Agree. Something the old LessWrong did that the LW2 community page doesn’t currently do, was that it displayed upcoming meetups on the side of every page, and in my experience as an organizer sometimes people would just stumble across the site for the first time, immediately see there was a meetup in my city, and show up. From a design perspective I know there’s no way Oliver will go for having meetups display on the side of every page, but maybe we can do something to make nearby meetups comparably visible, because that does seem really important.
Yes, I’ve had many of our newcomers tell me that they showed up because of that feature (not because they went looking for in-person meetups). Discoverability matters.
Wanted to share our thoughts on this so far (we’re currently pretty uncertain about how to weigh a large number of concerns together, but agree that meetups should be discoverable and are a really important part of the LessWrong community, and I’m interested in thoughts on how to go about this).
Throughout most of the web, you’re barraged with distractions. You can’t read a blogpost without seeing links to related content, notifications, etc, hyperlinks that force at least a mild decision of whether to keep reading the current thing or switch contexts or at the very least pause to open it in a new tab for later.
And this adds up to a major cost to attention, which is one of our most rare and precious resources. And a major design philosophy of LesserWrong is, as much as possible, to not be doing that. Each page on the site tries to focus your attention on one thing (with a plausible exception for the frontpage, but at least there’s a one-thing of “figure out what you want to read in detail”)
This does make a lot of design choices harder – if you’re not willing to bombard your user with lots of things-to-maybe-pay-attention-to, it’s obviously harder to offer them the ability to pay attention to things they haven’t yet considered.
Sidebars lean heavily into the “offer lots of other things to think about” mentality, which is why we’d like to avoid them.
We do plan to feature meetups in some more obvious-fashion on the frontpage, although it seems like this may involve some careful rework of what the frontpage is currently doing. This wouldn’t address the use-case of “gets linked to a particular blogpost, reads it, sees on the side that there’s a meetup in their city, goes to meetup.”
We are leaning towards tweaking the header-bar to contain more information (something like “transform what is currently the hidden hamburger menu into a menu-bar with more discoverability), which’ll help a bit, but it’d feel weird to me to use that particular space for “meetup in your area!”
It seems plausible that once you finish a given article that maybe it should show some things you might want to do next. (I think if this is put all the way at the bottom of the comments it’d be so obscured as to be mostly-useless, and if it’s put above the comments, it’s a bit differently weird)
There’s a whole separate issue, where it’s making some kind of statement about what LessWrong is when social hangouts [“board game meetup near you!”] are presented on the front page (and a different statement if the only meetups on the frontpage are more intellectual-leaning), and figuring out how to set the right tone for the culture is a pretty big question.
This is all to say “yes, we’re taking this seriously, but also it’s hard.” Solving the issue requires a fair amount of background on how everything fits together so most simple solutions will probably not be sufficient, but I’m interested in additional thoughts people have on it.
I vote for checking to see if there is a meetup coming up soon near the user’s IP address, and if so, putting a notification below every post, above the comments.
So on one hand, this particular solution wasn’t something I was seriously considering regardless. But, I’m curious:
a) are you therefore saying it’s basically not worth it to include any kind of prompt for meetups on individual blogposts? (this seems fine and coherent, but my previous comment was basically oriented around “how to give meetups as much exposure as we can without being distracting or producing weird cultural effects” and am curious what your own thoughts on that are.)
b) I’m not actually sure what the concern here is (I do have a vague ugh field around sites that do this – i.e. when tumblr shows me three random posts I might want to read after a post, something about that feels annoying, but I’m not sure why. Distraction doesn’t feel like the right word – I just finished a post, so it’s not like it’s ripping me out of my train of thought)
For B:
I have an analogy—it’s more like a Wikipedia article with relevant links interspersed than a clickbait article with a list of “you won’t believe what happens when you use this formula on yourself”, at the bottom.
I’m going to second a permanent sidebar. Frankly, I wouldn’t play coy with the concerns of in-person organizers. If they’re not among your top three priorities then your priorities happen to be wrong.
Agree. Something the old LessWrong did that the LW2 community page doesn’t currently do, was that it displayed upcoming meetups on the side of every page, and in my experience as an organizer sometimes people would just stumble across the site for the first time, immediately see there was a meetup in my city, and show up. From a design perspective I know there’s no way Oliver will go for having meetups display on the side of every page, but maybe we can do something to make nearby meetups comparably visible, because that does seem really important.
Yes, I’ve had many of our newcomers tell me that they showed up because of that feature (not because they went looking for in-person meetups). Discoverability matters.
Wanted to share our thoughts on this so far (we’re currently pretty uncertain about how to weigh a large number of concerns together, but agree that meetups should be discoverable and are a really important part of the LessWrong community, and I’m interested in thoughts on how to go about this).
Throughout most of the web, you’re barraged with distractions. You can’t read a blogpost without seeing links to related content, notifications, etc, hyperlinks that force at least a mild decision of whether to keep reading the current thing or switch contexts or at the very least pause to open it in a new tab for later.
And this adds up to a major cost to attention, which is one of our most rare and precious resources. And a major design philosophy of LesserWrong is, as much as possible, to not be doing that. Each page on the site tries to focus your attention on one thing (with a plausible exception for the frontpage, but at least there’s a one-thing of “figure out what you want to read in detail”)
This does make a lot of design choices harder – if you’re not willing to bombard your user with lots of things-to-maybe-pay-attention-to, it’s obviously harder to offer them the ability to pay attention to things they haven’t yet considered.
Sidebars lean heavily into the “offer lots of other things to think about” mentality, which is why we’d like to avoid them.
We do plan to feature meetups in some more obvious-fashion on the frontpage, although it seems like this may involve some careful rework of what the frontpage is currently doing. This wouldn’t address the use-case of “gets linked to a particular blogpost, reads it, sees on the side that there’s a meetup in their city, goes to meetup.”
We are leaning towards tweaking the header-bar to contain more information (something like “transform what is currently the hidden hamburger menu into a menu-bar with more discoverability), which’ll help a bit, but it’d feel weird to me to use that particular space for “meetup in your area!”
It seems plausible that once you finish a given article that maybe it should show some things you might want to do next. (I think if this is put all the way at the bottom of the comments it’d be so obscured as to be mostly-useless, and if it’s put above the comments, it’s a bit differently weird)
There’s a whole separate issue, where it’s making some kind of statement about what LessWrong is when social hangouts [“board game meetup near you!”] are presented on the front page (and a different statement if the only meetups on the frontpage are more intellectual-leaning), and figuring out how to set the right tone for the culture is a pretty big question.
This is all to say “yes, we’re taking this seriously, but also it’s hard.” Solving the issue requires a fair amount of background on how everything fits together so most simple solutions will probably not be sufficient, but I’m interested in additional thoughts people have on it.
I vote for checking to see if there is a meetup coming up soon near the user’s IP address, and if so, putting a notification below every post, above the comments.
No. You can encourage authors to back link. But this is way too much like distraction.
So on one hand, this particular solution wasn’t something I was seriously considering regardless. But, I’m curious:
a) are you therefore saying it’s basically not worth it to include any kind of prompt for meetups on individual blogposts? (this seems fine and coherent, but my previous comment was basically oriented around “how to give meetups as much exposure as we can without being distracting or producing weird cultural effects” and am curious what your own thoughts on that are.)
b) I’m not actually sure what the concern here is (I do have a vague ugh field around sites that do this – i.e. when tumblr shows me three random posts I might want to read after a post, something about that feels annoying, but I’m not sure why. Distraction doesn’t feel like the right word – I just finished a post, so it’s not like it’s ripping me out of my train of thought)
For B: I have an analogy—it’s more like a Wikipedia article with relevant links interspersed than a clickbait article with a list of “you won’t believe what happens when you use this formula on yourself”, at the bottom.
For A: I prefer a permanent sidebar. I don’t like floating, disappearing or overly complicated “features”.
I’m going to second a permanent sidebar. Frankly, I wouldn’t play coy with the concerns of in-person organizers. If they’re not among your top three priorities then your priorities happen to be wrong.