A Soothing Frontend for the Effective Altruism Forum
By NunoSempere @ 2023-05-05T19:59 (+22)
This is a linkpost to https://forum.nunosempere.com/posts/yAbYQrmK82qLvuQcN/a-soothing-frontend-for-the-effective-altruism-forum
About
forum.nunosempere.com is a frontend for the Effective Altruism Forum. It aims to present EA Forum posts in a way which I personally find soothing. It achieves that that goal at the cost of restricted functionality—like not being able to make or upvote comments and posts.
Usage
Frontpage
This forum frontend has a frontpage at forum.nunosempere.com/frontpage. It displays the latest posts in chronological order, and looks like this:
Recent comments
This forum frontend has a page showing the latest comments at forum.nunosempere.com/comments. It displays the latest comments in chronological order, together with their optional parent comment, and looks like this:
Posts
Like the EA forum, this frontend has an endpoint for posts at:
https://forum.nunosempere.com/posts/[post id]/[optional post slug]An example post—chosen to be a link post so that you can see both the article and the comments—looks like this:
RSS feed
This frontend has an rss endpoint at forum.nunosempere.com/feed: it piggybacks off the ea.greaterwrong.com RSS feed, fetching and reprocessing it every five mins.
Further notes
- Clicking on an article's or on a comment's timestamp directs to their location on the original EA Forum. This is useful, for example, to go to the original forum to leave a comment.
- My usecase is just being subscribed via rss (using newsboat), and displaying forum posts which interest me in this new frontend.
- Other EA Forum alternatives known to me are ea.greaterwrong.com and eaforum.issarice.com.
- This frontend takes around half a second to load. The regular EA Forum takes around 5 seconds.
Nathan Sherburn @ 2023-05-11T05:40 (+3)
Love this idea! One small suggestion, HCI research suggests that ~70 characters per line is the optimal width for text [1]. Of course, you might also have a subjective aesthetic preference for long lines of text or a dislike of whitespace so feel free to ignore this :)
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234578707_Optimal_Line_Length_in_Reading--A_Literature_Review
NunoSempere @ 2023-05-11T21:29 (+3)
Cool link. I do like the thing as it is, but you can tweak pages' css with something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/styl-us/ on firefox (or something else in Chrome). If you do get something working, I'm happy to link to it.
Renan Araujo @ 2023-05-05T23:57 (+3)
I wanted something like that - I feel like I’m subconsciously more willing to read posts in that front end. Thanks for sharing it.
NunoSempere @ 2023-05-06T00:55 (+2)
Thanks!