At least one person wasn’t a fan of the little “LW” tag that appears after LessWrong post-links. I’m curious to get multiple opinions here.
I’m particularly interested in what people expect to want in the longterm, when we have hoverpreviews that go to many common sites such as the EA Forum, wikipedia, arxiv (and possibly if we’re lucky generic wordpress blogposts and the like). In that world, do you think you’d want a visual indicator for which links go where? (see gwern.net for an example of what it might look like to have multiple indicators)
There’s also an option where we just use color-coding for onsite vs offsite links, possible example of what that might look like here:
One problem with link coloring is that link coloring is already used by the browser as semantic annotation and has been for decades by every web browser I am aware of: specifically, whether a link has been visited before or is novel. When I look at your screenshot, I can’t read it as ‘off vs on site’, I can only read it as ‘ah, Raemon has not yet read about foreign Sequences’. It’s too ingrained, and the colors are fighting >20 years of browser conditioning. Adding more colors to overload coloring doesn’t help this, as that makes even more to learn (what would it be, dark green for ‘unread on-site’, light green for ‘read on-site’ etc?). It is also somewhat difficult to tune them, and more obscurely, you have issues with color-blindness (depending on the colors you pick, some <10% amount of readers will struggle or be entirely unable to perceive the difference).
Link icons, on the other hand, are additions, rather than overloads, used at least somewhat occasionally online already, can be understood by anyone who isn’t blind (assuming grayscale like mine), and relatively self-explanatory (assuming good choice of logos).
Yeah, this and a bunch of other reasons caused us to mostly make the call against link-coloring. We are currently going with annotations, though I would want to make them a lot smaller than they currently are on gwern.net (I think they are fine on gwern.net for the kind of content that you produced, but would be too distracting for LW content).
After thinking a bit my current plan is actually to use the little degree symbol° that you used on Read the Sequences, which is sort of the minimum viable “this is slightly different” symbol without drawing too much attention.
Since all links begin in the same place but end in different places there’s an annoying micro-suspense before I reach the end of the link and figure out whether it’s LW or not.
Curious how you feel about the LW compared to the “little circle option”
(Seems like there’s a direct tradeoff in “how obvious it is”, where being obvious is good if you want to immediately see LW links, and bad if you’re just trying to read the text like normal)
The “micro-suspense” thing is an interesting aspect of the experience. I think it’s pretty rare for formatting to include meta-data at the beginning like that (whereas there’s an established convention for footnote-like-things), which I think makes it look more professional. So I’d lean towards keeping it to the end, but it’s an interesting argument to keep in mind.
At least one person wasn’t a fan of the little “LW” tag that appears after LessWrong post-links. I’m curious to get multiple opinions here.
I’m particularly interested in what people expect to want in the longterm, when we have hoverpreviews that go to many common sites such as the EA Forum, wikipedia, arxiv (and possibly if we’re lucky generic wordpress blogposts and the like). In that world, do you think you’d want a visual indicator for which links go where? (see gwern.net for an example of what it might look like to have multiple indicators)
There’s also an option where we just use color-coding for onsite vs offsite links, possible example of what that might look like here:
One problem with link coloring is that link coloring is already used by the browser as semantic annotation and has been for decades by every web browser I am aware of: specifically, whether a link has been visited before or is novel. When I look at your screenshot, I can’t read it as ‘off vs on site’, I can only read it as ‘ah, Raemon has not yet read about foreign Sequences’. It’s too ingrained, and the colors are fighting >20 years of browser conditioning. Adding more colors to overload coloring doesn’t help this, as that makes even more to learn (what would it be, dark green for ‘unread on-site’, light green for ‘read on-site’ etc?). It is also somewhat difficult to tune them, and more obscurely, you have issues with color-blindness (depending on the colors you pick, some <10% amount of readers will struggle or be entirely unable to perceive the difference).
Link icons, on the other hand, are additions, rather than overloads, used at least somewhat occasionally online already, can be understood by anyone who isn’t blind (assuming grayscale like mine), and relatively self-explanatory (assuming good choice of logos).
Yeah, this and a bunch of other reasons caused us to mostly make the call against link-coloring. We are currently going with annotations, though I would want to make them a lot smaller than they currently are on gwern.net (I think they are fine on gwern.net for the kind of content that you produced, but would be too distracting for LW content).
I’m a fan of link icons, and not a fan of color coding.
After thinking a bit my current plan is actually to use the little degree symbol° that you used on Read the Sequences, which is sort of the minimum viable “this is slightly different” symbol without drawing too much attention.
I liked the little “LW”.
Though why does it appear at the end of the link?
Since all links begin in the same place but end in different places there’s an annoying micro-suspense before I reach the end of the link and figure out whether it’s LW or not.
Curious how you feel about the LW compared to the “little circle option”
(Seems like there’s a direct tradeoff in “how obvious it is”, where being obvious is good if you want to immediately see LW links, and bad if you’re just trying to read the text like normal)
The “micro-suspense” thing is an interesting aspect of the experience. I think it’s pretty rare for formatting to include meta-data at the beginning like that (whereas there’s an established convention for footnote-like-things), which I think makes it look more professional. So I’d lean towards keeping it to the end, but it’s an interesting argument to keep in mind.
I definitely appreciate the idea of a “safe link” marker to other pages on LW.
The LW is (fairly) obvious as to what it means (especially to new users), and I don’t find it obtrusive ( I am on a biggish screen).
Full disclosure - I like seeing the LW on my links!