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In reply to:

Whatever the data-structure for the sequences is, the goal is to present the user a linear sequence of content (which might be dynamically generated from a dependency DAG).

It's really hard to keep track of your position in a tree, and practically all projects that I know of that tried to present complicated information a tree-view either failed or moved to a linear view eventually (for example Khan Academy)

Hm. What I want is a tree which is really just a linear structure functionally speaking (no automatic queuing of prerequisites or anything), but which allows more visual organization of a long sequence into parts for sanity's sake. I'd get >90% of the functionality I want just by being allowed to intersperse headers on a "sequence" page to organize sub-sequences. The sequences themselves currently have one more level of organization than that, with "books" and then "sections" -- so you can think of them as one long sequence with six sub-sequences and twenty-six sub-sub-sequences. That's the kind of hierarchical organization I'm asking for.

See comment in full context

LessWrong 2.0 Feature Roadmap & Feature Suggestions

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Jun 17, 2017

This post will serve as a place to discuss what features the new LessWrong 2.0 should have, and I will try to keep this post updated with our feature roadmap plans.

Here is roughly the set of features we are planning to develop over the next few weeks:

UPDATED: August 27th, 2017

Basic quality of life improvements:

Improve rendering speed on posts with many comments
(A lot of improvements made, a lot more to come)
Improve usability on mobile
(After the major rework this is somewhat broken again, will fix it soon)
Add Katex support for comments and posts
Allow merging with old LessWrong 1.0 accounts
Fix old LessWrong 1.0 links DONE!
Create unique links for each comment: DONE!
Make comments collapsible
Highlight new comments since last visit: DONE!
Improve automatic spam-detection
Add RSS feed links with adjustable karma thresholds
Create better documentation for the page, with tooltips and onboarding processes
Better search, including comment search and user search: DONE!

Improved Moderation Tools:

New Karma system that weighs your votes based on your Karma
Give moderators ability to suspend comment threads for a limited amount of time
Give trusted post-authors moderation ability on their own posts (deleting comments, temporarily suspending users from posts, etc.)
Add reporting feature to comments
Give moderators and admins access to a database query interface to identify negative vote patterns

New Content Types:

Add sequences as a top-level content-type with UI for navigating sequences in order, metadata on a sequence, and keeping track of which parts you've read DONE!
Add Arbital-style predictions as a content block in posts (maybe also as a top-level content type)
Add 'Wait-But-Why?' style footnotes to the editor
Discussion page that structures discussions more than just a tree format (here is a mockup I designed while working for Arbital, that I am style excited to implement)
...and we have many more crazy ideas we would like to experiment with

I will also create a comment for each of these under the post, so you can help us prioritize all of these. Also feel free to leave your own feature suggestions and site improvements in the comments.

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Comments

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Highlighting new comments since Today at 7:41 AM

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Basic Quality of life:
Make comments collapsible

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Basic Quality of life:
Create unique links for each comment

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This is now done! I am not fully happy with the implementation, but it feels like the best compromise I could find between a few different design goals with comment links.

You can access the link for each comment by clicking on the time the link was posted. When someone visits that link, the comment that you linked gets rendered at the very top of the post page, together with the immediate comment it is replying to (if it is a reply). That comment then has a link at the bottom that when clicked scrolls you down to the position of the comment in the full context of the discussion threads. My hope is that this will both allow comments to stand reasonably well on their own, as well as make it easier to find a comment in the context of the whole discussion.

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Nice!

Two thoughts:

What about adding a small link icon next to the time that is the link to the comment. Having the time be the link is pretty hard to discover. Facebook does it this way, and it took me a pretty long time to consistently remember, and rediscovering was really annoying.
I think the idea of displaying the linked comment at the top of the page is cool, but I also find it a little confusing (like I instictively think “where’s the rest of the discussion” for a quick sec). I also almost always click the “Show comment in full contetxt” link. Given this it seems to me that brining the user directly to the comment in context might be best. Maybe the comment could be highlighted in some way so that it was easy to see which comment was linked to.

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Fully seconded, on both points.

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Having written the parent comment, it occurred to me to wonder whether it was needed or useful; after all, there's already an upvote button, right? (Which I dutifully clicked, of course.) Did I just write the comment out of habit, having spent considerable time commenting in venues with no voting feature?

But what the upvote counter doesn't tell me is who upvoted something!

As a commenter/upvoter, I'd like to (have the chance to) communicate something more than "someone liked this post/comment enough to click upvote"; I'd like to convey "Not just someone, but I, whom you may know, whose views you may be familiar with, whose credentials on relevant topics you may investigate, agree with / endorse / support / etc. this post/comment".

And as a reader, I'd like to know who it is that agrees with, endorses, supports, etc. the post/comment in question. Maybe their opinion carries great weight with me; maybe they mean nothing to me; maybe their endorsement is, for me, an anti-endorsement.

(Then, of course, there's the old problem that it's not actually all that clear what it means, to upvote or downvote a comment. (All of you who disagree, and think it is clear—how sure are you that it's clear to everyone else, or even that everyone who thinks it's clear has the same understanding? Have we checked?) This, for me, was probably the biggest problem with LW 1.0's karma system, because it was fundamental and conceptual, and transcended any issue with moderation or what have you.)

So, in other words: upvoted, yes. But also verbally endorsed, and the endorsement signed.

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I agree there is something nice about being able to see who upvoted or downvoted a comment or post, but I don't think I'd want this to be the default. I expect I'd feel uncomfortable voting on some stuff if I knew that my vote would be public. Maybe after voting, an option could appear that said something like “Make vote public”. Then you could have something pop up on hover (or with a tap on tablets/phones) that showed something like “Malo and 3 other people upvoted this post”. Though that would probably get unweildy if lots of people made their votes public. I think there's a good idea in there though, just not sure about implementation specifics.

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Well, I think I might've been unclear. I wasn't actually suggesting that upvotes come with authorship labels. All the reasons you list for why this isn't a great idea, I agree with.

I was saying, rather, that the upvote/downvote system is fundamentally missing something; that it can't substitute for expressing explicit verbal agreement. The immediate corollary that should occur to us is: what is voting even for?

Consider a scenario. I write a post about software usability. A hundred people read it, and have a strong enough opinion on its quality that they are moved to click the voting widget. 99 of those people are ordinary LessWrongers, with no particular expertise in the subject. They upvote me. The 100th person is Jakob Nielsen. He downvotes me.

My post now has a score of 99 points. Is this an accurate representation of its value?

No. One “layman” doesn't equal one Jakob Nielsen, when it comes to evaluating claims or opinions about usability engineering. Even 99 laymen doesn't equal one Jakob Nielsen. If Nielsen thinks that my post is crap, and that basically everything I'm saying is wrong and confused, well, basically, that's that. 99 non-expert LessWrongers doesn't “balance that out”, and the sum of “99 LessWrongers think I'm right” and “Jakob Nielsen thinks I'm wrong” does not come out to “a score of +99! what a great post!”. That's just not how that math works.

Furthermore, suppose Nielsen posts a comment under my post, saying “this is crap and you're a nincompoop”. What, now, is the value of that “99” score, to a reader? You now know what a domain expert thinks. Unless other domain experts weigh in, there's nothing more to discuss. That 99 LessWrongers disagree with Jakob Nielsen about usability is... interesting, perhaps, in some academic sense. But from an epistemic standpoint, Nielsen's hypothetical comment tells you all you need to know about my post. The upvote score is obviated as a source of information about my post's value.

And yet, it's the upvote score that would be used, by various automated parts of the system (and by readers who aren't checking the comments carefully), to decide how good my post is. That seems perverse! Now, I'm not suggesting that "sort by experts' opinions, as expressed in comments" is a viable algorithm, of course. But this scenario, in my mind, calls into serious question what upvotes mean, and what sense there is in using them as a way to judge the value of content.

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Yeah upvotes can mean a lot of different things like endorse, agree, or high quality comment (even though I disagree). This comment thread on another post discussed some potential extensions to upvoting that might help with this.

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Probably not suitable for launch, but given that the epistemic seriousness of the users is the most important "feature" for me and some other people I've spoken to, I wonder if some kind of "user badges" thing might be helpful, especially if it influences the weight that upvotes and downvotes from those users have. E.g. one badge could be "has read >60% of the sequences, as 'verified' by one of the 150 people the LW admins trust to verify such a thing about someone" and "verified superforecaster" and probably some other things I'm not immediately thinking of.

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New Content Types:

Add 'Wait-But-Why?' style footnotes to the editor

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paulfchristiano

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Would be great to have entire discussions starting from a point in the document. (Also a pony.)

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Basic Quality of life:
Highlight new comments since last visit

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This is now done! Interested in your feedback on the implementation!

(For example, I can imagine people wanting to be able to select manually what the new comment date cutoff is, which is what SlateStarCodex has. Open to implementing that.)

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I don't think this is working for me. I just made a bunch of comments last night, and got a couple replies since then. When I visited the site today I only noticed people had added comments when I saw then in the recent comments section.

How's this supposed to work?

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Improved Moderation Tools:

New Karma system that weighs your votes based on your Karma

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I'm in favour of this, but I think it would be even better to give high weights by fiat to some trusted users, in a way that grounds the whole Karma system in something, and makes it harder for low-quality bubbles to self-perpetuate.

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The current plan is to seed the karma system with a set of highly trusted users, and then do something similar to Eigenkarma. Which would both ground the system in something, and allow for dynamic karma allocation.

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If you want to encourage engagement, don't hide the new comment box all the way down at the bottom of the page! Put another one right after the post (or give the post a reply button of the same sort the comments have.)

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Hmm, that seems correct, but I am also hesitant to have people post the same comment over and over again because they haven't read the thread.

I will think about the tradeoffs here more, and we will see what I come up with. Maybe there is something in between that works best.

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Sharing drafts / group editing, similar to Medium.

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New Content Types:

Add sequences as a top-level content-type with UI for navigating sequences in order, metadata on a sequence, and keeping track of which parts you've read

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Can individual articles in the sequence be written by different people? In such case, who manages the sequence itself?

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From a user's profile, be able to see their comments in addition to their posts.

Dunno about others, but this is actually one of the LW features I use the most.

(Apologies if this is listed somewhere already and I missed it.)

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Yes! I agree. I also see that as a key feature.

I've been working on this, but apparently forgot to add it to the feature list. This is related to improving search in general by allowing you to not only search through posts but also comments and user-profiles which is high-priority for me.

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Making posts which are replies/responses to other posts.

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New Content Types:

Add Arbital-style predictions as a content block in posts (maybe also as a top-level content type)

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paulfchristiano

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Adding extra top-level content types seems very expensive in terms of cognitive complexity + difficulty of making changes (since you have to think about how a change interacts with everything). Adding content within a post seems less problematic.

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Yeah, that's my guess as well. Though we might be able to do something in between where you could visit a page similar to the "Recent Comments" page where you can see all prediction-polls that have been posted in both comments and posts. And maybe feature some of that on the frontpage somehow.

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Basic Quality of life:
Highlight new comments since last visit

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Basic Quality of life:
Add Katex support for comments and posts

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Request 2: tagging people in relevant discussions FB style. IMO this is *uge* but might need some thinking to avoid high status people drowning in the noise (1 straightforward possibility is sorting your inbox by karma)

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It'd be nice to have a better meetup system than current LW's. I think I sketched my plan out earlier, but I might as well stick it here as well:

There are two basic sorts of meetups: one-offs and regular. (Austin's "Welcome Scott Aaronson to Austin" party vs. Austin's 1:30 Saturday meetup) Both have a location, a datetime, and an organizer. The regular meetups, in addition, have a repeat frequency and might have a link to somewhere else (maybe you arrange events on Facebook or Meetup.com). (And if we could somehow automatically import events from Facebook groups, all the better.)

Because of the similarity, those both seem like they could be the same data type to me. It also seems like the best way to display them is a map with a bunch of dots, probably colored by how far in the future they are (with something like "up to four hours ago" counting as now, so that meetups don't disappear right when people are desperately trying to figure out what the address was again), with a UI that manages to map a bunch of dots on top of each other not horrible. (Maybe combine a dot view with a list view, like on Google Maps?)

One of the big motivations here is that the LW meetup map is pretty sad (sometimes the closest meetup was in Europe!) when I think there are actually a bunch of regular meetups. (It also seems like we should encourage any of the EA/rationalist/humanist/SSC/MIRIx/etc. groups to have their meetups on the map, maybe with different shapes for different types and filtering, to make it even easier to connect people. "Ah, there isn't a LW meetup in my area, but there is an EA meetup!")

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For recurring events, it would be nice to have some assurance that the event is still happening. Recurring meetups which stop should disappear after a while, but confirmation of continued active meetups should (1) require minimal effort (2) not be easy to forget.

(1) and (2) are somewhat conflicting. Favoring (1) leads me to suggest something like LessWrong prompting the event creator once every six months: "Is this meetup still happening?" Favoring (2) leads me to suggest something which not only confirms that the event is still happening, but is valuable in itself, so that doing it can feel rewarding. For example, writing public event summaries. These could be short, and would give a highly visible sign to assure others that the meetup is still happening (and give them a bit of the flavor of it). It would also cause people to think about what they're going to write, so that they have an open loop in their brain about writing the thing. It can be a rewarding habit. And, these summaries could be useful in themselves.

But, some groups would doubtless fall out of the habit.

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For example, writing public event summaries. These could be short, and would give a highly visible sign to assure others that the meetup is still happening (and give them a bit of the flavor of it).

A thing I'd be worried about here is people being ashamed that their meetup is just a social club or something, or in general optimizing for doing things that sound good rather than are what the participants want to do.

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Basic Quality of life:
Improve rendering speed on posts with many comments

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Request 1: crisper outlining of comments. LW1 uses nicely visible boxes and colors to separate comments; IMO this is good

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I personally think to grey lines on the side do a pretty good job, but I also think that the boxes on LW 1 are doing something that makes things clearer. I do think that the LW 1 comments boxes do look a little junky though, and I'm very much enjoying the clean look of LW 2.0 overall. Not sure what a good compromise would be. Maybe all top level comments are a little more distinguishable in some way?

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