Comments

1
What are the odds Nick Denton actually admits he's wrong on something and rolls it all back?
2
And now might be a good time to stop trying to be more like Gawker.

Personally, I just browse the RSS feeds. I never visit the main page.
3
Oh, and: http://ca.io9.com/

Use the ca versions, which look like they used to.

http://ca.io9.com/
vs
http://www.io9.com/

No contest.
4

This probably has more to do with Google search algorithms rather than the Gawker "audience".

Resign is a "bad thing" because it undoes the search rankings and hyperlinks that score high... which is why you see lots of high traffic sites stuck in 2005, 2006 and no updates.
5
@3 Thanks! It's so beautiful and my notifications are right where I left them.

Why can't 'classic' mode look like this?
6
@5 because Nick Denton is an asshole
7
dude most of us just disabled the scripts you were using to track us.

grow up and stop being such a nosy parker.
8
The old design wasn't that good either.

The new one is just so annoying because you never know if its going to open the link you click or if its going to kick you back to the home page. It's even worse when your trying to read articles from your RSS reader. And all that AJAXy HTML5y "Lets look like an app!" stuff they added is just dumb and annoying.
9
@8 seriously? Compare the readability of these two:

http://ca.io9.com/5794115/wonder-woman-p…

&

http://www.io9.com/5794115/wonder-woman-…

Classic style site designs work for a reason: because that's what the entire internet has decided is easiest to read. The same reason books--kindle included--are fundamentally unchanged in hundreds of years. Kindle is just reading a book folded over so you only see one page at a time.
10
@8 The big fail for me on the new design is trying to get back to the home page. Unless I click back two or three times it just reloads the article. That and it can't handle different sized browser windows. The home column gets cut off.
11
I like that Denton keeps insisting that the public numbers from their own stats are "broken", and that they're all wrong. So something's wrong with a Gawker site, and instead of taking steps to fix it, Nick Denton's talking shit about the people pointing out what's wrong. Par for the fucking course, and why I left the Gawkerverse with the redesign.
12
Nick Denton needs to read something, anything, by Jakob Nielsen. Bad design drives users away, usually before they even click below the "fold." And they can't even articulate why they can't stand the design.

Maybe the bad design is simply highlighting Gawker's lack of content, but I never see anything I want to read over there anymore.
13
Yeah, I gave up on Fleshbot after they finally applied the redesign to it. Usability of the new format is absolutely shit.
14
@9, neither of those pages is readable at all. They're both about Wonder Woman and her embarrassing costume.
15
Do we know who's brother-in-law, or other connected insider, got the contract to do the re-design? Most of the times that I have seen any functional website go through a major re-design, the culprit has been some hire that insisted on dumping his predecessor's invariably "shitty code" and replacing it with his own.
And then not putting a single fucking comment in the new code.
Or care what existing users think about it.
16
The best part of what Gawker sites were is now the worst part. The comments are a mess; you can't tell who's replying to whom, and all the good commenters have left for other sites. It also doesn't help that they've gone to heavy-handed policies regarding comments, with anything the editors don't like or agree with being banished to #stupid, #trollpatrol or #offtopic threads.

The articles have gone to shit, too, either having been cut to Twitter-like blurbs with just a link to an article, or complete copy-and-paste jobs of almost entire articles.
17
I'd also like to see The Atlantic's own visitor numbers since the departure of Andrew Sullivan.

In passing, I used to buy The Atlantic at the airport as in-flight reading material, but made a decision never to give them any of my money again after the interview with Freeman Dyson a few months back where they insinuated that he probably only thinks the way he does about global warming because he's old, which means his brain is probably riddled with undiagnosed altzheimers.
18
I considered the Gawker redesign like the increase in cigarette taxes -- reason enough to quit.
19
I used to be a fan of Jezebel, checking it several times a day, but the redesign has only highlighted how marginal their content really is.

In the old format, I could quickly scan the 1 out of 10 or so posts I really wanted to read, now, with only the headline available, I've just given up. Sites like the Daily Beast and HuffPo are ugly as sin, but much more friendly to the browsing reader.
20
I think this is one of those rare moments where Schadenfreude is justified and delicious.
21
This one amazed me:

"Nick Denton wrote in to argue that the site's internal tracker has been broken for two months."

Here Nick, let me fix that for you: your entire media empire has been broken for months. Have fun being poor.
22
@21 Seriously. So he's denying his own ineptitude with... his own ineptitude.

(Perhaps he could release these mythical analytics that he seems to prefer referencing in the press? He no doubt has them on hand for advertisers... right?)
23
I used to read both Jezebel and Lifehacker, but they're both so awful now. If I google something and a Gawker site comes up, I either skip altogether or see if the text-only cached copy is readable. Neither helps their ad revenue.

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