You want higher content density for comments than for posts, so you need a smaller font size. You could sacrifice content density, but it would really make skimming comment threads a lot worse.
You may want higher density, but I don’t think you can say that I want high density at the expense of legibility.
It takes a lot to make me notice layout, and I rarely notice fonts at all… unless they’re too small. I’m not as young as I used to be. This change made me think I must have zoomed the browser two sizes smaller. The size contrast is so massive that I have to actually zoom the page to read comfortably when I get to the comment section. It’s noticeably annoying, to the point of breaking concentration.
I’ve mostly switched to RSS for Less Wrong[1]. I don’t see your fonts at all any more, unless I click through on an article. The usual reason I click through is to read the comments (occasionally to check out the quick takes and popular comments that don’t show up on RSS). So the comments being inaccessible is doubly bad.
My browser is Firefox on Fedora Linux, and I use a 40 inch 4K monitor (most of whose real estate is wasted by almost every Web site). I usually install most of the available font packages, and it says it’s rendering this text in “Gill Sans Nova Medium”.
My big reason for going to RSS was to mitigate the content prioritization system. I want to skim every headline, or at least every headline over some minimum threshold of “good”. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to look at any old headlines twice to see the new ones. I’m really minimally interested in either the software’s or the other users’ opinions of which material I should want to see. RSS makes it easier to get a simple chronological view; the built-in chronological view is weird and hard to navigate to. I really feel like I’m having to fight the site to see what I want to see.
Just want to chime in with agreement about annoyance over the prioritization of post headlines. One thing in particular that annoys me is that I haven’t figured out how to toggle off ‘seen’ posts showing up. What if I just want to see unread ones?
Also, why can’t I load more at once instead of always having to click ‘load more’?
The “Recommended” tab filters out read posts by default. We never had much demand for showing recently-sorted posts while filtering out only ones you’ve read, but it wouldn’t be very hard to build.
Not sure what you mean by “load more at once”. We could add a whole user setting to allow users to change the number of posts on the frontpage, but done consistently that would produce a ginormous number of user settings for everything, which would be a pain to maintain (not like, overwhelmingly so, but I would be surprised if it was worth the cost).
That doesn’t make sense to me, but then, I’m clearly not the target audience since ‘skimming comment threads’ isn’t a thing I ever want to do. I want to read them, carefully and thoughtfully, like I do posts.
This is, I think, related to how I feel that voting (karma or agreement) should be available only at the bottom of posts and comments, so that people are encouraged to actually read the post/comment before voting. Maybe even placed behind a reading comprehension quiz.
I think knowing the karma and agreement is useful, especially to help me decide how much attention to pay to a piece of content, and I don’t think there’s that much distortion from knowing what others think. (i.e., overall benefits>costs)
I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to see the karma and agreement at the top, just that you should only be able to contribute your own opinion at the bottom, after reading and judging for yourself.
You want higher content density for comments than for posts, so you need a smaller font size. You could sacrifice content density, but it would really make skimming comment threads a lot worse.
You may want higher density, but I don’t think you can say that I want high density at the expense of legibility.
It takes a lot to make me notice layout, and I rarely notice fonts at all… unless they’re too small. I’m not as young as I used to be. This change made me think I must have zoomed the browser two sizes smaller. The size contrast is so massive that I have to actually zoom the page to read comfortably when I get to the comment section. It’s noticeably annoying, to the point of breaking concentration.
I’ve mostly switched to RSS for Less Wrong[1]. I don’t see your fonts at all any more, unless I click through on an article. The usual reason I click through is to read the comments (occasionally to check out the quick takes and popular comments that don’t show up on RSS). So the comments being inaccessible is doubly bad.
My browser is Firefox on Fedora Linux, and I use a 40 inch 4K monitor (most of whose real estate is wasted by almost every Web site). I usually install most of the available font packages, and it says it’s rendering this text in “Gill Sans Nova Medium”.
My big reason for going to RSS was to mitigate the content prioritization system. I want to skim every headline, or at least every headline over some minimum threshold of “good”. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to look at any old headlines twice to see the new ones. I’m really minimally interested in either the software’s or the other users’ opinions of which material I should want to see. RSS makes it easier to get a simple chronological view; the built-in chronological view is weird and hard to navigate to. I really feel like I’m having to fight the site to see what I want to see.
Just want to chime in with agreement about annoyance over the prioritization of post headlines. One thing in particular that annoys me is that I haven’t figured out how to toggle off ‘seen’ posts showing up. What if I just want to see unread ones?
Also, why can’t I load more at once instead of always having to click ‘load more’?
The “Recommended” tab filters out read posts by default. We never had much demand for showing recently-sorted posts while filtering out only ones you’ve read, but it wouldn’t be very hard to build.
Not sure what you mean by “load more at once”. We could add a whole user setting to allow users to change the number of posts on the frontpage, but done consistently that would produce a ginormous number of user settings for everything, which would be a pain to maintain (not like, overwhelmingly so, but I would be surprised if it was worth the cost).
That doesn’t make sense to me, but then, I’m clearly not the target audience since ‘skimming comment threads’ isn’t a thing I ever want to do. I want to read them, carefully and thoughtfully, like I do posts.
This is, I think, related to how I feel that voting (karma or agreement) should be available only at the bottom of posts and comments, so that people are encouraged to actually read the post/comment before voting. Maybe even placed behind a reading comprehension quiz.
I think knowing the karma and agreement is useful, especially to help me decide how much attention to pay to a piece of content, and I don’t think there’s that much distortion from knowing what others think. (i.e., overall benefits>costs)
I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to see the karma and agreement at the top, just that you should only be able to contribute your own opinion at the bottom, after reading and judging for yourself.