I agree with Chris that it would be good not to have community/meta/daily hidden by default. The amount of clutter that those options produce isn’t that high and having them not hidden makes it faster for users to navigate around the website and makes them more discoverable.
I think it makes only sense to hide elements that are supposed to be seldomly used and I don’t think those qualify for that.
Hmm, will think about it more. I do feel like it’s important to disincentivise the meta section of the site (all sites end up becoming about themselves if you don’t push against it, which is why posts about the social community don’t get to frontpage). Also I think that I have a stronger intuition that clutter and complexity on a page is really damaging to the average user experience.
Also, note that if you’re someone who wants to always see e.g. ‘community’ when you land on the site, if you’re logged in the last one you have open will be stored and saved for you.
How about adding a button to collapse the list and remember whether it’s expanded or collapsed? That way users who want it to be expanded can have what they want and others as well.
“Hmm, will think about it more. I do feel like it’s important to disincentivise the meta section of the site”—Well maybe it was better when meta was in the menu then? It was discoverable, but empirically we could see that most of the discussion was occurring on the main page nonetheless.
In any circumstance, perhaps we should only be attempting to discourage meta discussion if the amount of meta-discussion starts to become a problem? The current amount of meta discussion seems completely reasonable for a relatively new site where so much is still yet to be determined.
I also think during open beta it might be better to make the meta section more accessible (so people can report bugs and discuss the evolution of the site), and if it feels like we’re getting much discussion there, we have a fairly crisp moment in time (switch to lesswrong.com) where it makes sense to say “okay, now that we’re done with the beta we’re moving back to meta being more disincentivized.”
I agree with Chris that it would be good not to have community/meta/daily hidden by default. The amount of clutter that those options produce isn’t that high and having them not hidden makes it faster for users to navigate around the website and makes them more discoverable.
I think it makes only sense to hide elements that are supposed to be seldomly used and I don’t think those qualify for that.
Hmm, will think about it more. I do feel like it’s important to disincentivise the meta section of the site (all sites end up becoming about themselves if you don’t push against it, which is why posts about the social community don’t get to frontpage). Also I think that I have a stronger intuition that clutter and complexity on a page is really damaging to the average user experience.
Also, note that if you’re someone who wants to always see e.g. ‘community’ when you land on the site, if you’re logged in the last one you have open will be stored and saved for you.
I feel that a clear distinction to keep the meta discussion out of the normal discussion should be enough to prevent the dynamic you want to prevent.
How about adding a button to collapse the list and remember whether it’s expanded or collapsed? That way users who want it to be expanded can have what they want and others as well.
“Hmm, will think about it more. I do feel like it’s important to disincentivise the meta section of the site”—Well maybe it was better when meta was in the menu then? It was discoverable, but empirically we could see that most of the discussion was occurring on the main page nonetheless.
In any circumstance, perhaps we should only be attempting to discourage meta discussion if the amount of meta-discussion starts to become a problem? The current amount of meta discussion seems completely reasonable for a relatively new site where so much is still yet to be determined.
I also think during open beta it might be better to make the meta section more accessible (so people can report bugs and discuss the evolution of the site), and if it feels like we’re getting much discussion there, we have a fairly crisp moment in time (switch to lesswrong.com) where it makes sense to say “okay, now that we’re done with the beta we’re moving back to meta being more disincentivized.”