and that horrible Kinja where comments have to be approved and you can’t really hold a proper conversation
Where can I go for my proper post GoT snark?? Other than here of course.
I just want their TV reviews to display the letter grade before I read the full review. Sometimes, I just want to know the score!
The new site lay-out is horrible.
Frankly, I never really liked the last revamp they did a few years back - I thought it was much too messy and cluttered. The new format is basically the same as io9 (natch), which I also read, so I’ll probasbly adjust pretty quickly.
There are still a few of us poor, lost souls keeping a tab open with the comments from yesterday’s final announcement article … the last remnant of the old site. Ghosts making Simpsons references in the void.
It’s Weird seeing AVClub posts alongside Gizmodo and IO9. This will take a little getting used to.
I miss the nice grid of thumbnails with the latest shows/episodes and their scores on the TV Club homepage. Made finding a particular review super easy. Now it’s just a long list of indistinguishable, random blog entries. What the hell?
And the show/season homepage for a particular show doesn’t have the episode number in the banner. So you have to read the blurb to try and figure out which episode it is in the season. Dumb.
I don’t have a comment account there so don’t care much about that but I don’t like the new layout. I liked how they had the reviews and stories separate on the page. It was easy to read exactly what you wanted. Now that it’s all mixed together it is harder to use.
I didn’t even participate in the comments but they were one of the site’s main draws for me. But now they no longer update live and can’t be sorted by old/new, so keeping track of a lively discussion is almost impossible now.
Everything about the new layout seems calculated to maximize clicks and unique page views without considering whether it’s making for a positive user experience or not. I feel like the AV Club has been going downhill for some time actually, ever since it was bought out a while back.
Terrible new layout, terrible comments section. It’ll be interesting to watch the traffic data over time.
Personally, I don’t think I’m going to go back to it anymore. Too much of a hassle to find what I actually want to read.
I’m thinking this is almost worth a poll in IMHO. “When was the last time a site redesign actually made a site better?”
I invited some AV Clubbers to join us here on the Dope – hopefully some will take us up on it.
Guess I’ll subject you all to my blathering. Won’t be quite the same for lack of nesting but its miles better than Kinja which might as well not even exist.
Blather: The soundtrack has been released. Those with an ear for music and tropes will be able to figure out stuff for tomorrow so avoid if you want to be completely spoiler free
Now that it’s been a week or so I can definitively say that the site is unusable now and I visit it less. I really liked that it had all the “bit sized” stories right in one place and in the front. It was a quick and easy way of catching up on Pop Culture news of the day. Now with just page after page of stories and reviews all mashed together I find I don’t care enough to dig for what I want.
The commenting is definitely worse, even with that Chrome extension. But I agree that what’s really keeping me from going to it more is the terrible mish-mash design where nothing can be found easily.
I really need to start that poll about web design.
After the unusable redesign, the site is dead to me. Dead, do you hear?
Darn shame, too.
The Disqus home page has a channel for AV Club refugees–it’s also somewhat uncategorized but at least the tags work so there’s that.
I don’t understand why they can’t keep a single damn tv water cooler community alone without fucking with it. Television Without Pity got canned by NBC, The AV Club got redesigned to hell by Univision, Previously.TV never got the traction to be lively and various Reddit subreddits tend to have pretty shallow analysis.
This reminds me of the whole Web 2.0 craze when every single website suddenly got a comment section and/or a message board, and social media links for no reason and I don’t think it helped anyone at all. At least back then you could ignore it despite it affecting the overall quality of the site subtly (since websites now had to have staff moderate the comment sections which took some resources away)