Recent site changes

matt

Recent site changes have generated more unhappiness than I expected. This post is a brief note to share resources that will make it easier for concerned site users to track what's happening and what we intend.

First, know that we're listening. We'll make further site changes next week that will likely include some reversions.
The official site issue tracker remains unchanged, but for the next week or so we'll work from this public Google Doc (just because it's lighter weight). Nothing on that document is a promise - just evidence of our current thinking. We'll strike out items on that list as we deliver them to our (private) staging server, and will roll them out onto the live site soon after.
I've reached out to a small handful of SIAI and LessWrong heavyweights to track my balance as we make these changes. My feed should make it clear that I'm trying to act with calm rationality, but I'm obviously invested in the work we've shared to date and asking for some external help seems prudent.
I'll track discussion on this post.

Some reflections:

On what we did wrong
1. We didn't predict the unhappiness our changes caused.
2. We didn't make it clear that we were listening for feedback, and that changes were not final.
On what many of you did right
1. Calmly and politely voiced your concerns about some of our changes.
2. Where you liked some of our changes, said so where we could see it. Thank you.
On what many of you could have done differently, that would have increased average happiness (particularly mine)
1. Calmly and politely voiced your concerns about some of our changes.
2. Checked the very common assumption that the recent changes were final and would not be discussed. (Please note that I've first admitted fault in not making this clearer.)

A bare fact of this episode is that I'm feeling shellshocked, and have not enjoyed the experience of spending significant time and money trying to make LessWrong better. Unless my brain is built differently than others of my species this experience is likely to lead to spending less on projects like this in the future.

Please feel free to add to these lists in the comments, and please feel free to other-optimize me. Tsuyoku Naritai.
… but try to be polite.

First, know that we're listening. We'll make further site changes next week that will likely include some reversions.
The official site issue tracker remains unchanged, but for the next week or so we'll work from this public Google Doc (just because it's lighter weight). Nothing on that document is a promise - just evidence of our current thinking. We'll strike out items on that list as we deliver them to our (private) staging server, and will roll them out onto the live site soon after.
I've reached out to a small handful of SIAI and LessWrong heavyweights to track my balance as we make these changes. My feed should make it clear that I'm trying to act with calm rationality, but I'm obviously invested in the work we've shared to date and asking for some external help seems prudent.
I'll track discussion on this post.

Some reflections:

On what we did wrong
1. We didn't predict the unhappiness our changes caused.
2. We didn't make it clear that we were listening for feedback, and that changes were not final.
On what many of you did right
1. Calmly and politely voiced your concerns about some of our changes.
2. Where you liked some of our changes, said so where we could see it. Thank you.
On what many of you could have done differently, that would have increased average happiness (particularly mine)
1. Calmly and politely voiced your concerns about some of our changes.
2. Checked the very common assumption that the recent changes were final and would not be discussed. (Please note that I've first admitted fault in not making this clearer.)

Please feel free to add to these lists in the comments, and please feel free to other-optimize me. Tsuyoku Naritai.
… but try to be polite.

Thank you for the detailed response.

Again, let me start by admitting fault in not communicating this more clearly: I assumed it was the most reasonable assumption that we would release features as they were ready, rather than releasing nothing, then everything. Once the redesign was ready we pushed it and all of the other features we'd finished to that point. There are other suggestions we've heard and plan to implement or are part way through implementing. … and, there are suggestions we don't plan to implement.

That modus operandi seems to be a trend in recent social web development (e.g. Facebook), but I don't think it's one that endears the developers to users. Prior communication is almost always a better option than just doing things whenever, especially in cases like this one where user advice and suggestions were explicitly requested.

Also, I suspect the release of new features at the same time as new visuals contributed to users' inference that what's been done so far constituted "everything." If a new feature pops up by itself, it's just a new feature. The inclusion of the graphic redesign made it seem like this was the entire redesign, period.

See my notes on your notes at the end of our notes doc. Several requests contradicted each other ("avoid clutter" vs "add feature/button/info X").

Thanks for the response. Before making a few specific replies, let me further explain why I went through the posted suggestions in that manner. Really, it was to make sure that I wasn't just upset because my own suggestions didn't appear to get much attention; I wanted to remove my own bias by looking at the contribution of the user base at large. As it turned out, my suggestions were repeated several times, and related suggestions were also repeated several times, as we both noted. On to specific notes:

I think you're interpreting #11 a touch broadly. When I see "clutter" in the context of web design, I think of something that takes up more space than its function is worth, i.e. a net negative contribution. It's not adding anything, it's just adding things that are not overall helpful/desired. Of course, that's my interpretation, and others may not share it.
I did not realize that the help page had been wikified, and that the welcome page will soon be as well. Thank you for pointing this out; it's a very good change.
I agree that #3, #14, #18, and #22 are complicated and expensive to implement.
I do not agree that #27, handling footnotes, is expensive. Collapsible sections take about 5 minutes to construct with CSS and Javascript, so the only difficult part would be adding a custom button to the article editor so they could be used. I have seen such buttons added in a variety of different editors (from vbulletin to wiki software), so I don't think that it's infeasible.
I'm not sure that separating upvotes and downvotes constitutes the desired polling solution; the discussion in that comment thread indicated a desire to separate polling and karma entirely.
I also do not agree that "don't add things without discussing" amounts to "design by committee"; ideas can be discussed without being subjected to a majority vote.
You did not remark on comment previews. Right now, the system of "just post it and then edit it" works fine for the user making the comment; the problem is that other users may start replying to those comments while they are still being edited, and manually adding a "don't reply to this yet" note is tedious for the user. (I have been on both ends of this problem.) I understand that adding an entirely separate preview interface would take a fair amount of work, but I think there is a simpler solution. Place a check box above the "Comment" submit button that, when selected by the user, flags the comment as a "draft." The comment still appears in the thread, but only to the commenting user, without a date, and with an extra button to submit it fully. I am not familiar enough with the backend of the site to know exactly how much work this would entail, but we definitely already track user-based properties of individual comments.

After your responses to the suggestion list, my revised count is: 13 Y, 29 N (7 planned), 2 ?. (This is after removing the 4 repeats you identified explicitly.) That obviously looks much better than it did before.

I hear you, and I think you may be accurately explaining why many felt annoyed/ignored… but "I made a suggestion and the suggestion wasn't executed" doesn't add up to good evidence that you were ignored.

I think the principle illustrated here is without providing explicit information and description, action:[considering suggestions carefully and sorting them into "implement immediately," "implement in the future," "too costly to implement"] looks a lot like action:[cherry-picking a few suggestions and just ignoring the rest]. It's very hard to tell how much effort was put into analyzing the suggestions if that effort isn't somehow conveyed to us.

Also, I suspect the release of new features at the same time as new visuals contributed to users' inference that what's been done so far constituted "everything."

Agreed. As you and others have pointed out, a post like this one would have helped a lot. I have learned.

Before making a few specific replies, let me further explain why I went through the posted suggestions in that manner.

For what it's worth, I did what you did, and we worked from a Freemind map very similar to your list, organised/weighted by upvotes, our estimate of effort requ... (read more)

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