Thoughts on minimalism, elegance and the internet:
I have this vision for LessWrong of a website that gives you the space to think for yourself, and doesn’t constantly distract you with flashy colors and bright notifications and vibrant pictures. Instead it tries to be muted in a way that allows you to access the relevant information, but still gives you the space to disengage from the content of your screen, take a step back and ask yourself “what are my goals right now?”.
I don’t know how well we achieved that so far. I like our frontpage, and I think the post-reading experience is quite exceptionally focused and clear, but I think there is still something about the way the whole site is structured, with its focus on recent content and new discussion that often makes me feel scattered when I visit the site.
I think a major problem is that Lesswrong doesn’t make it easy to do only a single focused thing on the site at a time, and it doesn’t currently really encourage you to engage with the site in a focused way. We have the library, which I do think is decent, but the sequence navigation experience is not yet fully what I would like it to be, and when I go to the frontpage the primary thing I still see is recent content. Not the sequences I recently started reading, or the practice exercises I might want to fill out, or the open questions I might want to answer.
I think ther are a variety of ways to address this, some of which I hope to build very soon:
+ The frontpage should show you not only recent content, but also show you much older historical content (that can be of much higher quality, due to being drawn from a much larger pool). [We have a working prototype of this, and I hope we can push it soon]
+ We should encourage you to read whole sequences at a time, instead of individual posts. If you start reading a sequence, you should be encouraged to continue reading it from the frontpage [This is also quite close to working]
+ There should be some way to encourage people to put serious effort into answering the most important open questions [This is currently mostly bottlenecked on making the open-question system/UX good enough to make real progress in]
+ You should be able to easily bookmark posts and comments to allow you to continue reading something at a later point in time [We haven’t really started on this, but it’s pretty straightforward, so I still think this isn’t too far off]
+ I would love it if there were real rationality exercises in many of the sequences, in a way that would periodically require you to write essays and answer questions and generally check your understanding. This is obviously quite difficult to make happen, both in terms of UI, but also in terms of generating the content
I think if we had all of these, in particular the open questions one, then I think I would feel more like LessWrong is oriented towards my long-term growth instead of trying to give me short-term reinforcement. It would also create a natural space in which to encourage focused work and generally make me feel less scattered when I visit the site, due to deemphasizing the most recent wave of content.
I do think there are problems with deemphasizing more recent content, mostly because this indirectly disincentivizes creating new content, which I do think would obviously be bad for the site. Though in some sense it might encourage the creation of longer-lived content, which would be quite good for the site.
The frontpage should show you not only recent content, but also show you much older historical content
When I was a starry eyed undergrad, I liked to imagine that reddit might resurrect old posts if they gained renewed interest, if someone rediscovered something and gave it a hard upvote, that would put it in front of more judges, which might lead to a cascade of re-approval that hoists the post back into the spotlight. There would be no need for reposts, evergreen content would get due recognition, a post wouldn’t be done until the interest of the subreddit (or, generally, user cohort) is really gone.
Of course, reddit doesn’t do that at all. Along with the fact that threads are locked after a year, this is one of many reasons it’s hard to justify putting a lot of time into writing for reddit.
Thoughts on minimalism, elegance and the internet:
I have this vision for LessWrong of a website that gives you the space to think for yourself, and doesn’t constantly distract you with flashy colors and bright notifications and vibrant pictures. Instead it tries to be muted in a way that allows you to access the relevant information, but still gives you the space to disengage from the content of your screen, take a step back and ask yourself “what are my goals right now?”.
I don’t know how well we achieved that so far. I like our frontpage, and I think the post-reading experience is quite exceptionally focused and clear, but I think there is still something about the way the whole site is structured, with its focus on recent content and new discussion that often makes me feel scattered when I visit the site.
I think a major problem is that Lesswrong doesn’t make it easy to do only a single focused thing on the site at a time, and it doesn’t currently really encourage you to engage with the site in a focused way. We have the library, which I do think is decent, but the sequence navigation experience is not yet fully what I would like it to be, and when I go to the frontpage the primary thing I still see is recent content. Not the sequences I recently started reading, or the practice exercises I might want to fill out, or the open questions I might want to answer.
I think ther are a variety of ways to address this, some of which I hope to build very soon:
+ The frontpage should show you not only recent content, but also show you much older historical content (that can be of much higher quality, due to being drawn from a much larger pool). [We have a working prototype of this, and I hope we can push it soon]
+ We should encourage you to read whole sequences at a time, instead of individual posts. If you start reading a sequence, you should be encouraged to continue reading it from the frontpage [This is also quite close to working]
+ There should be some way to encourage people to put serious effort into answering the most important open questions [This is currently mostly bottlenecked on making the open-question system/UX good enough to make real progress in]
+ You should be able to easily bookmark posts and comments to allow you to continue reading something at a later point in time [We haven’t really started on this, but it’s pretty straightforward, so I still think this isn’t too far off]
+ I would love it if there were real rationality exercises in many of the sequences, in a way that would periodically require you to write essays and answer questions and generally check your understanding. This is obviously quite difficult to make happen, both in terms of UI, but also in terms of generating the content
I think if we had all of these, in particular the open questions one, then I think I would feel more like LessWrong is oriented towards my long-term growth instead of trying to give me short-term reinforcement. It would also create a natural space in which to encourage focused work and generally make me feel less scattered when I visit the site, due to deemphasizing the most recent wave of content.
I do think there are problems with deemphasizing more recent content, mostly because this indirectly disincentivizes creating new content, which I do think would obviously be bad for the site. Though in some sense it might encourage the creation of longer-lived content, which would be quite good for the site.
When I was a starry eyed undergrad, I liked to imagine that reddit might resurrect old posts if they gained renewed interest, if someone rediscovered something and gave it a hard upvote, that would put it in front of more judges, which might lead to a cascade of re-approval that hoists the post back into the spotlight. There would be no need for reposts, evergreen content would get due recognition, a post wouldn’t be done until the interest of the subreddit (or, generally, user cohort) is really gone.
Of course, reddit doesn’t do that at all. Along with the fact that threads are locked after a year, this is one of many reasons it’s hard to justify putting a lot of time into writing for reddit.