This thread is for rancor directed against the designers of Boing Boing. Rancor at one another is forbidden!
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Letās revise your timeline a little shall we?
- Lots of people made a lot of posts with legitimate comments which were ignored.
- I made a (admittedly knee jerk) snarky comment that complaints would be shuffled out (because thats what has happened before)
- rob dismissed my concern with a gif, the implcation i took of such was that he thought i was whining unnecessarily
- i made a bunch of other posts which many people seem to be agreeing with me on
- bb staff still seem to be ignoring comments and criticism (ok they arent moving posts to another thread, maybe they never intended to, maybe because they got called out on it. who knows)
- you chimed in
I think the change is fine and I bet in a week I wonāt be able to remember what the old layout looked like, just like I have absolutely no memory of what the layout was before that oneā¦
Through the beauty of responsive design, you can actually kind of have it both ways. The featured articles on the right are actually also in the left, in the order youād expect, just hidden until there is no longer enough room for the two column layout.
Shrink your browser down to 'round 800px wide or smaller and the featured articles drop into the left hand feed where they should. Viewing boingboing on a phone, shrinking your browser width, increasing the zoom a few times (CRTL / +), or subscribing to the RSS feed will all result in much the same experience you are used to.
My issue with the headlines is that Maggie posts a lot of rich science and quirky things. Without a sentence or two Iām not sure which one Iām dealing with. Is this a deep piece on tapwater or something similar to her thing on Godzillaās urine? āClick to find outā isnāt going to do it for me and I both enjoy her work and trust her. This doesnāt have to be a finely crafted bespoke two sentence summary but just the first two sentences from the article.
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Not so empty, apparently, considering how eager you seem to be to boil everything I said down to that and ignore everything else as not valuable or useful. That dismissive attitude is also not as encouraging as you seem to think.
If you think my cynicism is empty, you could defuse it by addressing the points. Honestly, if most of us were against this redesign, conceptually, not in fine details, do you see yourselves changing your minds and going back on it, despite all the work that clearly went into it that would be for nothing? If so, say so. If not, itās worth knowing that too. Itās like I was trying to illustrate in the part you decided was worth ignoring: Information, either way, helps people decide what to do with our time. If thereās a chance we can alter the outcome, we can decide to focus on that. If thereās not, we can more quickly move on and either make the best of a bad situation by suggesting tweaks, or try to find other sites that meet our needs better. And for the record, Iād respect the site a hell of a lot more if they DID just say āItās not going to change, except in fine details, deal with it and help us with those details,ā assuming thatās the truth, and that is what your post, that I paraphrased, seemed to say. Again, if Iām incorrect, say so, itāll do us both good. But pretending that youāre open-minded about it when youāre not doesnāt do any of us any good, nor does explicitly dismissing criticism because you think theyāre looking at things with a filter of āempty cynicism.ā
The cynicism will never be empty if you keep feeding it.
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- I really like the features now get a lot more attention. The web needs more well-written medium/long-form articles, and focussing on those makes sense.
- However, it really is hard to notice the new content. I donāt know how this can be dealt with.
- You can dismiss it, but the criticism that teasers like the one on Maggieās article look like click-bait are completely valid. If the features are so important, canāt you give them a little more room to describe themselves? I realized, after all this discussion, that I hadnāt click on Maggieās article this morning, and yet I always love Maggieās articles. Looking back, I see not that I didnāt click on it because it looks like click-bait.
(And finally, 4, thereās still a bug(?) that the Tom the Dancing Bug post never showed up on the main page.)
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You can reasonably answer āyesā to that question even if the article is a quality article. If the article doesnāt match the expectations set by the āclickbaitā headline, then you were hooked. Also, if youāre reading the underlying article in order to know whether you were hooked or not, thereās a high likelyhood that you have been hooked.
There is a separate issue of āclickbaitā articles which are basically thinly-disguised trollies designed to get a rise out of people so that the article gets spread around socially and gains a lot more views. But in the context of the front page, thatās clearly not the issue.
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Regarding the test post just now (comments are closed there, but I think itās applicable) Submitted with love and respect for our beloved boingboing:
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Oh, come on.
You more or less say that this current design is what weāre basically getting, with maybe some tuning added to it, but that the Good, Old Days are gone and we wonāt get them back, no matter what happens. If thatās not what you meant when you wrote:
ā[ā¦] in the long run that a lot of the thoughts here will be used to refine the implementation, even if the basic concept of it is unchanged [emphasis added],ā
I encourage you to say so. It certainly reads as such, and you do realise, that many of us have seen such pronouncements before, and thatās been - without fail - what they mean.
The problem simply is that what some of us want and what you want - as evinced by e.g. the present front page - are so diametrically opposite that there is no tuning that to anything thatās going to make us both happy, and Iām betting dollars to donuts it wonāt be you whoās going to be left unsatisfied. Itās not empty cynicism to realise that, and to dismiss the criticisms because of that seems disingenuous to say the least.
It would be like me meeting a nice guy with whom I got along brilliantly, wanting to date him, and and then finding out that even though he liked me too, he was gay. Now we could ārefine that implementationā for as long as we wanted, but as long as I wasnāt going to spontaneously grow a penis we just wouldnāt bee able to get to a place where we both would be satisfied.
And itās not a question of āthe failure of a design to communicate how it worksā. (That sounds awfully lot like saying that those of us who dislike this new design just donāt āget itā. A bit patronising, donāt you think?) The design bloody well shouts at the top of its voice, I just donāt like what itās saying and how itās saying it.
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Yeah, when I flip between the new design and http://boingboing.net/page/1 itās a no-brainer. The new design is cluttered, confusing and a drudgery.
I started actually skimming through headlines and actually understanding what I was looking at here at the old design: http://boingboing.net/page/1
I stopped myself from enjoying boingboing.net and then went back to the old design to compare. Yep, with the new design I feel like Iām just looking at a bunch of square, grey blobs of jumbled text. Itās a downgrade in design, usability and enjoyability. Trash it.
Here is the solution:
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So it wasnāt a throwaway joke, it was something that you actually thought might happen? If so, and if thatās a real concern, then thatās a very valid criticism of BoingBoing in general (though not so much of the redesign). Iām not sure when this happened before.
I looked through the thread and saw lots of criticism, much of which I agreed with. What I didnāt do was pay a whole lot of attention to your contribution, because you came across as a crazy self-aggrandizing conspiracy theorist early on (again, if they have a real habit of moving posts that are critical out of a thread in order to hide the criticism then itās not conspiracy theorizing, Iāve just never experienced that and it strikes me as very out-of-character). You responded to a post that was dismissive of your silly joke - if it was a silly joke - as dismissive of all criticism; or you responded to a post that was dismissive of your very serious complaint about stifling opinions on these message boards as if it were dismissive of criticisms of the design of the site.
Iāve reread your post, Robās reply, and our subsequent back-and-forth. If trying to hide criticism is a practice on there boards, Iād be interested in hearing about it (though it seems like we should take that to a separate thread as it is pretty far off topic for this one). Otherwise, your insistence that I have no right to speak up about your earlier posts the thread without first reading all your subsequent posts is of no interest to me.
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He sees, he knows what your are saying, and he knows he is doing ti intentionally. He has played this game pf pretending he is clueless about click bait for months now.
I completely agree. Maybe Iām getting old but too much crap on the screen and my eyes glaze over.
I find myself latching onto simplified web designs. Linear and less busy = less time spent on the website trying to figure out what content I want to readā¦which is probably the exact opposite of what advertisers want.
The great thing about the internet is there are always new websites that fill the void when something stops working well. Sorry BB.
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I guess having visited Huffington Post and other news/blog/whatever sites, Iāve seen lots of headlines that I thought were actively trying to mislead about the content of the underlying story to get people who wouldnāt be interested in the content to click through. Thatās what Iād call āclickbait.ā
At any rate, Iām being pointlessly pedantic here. Iām defending Robās definition of Clickbait (as relating to the quality of the underlying story) as a reasonable (if not absolute) definition of the term (yours is reasonable as well, his resonates more with me). The real issue is that there is no meaningful description of the story beneath the headline and the image, and I agree with you that is a bad thing, so I should probably shut up about it.
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Hey Rob, might be worthwhile to provide that full RSS link next to the ātraditional reverse-chronological blog versionā link in the original post. The feed most of us use changed as per OPās objection with the redesign, and your BBS reply is the only place I was able to find the full feed again.
If you implement just one thing, at least implement a paragraph of the story under the headline. This is by far the biggest issue with your readers.
I think this issue can be quite reliably distinguished from kneejerking as useful criticism.
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Have a look at some of the game of thrones/tv complaint threads, specifically here and here. Moving complaints away from threads so that they can pretend they donāt exist
Thatās a feature.
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