Similar thing with paypal's redesign
To be fair, if it was a project to get promoted it wasn't really a vanity project. If it was a vainty project I suspect they wouldn't have quite half way through.
> Really bad redesign for no reason at all, ending in a frankenstein solution of mix of old and new interface.
From the looks of it, it's just applying Google's design that is everywhere else to Blogger. While for many people here this isn't needed. But we're for the most part considered advanced users of majority of things we use. This seems like a change that would make it easier for people who aren't that computer savy and are used to gmail and the other Google products and want to start blogging.
It’s more likely that someone somewhere was told to drag the UI forward for some internal-corporate-governance reason. Blogger had a bunch of features that were clearly built in different “eras” and looked terribly mismatched, they’ve probably realigned some of them too.
I think you underestimate the number of people involved in these kinds of projects.. guarantee there were multiple product managers, a host of UX designers, engineering managers, and devs. It's much harder for a developer to get a thing like this through than a product person.
Not to promote snark as a primary means of comment here on HN, but this sarcastic little nugget of a sentence really had me chuckling for quite some time.
The Reddit one is another perfect example.
Both infiniscroll and automatically expanded images were possible with the old reddit by using a browser extension and the site still felt lightweight and kept the same look.