Hi, I am Joanna. I did a design work trial for Lesswrong that ends tonight! As part of that, I designed a new profile page. If you don't like it, I won't be around to fix it unless they hire me. But, the team would surely care if you have comments! (And I would too.)
My contributions are primarily comments, it doesn't seem to have a way to make comments the main focus of the page. Also looks a bit wonky in dark mode. With the about-me no longer at the top, my about-me details are now hard to see. It makes me want to hide my posts, they're mostly all pretty boring, link lists mainly. It also makes me want to repost my favorite comments as posts, which I have been meaning to do anyway. Feels like it's wasting space - it's quite narrow on my screen. Not very dense, will be harder to find posts from the prolific posters (not me).
Huh, in what way is the page doing that more than the previous post page?
Comments aren't visible without clicking a button.
Pre-generalized solution: show both on the same page by default.
Dynamically generalized solution: let users choose what view their page opens in by default for users who haven't changed their preference on that user's page, so that I can set it so that new users see my comments, instead of my posts.
Like, the tension you are expressing seems to me to be fake, arising from a view that comments and posts are a different kind of thing, that comments are lesser and need not be shown to new users. I am frustrated by this; I have done a lot of commenting, tuned my presentation as a commenter, and now the LW team has decided something that, through the coarse-graining lens of "what has actually happened to the profile page over the past two days", they have a revealed preference of "we don't like commenting and won't show it to new users"; and when I try to ask for comments to be considered valuable again, I am told that it's okay because users can click things. But the reason we care about what's above the fold is that users don't usually click things. Users scroll more often than they click, and I previously was able to pin comments to show what I think are the most useful things I've sa...
I'd like it to always open that way for others when they visit my page, ideally. Also, does it still support pinned comments?
edit: it does, comments are just hard to see on dark mode. the background is also oddly light on dark mode, should be fully black like the rest of the site, imo.
Here's some feedback. Reading over it now it sounds overly harsh (sorry!) but I mostly endorse it. Looking forward to further improvements!
There's definitely something aesthetically pleasing to me about the new design, but it doesn't do what I valued the previous one for. Namely, it allowed me to quickly eyeball the user and see their recent fine-grained history, i.e., their comments, which are a good proxy of what they've recently been up to, LessWrong-wise.
Previously, I would first see their self-description, then their recent posts, but only titles, so that I don't need to scroll too much, or exercise small mental effort to ignore non-title text (which I have to do now), and then the comments.
Now, first I see the top posts, then the full list of posts, and the bio squeezed to the side, and I need to click "feed" to see the comments, where checking out recent comments is often the reason why I revisit somebody's profile.
In general, it would be very nice if such updates were first rolled out in a beta mode, where users can opt-in to having their profile page changed to a new design.
Or: have a 3×2 matrix: [I want to see profile pages in old design | I want to see profile pages in new design | I don't care] × [I want my profile page to show in old design to those who don't care | I want my profile page to show in new design to those who don't care].
I am pretty confident you actually pretty reliably care more about what the highest karma/self-curated posts from a user are, than what their most recent posts are (which is what we've always shown first so far)
Hm, for newish-to-me users, yes. But for users that I'm already familiar with / I've been reading for a while, I am more interested in their recent posts. And I open the profiles of the latter more often than those of the former.
or exercise small mental effort to ignore non-title text (which I have to do now)
Your brain is really good at parsing images! There is a reason why every other website on the internet uses images to convey context and content about a story. An image really conveys a lot!
Perhaps you misunderstood me. It's not about the images. I meant that this
is more time-consuming to browse through than a list like this
But now that I think about it more, maybe I'm overapplying the heuristics that I adopted for my email, and it's nice to be able to read the preview without having to hover. But I still will want to scroll through posts sometimes, so some "collapse/show preview" button would be great to have.
ETA: I also loved being able to see the comments withou...
Yeah, if I am looking for a post with a specific name, or just "I think I wrote a post on this topic", then seeing lots of article names is more useful than seeing only a few previews.
Perhaps add a checkbox "show previews"?
I am pretty confident you actually pretty reliably care more about what the highest karma/self-curated posts from a user are, than what their most recent posts are (which is what we've always shown first so far)
Aside from bristling a bit at being told that what I care about is wrong, I actually do care about recency more often than historical top-ranked for this view. Of course, sometimes I'm looking for "best of", but more often I'm checking whether the user is in a snit or otherwise commenting recently in a pattern I should understand/accommodate before I join one of their threads.
Overall like the aesthetic a fair amount and think it's going to be a bit improvement once it settles, but am kinda unhappy with how many clicks it will now take me to get to my list of comments sorted by top. That's the most common thing I do with my userpage, and even though posts are way more important, this seems like it unnecessarily de-emphasises an also relevant feature.
Some vague vibes of... noticing that you want to re-prioritize the page in a way I roughly endorse, but then not taking cheap wins to preserve the values of the things being down-weighted? e.g. now there's no way to get to drafts from your own userpage, comments are three clicks away, profile desc is not fully expanded by default.
It's beautiful, but it's less info dense. That's my biggest complaint. And my blog link is now in a dinky little corner. I like the addition of the top posts. The post preview is cool, but a bit less text would've been fine. It would be cool if I could close/open any/all of the previews with a single button click.
The old profile page made more sense to me: there was a list of posts (sortable), and then a list of comments. That's the information I needed.
Now everything above the fold is a newspaper-like display of just a few posts, with most of the real estate being taken up by illustrations, which are mostly default abstract imagery because most posts on this website don't (and probably shouldn't) have illustrations. How is this a good use of space? I understand the demand for customizability, but I thought the old profile page let you pin posts?
I don't like that you have to click "Feed" to see comments. Comments are important!
It's not even clear what information "Feed" is showing me! When I scroll down on my "Feed", after a bunch of recent comments, it shows a bunch of my posts one after another, but I definitely wrote comments in between those posts, as I can confirm on the GreaterWrong viewer. If "Feed" isn't a reverse-chronological list of both comments and posts (despite the fact that the gear menu says "Show: All"), what even is it? (Speculation: maybe this is a bug caused by the posts already being loaded in order to populate the "All Posts" view, whereas more comments aren't loaded ...
I don't love that the bio, which I explicitly wrote to highlight the main things that I want someone to know about me if they click on my user name is no longer front and center, but is rather off to the side and much less attention grabbing than other elements on the page.
Having a selection of highlighted posts seems like a good improvement to the page, especially if I can select which ones are most important to me. eg I'm not going to pick my three top posts, I'm going to pick the three good representative posts of the different kinds of things that I think and write about about—probably my best post on modeling the strategic situation, my best post on applied conversational rationality, and my best post on ethics, or something like that.
But, like, I do actually want the couple of sentences that I've selected to presented. myself to the world to be clearly highlighted, not kind of buried.
The main issue is that I can no longer see if there were new comments on recent posts (both mine and for other users), which were previously indicated by the comment counts displayed in green, including for the shortform post (there doesn't seem to be an easy way to find it at all now).
I liked the list of draft posts at the top, it's a regular reminder to keep thinking about them. The "top posts" selection that takes up the whole first screen doesn't help when it's my own posts. It's plausibly a good thing for posts by other users, though I personally don't get the appeal of a huge section of the page whose only meaningful content is a post title that could just take up a single line (and leave space to fit more data about other relevant things on the screen, including more of the other posts). So some issues seem to be about different needs for your own userpage vs. userpages for other users.