FWIW, I don’t really parse the sequences section on the front page as “common knowledge about the canon”, and my reaction to the change was “oh, good, the large block of noise above the actual content got smaller.” Perhaps this is different for people who haven’t read them already, but seeing a list of things I’ve read already that never goes away is really boring and I have long since tuned it out—my eyeballs skate right over it.
(To be clear, I do value the idea that there should be a canon, and I think content-wise you’ve probably made good choices about the canon… but I also think that having a block of static stuff that sits above the dynamic “place where people are actually doing things” will just tend to cause people to tune-out the stuff the way I have. Honestly if you’re familiar with “ad blindness”, it’s basically like that.)
Yeah, I definitely agree that the sequences block of content was too large for logged-in users. Which is why the goal is eventually to have dynamic content at the top that is both interesting to the user, and that highlights the canon of the community (I.e. that’s the direction we are going in with this update. With us making it significantly smaller in height, and planning to change it every week. Eventually it would only show you content that you haven’t read yet, and maybe sometimes (but marked as such) a reminder of a sequence you read a long long time ago and might want to read again).
FWIW, I don’t really parse the sequences section on the front page as “common knowledge about the canon”, and my reaction to the change was “oh, good, the large block of noise above the actual content got smaller.” Perhaps this is different for people who haven’t read them already, but seeing a list of things I’ve read already that never goes away is really boring and I have long since tuned it out—my eyeballs skate right over it.
(To be clear, I do value the idea that there should be a canon, and I think content-wise you’ve probably made good choices about the canon… but I also think that having a block of static stuff that sits above the dynamic “place where people are actually doing things” will just tend to cause people to tune-out the stuff the way I have. Honestly if you’re familiar with “ad blindness”, it’s basically like that.)
Yeah, I definitely agree that the sequences block of content was too large for logged-in users. Which is why the goal is eventually to have dynamic content at the top that is both interesting to the user, and that highlights the canon of the community (I.e. that’s the direction we are going in with this update. With us making it significantly smaller in height, and planning to change it every week. Eventually it would only show you content that you haven’t read yet, and maybe sometimes (but marked as such) a reminder of a sequence you read a long long time ago and might want to read again).