LessWrong email subscriptions?
Right now, LessWrong has a fair amount of email subscription options, but they’re given in a giant list in your user profile that’s kind of annoying to look at.[1]
I have a sense that some people – especially newer users, or users who just don’t have a habit of coming to LessWrong all the time – might benefit from having more subscriptions via email (including basic “subscriptions” like “replies to my comment”). But, also, it’s very easy for email to become pretty spammy and for people to tune-it-out completely.
If you have any plausibly email-shaped LessWrong related holes in your life, let me know.
Some examples of ideas here (inline-react with an “thumbs-up” for features that you’d use)
Better visibility of the “Subscribe to posts with >N karma” feature (this is available in the “subscribe” button on the sidebar).
Generally being able to subscribe to more things “if they get upvoted”, rather than for every single instance.
Batching of various email types into a digest that comes once a day/week.
A monthly update about top posts and comments on LessWrong
“Reading group” emails that will email you posts from The Sequences ~once a week (maybe with an option to be synced up with other people so you’re all encouraged to comment and discuss it at the same time)
More convenient options for shifting your subscription (i.e. maybe when you write comments, there’s a toggle for “subscribe to new comments via email” which is default “on” for new users but “off” for established users who visit frequently)
Better organization of the existing Notifications user options so it’s not so overwhelming.
Let me know if you have other ideas in the comments.
- ^
It’s pretty horrible. It doesn’t even fit on one screen:
My emails are just right.
Obvious suggestion would be to reduce the font size of the headers so that the dropdowns below can be moved to the same line, but maybe that’s irrelevant if more substantial changes are being made.
I would like the following subscription: All posts with certain tags, e.g. all [AI] posts or all [Interpretability (ML & AI)] posts.
I just noticed (and enabled) a “subscribe” feature in the page for the tag, it says “Get notifications when posts are added to this tag.” — I’m unsure if those are emails, but assuming they are, my problem is solved. I never noticed this option before.
I think by default they are site-notifications, but in your user settings you can change them to emails.
Is it possible to use these options to customize an RSS feed?
I feel like this does not fit with LessWrong well; its point is not only to have correct knowledge, but also to think correctly, and that works better with lots of evidence. In a digest, people might believe whatever the post title says disregarding caveats described in post itself.