They asked us to give DK5 a chance, and I did. Now it’s been a month, and I’m ready to render my verdict. Using DK5 is like looking at the site through a cardboard tube, and I’m finding more and more that it’s not worth my time.
I’ve believed for almost 10 years that the Daily Kos software in its DK3 and DK4 incarnations has been very nearly perfect for facilitating useful and productive conversations at volume. “Volume”—meaning amount rather than sound level, though we’re rarely shy of either—is particularly important when a moderately popular story or diary gets 100 comments or more; it’s vital that we have some way to quickly find and highlight the comments we want to read and ignore the rest. In DK3 and DK4, I always browsed stories and diaries with the comments section collapsed by default, which reduced each comment to a single line of single-spaced text that displayed its subject line, author, timestamp, and number of recs in a neatly hierarchical structure that made it easy to see who and what each one was responding to. Even a modestly sized computer monitor was big enough to display a couple dozen lines at a time. The design made it a snap to navigate even immense comments sections with a thousand or more comments, find exactly the ones you needed to see, and—importantly—re-find them later if necessary.
With DK5, all of that is gone. The current lamentable trend in web UX (user experience) design is outrageously low information density, in the service of what is supposed to be a “clean” look and feel. On a site like Twitter, that’s an understandable approach to take; giant fonts and loads of whitespace aren’t going to make the average 140-character Twitter dropping any harder to get through. On a site like this one, though, it’s a disaster. Comments longer than a few lines lose most or all positional context, making it difficult to tell who’s responding to whom and to remember what the earlier comment said. It’s no longer possible to see at a glance which comments spawn long, convoluted discussion trees and which ones are mere cul-de-sacs. The loss of subject lines, which if nothing else at least gave us a clue as to what a particular comment was about at a glance, just makes comments harder to scan. When a site makes me work this hard just to keep up with what’s going on, it starts to make me question whether any of it is worth my time at all. More and more, I find myself coming to the conclusion that it isn’t.
The DK powers that be say that they’re listening to us, and I believe them. But while we as a community have made our overall displeasure with DK5 pretty clear, the fact that we can’t come to much of an agreement about what specific aspect of the new site we hate makes it unlikely that we’re going to see fundamental changes to any of it. For example, a lot of people don’t like the new typeface used in stories, or feel that the font color and/or the page background color make stories too hard to read. I don’t care about any of that. If we could have the DK4 comments section back exactly as it was and keep the rest of DK5 exactly as it currently is, I’d be happy as a clam. Unfortunately, while we as individuals may each have perfectly valid and logical reasons for the specific complaints that we have, the fact that we don’t all agree on what changes we don’t like means that as a group, we just come off as a bunch of crabby people saying it sucks change it back. That’s not to say that anyone is wrong or to suggest that everyone ought to sign on to my pet issue. The situation is what it is, and it’s why I feel pessimistic about my chances for seeing the changes that I want to see made.
Am I leaving? No, I’m not leaving, but you’re probably not going to see nearly as much of me anymore. I’m sure I’ll stop by to write the occasional diary (blog? blog entry? whatever) when I have something to say, and I’ll probably leave a comment or two during debate liveblogs and the like. Overall, though, I just don’t find it fun to use this site anymore, and with so many other information and entertainment options competing for my limited time, it’s hard for me to see why I should continue to spend a lot of time on a site that I now find annoying and kind of exhausting. Sorry.