Not necessarily any one thing in particular, but it didn’t seem like people had put much effort in to optimizing them.
There’s duplicated text between the home page and about page. This is annoying if you’ve already read one.
The about page describes basic stuff about how the site works, like the fact that you can vote stuff up and down. This seems unnecessary because most of this stuff is pretty intuitive, so I don’t think we need to spell it out anywhere besides the FAQ.
I read a comment somewhere that said something like “most people I know who got in to Less Wrong do it after they read a particular article that they really enjoy”. This matches with my experience. For me, I got in to Less Wrong after reading a couple of the politics articles (science and politics fable + politics is the mindkiller) and realizing I was an uninformed libertarian nut. I don’t think the right article is guaranteed to be the same for every person, so I like the idea of the about page displaying a smorgasboard of different articles. I also think that just hyperlinking words isn’t a very good way to tell people what articles are going to be interesting. I’d rather write out a sentence about each article, or at least give the article’s full title.
There are a bunch of articles that people have explicitly made to be read by newcomers (“What is Bayesianism?”, “References and Resources for Less Wrong”, etc.) Right now these articles aren’t very visible. Making them more visible would be an easy win.
Some of the answers in the current FAQ are kind of unfriendly, such as the answer to why everyone is an atheist. The answer to “why does everyone on Less Wrong agree” strikes me as a tad obnoxious and arrogant. I don’t think these answers do a good job of communicating Less Wrong culture, which tends to be reasonably friendly and egalitarian for the most part (which is a good thing!)
One possible disadvantage is that my rewrites are overall friendlier and more inviting than the current versions, which may result in lowering the average poster caliber. But it’s pretty easy to stay friendly and also discourage people from posting, e.g. say something like “Less Wrong sets high standards and has some odd norms, lurk for a while before commenting” or whatever.
There’s also simple optimization that we can do. I deliberately wrote everything over from scratch without looking at what existed. Assuming we can conquer status quo bias, we ought to be able to go over candidate/existing pages line-by-line, and for each line, choose whichever page is better written (or something like that). Basically, even if there’s nothing obvious that needs correcting, more alternatives are good. And the About page, at least, should be optimized a ton because every newcomer sees a message that says “go read the about page”.
I could probably think of more things if you want.
The about page describes basic stuff about how the site works, like the fact that you can vote stuff up and down. This seems unnecessary because most of this stuff is pretty intuitive, so I don’t think we need to spell it out anywhere besides the FAQ.
Be careful here. Typical-mind fallacy crops up a lot when people say “intuitive” about user interfaces they’re familiar with. A visitor familiar with sites such as Reddit will readily understand the voting mechanism. But other folks might see the thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons and think they mean “recommend this to my friends” and “report this comment as abusive”, for instance.
(That said, I agree that a detailed explanation of the voting system does not really belong in the “About” page.)
Well, Facebook, Youtube, and pretty much every major website I can think of have gone pretty far with their usage instructions tucked in to a corner or entirely absent. And if we’re doing things right, LWers ought to be substantially smarter than typical users of those sites.
Not necessarily any one thing in particular, but it didn’t seem like people had put much effort in to optimizing them.
There’s duplicated text between the home page and about page. This is annoying if you’ve already read one.
The about page describes basic stuff about how the site works, like the fact that you can vote stuff up and down. This seems unnecessary because most of this stuff is pretty intuitive, so I don’t think we need to spell it out anywhere besides the FAQ.
I read a comment somewhere that said something like “most people I know who got in to Less Wrong do it after they read a particular article that they really enjoy”. This matches with my experience. For me, I got in to Less Wrong after reading a couple of the politics articles (science and politics fable + politics is the mindkiller) and realizing I was an uninformed libertarian nut. I don’t think the right article is guaranteed to be the same for every person, so I like the idea of the about page displaying a smorgasboard of different articles. I also think that just hyperlinking words isn’t a very good way to tell people what articles are going to be interesting. I’d rather write out a sentence about each article, or at least give the article’s full title.
There are a bunch of articles that people have explicitly made to be read by newcomers (“What is Bayesianism?”, “References and Resources for Less Wrong”, etc.) Right now these articles aren’t very visible. Making them more visible would be an easy win.
Some of the answers in the current FAQ are kind of unfriendly, such as the answer to why everyone is an atheist. The answer to “why does everyone on Less Wrong agree” strikes me as a tad obnoxious and arrogant. I don’t think these answers do a good job of communicating Less Wrong culture, which tends to be reasonably friendly and egalitarian for the most part (which is a good thing!)
One possible disadvantage is that my rewrites are overall friendlier and more inviting than the current versions, which may result in lowering the average poster caliber. But it’s pretty easy to stay friendly and also discourage people from posting, e.g. say something like “Less Wrong sets high standards and has some odd norms, lurk for a while before commenting” or whatever.
There’s also simple optimization that we can do. I deliberately wrote everything over from scratch without looking at what existed. Assuming we can conquer status quo bias, we ought to be able to go over candidate/existing pages line-by-line, and for each line, choose whichever page is better written (or something like that). Basically, even if there’s nothing obvious that needs correcting, more alternatives are good. And the About page, at least, should be optimized a ton because every newcomer sees a message that says “go read the about page”.
I could probably think of more things if you want.
Be careful here. Typical-mind fallacy crops up a lot when people say “intuitive” about user interfaces they’re familiar with. A visitor familiar with sites such as Reddit will readily understand the voting mechanism. But other folks might see the thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons and think they mean “recommend this to my friends” and “report this comment as abusive”, for instance.
(That said, I agree that a detailed explanation of the voting system does not really belong in the “About” page.)
Well, Facebook, Youtube, and pretty much every major website I can think of have gone pretty far with their usage instructions tucked in to a corner or entirely absent. And if we’re doing things right, LWers ought to be substantially smarter than typical users of those sites.
Related.