Oh, one issue with the current implementation is that it doesn't seem to preserve my front page preferences correctly when I return later. (Eg I end up back with the cards or Featured)
Nice, I like this! One extra thought: the ordinary Frontpage has a lot of scrolling you can do on it which can be interesting to catch unexpected content. Maybe you could add this to the Featured page too -- i.e. after the main featured items, you start displaying other high-karma / new (non-community, but also not manually selected) posts. At the moment I might get to the bottom of Featured, see nothing catches my eye, and then switch over to New & upvoted, but it'd be smoother if I could just keep going down.
This would push the page more in the direction of "current Frontpage with some heavier curation at the top" than "entirely reworked and wholly evergreen landing page" though. And also you might reasonably want to discourage just scrolling.
While I'm not a fan of the redesign in its current state, it's cool to see some experimentation, and I'm glad you've kept the option for the old-style frontpage, so thank you for that!
I think my main dislike (similar to Caleb) is that the information density is extremely low, and a lot of it taken up with pictures that don't contain much content helping me decide what to read (a lot are generic rather than post-specific, and even if not, often oddly cropped for the aspect ratio). But I can see that it might appeal to others.
As a smaller point, quick takes are not very readable on my device (iPhone 17 Safari), and most.of the space allocated to them is padding rather than actual content.
Did you see there's a section in the post about negative value? It does discuss the first point you raised, that our intuitions about variety suffering aren't as clear-cut, and that it's not so obvious how we'd ideally handle these cases:
I at least personally get the intuition that a variety of bads makes an outcome worse. [...] My intuition is that Diverse Hell is worse than Uniform Hell, but I accept that the intuition here is less clear than it is in the positive case.
I'm not sure if this would just create other technical problems I haven't thought of, but one solution could just be to replace "best possible" with, e.g., "ex ante 99.9th percentile". Then you wouldn't have this discontinuity from changing the max, but it captures basically the same intuition?
(One problem is that it's not obvious what the threshold should be. But my guess is that when people are trying to figure out the relevant denominator for PVBPF they're usually implicitly truncating the probability distribution over outcomes somewhere anyway, since it seems very hard to reason about the absolute maximum.)
Claude also suggested something like a conditional expectation of the upper tail, e.g. E[V|V≥q0.999], which seems interesting but I've not thought carefully about.
Oh, one issue with the current implementation is that it doesn't seem to preserve my front page preferences correctly when I return later. (Eg I end up back with the cards or Featured)
Nice, I like this! One extra thought: the ordinary Frontpage has a lot of scrolling you can do on it which can be interesting to catch unexpected content. Maybe you could add this to the Featured page too -- i.e. after the main featured items, you start displaying other high-karma / new (non-community, but also not manually selected) posts. At the moment I might get to the bottom of Featured, see nothing catches my eye, and then switch over to New & upvoted, but it'd be smoother if I could just keep going down.
This would push the page more in the direction of "current Frontpage with some heavier curation at the top" than "entirely reworked and wholly evergreen landing page" though. And also you might reasonably want to discourage just scrolling.
Yep, I think this would resolve the issue! It would then be basically just an extra-curated version of the normal Frontpage, right?
While I'm not a fan of the redesign in its current state, it's cool to see some experimentation, and I'm glad you've kept the option for the old-style frontpage, so thank you for that!
I think my main dislike (similar to Caleb) is that the information density is extremely low, and a lot of it taken up with pictures that don't contain much content helping me decide what to read (a lot are generic rather than post-specific, and even if not, often oddly cropped for the aspect ratio). But I can see that it might appeal to others.
As a smaller point, quick takes are not very readable on my device (iPhone 17 Safari), and most.of the space allocated to them is padding rather than actual content.
Did you see there's a section in the post about negative value? It does discuss the first point you raised, that our intuitions about variety suffering aren't as clear-cut, and that it's not so obvious how we'd ideally handle these cases:
I'm not sure if this would just create other technical problems I haven't thought of, but one solution could just be to replace "best possible" with, e.g., "ex ante 99.9th percentile". Then you wouldn't have this discontinuity from changing the max, but it captures basically the same intuition?
(One problem is that it's not obvious what the threshold should be. But my guess is that when people are trying to figure out the relevant denominator for PVBPF they're usually implicitly truncating the probability distribution over outcomes somewhere anyway, since it seems very hard to reason about the absolute maximum.)
Claude also suggested something like a conditional expectation of the upper tail, e.g. E[V|V≥q0.999], which seems interesting but I've not thought carefully about.