I’ve recently updated on how useful it’d be to have small icons representing users. Previously some people were like “it’ll help me scan the comment section for people!” and I was like ”...yeah that seems true, but I’m scared of this site feeling like facebook, or worse, LinkedIn.”
I’m not sure whether that was the right tradeoff, but, I was recently sold after realizing how space-efficient it is for showing lots of commenters. Like, in slack or facebook, you’ll see things like:
This’d be really helpful, esp. in the Quick Takes and Popular comments sections, where you can see which people you know/like have commented to a thing
I am fairly strongly against having faces, which I think boot up a lot of social instincts that I disprefer on LessWrong. LessWrong is a space where what matters is which argument is true, not who you like / have relationships with. I think some other sort of unique icon could be good.
Aren’t text names basically similar in practice? At least for me, I find they trigger basically the same thing because I do actually associate names with people.
Maybe this wouldn’t be true if I didn’t know people very well (but in that case, icons also wouldn’t matter).
(I overall dislike icons, but I don’t have a principled reason for this.)
I miswrote a bit when I said “relationships”. Yes, names and faces both trigger social recognition, but I meant to make the point that they operate in significantly different ways in the brain, and facial recognition is tuned to processing a lot of emotional and social cues that we aren’t tuned to from text. I have tons of social associations with people’s physical forms that are beyond simply their character.
a ui on your user page where you get to pick a four letter shortening of your name and a color. the shortening is displayed as
t g t a
in a tiny color-of-your-choice box. when picking your name, each time you pick a hue and saturation in the color picker (use a standard one, don’t build a color picker), it does a query (debounced—I hope you have a standard way to debounce in react elements) for other people on the site who have that initialism, and shows you their colors in a list, along with an indicator min(color_distance(you.color, them.color) for them in other_users).
the color distance indicator could be something like the one from here, which would need transliterating into javascript:
This formula has results that are very close to L*u*v* (with the modified lightness curve) and, more importantly, it is a more stable algorithm: it does not have a range of colours where it suddenly gives far from optimal results. The weights of the formula could be optimized further, but again, the selection of the closest colour is subjective. My goal was to find a reasonable compromise.
typedef struct {
unsigned char r, g, b;
} RGB;
double ColourDistance(RGB e1, RGB e2)
{
long rmean = ( (long)e1.r + (long)e2.r ) / 2;
long r = (long)e1.r - (long)e2.r;
long g = (long)e1.g - (long)e2.g;
long b = (long)e1.b - (long)e2.b;
return sqrt((((512+rmean)*r*r)>>8) + 4*g*g + (((767-rmean)*b*b)>>8));
}
I’ve recently updated on how useful it’d be to have small icons representing users. Previously some people were like “it’ll help me scan the comment section for people!” and I was like ”...yeah that seems true, but I’m scared of this site feeling like facebook, or worse, LinkedIn.”
I’m not sure whether that was the right tradeoff, but, I was recently sold after realizing how space-efficient it is for showing lots of commenters. Like, in slack or facebook, you’ll see things like:
This’d be really helpful, esp. in the Quick Takes and Popular comments sections, where you can see which people you know/like have commented to a thing
I am fairly strongly against having faces, which I think boot up a lot of social instincts that I disprefer on LessWrong. LessWrong is a space where what matters is which argument is true, not who you like / have relationships with. I think some other sort of unique icon could be good.
Aren’t text names basically similar in practice? At least for me, I find they trigger basically the same thing because I do actually associate names with people.
Maybe this wouldn’t be true if I didn’t know people very well (but in that case, icons also wouldn’t matter).
(I overall dislike icons, but I don’t have a principled reason for this.)
I miswrote a bit when I said “relationships”. Yes, names and faces both trigger social recognition, but I meant to make the point that they operate in significantly different ways in the brain, and facial recognition is tuned to processing a lot of emotional and social cues that we aren’t tuned to from text. I have tons of social associations with people’s physical forms that are beyond simply their character.
(A language model helped me write this comment.)
a ui on your user page where you get to pick a four letter shortening of your name and a color. the shortening is displayed as
t g
t a
in a tiny color-of-your-choice box. when picking your name, each time you pick a hue and saturation in the color picker (use a standard one, don’t build a color picker), it does a query (debounced—I hope you have a standard way to debounce in react elements) for other people on the site who have that initialism, and shows you their colors in a list, along with an indicator min(color_distance(you.color, them.color) for them in other_users).
the color distance indicator could be something like the one from here, which would need transliterating into javascript:
Are the disagree reacts with ‘small icons are good for this reason (enough to override other concerns)’ or ‘I didn’t update previously?’