LW - [New Feature] Your Subscribed Feed by Ruby

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [New Feature] Your Subscribed Feed, published by Ruby on June 12, 2024 on LessWrong.
tl;dr
LessWrong now has a Subscribed tab (next to the Latest tab and Enriched tab[1]). You can now "follow" users, which means their posts and comments will show up in your Subscribed tab[2].
We've put a lot of thought into how to display the right amount of recent content from people you follow, plus the right amount of surrounding context, to keep you up to date without it being overwhelming. See here for more detail.
How to follow people
You can follow users via multiple methods:
1. Using the widget on the Subscribed tab:
2. You can follow people from their user profile:
3. You can follow people using the user tooltip that comes up when you hover on their username.
Note!
Following people for your subscribed tab is different from subscribing to get notifications. Signing up for one does not cause the other!
Except, to help people start using the Subscribed tab, we did a one time operation to cause you to be following (for purposes of the subscribed tab), anyone who you'd already subscribed to for post and comment notifications. We assume if you want notifications, you'd also want to follow.
What's shown to me in my Subscribed feed?
Short description
We display the recent posts and comments of people you follow, plus comments from other users that people you follow are replying to.
Long description
(Subject to change, lasted update 2024-06-10)
1. We load posts and comments from people you follow from the last 30 days
2. We group posts and comments to the post level
1. We might show a post because someone you followed published it.
2. We might show a post because someone you follow is commenting on it, even if you don't follow the author of the post. (This will probably be most of your feed, unless you follow people who write more posts than comments.)
3. We display the five most recent comments from people you follow, unless those comments were a week or more older than the most recent one (we found this necessary to avoid seeing lots of stale content).
4. We further display (with de-emphasized styling) the comments being replied to by people you follow.
Why we built this
A while back we introduced the ability to subscribe to all of a user's comments. At first, I thought this was great - "wow, look at all these comments I was seeing previously that I want to read". However it cluttered up my notifications tab and also reading comments via notifications isn't best. I realized I wanted a feed, and that's what we've built.
The mainstay of LessWrong is the frontpage posts list, but I'm interested in supplementing with feeds since they have two main advantages:
1. You can easily start to read content of post before clicking. Especially on mobile where there's no hover-preview, it's often nice to get to read a few sentences before deciding to commit to a post.
2. Puts comments on even footing as posts. Often comments from some users are of greater interest than posts from others, a feed lets them be brought to your attention just as easily.
So far I've found the feed really great for (1) high signal-to-noise ratio content, since it's from people I've chosen to be follow, (2) reading through without having to spend as much up-front "decide what to read" energy. I like it for casual reading.
Future Directions
I think the Subscribed feed is good but has some drawbacks that mean it's not actually the feed I most want to see. First, it requires work to decide who to follow, and for users who aren't that familiar with the authors on the site, it'll be hard to decide who to follow. This means they might not get enough content. On the other hand, it's possible to subscribe to too many people, bringing down your average quality and driving you away from your feed.
Rather, I'm interested in a Subsc...