I think the highest payoff-per-unit-effort changes to LW as it currently exists are in content discovery.
We have this massive pile of mostly-evergreen content, yet we have very few ways for a user to find specific things in that pile which interest them. We have the sequences, and we have some recommendations at the top of the homepage. But neither of these shows things which are more likely than average to be of interest to this specific user. With such a huge volume of content, showing users the things most relevant to their interests is crucial.
So, two main criteria for changes to be high-value:
Content discovery needs to be on every post, not just the homepage
Content discovery needs to be relevant, i.e. not just showing everyone the same things all the time
Now, I’m not saying we need a fancy engine for user-level recommendations; “related posts” would be much easier and probably more effective than an off-the-shelf recommendation engine. The ideal starting point would be a sidebar on every post containing (some subset of):
Posts/comments which link to this post
Other posts by this author
Author-suggested related posts
“Users who upvoted/commented on this post also upvoted/commented on...”
Commenter-suggested related posts (would potentially help for forward-linking to newer versions of old ideas)
“Similar” posts, as judged by some automated natural language model and/or hyperlink-based model
Posts with similar tags (would require tag functionality)
… etc. Just getting a sidebar with one or two of these would give a good platform for extending functionality later on, and would dramatically improve visibility into our mountain of content.
I am hesitant about sidebars in general, but I agree that having recommendations below the post at least is a good idea. I would also experiment with putting them in the ToC navigation, though you don’t really have space for more than 2-3 related posts there.
I am generally a fan of minimalism, and having a focused reading experience. I like being able to read a post, and just focus on the content, without lots of other stuff that is trying to get my attention, until I am done with it.
This is mostly based on my models of intellectual effort, where I think distraction-rich environment make putting real effort into something a lot harder.
I think the highest payoff-per-unit-effort changes to LW as it currently exists are in content discovery.
We have this massive pile of mostly-evergreen content, yet we have very few ways for a user to find specific things in that pile which interest them. We have the sequences, and we have some recommendations at the top of the homepage. But neither of these shows things which are more likely than average to be of interest to this specific user. With such a huge volume of content, showing users the things most relevant to their interests is crucial.
So, two main criteria for changes to be high-value:
Content discovery needs to be on every post, not just the homepage
Content discovery needs to be relevant, i.e. not just showing everyone the same things all the time
Now, I’m not saying we need a fancy engine for user-level recommendations; “related posts” would be much easier and probably more effective than an off-the-shelf recommendation engine. The ideal starting point would be a sidebar on every post containing (some subset of):
Posts/comments which link to this post
Other posts by this author
Author-suggested related posts
“Users who upvoted/commented on this post also upvoted/commented on...”
Commenter-suggested related posts (would potentially help for forward-linking to newer versions of old ideas)
“Similar” posts, as judged by some automated natural language model and/or hyperlink-based model
Posts with similar tags (would require tag functionality)
… etc. Just getting a sidebar with one or two of these would give a good platform for extending functionality later on, and would dramatically improve visibility into our mountain of content.
BTW I love the link preview functionality, I think that one is huge for content discovery.
I am hesitant about sidebars in general, but I agree that having recommendations below the post at least is a good idea. I would also experiment with putting them in the ToC navigation, though you don’t really have space for more than 2-3 related posts there.
2-3 related posts would be plenty; the top 2-3 in a list are all people usually click on anyway.
Why the aversion to sidebars? I don’t disagree, bottom or ToC or elsewhere is fine, just curious.
I am generally a fan of minimalism, and having a focused reading experience. I like being able to read a post, and just focus on the content, without lots of other stuff that is trying to get my attention, until I am done with it.
This is mostly based on my models of intellectual effort, where I think distraction-rich environment make putting real effort into something a lot harder.