Slashdot Mirror
The Standards Wars and the Sausage Factory
Esther Schindler writes "We all know how important tech standards are. But the making of them is sometimes a particularly ugly process. Years, millions of dollars, and endless arguments are spent arguing about standards. The reason for our fights aren't any different from those that drove Edison and Westinghouse: It's all about who benefits – and profits – from a standard. As just one example, Steven Vaughan-Nichols details the steps it took to approve a networking standard that everyone, everyone knew was needed: 'Take, for example, the long hard road for the now-universal IEEE 802.11n Wi-Fi standard. There was nothing new about the multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) and channel-bonding techniques when companies start moving from 802.11g to 802.11n in 2003. Yet it wasn't until 2009 that the standard became official.'"
Mod parent up please!
We are the product, jumping from the shelves. What's the name of the store across the street?
Let's be clear who the combatants are: Dice vs. Slashdot users.
I have yet to hear anyone defend Beta. (If you do, you might want to post AC to preserve your karma. I doubt the moderators will be kind to someone who is so wrong.)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Oh sweet sweet Karma. Farewell. We had a good run of it, didn't we?
STFU about the beta site already, we get it.
That's because you are slightly less dense than the DICE overlords, who still don't get it. More protests are needed, until it's clear that the brass and not just the foot soldiers have heard us.
The only winning move is not to play.
Well, the users with mod points might not be kind. But there seems to be an unlimited supply of OT mods going about that are being applied to anti-beta posts. I'm sure the individual(s) doing this would be happy to supply some good karma to the turncloak.
..the Beta wars.
I initially found the protest against annoying and juvenile, but I'm changing my mind. Slashdot is its contributors. Look what happens when they cease to contribute.
Power to the people, motherfuckers!
Yep. How long before they come fed up with these protests and start deleting comments, or moderating them into oblivion? Please continue the fight, and also, pleace comment outside of their control here on reddit (where I may soon be moving to if classic goes away): http://www.reddit.com/r/social...
And Dice is interested in exactly one thing: their revenue stream.
So, if someone with a corner office has decided this will grow revenues ... then I assume they don't give a fuck about what we want.
If that means they lose the core audience of Slashdot and turn it into the next Women's World Weekly, that's what they'll do.
Beta does look like ass -- but corporations chasing profits only care about the profits. Thee and me, well, we're just the under-performing product which isn't generating enough ad revenue.
Which was more or less a predictable outcome the moment it got sold to Dice in the first place.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I don't like how beta was made (without serious consultation and requirements gathering) and I don't like the final product (site that no longer meets the needs of its community) so in this case I'm not eating whether I've seen the sausage factory or not.
FUCK BETA!!
Maybe it is time to head back to USENET, or maybe someone should make something functionally identical to USENET/NNTP except architected with anti-spam provisions and the fact that if a site gets known for uncontrolled spamming, other sites just won't forward that site's stuff.
Sigh. I do miss Kibo and Ludwig Plutonium.
I don't like the beta either and hopefully every story being full of complaints will help but don't forget to complain on the survey and answer the request for email based feedback too.
Survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/sdredesign
mailto:feedback@slashdot.org?subject=beta_feedback
Add comments to http://beta.slashdot.org/journal/634763/update-on-the-march-of-progress-how-slashdots-new-look-is-shaping-up
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
Hell no. And it's not over now...
The Beta Version prophets of doom swamp every story with predictions that everyone will leave slashdot and hyperbolic comments about how awful the new version is...
The remaining few who visit to read intelligent posting on critical analysis of tech stories get served up page after page of hyperbolic comment on how awful the new version is instead. They also leave.
The end
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
A little history of Slashdot courtesy of Wikipedia. What it was before It was destroyed by Beta. I tried posting this before but could not see it with beta. What am I doing wrong? I guess I will have to keep on trying until I can read it. Maybe that is why they call it beta. I am sure they will fix everything and everyone will be happy again. Tell me if you can read this. I am really upset that I can not see my own posts Maybe that is why they call it beta. I am sure they will fix everything and everyone will be happy again. Can you see this? I can't. What is wrong? Is this why they call it beta? I hope someone will be able to fix this because I am not happy it is not working. Maybe after the beta test is over it will work. It sure doesn't work now. I am getting even sadder.PLEASE HELP ME!!!!! The origins of the site now known as Slashdot date back to July 1997 when Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda started a personal website called Chips & Dips, which featured a single "rant" each day about something that interested him – typically something to do with Linux or open-source software. At the time, Malda was a student at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, majoring in computer science. The site became Slashdot in September 1997 under the slogan "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters," and quickly became a hotspot on the Web for news and information of interest to computer geeks.[4] The name "Slashdot" came from a somewhat "obnoxious parody of a URL" – when Malda registered the domain, he desired to make a name that was "silly and unpronounceable" – try pronouncing out, "h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org".[5] By June 1998 the site was seeing as many as 100,000 page views per day and advertisers began to take notice.[4] By December 1998, Slashdot had net revenues of $18,000, yet its Internet profile was higher, and revenues were expected to increase. On June 29, 1999, the site was sold to Linux megasite Andover.net for $1.5 million in cash and $7 million in Andover stock at the IPO price. Part of the deal was contingent upon the continued employment of Rob Malda and Jeff Bates and on "the achievement of certain milestones". With the acquisition of Slashdot, Andover.net could now advertise itself as "the leading Linux/Open Source destination on the Internet".[6][7] Andover.net eventually merged with VA Linux on February 3, 2000,[8] which changed its name to SourceForge, Inc. on May 24, 2007, and became Geeknet, Inc. on November 4, 2009.[9] Slashdot's 10,000th article was posted after two and a half years on February 24, 2000,[10] and the 100,000th article was posted on December 11, 2009 after 12 years online.[11] During the first 12 years, the most active story with the most responses posted was the post-2004 US Presidential Election article "Kerry Concedes Election To Bush" with 5,687 posts. This followed the creation of a new article section, politics.slashdot.org, created at the start of the 2004 election on September 7, 2004.[12] Many of the most popular stories are political, with "Strike on Iraq" (March 19, 2003) the second-most-active article and "Barack Obama Wins US Presidency" (November 5, 2008) the third-most-active. The rest of the 10 most active articles are an article announcing the 2005 London bombings, and several articles about Evolution vs. Intelligent Design, Saddam Hussein's capture, and Fahrenheit 9/11. Articles about Microsoft and its Windows Operating System are popular—a thread posted in 2002 titled "What's Keeping You On Windows?" was the 10th-most-active story, and an article about Windows 2000/NT4 source-code leaks the most visited article with more than 680,000 hits.[13] Some controversy erupted on March 9, 2001 after an anonymous user posted the full text of Scientology's "Operating Thetan Level Three" (OT III) document in a comment attached to a Slashdot article. The Church of Scientology demanded that Slashdot remove the document under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A week later, in a long article, Slashdot editors explained their decision to remo
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part!
I am not Slashdot -- I am part of the Slashdot community, and the community can go elsewhere. Old Slashdot was pretty good (certainly not perfect), but it was mostly the people here that made it great, and they were just guided by a sensible and intelligent framework (the moderation system was special), and a common goofy culture (Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman, insensitive clods...).
Don't feel discouraged, and don't think that this current Slashdot is the only option. New Slashdots can replace it because the website code ("Slash") is open-source. AltSlashdot is looking at getting this code up and running. Maybe there will be a variety of Slashdots in the future, who knows? In any case, we know that we don't need Dice, and we don't necessarily need the past history of Slashdot. New frameworks can be set up, people can go to a new site, and the electrons will flow elsewhere. In open-source terminology, we can fork Slashdot at anytime, and since Cowboyneal isn't an editor anymore here, I won't feel bad about leaving him behind.
DICE SUCKS. BETA SUCKS. FUCK BETA.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
What a coincidence, Dice thinks of Slashdot as another sausage coming from their factory, that needs to be standardized.
Yes, and in that briefest of moments, they epitomized everything wrong with society today. While we all talk about individuality and uniqueness, our economy is built on one-size-fits-all and making carbon copies of everything. Our houses, furniture, cars... pretty much everything we own comes off an assembly line. And the kicker? It's still more diversity than we're seeing on newly launched websites. Invariably, it's pastels, square blocks, and while it's pretty to look at, it's functionally about as useful as a flat tire on the interstate. Which is to say, you can move the car.. but you're not going to enjoy it.
The internet's standards and protocols were built to allow for a nearly limitless selection of design, every kind of spoken and written language, multimedia... it's all there. So why then, do the couple hundred people that hold all the money in the world seem to have homogenized into a single herd... charging like lemmings over cliffs while screaming "You're gonna follow us or else!?" Is it some kind of power trip? Some kind of collective psychosis?
I mean, how loudly do we have to say it before they get the message? Do we have to literally burn down their offices around them before they can see the people outside holding the signs that say "You had a good thing going. Then you fucked it up so bad nobody wants it anymore. TAKE THE HINT." ?! I am geniunely curious as to how this kind of disconnect becomes so severe without any warning indicators appearing. It's not like we haven't been telling them it sucks from day one. Do they not have focus groups? Did they not check their e-mail for the past, uhh... six months? Or is this an institutionalized case of confirmation bias and arrogance taken to a level in excess of that even seen in government?
I really do want to know how a load of fail this big happens. It's an excellent marketing study on how not to do it. We should teach this shit in classrooms.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Agreed, the little news blurbs on the page would be quite useless without the discussions.
In the Quakenet comments.
Sure, we've all seen our share of "___ is killing slashdot, so I'm leaving" comments over the years. Video slashvertisements, other "sponsored content". However, I've never seen quite this level of outrage before.
I don't think slashdot's ever seen this level of outrage. Sure all change is met with some resistance, but this flies in the face of everything most important about the site. Moreover, it has managed to do something I've only ever seen once before - seemingly unite the whole population of slashdot users in a common purpose.
What's astonishing to me is the total lack of response. That the head editor (is that timothy now?) is silently downmodding relevant discussion about the survival of the site, without himself posting anything speaks volumes to me about how the management of slashdot has changed.
Taco, wherever you are, you are missed.
Can we please spam the firehose with articles on this? Perhaps if we can get it repeatedly on the front page itself? Just post it and get people to upvote the story on the beta, rather than just on the comments.
The beta is bad at showing comments, so maybe if the headlines are "Slashdot Beta Sucks" ..
Let's be clear who the combatants are: Dice vs. Slashdot users.
I have yet to hear anyone defend Beta. (If you do, you might want to post AC to preserve your karma. I doubt the moderators will be kind to someone who is so wrong.)
Personally, I don't have a beef with Dice. Now all of the flaming "Fuck the Beta" posts, that's a different story. The beta is far more useable than classic mode is with all of these posts, so personally, if I'm going to go to war over slashdot it will be with the people messing it up -- and that isn't Dice.
I'm surprised with the amount of protesting under each story there hasn't been a response from Dice.
As a long-time (VERY long-time) veteran of Usenet, I'd like to point out that it's quite viable. The anti-spam methods now in place are quite a bit better than what we had just a few years ago. There are a number of newsgroups that are doing very well (including a lot of technical ones), some that are languishing, and some that are on hold.
/. appears to be intent on committing public suicide via this idiotic Beta,
supported exclusively by the imbicles and morons at Dice, perhaps it's
time to start migrating back to Usenet, where corporations can't exert
the kind of control they can here.
Usenet has a lot of architectural features that make it very good for these kinds of discussions: it is privacy-friendly. It's text-based. it's easily gatewayed to and from email. It's easily archived. (I have many, many years of certain newsgroups.) It requires modest resources. It's resilient in the face of broken sites and broken network links. It's bandwidth-friendly. It runs on relatively lightweight hardware. The software is mature. And so on.
Not that it's perfect: of course it's not, and I can probably enumerate its flaws better than all but a handful of other people. But it works, and it works well even when other allegedly more sophisticated mechanisms fail. I've long said that Usenet proficiency is one of the basic qualifications for system and network administrators: they don't need to know the ins/outs of NNTP nor do they need to admin a node, but they do need to know how to use it.
Since
Gee, who do you think has unlimited mod points and a vested interest in shutting down the anti-beta posts?
The funny thing is, as another poster pointed out, the /. editors would be the first ones to cry "Censorship!" if some other site attempted to silence *their* users.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
In A.D. 2014 ....
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the beta.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's You !!
Dice: How are you gentlemen !!
Dice: All your site are belong to us.
Dice: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
Dice: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Dice: HA HA HA HA
Captain: Take off every 'classic' !!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'CLASSIC'.
Captain: For great justice.
Them's fighting words. HAVE AT THEE
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Just change everything about it and it will be perfect! First of all, I found Comment Threshold and that is good, however the default should be 1, not 0, because otherwise you get some truly vile comments on your first pass.
Next, Comment Threshold is nearly invisible. if it was defaulted to 1 that might not matter but it isn't so it does, so fix it.
EVERYONE HATES LOAD MORE COMMENTS.
either autoload them as you scroll down, or better yet just fucking load them to begin with.
I kind of feel as though the walls are closing in on my a bit on the left and right. why so little text and so much empty space? Are you getting ready to do wrap-style banners? Please don't do that.
How about collapsing some of these posts? Commenters should hook us in with a decent title, and that is all we should see until we click it. otherwise, we just CONSUME page space for no good reason, and it makes the conversation harder to follow.
There is so much additional whitespace. This isn't a design/marketing website, and we don't appreciate the ascetic as much as you might have anticipated. a little narrowing of the gaps would go a long way.
They may well have *listened* to it. It was the fact that they then *disregarded it* that's the problem.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I'm not sure how long I've been on Slashdot... at least 10 or 11 years, I guess. It's been a continuous source of enjoyment for me, even though I've never been a particularly active user. Oh, I comment every now and then, I moderate and meta-moderate occasionally, and I may have even tried submitting a story or two at some point (I honestly don't remember). There have been periods when I left Slashdot for some time, when something else really caught my interest and monopolized my attention, but I always came back. I felt like I was part of a persistent community that would last.
Now, the previously unthinkable may happen... I may leave and never come back. Beta is that bad. I hate the way it looks, the way it works, and how it will affect all the things I love about Slashdot.
This is really sad. I never thought I would feel this way about a website. I used to enjoy segfault back in the day, and I remember feeling that loss pretty keenly. The loss of slashdot will be infinitely worse. I hope it won't happen, but I fear that it will.
Please, please, please... if anyone at Dice is listening... don't kill my Slashdot.
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Please learn how to edit
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
In this case, however, I believe their strategy is not a good one. If you alienate the commenters, then they will leave, and all that will be left is a stream of story digests with links to other sites. The bulk of their readership (all those people who come to Slashdot but don't comment on stories) will go to other sites (there are plenty that do a better job of finding and organizing links to interesting stories). The only differentiator that Slashdot has is its vibrant and intellectual community, which leads to interesting discussions, which in turn justifies actually visiting the site. Once the commenters leave, your revenue stream (ad impressions) will go away.
There is some truth to this. Slashdot users are probably less likely to click on ads than the average person. We are probably more aware of advertising tactics, and may thus avoid being influenced (to the extent one can). Slashdot users are probably more likely than most people to use ad-blockers. On the other hand, Slashdot users occupy a huge number of key decision-making posts in all the major tech companies. Even 'lowly' employees can have a huge impact on what their employer spends money on. I would also note that an ad is not necessarily a failure if no one clicks on it. One of the main purposes of advertising is awareness and branding. If you see ads for a given company on Slashdot, you will subconsciously become aware of them, making it more likely that you will consider them when making your next purchase. No clicking required.
I fully admit that it is difficult to quantify the 'value added' of advertising to the unique Slashdot community. I would hope that Dice has made this case to their ad partners; I guess it wasn't enough?
Actually it's not clear to me that's the case. The things I've read indicate that revenue coming from Slashdot is decreasing with time. But this isn't the same thing as saying that Slashdot doesn't generate enough revenue to pay for operating Slashdot. From what I can gather, Slashdot is a net money-maker... it's just not making enough money, and the owners want to make more. (If someone has better info, please share!)
Well, YOU may think you're Slashdot, but Dice thinks you're "our audience"
No .. Dice thinks that I am a statistic that allows them to sell ad space.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The beta is far more useable than classic mode is with all of these posts,
And with no beta, these posts go away, and classic is more useful again.
f I'm going to go to war over slashdot it will be with the people messing it up -- and that isn't Dice.
The /. community didn't stir up this hornets nest. Dice did.
Their stubborn silence with respect to addressing the communities perceived shortcomings with the new site is what escalated this to where it is now.
In the end Dice can do what they want with the site. Whether it has any value to anyone once they've finished remains an open question.
Managing a community is hard. If this was anywhere but /. the insightful comments here watching the "other" site implode would put the blame squarely on the sites management for failing utterly to meet the needs of the community and audience; failing to maintain communicatation about what the community wants and needs.. And then maintaining stoic silence and apparent determination to just keep on doing what they are doing in the face of rising outrage just stems to further fuel that outrage.
You just don't get this level of outrage from the people who use a site unless you REALLY botch it good.
This event will be a great case study in managing (or failing to manage) an online community one day.
...which is ultimately not very meaningful.
Beta does look like ass -- but corporations chasing profits only care about the profits.
You presume that the people making the decisions know what the fuck they are doing. I don't think they do.
Becoming yet another website of pablum without a niche isn't going to bring in any profits, the competition for the most mediocre site on the net is just too fierce.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
We've implemented a number of changes since the first October rollout in response to feedback. We'll be implementing more in response to today's feedback. I'm sorry we can't make all those changes instantaneously; our engineering team is small and flooded with work. But that's why the classic site is still available.
I can't promise that the end result will be to your exact preference; a hundred different people will have a hundred different opinions on how the site should look. But I can promise that we'll take all the feedback to heart.
Here of my own accord, actually. We'll have an official posting coming out soonish, but I wanted to let people know we're listening in the meantime.
Timothy has been responding to a ton of emails -- mainly the ones with bug reports and constructive suggestions. But our inboxes got blown up pretty well over the past 24 hours, and it takes time to consolidate several thousand data points.
You seem pretty worried about this, but there sure are a lot of high-scoring anti-beta comments on every story.
Also, we don't delete comments.
Here of my own accord, actually.
Ah - so, less official mandate, more masochism. Should have known you like the abuse :)
Timothy has been responding to a ton of emails -- mainly the ones with bug reports and constructive suggestions.
Can you define "constructive suggestions?" Perhaps provide an example or two?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Thanks for the reasonable response.
Some functionality hasn't made it to the beta yet, yes. That's a totally valid objection, and we're working to make it feature complete. My personal preference is to never lose functionality -- but at the same time, I'm well aware of the development conventions that say at some point, you need to ship. It's really tough deciding which features don't make the initial launch.
The main thing we want is a site that doesn't look old and stale, because that will slowly drive readers and contributors away. Or keep new users from giving it a shot. (Not necessarily new types of users.) Websites have to evolve. To me, it's a necessary evil. I'll occasionally use the Wayback Machine to check out sites I frequented 10 years ago, and it often strikes me how bad the old versions look, comparatively. They didn't look bad when I used it, but they do now.
Sometime's that's done incrementally, and sometime's it's done in huge chunks. We're doing the latter, of course. Unfortunately, we can't just think about what the site looks like today -- we have to think about what it will look like in three years.
First of all, thanks for replying. It's nice to know that someone in the /. hierarchy is paying attention ...
We've implemented a number of changes since the first October rollout in response to feedback. We'll be implementing more in response to today's feedback. I'm sorry we can't make all those changes instantaneously; our engineering team is small and flooded with work. But that's why the classic site is still available.
... or are you? Because seriously, I think it's pretty obvious from the feedback that the best thing to do would be to give the overworked engineering team some time off. As in, stop having them work on the beta. Because there is no way to fix the beta. The only change we want to see is the beta deleted forever.
I can't promise that the end result will be to your exact preference; a hundred different people will have a hundred different opinions on how the site should look.
Several thousand people--which is probably just about Slashdot's entire active user base at this point--have made their single opinion quite clear. Please stop pretending there's a debate about this.
But I can promise that we'll take all the feedback to heart.
Uh-huh.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
well from the comments your CURRENT userbase has the following feelings
What do We want??
"I'd like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some redesigns come with too high a price. I want to look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this.
[WAVES]
Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Soulskill? "
what this site will look like in 3 years is a 404 (userbase not found).
Why not update things to have proper Unicode support?? (maybe whitelist known sections??)
Allow the turning OFF of the pics??
Have a setting to SHOW ALL COMMENTS??
Have at most 4 levels of indent (and indent only like a half tab)??
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The main thing we want is a site that doesn't look old and stale, because that will slowly drive readers and contributors away.
Driving readers and contributors away quickly is a much better strategy, huh?
Well, if you don't want to completely kill the sense of this being a discussion site, there really needs to be a way to:
1) see if anyone has responded to your past comments
2) see if your comments have been moderated
Both of these things are easily accomplished in Classic, but I couldn't figure it out in Beta. Maybe I just overlooked the display somewhere, but assuming I didn't, will those things be worked in before launch?
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Frankly, the whole cut your head off and stick it on a pike is going too far. You think saying that to someone is even remotely appropriate? This is slashdot, but still claiming the want to look up into the lifeless eyes of someone and wave is shameful and you should pause and reflect about yourlife and what you are bringing to the table here. This site has been my homepage since pre y2k and your comment goes down as the one that made me ashamed to actually be part of this community.
Please don't lump "me" into your "WE want" asshattery. I'm not fond of the beta but please don't think your sentiment is even remotely appropriate, or that everyone stands beside you.
I can disprove you in one word: Facebook.
I wouldn't know I don't use it, and of the people I do know that use it most are using it increasingly less.
Facebook has also made an about face on some policies that the users got up in arms about.
Finally, as bad as you or I might think facebook is, when has it done anything so monumentally disliked that the facebook user community impoded on the scale that /. just has. Where every single page is complaining about it. Every update posted on any company page is responded to with complaint about the facebook change. Its Never happened, nor anything close to it.
Its always been sporadic grumbling here or there, occasionally loud but never anything at all like this. /. has always had its flare ups of complaints during redesigns, people displiking april fools, bennet haselton making it his personal blog, idiotic editing, lousy summaries... etc... but that just noise compared to THIS.
This is something entirely different.
So I'm not sure what "facebook" proves.
There have been a lot of great emails from users with tweaked screenshots showing how they'd prefer the layout to look. Some people have even sent us CSS/HTML tweaks.
But mainly, it just helps to have a detailed explanation of a specific task, and how the beta site prevents you from completing/accomplishing it. For example, direct links to individual comments isn't implemented yet. So, if you were to say, "Every time I leave a comment, I go to the comment link and bookmark it in my browser to keep track of it. The beta doesn't let give me direct comment links, so I can't do this anymore.' That would be something well-defined and actionable.
Regardless of "needing to ship" or what features are on the board, the commenting system is the ONLY reason people come here. Reading moderated comments is the ONLY reason I come here.
The dev team absolutely needs to ensure that commenting, reading comments, and seeing threads is FULLY functional.
The wasted space is annoying but livable... except when a deeply nested comment is only 3 words wide and contains multiple paragraphs.
The annoying pictures are livable too.
The fonts are livable... but some things are NOT.
Again, this must be heard: It is all about the comments and participating in the comments (writing or moderating).
Thank you for your time.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
For one, we drastically upped the maximum page width. Back in October, people very strongly complained that it was too narrow, and made the site difficult to use on bigger displays. So we fixed it.
We also reduced the amount of whitespace. Yes, we know a lot of people think there's still too much, and we haven't finalized it yet.
The original beta was also very feature-incomplete. We've implemented moderation, the ability to add replies, a number of comment navigation options, story submission. We've re-arranged some page elements to make them fit better.
You may not like the current design -- that's your right. But that doesn't mean we aren't incorporating reader feedback. I'm sorry if it's not as quick as you like, but that's why the classic site is still around, and why we're continuing to ask for feedback.