The ‘Community Favorites’ section keeps listing the same posts over and over again. I don’t see the point of having a prominent list of favorite posts in the home page that changes so little. I suggest expanding the list considerably so that regular visitors can still expect to see novel posts every time they visit the homepage.
I don’t know what settings the EA Forum uses, but on LessWrong we filter this list to only show users posts that they have not clicked on. I expect eventually we will also add additional functionality to stop showing posts when a user has seen a post a number of times and has repeatedly decided to not click on it.
The ‘Latest Posts’ section sorts posts neither by karma nor by date; rather, it seems to rely on a hybrid sorting algorithm. I don’t think this is useful: as someone who checks the home page regularly, I want to be able to easily see what the latest posts are, so that when I go down the list and eventually come across a post I have already seen, I can conclude that I have seen all posts after it as well.
I would use the All-Posts page for this use-case. I check the forum only about once a week, and I like only seeing the best posts from the last few days on the frontpage, as opposed to all of them. There are also a variety of other problems with sorting things strictly by recency, one of the biggest ones is that it basically fails completely as an attention allocation mechanism, and causes people to be a lot more aggressive with downvotes, because everything is competing in a much more direct way for frontpage space (i.e. any user creating any post will take up frontpage space, independently of whether the post is well-received or is of broad interest).
Ah, I hadn’t noticed the ‘All-posts page’. That addresses my needs, thanks. And point taken about the drawbacks of recency sorting. I retract that part of my comment.
We’ve tried to make the “All Posts” page fairly visible (it appears on the homepage sidebar, and can be found in the drop-down sidebar from any post on the Forum).
Do you have any suggestions for what might have made it more visible to you? You strike me as a careful reader, and someone who spends a lot of time viewing EA content, so if you hadn’t noticed this page, I’d guess that many other readers aren’t seeing it either.
I think in this case the fault lies entirely with me, given the number of different ways one can see a list of all the most recent posts.
(My original bullet point also mentioned that sorting by recency seemed like a preferable way to display posts anyway, and for this reason I concluded that this should be the default display. But in his reply Oli mentioned some important drawbacks that I had overlooked, so I no longer believe this.)
Pablo already replied, but FWIW I had the same irritation (and similarly had all posts pointed out to me by someone else after complaining to them about it). I think in my case the original assumption was that ‘latest posts’ meant what it sounds like, and on discovering that it wasn’t I (lazily) assumed there wasn’t a way to get what I wanted.
I don’t have a constructive suggestion for a better name though.
I don’t know what settings the EA Forum uses, but on LessWrong we filter this list to only show users posts that they have not clicked on. I expect eventually we will also add additional functionality to stop showing posts when a user has seen a post a number of times and has repeatedly decided to not click on it.
I would use the All-Posts page for this use-case. I check the forum only about once a week, and I like only seeing the best posts from the last few days on the frontpage, as opposed to all of them. There are also a variety of other problems with sorting things strictly by recency, one of the biggest ones is that it basically fails completely as an attention allocation mechanism, and causes people to be a lot more aggressive with downvotes, because everything is competing in a much more direct way for frontpage space (i.e. any user creating any post will take up frontpage space, independently of whether the post is well-received or is of broad interest).
Ah, I hadn’t noticed the ‘All-posts page’. That addresses my needs, thanks. And point taken about the drawbacks of recency sorting. I retract that part of my comment.
We’ve tried to make the “All Posts” page fairly visible (it appears on the homepage sidebar, and can be found in the drop-down sidebar from any post on the Forum).
Do you have any suggestions for what might have made it more visible to you? You strike me as a careful reader, and someone who spends a lot of time viewing EA content, so if you hadn’t noticed this page, I’d guess that many other readers aren’t seeing it either.
I think in this case the fault lies entirely with me, given the number of different ways one can see a list of all the most recent posts.
(My original bullet point also mentioned that sorting by recency seemed like a preferable way to display posts anyway, and for this reason I concluded that this should be the default display. But in his reply Oli mentioned some important drawbacks that I had overlooked, so I no longer believe this.)
It’s also linked from the frontpage with the “Advanced Sorting/Filtering” link.
Pablo already replied, but FWIW I had the same irritation (and similarly had all posts pointed out to me by someone else after complaining to them about it). I think in my case the original assumption was that ‘latest posts’ meant what it sounds like, and on discovering that it wasn’t I (lazily) assumed there wasn’t a way to get what I wanted.
I don’t have a constructive suggestion for a better name though.