Yea, I left Slashdot after The Great Redesign, and other websites too for similar reasons. It seems to be this inevitable milestone in any website's (or, generally, software's) life:
- V1: Focused, works, fast, lacks some features, but good enough to grow
- V1.1: More features, still performs well, exponential community growth
- V1.2: Adds chat, messages, social, loses focus, performance starts to suffer, linear or slowing growth
- V1.3: Start loading up with ads, things are getting worse, usage plateaus or teeters
[EMERGENCY! HIRE THE DESIGNERS!]
- V2.0: Huge, unnecessary re-design [1] without community input. Most features gone. More ads. Community craters. This is the Fark.com "You'll get over it" phase.
- V2.1: Saturated with ads, founders have moved on, site is on autopilot, a shell of what it used to be.
- V1: Focused, works, fast, lacks some features, but good enough to grow
- V1.1: More features, still performs well, exponential community growth
- V1.2: Adds chat, messages, social, loses focus, performance starts to suffer, linear or slowing growth
- V1.3: Start loading up with ads, things are getting worse, usage plateaus or teeters
[EMERGENCY! HIRE THE DESIGNERS!]
- V2.0: Huge, unnecessary re-design [1] without community input. Most features gone. More ads. Community craters. This is the Fark.com "You'll get over it" phase.
- V2.1: Saturated with ads, founders have moved on, site is on autopilot, a shell of what it used to be.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI