There are a few object-level changes, representing in some cases a shift in underlying philosophy.
Object-level Changes
1. Clicking on a post first shows you a highlight of that post (right now this is a crude ‘chop off the post after 450 pixels’, later post authors will have the opportunity to write their own highlights, up to 500 words).
You can get to the full post by clicking a “read more” button at the top of the highlight.
2. Click on the comments icon shows you two things—the top 3 highest upvoted comments, and any _new_ comments since you last either viewed the post or clicked on the post on the frontpage.
There’s also a larger version of the “type of post’ icon (i.e. Curated/Frontpage/Personal-blog-posts), which doubles as a direct link to the post itself.
Both the comments and posts-category icons turn green if there is unread content there (i.e if you haven’t read the post at all, or if there are new comments you haven’t read)
Goals 1+2: Simple quality of life improvements
It’s inconvenient to read through a giant list of comments to find the new ones. The new “show recent comments” option makes it super easy to see the latest conversational thread (and shows all new comments sorted in proper order, with a parent comment for context)
Another obvious goal is to make it easier to “check out” a post from the front page without committing to reading the whole thing. (I personally suffer from “clicking on a new post feels like a major commitment—it may be a bad or uninteresting post, but it’ll take awhile to read it and figure that out)
Goals 3-4: Highlights and Brevity
1. We want posts to have highlights—if you write a big, Scott Alexander length essay, we want people to be able to quickly figure out (roughly) what it’s going to be saying and whether it’s interesting. This is sort of like the abstract of an academic paper… but academic abstracts are terrible.
On FB, when you quote a giant essay, you usually post a few snippets of that essay—not necessarily from the _top_ of the essay: sometimes it’s just the most interesting quote that you can reasonably share out of context.
Sometimes, a post literally can be summarized in it’s entirety in 500 words (the rest is sort of fleshing it out, making the idea more salient or providing more evidence).
Sometimes, you really just have one thing to say, but it feels a bit awkward to say it _without_ a giant essay supporting it, and a highlight is sort of a socially acceptable _excuse_ to just say it, where people can read the full essay if they actually want to.
In those sorts of cases, we wanted shorter highlights to exist (both for the frontpage, and perhaps later for hover-linking, i.e. if you link to a LW post from LW, when you mouseover it shows the highlight)
And the last goal is “we just straight-up notice people writing longer essays than they need to.” While writing a post, when you cross the 500 word count, we’re thinking of having the highlight section appear in the editor, with a quick note that “now that your post is 500 words long, by default it’ll show the first 500 words on the Frontpage, and you can edit a custom highlight section if you want”
And a subgoal there is that some people will just think “you know, I didn’t really need to spend an extra 200 words here, I could just make the whole thing fit in 500 words”
I actually prefer the current system. It is very easy to open posts in new tabs and then close them if you don’t like them.
Could we make View Full Post a larger target? Ie. a rectangle as per comments, instead of a little star? Similarly, instead of having to click on Read Full Post, I would prefer to be able to click on the entire bar with title “Post Highlight”
I like the highlight over the comment when you mouse over. It makes it clear that you can go straight to the comment.
For the comment preview, I’d prefer the View All Comments button at the top, rather than the bottom, because it’d make it easier to go through the path: Click Preview Comments → Click All Comments
Why doesn’t clicking on a comment take you to the page unless you click on the tiny link? If you do this, then you should highlight on mouseover like with the posts
I can definitely get behind the encouraging more brevity. I’ve noticed the issue of overly long posts too. (I think my last post suffered from that issue).
There are a few object-level changes, representing in some cases a shift in underlying philosophy.
Object-level Changes
1. Clicking on a post first shows you a highlight of that post (right now this is a crude ‘chop off the post after 450 pixels’, later post authors will have the opportunity to write their own highlights, up to 500 words).
You can get to the full post by clicking a “read more” button at the top of the highlight.
2. Click on the comments icon shows you two things—the top 3 highest upvoted comments, and any _new_ comments since you last either viewed the post or clicked on the post on the frontpage.
There’s also a larger version of the “type of post’ icon (i.e. Curated/Frontpage/Personal-blog-posts), which doubles as a direct link to the post itself.
Both the comments and posts-category icons turn green if there is unread content there (i.e if you haven’t read the post at all, or if there are new comments you haven’t read)
Goals 1+2: Simple quality of life improvements
It’s inconvenient to read through a giant list of comments to find the new ones. The new “show recent comments” option makes it super easy to see the latest conversational thread (and shows all new comments sorted in proper order, with a parent comment for context)
Another obvious goal is to make it easier to “check out” a post from the front page without committing to reading the whole thing. (I personally suffer from “clicking on a new post feels like a major commitment—it may be a bad or uninteresting post, but it’ll take awhile to read it and figure that out)
Goals 3-4: Highlights and Brevity
1. We want posts to have highlights—if you write a big, Scott Alexander length essay, we want people to be able to quickly figure out (roughly) what it’s going to be saying and whether it’s interesting. This is sort of like the abstract of an academic paper… but academic abstracts are terrible.
On FB, when you quote a giant essay, you usually post a few snippets of that essay—not necessarily from the _top_ of the essay: sometimes it’s just the most interesting quote that you can reasonably share out of context.
Sometimes, a post literally can be summarized in it’s entirety in 500 words (the rest is sort of fleshing it out, making the idea more salient or providing more evidence).
Sometimes, you really just have one thing to say, but it feels a bit awkward to say it _without_ a giant essay supporting it, and a highlight is sort of a socially acceptable _excuse_ to just say it, where people can read the full essay if they actually want to.
In those sorts of cases, we wanted shorter highlights to exist (both for the frontpage, and perhaps later for hover-linking, i.e. if you link to a LW post from LW, when you mouseover it shows the highlight)
And the last goal is “we just straight-up notice people writing longer essays than they need to.” While writing a post, when you cross the 500 word count, we’re thinking of having the highlight section appear in the editor, with a quick note that “now that your post is 500 words long, by default it’ll show the first 500 words on the Frontpage, and you can edit a custom highlight section if you want”
And a subgoal there is that some people will just think “you know, I didn’t really need to spend an extra 200 words here, I could just make the whole thing fit in 500 words”
I actually prefer the current system. It is very easy to open posts in new tabs and then close them if you don’t like them.
Could we make View Full Post a larger target? Ie. a rectangle as per comments, instead of a little star? Similarly, instead of having to click on Read Full Post, I would prefer to be able to click on the entire bar with title “Post Highlight”
I like the highlight over the comment when you mouse over. It makes it clear that you can go straight to the comment.
For the comment preview, I’d prefer the View All Comments button at the top, rather than the bottom, because it’d make it easier to go through the path: Click Preview Comments → Click All Comments
Why doesn’t clicking on a comment take you to the page unless you click on the tiny link? If you do this, then you should highlight on mouseover like with the posts
I can definitely get behind the encouraging more brevity. I’ve noticed the issue of overly long posts too. (I think my last post suffered from that issue).