I was hoping Slashdot was going to reduce the huge amount of padding around each comment, but no luck. For instance, on my screen right now I can fit 13 comments on HN or reddit but no more than 5 on slashdot. This makes it <i>much</i> harder to navigate comment threads, connect replies with comments, etc.<p>I'm I the only one who thinks this is easily the worst part of Slashdot? It's reminiscent of a bad forum where each 3-word quip comes with an avatar, a custom border, and a 5-line signature.
I liked slashdot more when it was plain, quick-loading HTML. I liked most sites more when they were plain, quick-loading HTML. Ain't It Cool News is the only other one coming to mind at the moment, though.
The old Slashdot design bothered me so much I proposed a minimalist layout last year: <a href="http://nylira.com/p/slashdot" rel="nofollow">http://nylira.com/p/slashdot</a><p>Thoughts on this one:<p>Slashdot's homepage is much cleaner than before, but the thick green bars denoting each story is visually oppressive. I understand that it's a branding element, but it hampers readability.<p>The fixed navigation annoys me, but that's a personal preference: I don't think the menus are important enough to be constantly on-screen.<p>I see they still haven't added a max-width to text columns either. It's difficult reading comments on a 1440px+ screen.
It's unfortunate that they've jumped on the fixed positioning bandwagon. Non-scrolling headers/footers break the way Page Up and Page Down work, because the visible size is no longer the size of the scrollable area.<p>Luckily there's a user style in the Slashdot comments that changes the fixed elements to absolute positioning. It isn't a perfect solution, though (e.g. for when you use an alternate browser).
Ugh, all this time, a whole new revamp, and it <i>still</i> suffers from the problem where hitting "Get more comments" moves everything around, and you've got to look through everything to figure out what the hell actually just loaded...<p>Why would anyone ever think that hitting more should load more comments <i>above</i> the comment you just finished freaking reading? And yes, I realize they're loading low ranked deeply nested comments that are underneath ones that are already visible, but yeesh - just clip the damn comment tree after a certain number of comments are displayed, FFS, no need to try and be clever about it...
I don't really care so much for design as content. Slashdot looks tired, whatever design you slap on top of
it. For example they've updated the Bill Gates Borg icon. It looks very dated now, though.
These kinds of designs often work badly with flash, as can be seen by the flash ad on the page: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/qycS8.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/qycS8.png</a><p>(flash in most (all?) browsers appears on top of even html regardless of specific css rules)
This is probably the first good redesign that /. has done this century!<p>I actually stopped visiting Slashdot because the previous rounds of "improvement" to the comment system was always a pain in the butt if you had to switch tabs while typing. It will be good to be back.
I hope it will work better than the previous one. It was unbearably slow on my puny work PC and hardly usable on my other machines, and frankly, I don't think that I should upgrade to quad core because of ONE website.
I am glad they kept much of the original design, especially the rounded edges and the green. Yes, it's not pretty, but for me it's like listening to an oldie station. Slashdot was there in the 90s when you felt like participating in a revolution for using Linux (or, if you wanted to be even more avantgarde, one of the BSDs). It helped people get through the time of the Columbine massacre, was the best place to discuss the Halloween documents, offered endless First-Post/Nathalie-Portman trolling opportunities, and with Jon Katz you always had something to talk (or complain) about.<p>The problem is that the culture did not really evolve. There's nothing that Slashdot stands for anymore. I wonder whether it would be a good idea for Slashdot, now that the readers as well as the authors are older, to cover topics for geeks in their 30s or 40s: homes, families, kids... I believe that there would be a range of interesting topics, and I don't know any news site that covers them.
Now it looks like a framed site from good ol' 1997 again. Fixed header, fixed menu cluttering up your 800x600 pixel smartphone screen, and a small scrollable area (of which most is white space) with the actual content. Wow, that went seriously wrong.
It looks uglier than the old version, in my opinion. On the other hand, it looks like paste now works correctly when entering comments. (It used to often fail on Webkit-based browsers if there was any text already in the box), so that's a huge improvement.
My problem with /. was that the stories were not voted in on by the community but rather by a select few curators who added editorial content in the headlines.<p>And they're still using the Bill Gates Borg icon?
Does the redesign involve removing most of their userbase? There's some kind of aversion to people charging money on that site that just doesn't jive with me. I assume that HN will at some point reach the critical mass that killed slashdot for me. Hopefully that day will be far far in the future.