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A comment on Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com. Parent comment

Re:Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com by hn_throwaway_99 on Friday May 08, 2020 @12:57PM (#23116862)
But, perhaps ironically, Slashdot was killed because its design updates made it more "designer-y" but much less usable. I remember one update in particular that added a ton of whitespace, gave it a "cleaner" look I guess, but it meant there were like 1/4 of the posts on the screen so it just took longer to peruse the comments. They also f'd up how they showed voting so it became much harder to just scan for popular comments and valuable discussion. I remember going to Slashdot pretty much daily and after that update just said screw this, will have to find something else.

Design updates can be useful, but just like for engineers, "beware lots of highly paid people looking for something to do".

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Re:Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com by ryandrake on Friday May 08, 2020 @07:09PM (#23120523)
Yea, I left Slashdot after The Great Redesign, and other websites too for similar reasons. It seems to be this inevitable milestone in any website's (or, generally, software's) life:

- V1: Focused, works, fast, lacks some features, but good enough to grow

- V1.1: More features, still performs well, exponential community growth

- V1.2: Adds chat, messages, social, loses focus, performance starts to suffer, linear or slowing growth

- V1.3: Start loading up with ads, things are getting worse, usage plateaus or teeters

[EMERGENCY! HIRE THE DESIGNERS!]

- V2.0: Huge, unnecessary re-design [1] without community input. Most features gone. More ads. Community craters. This is the Fark.com "You'll get over it" phase.

- V2.1: Saturated with ads, founders have moved on, site is on autopilot, a shell of what it used to be.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI

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