The Smoking Gun recently changed their main page, leading me to abandon them.
I traditionally used Digg for a long time, but honestly my use of it has been extremely low over the past 1.5 years or so. For me, the actual reason was the huge influx of video digs.
You would see an article link on Digg, think it was interesting and when you click all the way through to it, it’s a video. I have no problems with streaming video, but I abhor when there is news on the internet that I’m forced to watch in video form. Since Digg was becoming dominated by video links, I quit using it. It wasn’t so bad at first when most people would post [Video] tags in the link so you could just avoid them entirely, but near the end pretty much 50% of the links were videos and no one was using the video tag.
I like Reddit in principle but can’t stand it in practice. I think conversation threads like that have the same problem they did 15+ years ago when they were more common. Mainly, they are super easy to be involved in, but I find it a labor to actually read through them after the fact. So basically they suck for anyone who isn’t part of the original conversation.
The thing about SDMB threads, is because we use a much more easy to navigate and linear thread format, there’s no confusion about where the start of the thread and the end of the thread is. If I want to read a conversation from the beginning, it’s very easy. With Reddit, the trees can have tons of comment sub-trees that you have to open again and again and again to read all the comments. Basically, the auto-segregation of side conversations isn’t something I like. I like reading the long threads here on SDMB, including the side convos. On Reddit it’s just too much of a pain.
Another recent redesign I hate is Google News. Google News had been my news source for years. Then Google decided to do a redesign, previously Google News had a great double column layout, with each section have 4-5 stories on the front page (and you could click the sections to see more.) Because of the double column layout you could quickly scan allthe sections from the same start page.
Google then made it a vertical column layout where you can only really look at one section at a time, instead of scanning between sections. Then, they also introduced “personalization” which meant they now prioritize serving up news articles that are interesting to “you” based on your news browsing habits. I hate that. I liked Google News because it was good at making me aware of stories that were news to society at large, even if they weren’t on topics or subjects I would normally follow or care about. By adding personalization it basically erodes the ability of news reading to broaden one’s understanding and knowledge of topics outside of what you already know about and read about.
I’ve been using Bing News, which is better than the new Google News but not as good as the original Google News :(.
Agh double post.
Digg was great for times when you just wanted to read interesting stuff from all over the web. It was clean and easy to browse. Worst problem I had with it is it wouldn’t keep me logged in. Now with the redesign it’s terrible.
Reddit is just plain ugly, I won’t be going there.