Already diaried! But I get to, too.
I've looked at the beta, poked around in it some. I think it's pretty. I'm not sure how much I'm interested in all the new added features, but otoh, I didn't know how much I'd be interested in blogging until I discovered that, either.
Many people are unhappy about the full new diary thread not being on the front page. Instead, a link to the full new diary thread is on the front page, plus you can filter it in a whole bunch of ways.
I think that's interesting; some people seem to be really attached to the idea of the whole shebang of new input being on the front page; the fact that the new format is much more agile seems irrelevant to them.
That seems a visual thing to me, to some extent. I have known people who never put anything away. They leave everything out, in piles. If you mess with the piles, they can't find anything. Otherwise, they're fine. They know exactly where everything is, because their visual memories are right there, like card catalogs, to remind them.
I can't handle that. I don't have visual memory. I have organizational memory. I have to put things away. I have systems about where things go. I work well with such. I like my hotlist, and I use it a lot.
So maybe that's part of the split here on the new front page layout conflict; some of us are system memory people, some of us are visual memory people. Something like that, anyway.
Slinkerwink posted an essay yesterday asking people how they use the site. I didn't read all the feedback, but I did note that a lot of people don't use their hotlists. I kind of suspected that...the hotlist is like a prototype of what DKIV is trying to accomplish. It lets you filter for recent replies, track other bloggers' efforts, and bookmark individual posts.
Apparently, a lot of people here are just kind of whooshing through for that in-the-moment experience, and don't want that interfered with.
Nothing wrong with that. But I can see how they'd not find DK IV appealing in that sense. Even one extra portal can be one too many for some people.
It really will change the community, this new upgrade. I'm not convinced that it will just make it smaller, though. It may make it more inviting for some.
I'm tending to see it as a kind of a blog mall with evolved interlinking. I wonder whether this could work without a pre-existing community wanting it to work. I'm sure this has been tried before, though probably not in quite this way. This isn't "Facebook Lite," this is more like a hybrid of blogging and Facebook. (And hopefully without Farmville, or else I really will leave!)
At the same time, I've seen so many other blogs evolve as spin-offs from this one, but never quite gain momentum. The fact that this happens suggests that we do need the option of having some distance from each other, and definitely some autonomy. But maybe we need to do that and still keep up the connections, instead of declaring war?
I don't know whether teh Rulez of Version IV have been discussed, though. If we are able to parcel ourselves out into various little subsets, with the option of interlinking...will the rulers of these little fiefdoms be able to make their own rules, to any extent? Because that's bound to come up. Will there be rulers? Will there be cooperatives?
Will there be people coming around instituting the same rules to all of these little places, with their unlimited diaries?
I kind of hope not. I mean, there's something about the whole idea that is kind of anarchic, just because there is only so much money anybody in charge here has to pay anybody to go around policing people. I think that's what I like best about the idea of Version IV, unlimited diaries, silos and all. There might actually be a lot more room to move in there. It could become less monolith, more horizontal, less vertical. I like that in politics.