I’m only rarely on the LW forum (mainly reading via email summaries), so I don’t know what LW’s target audience or approach to new users is.
From the impression I got during various EA activities, theEA forum is meant to be a welcoming place for new users who are encouraged to interact. This doesn’t necessarily mean making full standalone posts, but can include creating question-posts or shortforms. The issue I’ve described applies to all post types.
Note that with new users I mainly mean users new to the forum, not necessarily new to EA. Having good knowledge of EA principles doesn’t include forum-navigation skills.
I understand you prefer new users to comment, and I agree that commenting is something that is easier to find. As a new user basic actions I picked up quickly were: viewing posts, voting, commenting, searching, opening my profile, using the sidebar. None of these actions included finding the forum manual and learning how or when to create posts.
So even after having lurked for a few weeks (so being within your “create-post target audience”), these things weren’t clear to me. There is no guide between creating comments and creating posts.
So aside from changing the general UI, what do you think about the other proposed suggestions?
I think having a better linked forum manual, or something in that space seems pretty good to me. I feel like we can generally do better at cultural onboarding and helping people orient to the site, though it’s a hard problem, since people do rarely read things even when they are pretty prominently linked, so I am not super sure how much a prominently linked forum manual might help.
I’m only rarely on the LW forum (mainly reading via email summaries), so I don’t know what LW’s target audience or approach to new users is.
From the impression I got during various EA activities, theEA forum is meant to be a welcoming place for new users who are encouraged to interact. This doesn’t necessarily mean making full standalone posts, but can include creating question-posts or shortforms. The issue I’ve described applies to all post types.
Note that with new users I mainly mean users new to the forum, not necessarily new to EA. Having good knowledge of EA principles doesn’t include forum-navigation skills.
I understand you prefer new users to comment, and I agree that commenting is something that is easier to find. As a new user basic actions I picked up quickly were: viewing posts, voting, commenting, searching, opening my profile, using the sidebar. None of these actions included finding the forum manual and learning how or when to create posts.
So even after having lurked for a few weeks (so being within your “create-post target audience”), these things weren’t clear to me. There is no guide between creating comments and creating posts.
So aside from changing the general UI, what do you think about the other proposed suggestions?
I think having a better linked forum manual, or something in that space seems pretty good to me. I feel like we can generally do better at cultural onboarding and helping people orient to the site, though it’s a hard problem, since people do rarely read things even when they are pretty prominently linked, so I am not super sure how much a prominently linked forum manual might help.