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.
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.