In exchange we can offer you a wider audience and some new perspectives.
No, you don’t have a wide audience. You have a politics group with four members. Writing on Lesswrong reaches a much wider audience.
The site has been built, but then that was always going to be the easiest part.
The way the website looks, it seems like you failed at the building part. You have a color scheme that has grey letters on grey background next to greish blue letters on grey ground.
It also looks like you tried to build a new system of how an online forum should operate instead of just taking a readymade solution. As a result it seems you have to make a bunch of bad UI decisions.
But the problem is, a few thousand people visit Less Wrong regularly, generating and evolving a unique memescape. And a few miles down the information highway, another few thousand people post to Humanity+ mailing lists; building up a different memescape. There is some overlap, naturally, but not nearly enough.
In my experience Lesswrong is fairly diverse. I don’t think that there a problem of not enough Humanity+ type people contributing ideas to lesswrong. Lesswrong attracts a fairly diverse readership.
No, you don’t have a wide audience. You have a politics group with four members. Writing on Lesswrong reaches a much wider audience.
In my experience Lesswrong is fairly diverse. I don’t think that there a problem of not enough Humanity+ type people contributing ideas to lesswrong. Lesswrong attracts a fairly diverse readership.
Five, but point taken. That’s why we’re recruiting in the first place. A site no-one knows about isn’t doing any good after all. So we recruit. From LessWrong, from Humanity+, SENS and Lifeboat but also from sites you might not have considered as futurists, like Space.com, Greenpeace, Thingiverse, and the European Pirate party. This is where the diversity bit comes in. Emails and posts are going out to these groups as fast as we can make them, but we chose to contact LessWrong as early in the process as possible, because, as you point out, it is a large and diverse community.
The way the website looks, it seems like you failed at the building part.
The website is very much a work in progress, yes. But then websites generally do look bad in the beginning, until the influx of fresh eyes help the developers see the trouble spots. Work is ongoing to make a prettier front end, but the off the shelf solution we found was deemed more cost effective than having a group of novices sit down and design a page from scratch.
The website is very much a work in progress, yes. But then websites generally do look bad in the beginning, until the influx of fresh eyes help the developers see the trouble spots.
No, that’s not how it normally works for a professional website.
Normally websites aren’t designed by developers but are designed by a webdesigner. On top of that there are readymade solutions for forums. LessWrong for example uses the reddit framework.
The website would probably profit from starting from scratch with a proper design.
Emails and posts are going out to these groups as fast as we can make them, but we chose to contact LessWrong as early in the process as possible, because, as you point out, it is a large and diverse community.
So you choose to contact Lesswrong for recruitment at a time where it’s inprobable that your recruiting is very successful because it’s large...
It also looks like you tried to build a new system of how an online forum should operate instead of just taking a readymade solution. As a result it seems you have to make a bunch of bad UI decisions.
It looks like Drupal to me. You might not like it, but you can hardly say they failed to make use of existing components.
There no facebook sign in. There’s for example “4 comment(s)” under an article but no hotlink to the comments.
In case you don’t know, different people have a different ability to distinguish shades of blue and most people are not perfect. For me that “Create an account link”-text on the startpage is unreadable.
Even beyond this the page is very uninviting.
If I read a topic I find under the topic “Promote content” but no “Post comment button or free text box”.
There some unlabled blue thing that shows that(you have to log in to post but only if you hover over it.
To further deter people from registering, at the end of comments where you get information that you have to login/register, the words login/register are in lower font size than the rest of the text. After all you don’t want to draw attention to logining in or registering.
Those issues don’t seem like a decision that anybody who designs a framework that intents to encourage community participation should make. For that reason it looked to me like it doesn’t use a proper community platform.
If you have a corporate website, you might not want to encourage as much participation as possible and have some barrier to entry. You might use a website that looks that way. If your intend is to grow a community it doesn’t seem like a good decision.
On Drupal.org they use a forum plugin for their forum: https://drupal.org/forum/22
I think using Drupal and not using a forum plugin when you want to built a forum but trying to do it your own way, counts as not using existing components.
On Drupal.org they use a forum plugin for their forum: https://drupal.org/forum/22 I think using Drupal and not using a forum plugin when you want to built a forum but trying to do it your own way, counts as not using existing components.
You seem to have very weak evidence that they actually did this. It seems tremendously unlikely to me. Drupal comes with a forum module and it has many third party forums available. I see no good reason to think that they failed to make use of these resources.
The forum on Drupal.org looks I expect a forum to look. I would disagree with a few design choices but there’s nothing that looks obviously wrong.
It might be that it’s just a wrongly configured plugin but the UX decisions like the one about the fontsize of the register/login of the existing website just doesn’t make sense for the purposes of running a forum.
No, you don’t have a wide audience. You have a politics group with four members. Writing on Lesswrong reaches a much wider audience.
The way the website looks, it seems like you failed at the building part. You have a color scheme that has grey letters on grey background next to greish blue letters on grey ground.
It also looks like you tried to build a new system of how an online forum should operate instead of just taking a readymade solution. As a result it seems you have to make a bunch of bad UI decisions.
In my experience Lesswrong is fairly diverse. I don’t think that there a problem of not enough Humanity+ type people contributing ideas to lesswrong. Lesswrong attracts a fairly diverse readership.
Five, but point taken. That’s why we’re recruiting in the first place. A site no-one knows about isn’t doing any good after all. So we recruit. From LessWrong, from Humanity+, SENS and Lifeboat but also from sites you might not have considered as futurists, like Space.com, Greenpeace, Thingiverse, and the European Pirate party. This is where the diversity bit comes in. Emails and posts are going out to these groups as fast as we can make them, but we chose to contact LessWrong as early in the process as possible, because, as you point out, it is a large and diverse community.
The website is very much a work in progress, yes. But then websites generally do look bad in the beginning, until the influx of fresh eyes help the developers see the trouble spots. Work is ongoing to make a prettier front end, but the off the shelf solution we found was deemed more cost effective than having a group of novices sit down and design a page from scratch.
No, that’s not how it normally works for a professional website. Normally websites aren’t designed by developers but are designed by a webdesigner. On top of that there are readymade solutions for forums. LessWrong for example uses the reddit framework.
The website would probably profit from starting from scratch with a proper design.
So you choose to contact Lesswrong for recruitment at a time where it’s inprobable that your recruiting is very successful because it’s large...
It looks like Drupal to me. You might not like it, but you can hardly say they failed to make use of existing components.
There no facebook sign in. There’s for example “4 comment(s)” under an article but no hotlink to the comments.
In case you don’t know, different people have a different ability to distinguish shades of blue and most people are not perfect. For me that “Create an account link”-text on the startpage is unreadable. Even beyond this the page is very uninviting.
If I read a topic I find under the topic “Promote content” but no “Post comment button or free text box”. There some unlabled blue thing that shows that(you have to log in to post but only if you hover over it.
To further deter people from registering, at the end of comments where you get information that you have to login/register, the words login/register are in lower font size than the rest of the text. After all you don’t want to draw attention to logining in or registering.
Those issues don’t seem like a decision that anybody who designs a framework that intents to encourage community participation should make. For that reason it looked to me like it doesn’t use a proper community platform.
If you have a corporate website, you might not want to encourage as much participation as possible and have some barrier to entry. You might use a website that looks that way. If your intend is to grow a community it doesn’t seem like a good decision.
On Drupal.org they use a forum plugin for their forum: https://drupal.org/forum/22 I think using Drupal and not using a forum plugin when you want to built a forum but trying to do it your own way, counts as not using existing components.
You seem to have very weak evidence that they actually did this. It seems tremendously unlikely to me. Drupal comes with a forum module and it has many third party forums available. I see no good reason to think that they failed to make use of these resources.
The forum on Drupal.org looks I expect a forum to look. I would disagree with a few design choices but there’s nothing that looks obviously wrong.
It might be that it’s just a wrongly configured plugin but the UX decisions like the one about the fontsize of the register/login of the existing website just doesn’t make sense for the purposes of running a forum.