I've been browsing LessWrong less often as of late, and I believe that one of the reasons is because I don't want to get all excited all over a new insightful LW post, only to discover that it's a meetup in a city that I'm not even in.
And for newbies to the site in particular, they're not going to see all the awesomeness of this site if they simply look at the frontpage and think it's a community just for meetups.
I'm sure meetup discussions can go somewhere prominent. Maybe a separate section can be devoted to them.
newbies to the site in particular, they're not going to see all the awesomeness of this site if they simply look at the frontpage and think it's a community just for meetups.
Even without meetups, the promoted feed is still a pretty terrible way to browse the site for a newbie. It would be like if Wikipedia's main page was the recently created pages. LW needs a homepage. I've asked for a volunteer to help create one and promised to implement it if it's designed. I'm not a designer but I'm offering to help with the implementation... but no one has even tried.
There's karma for complaining, but none for fixing problems. I think when Yvain, the LW admins, and I helped create the entire discussion sub-reddit, we got 3 karma apiece in comments related to it. You've already gotten more karma just for complaining about meet-up announcements for the 10th time without offering to help.
G'day Louie, Trike has a LessWrong design review sitting near the top of our list of design projects for the awesome Jimmy Gleeson - we'd hope to get to it (the design) inside a month, and to get it implemented soon after. We were planning on just tweaking, but a new post trying to collect design priorities would garner you a large pot o'karma and guide Jimmy's (and my) work on the review.
Seems like a homepage could be made out of the Wiki's front page, right?
If that got to be good enough quality LW could have "lesswrong.com" point to the Wiki and there have a link "Blog" that points to the posts.
1KenChen
As a quick alternative, would it make sense to create a promoted top-level post containing the Sequences, and "sticky" that post so that it's the first thing newcomers see?
You could create a preference to not display it for logged in users, if that's an issue.
I've been browsing LessWrong less often as of late, and I believe that one of the reasons is because I don't want to get all excited all over a new insightful LW post, only to discover that it's a meetup in a city that I'm not even in.
And for newbies to the site in particular, they're not going to see all the awesomeness of this site if they simply look at the frontpage and think it's a community just for meetups.
I'm sure meetup discussions can go somewhere prominent. Maybe a separate section can be devoted to them.