LW admins—Is there a good reason why half my browser window when viewing the LW home page needs to be taken up with an enormous map? It’s pretty horrible (and somehow pushes the same mental buttons as those whole-screen “why not sign up for our mailing list?” popups some sites give you, though obviously it’s not actually very similar to those). I guess the idea is to encourage more people to go to meetups or something, but I promise it does not make me the least bit more inclined to do so.
First: note that you can turn this off in your user settings. (Habryka mentioned this in the stickied post about it)
The reason we’re pushing meetups this month is because of SlateStarCodex Meetups Everywhere. This is not a permanent change to the site, it’s a temporary solution to a fairly difficult problem. The point is not that people who aren’t interested in meetups should be forced to engage with them, the problem is that we do want everyone who is interested in meetups to know that there’s a major meetup coordination event happening this month.
(I do think we should make the “hide map” button easier to access and will probably add something like that next week)
There’s a generally hard problem where LessWrong as a site does a lot of different things, and there’s really only one space to put things that everyone will see them. We mostly haven’t emphasized meetups over the past couple years because they don’t quite make the cut of “top 2 things that we want everyone to see on the frontpage”. (And meanwhile this has made it harder for meetup organizers to get traction)
I actually think the compromise solution of “once a year, for few weeks, the site reminds everyone that meetups exist and gets them to sign up for notifications if they want them” might actually be the least-bad option. (Although what I notice just now is that the front-page-map fails to have the most important call-to-action there, of the “sign up for meetup announcements” button)
The frontpage map in general was somewhat rushed to be “in time to be useful to SSC everywhere”, so there are probably some more optimizations we can do to it, both to make it easier for people to turn off if they don’t care, and to actually sign up for notifications if they want.
How about asking the user when they click on “Community Events” to allow the browser to get their location? Then if the user says yes, use that location to show the right events on the left side of the front page.
I also just created a PR that adds a close-button right to the top of the map, to make it more convenient to hide it. That should be merged early next week when others have the time to review it.
LW admins—Is there a good reason why half my browser window when viewing the LW home page needs to be taken up with an enormous map? It’s pretty horrible (and somehow pushes the same mental buttons as those whole-screen “why not sign up for our mailing list?” popups some sites give you, though obviously it’s not actually very similar to those). I guess the idea is to encourage more people to go to meetups or something, but I promise it does not make me the least bit more inclined to do so.
First: note that you can turn this off in your user settings. (Habryka mentioned this in the stickied post about it)
The reason we’re pushing meetups this month is because of SlateStarCodex Meetups Everywhere. This is not a permanent change to the site, it’s a temporary solution to a fairly difficult problem. The point is not that people who aren’t interested in meetups should be forced to engage with them, the problem is that we do want everyone who is interested in meetups to know that there’s a major meetup coordination event happening this month.
(I do think we should make the “hide map” button easier to access and will probably add something like that next week)
There’s a generally hard problem where LessWrong as a site does a lot of different things, and there’s really only one space to put things that everyone will see them. We mostly haven’t emphasized meetups over the past couple years because they don’t quite make the cut of “top 2 things that we want everyone to see on the frontpage”. (And meanwhile this has made it harder for meetup organizers to get traction)
I actually think the compromise solution of “once a year, for few weeks, the site reminds everyone that meetups exist and gets them to sign up for notifications if they want them” might actually be the least-bad option. (Although what I notice just now is that the front-page-map fails to have the most important call-to-action there, of the “sign up for meetup announcements” button)
The frontpage map in general was somewhat rushed to be “in time to be useful to SSC everywhere”, so there are probably some more optimizations we can do to it, both to make it easier for people to turn off if they don’t care, and to actually sign up for notifications if they want.
Aha, thanks. Sorry for being grumpy about it! (I hadn’t known there was a profile setting to turn it off.)
How about asking the user when they click on “Community Events” to allow the browser to get their location? Then if the user says yes, use that location to show the right events on the left side of the front page.
That’s what usually happens, but most people don’t click on community events. So having one month that makes sure everyone knows about it is helpful
You can disable it on your account settings :)
I also just created a PR that adds a close-button right to the top of the map, to make it more convenient to hide it. That should be merged early next week when others have the time to review it.