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

[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.