I'm in the process of refactoring how we handle the default posts view. The core goal was to implement some anti-spam features into it. But it highlighted some oddness in how we're currently filtering things.

I wanted to check how this might effect people on GreaterWrong, and people who use the Daily page.

tldr: would you feel better or worse if Events showed up in the daily feed? (for reference, there seems to be roughly one event listing per two days)

(And, for people implementing LW readers, would it be a problem if events and meta posts appeared in the default post view?)

Technical details:

Currently our default view filters out meta posts, event posts, and posts associated with a particular community group. But, almost all the actual views we use on lesswrong.com don't really need that default filtering:

  • The curated feed only includes thing we manually put there (so it's not especially useful to filter out meta/events/group-descriptions, since we just wouldn't put them there)
  • Same for frontpage
  • Same for sequences
  • The events view only shows events anyhow
  • User profiles currently aren't showing events / meta / group posts, and this is actually a problem – it means it's harder for a user to find all their posts
  • Recent discussion already deliberately includes all these things (but has to go out of it's way to

The only two views where we actually would want to exclude things are in "All Posts" and "Daily", which serve similar functions.

"Event" posts are location-specific and so aren't as often relevant to people, but also, if your primary way of engaging with site is on /daily, you might not otherwise get to see events.

I'm curious if people who primarily read daily would feel better or worse about Events getting included there. (Again, the frequency seems to be about 1 listing per two days)

New Comment
4 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 1:15 PM

Only a tiny minority of events are relevant to me. So I prefer they are not included.

I bookmark /daily and pretty rarely look at home, almost never any other view. I don't much care about events, but I also don't care about many topics that get posts, so it doesn't bother me much if I need to ignore a few more entries.

I primarily use /daily so I had no idea about events. Maybe if it was an option to show them in the daily view? I think I probably wouldn't mind seeing them because I could just skip them so long as they are clearly labeled.

Yeah, this was part of the reason I thought including them by default might be a good idea.