The new Blogger interface is appalling · 1:06am Aug 7th, 2020
I've had my off-site blog, Louder Yay, since 2012. Throughout that time, the Blogger platform has offered me a simple, relatively no-frills way to post MLP stuff. Why don't I post it here? Well, I could do that, sure but then I'd have to (for example) remember never to link directly to M-rated stories. I also get more freedom in terms of layout, which is nice when I'm doing something like an episode review. Plus I like how Blogger works.
Make that liked.
Google in all its wisdom has decided to wreck improve wreck the editing interface. You either get a slow, glitchy and imprecise "Compose View" or a hideously ugly and messy "HTML View". The old legacy interface, which just worked, is being withdrawn later this month -- despite Blogger repeatedly having assured users that it would "remain available" and only springing on us very recently that actually ha ha it would be going away whether we wanted it to or not.
Google is ever more today's equivalent of Microsoft in its worst era. The "don't be evil" line is now something for its staff to giggle at. What users actually want is completely irrelevant. We've seen this with Chrome -- I now use Firefox all the time again as a direct result -- and with YouTube. Now we're seeing it with Blogger. It makes no sense for a text-based blogging platform to be redesigned to be easier to edit on a phone than on a computer with a keyboard. It makes even less sense when you realise it's bloody awful on both.
I really don't want to leave Blogger, as a lot of my fandom memories are there and Louder Yay has built up a small but very welcome audience whose comments I appreciate enormously. The other main blogging platform, WordPress, is by all accounts also often very frustrating to use. Google of course doesn't give a flying feather -- it's even protected Blogger's Twitter account to avoid hearing things it doesn't want to hear. So all I can do is have a good whinge about it. Which I'm afraid you get here!
Wordpress is also about to force their UI change through soon. I got a reminder for it today. And while not awful, it's also considerably inferior to the 'classic' version.
Why do websites do this? :(
I think what it is is that Blogger isn't drawing the type of audience that Google wants. They want their products to attract a sort of flash mob for an audience. They want something that people can read, feel strongly about without thinking or analyzing, and then pass it along to three or four friends quickly, within a minute or so of finding it, so that it becomes viral. That's why they're trying to force your interface towards phones. That, I'm convinced, is also what drove that obnoxious "trending searches" test on the webpage that finally convinced me to use Duckduckgo instead of Google.
Edit: Afterthought
And, on further consideration, there *may* be a secondary desire to improve the efficiency of their network. IF they can manipulate enough users into selecting the "trending" result, that should reduce the load on the network by allowing them to serve a significant portion of their traffic from cache, instead of generating live results for each user. I tend to discount that as a primary motive, since they have better resources than most governments, but I'm sure that at some point, that appeared in the discussion as a point in favour of the new practices.
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I suppose they look at Facebook or Twitter or whatever and think, "Hey, we want a bit of that!" Either that or they're entirely staffed by people who do have 15-second attention spans. If I wanted Equestria Amino, I'd use that. I most decidedly don't!
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In other words, social media. I can see that, yeah. It's exactly what I don't want, though -- a major reason why many of us who still blog, do so, is that we don't want it to be like social media.
Fixing things that weren't broke in the first place seems to be a common M.O. on the Web. Being a creature of habit, I always find it inconvenient when a site changes to something very different, with no obvious advantage (and plenty of obvious disadvantages).
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Indeed so. See also DeviantArt's new black look, which to me at least remains a great deal worse than the old green design.