Upvoted for interesting direction, but I'd like to hear more detail before I know whether I support it or whether I'd prefer people put their energy into other improvements. Note: I'm probably not the primary audience for this: I read ~25 substacks in Inoreader, and read LW via https://www.lesswrong.com/allPosts, and will probably move all my reading to LLM-mediated summaries and prioritization (with links/copies of the full originals in a Karpathy-inspired KB) in the next 6 months.
A few examples of posts that you think would benefit, working out what additional effort you're imposing on the author, and what benefit you're bringing to the visitors (who may or may not be readers of that post) would go a long way.
Subtitles should be optional
Maybe I should have been more direct with my ignorance: I am guessing at what you're talking about. What exactly are subtitles, and what changes to frontpage, allPosts, post display, and authoring post form are you proposing.
A few worked examples of posts which would benefit from subtitles (rather than just having better titles in the first place) would go a long way.
Perhaps what Chris is gesturing towards is a tl;dr, but a semantic one: a paragraph that the site would treat specially. It could be prioritized for display in hover-cards, or displayed inline in listings, and could carry higher weight for search indexing. I've started thinking of these as ledes (mostly because using that word elicits better tl;drs from Claude).
I was just thinking a subtitle rather than a paragraph.
Would be very curious to know his reasons.
I don't feel strongly for or against this idea, but I don't see how it makes LW a better place to share your own writing. Is the idea that it would increase the audience for each post, and posters want a larger audience? I would think that the LW frontpage already has a moderate-to-large audience-size advantage over most people's personal Substacks.
(Checking this: Claude estimates 3-7k LW homepage visits per day, and 1-3k readers for a typical post in its first week. This is way below a big Substack's numbers, of course, but in the range of a lot of established, in-the-conversation rationalist Substacks I subscribe to.)
I don't see how it makes LW a better place to share your own writing
Even though it is theoretically possible that authors only use subtitles because they feel forced to by other authors using it, I would suggest that our default should be to assume that subtitles developed for a reason.
If Less Wrong wants people to be sharing more of their intellectual output on this website, we should probably be looking at Substack since it probably scores best in terms of being both successful and similar.
Whilst I expect there are many features that would make sense to copy over, the feature I am focusing on today is subtitles.
A good title is focused on being memorable and catching the readers attention, maybe you'd prefer for everyone to just make their titles as descriptive as possible, but expecting that to work feels naive to me. In contrast, subtitles address this issue systematically: the title catches the user's attention and the subtitle tells you clearly what the article actually focuses on, so you can decide whether it is worth your time or not.
I'm not claiming that this feature will radically transform this website, but it would be a relatively simple feature to add, so I think the cost-benefit ratio would be pretty good. Beware Trivial Inconveniences comes to mind. Insofar as people chose to prioritize other platforms, I suspect that often a bunch of small features like this end up making the difference.