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).
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).