1. When I go to my profile page, among the things there is a selection of ten “recent comments”. These range from 7 months ago to 8 years ago. The older ones aren’t super-highly-voted-for or anything like that. Even if the import from LW 1.0 has pulled Main but not Discussion material, which would certainly lose a lot of my comments, there is something really weird with the selection here. There’s also no way to choose how those comments are sorted, which might be OK if it were something simple and clear (oldest first, newest first, highest-voted first) but actually it seems to be pretty much random.
2. There’s some indication on my profile page that I have 1 of something, 23 of something else, and 5306 of something else. There are no explanatory words or hover-text or anything. I guess the last one is comments, the first one (with a star) might be “favourites” in some sense, and perhaps the middle one is posts. But there’s no way to see whatever posts there may be. (My profile has a “Blog posts” section but it’s empty. I don’t know whether that refers to posts on LW, of which I definitely have some both in Main and in Discussion, or to imported/linked blog posts from elsewhere, of which indeed I have none.) Surely, from a profile page there ought to be a way to see the user’s posts.
3. Clearly we have preserved votes on comments from old-LW. Perhaps that means users have karma scores. But I can’t see mine anywhere. Maybe that’s a good thing, of course. And maybe the details of how—if at all—to aggregate votes on posts and comment to get per-user karma/reputation are still being hashed out; but it seems like this will affect the dynamics of the community, and we don’t have that long before we have to decide whether to stick with this thing or throw it away...
4. Formatting of quoted material in comments is weird: it comes out larger than everything else, with extra vertical space below but not above. (At least one one of my computer/browser combinations: recent-ish Firefox on Unix.)
5. I am with those who don’t much like the look of the text. It’s better on higher-resolution displays but far from delightful anywhere.
6. As I enter more text into the comment editor, the region occupied by my text extends downwards. After a while it overlaps, and sits behind, the dark bar with the formatting buttons on it and becomes almost, but not quite, invisible. Surely this can’t be the optimal behaviour.
7. Someone else asked for a RSS feed for posts (I guess Atom would do just as well). I second this request. I haven’t looked to see whether there are feeds for anything else; I would encourage a general policy of having feeds for everything anyone might want, if performance considerations allow.
8. Following a link to an old comment is a frustrating experience, at least sometimes. You get this weird page that has the comment you already read at the top of the page, without any context. Then there’s a “comment in full context” link (if I didn’t want the comment in full context, I wouldn’t have come to the page in the first place), except that it usually doesn’t work because only 50 comments have been loaded. So then you have to load more comments. 50 at a time, just because. Taking a substantial amount of time for each block of 50 to load. Only then can you follow that full-context link and have it actually work.
[EDITED to add more:]
9. Clicking “Reply” opens up a comment not-box … and doesn’t give it focus. That’s really annoying.
10. “LESSWRONG” in the bar at the top of each page seems like it ought to be a link, but it isn’t. It’s a thing you can click on that navigates your current window to the front page. You can’t middle-click on it to open a new tab. You can’t right-click to get options like “Open in new tab/window”. So far as I can see, there is no benefit at all to this over just making it be a link. Please just make it be a link.
11. On old-LW every page has a right-hand sidebar containing lots of things I don’t care about, and some things I do like to have at my fingertips like the list of most recent posts and comments. Here there’s nothing of the kind: there’s just a single “middle” column with article + comments or whatever. For me, this—perhaps in combination with the mostly-grey presentation—has a curious psychological effect: somehow it doesn’t feel as if I’m on a website but more as if I’m reading a book or technical paper or something. And, perhaps because this is not in fact a book or technical paper and doesn’t have pages or chapter divisions or anything, the net effect is that when reading a lot of comments here I feel like I’m adrift in a trackless waste with no signposts to guide me :-). I am only guessing at the elements that contribute to this feeling, but for whatever reason I don’t get it so much on old-LW or even in SSC’s monstrous comment sections.
[EDITED again to add even more:]
12. Headings in comments are, or at least sometimes are, really large. Comments that use them can end up with more prominence than the article they’re commenting on, and the rather uniform-looking design of everything here can make it hard to see at a glance what’s article and what’s comment. This is especially bad when the comment in question is the one being shown at the top of a page because you followed a link-to-a-comment; this is a particularly clear (or, in other words, particularly unclear) example.
13. Timestamps are shown as “5h”, “6d”, “7mo”, etc., indicating roughly how long ago a thing was posted. That’s nice and friendly. But it would be nice to be able to get more precision, especially when viewing comments sorted in some way other than chronologically. In an ideal world, (1) hovering over the timestamp would show the actual date+time and (2) there would be a per-user preference setting that would reverse this, so that you get the date+time by default and can hover for a user-friendly about-how-long-ago view.
14. Comments have net scores displayed but no indication of e.g. whether +1 means “one person liked it” or “101 people liked it and 100 people hated it”. Again, it would be nice if hovering over the score said something like “+17-15”. (Not, please, the “percentage positive” we have on old-LW.)
> There’s some indication on my profile page that I have 1 of something, 23 of something else, and 5306 of something else. There are no explanatory words or hover-text or anything.
The first seems to be karma, which seems not to have been carried over. I guess the others are posts and comments.
Noooo! I spent years accumulating all that lovely karma, and it’s all going to vanish? I am disappoint.
Slightly more seriously, there’s something very weird about this. If I click on the search icon and start typing, one of the things I see is usernames, along with their karma scores. So e.g. if I start typing “lu” then near the top I see “lukeprog 64947 points 3mo”. But if I click on that link to go to the profile page for lukeprog that’s been created here on Lesser Wrong … that thing that may or may not be a karma score shows “9”. And if I search again and start typing my username, I see “gjm 1 points 3mo”.
So it seems that (1) some users’ karma scores are kinda-half-known to Lesser Wrong and some aren’t, and (2) the scores shown when you search are unrelated to the scores shown on users’ profile pages.
Speaking of karma, here’s another Weird Thing: that reply seems to have had 2 points from the instant when it was first posted. Unless I hallucinated it, this suggests that comments’ scores are not simply the sum of votes cast on them. [EDITED to add:] This one, too.
Ah, I’m also apparently giving +2 and −2 when I upvote/downvote things. Probably the same thing, since you’re automatically deemed to have upvoted every comment you make. (Maybe everyone’s votes are giving +-2, though there are some things whose score is an odd number. Maybe Lesser Wrong has noticed that I have a lot of old-LW karma and is giving me superpowers. Maybe everyone starts out counting for +-1 and then gets increased to +-2 once they get their first upvote or something. Maybe it’s just a bug.)
Hi! Your voting power is currently log base 5 of your karma. In the next day or so we’ll import people’s karma from LW 1.0 and then people’s weightings won’t mostly be 2.
Aha, makes some sense. I guess it’s rounded up so that anyone with karma >1 gets a voting power of 2?
In the past everyone had a “voting power” of one unit. Now most people will have more than that, and some will have quite a bit more. So scores on posts and comments will be *much larger*, at least if the amount of voting on them is fixed, and the very first downvote a comment gets can bring its score down to levels formerly only seen by *exceptionally* stupid or spammy or otherwise horrible comments. Old comments will mostly have more “moderate” scores—apart from any that get discovered by new superpowered users...
Unless, of course, you retroactively recompute all past comment scores according to the voters’ karma—and then presumably recompute that karma, which may be several times larger as a result, and iterate to convergence. That will substantially inflate everyone’s karma.
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.
A few mostly-superficial first impressions:
1. When I go to my profile page, among the things there is a selection of ten “recent comments”. These range from 7 months ago to 8 years ago. The older ones aren’t super-highly-voted-for or anything like that. Even if the import from LW 1.0 has pulled Main but not Discussion material, which would certainly lose a lot of my comments, there is something really weird with the selection here. There’s also no way to choose how those comments are sorted, which might be OK if it were something simple and clear (oldest first, newest first, highest-voted first) but actually it seems to be pretty much random.
2. There’s some indication on my profile page that I have 1 of something, 23 of something else, and 5306 of something else. There are no explanatory words or hover-text or anything. I guess the last one is comments, the first one (with a star) might be “favourites” in some sense, and perhaps the middle one is posts. But there’s no way to see whatever posts there may be. (My profile has a “Blog posts” section but it’s empty. I don’t know whether that refers to posts on LW, of which I definitely have some both in Main and in Discussion, or to imported/linked blog posts from elsewhere, of which indeed I have none.) Surely, from a profile page there ought to be a way to see the user’s posts.
3. Clearly we have preserved votes on comments from old-LW. Perhaps that means users have karma scores. But I can’t see mine anywhere. Maybe that’s a good thing, of course. And maybe the details of how—if at all—to aggregate votes on posts and comment to get per-user karma/reputation are still being hashed out; but it seems like this will affect the dynamics of the community, and we don’t have that long before we have to decide whether to stick with this thing or throw it away...
4. Formatting of quoted material in comments is weird: it comes out larger than everything else, with extra vertical space below but not above. (At least one one of my computer/browser combinations: recent-ish Firefox on Unix.)
5. I am with those who don’t much like the look of the text. It’s better on higher-resolution displays but far from delightful anywhere.
6. As I enter more text into the comment editor, the region occupied by my text extends downwards. After a while it overlaps, and sits behind, the dark bar with the formatting buttons on it and becomes almost, but not quite, invisible. Surely this can’t be the optimal behaviour.
7. Someone else asked for a RSS feed for posts (I guess Atom would do just as well). I second this request. I haven’t looked to see whether there are feeds for anything else; I would encourage a general policy of having feeds for everything anyone might want, if performance considerations allow.
8. Following a link to an old comment is a frustrating experience, at least sometimes. You get this weird page that has the comment you already read at the top of the page, without any context. Then there’s a “comment in full context” link (if I didn’t want the comment in full context, I wouldn’t have come to the page in the first place), except that it usually doesn’t work because only 50 comments have been loaded. So then you have to load more comments. 50 at a time, just because. Taking a substantial amount of time for each block of 50 to load. Only then can you follow that full-context link and have it actually work.
[EDITED to add more:]
9. Clicking “Reply” opens up a comment not-box … and doesn’t give it focus. That’s really annoying.
10. “LESSWRONG” in the bar at the top of each page seems like it ought to be a link, but it isn’t. It’s a thing you can click on that navigates your current window to the front page. You can’t middle-click on it to open a new tab. You can’t right-click to get options like “Open in new tab/window”. So far as I can see, there is no benefit at all to this over just making it be a link. Please just make it be a link.
11. On old-LW every page has a right-hand sidebar containing lots of things I don’t care about, and some things I do like to have at my fingertips like the list of most recent posts and comments. Here there’s nothing of the kind: there’s just a single “middle” column with article + comments or whatever. For me, this—perhaps in combination with the mostly-grey presentation—has a curious psychological effect: somehow it doesn’t feel as if I’m on a website but more as if I’m reading a book or technical paper or something. And, perhaps because this is not in fact a book or technical paper and doesn’t have pages or chapter divisions or anything, the net effect is that when reading a lot of comments here I feel like I’m adrift in a trackless waste with no signposts to guide me :-). I am only guessing at the elements that contribute to this feeling, but for whatever reason I don’t get it so much on old-LW or even in SSC’s monstrous comment sections.
[EDITED again to add even more:]
12. Headings in comments are, or at least sometimes are, really large. Comments that use them can end up with more prominence than the article they’re commenting on, and the rather uniform-looking design of everything here can make it hard to see at a glance what’s article and what’s comment. This is especially bad when the comment in question is the one being shown at the top of a page because you followed a link-to-a-comment; this is a particularly clear (or, in other words, particularly unclear) example.
13. Timestamps are shown as “5h”, “6d”, “7mo”, etc., indicating roughly how long ago a thing was posted. That’s nice and friendly. But it would be nice to be able to get more precision, especially when viewing comments sorted in some way other than chronologically. In an ideal world, (1) hovering over the timestamp would show the actual date+time and (2) there would be a per-user preference setting that would reverse this, so that you get the date+time by default and can hover for a user-friendly about-how-long-ago view.
14. Comments have net scores displayed but no indication of e.g. whether +1 means “one person liked it” or “101 people liked it and 100 people hated it”. Again, it would be nice if hovering over the score said something like “+17-15”. (Not, please, the “percentage positive” we have on old-LW.)
> There’s some indication on my profile page that I have 1 of something, 23 of something else, and 5306 of something else. There are no explanatory words or hover-text or anything.
The first seems to be karma, which seems not to have been carried over. I guess the others are posts and comments.
Noooo! I spent years accumulating all that lovely karma, and it’s all going to vanish? I am disappoint.
Slightly more seriously, there’s something very weird about this. If I click on the search icon and start typing, one of the things I see is usernames, along with their karma scores. So e.g. if I start typing “lu” then near the top I see “lukeprog 64947 points 3mo”. But if I click on that link to go to the profile page for lukeprog that’s been created here on Lesser Wrong … that thing that may or may not be a karma score shows “9”. And if I search again and start typing my username, I see “gjm 1 points 3mo”.
So it seems that (1) some users’ karma scores are kinda-half-known to Lesser Wrong and some aren’t, and (2) the scores shown when you search are unrelated to the scores shown on users’ profile pages.
Speaking of karma, here’s another Weird Thing: that reply seems to have had 2 points from the instant when it was first posted. Unless I hallucinated it, this suggests that comments’ scores are not simply the sum of votes cast on them. [EDITED to add:] This one, too.
Ah, I’m also apparently giving +2 and −2 when I upvote/downvote things. Probably the same thing, since you’re automatically deemed to have upvoted every comment you make. (Maybe everyone’s votes are giving +-2, though there are some things whose score is an odd number. Maybe Lesser Wrong has noticed that I have a lot of old-LW karma and is giving me superpowers. Maybe everyone starts out counting for +-1 and then gets increased to +-2 once they get their first upvote or something. Maybe it’s just a bug.)
Hi! Your voting power is currently log base 5 of your karma. In the next day or so we’ll import people’s karma from LW 1.0 and then people’s weightings won’t mostly be 2.
Aha, makes some sense. I guess it’s rounded up so that anyone with karma >1 gets a voting power of 2?
In the past everyone had a “voting power” of one unit. Now most people will have more than that, and some will have quite a bit more. So scores on posts and comments will be *much larger*, at least if the amount of voting on them is fixed, and the very first downvote a comment gets can bring its score down to levels formerly only seen by *exceptionally* stupid or spammy or otherwise horrible comments. Old comments will mostly have more “moderate” scores—apart from any that get discovered by new superpowered users...
Unless, of course, you retroactively recompute all past comment scores according to the voters’ karma—and then presumably recompute that karma, which may be several times larger as a result, and iterate to convergence. That will substantially inflate everyone’s karma.
Both of these outcomes feel a bit weird to me.
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.