Slashdot redesign is now in beta | Hacker News Reader

Slashdot redesign is now in beta

beta.slashdot.org

It looks... okay. I'll leave the technical issues (such as non-responsive elements) to people with more skill to critique them.

My main issue with the redesign is that it's too generic. It doesn't look that much different than any other site. My personal preference would be something very much like this new design but that incorporates more of the signature things that make Slashdot look like, well, Slashdot.

A good example of a site that pulls this off is reddit. Reddit actually looks quite a bit different from the way it did when it launched, but it still looks like reddit. I think this is primarily because reddit doesn't like launching "THE" new design every once in a while. Its strategy is more of constantly tweaking the look of the site. I think Slashdot should take this approach.

I mean, that's nice and all. But Slashdot, in design terms, has been locked in the past for so long without incremental design updates - it's likely that anything more than very simple cosmetics would be perceived as a radical change (much like this).

If Slashdot would have been doing incremental design changes like Reddit, then possibly this beta wouldn't look "unlike" Slashdot. It's just that they are attempting to radically catch up or risk being left a relic of Web 1.0 forever.

Slashdot's previous design changes have always, for me, made the experience worse, not better - so I for one appreciate this new direction and welcome our new /. design overlords.

I had the same response. It's 'nice', but it looks washed-out and generic. There's no part of the design that looks like a signature difference. The colour scheme seems to have moved from 'bold and clear' to 'gentle pastel'.

Personally, I like 'authentically digital' as a web design ethic, but I can't wait for 'flat' to be superceded by the next fad.

Can someone tell me why the images are fading in on the homepage on desktop? Is that a performance enhancement? bandwidth saving?

Is that for help mobile browser, it's just weird to me, I just want to see the image and it seems to be affecting my scroll at times.

Longtime /. user here, and this redesign will probably kill the site...not that it's as healthy as it used to be.

I'm not being melodramatic here, but it's crystal clear that Dice have no idea what /. is about.

At least HN and Ars haven't been ruined by PHB's.

Agreed. That commenting system looks so bad. I don't know what they were thinking.

As opposed to the old commenting system? If slashdot would have just stayed with the original commenting system (which didn't look much unlike HN), they would have likely stayed relevant. I don't think this beta does any more harm than previous design efforts.

Just because I'm not a fan of the new commenting system, doesn't mean I like the old one. I certainly don't. But I definitely prefer the old system to the new one.

What are they trying to fix?

Maybe they have a requirements document somewhere that defines the goals of this redesign, but I don't see anything like it on their blog post. Just a couple of hand-wavy statements that don't describe the changes in any level of detail.

If they can't tell us their goals and how the changes achieve those goals, all I can do is take the changes at face value which is basically too much white-space and reduced functionality for reading comments.

Also not happy about the reliance on googleapis - as far as I can tell, every significant amount of javascript added to slashdot over the years has been of questionable usability at best. Maybe it is nicer under the hood, but from the user's perspective all they've done is add complexity without any corresponding improvement of the user experience.

Slashdot has never been a beautiful website. I remember the previous redesign - it made the site look a bit different, but it was essentially the same. (And the html is not very pretty either)

However, Slashdot has also always been about the discussion, so a lack of prettiness is easily forgiven. I feel that this redesign fails on this count, since the new design while being still average, it makes the discussion page less usable. Instead of the wide discussion page that made it easier to navigate large threaded discussions, you now have a narrower page that makes the comments feel like an added afterthought.

Looks a couple years behind but my main criticism is of those images. In most cases, they appear largely irrelevant but are quite visually dominating and not strongly tied to their respective stories. I instinctively check the note beneath it for a clue as to which story it relates to and see just the image credit.

It seems like they're using images for the sake of it and the end result is less useful information in each screenful of content.

Imagine if Hacker News put in an image like that every 5-10 headlines!

Reminds me of Google Plus's War on Words.

I Twitter-whinged about this a few weeks ago, except I used an Ars Technica story as the example.[1]

I think it's a case of "everyone else is doing it, so we should, too!" Or maybe I'm completely underestimating the "oooh, shiny!" effect on a website's average visit duration.

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1. https://twitter.com/areuugee/status/380384096762867712/photo...

Slashdot should be imitating HN or Reddit's design. Liberal usage of whitespace is NOT a good idea for news aggregators. (too slow to scan content)

I'm surprised Reddit doesn't offer a service where you can have your own "clone" of Reddit (similar to how you can pay for a white label Stackoverflow subdomain). Like a SaaS replacement of vBulletin or PHPBB.

> similar to how you can pay for a white label Stackoverflow subdomain

[citation needed]

You cannot pay for a white label subdomain. You can however license the engine for internal use only (but pricing makes it only make sense for large institutions).

citation: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/16054/is-the-stack-e...

It looks like at one point, they did used to offer whitelabels:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/83591/how-to-run-a-p...

Sorry I couldn't find a better link on short notice :)

They allow you to just start a new subreddit. Or download the source and run your own....

Already exists (though a bit dead) http://www.reddit.com/r/slashdot

the reddit stack is open source (beyond their secret sauce anti-spam stuff) so you can easily run run your own reddit clone already.

It does. You can start your own subreddit, point your own domain at it, and then style it to your liking.

It's not super obvious, but the functionality has actually been there for years.

OMG they killing it slowly. The new owners do not get that the most important part is able to read the comments. I dont^wdidn't go to /. because each article had photo. I wnet because it filter news to news for nerds and the comments were informative/funny/insightful/interesting or just plain troll.

Poor CmdrTaco

Too much white space. Plus it looks more like a blog rather than a news site. Why go with only two columns and not taking advantage of the rest of the screen real estate. Sure it looks tidy, clean and it’s responsive but I can’t say I’m impressed.

By the way, what happened to the tags? I don’t see them in any article.

I gave up reading Slashdot* but I have started reading it again occasionally. The new design looks like any other blog; I might give up again if they go with this look.

Problems with Slashdot that caused me to leave: * Stories getting later * Less relevant stories * Stories posted with opinionated comments in the summary * Commenting got slower and waiting unusably long for a preview * Horrible moderation; e.g. add lots of irrelevant links to Wikipedia = +5; too many (un)"funny" comments; way too many meme comments * Anti patent stance with no understanding of what patents actually are

I don't see Reddit as an alternative. Reddit is where you go to waste time. I'm not interested in captioned photos, TIL or AMA.

Well, this absolutely destroys the commenting system.

Was the problem the design of the site or the community? I was never really a big /. user but from everything I've read, it seemed like the community was the main issue.

The community. Definitely the community. I used to be a frequent Slashdot reader, but moved on to Reddit.

Talk about non sequitur...

So to me, this is like a mechanic saying "The engine on your Datsun is rusted out, let's fix your car by painting it Ferrari red." I mean I just went to the site and it looks like Gizmodo or Engadget 3 years ago.

For me, Slashdot killed Slashdot. The editors increasingly did not care about editing the content that was submitted (and not just from a grammatical standpoint). I stopped subscribing to Slashdot's RSS feed just in time to avoid shit like this [1] appearing in Feedly.

To be fair to Slashdot, however, they have removed the "stuff that matters" tagline from visibility on their site (it's in the source).

That, and Hacker News seems to be about 3 days ahead of /. so it's kind of redundant to read it. Unless I want to learn about new keyboard shortcuts. I read Ars too, which is sometimes a bit behind HN but also covers different material.

[1] http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/08/26/0010239/the-greatest...

I started reading slashdot in like 99.. the editors didn't 'edit' the stories back then either. In fact, as far back as I can remember people have been complaining about the editors no longer doing their jobs.. which is weird because as far as I could tell, they never did them to begin with.

The community indeed. I'm still a /. reader, but I have to say, it is very occasional that I do not know what the comment will be before opening them.

Most of the +5 comment are traditional /. "meme" (OSS good, closed-source bad, MS bad, Google good, ...) and their counter of course. That has always been the case to some extend (that's /. DNA), but it has gotten to the point that it is extremely hard to find any type of information whatsoever just an endless battle of people throwing rumours (you would think that the majority of /. reader are board member of major tech corp), group-think opinion or unrelated info at each other to "win".

It reads now like a political blog for teenagers.

HN has great comment, to me that the closest to reproduce the /. experience of 10 years ago (although it could use a good flamewar between friends once in a while) But even the more chaotic reddit manage to show interesting comments on top.

I just looked at my comments and submissions for the last year. 12 comments and zero submissions. Before, I'd punch out 12 comments in a day.

The problem started with the lateness of the submissions...easily trailing other sites by days at times. I quit posting submissions because they'd never show up, despite being fairly interesting topics on other sites.

Then the quality of the comments started going downhill, largely a product of the overall malaise that fell over the site brought about by the rather mentally torpid powers-that-be that ran the site.

So they're going for the Lifehacker/Gizmodo/Engadget sort of look. Huh.

Doesn't seem responsive to wider screens, i.e. fixed width beyond a certain point and wasted space.

Images also seem way too big. Seems like they want to go more of editorial (de-emphasis on ratings, emphasis on visuals).

I'm reading some slash dot comment sections and although the jokes remind me of the good old days (hot grits, n*...) the quality stinks. That site is better left a 15 year old memory.

Slashdot, concentrate on the mobile version. Most of us read /. when we're in bed and supposed to be sleeping.

I do my sleeping at work, you insensitive clod!

I remember Slashdot before it went green (circa 1997?) From memory it was black & white I think.

Wasn't it only designed a couple of years back? They had that competition to redesign it IIRC.

I still frequent Slashdot - I'm not that impressed. I'm reminded by digg 2.0

Seems to be following all of the recent clichéd design trends. /. always had a distinctive style, and that's been bastardized. Not impressed.

Fixed width. :-(

Looks like Talking Points Memo.

Neat, now it looks like every other blog out there. That's.... good for them I guess, they're brand didn't seem to have much value of late. Seems like maybe there are better things to put effort into though

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