TheAgitator.com
Comments
Thursday, October 15th, 2009I’ve emailed with Fred at LivePodium and we’re going to disable the LivePodium system for the time being. Fred’s going to make some major adjustments then we’ll reassess.
‘Til then, it’s back to the old commenting system.
the old system sucks! I hate this place! It’s not the way IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII want it!
hehehe
I noticed when scrolling, usually down, that parts of the comments would disappear, like the first line of a two line comment. This would happen to multiple comments on the screen at the same time. Text would just disappear, and scrolling back would usually make them reappear.
Hey, where’s live chat?
I appreciate that you guys have been putting alot of effort into this. I think the thing to keep in mind is that you’re working within two competing goals. One of them is having a system which provides alot of utility and interactivity. The other is a system which is highly accessible from multiple platforms/browsers. The LivePodium system went very far towards the former, away from the latter. I think too far for most people.
I liked the new one when I was at home, but couldn’t use it at work. It looked nice.
Thanks, Radley!
As someone that does system implementation for a living, this is a mistake. 90% of any implementation is having/cajoling/forcing people to accept the changes. 90% of forcing is letting people bitch till they grow tired of it. Unless there were show stopping issues, never go back.
This system makes it MUCH easier to do comments that require research, quoting, and such. Yay regular comments!
Yay, I can actually read and post comments again!
And there was much rejoicing.
Marc (#7)
I don’t know as much about libertarianism (?) as I’d like, but I’m learning more from this site. It seems like trying something new and letting people decide whether they like it is libertarianism at its best. Trying something new and then forcing people to use it even if they don’t seems more like what the government does best.
>>>>.90% of any implementation is having/cajoling/forcing people to accept the changes. 90% of forcing is letting people bitch till they grow tired of it. <<<<<
Typical attitude of incompetent IT people.
It feels like a vinyl record in here. Kick’n it ol’ school style comments.
Very nice and scratchy feeling.
#11
If you changed the font, people would bitch. People don’t like change. When implementing a new system, things have to change.
@ #11: Nothing that happens with respect to the comments here has anything to do with libertarianism. Libertarianism is a philosophy regarding the proper role of government. What Radley chooses to do with his private property (e.g., this website) is not something libertarianism generally addresses.
@cliff: “Typical attitude of incompetent IT people.”
Actually, you can be a very competent IT person with really lousy customer service skills. That being said, anyone in a service role (which IT is, by the way) who walks around thinking that “letting people bitch till they grow tired of it” is an acceptable way of providing their service will soon be bitching about the unemployment line (until they grow tired of it.)
My constructive criticism,
1. You shouldn’t have to navigate away from the site to use live podium. Should of been under posts like any comments.
2. I like not having to sign up for another username/passworded account.
You know, Sean, I’ve been watching people like Marc in IT for 20+ years now. I’ve yet to see them get fired. I had to go start my own company, I simply couldn’t stand the attitude.
Nice to be able to read comments again.
John Jenkins (#15)
You know more about this than I do, but I think you missed my point (or maybe I didn’t make it well). Government is obviously an important part of libertarianism, but not all. Of course this is Radley’s site, and he can do with it whatever he wishes. My point was that a good libertarian would see the benefit of giving the market something it wants, rather than trying to coerce it into accepting something it doesn’t want — possibly encouraging it to find something it likes better.
#7
It’s not a “mistake” unless the goal is to ram through a new system, regardless of its merits. Radley was quite clear from the beginning that he was being paid to participate in a trial system, after which the ultimate decision about whether to switch comment systems would be made. The ultimate issue is the overall merits of each system, and that’s an open question at this point.
I am the developer of LivePodium, so let me ask this question. Forgetting any short comings with the user face (user interfaces can always be changed/fixed). Do you think there is any real benefits in the real time updates and/or online presence (online indicator) of other users?
@ FredZ – I’d like to have the option of turning the online presence indicator off. As to the benefits..not to me since I don’t like to chat. But surely, for those that are looking to chat, the online indicator would be nice.
Yes and yes. But there are better ways to implement it, in my view. I’ve seen enough java-based systems that work wonderfully. But I like being able to post/read comments from my iPhone, which I couldn’t do under the old system.
Fred,
The real time updates to comments are excellent and encourage conversation. There are some excellent implementations of this in other sites I use.
I really think that there are some basic issues with the process.
1. Leaving the page to comment. It’s not good.
2. The frame. It limits space and is a giant PITA.
3. The register/login thing – Radley doesn’t make us do it now, why do we have to do it in the new system?
Fix these three things and you fix a ton of the complaints about the new system.
HOWEVER, I can’t use flash at work, and there are a ton of people like me, so the new system drives me away from Radley’s site.
Radley, I’m sorry your new system didn’t work out for you. I know you had high hopes for it. Perhaps there will be a place for it in the future.
FWIW: I’ll make do with whatever you decide. Chin up! Love this site.
@Dana Gower:
I think you are wrong here. The central tenet of libertarianism is, approximately, that the state should not prevent any adult from doing anything that does not harm anyone else absent valid consent. Right from the start, it’s based on a limitation of government and it does not seek to order consensual private interaction.
Your rule is sort of business-maximizing, but that really is irrelevant to libertarianism. Providing what consumers want is a basic business principle followed by a lot of very non-libertarian folks (e.g., Apple, Inc., virtually any other large corporation). Even if you have a government monopoly, if no one wants your product, you’re not going to sell much of it.
So a proprietor who says “this is how it is, take it or leave it” can be completely libertarian, but reject your premise on how to run his business (perhaps he is happy with a smaller, more dedicated clientele, or has some other reason). There is nothing about dedication to libertarianism that requires a dedication to a business-maximizing rule. The relationship between a proprietor and a customer is so different from the relationship between a state and a citizen that there is no reason to expect the same rules to apply.
My main dislike was not being able to post or read comments from work. (Although the logon would probably make it easier to ban trolls who became obnoxious.)
On balance, I liked the threaded comments. If you were late to a thread, it made it easier to see what responses there had been to a comment. It also made it clear what you were responding to.
Did the Live Podium format allow us to have multiple comment threads open at the same time? (I didn’t get a chance to try it.) If so, that would have been a bonus.
I also liked the ability to compare the number of up karmas and down karmas rather than simply having one net number. Does +3 mean that only 3 people cared enough to grade you or that 103 people liked your comment and 100 people hated it?
Fred, I never cared to know who was online and I don’t think I hang around long enough for live comments to matter. However, those are fairly trivial features and don’t cause problems. I prefer the Facebook method of handling updates: a link comes up that says “new comments are available – click here to show them”. That would be easy to implement on this sort of a system and would work well regardless of the comment style (nested/flat).
The fact is, though, that you’re never going to get much feedback on these issues until you get rid of Flash and make a good interface. It’s like asking people what color they’d like the walls painted when the house is on fire.
“It’s like asking people what color they’d like the walls painted when the house is on fire.”
Fire-suppresant foam white, thanks.
John Jenkins (#27)
Okay, I’m going home to read now.
I still think we are going to disagree on the part about government, though. This is a sentence I picked up on some Web site on libertarian philosophy: “Libertarians are strongly supportive of the civil liberties detailed in the Bill of Rights of our Constitution. They maintain that the Constitution does not grant us these rights, but instead recognizes those rights we naturally possess by virtue of our humanity.” I think that’s pretty much the point — No rights, or anything else, are granted by government. People grant rights to governments.
People come to Radley’s site for his ideas and information, not (just) because the site is user-friendly. But it helps.
I like the old system better. I do not like the idea that I have to register to put a comment on the new system.
Yes I am a bit paranoid. I will not visit any site that requires registration. It probably means that I am missing out on a lot of the the I-net has to offer but that’s my position.
Long live the old system!
Thank you baby Jesus.
It seems to me that the LivePodium thing is technology trying to provide a solution to something that isn’t a problem. There is a HUGE difference between a discussion board and providing a simple way to leave comments on a blog. I’ve been a part of a number of very active online forums before, and I like them. That’s a real community. But this is different. This is simply a place where we come to read what Balko has written and then make comments about it, many times responding to each other. It’s NOT a community where we’re going to “hang out” and start new threads and such. If Balko wants a discussion board, there are plenty of software packages that would allow him to provide one. The LivePodium approach seems to be trying to be some odd compromise between the two approaches. It’s not one I care for. I don’t want live interaction with other people unless I’m on a discussion board with its own community. I only do that when I make a commitment to elevate my involvement at a site. For someone else’s blog, I just want to leave comments, maybe respond to other comments, and then leave. I don’t want the kind of live interaction that the system is trying to provide. Not only do I not want it, but I find that it gets in the way of what I DO want to do. So even though I agree with many of the comments that people have made about specific UI issues or technical issues, the biggest issue I have is one of philosophy. I want something that allows me to make comments and be done with it, NOT something that tries to funnel people into acting more like a community.
“I am the developer of LivePodium, so let me ask this question. Forgetting any short comings with the user face (user interfaces can always be changed/fixed). Do you think there is any real benefits in the real time updates and/or online presence (online indicator) of other users?”
No, no. I think it breaks the traditional paradigm of standard blog comments in a way that leans towards real-time interaction instead of thoughtful lineral comments/debate. I think the old comments system would be fine with a few extra features, like “quote this post in a reply”, being able to edit previous comments made by you being the 2 big ones. I may be forgetting one…. I think the replies to a comment in a subtree type of pattern make the comments a lot less readable.
In other words, “what David M #34 said.”
#17
1. You shouldn’t have to navigate away from the site to use live podium. Should of been under posts like any comments.
2. I like not having to sign up for another username/passworded account.
QFT. Thanks for saying what I couldn’t find the right words to say.
Fred, I’m with #29 Michael Chaney on all points.
I would add that the two questions you ask, although valid, are miniscule compared to the interface problem. Flash in particular renders it useless. Sorry, that’s the only way to put it you.
Fred,
No and no. And as #38 says, those are fairly trivial questions. Using Flash for this system is absolutely the wrong call, for all the reasons people have stated over and over. It breaks the way blog comments are thought to work by most users. There is a reason you never see it used for comments. All the stuff you want to do with it can be done with AJAX.
If you changed the font, people would bitch.
What is this “font” you speak of?
You must be using some inferior browser.
@22 — No. Emphatically: no.
Forgetting any short comings with the user face (user interfaces can always be changed/fixed). Do you think there is any real benefits in the real time updates and/or online presence (online indicator) of other users?
No benefit. The online presence of a blog commenter is his comment. If I wanted a chatroom, I’d fire up IRC.
There are many ways this could have been handled better.
First, Radley could have said he was thinking of the comments and asked people what are some features they would like.
Second, Radley could have offered the packages he was thinking of implementing and solicited comments about them.
Third, he could have given warning to people before springing the change.
All these help people deal with change, which is all a system implementation is about. There is nothing in web or other IT that hasn’t been done many times before at this point and time, the technology is rarely the reason why implementations fail, it usually people.
That said, with all the bad feelings about the new comment system it is dead, maybe it could be resuscitated with some serious effort, but in my experience – it is dead.
I would suggest that a priority should be to make LivePodium share a database with the old chat system or something like it, so that people can use either the old or new system. If the new system offers some real advantages, people will gravitate toward it. If not, why should they have to?
One thing that would be nice would be to be able to have a button on each post that would switch between threaded and chronological mode, with that post retaining focus. Probably wouldn’t be too hard in Flash; might be more difficult in JavaScript (conventional HTML could do it with a page reload, but instant switching might be nicer).
No. It’s terribly annoying to be reading something and having pushed updates moving things around. On the rare occasions when I visit such a site, I disable scripting as soon as a page has loaded.
For some sites, perhaps. For this site, no.
And then – your software never worked for me. I got a message saying I need to install Flash, but I do have it on my computer. So — I would like to suggest you provide better error reporting.
For example, if your system is not happy my particular computer operating system, or version of Flash, it should specifically say so.
But — please don’t take this remark as an indication that I in any way at all think Flash is an appropriate technology for implementing this sort of thing. As I have said, it’s proprietary (leaving us at the mercy of Adobe, a company that demonstrably does not give a shit about its users), unstable (it sometimes crashes, or doesn’t work, ala above), a serious resource hog, and above all it’s a known security risk.
Isn’t Flash what YouTube uses to play its videos? Or is Flash Video a different animal? It’s all the flash video I watch that makes me feel like Flash is one of the things a web site can reasonably expect you to have and not work unless you download.
Flash is not the only video format YouTube has available, but yes, it is currently the dominant one. There is an effort underway to move away from its use. See, for example, the evolving HTML5 (the language used to construct web sites) standard. And, stuff like this -
http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/killers.html
Yes, that’s for software people… But, one can simply go to a place like http://keepvid.com/ and get an MP4 copy though them. Which will also look better, by the way.
As for what’s reasonably expectable – having to download anything from a site in order to make it work is not, at all. This is one of the primary ways bad things wind up on good peoples’ computers… I’m not saying this is what Fred is doing, but A) I don’t know him, and B) his site wants access to my computer that requires I trust he won’t do anything evil with it. As opposed to my just sticking with the stuff Apple itself has put there. Hmm… Which would you choose?
Here’s yet another problem with Flash you may find interesting -
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you-deleted-your-cookies-think-again/
I have not, do not, nor do I suspect I will ever care about any of those things, so no.
It sounds great for “creating community” buzzword garbage, but in practice it’s all just… flash… and no substance.
My family has a private, passworded discussion board with forum software… and even on that I don’t feel the need to know who is online. Heck, my sister purposely turns her Yahoo Messenger status to “off.”
This was a solution looking for a problem that didn’t exist. We just want to leave comments. That’s it. I don’t care who is online, I don’t want to dialog with any of them (except Radley, maybe, but then I can email him if I need to). Plus, using flash, besides being a security hole, breaks simple things like searching for text (ctrl-f).