Zing!!
God forbid that complaints be collected in a single, accessible, public location so that they may be referred to later!
Pretending they donât exist would be easy: if we wanted to do that, weâd just delete them.
And, see, you werenât joking. 
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No, sorry. Donât like it at all. Canât find the comics, looks like every other damn website. Too busy, too messed up. DIDNâT NEED REDESIGNING. Silly peopleâŚ
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Comics will be back soon (tomorrow)
Iâll agree that a number of article headlines give the appearance of click-baiting, regardless of whether that was the intention or not. Just because you donât see it Rob, doesnât mean it isnât there. Or at least, that itâs perceived to be there by others. Instead of ignoring others who are saying that it is there perhaps you should give some thought as to why other people are saying that it is.
However, the real problem is the lack of any meaningful amount of information in the text body with which to decide if the article merits clicking on.
For example (and no, I wonât pick Maggieâs water article!) how about the âGoing Broke in LAâ piece. Apart from the headline, it features a picture of birds roosting on power lines and the text âAnonymous in LA comes to terms with the disappearance of his profession.â
So I know it is about employment problems in LA but little else. What is Anonymousâ profession? Is it relevant to me? Am I interested in it? Does the picture have any significance to the story? Why is Anonymous going broke? Canât he get another job? Retrain?
Whilst Iâve been a bit mean with the above line of reasoning, the point remains that I donât have enough information to decide if I might be interested in the article. A headline, a picture and a single line of text is just not enough.
I have more than enough to do in my day without second guessing an articleâs merits based on insufficient information. As a result, I am more likely NOT to click on an article if I canât understand what it is about or if it is relevant/interesting to me.
Iâd be interested to see your site metrics after the new front page has been around for a week or so. I have a suspicion that a lot of people will simply use the chronological link, even though the articles there have no more information about them than on the front page. I also suspect a lot less article click-through as a result of this change.
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Or from the point of view of someone to who you spoiled GoT, âletâs put all of the complaints over there so that we donât need to address them. oh and now we have the added bonus that no one looking at the main thread sees any complaints! YAY! GO US! NO COMPLAINTS!â
Read through those threads (which contain lots of moderator input, so are hardly being ignored). I understand and endorse their reasoning. And by that reasoning, your post complaining about them doing that and all subsequent posts, including mine on the meta-topic of how BB handles criticism of their design were moved to a separate thread, that would seem totally appropriate to me.
At any rate, this all seriously muddies the issue of whether Rob was dismissing a flippant joke or not. Since I have the addition context of understanding that your first post was not wild conspiracy theorizing but rather a joke - a joke that you were dead serious about, let me rephrase my response from:
To:
Oh for goodness sake. Your âcriticismâ was a prediction that they would sequester criticism to make themselves feel better. You may disagree with how theyâve decided to moderate discussions in the past, but that isnât even related to the new layout. I donât like the new layout, but I didnât like your post either.
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Hey, while youâve still got the designers in, how about a âdislike buttonâ in the comments?
The times Iâve wanted to reach for one of those.
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and dates on posts on the main page?
and comment counts on posts on the main page?
and more description in posts on the main page?
I think weâre describing close to the same thing, here. Iâm just saying the article doesnât have to be bad for the headline to be clickbait. Without any real information about what the article discusses, thereâs a lot of room to be mislead, and you canât tell whether you would be interested until youâve actually clicked through. It could be an award-winning article with the best research possible, but if the subject is something Iâm not interested in and I only clicked because the headline didnât have enough information then Iâm going to be feeling that hook.
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No. Just no. Iâm o.k. rewriting all my bookmarks to page/1 but when I return to a story from the forums⌠or want to go back to the front page from a story Iâll end up returning to the broken front page.
A lot of other people have said whatâs wrong so I wonât repeat it.
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We just need a boingboingspoilers twitter feed to go with the huffpospoilers one.
Ahah, see, this is the perfect illustration of the issue. A recap thread is for discussion of an episode of a TV show. But you would like the thread to accomodate discussion of something else: criticism of posting spoilers.
Moreover, you donât just want the thread to be about that, tooâan explicit component of your request is that other people see the complaints in a context where their topicality is suspect, whether they care about that tangential issue or not, but where a larger public audience is guaranteed.
But anyone who wants to talk about or complain about spoilers can just read the complaints thread, which is right there, active and pulsing away.
When you say you want spoiler complaints put somewhere we need to address them, what you mean is you want to put them somewhere other readers are forced to see them.
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My solution there is to go through and like everything else in the thread. Itâs a lot more work but some comments are so wrong theyâre worth it.
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I tried to like your post just now and I shit you not this came up just as I tried to do so:
Control-freakery strikes againâŚ
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Honestly, Iâve been considering quitting this site for a while now. Iâve been noticing a a lot of TV recaps (I donât watch TV much, but what I do watch gets spoilt by the recaps) and random images that are accompanied with a single sentence (this isnât memebase, come on).
I kept with the general decline in quality because I felt loyal to this site; Iâve always seen it as a site with diverse news that are almost always relevant and well written, even if that wasnât the full intention of it. I thought the site was just going through a bad phase, but now thanks to the new, potentially click-baity layout, this seems much more permanent.
Adios.
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I just feel that pushing the spoiler comments to a different thread, when there was a great many people saying they were upset showed a monumental âsweeping things under the carpetâ attitude.
Rob, I direct your attention to this comment I made a couple of minutes ago:
These points seem to be what most people are upset about, so Iâll ask directly.
Is there any comment on these points? If yes, say so, we arenât mind readers. If not, say so so that we can all put the issue to bed.
Dates: probably, like this:
Itâs important that the natural language style be there, because we donât want to just have timestamps, which is why itâs not day 1 stuff but rather a coming attraction.
Comment counts; perhaps, like so: Discuss (35).
Descriptions will generally be longer on features than they have been today, but still no more than a couple of sentences.
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Why are you fixing what isnât broken?
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tl;dr version of this comments thread may be found by clicking here.
