Oh, Livejournal.
You really enjoy pulling the rug out of everyone, and I bet you wonder why everyone hates you. Minus the supremely slick hipster site vibe I'm getting from the design, so far I'm actually liking all these changes.
There's a section that makes Communities easier (possibly) to advertise and browse, which is great because LJ needs its users to use LJ to survive. For a while my LJ usage was floundering until I found hogwartsishome, and with Community Directory so front and center in the nav bar, I think that could be a really good thing for the site.
The Feed tab will take some getting used to, but once I'm on my flist I'm back to the layout I know and love, so the majority of my actual user experience doesn't change. I won't really need Shop or Help, but My Blog leads to some interesting (new? previously hidden?) sections, like statistics. The Tags link there is actually super useful since I've just started working with that section for hh_sugarquill, so I like that it's easier to access now. It felt buried before.
The Post In Blog tab was too far to the right for me (but my monitor is also pretty wide) and not as intuitive as it would have been had it just been placed under My Blog, but the Inbox link is a nice addition. Again, it surfaces previously hard to find links based on, I'm guessing, what people primarily use.
From a cursory look, the rest just looks like it's been given a facelift. I'm meh on the design -- I really wish we as a society can move away from this whole 'light grey text on sterile white background is AWESOME' web design aesthetic; for fuck's sake, I can't read a damn thing -- but the old site was really old. From playing in InsaneJournal (which took LJ's opensource coding and never really added much more to it) I'm not so sure that I'd trade in the ability to edit comments just so I could have subject lines in my comments anymore. It would be good to have both, for sure, but editing comments has been really great for LJ.
But of course, no matter how much LiveJournal improves the site, it will never be able to stop angering its users. Is an email to every registered user so hard to do? Fuck knows I get emails from everyone else for the smallest tweak. Just warn us that shit like this is happening, and maybe, even better, tell us why you're doing it. What user experience pain points are you addressing? What hasn't changed? What can we do better now? What about the features you know we love?
If Livejournal acted like it thought of its users before it did anything, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't annoy so many people as much as it did. But the time to start reaching out was not last week. It was not even last year. It was years ago, when they did this first. Maybe even the second time they did this. But they've done it so often and so unapologetically that the reaction, by now, is Pavlovian. LJ changes something? Fuck, they don't know what they're doing; Of fucking course they did; etc etc.
Oh well. Right now, that's just the way it is. If LJ had had just one competition early on, instead of the five that popped up, it wouldn't be here today. They got lucky.
Us, not so much.
There's a section that makes Communities easier (possibly) to advertise and browse, which is great because LJ needs its users to use LJ to survive. For a while my LJ usage was floundering until I found hogwartsishome, and with Community Directory so front and center in the nav bar, I think that could be a really good thing for the site.
The Feed tab will take some getting used to, but once I'm on my flist I'm back to the layout I know and love, so the majority of my actual user experience doesn't change. I won't really need Shop or Help, but My Blog leads to some interesting (new? previously hidden?) sections, like statistics. The Tags link there is actually super useful since I've just started working with that section for hh_sugarquill, so I like that it's easier to access now. It felt buried before.
The Post In Blog tab was too far to the right for me (but my monitor is also pretty wide) and not as intuitive as it would have been had it just been placed under My Blog, but the Inbox link is a nice addition. Again, it surfaces previously hard to find links based on, I'm guessing, what people primarily use.
From a cursory look, the rest just looks like it's been given a facelift. I'm meh on the design -- I really wish we as a society can move away from this whole 'light grey text on sterile white background is AWESOME' web design aesthetic; for fuck's sake, I can't read a damn thing -- but the old site was really old. From playing in InsaneJournal (which took LJ's opensource coding and never really added much more to it) I'm not so sure that I'd trade in the ability to edit comments just so I could have subject lines in my comments anymore. It would be good to have both, for sure, but editing comments has been really great for LJ.
But of course, no matter how much LiveJournal improves the site, it will never be able to stop angering its users. Is an email to every registered user so hard to do? Fuck knows I get emails from everyone else for the smallest tweak. Just warn us that shit like this is happening, and maybe, even better, tell us why you're doing it. What user experience pain points are you addressing? What hasn't changed? What can we do better now? What about the features you know we love?
If Livejournal acted like it thought of its users before it did anything, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't annoy so many people as much as it did. But the time to start reaching out was not last week. It was not even last year. It was years ago, when they did this first. Maybe even the second time they did this. But they've done it so often and so unapologetically that the reaction, by now, is Pavlovian. LJ changes something? Fuck, they don't know what they're doing; Of fucking course they did; etc etc.
Oh well. Right now, that's just the way it is. If LJ had had just one competition early on, instead of the five that popped up, it wouldn't be here today. They got lucky.
Us, not so much.