FWIW, I approve of people posting more random inside-baseball discussions of stuff to LW, and posting especially interesting and not-too-inaccessible inside-baseball stuff to the frontpage. Indeed, I think there should be way more of that stuff here. I think this particular post would plausibly be frontpage-worthy if it weren’t written by Eliezer, but given that it’s an Eliezer post and a lot of people will probably see it anyway (and there may be a false presumption, since it’s by Eliezer and on the LW frontpage, that it’s “essential reading” of some kind), frontpaging it seems a bit overkill-ish.
(I might feel differently if LW didn’t have a ‘subscribe to author’ feature that makes it easy for people who just want to read everything by someone to not miss it.)
given that it’s an Eliezer post and a lot of people will probably see it anyway
I don’t think I’d ever have seen this if it weren’t posted here on the front page. (To be clear, I am not saying that’s a bad thing.)
(I might feel differently if LW didn’t have a ‘subscribe to author’ feature that makes it easy for people who just want to read everything by someone to not miss it.)
I wager that many people don’t know about this. I certainly didn’t, until now!
(Question to the dev team: what the heck does “subscribing to author” do? I went to Eliezer’s profile page, clicked “Subscribe”, got a message that I’m subscribed. Uh… ok. What does that mean? What happens now? Suggestion: under the “subscribe” link, have descriptive text specifying what on earth it means to subscribe; possibly repeat this information in the “you are now subscribed” popup.)
Yeah, we really need to improve and overhaul the subscription and notification experience. Clicking subscribe makes it so that it shows up in your notifications, aka. the bell icon in the top right corner. The system is still a bit spotty, which is why we haven’t made it so that the bell icon shows you the number of unseen notifications, since I wasn’t confident that number would actually be accurate, and it seemed better to have a subdued and slightly buggy notification system, than a loud and annoying buggy notification system (and very slightly better to have the first one than none at all).
FWIW, I approve of people posting more random inside-baseball discussions of stuff to LW, and posting especially interesting and not-too-inaccessible inside-baseball stuff to the frontpage. Indeed, I think there should be way more of that stuff here. I think this particular post would plausibly be frontpage-worthy if it weren’t written by Eliezer, but given that it’s an Eliezer post and a lot of people will probably see it anyway (and there may be a false presumption, since it’s by Eliezer and on the LW frontpage, that it’s “essential reading” of some kind), frontpaging it seems a bit overkill-ish.
(I might feel differently if LW didn’t have a ‘subscribe to author’ feature that makes it easy for people who just want to read everything by someone to not miss it.)
I don’t think I’d ever have seen this if it weren’t posted here on the front page. (To be clear, I am not saying that’s a bad thing.)
I wager that many people don’t know about this. I certainly didn’t, until now!
(Question to the dev team: what the heck does “subscribing to author” do? I went to Eliezer’s profile page, clicked “Subscribe”, got a message that I’m subscribed. Uh… ok. What does that mean? What happens now? Suggestion: under the “subscribe” link, have descriptive text specifying what on earth it means to subscribe; possibly repeat this information in the “you are now subscribed” popup.)
Yeah, we really need to improve and overhaul the subscription and notification experience. Clicking subscribe makes it so that it shows up in your notifications, aka. the bell icon in the top right corner. The system is still a bit spotty, which is why we haven’t made it so that the bell icon shows you the number of unseen notifications, since I wasn’t confident that number would actually be accurate, and it seemed better to have a subdued and slightly buggy notification system, than a loud and annoying buggy notification system (and very slightly better to have the first one than none at all).