the new delicious
Sep. 27th, 2011 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arduinnaFirst, and VERY IMPORTANT:
Everyone should check to see if they actually got transferred; I know at least one person who signed the agreement in the last allowable day or two whose bookmarks didn't make it over. (And now I've found two whose accounts moved, but whose bookmarks didn't. wtf.)
If yours didn't, there's a mailto link for migration issues on the contact tab of the Help page. Sooner is probably better than later for contacting them; even assuming Yahoo has held on to the old database for problems, they're probably obligated to dump it sometime soon as a condition of the sale.
Okay, on to the actual content of this post:
I started seeing posts on my droll about the new delicious and how awful it is, and went to look.
Wow, that's pretty freaking awful.
And all that is just on an initial poke around the site. I am just baffled that they rolled this out with so many existing features broken or missing. It makes the site effectively useless, at least for now. I don't understand why they broke every existing social feature in an effort to make it more social.
The one thing that does work is sitewide search; you can type a word into the search box at the top and bring up pages of links. But with the site's layout, it's hard to actually find anything, between the oceans of white space and only ten links showing up at a time anyway. And to get to them, you need to scroll past your own links first, then past any "stacks" that people created with that search term even vaguely associated with it (e.g., a search for SGA brought up four stacks: two for SGA fic, one for Darren Criss [because the URL for one of the youtube videos in the "stack" included the letters SGA], and one for Tanzania [I have no idea; I couldn't find "SGA" anywhere on the page]. Yeah.).
And apparently the new "stacks" function works, but even if I wanted to use it, the way the site is physically set up now makes that unbelievably painful to do. "Find three or more links and add them to a stack!" -- well, great, but I'm only allowed to see ten links at a time. Out of my thousands of links. The only way to find them is to click page after page after page after page after page, yet again.
Which has just led me to realize -- of course. They're going for page clicks over actual usability or accessibility, to look more appealing to advertisers. Awesome.
But hey, they're promising "buttons" and "badges", so, you know. Woo-hoo. Because that's what I really want on a social bookmarking site.
(Okay, I admit, I am an old fogey of a cane-waving dinosaur; I do not understand the obsession with buttons and badges. Icons/avatars on posts/comments to show who you are, sure. But images that exist just to clutter things up that provide no actual information? No thanks.)
*Deep breath*. Okay, I will attempt to end on a semi-positive note, at least.
After digging around in their fairly useless FAQ and Help pages (and the useless blog where I suspect they're screening all comments, because there's no way the userbase hasn't left them hundreds of angry messages so far), I did find something that indicated they're aware that the site is mostly broken and useless, although they don't use those terms.
Under the Help page's "Transition from Yahoo" section, they say this:
So. Yeah. Every existing social and useful function is broken, but in theory they're working on it. We'll see.
The hell of it is, Delicious was the best place for actual shared bookmarking; the subscriptions and network were great ways to find things to read/watch/do. Pinboard is good for bookmarking, but not so good for following other people/tags. Likewise Diigo -- sort of fabulous for bookmarking, actually, but while you can follow other people, there doesn't seem to be any way to follow tags to get a steady, sitewide stream of what you want. Tumblr is great for a sitewide stream on any tag you want, but it's far more likely to be pictures or random quotes than links to fanworks or discussions.
I guess for now I'll wait it out and see if they can manage to get the site fixed to a level where it's at least functional again -- and meanwhile I'll start copying my last year's worth of bookmarks over to pinboard, just in case.
Everyone should check to see if they actually got transferred; I know at least one person who signed the agreement in the last allowable day or two whose bookmarks didn't make it over. (And now I've found two whose accounts moved, but whose bookmarks didn't. wtf.)
If yours didn't, there's a mailto link for migration issues on the contact tab of the Help page. Sooner is probably better than later for contacting them; even assuming Yahoo has held on to the old database for problems, they're probably obligated to dump it sometime soon as a condition of the sale.
Okay, on to the actual content of this post:
I started seeing posts on my droll about the new delicious and how awful it is, and went to look.
Wow, that's pretty freaking awful.
- Clicking your name doesn't bring you to your home page; you have to open the dropdown and click "My Links" (sounds minor, but extra clicks are wasteful and annoying, and bad for accessibility).
- Page view is restricted to 10 bookmarks/links per page; there's no way to set it any higher than that. Again with the wasteful, annoying, bad-for-accessibility extra clicks.
- Also, on a purely aesthetic level, these bookmarks have way too much white space in them -- and I say that as someone who likes nice clean open layouts that don't feel cramped. I need to scroll way too much to see 10 bookmarks on a page here.
- Every link has been rewritten to start with "http://delicious.com/browsebar?urlmd5=" and a long string of letters and numbers, ending with "&url=[the actual url of the link]", and every one automatically opens in a new tab now. That may sound minor, but I for one do a lot of "copy link location" out of my delicious to point people at things, which is now going to be a PITA. Also I just plain dislike it when sites rewrite my content; I have no idea what that internal number means or where it's referring. Argh.
- Tags are so broken, omg.
- The tag list on a user's home page, including your own, appears to only be their most-used tags, and there's no way to get to the full list that I can see (again, not even your own).
- If you want to find something under a given tag, you have to know what the tag is and how it's spelled, and search for it.
- Any tag with a slash in it is broken and comes up 404 when you try to get to it.
- There's no rename-tag feature, or any bulk editing features at all. So all those broken tags are just going to stay broken for the foreseeable future.
- Network (and Subscriptions?) seems to have been subsumed into "Following".
- This doesn't exist as a link across the nav bar; you have to go to the dropdown next to your name at the top right to find it.
- It only shows the list of people you're following (the names in your old Network). There are no bookmarks/links here, just people.
- Given the lack of links, obviously there are no subscriptions here, either, at least not yet.
- The Firefox add-on is broken, which means every other add-on probably is, too. Worse, it thinks it's working; I've just tagged two different pages, one public and one private, and it happily saved away like I was properly logged in. But neither bookmark is showing up on the new site. (Still not showing up, three hours later.)
- Saving URLs directly with the "Save Link" button on the delicious site is bizarre and unintuitive, and requires clicking through two screens.
- On the first screen, all you can type in is the URL, and mark it as private or not.
- On the second screen, you're presented with multiple unlabeled fields, and you get to guess what you're meant to put in them. This is the same screen that pops up when you hit "edit" on an existing bookmark in your list. For the record, the top field is for a description, the middle field is for tags, and the bottom field is for notes/comments.
And all that is just on an initial poke around the site. I am just baffled that they rolled this out with so many existing features broken or missing. It makes the site effectively useless, at least for now. I don't understand why they broke every existing social feature in an effort to make it more social.
The one thing that does work is sitewide search; you can type a word into the search box at the top and bring up pages of links. But with the site's layout, it's hard to actually find anything, between the oceans of white space and only ten links showing up at a time anyway. And to get to them, you need to scroll past your own links first, then past any "stacks" that people created with that search term even vaguely associated with it (e.g., a search for SGA brought up four stacks: two for SGA fic, one for Darren Criss [because the URL for one of the youtube videos in the "stack" included the letters SGA], and one for Tanzania [I have no idea; I couldn't find "SGA" anywhere on the page]. Yeah.).
And apparently the new "stacks" function works, but even if I wanted to use it, the way the site is physically set up now makes that unbelievably painful to do. "Find three or more links and add them to a stack!" -- well, great, but I'm only allowed to see ten links at a time. Out of my thousands of links. The only way to find them is to click page after page after page after page after page, yet again.
Which has just led me to realize -- of course. They're going for page clicks over actual usability or accessibility, to look more appealing to advertisers. Awesome.
But hey, they're promising "buttons" and "badges", so, you know. Woo-hoo. Because that's what I really want on a social bookmarking site.
(Okay, I admit, I am an old fogey of a cane-waving dinosaur; I do not understand the obsession with buttons and badges. Icons/avatars on posts/comments to show who you are, sure. But images that exist just to clutter things up that provide no actual information? No thanks.)
*Deep breath*. Okay, I will attempt to end on a semi-positive note, at least.
After digging around in their fairly useless FAQ and Help pages (and the useless blog where I suspect they're screening all comments, because there's no way the userbase hasn't left them hundreds of angry messages so far), I did find something that indicated they're aware that the site is mostly broken and useless, although they don't use those terms.
Under the Help page's "Transition from Yahoo" section, they say this:
#Did you rewrite every single feature of the old Delicious?
No. We tried our best, but we have been working hard and hope you will love the new features we've added. Below is a list of features that are still being worked on:
* Edit Network: We have ability to add/remove users, but do not currently support nicknames
* Edit Network Bundles: We will migrate existing bundles, but not initially have support for editing network bundles
* Set Network Privacy: We retain existing settings, but do not have an option to change at launch.
* Rename Tags
* Delete Tags
* Edit Tag Descriptions
* Edit Subscriptions
* Edit Subscription Bundles
* Delete People
* Network Badges
* Link Rolls: we will support existing link rolls via feeds
* Tag Rolls : we will support existing tag rolls via feeds
* Blog Posting: we will support existing blog post jobs
* Forums: we are evaluating options
* “My Tags” Page Example: http://www.delicious.com/tags/
* “Explore Tags” Page: http://www.delicious.com/tag/
* Follow /[user]/[tag]
* Post saved links to Twitter
So. Yeah. Every existing social and useful function is broken, but in theory they're working on it. We'll see.
The hell of it is, Delicious was the best place for actual shared bookmarking; the subscriptions and network were great ways to find things to read/watch/do. Pinboard is good for bookmarking, but not so good for following other people/tags. Likewise Diigo -- sort of fabulous for bookmarking, actually, but while you can follow other people, there doesn't seem to be any way to follow tags to get a steady, sitewide stream of what you want. Tumblr is great for a sitewide stream on any tag you want, but it's far more likely to be pictures or random quotes than links to fanworks or discussions.
I guess for now I'll wait it out and see if they can manage to get the site fixed to a level where it's at least functional again -- and meanwhile I'll start copying my last year's worth of bookmarks over to pinboard, just in case.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 04:37 am (UTC)And god, I can't wait till AO3 is able to handle imports and proper sorting/filtering/browsing for bookmarks. I am porting all my fannish bookmarks over so fast, man. Argh.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 04:40 am (UTC)/cynical
no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 01:50 am (UTC)You're a better person than I am. All I've been able to do is hiss out different variations on the word HAAAAAAAAAAAATE. >:(
I'm at least grateful that all of my existing links and their tags were already safely copied into my Firefox delicious sidebar--new ones won't make it in there, like you say, but the old ones are still there and can easily be searched/browsed/etc. Cos BABY NEEDS HER LINKS.
I suppose I might feel for AVOS a teensy tiny little itty bit, if the destruction of all functionality was caused by some legal agreement that they had to ditch Yahoo's proprietary architecture by this date. But only a teensy tiny little itty bit, and it fades REALLY FAST. Because things like the giant white spaces and the ten tags per page and the non-alphabetization of tags and the focus on tons of clicks and reward badges or whatever, that has nothing to do with proprietary anything, that's all their idea that they must have had MEETINGS about and SMILED and given THUMBS UP to planning memos and said, hey, heckuva job.
So yeah. Pretty much just: HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 04:58 am (UTC)But that's pretty much the only thing I don't mind. The white space is driving me out of my mind; the old revamped delicious was already wasting too much space by hard-coding areas as reserved for random things, and this just made it exponentially worse. Ugh. All so they can have mouseovers, joy. Not to mention all the bizarrely wide space between entries.
Also the default user icon is stupid.
Just all of it. Rarrgh!! It makes me so unhappy; early delicious was such a clean, simple, useful site, and every time someone comes along and decides it's a cash cow, they make it worse and worse.
I seriously can't wait for AO3 to revamp their bookmarking.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 12:58 pm (UTC)Oh, I don't mean the tag list on each link (I prefer those tags in the order I chose to assign them as well, if I can get it), I mean the big tag list on the right of the page. I cannot actually figure out what order that list is in, but alphabetical is not one of them. Nor is 'by number of uses'. I then thought it might be 'recency,' but that didn't match either. 'Random' is my best guess right now. Or possibly 'Possessed By Cthulhu'.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 04:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 04:59 am (UTC)