[New Feature] Your Subscribed Feed

Ruby and RobertM
11 Jun 2024 22:45 UTC
69 points
9 comments4 min readLW link

tl;dr

LessWrong now has a Subscribed tab (next to the Latest tab and Enriched tab[1]). You can now “follow” users, which means their posts and comments will show up in your Subscribed tab[2].

You can subscribe to users that are suggested to you, or search for other users using the search bar. You can also find subscribe options on user profile pages and user hover popup-tooltip.

We’ve put a lot of thought into how to display the right amount of recent content from people you follow, plus the right amount of surrounding context, to keep you up to date without it being overwhelming. See here for more detail.

In this example, I’m subscribed to both jessicata and dxu. Comments by other users are de-emphasized, and comment trees over a certain size are collapsed by default.

How to follow people

You can follow users via multiple methods:

  1. Using the widget on the Subscribed tab:

2. You can follow people from their user profile:

3. You can follow people using the user tooltip that comes up when you hover on their username.

To follow, click the Follow button in top right

Note!

Following people for your subscribed tab is different from subscribing to get notifications. Signing up for one does not cause the other!

However, to help people start using the Subscribed tab, we did a one time operation to cause you to be following (for purposes of the subscribed tab) anyone who you’d already subscribed to for post and comment notifications. We assume if you want notifications, you’d also want to follow.

What’s shown to me in my Subscribed feed?

Short description

We display the recent posts and comments of people you follow, plus comments from other users that people you follow are replying to.

Long description

(Subject to change, lasted update 2024-06-10)

  1. We load posts and comments from people you follow from the last 30 days

  2. We group posts and comments to the post level

    1. We might show a post because someone you followed published it.

    2. We might show a post because someone you follow is commenting on it, even if you don’t follow the author of the post. (This will probably be most of your feed, unless you follow people who write more posts than comments.)

  3. We display the five most recent comments from people you follow, unless those comments were a week or more older than the most recent one (we found this necessary to avoid seeing lots of stale content).

  4. We further display (with de-emphasized styling) the comments being replied to by people you follow.

Why we built this

A while back we introduced the ability to subscribe to all of a user’s comments. At first, I thought this was great – “wow, look at all these comments I was seeing previously that I want to read”. However it cluttered up my notifications tab and also reading comments via notifications isn’t best. I realized I wanted a feed, and that’s what we’ve built.

The mainstay of LessWrong is the frontpage posts list, but I’m interested in supplementing with feeds since they have two main advantages:

  1. You can easily start to read content of post before clicking. Especially on mobile where there’s no hover-preview, it’s often nice to get to read a few sentences before deciding to commit to a post.

  2. Puts comments on even footing as posts. Often comments from some users are of greater interest than posts from others, a feed lets them be brought to your attention just as easily.

So far I’ve found the feed really great for (1) high signal-to-noise ratio content, since it’s from people I’ve chosen to be follow, (2) reading through without having to spend as much up-front “decide what to read” energy. I like it for casual reading.

Future Directions

I think the Subscribed feed is good but has some drawbacks that mean it’s not actually the feed I most want to see. First, it requires work to decide who to follow, and for users who aren’t that familiar with the authors on the site, it’ll be hard to decide who to follow. This means they might not get enough content. On the other hand, it’s possible to subscribe to too many people, bringing down your average quality and driving you away from your feed.

Rather, I’m interested in a Subscribed+ or “For You” kind of feed that includes people you’ve followed, but also includes content based on several other factors. For example, we could roll in: curated posts, popular comments, top quicktakes, posts that our Recommendations Engine predicts you’ll like, generally highly upvoted stuff, stuff that’s from Tags you’ve followed or simply few a lot.

This would be a feed that gives you a lot of good stuff without the effort/​overhead of Subscribed. However, Subscribed was the most straightforward to get started with for experimenting in this direction.

I realize such feeds aren’t universely popular on sites like Facebook and Twitter. I speculate that this is less that feeds themselves can’t be good and more that other sites prioritize clickthrough-rates of the average user over preferences people have, e.g. removing chronological views. We’re doing this already with recommendations on the Enriched tab, but we’re prepared to knowingly take a hit on clickthrough-rate and other naive metrics if it means the content presented is more endorsed and something people feel good about. And it can be tricky to provide in all ways, but I’d also want to make people’s feeds transparent and configurable.

FAQ

What about Recent Discussion?

Recent Discussion is the feed at the bottom of the homepage. It is a mostly unfiltered feed of all activity on the site. It’s a bit firehose-y. The Subscribed tabs swings in the opposite direction, giving you only stuff you explicitly opted in to seeing.

The Subscribed tab also gets some improved styling to Recent Discussion.

I can imagine that eventually Subscribed tab (or “Subscribed+) replaces Recent Discussion. Or we do something like Tabs on the feed section of the frontpage, same as we have Tabs on the posts list section.

How can I unsubscribe from people?

  • You can unsubscribe from the user tooltip that appears when you hover over someone’s username (on desktop).

  • You can unsubscribe from a user on their profile page by clicking the subscribe button.

  • You can view all your follows/​subscriptions on the manage subscriptions page.

How does following relate to my other subscriptions?

This is a new “subscription type” that’s independent from the subscription types for notification. However, we performed a one-time migration to cause people who are getting notifications for a user’s post or comments to also be following them. We’re making an assumption here that if you want notifications, you want to follow someone. However this is only a one-time thing and in general they are separate kinds of subscriptions.

Why am I seeing comments from people I’m not following in my feed?

In user testing we found that it was disorienting to only have the comments from people you are subscribed to when they are participating in a thread with other people. So to provide context, we include comments in a thread if someone you follow is participating.

So it’s all figured out?

No, there are several unsolved design problems. Particularly around how much content to show, where we want to balance between showing enough to provide context but not so much as to be overwhelming.

For example, we currently don’t show other users’ replies to the most recent comments by users you’re following; this is tricky for both performance and UX reasons.

Hope you like it! Feel free to leave questions and comments here, or contact us via the usual channels.

  1. ^

    In case you missed it, the Enriched tab is 50% from Latest and 50% personalized recommendations for you from all of LessWrong’s massive store of posts.

  2. ^

    This is opposed to the existing kinds of subscriptions that send you notifications/​emails about people’s posts and comments.

Ruby and RobertM
11 Jun 2024 22:45 UTC
69 points
9 comments4 min readLW link