let's be honest. i just have a lot of personal problems.

[drunkoffthestars]

The whole delicious disaster has brought a MAJOR thing to my attention that I never thought to apply to fucking tech reporting, but learn something new every day. You know how when the mainstream media reports on something, they pull out the 'fair to both points of view' even when one of the points of view is coming from a rabid bear with a compulsive lying problem. And both 'points of view' are often regurgitated verbatim with absolutely ZERO analysis or fact-checking or ANY hint that anything that either party is saying might not be 100% true or accurate.

Yeah, the tech world does that with an incredibly irritating overlay of fawning sycophantery. (Is that even a word? NO. Do I even care? NO.)

GUESS WHAT IS NOT A NEW OR AMAZING CONCEPT: STACKS (even if you explain them by calling them 'playlists', but guess what? THEY ARE NOTHING LIKE PLAYLISTS EXCEPT THEY ARE A LIST. YOU CERTAINLY DON'T 'PLAY' THEM).

GUESS WHO HAS BEING DOING THAT CONCEPT ALREADY: LOTS OF PEOPLE INCLUDING PINTEREST NOT TO MENTION SEVERAL OF THOSE OTHER BOOKMARKING ALTERNATIVES.

GUESS WHAT IS NOT A SUCCESSFUL PRODUCT LAUNCH: A PRODUCT LAUNCH WHERE YOU FUCK OVER ALL YOUR POWER USERS BY RENDERING THEIR DATA INACCESSIBLE AND OVER 90% OF FUNCTIONALITY IS STILL ABSENT.

GUESS WHAT IS NOT A UNIQUE AND SPECIAL PAGE LAYOUT: BOXES WITH PICTURES. FUCKING EVERYONE IS DOING THAT ALREADY, ESPECIALLY FOR STUFF ON SMART PHONES. PROTIP: MY LAPTOP DOES NOT MAKE PHONE CALLS AND HAS A GIANT SCREEN. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS. Also guys, it looks like a link farm. Seriously. You're taking design tips from link farms? Is there something you'd like to share with the class about your future plans for the delicious.com domain?

And I know I bring these things on myself, but looking at ppl who were tweeting about delicious after the launch, it was two distinct camps: (1) people who were WTF WHERE IS MY DATA and (2) marketing/media/tech sycophants all 'WOW WHAT A SUPER-GRATE PRODUCT STACKS ARE SO COOL, WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR SLIPPERS WITH THAT BLOWJOB.

And I would like to offer a FREE PUNCH IN THE FACE to ever article writer who uncritically regurgitated the

"designed to make Delicious easier to use" / "simplify site navigation"

because less than 5 minutes of investigation would have revealed that DELICIOUS WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO USE AND NAVIGATION WAS NONEXISTENT *insert FEELINGS here*

Which isn't to say that there weren't some articles who made some stab at pointing out the flaws in the launch. But even then there was (and continues to be) massive amounts of verbatim regurgitation which. Ugh. WORLD. WHY YOU BE LIKE THAT.

I will leave you with this super-great quote from some dude whose name I may or may not be supposed to recognize at AVOS:

We’ve been focused on making the transition from Yahoo happen as fast as possible. Because of this, we needed to reduce some functionality in the short term and introduce a basic set of new features to get the site out the door. From our standpoint, it’s a competitive market and we’re going to err on the side of speed versus perfection to hopefully build a larger, more compelling experience. We’ll always be listening to the community and will literally be updating the product on a daily basis.”

My Interpretation:

We planned it this way all along, we made absolutely no study of who used the old service or how those people actually used it, it was kind of an impulse purchase, we don't actually care about the gagillion people who've already saved massive numbers of curated bookmarks with us, we're hoping to drive them off and keep the data to make a facebook wannabe that we can slap keyword ads all over and then sell to some sucker a la youtube. And yeah, we can't code our way out of a paper bag, hopefully the site will actually start working eventually. But not too soon, don't want those 'non-mainstream' users coming back to use their data!

IDK, I still think it'll mostly come back eventually. Emphasis on eventually. Long after the daily users have fucked off.

Comments

[jumpuphigh]

Violet Blue is full of awesome.

Beware: There be snark. Tons and tons of delicious snark. #nom

[drunkoffthestars]

oh yes! That one is so good!

[lovelypoet.livejournal.com]

That's seriously the thing that I can't figure out... how did they con anyone into thinking that Stacks are something new and different? I mean, great, they take the coding out of it, but FFS, it's a topical list. I like lists, but I like lists that come with pithy commentary or that at least have some actual sense of order and logic to them. From the ones that I've looked at, nobody playing with stacks has any clue about what it means to create a useful themed list.

[drunkoffthestars]

oh my god YES. The whole thing makes me want to RANT AT LENGTH. I'm so sorry.

I've been playing around with Pinterest for months now, and at least they seem to understand about the difference between visual media and text. Visual media = prime for stacks/pinboards/whatever. Text? Makes for Very Stupid Looking 'Stacks'.

I'm taking the current quality of stacks with a giant table full of salt. I honestly believe that the majority of people who are using them are newbies, link farmers, and social media ball-lickers. I think that most people capable of creating quality content are too busy wailing and gnashing their teeth over how completely unusable the whole thing is to actually curate any content. But yeah. It's terrible. My favorite part is the INCREDIBLY inappropriate and or ugly pictures they automatically pull in. Everything looks so awful, I'm kind of delighted. /evil

And I'm going to try not to get started on the tech community reaction. It's seriously the worst sort of echo-chamber, corporate marketing speak, blind worship of a dude who had one good idea that one time and made obscene amounts of money off it, and a palpable stench of desperation that they too can make that 'WHATEVER-KILLER' website/product/whatthefuck and also become billionaires over night. PROTIP: You will never achieve that dream by licking the balls of people who have already made the dream come true.

I am so sorry about all the balls. I cannot think of a better description for what is happening. /o\