Beta-Beta Testing: Frontpage Rework [Update - further tweak]

There are a few object-level changes, representing in some cases a shift in underlying philosophy.

Object-level Changes

1. Clicking on a post first shows you a highlight of that post (right now this is a crude 'chop off the post after 450 pixels', later post authors will have the opportunity to write their own highlights, up to 500 words).

You can get to the full post by clicking a "read more" button at the top of the highlight.

2. Click on the comments icon shows you two things - the top 3 highest upvoted comments, and any _new_ comments since you last either viewed the post or clicked on the post on the frontpage.

There's also a larger version of the "type of post' icon (i.e. Curated/Frontpage/Personal-blog-posts), which doubles as a direct link to the post itself.

Both the comments and posts-category icons turn green if there is unread content there (i.e if you haven't read the post at all, or if there are new comments you haven't read)

Goals 1+2: Simple quality of life improvements

It's inconvenient to read through a giant list of comments to find the new ones. The new "show recent comments" option makes it super easy to see the latest conversational thread (and shows all new comments sorted in proper order, with a parent comment for context)

Another obvious goal is to make it easier to "check out" a post from the front page without committing to reading the whole thing. (I personally suffer from "clicking on a new post feels like a major commitment - it may be a bad or uninteresting post, but it'll take awhile to read it and figure that out)

Goals 3-4: Highlights and Brevity

1. We want posts to have highlights - if you write a big, Scott Alexander length essay, we want people to be able to quickly figure out (roughly) what it's going to be saying and whether it's interesting. This is sort of like the abstract of an academic paper... but academic abstracts are terrible.

On FB, when you quote a giant essay, you usually post a few snippets of that essay - not necessarily from the _top_ of the essay: sometimes it's just the most interesting quote that you can reasonably share out of context.

Sometimes, a post literally can be summarized in it's entirety in 500 words (the rest is sort of fleshing it out, making the idea more salient or providing more evidence).

Sometimes, you really just have one thing to say, but it feels a bit awkward to say it _without_ a giant essay supporting it, and a highlight is sort of a socially acceptable _excuse_ to just say it, where people can read the full essay if they actually want to.

In those sorts of cases, we wanted shorter highlights to exist (both for the frontpage, and perhaps later for hover-linking, i.e. if you link to a LW post from LW, when you mouseover it shows the highlight)

And the last goal is "we just straight-up notice people writing longer essays than they need to." While writing a post, when you cross the 500 word count, we're thinking of having the highlight section appear in the editor, with a quick note that "now that your post is 500 words long, by default it'll show the first 500 words on the Frontpage, and you can edit a custom highlight section if you want"

And a subgoal there is that some people will just think "you know, I didn't really need to spend an extra 200 words here, I could just make the whole thing fit in 500 words"

Just a PSA: right-clicking or middle-clicking the posts on the frontpage toggle whether the preview is open. Please make them only expand on left clicks, or equivalent!

There was a "right-clicking behaves like left-clicking instead of doing the same thing as right-clicking any other link does" bug, which has now been mostly fixed. But if you right-click on the speech-bubble icon at the right-hand side of a post's entry on the front page, you still get the same bad behaviour. Right-clicking there should, I think, do the same as right-clicking on the post's title.

Why do some continue to full post links give word counts, and some don't?

I just uploaded a different variation to Lessestwrong.com

This time, the title links to the post itself, and the rest of the PostItem opens and closes the highlight, with a hoverover message to clarify which is happening.

The main worry we have is with people accidentally clicking one when they meant the other, and I'm not sure if the current set up is enough to avoid that, but hope it's at least an improvement.

Personally, I don't find the first two goals to be particularly useful. I find it easy to scan for new comments by scrolling down the page looking for the green left highlight. I also find myself always wanting to scroll down to get the actual comment in context.

However, I am a very big fan of the idea to allow the author to provide a summary. Honestly, I think it may even be a good idea to require a summary for sufficiently long posts. I suspect that requiring a summary will a) be great for users, and b) not meet too much resistance from writers.

For me, sometimes clicking shows a preview, sometimes it goes to the full post. I think that clicking the lower half displays a preview, and the upper half the full post.

It is currently way too hard to ignore highlights for people who want to ignore them. I think that dubleclicking the highlight should send you to the whole post. Once the highlight is open, both the title and the whole highlight should a link to the whole post.

I think you should be able to upvote a post from the front page if and only if it is short enough that you can view the entire thing from the front page.

lesswrong, lesserwrong, lessestwrong, what comes next =P