There has been a lot of discussion about the new DailyKos design, and from most of what I’ve been a lot of people are not very happy. I am one of them. I’ve read a lot of complaints and have to agree with most of them, though reading this on a laptop I don’t mind the white spaces so much and I don’t really have a problem with the site loading.
What I DO mind is the way the functionality of the site has changed, and what I need most it for is now missing. Hopefully what I think has been lost can be restored.
It has always been my assumption that DailyKos was a site designed to elect Democrats. To discuss the issues of the day, provide a space for community organizing, and for liberal progressives to network.
That requires a SERIOUS set of features. It requires discussion. It requires the ability to network, and the ability to converse. Facebook was designed to talk about what I had for dinner last night. DailyKos was designed to discuss the nature and structure of the economy that allows me to buy it, understand the agribusiness in which it was grown, and learn if there are any harmful additives in it that may harm me if I eat it.
Therefore, it is NOT a site like Facebook by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t need pictures, I don’t need videos. What I want to do is READ and be able to follow a serious discussion about serious issues the way I could before.
I am also in IT, and work in developing successful websites for a major American university, and I’m sorry to have to throw shade, but this site and whoever designed it has no idea about what DKos was about or what kind of features it needed to make it better.
Way back in 1983, I started one of the first netzines in the world, called Netwits for CompuServe. It pioneered the nested comment features that DKos4 used to use, and most sites use for their comment sections. I know how conversations work online. This new site will not work.
Let me also say that many of the complaints that are being voiced today are complaints that I commented on in the beta version of this site but were CALLOUSLY ignored by the developers, intent on turning this site into the equivalent of Facebook for Politics.
An easy fix would be restoring many of the old features to the site:
- Bring back diary summaries so that you can get a brief understanding of a diary without having to read the whole thing before knowing whether it is of interest or not.
- Bring back headlines
- Let users change the font/text size/text color
- Bring back some kind of formatting to show how a comment relates to the comment it is responding to
- Bring back siglines
I am more than happy to help with a redesign. It would be nice for a site that brags about community to actually use that community to build the place we want to call home.