>Most people (members included) prefer the new
site. I can almost hear some of you cussing and swearing at me as I write this, and you
may never believe me no matter what I say. <g> The fact is that 85% or better of our
total traffic comes from the new site, not the old. Plus, traffic on the new site is growing
rapidly. If you don't believe that, then you can definitely believe this...if it were the other
way around, I would have canned the new site a long time ago. As I indicated above,
we are not in this to "force our will" on anyone. We're in this to attract, engage and
please as many customers as possible. Period. <
Please don't equate traffic with preference. I am using the new site, and I am on record for having an emphatically strong preference for the old site. Why am I doing this, you may wonder? Because I received the mass private message in December advising me that the old site was being killed over the weekend. It is the operational equivalent of a Soviet election - there is only one candidate on the ballot.
There never was an open, undistorted effort to ask the members which interface they prefer. The only polls run were the samizdat efforts put together by me and Neenny and CheekyKid - efforts which did not receive support or acknowledgement by anyone at Go2Net. In fact, we were in for a fair bit of ridicule, almost exclusively by GNET shareholders, as Luddites and obstructionists.
Do not make the mistake of deriving a sense of legitimacy from eyeball counts. The new site and the old site were never put on an equal basis from the moment the Beta gates were opened. I find it very revealing that with the technology and the will to send mass PMs having been demonstrated, no mass opinion audit was sent to all SI members, containing simple, uncharged questions like which look and features they preferred. Now I'm only guessing here because I'm an outsider, but this transition has been consistently managed from day one as a matter of directive. GNET/SI management decided that the GNET-branded New Look was going in. Period. All else was image management guided by the decision that New SI was gonna be the only game in town, baby.
I contend that the majority of users prefer the look and feel of the old site. I further contend that there was no open opinion-gathering process to test this supposition objectively. I have seen that the member-initiated petition and poll were effectively ignored by those in charge ... because the inertia of the average user worked in their favor.
We will never ever get to the bottom of things because the game was fixed from day one. GNET acquired SI and decided to brand it. This required a total retooling of the old site - especially in ergonomics. The addition of new features like tenatatime was used as a carrot to lure especially the traders and power users into the new environment. I consider this to be a simple conflict between an autonomous user community (the Dryers' original cybervillage) and a corporate technocracy. The technocrats won and came bearing writs and Caterpillars.
But do not insult us by trying to sell the idea that the user came first. And do not forget that you ducked my earlier points by fabricating a perceived insult from my substantive complaints. You, BryanB, are GNET first and SI second. Have the grace to admit it.
You won.
But do not delude yourself into believing your own BS: that you did it fair and sqare under the "old rules". |
