Dunno.)

First, I'm seconding a couple of things. There should be a comment box.

And please don't have huge pictures for static material at the top of the home page. There's a lot to be said for tabs with words on them at the top. I realize three lines for a menu is fairly standard these days, but it still leaves me feeling as though the site is a puzzle which has to be solved.

In the spirit of experimentation, I tried out the numbers on the strip under the comment space. Being able to change font size and line spacing probably has its uses, but the one thing that isn't offered is the ability to get back to the standard comment proportions. I'd have done that if I could.

I read Notes from an Apocalypse <a href="https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/iuNSrBoX2W5qHCAAo/notes-from-an-apocalypse">, which I think is a fair test of reading long form on the site.

I'm fine with the font with the serifs, but I found myself really wanting some indication of what site I was on. A little color, a border, something. This place is less distinctive than a mainstream news site.

I couldn't get the submit link to work-- that is, I entered the link and the title and hit submit, and nothing happened.

What's required to have my posts that I make to my own blog be automatically posted here? That's a thing the new site can do, right?

Magical scoring might work well to filter through large amounts of content and only promote the best, but right now there is not a lot of content. I'm curious to look at all the things people have posted, and there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to do that. In particular, I want to know which writers I already like are signed up to LW 2.0 so I can subscribe to them, and I don't have any way of distinguishing "this writer hasn't signed up for LW 2.0" from "this writer has signed up for LW 2.0 but none of their posts have made it to the front page."

For me the grey is unnecessarily hard to read. Especially when it comes to skimming the first line of a post in the "Featured post"-list and "Recent post"-list, I feel like it's harder then necessary because of the low contrast between the font and the background.

It got me to readjust the angle of my monitor and that made it a bit better but it still seems an unnecessary impediment to me.

It appears that there is no way to insert an image into a post, which is a fairly nice feature that appears to be still supported on the backend, since old LessWrong posts still have their images.

Separately, and more important, the way links are displayed currently makes it hard to tell if a link has already been visited. Also if you select text you can't see links anymore.

Firefox 57 on Windows 10.

A RSS feed for new posts is highly desirable - I don't generally go to websites "polling" for new information that may or may not be there unless e.g. I'm returning to a discussion that I had yesterday, so a "push mechanism" e.g. RSS is essential to me.

My own four cents:

Visually this is a noticeable improvement. Cleaner design. Larger body text with reasonable max-width. Less UI "noise". I haven't messed around much with the interface; there are probably other positives. Only significant visual regression is the lack of alternating colors on comments.

(a few people have noted that the new visual scheme isn't all that site-distinctive; I'm not sure if I like it that way or not)

I see posts from names I haven't seen on LW proper in a while, which is a good sign. Content is king.

That said, some preferences the new site violates:

1. Lag. I get it mostly when scrolling or doing text input, rather than loading. I am not sure how much of that is the site's fault or my machine. I am tempted to blame it on the site, because...

2. Overly dynamic interface. I don't know what your performance bottlenecks are (I assume you're profiling and know better than me), but I see elements that could easily be static sidebars turned into foldouts, or the popup formatting overlay, or whatever it is that's making the titles on my tabs change, and...well, it smells like lagbait. Code that doesn't run can't cause performance problems, and none of that stuff is necessary. (also I don't like it stylistically, but I admit my tastes are technologically ascetic.)

3. Speaking of the formatting overlay: I see no way to compose in plain text with markup...any form of markup. I favor markdown, but the specific format is irrelevant, any of the modern LMLs will do. I want to not be fighting the editor (right now I'm fighting the list detection and undo), if I am thinking about the editor I am not thinking about my post, and I want the option of composing nontrivial posts in my editor of choice. If I can't copy-paste marked-up text into the posting interface, it will be either enraging (if I use it) or useless (if I don't).

4. There should be no topbar or bottombar, at least not on widescreen displays. I appreciate that the topbar here isn't nearly as obstructive as many other sites. I can actually see the body text without scrolling first! But horizontal space is practically free and vertical space is priceless. UI chrome should eat the former, not the latter.

Sometimes you have to clear rubble before you can build, and I know that's what this project is all about, so I'm not complaining too hard about regressions. The only dealbreaker for me right now is the editor. If I can't compose in plain text without interference, I probably won't be posting at all.

Is there any way to tell whether a comment has been edited? That is a feature of Reddit, Facebook, the old LW, etc., and seems valuable as a way of catching some kinds of bad behavior (and, occasionally, for keeping track of what's happening in a conversation).

Never used old LW much, but I'm a longtime SSC reader. I read the goals and strategy and hopes this project succeeds. My impressions so far:

-Everything's very minimalist; it seems very trendy and a little pretentious (though I suppose this is a matter of personal taste). A bit of color could help things like usernames to stand out. A bit of clutter at the top, in the form of a permanent header or sidebar (as opposed to the current, click-to-view menus) might help with site navigation, loading times (I don't do web design, but this seems like a thing), and making the whole place seem a little less self-serious.

-The site is slow. Slow to load, yes, but I experienced a lot of lag just writing a comment last night. (Maybe all my neighbors were watching HD Netflix last night though, as it's only minor lag right now. EDIT: Now the lag's back. I guess the site is only fast for me during low band-use hours.)

-I spent five minutes looking for a way to mark sequences as read, and then tried reading one essay at normal speed to see if I could then tell the difference between it and an unread essay. This is marked as "Done" on the feature roadmap, but I still have no idea how to use it.

-I really like the idea of cross-posting here from personal blogs. It's not obvious to me how to do this. Is that what a "Link post" is?

-I like the search feature; it's speedy, and I like how I don't have to leave the page to see results. It would nice to see more than three post and three comment results though. Also, when I click "LESSWRONG" at top left, it took me to the homepage but left the search view up. It would be nice if this link deactivated search; I was briefly left thinking the link hadn't worked at all.

-I don't want to see "Recommended Reading" every time I go to the homepage. I've read most of it. I think it's good to have on the homepage, but I'd rather it be further down or in a sidebar or something. Else, we could have a landing page with recommended reading and a recent activity page that people who just want to see what's new can bookmark.

Of those, only website speed and cross-posting is likely to affect whether or not I keep using the site. Mostly, it'll come down to adoption. I hope the project succeeds; it would be very nice to have a functioning central hub for rationalish stuff.

On old-LW, my username at top right is an ordinary link, so I can use it to (e.g.) open a new tab showing my profile without leaving the page I'm currently on. (Example scenario: I'm writing a comment, I think "I'm sure I said something relevant a little while ago", so I want to go and find that earlier comment to see. I don't want to leave the page I'm on, though, I want it in a new tab.)

On LW2, it's a magic thing that provides a drop-down menu. That makes it easier to create a new post, edit my account info, or log out; but it makes it harder to look at my profile page.

For me -- and I appreciate that my preferences may differ from others' -- "visit profile page in a new tab" is an operation I want to do every couple of days, whereas the other things I want to do (at most) every few weeks.

It might be worth considering making that top-right username just be a link, and making sure that from the profile page one can do all those things currently in the drop-down menu.

Speaking of hard to find things, the only way I found this thread was that a recent comment was from this thread and I clicked on the comment. I'd been emailing in my issues as I found them.

My basic first impression is that this is a solid foundation but the site is too slow and has some quite serious bugs (e.g. attempting to move one of my blog posts to main killed all the content on that page on both attempts, one of which was fixed by admin and one of which wasn't), and the sorting/finding systems need a lot of conceptual work.

I'm excited that we've got people talking and thinking again, and by the potential - there are a lot of great things in the design spec and some of them even work - but worried that we went beta while things were still in an alpha state. I hope we can sustain momentum and/or that we effectively get another push when we go live. My guess is that this site is not currently a month away from being ready to replace 1.0 but that it will get there if we give it time (assuming the loading times problem is not intractable).

When posting a link post, instead of a text post, it is not clear what would be the result. There is still an option to write text, which appears strictly as text right after submitting, but when the post is viewed (from the search bar) only some portion of the text is visible and there is no indication that this is a link post.

It would be much more comfortable if editing of a post could be done only using the keyboard. For example, when adding a link, apart from defining a keyboard shortcut, it should also be possible to press enter to submit the link. I also think it would be more comfortable to add HTML support.

Also, do you have MathJax? or something similar to write math?

I'm reading on a smartphone. The font and layout are great. I'm super excited by the "codex" section nervou because I always wanted to read scc most important parts but had no good strategy for approaching that.

I have trouble jumping to next article in the codex after finishing reading one of them: can't find any navigation button for that, so I end up navigating back to the list of all articles in the book and manually selecting next one. This is a bit complicated by the fact that I can't distinguish articles already read from not read - I believe that there should be some kind of progress indicator but 't find it. Also as I type right now using Google swaype style keyboard something keeps eating words

Impressions:
I'm not sure how to create meta posts or community posts for that matter.

I get very annoyed when I create a link at the end of my input and I can't just press right arrow at the end to get out of the link when I want to create none link content.

(The following is an issue in many places on the site. I'm just giving the most visible example.)

Suppose you go to the front page and have a look at, say, the latest-comments section. If you hover your mouse pointer over any of the comments, you'll see a highlight around a box containing the comment and its metadata, and it seems like the whole box functions as a button that takes you to that comment in its context. (So, e.g., clicking on whitespace within the box does that; and your pointer changes shape as it does when hovering over a link or a button.)

Very nice. Makes it easier to follow these links. Less fiddly. WRONG.

Why wrong? Because actually the whole box isn't a link. Or, rather, it kinda is, but then some things inside it do different things. If you click on one little bit of it, you get the author's profile page instead. If you click on another bit, you upvote or downvote the comment.

I suggest that the ability to upvote and downvote comments without even reading all of them (let alone their context) is a Really Bad Idea. Some people will do it on purpose. Some people will do it by accident. (I have, at least once. Fortunately I noticed. I bet it's easy to do without noticing.)

The overall effect is that all the visual cues you've got are telling you "this whole thing is a big button-like thing, just click anywhere inside it" but the reality is quite different. This will remain true even if the voting arrows are removed, which they absolutely should be regardless of any other changes.

Possible fixes: (1) Make the whole thing be a big button-like thing all of which does the same thing. (Downside: anywhere you do this, you lose the ability to go to the author's profile page, which is useful from time to time.) (2) Make it so that the whole box containing the list entry is no longer a link. Now we have a bunch of fiddly little mouse targets -- but it's no longer masquerading as something else. (Downside: a bunch of fiddly little mouse targets. Also, not clear how effective this will be on its own; perhaps combine with 3.) (3) Make the special bits more visually apparent, using colour or boldface or whatever. (Downside: goes against the aesthetic apparently being aimed for on LW2 as a whole -- which I find a nice-looking aesthetic but often not a good user experience.)

I seemed to have to switch on notifications to get back to lesswrong normal (being told if people comment on your stuff etc)

• Many broken links in the Codex.

• Searching is fast and awesome and I love it.

• Initial pageload is very slow: nearly 2.5MB, requiring 14.17s until DOMContentLoaded, 1.5MB of which is a single file.

I clicked on the comment box that said 2 comments on Toggle's recent post, and got directed... to the top of the page, instead of the bottom, where the comments are.

There's still something about the comment-reading experience that's unsettling. I think boxes for the comments, rather than just the left bar, would help?

A few mostly-superficial first impressions:

1. When I go to my profile page, among the things there is a selection of ten "recent comments". These range from 7 months ago to 8 years ago. The older ones aren't super-highly-voted-for or anything like that. Even if the import from LW 1.0 has pulled Main but not Discussion material, which would certainly lose a lot of my comments, there is something really weird with the selection here. There's also no way to choose how those comments are sorted, which might be OK if it were something simple and clear (oldest first, newest first, highest-voted first) but actually it seems to be pretty much random.

2. There's some indication on my profile page that I have 1 of something, 23 of something else, and 5306 of something else. There are no explanatory words or hover-text or anything. I guess the last one is comments, the first one (with a star) might be "favourites" in some sense, and perhaps the middle one is posts. But there's no way to see whatever posts there may be. (My profile has a "Blog posts" section but it's empty. I don't know whether that refers to posts on LW, of which I definitely have some both in Main and in Discussion, or to imported/linked blog posts from elsewhere, of which indeed I have none.) Surely, from a profile page there ought to be a way to see the user's posts.

3. Clearly we have preserved votes on comments from old-LW. Perhaps that means users have karma scores. But I can't see mine anywhere. Maybe that's a good thing, of course. And maybe the details of how -- if at all -- to aggregate votes on posts and comment to get per-user karma/reputation are still being hashed out; but it seems like this will affect the dynamics of the community, and we don't have that long before we have to decide whether to stick with this thing or throw it away...

4. Formatting of quoted material in comments is weird: it comes out larger than everything else, with extra vertical space below but not above. (At least one one of my computer/browser combinations: recent-ish Firefox on Unix.)

5. I am with those who don't much like the look of the text. It's better on higher-resolution displays but far from delightful anywhere.

6. As I enter more text into the comment editor, the region occupied by my text extends downwards. After a while it overlaps, and sits behind, the dark bar with the formatting buttons on it and becomes almost, but not quite, invisible. Surely this can't be the optimal behaviour.

7. Someone else asked for a RSS feed for posts (I guess Atom would do just as well). I second this request. I haven't looked to see whether there are feeds for anything else; I would encourage a general policy of having feeds for everything anyone might want, if performance considerations allow.

8. Following a link to an old comment is a frustrating experience, at least sometimes. You get this weird page that has the comment you already read at the top of the page, without any context. Then there's a "comment in full context" link (if I didn't want the comment in full context, I wouldn't have come to the page in the first place), except that it usually doesn't work because only 50 comments have been loaded. So then you have to load more comments. 50 at a time, just because. Taking a substantial amount of time for each block of 50 to load. Only then can you follow that full-context link and have it actually work.

[EDITED to add more:]

9. Clicking "Reply" opens up a comment not-box ... and doesn't give it focus. That's really annoying.

10. "LESSWRONG" in the bar at the top of each page seems like it ought to be a link, but it isn't. It's a thing you can click on that navigates your current window to the front page. You can't middle-click on it to open a new tab. You can't right-click to get options like "Open in new tab/window". So far as I can see, there is no benefit at all to this over just making it be a link. Please just make it be a link.

11. On old-LW every page has a right-hand sidebar containing lots of things I don't care about, and some things I do like to have at my fingertips like the list of most recent posts and comments. Here there's nothing of the kind: there's just a single "middle" column with article + comments or whatever. For me, this -- perhaps in combination with the mostly-grey presentation -- has a curious psychological effect: somehow it doesn't feel as if I'm on a website but more as if I'm reading a book or technical paper or something. And, perhaps because this is not in fact a book or technical paper and doesn't have pages or chapter divisions or anything, the net effect is that when reading a lot of comments here I feel like I'm adrift in a trackless waste with no signposts to guide me :-). I am only guessing at the elements that contribute to this feeling, but for whatever reason I don't get it so much on old-LW or even in SSC's monstrous comment sections.

[EDITED again to add even more:]

12. Headings in comments are, or at least sometimes are, really large. Comments that use them can end up with more prominence than the article they're commenting on, and the rather uniform-looking design of everything here can make it hard to see at a glance what's article and what's comment. This is especially bad when the comment in question is the one being shown at the top of a page because you followed a link-to-a-comment; this is a particularly clear (or, in other words, particularly unclear) example.

13. Timestamps are shown as "5h", "6d", "7mo", etc., indicating roughly how long ago a thing was posted. That's nice and friendly. But it would be nice to be able to get more precision, especially when viewing comments sorted in some way other than chronologically. In an ideal world, (1) hovering over the timestamp would show the actual date+time and (2) there would be a per-user preference setting that would reverse this, so that you get the date+time by default and can hover for a user-friendly about-how-long-ago view.

14. Comments have net scores displayed but no indication of e.g. whether +1 means "one person liked it" or "101 people liked it and 100 people hated it". Again, it would be nice if hovering over the score said something like "+17-15". (Not, please, the "percentage positive" we have on old-LW.)

It is not uncommon for a comment to begin by quoting something. For me right now (Firefox on Windows, but a brief look suggests that this isn't browser-specific) the front page / profile page comment lists remove the distinctive formatting that quoted material gets, so it looks exactly as if the quoted material was written by the commenter. This is unfortunate (especially when there are upvote and downvote arrows right next to that material...).

It looks to me as if not all formatting is lost in these lists; I don't know what makes quoting different.

[No idea whether anyone is actually still reading this...]

So far as I can tell, there is no facility for commenting here on linkposts. That is, a linkpost really is just a link; if you click on the "comments" icon you get taken to the far end of the link; there's no expectation, and no possibility, of discussion here on LW.

I guess that's a deliberate decision. (The idea being, perhaps, to avoid fragmenting discussion of any given thing, and if LW2 takes off to avoid sucking oxygen from other people's blogs.) Maybe it's a good one. But (to me, at present) it's not obvious. It's not even obvious that everywhere we might want linkposts from has usable comment/discussion facilities. (E.g., Eliezer Yudkowsky posts a lot on Facebook; perhaps there will be linkposts to his Facebook posts; but Facebook discussion is only available for people with Facebook accounts, and some LW people deliberately don't have those and others who do may prefer to keep FB for social use. More generally, a link can go absolutely anywhere and plenty of interesting pages on the web don't have comments.)

My own intuition goes the opposite way from the decision that's been made here: my guess is that it would be better if LW did provide for discussion of content from linkposts. Has this already been discussed to death somewhere? If not, is it worth revisiting?

First of all, thanks for making this all! :)

One suggestiong: coudl we hvae a sepll-ckecher for the cmmonent box?

When i subscribe to a user, what happens? Does that affect the magical sorting algorithm or what?

I have no idea where else to ask this, so I do it here: Where can I find an introduction to how the site works? Where can I ask questions about site mechanics? LW had the newbies thread, the open and stupid questions thread and the wiki. While I recognize a lot of part here on LW 2.0 some seem different and I'd like to have a place for it. I would be willing to write a post for it, but I'm not sure whether I overlooked something and/or just add to the confusion.

I'm not the biggest fan of how large the recommended reading is. I understand the incentive to drive people to read the sequences, but the images and text are the single largest presence on the landing page. I could understand if it was at the bottom, or perhaps in a non-existent sidebar, but as it stands, they feel a little imposing. The font is pretty good, and the interface is clean, but I'm afraid it might be a little too clean - there aren't very many colors on the page to hold your attention. Also, it might be a good idea to add the functions for italicizing and embolding above the comment box, in order to prevent people from trying to use reddit markup. (or just add in-built support for the markup to begin with)

Is there any plan to add a feature that allows citations in a post? It's not that important, in the grand scheme of things, but seeing as the website is oriented towards encouraging comprehensive reading it might be useful. Additionally, I agree with some of the other comments here that the general website speed is slow. I made quite a few spelling errors in the first draft of this post due to lag. I have yet to try using the site on anything other than my crappy chromebook, which may be the issue, but even then, that's a huge blow to accessibility.

Other than that, I can't think of much. It's definitely an excellent effort, so far.

The comment font has a weird lowercase 'w'. It is larger than the surrounding letters. Now that I have noticed it, I can't stop being distracted by it.

Some things I wonder:

1) How much effort did it take to make this site?

2) How much effort will it take to get this site up to acceptable quality?

3) How much effort would it have taken to fix the problems with the old LW?

4) How much effort was spent evaluating other forum software? What was wrong with those systems that meant it couldn't be used instead of this?

I've noticed an antipattern in a few old jobs where people have found problems with existing systems and instead of fixing them invested huge effort into reinventing a square wheel. I can't help thinking the same thing has happened here.

bug: Highlighting new comments isn't working for me. It says "Highlighting new comments since Today at (current time)" which it totally useless. I want to see the comments since I last visited the page.

bug2: Currently, I can't see what I'm typing because it's underneath what I assume is the rich text editor toolbar thingy

bug3, or maybe I'm going crazy: I'm sure sometimes the page layout has shifted under my feet, so I page down and what comes next isn't what was after what I'm currently reading, and what I'm currently reading has gone somewhere else.

unpleasantness: "showing 50/56 comments" 56 is way too few comments to start hiding them away. Also, I've not noticed any indication of where the hidden comments are. Top level? Replies? Who knows?

stlying whinge: On old LW, the boxes round comments and alternating colours made it easy to see the tree structure at a glance when scrolling around. That's much harder now

more horrible slowness: The text appearing when I type isn't always keeping up with my typing. This was a solved problem when I first used the web 20 years ago on a computer that's about 100 times slower than this one. Please stop unsolving it.

Bug: "Daily" lists some posts as having been made on Friday; these posts appear briefly then disappear by the time the page has fully loaded. I think it might be because right now it is Thursday in my time zone?

ETA: "Daily" is now working properly. It is still Thursday in my time zone.

ETA2: Now the bug is happening again? I am confused.

I am ecountering some kind of error when opening the links here to rationalsphere and single conversational locus. When I open them, a box pops up that says "Complete your profile" and asks me to enter my email address (even though I used my email to log in in the first place). When I type it in and press submit, I get the error: {"id":"app.mutation_not_allowed","value":"\"usersEdit\" on _id \"BSRa9LffXLw4FKvTY\""}