Re: GW – obviously the GW team has limited time, but there shouldn’t be anything stopping them from implementing these features. And in the meanwhile, if you hop over to lesswrong.com to use a feature (such as deleting a comment or banning .a user) it should have the desired effect over on greaterwrong.
I do expect, as the LW team tries more and more experimental things that are designed to radically change the shape of the site, that the GW experience will start to feel a bit confusing, depending on how much time the GW team has to implement things.
[note to GW team: I know at least part of the problem is that the LW team hasn’t been that proactive about communicating our plans. My current impression is that you’re sufficiently bottlenecked on dev-time that doing so wouldn’t really help, but if you thought otherwise I could maybe arrange for that]
One recent example are Related Questions, which I expect to be a major component of how the questions feature (and the site overall) ends up working. The greaterwrong version of this question doesn’t show it’s parent question, either at the top of the page or in a list further down, which changes the context of the question quite a bit. See the lesswrong version).
(Related questions overall are still in a “soft beta” where we’re still tweaking them a bunch and aren’t confident that they’re usable enough to really advertise, but I expect that to change within a couple weeks)
It is true that we’re bottlenecked on developer time, yes. We wouldn’t say no to more communication of the LW team’s plans, of course, but that is indeed not a major problem at this time, as far as I can tell.
One thing that would be quite useful would be a maintained centralized list of LW features (preferably in order of when they were added, and with links to documentation… a Blizzard-style list of “patch notes”, in other words, aggregated into a change history, and kept somewhere central and easy to find).
If, perhaps, this were a post that were to be updated as new features rolled in, we could use it as a way to track GW vs. LW feature parity (via comments and updating of the post itself), and as a publicly visible roadmap for same.
I think the recently published FAQ has almost all of our features, though not in an easily skimmable or accessable format. But definitely better than what we had before it.
Knowing your plans could definitely make a difference—I do want to prioritize fixing any problems that make GW confusing to use, as well as adding features that someone has directly asked for. As such, I just implemented the related questions feature.
I think another major issue is going to be custom commenting-guidelines, which GreaterWrong doesn’t have AFAICT.
Right now, custom commenting guidelines aren’t actually all that clear on LW, and I don’t think people rely on them much. But we’ve been talking about making guidelines and moderation-policies appear next to commenting boxes as soon as you start typing, or otherwise making it more visually distinct what the norms of a given discussion section is.
If we ended up learning harder into the archipelago model, this would become particularly important.
Re: GW – obviously the GW team has limited time, but there shouldn’t be anything stopping them from implementing these features. And in the meanwhile, if you hop over to lesswrong.com to use a feature (such as deleting a comment or banning .a user) it should have the desired effect over on greaterwrong.
I do expect, as the LW team tries more and more experimental things that are designed to radically change the shape of the site, that the GW experience will start to feel a bit confusing, depending on how much time the GW team has to implement things.
[note to GW team: I know at least part of the problem is that the LW team hasn’t been that proactive about communicating our plans. My current impression is that you’re sufficiently bottlenecked on dev-time that doing so wouldn’t really help, but if you thought otherwise I could maybe arrange for that]
One recent example are Related Questions, which I expect to be a major component of how the questions feature (and the site overall) ends up working. The greaterwrong version of this question doesn’t show it’s parent question, either at the top of the page or in a list further down, which changes the context of the question quite a bit. See the lesswrong version).
(Related questions overall are still in a “soft beta” where we’re still tweaking them a bunch and aren’t confident that they’re usable enough to really advertise, but I expect that to change within a couple weeks)
It is true that we’re bottlenecked on developer time, yes. We wouldn’t say no to more communication of the LW team’s plans, of course, but that is indeed not a major problem at this time, as far as I can tell.
One thing that would be quite useful would be a maintained centralized list of LW features (preferably in order of when they were added, and with links to documentation… a Blizzard-style list of “patch notes”, in other words, aggregated into a change history, and kept somewhere central and easy to find).
If, perhaps, this were a post that were to be updated as new features rolled in, we could use it as a way to track GW vs. LW feature parity (via comments and updating of the post itself), and as a publicly visible roadmap for same.
I think the recently published FAQ has almost all of our features, though not in an easily skimmable or accessable format. But definitely better than what we had before it.
Agree having a proper list would be good.
Knowing your plans could definitely make a difference—I do want to prioritize fixing any problems that make GW confusing to use, as well as adding features that someone has directly asked for. As such, I just implemented the related questions feature.
Thanks! (missed this the first time around)
I think another major issue is going to be custom commenting-guidelines, which GreaterWrong doesn’t have AFAICT.
Right now, custom commenting guidelines aren’t actually all that clear on LW, and I don’t think people rely on them much. But we’ve been talking about making guidelines and moderation-policies appear next to commenting boxes as soon as you start typing, or otherwise making it more visually distinct what the norms of a given discussion section is.
If we ended up learning harder into the archipelago model, this would become particularly important.