Today, we're rolling out several new beta features on the home page, which display recommended posts to read. The first is a Continue Reading section: if you start reading a multi-post sequence, it will suggest that you read another post from that sequence. The second is a From the Archives section, which recommends highly-rated posts that you haven't read, from all of LessWrong's history.

To use these features, please ensure you are logged-in.

Continue Reading

Sequences are a mechanism on LessWrong for organizing collections of related posts. Anyone can create a Sequence from the library page. If you write a series of posts and add them to a Sequence, they will have Previous and Next links at the top and bottom; if you create a Sequence out of posts by other authors, they will have Previous and Next links for readers who came to them via the Sequence.

When you are logged in and read a post from a Sequence, the first unread post from that sequence will be added as a recommendation in the Continue Reading section, like this:

If you decide not to finish, hover over the recommendation and click the X button to dismiss the recommendation. For logged-out users, the Continue Reading section is replaced with a Core Reading section, which suggests the first posts of Rationality: A-Z, The Codex, and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

From the Archives

The home page now has a From the Archives section, which displays three posts randomly selected from the entire history of LessWrong. Currently, a post can appear in this section if:

(1) you've never read it while logged in (including on old-LessWrong),

(2) it has a score of at least 50, and

(3) it is not in the Meta section, or manually excluded from recommendation by moderators. (We manually exclude posts if they aged poorly in a way that wouldn't be captured by votes at the time -- for example, announcements of conferences that have already happened, and reporting of studies that later failed to replicate.)

Currently, if a post is eligible to appear in the From the Archives section, it will appear with probability proportional to the cube of its score.

Why These Features

LessWrong as a Repository for "long content"

Gwern’s about page has influenced me a lot in thinking about the future of LessWrong. Gwern uses the following quote:

The Internet is self destructing paper. A place wher

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