Thanks a lot for all of these! Sorry for taking a while to take a proper look at them. I’ve been busy with performance improvements:
1-4 should be fixed. Let me know if that’s still an issue.
5: Feedback on the font has been varied, from some people really really liking it, to some others not liking it. There is also I think still a bug where it renders in really ugly ways on Windows, which might have added to that. If you have a link to a screenshot of the font, then I might be able to see whether this is maybe just uninentional (and then fix it systematically)
6. Ah, this took me a while to understand. I haven’t run into that problem, but if you do again, do you think you can take a screenshot and add a Github issue?
7. We have an RSS feed of all posts, and more RSS feed stuff is coming soon. You can find the RSS feed of all posts here.
8. Yeah, totally agree with all the frustration about having only parts of the comments loaded. This is fairly high priority to fix. We mostly just need to make sure we load the comment you want to jump to first, and then generally load the remaining comments as you scroll down (and also add a button at the bottom that allows you to click to see more comments, or maybe automatically load them on scrolling)
9. Hmm, I hadn’t noticed that, but yeah, it should clearly autofocus. I created an issue for it.
10. This should be fixed
11. I am conflicted on this. I really dislike the sidebar on the old LessWrong and on SSC, with its ton of irrelevant content that I don’t want to be distracted by when I am reading a post or comments. But also agree that especially on large screens things can feel a bit spacey and daunting on the new page. I think some of the latest style changes improved this a bit, but I am still experimenting with how to improve this.
12. Agree with this. I am planning to restrict headings in comments to h3 and h4 as soon as I get around to it.
13. Definitely agree with showing the full-time on hover. User-setting is a bit hard here, since this would significantly expand the length of the string, and so it might break some design constraints, but hover should be trivially doable.
14. I think something like this is sensible. Especially with voting weights it’s not fully clear to me what more detailed information to show, but agree that hover should give you access to some more detailed distribution.
Re 8, another good thing to do would be to load all the damn comments from the outset, or at least have the initial number it loads be like 250 or 400 rather than 50. If this is problematic for performance reasons, then I think that’s best considered a performance issue that needs fixing and working around it by loading only a small number of comments is, well, only a workaround, and not a very nice one.
[EDITED to add:] OK, more than two minutes elapsed after hitting submit with only an empty comment showing for me, at which point I’m going to guess it’s never going to appear. (Maybe if I reloaded the page.) I guess there’s a timeout or something?
Re 5, here’s a screenshot of some comment text from this thread, with annotations of a few things that look bad. This is on a recent version of Firefox, on Windows 8.1, with a not-super-high-resolution monitor and (I think) sizes and things all on their default settings in my browser.
… Gosh, something odd just happened with this. I submitted the comment, and what appeared to be an empty comment from me appeared in the thread. Editing it brought back the content; submitting it again gave an empty-looking comment again. After a couple of iterations of this it looked normal. I don’t know whether if I’d just waited it would have finished loading something and recovered.
[EDITED to add:] Same happened with this comment. This time I tried just waiting, and after about five seconds the content appeared. This is a really bad user experience; if things are going to be loaded asynchronously, it’s probably better to have some indication that it’s happening.
[EDITED again to add:] On submitting the edit above, initially the old version of the comment was displayed, and then after some seconds the edited version appeared. Again, not a good user experience.
Re 6, have a look at thesefivesuccessivescreenshots. I should have said explicitly that this happens when the comment area is at the bottom of your browser window.
[EDITED to add:] That apparently-empty-comment thing happened again with this one, and after something like 30 seconds of waiting the comment still appeared empty. I’ll see whether it’s quicker after an edit.
[EDITED to add:] Yes, it’s quicker: about 10 seconds. Might just be coincidence, of course.
Thanks a lot for all of these! Sorry for taking a while to take a proper look at them. I’ve been busy with performance improvements:
1-4 should be fixed. Let me know if that’s still an issue.
5: Feedback on the font has been varied, from some people really really liking it, to some others not liking it. There is also I think still a bug where it renders in really ugly ways on Windows, which might have added to that. If you have a link to a screenshot of the font, then I might be able to see whether this is maybe just uninentional (and then fix it systematically)
6. Ah, this took me a while to understand. I haven’t run into that problem, but if you do again, do you think you can take a screenshot and add a Github issue?
7. We have an RSS feed of all posts, and more RSS feed stuff is coming soon. You can find the RSS feed of all posts here.
8. Yeah, totally agree with all the frustration about having only parts of the comments loaded. This is fairly high priority to fix. We mostly just need to make sure we load the comment you want to jump to first, and then generally load the remaining comments as you scroll down (and also add a button at the bottom that allows you to click to see more comments, or maybe automatically load them on scrolling)
9. Hmm, I hadn’t noticed that, but yeah, it should clearly autofocus. I created an issue for it.
10. This should be fixed
11. I am conflicted on this. I really dislike the sidebar on the old LessWrong and on SSC, with its ton of irrelevant content that I don’t want to be distracted by when I am reading a post or comments. But also agree that especially on large screens things can feel a bit spacey and daunting on the new page. I think some of the latest style changes improved this a bit, but I am still experimenting with how to improve this.
12. Agree with this. I am planning to restrict headings in comments to h3 and h4 as soon as I get around to it.
13. Definitely agree with showing the full-time on hover. User-setting is a bit hard here, since this would significantly expand the length of the string, and so it might break some design constraints, but hover should be trivially doable.
14. I think something like this is sensible. Especially with voting weights it’s not fully clear to me what more detailed information to show, but agree that hover should give you access to some more detailed distribution.
Re 8, another good thing to do would be to load all the damn comments from the outset, or at least have the initial number it loads be like 250 or 400 rather than 50. If this is problematic for performance reasons, then I think that’s best considered a performance issue that needs fixing and working around it by loading only a small number of comments is, well, only a workaround, and not a very nice one.
[EDITED to add:] OK, more than two minutes elapsed after hitting submit with only an empty comment showing for me, at which point I’m going to guess it’s never going to appear. (Maybe if I reloaded the page.) I guess there’s a timeout or something?
Re 5, here’s a screenshot of some comment text from this thread, with annotations of a few things that look bad. This is on a recent version of Firefox, on Windows 8.1, with a not-super-high-resolution monitor and (I think) sizes and things all on their default settings in my browser.
… Gosh, something odd just happened with this. I submitted the comment, and what appeared to be an empty comment from me appeared in the thread. Editing it brought back the content; submitting it again gave an empty-looking comment again. After a couple of iterations of this it looked normal. I don’t know whether if I’d just waited it would have finished loading something and recovered.
[EDITED to add:] Same happened with this comment. This time I tried just waiting, and after about five seconds the content appeared. This is a really bad user experience; if things are going to be loaded asynchronously, it’s probably better to have some indication that it’s happening.
[EDITED again to add:] On submitting the edit above, initially the old version of the comment was displayed, and then after some seconds the edited version appeared. Again, not a good user experience.
Re 6, have a look at these five successive screen shots. I should have said explicitly that this happens when the comment area is at the bottom of your browser window.
[EDITED to add:] That apparently-empty-comment thing happened again with this one, and after something like 30 seconds of waiting the comment still appeared empty. I’ll see whether it’s quicker after an edit.
[EDITED to add:] Yes, it’s quicker: about 10 seconds. Might just be coincidence, of course.