I will not be able to participate in DKos4.
I have been over to the site on 4 different occasions and I am unable to navigate with any of the electronic equipment I currently own.
My PC flat screen is 21 inches and will only display about 65% of the width of the home page and subsequent pages, without constant scrolling back and forth. Using the "Zoom" function to shrink the display makes the text too small to read!
Further, there is so much "stuff" on the page that I have to constantly scroll up and down to read any content. Indeed, I am reminded of early web pages that tried to put every bell and whistle "right there" to grab attention with little concern for ease of navigation.
Trying to navigate this unwieldy behemoth on a tablet is just a joke.
Wading through the "aesthetics" of the site is trying. I am, first and foremost, a reader and writer. I want to read that which is offered without distractions, and being a very fast reader, I do not want to "hunt" for the text in a sea of graphics. Indeed, one of the first things I did on finally joining The Orange Party was to subscribe, to avoid the visual distractions of the ads and the effects they have on the location of text on the page.
When everything else is taken into consideration, this is a visual medium, delivering information in a rapid and easily accessible way. Anything which detracts from that fundamental principle is not an enhancement. It is merely boys, and their toys, run wild.
In the Community Diary from last week, one thing which jumped from the comments section was the age of the participants in this group. We are NOT adolescents, in pajamas, in our parents basement, gleefully in pursuit of each new trick or treat.
We are, by and large, the parents and grandparents.
With that realization, format, congestion in the display, eliminating general "busyness", and ease of access should be the primary goal of any changes undertaken. It would seem that re-design has taken the place of improvements. For those of us who created the "computer revolution" (from Assembly and Fortran, through RPG and Cobol, into C++) change, merely for the sake of change, is something we learned to avoid several decades ago.
Daily Kos is not Facebook, nor Twitter, and it saddens me to see the underlying philosophy of those widely used tools applied to a community that values discussion. Compartmentalizing participation is a lot like "Friending" isn't it? And multiple diaries encourages the same shallow analysis, and broadcasting of trivia as Twitter.
So, I wish you all well. I will venture over every now and then, but I do not see any way that I might participate in this brave new world without buying a gigantic new monitor or retooling over 7 decades of acquired reading and comprehension skills, to master something that seems to offer limited advantages to the existing community.
Please fell free to use this diary for you own "issues".