I wanted to make two points as feedback for the LW designers, but I realized there’s actually only one point: Personal Blog feature makes me very sad.
I wanted to find this Open Thread page, but it didn’t show up on my front page as it usually does.
I was wondering why Zvi hasn’t posted about covid in a while. I went to his user page and turns out he has been posting, but because they are Personal Blog posts, I haven’t seen them.
Yeah, it’s a trade off. I think it makes sense for both of those to not be the first thing new people see when they show up. Happy about suggestions for changes. I don’t think the current thing is perfect, but I definitely thought about it a good amount and haven’t been able to come up with something much better.
Maybe we could make the filter button for personal blog posts more noticeable? It seems pretty prominent at the moment, but we could make it more prominent.
Maybe we could make the filter button for personal blog posts more noticeable? It seems pretty prominent at the moment, but we could make it more prominent.
Oh! I did not see that at all until I just went to search for it. I think the problem there is that it was not clear at all to me what those tags (next to Latest) meant. I thought they were just showing recent tags from recent posts. I had no idea they were filter settings. I think a bit of a UI tweak should help, like maybe adding a filter icon.
I think another thing that would help is when you’re looking at a Personal Blog page for someone you’re not subscribed to, there should be a relatively prominent message that says: “Hey, do you want to subscribe to this person? That way you’ll see their posts (like this one) in your feed.”
Yeah, adding a filter icon seems pretty reasonable to me. Maybe just replacing the small plus icon with a filter icon. I will give that a try.
Also probably have Personal Blog on by default.
It is a plausible decision to turn on personal blogposts by default when you log in, but I am currently leaning against, but it’s definitely a non-obvious decision.
Yeah, agree that it should be here. The whole account page is kind of a mess and I really want to improve it. Currently adding UI there is kind of a pain and it’s already super cluttered.
I agree that there should be filters on that page, but I do think by default it should be separate filters than from the frontpage (since I think the “All Posts” page should definitely by default show all posts).
It is a plausible decision to turn on personal blogposts by default when you log in, but I am currently leaning against, but it’s definitely a non-obvious decision.
I’m curious why. (You don’t have to reply if you don’t think it’s worth the time.) My original intuition was that it’s hard to discover things you’ve never seen. Vs turning things off is usually pretty intuitive.
The goal is really to balance the forces that move LessWrong towards a news-driven and politics-driven direction, with the need to sometimes have to talk about urgent and political stuff, at least with people who have context. I am worried that if we make all that stuff visible by default to logged-in users, this will skew the balance too much in the direction of having things be news-driven and political, and we end up in a bad attractor. I also like the general principle of “these topics aren’t forbidden on the site, but when you write about them, you can generally expect to only get people who have been around a lot and have more context on your culture to read them and discuss them with you, instead of being exposed to tons of people who don’t really know what’s going on”.
The other thing is that I don’t really like it when the frontpage changes without making it explicit what happened. Like, I wouldn’t expect logging in to change the frontpage algorithm, so it feels a bit bad to make that happen, and makes the site feel a bit less understandable and transparent. This isn’t a huge deal, but it is a consideration that I do think is somewhat important.
Ok, here’s the thing that doesn’t quite make sense. You’re mostly concerned about specific topics (like politics) not being visible. But this issue is being solved by hiding all personal blog posts. Clearly there could be a large number of personal blog posts that are not about the sensitive topics.
Now that you have tags, I think a better solution is to show all personal blog posts unless they have certain tags (like politics). Which solves the problem more directly. (Edit: I guess that opens the door for some users to add politics tags to a lot of posts to hide them from the front page… Hmm. May be these tags are reserved for trusted users.)
Also, yeah, definitely people should be able to say that their post shouldn’t appear on the front page. That’s totally fine.
There are three reasons why a post might be a personal blogpost instead of a frontpage post:
It’s about a topic we intentionally want to limit discussion on
It’s about a niche topic that’s only interesting to a very small fraction of the LW audience
The author wanted it to not show up on the frontpage
It seems that for all three of those, the reasons, it makes sense to limit visibility. I don’t think there are personal blogposts that don’t fit into any of the above three categories.
I wanted to make two points as feedback for the LW designers, but I realized there’s actually only one point: Personal Blog feature makes me very sad.
I wanted to find this Open Thread page, but it didn’t show up on my front page as it usually does.
I was wondering why Zvi hasn’t posted about covid in a while. I went to his user page and turns out he has been posting, but because they are Personal Blog posts, I haven’t seen them.
Yeah, it’s a trade off. I think it makes sense for both of those to not be the first thing new people see when they show up. Happy about suggestions for changes. I don’t think the current thing is perfect, but I definitely thought about it a good amount and haven’t been able to come up with something much better.
Maybe we could make the filter button for personal blog posts more noticeable? It seems pretty prominent at the moment, but we could make it more prominent.
Oh! I did not see that at all until I just went to search for it. I think the problem there is that it was not clear at all to me what those tags (next to Latest) meant. I thought they were just showing recent tags from recent posts. I had no idea they were filter settings. I think a bit of a UI tweak should help, like maybe adding a filter icon.
Also probably have Personal Blog on by default.
Another two places I’d expect to see those settings: https://www.lesswrong.com/account and https://www.lesswrong.com/allPosts (but they aren’t in either of those two places)
I think another thing that would help is when you’re looking at a Personal Blog page for someone you’re not subscribed to, there should be a relatively prominent message that says: “Hey, do you want to subscribe to this person? That way you’ll see their posts (like this one) in your feed.”
Yeah, adding a filter icon seems pretty reasonable to me. Maybe just replacing the small plus icon with a filter icon. I will give that a try.
It is a plausible decision to turn on personal blogposts by default when you log in, but I am currently leaning against, but it’s definitely a non-obvious decision.
Yeah, agree that it should be here. The whole account page is kind of a mess and I really want to improve it. Currently adding UI there is kind of a pain and it’s already super cluttered.
I agree that there should be filters on that page, but I do think by default it should be separate filters than from the frontpage (since I think the “All Posts” page should definitely by default show all posts).
I’m curious why. (You don’t have to reply if you don’t think it’s worth the time.) My original intuition was that it’s hard to discover things you’ve never seen. Vs turning things off is usually pretty intuitive.
The goal is really to balance the forces that move LessWrong towards a news-driven and politics-driven direction, with the need to sometimes have to talk about urgent and political stuff, at least with people who have context. I am worried that if we make all that stuff visible by default to logged-in users, this will skew the balance too much in the direction of having things be news-driven and political, and we end up in a bad attractor. I also like the general principle of “these topics aren’t forbidden on the site, but when you write about them, you can generally expect to only get people who have been around a lot and have more context on your culture to read them and discuss them with you, instead of being exposed to tons of people who don’t really know what’s going on”.
The other thing is that I don’t really like it when the frontpage changes without making it explicit what happened. Like, I wouldn’t expect logging in to change the frontpage algorithm, so it feels a bit bad to make that happen, and makes the site feel a bit less understandable and transparent. This isn’t a huge deal, but it is a consideration that I do think is somewhat important.
Ok, here’s the thing that doesn’t quite make sense. You’re mostly concerned about specific topics (like politics) not being visible. But this issue is being solved by hiding all personal blog posts. Clearly there could be a large number of personal blog posts that are not about the sensitive topics.
Now that you have tags, I think a better solution is to show all personal blog posts unless they have certain tags (like politics). Which solves the problem more directly. (Edit: I guess that opens the door for some users to add politics tags to a lot of posts to hide them from the front page… Hmm. May be these tags are reserved for trusted users.)
Also, yeah, definitely people should be able to say that their post shouldn’t appear on the front page. That’s totally fine.
There are three reasons why a post might be a personal blogpost instead of a frontpage post:
It’s about a topic we intentionally want to limit discussion on
It’s about a niche topic that’s only interesting to a very small fraction of the LW audience
The author wanted it to not show up on the frontpage
It seems that for all three of those, the reasons, it makes sense to limit visibility. I don’t think there are personal blogposts that don’t fit into any of the above three categories.
What about threads like “Open & Welcome Thread”? I had a bit trouble finding it today.
A way to make these would be to make a second version of the Personal Blog, which shows on the main page.
Or entirely different tag, “Community Post”? Available for trusted members. Though it would probably be the same as “Open Threads” tag.
Thanks, that’s good context. I’ll post if I think of anything.