a few days later...
Okay. As far as I can tell, del is not mainstream. It never has been. It's for technogeeks and web fetishists. Do you keep an eye on the top ten links? They're OS X tricks and Lifehacker posts.
... and fanfiction. (Sometimes.)
My hypothesis is that fen are the other main userbase of delicious. I mean, most fannish people I know have a del account or seven. Most of the non-geek people I talk to have never even HEARD of it, or if they have, they shrug and say they don't get it and they move on. Even among technogeeks, I think it's losing its shine (see this post about how no one bookmarks things anymore, for example). Fen still bookmark, though, passionately -- and that's going to be the case for a very long time.
The thing is, fen use del in ways its creators never intended, imagined, nor anticipated. We use bundles to impose a hierarchical taxonomy on a flat structure; we use punctuation to force a sort and, again, to impose a hierarchy; we have thousands and thousands of tags in our accounts; we have long, strange tag names; we have multiple accounts and we scrape our links and send them other places with scripts and feeds; we use it as an important piece of fannish infrastructure (newsletters, reccers, etc); the list goes on and on. It's not simply a place to store our bookmarks so we can find them later. It's much, MUCH more than that.
Worried is not necessarily the right word for what I am right now, but I'm seriously considering leaving del. I interact with it mostly through third-party applications -- I use Pukka to post links and an RSS reader for my network and subscriptions -- so when I go to the site, I go to do very specific things. Those things (the biggest one is bundling) are currently impossible because of bugs, and said bugs are low-priority.
I don't know. I really don't know. I don't think that my concerns should outweigh anyone else's. I know the del team has a lot going on. (I work in web development, so I really, REALLY know, and I don't know how they haven't just killed everyone.) I'm not even sure I know what my point is. I guess I am frustrated right now because I love this site and kind of feel my del account is a work of staggering genius, and I spent hundreds of hours of my life on it, and I feel that mostly, fannish concerns with the new site are being dismissed as weird extreme issues that are pretty much our own fault for using the site in ways it wasn't intended to be used.
And maybe that's true. But I still don't think it's okay. Don't you want to show your power-users some love? Fen are awesome. Throw us a bone once in a while, and we will do amazing things for you. But I guess I keep forgetting that Yahoo owns del now, and they probably do not give a fuck. Sigh.
Sigh. So, yeah, I don't know. I still haven't had as much time to play with it as I'd like, but I can't do any of the things I normally do, so what's the point? And everything else I do sometimes has been made very complicated. Everything takes many more clicks, which is the cardinal sin of interface design, and the click targets have been made very small, and the team keeps saying things are "lined up better," but that is not true by any definition of "lined up" I'm familiar with, and I just. There is a lot of awesome here, but the back-end improvements, for me, have been completely obfuscated by interface design choices that make things harder. At first glance, it looks nice, but I think I like it less now that I've had time to get used to it than I did when it was shocking and new. Argh. Del. I love you. Why must you mistreat me?
Am I overreacting? I do that sometimes. Do you guys have thoughts now that you've had a little more time to get used to it?
... and fanfiction. (Sometimes.)
My hypothesis is that fen are the other main userbase of delicious. I mean, most fannish people I know have a del account or seven. Most of the non-geek people I talk to have never even HEARD of it, or if they have, they shrug and say they don't get it and they move on. Even among technogeeks, I think it's losing its shine (see this post about how no one bookmarks things anymore, for example). Fen still bookmark, though, passionately -- and that's going to be the case for a very long time.
The thing is, fen use del in ways its creators never intended, imagined, nor anticipated. We use bundles to impose a hierarchical taxonomy on a flat structure; we use punctuation to force a sort and, again, to impose a hierarchy; we have thousands and thousands of tags in our accounts; we have long, strange tag names; we have multiple accounts and we scrape our links and send them other places with scripts and feeds; we use it as an important piece of fannish infrastructure (newsletters, reccers, etc); the list goes on and on. It's not simply a place to store our bookmarks so we can find them later. It's much, MUCH more than that.
Worried is not necessarily the right word for what I am right now, but I'm seriously considering leaving del. I interact with it mostly through third-party applications -- I use Pukka to post links and an RSS reader for my network and subscriptions -- so when I go to the site, I go to do very specific things. Those things (the biggest one is bundling) are currently impossible because of bugs, and said bugs are low-priority.
I don't know. I really don't know. I don't think that my concerns should outweigh anyone else's. I know the del team has a lot going on. (I work in web development, so I really, REALLY know, and I don't know how they haven't just killed everyone.) I'm not even sure I know what my point is. I guess I am frustrated right now because I love this site and kind of feel my del account is a work of staggering genius, and I spent hundreds of hours of my life on it, and I feel that mostly, fannish concerns with the new site are being dismissed as weird extreme issues that are pretty much our own fault for using the site in ways it wasn't intended to be used.
And maybe that's true. But I still don't think it's okay. Don't you want to show your power-users some love? Fen are awesome. Throw us a bone once in a while, and we will do amazing things for you. But I guess I keep forgetting that Yahoo owns del now, and they probably do not give a fuck. Sigh.
Sigh. So, yeah, I don't know. I still haven't had as much time to play with it as I'd like, but I can't do any of the things I normally do, so what's the point? And everything else I do sometimes has been made very complicated. Everything takes many more clicks, which is the cardinal sin of interface design, and the click targets have been made very small, and the team keeps saying things are "lined up better," but that is not true by any definition of "lined up" I'm familiar with, and I just. There is a lot of awesome here, but the back-end improvements, for me, have been completely obfuscated by interface design choices that make things harder. At first glance, it looks nice, but I think I like it less now that I've had time to get used to it than I did when it was shocking and new. Argh. Del. I love you. Why must you mistreat me?
Am I overreacting? I do that sometimes. Do you guys have thoughts now that you've had a little more time to get used to it?