Several comments about the switchover:
“This font makes my eyes bleed.”
“There is a practical limit to how much an individual is willing to scroll on a website before getting frustrated, and the DailyKos Beta goes well past that limit. Frustrated users mean less time spent on the site, which reduces the site's impact,”
“There is also the problem of readability for people like me. I have vision problems … I am thinking, what the fuck is wrong with Markos? He needs our participation.”
”I find the design extremely difficult. Too much information, bad layout, too much scrolling. And even though Markos says the font is bigger (which I fully believe), I wonder if it isn't thinner. The leading is too wide, the margins don't wrap correctly, and there's too much blank space around comments.”
“The simple fact of the matter is that [the last site] was better and more usable ... This site is not facebook and doesn't need to be awe inspiring. “
”I can't spend much time here because my eyes hurt and I get a headache after straining more than 30 minutes.”
Do those sound like a comprehensive summary of much of the criticism over the last two days? Absolutely. Those are also comments made about the change to DK4 in February of 2011. This is the same DK4 that many people are now hating on. People hated DK4 when we switched to it, and now we’ll only pry it from their cold, dead, fingers. But thanks to a combination of fixes and tweaks and new familiarity, those complaints eventually subsided and disappeared.
That’s what we’re focusing on now, those fixes and tweaks that will alleviate most of the trauma of a big site update.
Yesterday I wrote about our early thoughts on the feedback. After another day, I’m actually very optimistic and heartened by the response. I’m confident that we can fairly easily take care of about 80 percent of complaints in a matter of weeks. Another 10 percent may take a little longer, requiring heavier dev load. For example, some of the complaints about comments (confusion about nesting) will be fixed in a major overhaul we’ve got sketched out, but that won’t arrive for months.
I’m also pretty pleased at how well received the content creation tools have been. The biggest complaints are in the content consumption side, and like I said, most of that are aesthetic tweaks we’ll be able to address relatively quickly.
All that said, I have a couple of things I want to make very clear:
LEAVE MY STAFF ALONE. If you’ve got a bone to pick about deign or functionality, take it out on ME, not my staff. They follow my directions and my vision. I approve every change. So if you don’t like something, it’s because of ME.
You can write all those silly “Markos hates you” stories and I don’t care, because fuck anyone who would even think that, they’re not worth taking seriously. But if you take it out on my staff, then I have a serious problem with YOU.
What my staff has accomplished given severe limitations in staff size and resources is nothing short of amazing. I don’t expect you to understand that. You can’t possibly know how complex the site is under the hood, the tens of thousands of lines of code that power it, the layers upon layers of complexity, all of them essential to supporting this incredible community. You don’t have access to the site metrics, understanding just how people use the site.
All you know is how YOU use the site, and I am sympathetic when changes impact your ability to use the site as you are accustomed to. I get it! So what I ask is you give us time and space to systematically run down the list of feedback, implement our tweaks and fixes, and continue to provide constructive feedback.
Remember, Buzzfeed has about 150 engineers, Vox is approaching 100. There isn’t a site with our level of traffic and complexity with as small an engineering team as ours. I am in awe of what my staff has accomplished and will continue to accomplish.
STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA. Seriously. Just stop. There’s been a lot of dismissive comments along the lines of “Kos is trying to turn this into Facebook”. We are building a movement here. We can either talk to ourselves and stagnate, or we can grow beyond our demographic cul de sac and increase our impact. Facebook is a hotbed of political discussion and organizing. Why wouldn’t we want to tap into that? Society evolves, and we must evolve along it to remain relevant and impactful for the battles ahead. If that happens to mean tighter integration with social media today? Then yes! We will do that. If that means building a site that works better on smaller screens? Then yes! We will do that.
In the future, the web and the world will continue to evolve in ways we couldn’t possibly foresee, and that’ll mean that we will have to evolve along with it. The first version of Daily Kos would be woefully irrelevant today. We’ve been effective doing what we’ve been doing because we haven’t been afraid to change. And in the future, we will change again. And then again. It’s a never-ending process that will continue long after I’m gone. Because the day Daily Kos stops evolving is the day Daily Kos dies.
So anyway, thanks for listening to my little rant, and thanks for being patient as we work through the list of changes and updates that will make most of you comfortable with this new and—yes!—very much improved Daily Kos.