Notes on our new comment system

[news]

  Thanks to all of you for providing your feedback and voicing your concerns about LiveJournal's new comment system. Please understand that we are taking your feedback seriously, and will continue to evaluate this new feature. In the meantime, we'd like to explain the reasons behind the change and the greater impact this has for LiveJournal.

First

Comments

[archangelbeth]

I wish that LJ hadn't kind of trained everyone to immediately go thermonuclear just to get heard. The lack of response, the feeling that only a massive dogpile will get results, the feeling that the management is out of touch with what the current readership is using the service for (and what functionality the current customers paid for!)... It breeds ugliness. It really does.

From what I can tell, there were nearly unanimous "good gods, what ugliness is this? they'd better not be releasing that!" comments on a sneak-peek over... Drat, I've lost the link. But they had uniformly negative comments to draw on prior to this update, and still they rolled it out. They didn't have a S2 style prepped for the people who've been happily puttering along on S1 (Dystopia FOREVER!). This... shows a lack of regard for what functionality people want available, no matter how often they use or don't use it, and the constant minimizing of the outcry shows a lack of respect for the customers. It's practically gaslighting. "No, no, you don't actually feel this bad."

Gaslighting makes people emotionally unstable. But since there's a lot of outcry, showing that it's not Just One Person, and Everyone Else Is Fine With Things, instead of doubting our perceptions... It just makes us angry, and prone to use the Tourist Language Trick of speaking VERY LOUDLY in the hopes that somehow, this will get our point across.

If LJ's management would appoint not just a PR figurehead, but someone who could actually say, "Okay, we need to simplify the system for new users; how can we do this without alienating all you current users?" and dictate to the programmers to a realistic extent... (no flying ponies, alas!) Then I think that we could come up with some pretty reasonable suggestions, and make polite alerts like, "This has accessibility issues! Can you tweak the background to X?" Or "This seems to be overwriting custom CSS; need to take out the !important here!" Or "How about starting new users with the Simple Style, and put in a button that says, "Advanced Options." Or, "Lack of Subject lines can be very triggering. If you just have to have a "cleaner" interface to reduce perceived hurdles to posting for newbies... how about have the Subject line be mouse-over, like the other links? Or put a gray-text 'optional' in the field to indicate they don't have to fill it out?"

Or, "...wait, you made that Flash? But I have Flash-block turned on, and there's not even a way to click on the thing to make the Flash comments work, the way there is for YouTube and the like! Dude, no Flash. Flash is dead. HTML5 is where it's at."

Communication, accurate representation of the complaints without minimizing the amount of betrayal that many of us are feeling, and showing a willingness from the beginning to modify things to accommodate how current users are using the service? It could start to heal things. I think most of us want to be happy at LJ. We've got a lot of history here.

But current management needs to Get A Clue.

[buildsconsensus]

see, this was my argument. initially my reaction was just "wow, you guys really don't get it, do you?" and now i'm just pretty sure they care even less

but that's still no excuse

i understand people getting upset. personally, i feel like they have the right to be when lj has pretty much given them no choice. i saw a lot of level arguments. granted i also feel like threatening to leave a service you're paying for is valid because you paid for a specific service and no one really listened to any of the users from really any of the countries that use livejournal

someone made a comment about how rehashing the code is valid. it is. but there still isn't any excuse for the code can't mimic the old system with some upgrades. so, really, lj is just shooting itself in the foot here

having someone who could field our concerns (or a group of someones) just so we understand we're being considered rather than ignored would help sooth people out, and i agree that management has lost it's mind

[numisma]

+1 for your well articulated reasoning.

Thank you.

[archangelbeth]

I just wish I had the feeling that my reasoning would be listened to. Instead, I have a rather depressed feeling that if any changes are made, it will be because of profanity, screaming, and dogpiling.

*sigh*