the new delicious

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:46:27 GMT

First, 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. )

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.

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Arduinna

the new delicious