Fair enough. Well, but then I am confused—how do you square that with “ personalized recommendations that change relatively frequently and help you discover old content”? In any case that sounds like a thing I just don’t want.
Look, the fact is, you can design that feature however you like—but the details of your design matter a great deal less, and impact my experience of the site a great deal less (i.e., less negatively), if I can just hide the darn thing!
Please, seriously consider whether foisting something like this on users, when they don’t want it, is good design.
(Of course, ultimately, this is not a problem for me, in practice, both because I can simply use an ad-blocker to block that element, and because I use GW rather than going to lesserwrong.com directly. So if your position on this is along the lines of “Said Achmiz, and other people who share his preferences, should use ad-blockers / go to greaterwrong.com / etc.”—well, fair enough!)
If we show you a sequence or a post that we think you haven’t read yet, and you don’t click on it for a significant amount of time (not sure exactly how long, would want to experiment with that), then it seems reasonable to conclude that you’ve either already read it or don’t want to read it, so we would show you the next best thing we think you haven’t read yet (and we would probably also have a button that says “I’ve already read this” somewhere there, to allow you to force the content to cycle).
I do also think that for people who have read enough of the sequences and the other core content on the page, it should be possible to hide the thing, and maybe replace it with a small badge next to your username that reminds you that you are one of the users who has read the Sequences and the Codex, etc. And then to make the section reappear again when we add a new piece of content to the canon (e.g. Inadequate Equilibria).
I am more hesitant to allow people who haven’t read the canon to dismiss the canon section, since I do think it makes sense to nudge users towards reading the core content if they haven’t done so in one form or another. Presenting users with the explicit option to hide that section sets a tone for the page that it is encouraged to just not engage with that part of the site (if you haven’t done so in the past), which strikes me as a pretty slippery slope to go down.
(Obviously there are problems with determining whether someone has read the core content, which is definitely something I don’t yet have a perfect solution for. We do know which pages any user visited while logged in, even from the old LessWrong, but people might have read an ebook version of the content, or read the content while logged out, etc. So that’s a problem that we will still need to figure out.)
There is a broader vision for the page here, that I haven’t yet really gotten around to writing down, which has to do with the fact that 90% of the best content for most users, is older than 6 months. And that content discovery and scholarship should become a core aspect of the site. I expect that in the long-run we will focus quite a bit of our efforts on allowing users to discover old content, and help them learn the content in the canon, and generally focus on a bunch of scholarship-based features.
Seconding Elo; this “badge” thing sounds unfortunate and I don’t want it. Private “achievements” also seem bad (for different reasons).
Edit: I do agree with this:
90% of the best content for most users, is older than 6 months. And that content discovery and scholarship should become a core aspect of the site. I expect that in the long-run we will focus quite a bit of our efforts on allowing users to discover old content, and help them learn the content in the canon, and generally focus on a bunch of scholarship-based features.
But I think that gamification / badges / achievements / nagging / obtrusive, unremovable UI elements / etc., are just not the way to go about this.
I don’t want that badge system. I don’t want a badge. It makes an “us and them”. The most I’d take is “been here a while” which could be taken as a mishonour.
Is this a concept that the community can discuss in a separate post?
Sure, seems fine to open a separate meta-post about this, though in this case I wasn’t actually thinking of a public badge, but instead a private badge on your own profile (I guess achievement would fit it better, but I was just thinking of the visual style of a badge).
I do actually feel pretty positive towards public badges (and it’s been requested by Lukeprog, so discussing that seems good to me. Though it looks like possibly implementing that is still a while off, so unsure how actionable that discussion would be.)
Fair enough. Well, but then I am confused—how do you square that with “ personalized recommendations that change relatively frequently and help you discover old content”? In any case that sounds like a thing I just don’t want.
Look, the fact is, you can design that feature however you like—but the details of your design matter a great deal less, and impact my experience of the site a great deal less (i.e., less negatively), if I can just hide the darn thing!
Please, seriously consider whether foisting something like this on users, when they don’t want it, is good design.
(Of course, ultimately, this is not a problem for me, in practice, both because I can simply use an ad-blocker to block that element, and because I use GW rather than going to lesserwrong.com directly. So if your position on this is along the lines of “Said Achmiz, and other people who share his preferences, should use ad-blockers / go to greaterwrong.com / etc.”—well, fair enough!)
If we show you a sequence or a post that we think you haven’t read yet, and you don’t click on it for a significant amount of time (not sure exactly how long, would want to experiment with that), then it seems reasonable to conclude that you’ve either already read it or don’t want to read it, so we would show you the next best thing we think you haven’t read yet (and we would probably also have a button that says “I’ve already read this” somewhere there, to allow you to force the content to cycle).
I do also think that for people who have read enough of the sequences and the other core content on the page, it should be possible to hide the thing, and maybe replace it with a small badge next to your username that reminds you that you are one of the users who has read the Sequences and the Codex, etc. And then to make the section reappear again when we add a new piece of content to the canon (e.g. Inadequate Equilibria).
I am more hesitant to allow people who haven’t read the canon to dismiss the canon section, since I do think it makes sense to nudge users towards reading the core content if they haven’t done so in one form or another. Presenting users with the explicit option to hide that section sets a tone for the page that it is encouraged to just not engage with that part of the site (if you haven’t done so in the past), which strikes me as a pretty slippery slope to go down.
(Obviously there are problems with determining whether someone has read the core content, which is definitely something I don’t yet have a perfect solution for. We do know which pages any user visited while logged in, even from the old LessWrong, but people might have read an ebook version of the content, or read the content while logged out, etc. So that’s a problem that we will still need to figure out.)
There is a broader vision for the page here, that I haven’t yet really gotten around to writing down, which has to do with the fact that 90% of the best content for most users, is older than 6 months. And that content discovery and scholarship should become a core aspect of the site. I expect that in the long-run we will focus quite a bit of our efforts on allowing users to discover old content, and help them learn the content in the canon, and generally focus on a bunch of scholarship-based features.
Seconding Elo; this “badge” thing sounds unfortunate and I don’t want it. Private “achievements” also seem bad (for different reasons).
Edit: I do agree with this:
But I think that gamification / badges / achievements / nagging / obtrusive, unremovable UI elements / etc., are just not the way to go about this.
Let me add my voice to the chorus of “ewwww, no badges please”.
I don’t want that badge system. I don’t want a badge. It makes an “us and them”. The most I’d take is “been here a while” which could be taken as a mishonour.
Is this a concept that the community can discuss in a separate post?
Sure, seems fine to open a separate meta-post about this, though in this case I wasn’t actually thinking of a public badge, but instead a private badge on your own profile (I guess achievement would fit it better, but I was just thinking of the visual style of a badge).
I do actually feel pretty positive towards public badges (and it’s been requested by Lukeprog, so discussing that seems good to me. Though it looks like possibly implementing that is still a while off, so unsure how actionable that discussion would be.)