Impressions Thread: One Month In
Again, I thought it would be better to create a thread for discussing our impressions rather than having each person who wants to post their impressions having to create their own thread. Now that one month has passed, it should be much clearer how well some of the features are working.
I’ve been surprised by how much good content has been posted on the site. Admittedly a lot of this was from Conner’s 30 day project, but even when this stops it seems like we are getting much more quality content than before.
I mainly use the all posts view as I want to see all the posts that got a good number of upvotes regardless of whether it is front-page or on a blog.
The site is still buggy enough on my Android phone that I only use the web version of this site.
That said, I haven’t been seeing nearly as many issues on the site in a desktop browser any more. This stability is definitely appreciated.
I really appreciate personal blogs being differentiated from other posts. Before it was very confusing to tell which was which.
I can report that the reputation system was good at motivating me to get up to 125 reputation, but now I’m just gliding my way towards the next threshold. Once I get close, it’ll probably motivate me again. Longer term, we might want to copy StackExchange and attach some other privileges to reputation to encourage people to contribute to the website. But more than this, I suspect making a person have to earn their right to have a significant voice in what content is good or bad is a great way of getting people to buy into the community more in a manner that is seperate from the short term motivation effects.
I’m finding it really convenient having top blogs imported into the site. I want to know if certain popular blogs have written something that is resonating with people, but I’m not interested enough to want to read everything they right. This solves this problem very well.
I still find creating Meta posts confusing because of the Post to Front-page checkbox which is showing.
The top feature that I am waiting on is the ability to tag posts. One reason is that I think that it is important to have some discussion about the Less Wrong community and there isn’t a good way to do this until we get the community tag. I feel that there is a lot to be discussed now that we actually have an online community again.
Standard disclaimer: Oliver/Ben/I reserve right to use our own judgment, soliciting comments to flesh out judgment rather than commit to whatever the most popular request is.
I’m curious how you’d rank these features:
Tagging
Properly working view tracking (so that you can see which posts you’ve already read, and which comments are new)
Properly working notifications (so you can easily subscribe to individual users and receive all their posts)
Currently we’re planning to get 2 and 3 done by November, and Tagging is a complex enough new feature it’s not likely to get implemented till a bit later, but was curious how they compare.