Hiii

LMAO fr site on my end been buggin

doing some maintenance rn to avoid issues from yesterday sorry for any inconvenience

Sorry I took so long to get back to you regarding the layout design tested in Books sxn fam

But personally that layout just didn't fit the site imo. I dont mean like it didn't fit with the site's overall look — rather it doesn't seem like the best fit for how users interact with the site and its contents.

The current traditional forum layout works well because most people (I assume) enioy seeing and browsing through a lot of different threads at various points throughout the day. It's a good midpoint between viewing too little content and being overloaded with content.

That test layout gave each thread a lot of space (each in their own "bubble") and took away that ease of content accessibility imo. It looked more in the direction of what you'd find on Reddit mobile, and that platform is pretty much impossible to find any post from a week ago if you didn't manually save or bookmark it.

I'm definitely not saying that the current regular forum layout is the best way to go, there's surely some kind of new, updated layout concept that fits the needs and uses of the site (and might even serve it better). I just think that whatever layout this site has, it should maintain the ability to browse a lot of threads easily, find/see older threads you want to revisit easily, and kept simple to not overcrowd the page with design elements.

The test layout looks like a design that might tempt users to only interact with the top several threads at a given time instead of scrolling more to find others. In contrast to the traditional one where you dont have to scroll much to see a ton of different threads. If that's the kind of thing you're going for then the test layout is a step in the right direction for that.

I remember our convos from a few years ago about your ideas for lowkey, and if you're still wanting to redesign the whole user experience to be more of a social platform than a traditional forum, then what I said above doesn't really apply haha.

One thing I will say is that stickied topics are still super convenient and helpful. I cant remember if Books Sxn even had stickies, but i think it would be cool and maybe cleaner if you somehow moved stickies in each section inside a dropdown or side nav menu or something. (If you dont plan on just keeping them out in the open up top, i mean).

Im excited to see more tests and updates tho fam. It awesome to see this place transforming in major ways after all this time

no worries brotha thank you

The layout in books sxn is unique, similar thoughts as the person above, perhaps a more streamlined look but still ahead of the current layout

Man, clicking on settings goes to a not found page

It's getting annoying

appreciate the write up
This is still a WIP that will change based on feedback

But personally that layout just didn't fit the site imo. I dont mean like it didn't fit with the site's overall look — rather it doesn't seem like the best fit for how users interact with the site and its contents.

That test layout gave each thread a lot of space (each in their own "bubble") and took away that ease of content accessibility imo.

It looked more in the direction of what you'd find on Reddit mobile, and that platform is pretty much impossible to find any post from a week ago if you didn't manually save or bookmark it.

not a fan of reddit but their mobile experience is beyond awful and would never have something that bad. can you tell me more about the times when you set out to find old threads, like some example reasons & how often?

im not sure i see how this would hurt that though, even with the current design in books, so please feel free to expand

I'm definitely not saying that the current regular forum layout is the best way to go, there's surely some kind of new, updated layout concept that fits the needs and uses of the site (and might even serve it better). I just think that whatever layout this site has, it should maintain the ability to browse a lot of threads easily,

i agree. right now we have a huge issue that's basically invisible to everyone...

there's a lot of artists where you have 100+ active posters as fans (aggregate spotify top artists), but little to no activity. and even if people post about them the threads are so disproportionately inactive compared to more popular artists.

it's actually ridiculous how unfair it is. and it's self perpetuating — you see no one talking about artist x, so why post about them? and even if you do it'll just fall of the page so fast.

i know some people wont like the sound of the word "algorithm", but chronological sorting is just an algorithm (based on a single metric) which can be relatively arbitrary in a lot of contexts when it comes to relevance.

e.g, someone happened to reply to a thread in music sxn half a second before you opened it, now it's at the top of your feed but might be totally irrelevant to 99% of people.

people like chronological sort because of the familiarity and simplicity, but the usefulness of it really just falls apart for any discussion platform with a real amount of activity. and a lot of the concerns in your post — which already sound like poor user experience from how you describe them — can be fixed with different sort options, as well as other features

ideally the best sort order would look as close as possible to the perfect list of threads you'd wanna see each time. a perfect list isnt realistic... but it's a lot closer than the current algorithm, and scrolling through all that noise.

find/see older threads you want to revisit easily

are you saying you regularly scroll and scroll to find threads from ~a week ago or more? this in itself sounds like an issue i want to fix, pls elaborate!

and kept simple to not overcrowd the page with design elements.

i've always been about the most minimalist ui design as u can tell. but sometimes things can be genuinely useful. e.g., seeing a short preview of the actual post — and sometimes the last reply

that last reply preview won't be on as many posts as it currently is. it will also use other factors besides recency to determine which reply to show there (e.g., followed users, whether you regularly check the thread/have posted in it, etc, already seen that reply, etc)

it also lets you to jump to that post by tapping on it, which is a huge improvement from how things currently are.

The test layout looks like a design that might tempt users to only interact with the top several threads at a given time instead of scrolling more to find others.

maybe. i get why you'd think this and you could be right. i'd lean neutral or even the other way from intuition though, if it does have an objective net negative effect on people checking out other threads i'd expect it to be so small as to be insignificant.

the ratio is something like 2.5:1 to 3:1 with the WIP design, but vertical scrolling is one of the most frequent things we do when browsing to the point we don't think twice about it, and it doesn't really exert much energy.

it's possible that scrolling more to see more threads could actually encourage more scrolling and exploration, especially with the ability to better judge threads... i mean right now we just have the title. no preview or anything. this also discourages clickbait titles.

I remember our convos from a few years ago about your ideas for lowkey, and if you're still wanting to redesign the whole user experience to be more of a social platform than a traditional forum, then what I said above doesn't really apply haha.

that's always been the goal. but not at the cost of what people like about things right now. i think wording it like "more of a social platform" or similar isnt how i'd put it today though, given the connotations and potential for huge misinterpretation/expectation (like "algorithm") that it might have for some people.

One thing I will say is that stickied topics are still super convenient and helpful. I cant remember if Books Sxn even had stickies, but i think it would be cool and maybe cleaner if you somehow moved stickies in each section inside a dropdown or side nav menu or something. (If you dont plan on just keeping them out in the open up top, i mean).

It did, but the sxn is inactive enough that they're basically all there anyway. And yep I'm doing just that, and have been wanting to forever. We have some sxns with 8-10 pinned threads, its insane.

in music sxn we'll be replacing album threads with a horizontal scrolling list on mobile with album covers/titles, and pinned threads will go elsewhere.

other sxns will have a horizontal scrolling list of pinned threads.

Im excited to see more tests and updates tho fam. It awesome to see this place transforming in major ways after all this time

thank you man. for the write up, and also thank you for being open minded too! i seriously appreciate it.

and again also all of this stuff is going to be optional. im also confident that when most of the short-medium term stuff is rolled out — and especially when i finally get the f***ing native app out already — that 99% of people would never want to go back (except nostalgic reasons)

and again, just bc i probably havent communicated some things in this post as i could have done (and because some people can be quick to jump to negative interpretations and assume the worst)... there are no plans for significant changes to core features of the website (as it is today) that can't be disabled.

i mean theres still the option for "old layout" in settings lol

Artist threads will be phased out in favor of the above. People who currently maintain these threads will become “contributors” with special badges. Multiple people can be contributors.

When might this be taking place and what will it look like realistically? Are official artist threads gonna be locked? Why not just make established artist threads more official?

just saw this. i dont have time rn to get into detail but making artist threads more established and official is basically the point. threads are too limiting of a format. prone to being abandoned/out of date, updates can be in the middle of a 2k page thread, etc. also for smaller artists they can be missed and die out.

people who currently maintain artist threads won't be losing anything. we want to highlight ppl who contribute to them. still figuring out exact details on that part. there's also more features relating to diff types of accounts that i cant talk about yet.

artist threads that are basically chat threads (eg some pinned threads in artist sxn curretly) can convert into groups/chats. in the app your groups/chats are pinned to the left side (swipe right to slide open). will reveal more about this & iterate based on feedback from everyone when the time comes.

that was very reassuring and sounds awesome. looking forward to seeing how that develops

is changing the site logo to anything u want a premium thing? either way, really cool i just found out i could do that today

Yes it is

We making moves

More resources iOS app progressing faster and the full vision I’ve had for three years is finally coming to reality

@training

Let's go! Any chances of a Testflight Beta for the app anytime soon?

@ me famo when the Android version is done though

@op still need any ux help?

@scott where do I report a vulnerability?

s@​lwky.app thank you!

corner radius got more exaggerated

yeah ngl i'm not a fan of book section restyle