communicating about the How and the Why of this process
I think this is one of the biggest reasons you are getting such negative pushback. A very large part of the active and vocal Slashdot audience (the "community") probably share a similar viewpoint when it comes to change. Change for change's sake is bad, and if you want to change something that works just fine then you'd better be able to give me a good, objective reason. So far that just isn't something we've seen. What I see is a site that's been redesigned with two goals in mind:
Jump on the current web design bandwagon. For example: poor text contrast, gradients and transparency that slows things down, etc.
Water down and weaken the commenting system. The original beta made it clear that the drivers of this change felt that the Slashdot comment system was too complex and should be "simplified". Taking it to a flatter model with less information about posts and their relationships, in addition to "lazy" loading comments just says that your target audience must feel like "comments are hard, let's go shopping!"
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site [that is] more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
What exactly is it about the current site that makes it inaccessible? Which audience are you trying to reach? I'm quite serious -- knowing this may make it easier for people to accept change (assuming that the audiences you're reaching out to aren't "advertisers" and "market analytics"). Just going based on what you've said it sounds like you want to make Slashdot Yet Another generic news aggregator. Don't you remember Digg? That sad story should have taught you a few lessons about the value of a generic news aggregator and the results of alienating a community.
Will the new site finally support (even a small subset of) Unicode? Just adding support for that would probably make Slashdot accessible to more people than this absurd proposed redesign. No, I'm not kidding.
As an aside, how about you fix simple 2-year old bugs in this site's CSS so that things like lists work?
li { list-style: none }
That's not very helpful.
It's hard to feel comfortable with the drastic changes being proposed (or shoved down our throats) when the old new site still doesn't render correctly.
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site [that is] more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
What exactly is it about the current site that makes it inaccessible?
As a programmer, this pisses me off because Slashdot is a completely transparent, public website, that you don't even need to make an account for, and you can even post anonymously! How much more open can you get?! Apparently this is "NewSpeak open" (god damn it, now you guys have finally gotten me making 1984 references!:) Not "open as in source" or "free as in beer," but "open as in whatever we want it to mean to justify our position."
If you want to know "why" do a Google Trends search on slashdot. You see something that looks like e^-x, asymptoting towards zero.
It's pretty bloody obvious what's going on. A company has a unique asset, this asset is not making them money. I can sort of sympathize with this. You gotta pay the bills, right? So they try to broaden their audience (no quotations, I get that too). But as all the old timers have said - repeatedly - they only come to the site for the comments, and WE ARE THE MOTHERFUCKING COM
You see but you do not observe.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes"
The Why (Score:5, Insightful)
communicating about the How and the Why of this process
I think this is one of the biggest reasons you are getting such negative pushback. A very large part of the active and vocal Slashdot audience (the "community") probably share a similar viewpoint when it comes to change. Change for change's sake is bad, and if you want to change something that works just fine then you'd better be able to give me a good, objective reason. So far that just isn't something we've seen. What I see is a site that's been redesigned with two goals in mind:
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site [that is] more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
What exactly is it about the current site that makes it inaccessible? Which audience are you trying to reach? I'm quite serious -- knowing this may make it easier for people to accept change (assuming that the audiences you're reaching out to aren't "advertisers" and "market analytics"). Just going based on what you've said it sounds like you want to make Slashdot Yet Another generic news aggregator. Don't you remember Digg? That sad story should have taught you a few lessons about the value of a generic news aggregator and the results of alienating a community.
Will the new site finally support (even a small subset of) Unicode? Just adding support for that would probably make Slashdot accessible to more people than this absurd proposed redesign. No, I'm not kidding.
Re: (Score:2)
As an aside, how about you fix simple 2-year old bugs in this site's CSS so that things like lists work?
li { list-style: none }
That's not very helpful.
It's hard to feel comfortable with the drastic changes being proposed (or shoved down our throats) when the old new site still doesn't render correctly.
Re: (Score:2)
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site [that is] more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
What exactly is it about the current site that makes it inaccessible?
As a programmer, this pisses me off because Slashdot is a completely transparent, public website, that you don't even need to make an account for, and you can even post anonymously! How much more open can you get?! Apparently this is "NewSpeak open" (god damn it, now you guys have finally gotten me making 1984 references! :) Not "open as in source" or "free as in beer," but "open as in whatever we want it to mean to justify our position."
The Why (is obvious) (Score:2)
It's pretty bloody obvious what's going on. A company has a unique asset, this asset is not making them money. I can sort of sympathize with this. You gotta pay the bills, right? So they try to broaden their audience (no quotations, I get that too). But as all the old timers have said - repeatedly - they only come to the site for the comments, and WE ARE THE MOTHERFUCKING COM