Beta - First Impressions

[-]Lightwave8y170

The site is lacking breadcrumbs so it's hard to orient oneself. It's hard to follow what section of the website you're in as you dig deeper into the content. Any plans to add breadcrumbs (or some alternative)?

4habryka8y

Yep, I have some plans for this. The current mainline plan (which might still change) is to change the color and title of the navbar when on a user page, or when you are on a collection or when you are in the Meta section of the page. And then generally improve the degree to which the content above the fold clearly tells you where you are.

[-]Sniffnoy8y140

The site is just too slow to load, IMO.

Also, echoing other users who said it's too hard to find anything. I have no idea how I would, say, scroll through the chronological archives. (And there should *be* chronological archives. Think standard features available on a blog, or Reddit, or StackExchange -- chronological archives, per user archives, search, etc.)

I don't like the whole "load more" thing. Having discrete pages is definitely preferable, it doesn't end up with some godawful amount of stuff displayed at once, and more easily allows one to skip through. (One problem with old LW was that if you wanted to, say, look through all of a user's comments, all you could do is page through; there was no way to skip to the end. We need more stuff like that. Right now it seems we have even less.)

Edit: Also the interface is too hard to read. The old interface was colorful and readable; this one just all blends together. I like the new bars on the side, but where's the old Reddit-style alternating colors? And why are the names, points, times, etc so small? (Not to mention the *buttions*! The reply button is *tiny*!)

Edit again: Also when you up

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4Sniffnoy8y

Adding separate comment so this'll be seen -- you should probably take a look at some of the comments over on SSC (another one). (Helps mitigate the selection bias that only people who were already willing to navigate the interface here will comment here!) Also, the site is now somehow even slower than it was a few days ago. Seriously, this new site is *way* less usable than the old one. If you scrapped all this and went back to the old design it would be a substantial improvement. Which is probably not what you should do, because the old design has some real problems too -- no way to skip around the archives or skip to the end of things or look up posts based on date, for instance. But I'm not sure this version has those either? What I want, I guess, is something that resembles a blog or message board (in terms of navigability and searchability) as far as things like main posts and user history pages go but resembles Reddit as far as comment threads on an individual post go. Whereas the old site resembled Reddit in both. This new site seems to have copied over the "resembles Reddit in both" while also adding lots of junk that's slowed everything down and made everything more confusing.

1habryka8y

The performance should be a good bit better now, though more improvements are still coming.

[-]Futilitarian Akrasia8y110

It's a bit weird that I can't find this post by sorting posts by new, but I can see the comment made to it among the recent comments.

Basically, the post is hidden the comments to it are not.

[-]Chris_Leong8y100

I really like the design and the concept as explained in the strategic overview. I think this has a lot of potential, but I think that there is still a significant amount of work to do.

Firstly, it is really annoying to always have the recommended reading up the top. You should be able to collapse this panel and it should stay collapsed if you are logged in.
You can only see the last three featured posts, there does not seem to be any way to go back in time.
Recent posts is extremely clumsy. Clicking on the title should open it up to a full page view. Instead, you have to click load more, which only loads a couple more, making it take much longer for you to browse backwards in time than in the current Less Wrong. I'm not a fan of infinite scrolling, but this is infinite scrolling without the scrolling!
The current Reddit allows you to view the highest rated posts in the last day, week, month, three months and year. These options are useful as they allow you to quickly catch up on what has occurred since the last time you visited.
There is no way to easily browse people's profiles. This is a big issue if we are going to make posts first go to individual's profiles.
Meta p

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4Ben Pace8y

Thanks for the list! Brief responses: * Yes, the recommended reading will be changed for logged-in users. If you saw the image in the strategy overview, we're planning to have it be the space to continue reading, which is smaller too, but we'll probably give you further edit power still. * To be done this week. * To be done this week. * This sounds like a good idea, my guess is we'll add this at some point during the open beta. * If you mean that you'd like to, say, be able to be notified when your favourite writers / friends post, then yup, we'll add that during the open beta. If you want more generally to know who is writing atm, you can see all new posts in the 'all posts' page in the menu, and then click on their usernames to go to their profiles. Let me know if you had something else in mind. * To be done this week. * You're totally right, we just did a bunch more tests on Android. I don't have a sense whether this is something we can fix quickly, but this is very important and we'll definitely get this sorted during open beta.

[-]philh8y90

(Editing things in as I think of/come across them.)

When I go to my user page (https://www.lesserwrong.com/users/philh), there seems to be no way to access the comments on the link posts that I've made.

I agree with Chris_Leong's bullet points, but the specific one I was going to make myself was this: "Recent posts is extremely clumsy. Clicking on the title should open it up to a full page view." More precisely, there should be a specific page that I can go to for just recent posts.

There's no way I can find to see a user's comme

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3gjm8y

I get "Schema validation error" on adding a URL with the correct scheme to my profile. This turns out to be because the software here likes http:// but not https://. That's very bad.

3gjm8y

Oops, no, I take it back. It doesn't like it either way. (It just takes a moment before it says "Schema validation error", so I briefly thought it was OK the second time around.) I don't know whether there's anything that one can put in that URL field without producing the error, but two perfectly good URLs both produced it for me.

1ozymandias8y

I found that https://www.thingofthings.wordpress.com did not produce a schema validation error.

2gjm8y

Interesting. I seem to get "Schema validation error" on anything with any slashes in it. I can enter just the hostname of my site but then I get a link going to the wrong place. (Not just because I'm lacking the path component -- it goes to something like https://www.lesserwrong.com/users/gjm/www.mccaughan.org.uk/ which is totally wrong.)

2habryka8y

Sorry! This was me being an idiot and not thinking before fixing bugs. This should be fixed later today.

2gjm8y

Still seems to be broken as of now.

1habryka8y

Yeah, it turned out to be a bit harder to fix than I thought. I hope I can get to it today.

2gjm8y

Looks like it's slipped a little. Any idea when it's actually likely to work?

2ozymandias8y

My post appears for me if I go to my profile page and switch the view to "most recent posts." I am not sure why it only wants to show one post of mine at a time though; this seems pretty confusing. ETA: when I go to Chris_Leong's page, it doesn't show him as having written any blog posts at all, even though he has clearly written a blog post which I am currently commenting on. So perhaps there is some deeper problem?

5philh8y

It looks like on your profile page, the default view lists only an old post of yours, https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/iyGFNMtvmW6nMJwHi/i-m-not-an-effective-altruist-because-i-prefer , which seems not to have been imported properly. If I sort by magical scoring, recent or karma, I see your two recent posts. (Magical scoring claims to be the default, but apparently isn't. The default isn't available from that selector.) If I sort by "my drafts" I see nothing. (I'm not sure why this option is available.) If I sort by "day" I get taken to a whole new page, https://www.lesserwrong.com/daily which I am glad to have discovered but I'm not sure what it's doing linked from there. Meanwhile, my page shows a lot of things by default, but only one thing (https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/EAJTMRr8JpnG7Hw6Q/fascists-and-rakes) when I sort. My drafts contains an actual five-year-old draft of mine; that's neat. Day does the same thing as on yours. Chris' page might just not be showing things posted to meta?

[-]gjm8y80

I accidentally clicked on the "Submit" button at the bottom of one of the HPMOR chapters instead of the next-chapter link. (Anyone who has looked at any of those pages will, I think, appreciate how easy this is to do.) The result is that that chapter now has an empty comment from me. I think the "submit" button should do nothing (or maybe not even exist) when the comment text is empty. (Perhaps also when it's whitespace-only.)

3gjm8y

Apropos of which, it would be nice to be able to delete one's own comments. (Perhaps only when they have no replies.)

1VipulNaik8y

This is already an issue: https://github.com/Discordius/Lesswrong2/issues/168

[-]gjm8y70

Notifications are more than a little weird, and not really in a good way.

On old-LW, if I want to know what I need to be responding to, I can go to my profile page and see everything I've posted recently together with others' replies, or go to my inbox and see just the replies (along with PMs, and unfortunately without context, but of course there are links).

On LW2, my profile page shows only my own posts and comments, so I look at notifications. That means clicking on the little bell icon at top right, which drops down a sort of menu-like thing s

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[-]NancyLebovitz8y70

First, I'm seconding a couple of things. There should be a comment box.

And please don't have huge pictures for static material at the top of the home page. There's a lot to be said for tabs with words on them at the top. I realize three lines for a menu is fairly standard these days, but it still leaves me feeling as though the site is a puzzle which has to be solved.

In the spirit of experimentation, I tried out the numbers on the strip under the comment space. Being able to change font size and line spacing probably has its uses, but the o

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[-]Said Achmiz8y70

What's required to have my posts that I make to my own blog be automatically posted here? That's a thing the new site can do, right?

[-]ozymandias8y70

Magical scoring might work well to filter through large amounts of content and only promote the best, but right now there is not a lot of content. I'm curious to look at all the things people have posted, and there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to do that. In particular, I want to know which writers I already like are signed up to LW 2.0 so I can subscribe to them, and I don't have any way of distinguishing "this writer hasn't signed up for LW 2.0" from "this writer has signed up for LW 2.0 but none of their posts have made it to the front page."

6Ben Pace8y

Hi! This doesn't address all the things in your comment, but we'll add a feed for 'all posts' today.

1ozymandias8y

I think "daily" is actually the thing I was looking for, in which case it is rather hidden and perhaps should be placed in some more obvious location such as the sidebar.

4Ben Pace8y

Done.

[-]ChristianKl8y60

For me the grey is unnecessarily hard to read. Especially when it comes to skimming the first line of a post in the "Featured post"-list and "Recent post"-list, I feel like it's harder then necessary because of the low contrast between the font and the background.

It got me to readjust the angle of my monitor and that made it a bit better but it still seems an unnecessary impediment to me.

[-]gbear6058y60

It appears that there is no way to insert an image into a post, which is a fairly nice feature that appears to be still supported on the backend, since old LessWrong posts still have their images.

[-]dogiv8y60

Separately, and more important, the way links are displayed currently makes it hard to tell if a link has already been visited. Also if you select text you can't see links anymore.

Firefox 57 on Windows 10.

5Raemon8y

Upvoted for including OS/browser info

[-]PeterisP8y60

A RSS feed for new posts is highly desirable - I don't generally go to websites "polling" for new information that may or may not be there unless e.g. I'm returning to a discussion that I had yesterday, so a "push mechanism" e.g. RSS is essential to me.

2Chris_Leong8y

I believe that this is already on the roadmap.

1Brendan Long8y

There's some sort of top-level RSS feed: https://www.lesserwrong.com/feed.xml I don't know if there's any way to subscribe to individual people/sections.

2Unnamed8y

The RSS feed currently doesn't show the author of the post (for me in Feedly). I'd like it better if it did.

1habryka8y

RSS feeds for users and comments and a bunch of other stuff are coming today

[-]Error8y50

My own four cents:

Visually this is a noticeable improvement. Cleaner design. Larger body text with reasonable max-width. Less UI "noise". I haven't messed around much with the interface; there are probably other positives. Only significant visual regression is the lack of alternating colors on comments.

(a few people have noted that the new visual scheme isn't all that site-distinctive; I'm not sure if I like it that way or not)

I see posts from names I haven't seen on LW proper in a while, which is a good sign. Content is king.

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5habryka8y

Agree with most of this. Here are more precise thoughts: 1. Agree that lag is bad. Performance and speed continues to be top priority. Our main performance branch with significant improvements in this area is currently blocked from merging by a bug in Meteor, but I will probably move a good chunk of them out of there in the next few days and implement them directly. That should improve lag a good bit. 2. Agree that a bunch of stuff is currently too dynamic. In the modern node landscape it's a bit too easy for my taste to just download an npm package that solves all of your problems, while having subtle but significant long-term impacts, and I think this happened a bit too often in development. I've changed how we make design decisions significantly till then, and have spent a lot of time cleaning things up. Expect things to generally get a lot slimmer and less bulky over time. 3. We are working on a bunch of editor improvements, and one of the things I definitely want is just a markdown mode for our editor. We actually have all the relevant infrastructure, and would only need to build the relevant UI, though I do want to make sure that that is simple and not confusing. And also that you can translate between the two presentations of the content, without needing to redo the markup. But given what you said about the importance, and a few others who have expressed similarly strong preferences, I will consider just pushing a slightly less ideal version first, and then building one later. I.e. one thing that would only be an hour or two of work would be to add a profile setting that changes the comment editor to markdown. 4. Hmm, not sure what you mean by topbar. We don't have a bottom bar at all, and we have a non-fixed app bar that's only fixed on mobile devices, since that makes the navigation there a bit easier (though I will probably also make it non-fixed there). I don't think we can easily do away with having a navigation bar at all, but I would also be surpri

4Zvi8y

General strategic thought: I worry more about where we are a month from now than where we are a day from now. If the bug in Meteor will be fixed reasonably soon and it takes non-trivial effort to migrate the code to where you can implement it now, I'd be inclined to wait, even though I agree that would be the best improvement to make right now. In general I think one should be suspicious of short-term wins that slow down long-term progress.

2Error8y

Re: dynamism and lag, one thing that really makes me suspicious is the cycling of the tab title. Something is looping in the background after the page is done loading. I'm no web developer (I do python cantrips, mostly) but I might poke around myself. What do you use for profiling? By topbar I think I mean the app bar. The one across the top. I would prefer if, on widescreens, it were placed along the side (where the foldout menu appears, perhaps) in order to maximize available vertical space. That's an aesthetic preference, though. I do really like that it doesn't chase my scrolling down the page, or pop up whenever I scroll back, like some sites I could name. Thank you for that. Is there a documented API for the site, by the way? Is it in principle possible to develop a native client?

[-]Unnamed8y50

Is there any way to tell whether a comment has been edited? That is a feature of Reddit, Facebook, the old LW, etc., and seems valuable as a way of catching some kinds of bad behavior (and, occasionally, for keeping track of what's happening in a conversation).

1habryka8y

Not yet, though I have editing history for posts and comments on the features list. That would naturally be accompanied by this feature.

[-]Thomas Ambrose8y50

Never used old LW much, but I'm a longtime SSC reader. I read the goals and strategy and hopes this project succeeds. My impressions so far:

-Everything's very minimalist; it seems very trendy and a little pretentious (though I suppose this is a matter of personal taste). A bit of color could help things like usernames to stand out. A bit of clutter at the top, in the form of a permanent header or sidebar (as opposed to the current, click-to-view menus) might help with site navigation, loading times (I don't do web design, but this seems

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2habryka8y

Regarding the "marked as read" feature. I ended up deactivating it as part of the speed improvements, and will activate it again as soon as we have an optimized version of it. Sorry for the confusion.

[-]gjm8y50

On old-LW, my username at top right is an ordinary link, so I can use it to (e.g.) open a new tab showing my profile without leaving the page I'm currently on. (Example scenario: I'm writing a comment, I think "I'm sure I said something relevant a little while ago", so I want to go and find that earlier comment to see. I don't want to leave the page I'm on, though, I want it in a new tab.)

On LW2, it's a magic thing that provides a drop-down menu. That makes it easier to create a new post, edit my account info, or log

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[-]Zvi8y50

Speaking of hard to find things, the only way I found this thread was that a recent comment was from this thread and I clicked on the comment. I'd been emailing in my issues as I found them.

My basic first impression is that this is a solid foundation but the site is too slow and has some quite serious bugs (e.g. attempting to move one of my blog posts to main killed all the content on that page on both attempts, one of which was fixed by admin and one of which wasn't), and the sorting/finding systems need a lot of conceptual work.

I'm excit

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[-]edoarad8y50

When posting a link post, instead of a text post, it is not clear what would be the result. There is still an option to write text, which appears strictly as text right after submitting, but when the post is viewed (from the search bar) only some portion of the text is visible and there is no indication that this is a link post.

It would be much more comfortable if editing of a post could be done only using the keyboard. For example, when adding a link, apart from defining a keyboard shortcut, it should also be possible to press enter to submit the link. I

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3edoarad8y

after posting, I have tried to change a link post to a text post. It seemed to be possible when editing the original post, but I have discovered later that the changes were not kept and that the post is still in the link format.

[-]qbolec8y40

I'm reading on a smartphone. The font and layout are great. I'm super excited by the "codex" section nervou because I always wanted to read scc most important parts but had no good strategy for approaching that.

I have trouble jumping to next article in the codex after finishing reading one of them: can't find any navigation button for that, so I end up navigating back to the list of all articles in the book and manually selecting next one. This is a bit complicated by the fact that I can't distinguish articles already read f

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[-][anonymous]8y40

Impressions:
I'm not sure how to create meta posts or community posts for that matter.

I get very annoyed when I create a link at the end of my input and I can't just press right arrow at the end to get out of the link when I want to create none link content.

[-]gjm8y40

(The following is an issue in many places on the site. I'm just giving the most visible example.)

Suppose you go to the front page and have a look at, say, the latest-comments section. If you hover your mouse pointer over any of the comments, you'll see a highlight around a box containing the comment and its metadata, and it seems like the whole box functions as a button that takes you to that comment in its context. (So, e.g., clicking on whitespace within the box does that; and your pointer changes shape as it does when hovering over a link or a

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1habryka8y

Yeah, so originally the whole comment was a link. But then I wanted to make it expandable to not have it be so massive on the frontpage, and for that it needed to not all be clickable, and so we ended up with the current state. I think it probably makes sense to change the design and no longer make it do its hover-over card thing. And then making the comment link more prominent.

[-][anonymous]8y40

I seemed to have to switch on notifications to get back to lesswrong normal (being told if people comment on your stuff etc)

[-]AABoyles8y40

Many broken links in the Codex.
Searching is fast and awesome and I love it.
Initial pageload is very slow: nearly 2.5MB, requiring 14.17s until DOMContentLoaded, 1.5MB of which is a single file.

[-]Vaniver8y40

I clicked on the comment box that said 2 comments on Toggle's recent post, and got directed... to the top of the page, instead of the bottom, where the comments are.

There's still something about the comment-reading experience that's unsettling. I think boxes for the comments, rather than just the left bar, would help?

[-]gjm8y40

A few mostly-superficial first impressions:

1. When I go to my profile page, among the things there is a selection of ten "recent comments". These range from 7 months ago to 8 years ago. The older ones aren't super-highly-voted-for or anything like that. Even if the import from LW 1.0 has pulled Main but not Discussion material, which would certainly lose a lot of my comments, there is something really weird with the selection here. There's also no way to choose how those comments are sorted, which might be OK if it were something simple

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2philh8y

> There's some indication on my profile page that I have 1 of something, 23 of something else, and 5306 of something else. There are no explanatory words or hover-text or anything. The first seems to be karma, which seems not to have been carried over. I guess the others are posts and comments.

2gjm8y

Noooo! I spent years accumulating all that lovely karma, and it's all going to vanish? I am disappoint. Slightly more seriously, there's something very weird about this. If I click on the search icon and start typing, one of the things I see is usernames, along with their karma scores. So e.g. if I start typing "lu" then near the top I see "lukeprog 64947 points 3mo". But if I click on that link to go to the profile page for lukeprog that's been created here on Lesser Wrong ... that thing that may or may not be a karma score shows "9". And if I search again and start typing my username, I see "gjm 1 points 3mo". So it seems that (1) some users' karma scores are kinda-half-known to Lesser Wrong and some aren't, and (2) the scores shown when you search are unrelated to the scores shown on users' profile pages.

3gjm8y

Speaking of karma, here's another Weird Thing: that reply seems to have had 2 points from the instant when it was first posted. Unless I hallucinated it, this suggests that comments' scores are not simply the sum of votes cast on them. [EDITED to add:] This one, too.

2gjm8y

Ah, I'm also apparently giving +2 and -2 when I upvote/downvote things. Probably the same thing, since you're automatically deemed to have upvoted every comment you make. (Maybe everyone's votes are giving +-2, though there are some things whose score is an odd number. Maybe Lesser Wrong has noticed that I have a lot of old-LW karma and is giving me superpowers. Maybe everyone starts out counting for +-1 and then gets increased to +-2 once they get their first upvote or something. Maybe it's just a bug.)

3Ben Pace8y

Hi! Your voting power is currently log base 5 of your karma. In the next day or so we'll import people's karma from LW 1.0 and then people's weightings won't mostly be 2.

4gjm8y

Aha, makes some sense. I guess it's rounded up so that anyone with karma >1 gets a voting power of 2? In the past everyone had a "voting power" of one unit. Now most people will have more than that, and some will have quite a bit more. So scores on posts and comments will be *much larger*, at least if the amount of voting on them is fixed, and the very first downvote a comment gets can bring its score down to levels formerly only seen by *exceptionally* stupid or spammy or otherwise horrible comments. Old comments will mostly have more "moderate" scores -- apart from any that get discovered by new superpowered users... Unless, of course, you retroactively recompute all past comment scores according to the voters' karma -- and then presumably recompute that karma, which may be several times larger as a result, and iterate to convergence. That will substantially inflate everyone's karma. Both of these outcomes feel a bit weird to me.

1habryka8y

Thanks a lot for all of these! Sorry for taking a while to take a proper look at them. I've been busy with performance improvements: 1-4 should be fixed. Let me know if that's still an issue. 5: Feedback on the font has been varied, from some people really really liking it, to some others not liking it. There is also I think still a bug where it renders in really ugly ways on Windows, which might have added to that. If you have a link to a screenshot of the font, then I might be able to see whether this is maybe just uninentional (and then fix it systematically) 6. Ah, this took me a while to understand. I haven't run into that problem, but if you do again, do you think you can take a screenshot and add a Github issue? 7. We have an RSS feed of all posts, and more RSS feed stuff is coming soon. You can find the RSS feed of all posts here. 8. Yeah, totally agree with all the frustration about having only parts of the comments loaded. This is fairly high priority to fix. We mostly just need to make sure we load the comment you want to jump to first, and then generally load the remaining comments as you scroll down (and also add a button at the bottom that allows you to click to see more comments, or maybe automatically load them on scrolling) 9. Hmm, I hadn't noticed that, but yeah, it should clearly autofocus. I created an issue for it. 10. This should be fixed 11. I am conflicted on this. I really dislike the sidebar on the old LessWrong and on SSC, with its ton of irrelevant content that I don't want to be distracted by when I am reading a post or comments. But also agree that especially on large screens things can feel a bit spacey and daunting on the new page. I think some of the latest style changes improved this a bit, but I am still experimenting with how to improve this. 12. Agree with this. I am planning to restrict headings in comments to h3 and h4 as soon as I get around to it. 13. Definitely agree with showing the full-time on hover. User-settin

4gjm8y

Re 8, another good thing to do would be to load all the damn comments from the outset, or at least have the initial number it loads be like 250 or 400 rather than 50. If this is problematic for performance reasons, then I think that's best considered a performance issue that needs fixing and working around it by loading only a small number of comments is, well, only a workaround, and not a very nice one. [EDITED to add:] OK, more than two minutes elapsed after hitting submit with only an empty comment showing for me, at which point I'm going to guess it's never going to appear. (Maybe if I reloaded the page.) I guess there's a timeout or something?

4gjm8y

Re 5, here's a screenshot of some comment text from this thread, with annotations of a few things that look bad. This is on a recent version of Firefox, on Windows 8.1, with a not-super-high-resolution monitor and (I think) sizes and things all on their default settings in my browser.

2gjm8y

... Gosh, something odd just happened with this. I submitted the comment, and what appeared to be an empty comment from me appeared in the thread. Editing it brought back the content; submitting it again gave an empty-looking comment again. After a couple of iterations of this it looked normal. I don't know whether if I'd just waited it would have finished loading something and recovered. [EDITED to add:] Same happened with this comment. This time I tried just waiting, and after about five seconds the content appeared. This is a really bad user experience; if things are going to be loaded asynchronously, it's probably better to have some indication that it's happening. [EDITED again to add:] On submitting the edit above, initially the old version of the comment was displayed, and then after some seconds the edited version appeared. Again, not a good user experience.

1gjm8y

Re 6, have a look at these five successive screen shots. I should have said explicitly that this happens when the comment area is at the bottom of your browser window. [EDITED to add:] That apparently-empty-comment thing happened again with this one, and after something like 30 seconds of waiting the comment still appeared empty. I'll see whether it's quicker after an edit. [EDITED to add:] Yes, it's quicker: about 10 seconds. Might just be coincidence, of course.

[-]Chriswaterguy8y30

Feedback on the mobile site.

Using Chrome on a Nexus 6P running Android 8.1.

The suboptimal:

The mobile view has no margin at all on the sides, which makes it unpleasant to read. [Screenshot](https://image.ibb.co/jwaHaR/Screenshot 20171215 223941.png)
I had to write this comment in my text editor app then pasted it, because oh god, the editor is so slow (on my phone) that it's unusable. THEN, paste didn't work in the comment box. So I had to use the desktop site in Chrome (on Android), which allowed me to successfully paste.
I can also enter te

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1Chriswaterguy8y

Also, I wasn't effusive enough: thank you so much. I love what you're doing with this site.

[-]gjm8y30

It is not uncommon for a comment to begin by quoting something. For me right now (Firefox on Windows, but a brief look suggests that this isn't browser-specific) the front page / profile page comment lists remove the distinctive formatting that quoted material gets, so it looks exactly as if the quoted material was written by the commenter. This is unfortunate (especially when there are upvote and downvote arrows right next to that material...).

It looks to me as if not all formatting is lost in these lists; I don't know what makes quoting different.

[-]gjm8y30

[No idea whether anyone is actually still reading this...]

So far as I can tell, there is no facility for commenting here on linkposts. That is, a linkpost really is just a link; if you click on the "comments" icon you get taken to the far end of the link; there's no expectation, and no possibility, of discussion here on LW.

I guess that's a deliberate decision. (The idea being, perhaps, to avoid fragmenting discussion of any given thing, and if LW2 takes off to avoid sucking oxygen from other people's blogs.) Maybe it's a good

... (read more)

3Raemon8y

This is a bug, we built a fix for it yesterday - I'm not sure if that's been deployed to production. (The change was that clicking on the comments icon takes you to the comments section of the page, although for *not* linkposts did doesn't work right because of an unrelated issue)

3gjm8y

Excellent, thanks!

[-]Sniffnoy8y20

Also, Markdown doesn't work in user profiles, rendering my old profile pretty broken.

[-]Sniffnoy8y20

The comment box is still horribly unusable because it is still doing its stupid quasi-WYSIWYG thing where entered Markdown gets converted to terrible-to-manipulate rich text. Seriously, this is a really bad idea that makes the sites much less usable. Just either have plaintext input with preview so you can see how the Markdown comes out (my preference), possibly with optional rich-text input for those who prefer that for some reason. But the current way just makes me hate commenting here. There was nothing wrong with the way it worked on the old site a... (read more)

[-]Sniffnoy8y20

Minor problem: Markdown doesn't seem to work in profiles. I copied over my old profile from LessWrong (with some small modification) but the Markdown doesn't work now.

(Note, this is a much smaller problem than the horribly confusing Markdow/rich-text-editor-cobbled-together-thing that's currently used for writing comments...)

[-]Sniffnoy8y20

Well I just visisted LW 2.0 for the first time in a while and the new comment editor... I'm sorry but it's really, really bad. Markdown that is automatically converted into rich text, or automatically displayed as rich text, or whatever is going on... how does one work with this? How does one edit this sensibly? I have no idea. I mean I'm sure some people want a rich text editor, let them have it, but for the rest of us please let us just turn this off. And just write in Markdown so we have full control over what we're doing. Idea... (read more)

[-]mako yass8y20

How is it that this post uses a sans-serif font? Are some users able to pick a font? No one should have that power. As far as I could tell, the literature seems to say that the only thing about fonts that affects their readability is their familiarity, how much text the reader has previously read in this font.

You can use a serif font as the site default if you really want to, you probably should use a sans-serif font because that's what people are mostly used to reading in most venues, but if you encourage authors to switch between them you are doing ... (read more)

[-]Larks8y20

First of all, thanks for making this all! :)

One suggestiong: coudl we hvae a sepll-ckecher for the cmmonent box?

1habryka8y

Hmm, my comment boxes seem to have functional spell-checkers. Spell-checkers are usually implemented by browsers these days. Here is a screenshot of how it looks on my machine: https://imgur.com/a/dbK2p Maybe it's a browser compatibility issue? What browser/OS do you use?

[-]Commander Zander8y20

When i subscribe to a user, what happens? Does that affect the magical sorting algorithm or what?

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke8y20

I have no idea where else to ask this, so I do it here: Where can I find an introduction to how the site works? Where can I ask questions about site mechanics? LW had the newbies thread, the open and stupid questions thread and the wiki. While I recognize a lot of part here on LW 2.0 some seem different and I'd like to have a place for it. I would be willing to write a post for it, but I'm not sure whether I overlooked something and/or just add to the confusion.

1habryka8y

Right now just opening up new top-level meta posts is fairly reasonable. Otherwise, feel free to ping me and the rest of the team on Intercom.

[-]Robert Barlow8y10

I'm not the biggest fan of how large the recommended reading is. I understand the incentive to drive people to read the sequences, but the images and text are the single largest presence on the landing page. I could understand if it was at the bottom, or perhaps in a non-existent sidebar, but as it stands, they feel a little imposing. The font is pretty good, and the interface is clean, but I'm afraid it might be a little too clean - there aren't very many colors on the page to hold your attention. Also, it might be a good idea to add the fu

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[-]Vivificient8y10

The comment font has a weird lowercase 'w'. It is larger than the surrounding letters. Now that I have noticed it, I can't stop being distracted by it.

1habryka8y

Hmm, I am not noticing anything. Could you post a link to a screenshot?

1Vivificient8y

Here is what I am seeing: https://snag.gy/tvGpdx.jpg I am on Chrome on Windows 10. Experimentation shows that the effect only happens when the page zoom is at 100%... if I zoom in or out, the w goes back to normal.

1habryka8y

Wow, yeah. This is definitely broken. One more way you could help me out. Could you send me a screenshot of how this page looks? https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/ That's where a large part of our fonts and styles come from.

1Vivificient8y

Certainly! Here it is: https://i.snag.gy/8QxDsF.jpg On that page, it is fine at normal zoom, but the problem occurs when I zoom out to 80%, at which point the text is roughly the same size as here. So I guess it is something to do with how the font is rendering at that size. Whether it is something wrong with my computer or with the font I don't know.

1habryka8y

Well, I guess I am disappointed in Edward Tufte. This makes it more likely that we will move away from our current font setup, which makes me sad since I do really like how the font renders on all of my devices.

1Said Achmiz8y

When you select a new font to use, please make sure to select a font family which is complete (ET Book lacks a bold-italic variant, causing rendering issues, and also has other problems like inconsistency in numeral style between the variants), and has clearly visually distinctive weights! Recommendations: Merriweather remains my preferred selection; in the “old style serif” category, EB Garamond is an excellent choice (do not use Google Fonts for this one, though; they only have the Regular variant—no bold or italics!). Noto Serif is also a fine, understated choice. Regardless of what font you select—for people who block webfonts (with NoScript or similar), please define Georgia as the fallback for your webfont of choice (rather than dropping directly down to “serif”); the results are much more aesthetically pleasing and readable for such setups. (I also strongly recommend verifying readability and rendering across a variety of platforms and setups before committing to a choice.)

4habryka8y

Excellent, thanks for the recommendation! I quite like Merriweather, which I think would be my default choice, though I think it feels a bit too modern for the page. Noto Serif also seems good, but I think it also gets rid of some of the flair of the page. PracticalTypography recommends: Palatino Nova, Iowan Old Style, Verdigris and Bembo Book as fonts that are similarly modeled after Renaissance typography and the original Bembo typeface. I am not fully sure how to chose between them, but all of them seem reasonable to me. I like Bembo Book, but we appear to have run into some problems with the Bembo typeface, though I am not sure whether those would still exist if we would move towards the more standard interpretation, as opposed to Tufte's version. After that I think I prefer Verdigris, and am indifferent between the other two. If we go the route of professional fonts that cost money, we could also go the same way you went on readthesequences.com and choose Garamond Premier Pro, which I also quite like, but feels a bit too legal instead of renaissance-flavored to me. We could also go with PracticalTypography's Equity, though again that feels a bit too legal, but it does have great readability. Strongly interested in more input on this, if you or anyone else has any strong opinions on any of the above.

[-][anonymous]8y10

Some things I wonder:

1) How much effort did it take to make this site?

2) How much effort will it take to get this site up to acceptable quality?

3) How much effort would it have taken to fix the problems with the old LW?

4) How much effort was spent evaluating other forum software? What was wrong with those systems that meant it couldn't be used instead of this?

I've noticed an antipattern in a few old jobs where people have found problems with existing systems and instead of fixing them invested huge effort into reinventing a square wheel. I can&#x

... (read more)

1habryka8y

(I think the original author of these deleted their account, so this is mostly just replying in case others are interested as well) 1) It took me about 6 months, so probably a total of about 8 person months 2) I would guess about another 3-4 months or so to get to an acceptable level, and probably a year or two until it is a really full-featured discussion platform that can compete with the modern frameworks on a lot of core features. Though I expect this community will benefit much much earlier from it. 3) It seemed really really hard to fix the problems with the old LW. All the technology is really old, webdevelopment moves very quickly, and the codebase was not a great codebase. My read was about a year to get to a solid state, but then with almost no future-proofing and ability to expand on that. 4) I've spend about 1.5 months with a bit more than 60% of my time looking at various competitors and trying to build minimum prototypes with them. A full comparison of why the other frameworks didn't make as much sense is a bit beyond the scope of this comment, but we definitely spend a good bit of effort on evaluating the competition.

[-][anonymous]8y10

bug: Highlighting new comments isn't working for me. It says "Highlighting new comments since Today at (current time)" which it totally useless. I want to see the comments since I last visited the page.

bug2: Currently, I can't see what I'm typing because it's underneath what I assume is the rich text editor toolbar thingy

bug3, or maybe I'm going crazy: I'm sure sometimes the page layout has shifted under my feet, so I page down and what comes next isn't what was after what I'm currently reading, and what I&

... (read more)

1[anonymous]8y

It doesn't remember that I want to sort comments by date. When I click reply the cursor isn't put into the reply box.

1[anonymous]8y

More whining: I went to sort by "most recent", and now it's only showing 10/60 comments. Why not 60/60? (edit: "show more" brought me to 20/62. Come on, really?? edit2: Then I scrolled up and it said 30/62. Is this a forum or a gaslighting simulator? edit3: And 30/62 is a lie, it's only actuall showing 20 posts) I went to "All posts" and for every day it said there were no posts that day. 10 seconds later, it decided that there were posts there after all. Slowness aside, displaying lies on load and then replacing it with the truth later is a bad user experience.

1[anonymous]8y

Okay, my bug3 is not me going crazy. I pressed submit on the previous comment, then after about 10 seconds with no indication that my buttonpress had been registered, my new comment appeared, with the new comment green bar (first I'm I've seen the green bar, see bug1). Then, my new comment disappeared from the page. wtf??? Then I went back to the top and clicked on show all comments, and it appeared (in the middle of the page, thanks magic algorithm)

1[anonymous]8y

This reply showed up, then disappeared. I scrolled up to see that it said "All comments loaded", then scrolled down again and my comment was there.

[-]ozymandias8y10

Bug: "Daily" lists some posts as having been made on Friday; these posts appear briefly then disappear by the time the page has fully loaded. I think it might be because right now it is Thursday in my time zone?

ETA: "Daily" is now working properly. It is still Thursday in my time zone.

ETA2: Now the bug is happening again? I am confused.

[-]dogiv8y10

I am ecountering some kind of error when opening the links here to rationalsphere and single conversational locus. When I open them, a box pops up that says "Complete your profile" and asks me to enter my email address (even though I used my email to log in in the first place). When I type it in and press submit, I get the error: {"id":"app.mutation_not_allowed","value":"\"usersEdit\" on _id \"BSRa9LffXLw4FKvTY\""}

1habryka8y

This is a bug that sometimes happens when you logged out of your account in one tab but are still logged in with another. This also sometimes happens when we push new versions, which currently sometimes logs users out.

[+][comment deleted]8y10

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Beta - First Impressions

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