Re-design without community buy-in will kill you
 

Fuckin -- man, it's too late in the day to write this properly, but--

Google Reader redesigned and they, like, fucked it up in multiple ways, and everyone is steaming mad. I'm part of that and this is what started me thinking about this.

Digg 4.0 is considered a gigantic failure in the history of link-sharing communities.

Fark lost the respect of a lot of readers when, after their redesign, one of the admins wrote the haters off with a "you'll get used to it" attitude.

Partly, the Internet is fickle. But there's something more deep about all this, and I think it's something we understand better than the rest of the Internets, in general --

This stuff is IMPORTANT to us, we have an EMOTIONAL connection to it. It is a different kind of social, but it is social, and we are mankind, ever social in nature as we are.

I have not said in a while, but I will say again: if the Cellar is ever down, just keep checking it. Hardware, software, troll or spammer, whatever troubles may occur, I believe we can keep them at bay. This place is important to a lot of us, and I feel a responsibility, far larger than the tip mug, to keep it as a community for as long as possible.

Let me see if I'm understanding you...

An internet entity with no buy-in can not exist.

Yeah. I'd agree with that. You can have all the wires and processors and super duper hertz, but without the people.. the only buzz you'll have is from the fluorescent lights.

Thank you UT

UT, I'm very interested, but I have to admit I don't understand what things
Google has done/not done with the software you describe.

Several months ago I recognized something was happening at Google,
but did not appreciate what was going on.
It became a little more clear when the (new?) CEO announced
the pending shutdown of several Google projects.
I was bothered by the loss of the Real Estate program associated with Google Maps.
But that's bye the bye. It's gone now.

Would you please take another stab at explaining (to us laymen)
what is going on that is not good for you and yours.

Google also recently removed the meaning of '+' from searches. It used to make sense. Use '-' to only show pages without the word. Use '+' to show pages only if the word was included. They still honor '-' but took out the code for '+'.

They didn't provide any alternative method of forcing this. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

you can put the word in quotes and it will do the exact same thing + did. You just have to hit that extra key to put the end quote in there. So there is an additional keystroke.

I'll be damned. I hadn't realized that. I had thought including AND was still working, and I had to come up with a very complicated test case to be sure, but

giants AND onomatopoeia AND cheese AND fishing AND calliope

comes up with 2,230,000 results, which seems fishy on its own, but making it

giants AND onomatopoeia AND cheese AND fishing AND calliope AND Ireland

increases the results to 2,250,000 results. It's broken. That's irritating.

Well
"giants" "onomatopoeia" "cheese" "fishing" "calliope" comes up with 4,620 hits

and
"giants" "onomatopoeia" "cheese" "fishing" "calliope" "Ireland" gives you 3,930 hits

How many were you expecting?

This is true.

This is false. The new syntax is to enclose the desired word in double quotes, just as you previously would have preceded the desired word with a +.

This is debatable.

well, I'm a slow poster. :d'oh!:

You've mentioned this before. How do you read the Cellar? Did you open this thread in one tab, and then open a bunch of other tabs to read up on Google search protocol? That's the main way that I end up posting slowly. Too many tabs open.

Actually, in this case, my slowposting was due to a deviation from my normal cellar reading style. In this case, I simply knew the answer, having experienced the phenomenon PZ described, and quickly posted my answer. "Slow poster" is a poor description of the actual post effect. "opening my mouth before reading what was already discusssed" would be much more correct. I could have deleted my post, but I very rarely do that.

As for how I normally read the cellar, I'm pressing the "new posts" link frequently. I then read from the oldest to the newest, refreshing as I go. When I see a thread I'm following with particular interest come up toward the top with a fresh post, I will sometimes read that one, bumping it out of my oldest to newest general consumption.

I do sometimes open a thread in a new tab if I am working on a long or detailed post. This particular computer and the trackpad has given me extreme grief a couple times by taking an incidental brush on the trackpad as a navigation gesture and removing my textual input to that point like a popped soap bubble. Then, I curse. Then, I restart with my text going into a separate editor, to be composed and then copied to the quick reply box.

welll... plenty of detail there. The point is that I usually try to read *as much as possible* before replying, but in this case, I just shot from the lip.

I click on new posts, and then open a handful of threads in new tabs. Then close them when I'm done.

Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that Google posted a different substitution when they first did this. I posted a search like:

first second +third

and they proposed:

"first second third"

which isn't the same thing. I'll have to try the quote thing for single words.

Off Topic/
Exactly what I do. Happens all the time on an active thread where I respond and in the meantime there have been multiple posts in between.
/Off Topic

None, actually. The whole reason I kept adding words to the string was I was trying to get a result of zero, but it kept not happening.

I find it ironic that there's such outrage over the design of an RSS aggregator.

One of the points of RSS is to present you with raw information, information that you (or your software) will then slice, dice, and use as you prefer. By deciding to use RSS, you have already sidestepped a great many of the page design decisions made by the sites you subscribe to.

But in presenting you this information, your RSS reader has to do... something. And so Google Reader imposes a set of decisions about design and layout on its users (decisions that most people agree are poor in its latest iteration).

In the great Platonic Ideal Hypertextual Internet, this would be about as newsworthy as coverage of the fact that I've chosen to change the desktop wallpaper on my computer. But here in the gristly real-world Internet, web sites want to give us stuff in a particular format that they chose. Even a web site that owes its very existence to the concept of pulling the content of other web sites out with no particular formatting information. So, you don't like Google Reader? Use a different RSS aggregator. The very lack of alternatives, or perceived alternatives, is in itself telling.

Quote:

The problem for the tech industry corporations is that RSS disempowers them. It makes them commodities. And if that's what they are, they can't command a premium in the stock market. --Dave Winer