Yeah, getting summaries would be nice, but the effort of writing a summary for each post would have been prohibitive (especially one that the authors would have been happy with). We tried showing the start of the post, but it wasn’t very helpful for deciding whether to read something.
My worry was that having summaries only inconsistently adds a lot of mental complexity to track to the page. Now only sometimes when you hover over something do you see some kind of preview, and if you have ~60 items on a single page, adding any kind of indicator for that quickly makes things very cluttered.
And you would have to redesign the page quite a bit to have a good place for summaries without adding a huge amount of clutter or flashing or movement on the page.
I think they wouldn’t work well for this the vast majority of time. I think if you see all the reviews and can quickly skim them they are useful, but they definitely are not that helpful for deciding whether to read a post. It’s either a pretty generic “this post was great and useful”, or a really in-depth review that definitely assumes you’ve read the post and is very hard to parse without having read it.
Yeah, getting summaries would be nice, but the effort of writing a summary for each post would have been prohibitive (especially one that the authors would have been happy with). We tried showing the start of the post, but it wasn’t very helpful for deciding whether to read something.
Maybe consider asking the authors if they’d want to volunteer a ?50? word summary for this purpose, and include summaries for those who do?
It’s a nice idea to have an optional field on posts for the author to submit a summary with a max-length.
My worry was that having summaries only inconsistently adds a lot of mental complexity to track to the page. Now only sometimes when you hover over something do you see some kind of preview, and if you have ~60 items on a single page, adding any kind of indicator for that quickly makes things very cluttered.
And you would have to redesign the page quite a bit to have a good place for summaries without adding a huge amount of clutter or flashing or movement on the page.
Why not show the top-rated review, like you do at the top of the page?
I think they wouldn’t work well for this the vast majority of time. I think if you see all the reviews and can quickly skim them they are useful, but they definitely are not that helpful for deciding whether to read a post. It’s either a pretty generic “this post was great and useful”, or a really in-depth review that definitely assumes you’ve read the post and is very hard to parse without having read it.