Vale's Shortform

Vale

This is a special post for quick takes by Vale. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

When I first discovered LW 2.0, I was blinded by its majesty. It was beautiful. However, I can't help but feel some of that beauty has been lost.

I feel even more has been lost in a move to Next.js and the horrors of Vercel. I regularly find myself staring down the barrel of a black void with the all too common text: 'Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).'

So many little bugs and glitches that never reoccur twice but are everywhere. This isn't even something I can report, because the issues are everywhere and appear inconsistently. Most of the time they can't be replicated, but I figure most people using this site know what I'm talking about. The framework special of clicking a button and nothing happening, then clicking it again and the initial action happening, and then the second input suddenly taking place immediately after, by which point you've already clicked the button again and now things are in some half-broken state until you click away and then back.

I'm certainly not alone in these thoughts.

I understand that these actions have been taken in an effort to make the site easier to develop and more in line with the tech used by the rest of the projects the team works on, but the user experience is abysmal. I don't personally love the experience or appearance of GreaterWrong (due to personal preference, not any particular issue with the site), but it seems like the only way to read LessWrong without experiencing constant breakages and interruptions.

LessWrong was such a beautiful and well-crafted website, but it seems to only stray further and further from that polish. Every action taken seems to push the site further from the web platform and further towards using some reinvention of the wheel. Please reconsider the choice of technologies and whether the recent changes are worth it.

2RobertM1y

This is not my experience of using the site. We're happy to have bugs reported to us, even if they're difficult to reproduce; we don't have the bandwidth to fix all of them on any given timeline, but do try to triage those that are high-impact (which will often by true for bugs introduced during such a migration, since those are more likely to affect a large number of users).

Not sure if you're intending to disagree, but I do sometimes have like a post-list or the quick-takes fail to load, with a red error message instead, and then if I refresh it goes away.

(I can't recall it happening very often, mostly I see it when I run a dev instance.)

3kave1y

I believe there's been a local increase in bugs since switching to Vercel. It would be shocking if that weren't true! It was a major website port. That said, I think the general bugginess of the website has been trending down over time, and this local increase is only equivalent to 1-3 years of regression.