I share the model that shorter content would attract more readers, and that we should build something more short-form shaped, but also that it seems very unlikely that we want to give up the more traditional post-format as the primary way of engagement with LessWrong.
One thing I’ll point out is the “recent discussion” feels less accessible than on old LW (requires scrolling), and the lack of a “top users, 30 days” section probably decreases my engagement a bit as well—both because of the lack of a “leaderboard effect” and because it can be useful to look at that to see who’s been posting interesting content that I might otherwise have missed.
Interesting – on old LW I basically never read the recent discussion because it was small and off to the side and didn’t display much of the comments.
I do think not having the leaderboard thing decreases engagement, and have mixed feelings about that, since the way it increased engagement was the sort of facebook-like-thing that’s kinda hijacking your monkey brain in skinner-boxy-ways.
Same. The recent discussion section feels a lot more prominent to me than on old LW. I also practically never used the recent discussion section on the old site.
it’s literally the only thing I use. I basically never click on the post list because they’re all collapsed and on a different page. give me a feeeeeeed
Both, but the sidebar widget is the main thing I miss. I notice that I still use it on the EA Forum, for instance, which has much of old-LW’s structure. On current LW I have to scroll down a lot on the front page to see recent comments and they don’t appear while reading posts, which IMO quite reduces my engagement.
my metric of success: “get rationalists off of facebook”. to do this you need to replace facebook. discord replaces part of it with a much healthier thing, but lesswrong like stuff is needed for the other part.
because otherwise people don’t read less wrong because the only things that happen there are people posting overthought crystallized ideas.
It seems like ‘people’ read LessWrong as it currently exists, although I’m not aware of the actual visitation stats.
Happy to provide people with any stats they want.
I share the model that shorter content would attract more readers, and that we should build something more short-form shaped, but also that it seems very unlikely that we want to give up the more traditional post-format as the primary way of engagement with LessWrong.
One thing I’ll point out is the “recent discussion” feels less accessible than on old LW (requires scrolling), and the lack of a “top users, 30 days” section probably decreases my engagement a bit as well—both because of the lack of a “leaderboard effect” and because it can be useful to look at that to see who’s been posting interesting content that I might otherwise have missed.
Interesting – on old LW I basically never read the recent discussion because it was small and off to the side and didn’t display much of the comments.
I do think not having the leaderboard thing decreases engagement, and have mixed feelings about that, since the way it increased engagement was the sort of facebook-like-thing that’s kinda hijacking your monkey brain in skinner-boxy-ways.
Same. The recent discussion section feels a lot more prominent to me than on old LW. I also practically never used the recent discussion section on the old site.
it’s literally the only thing I use. I basically never click on the post list because they’re all collapsed and on a different page. give me a feeeeeeed
On old-LW, did you view recent discussion via the sidebar widget, or were you going to an endpoint like `/comments`?
Both, but the sidebar widget is the main thing I miss. I notice that I still use it on the EA Forum, for instance, which has much of old-LW’s structure. On current LW I have to scroll down a lot on the front page to see recent comments and they don’t appear while reading posts, which IMO quite reduces my engagement.
I realized I never posted this here, but it does seem good to mention that we do have a “recent comments in chronological order” page here.
I did and still do read /comments.
my metric of success: “get rationalists off of facebook”. to do this you need to replace facebook. discord replaces part of it with a much healthier thing, but lesswrong like stuff is needed for the other part.