This post will serve as a place to discuss what features the new LessWrong 2.0 should have, and I will try to keep this post updated with our feature roadmap plans.
Here is roughly the set of features we are planning to develop over the next few weeks:
UPDATED: August 27th, 2017
Basic quality of life improvements:
- Improve rendering speed on posts with many comments
- (A lot of improvements made, a lot more to come)
- Improve usability on mobile
- (After the major rework this is somewhat broken again, will fix it soon)
- Add Katex support for comments and posts
- Allow merging with old LessWrong 1.0 accounts
- Fix old LessWrong 1.0 links DONE!
- Create unique links for each comment: DONE!
- Make comments collapsible
- Highlight new comments since last visit: DONE!
- Improve automatic spam-detection
- Add RSS feed links with adjustable karma thresholds
- Create better documentation for the page, with tooltips and onboarding processes
- Better search, including comment search and user search: DONE!
Improved Moderation Tools:
- New Karma system that weighs your votes based on your Karma
- Give moderators ability to suspend comment threads for a limited amount of time
- Give trusted post-authors moderation ability on their own posts (deleting comments, temporarily suspending users from posts, etc.)
- Add reporting feature to comments
- Give moderators and admins access to a database query interface to identify negative vote patterns
New Content Types:
- Add sequences as a top-level content-type with UI for navigating sequences in order, metadata on a sequence, and keeping track of which parts you've read DONE!
- Add Arbital-style predictions as a content block in posts (maybe also as a top-level content type)
- Add 'Wait-But-Why?' style footnotes to the editor
- Discussion page that structures discussions more than just a tree format (here is a mockup I designed while working for Arbital, that I am style excited to implement)
- ...and we have many more crazy ideas we would like to experiment with
I will also create a comment for each of these under the post, so you can help us prioritize all of these. Also feel free to leave your own feature suggestions and site improvements in the comments.
Facebook-like reactions.
I would like to be able to publicly say eg "hear hear" on a comment or post, without cluttering up the replies. Where the "like" button is absent eg on Livejournal, I sorely miss it. This is nothing to do with voting and should be wholly orthogonal; voting is anonymous and feeds into the ranking algorithm, where this is more like a comment that says very little and takes up minimal screen real estate, but allows people to get a quick feel for who thinks what about a comment.
Starting with "thumbs up" would be a big step forward, but I'd hope that other reactions would become available later, eg "disagree connotationally" or "haha" or "don't like the tone" or "I want to help with this". Each should be associated with a small graphic, with a hover-over to show the meaning as well as who applied the reaction. Like emoji in eg Discord and unlike Facebook, a single user can apply multiple reactions to the same comment, so I can say both "agree" and "don't like the tone".
I apologise for having buried this feature request in the depths of not one but two comment threads before putting it here :)
Basic Quality of life:
Make comments collapsible
Spoiler markup. This post has lots of comments which use ROT13 to disguise their content. There's a Markdown syntax for this.
I note that this is now done. As I have for so many things here. Great work team!
Spoiler space test
Basic Quality of life:
Create unique links for each comment
Request 2: tagging people in relevant discussions FB style. IMO this is *uge* but might need some thinking to avoid high status people drowning in the noise (1 straightforward possibility is sorting your inbox by karma)
From a user's profile, be able to see their comments in addition to their posts.
Dunno about others, but this is actually one of the LW features I use the most.
(Apologies if this is listed somewhere already and I missed it.)
Probably not suitable for launch, but given that the epistemic seriousness of the users is the most important "feature" for me and some other people I've spoken to, I wonder if some kind of "user badges" thing might be helpful, especially if it influences the weight that upvotes and downvotes from those users have. E.g. one badge could be "has read >60% of the sequences, as 'verified' by one of the 150 people the LW admins trust to verify such a thing about someone" and "verified superforecaster" an
New Content Types:
Add 'Wait-But-Why?' style footnotes to the editor
Making posts which are replies/responses to other posts.
Basic Quality of life:
Highlight new comments since last visit
Sharing drafts / group editing, similar to Medium.
Subscribe/get notification for new comments in a post. I have already enough tabs open on the browser to keep track of all the interesting posts :)
It'd be nice to have a better meetup system than current LW's. I think I sketched my plan out earlier, but I might as well stick it here as well:
There are two basic sorts of meetups: one-offs and regular. (Austin's "Welcome Scott Aaronson to Austin" party vs. Austin's 1:30 Saturday meetup) Both have a location, a datetime, and an organizer. The regular meetups, in addition, have a repeat frequency and might have a link to somewhere else (maybe you arrange events on Facebook or Meetup.com). (And if we could somehow automatical
Improved Moderation Tools:
New Karma system that weighs your votes based on your Karma
New Content Types:
Add sequences as a top-level content-type with UI for navigating sequences in order, metadata on a sequence, and keeping track of which parts you've read
Basic Quality of life:
Improve rendering speed on posts with many comments
Allow to edit one's username (context: I now go by Mati_Roy instead of MathieuRoy, but I don't want to create another account and loose my history).
If you want to encourage engagement, don't hide the new comment box all the way down at the bottom of the page! Put another one right after the post (or give the post a reply button of the same sort the comments have.)
Basic Quality of life:
Highlight new comments since last visit
Create shared pages which multiple people can post to/collaborate on, almost like a journal.
This is a test comment. Any comment related testing you want to do just-to-see-if-it-works should go underneath this comment.
Request 1: crisper outlining of comments. LW1 uses nicely visible boxes and colors to separate comments; IMO this is good
New Content Types:
Add Arbital-style predictions as a content block in posts (maybe also as a top-level content type)
Basic Quality of life:
Add Katex support for comments and posts
New Content Types:
Discussion page that structures discussions more than just a tree format (here is a mockup I designed while working for Arbital, that I am still excited to implement)
Improved Moderation Tools:
Give moderators and admins access to a database query interface to identify negative vote patterns
Improved Moderation Tools:
Add reporting feature to comments
Improved Moderation Tools:
Give trusted post-authors moderation ability on their own posts (deleting comments, temporarily suspending users from posts, etc.)
Improved Moderation Tools:
Give moderators ability to suspend comment threads for a limited amount of time
Basic Quality of life:
Create better documentation for the page, add tooltips and create onboarding processes
Basic Quality of life:
Add RSS feed links with adjustable karma thresholds
Basic Quality of life:
Improve automatic spam-detection
Basic Quality of life:
Fix old LessWrong 1.0 links
Basic Quality of life:
Allow merging with old LessWrong 1.0 accounts