Why, LJ?

[owlmoose]

Why? Why why why why? Why take away the ONE THING that made you better than other community sites?

I. Don't. Get. It.

Edit: And you know the really SHITTY thing? They only made the announcement on a Russian language community, a couple of weeks ago. The latest news post, from 12/14, makes mention of "changes to comments coming soon!" with no details. It's like they knew they were going to have to sneak it by the user base. Feh.

The change: taking away subject lines from comments. Which is vital for users like fic memes. It makes them impossible to read or track. Disaster for fandom, and you all know I don't use that word lightly.

Son of edit: Looking to leave feedback? This seems to be the best place.

Comments

[sarasa_cat]

Omg they didn't?? Did they? Wtf? Please no.

If so, it is time to massively migrate all the FF and DA fans over here pronto.

:/

[owlmoose]

We may certainly see the migration of kinkmemes etc. here. But thinking of all the history that will be lost makes me very sad.

[sarasa_cat]

I know-- so much history lost. :'(

This is truly the year of Internet fail. Google. Delicious. LJ.

[owlmoose]

Seriously.

...at least the year is almost over and there isn't time for any more fail? Especially since the SOPA hearings have been pushed back to January.

[sarasa_cat]

Let's not even mention about the painful stupidity that is SOPA.... >_<

The past few months of fail have really changed my mind about the kinds of tools that I will use for content posting/archiving when participating in fandom activities.

Unless a tool is specifically designed for fandom (ff.net, AO3) or has a very large percentage of its users in fandom (DW), I'm no longer going to be so open to the tool. :/

[owlmoose]

Unless a tool is specifically designed for fandom (ff.net, AO3) or has a very large percentage of its users in fandom (DW), I'm no longer going to be so open to the tool.

Yeah. It's becoming more and more clear that this is the best policy.

Look at this fucking amazing subject line!

[renay]

Re: Look at this fucking amazing subject line!

[owlmoose]

Accurate. (Although I haven't left LJ yet. Who knows, maybe this will push critical mass out the door.)

Re: Look at this fucking amazing subject line!

[stealth_noodle]

This picture speaks the words of my heart! What the actual fuck, LJ. SHIT LIKE THIS IS WHY WE BROKE UP.

Re: Look at this fucking amazing subject line!

[renay]

The separation is no longer just a break, it's an outright divorce. :|

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

Everything else aside, I can't believe how ugly it is. And I'm not usually particularly sensitive to layout; my standard approach is that if there are words to read, and I can read them, nothing else matters very much.

But it's still too ugly for me. And good lord, those rounded enormous buttons, and the plastic-and-jelly color scheme: do they want us to feel like we're in kindergarten? Or is it really true that, difficult as I find to believe it, that's the kind of design scheme that all the cool kids are using these days?

[owlmoose]

It's bad, all right. It reminds me in the respects you mentioned of the Google redesign, which I find equally terrible. I don't think anyone actually *likes* it, but at least in Google's case they wanted something that would work on mobile browsers as well as standard. An understandable goal, but a foolish one. I wonder if something similar might be driving LJ?

[cypher]

If that is their goal, they're failing that part, too -- I'm hearing a lot of reports from friends and acquaintances that they can't get anything from LJ to load on their mobile devices today. (Apparently the redesign puts a lot of flash all over the site? for no explicable reason?)

[unjapanologist]

It seems to depend on what style is used and/or if people implemented some of the unofficial fixy things that are being linked around. failfandom_anon and others look and function fairly normally on my phone by now, but the announcement post in lj-releases takes ages to load. It does a long and weird resizing dance when I click 'comment', and the 'add a comment' button is completely gray. Couldn't actually read the text on it until I zoomed in on the thing. When I click 'expand' on a comment, the view jumps to the top of the comment page. It goes back down to the expanded thread as soon as it finishes loading, but it takes so long that you start thinking something went wrong and go navigating up and down the page again. (Dolphin browser on Android)

[owlmoose]

I haven't tried it on my phone or iPad yet, but it wouldn't surprise me.

I can only imagine how terrible the icon picker must be over a cell phone connection, especially for those of us who have over a hundred userpics.

[liri]

It's TERRIBLE. I've been poking around the anon meme I use and I'm having a hard time navigating threads for my own fills.

At least DW's got open signups from now till the end of the year, but I'd be amazed if it led to a mass fandom migration. D:

I kind of feel like I should enter a subject line just because it's there.

Gratuitous use of subject line

[owlmoose]

Use it or lose it? ;) I don't see DW changing this any time soon, though. Especially not now!

At least according to that Russian post, the claim was that fewer than 1% of LJ comments included a subject line, which was supposedly the justification for taking it away. (My source for that piece of data is commenters on failfandom_anon, so take that as you will.)

I do wonder about the timing of these open DW signups... Clever strategy, if so.

Nope, don't think it would ever change now :D

[liri]

I'd seen that claim as well, and it's probably true, but the 1% of comments that did have them NEEDED them... I also loved the fail_fandomanon thread that translated a comment on it, including the gem of a detail "the new commenting system in default styles, that was beta-ed for more than a week" (emphasis mine.) More than a week!

Shortly before they announced the open signups I offered up a bunch of my invite codes, during one of the DDOS attacks, and I was surprised how many of the resulting journals had Cyrillic in their test entries. I think LJ's starting to lose some of their core audience, even if fandom's still clinging to it.

Re: Nope, don't think it would ever change now :D

[fiatal]

(this is penrynsdreams from lj)

Not to mention that if one percent of comments used subject lines, WAY MORE THAN ONE PERCENT OF USERS have used subject lines. But really, since when do we take away features that people regularly use? Why is this a thing?

Re: Nope, don't think it would ever change now :D

[owlmoose]

Hey, welcome aboard!

But really, since when do we take away features that people regularly use? Why is this a thing?

I don't know, but we've seen it again and again this year -- Google Reader, Delicious, now this. So frustrating.

Re: Nope, don't think it would ever change now :D

[fiatal]

Hey, thanks! I figured why not, with the open sign-ups.