There was a story in L.A. Times about this, though the writer apparently did not speak to more than a few current and/or former CHers. No mention of any of the banishing that several veterans have reported, and no discussion of the simple awfulness of the new interface.
I wonder if I’m one of the boring old poops the new site’s fans seem so happy to have left behind? I did find their “Don’t let the door hit you” attitude a tad annoying, but I suppose it’s to be expected.
I never understood the comment of losing the regional boards - if you go through the regional tags, e.g. San Diego for me you get exactly the same board as before - if you bookmark it you don’t even have to search it.
Not exactly the same. The auto-tagging wasn’t applied to 100% of the regional board topics, so a small percentage of topics got lost. More commonly, topics from other boards such as Wine or other regions were in some cases picked up and added. And unless they’ve fixed the bug, topics often show up multiple times.
Far more significantly, since regional tags are now optional and there are many more of them, going forward posts that previously would have been on the regional board may not have that particular tag. E.g. someone might create a topic with an “Oakland” tag and it would not show up in the search results for the “SF Bay Area” tag. Over time the previous sharp regional focus will blur.
I’ll be surprised if this isn’t a temporary thing and phase 2 is actual geo-tagging with map points.
Well the changes they’ve made have meant you have to really get Into site mechanics to recreate what you had before. I can’t really recall every one of the many many changes they’ve made since Beta, but I don’t think you could do that at first. Certainly by making subject ‘communities’ the only starting point in topic creation they showed an intent to get rid of the insular nature of the regional boards. Why? One could assume it’s too broaden the appeal of the site, but has the effect of diluting the strengths those boards offered. JMHO of course.
But I think, while most realize and agree with you (at least on a subliminal level), the tag system deprives the user of a sense of place – even in a bare ether-generated sense.
Before the current makeover, a person could click on the “San Diego” board link, and you’re taken there (wherever there might have been).
In its current guise, there is no there. You’re simply plunked down into a big morass of tags, and if you click on a location tag (like San Diego) you have to take a leap of faith that every single other user to have come across the site will have properly tagged “San Diego” appropriately.
This is made all the more confounding when, in addition to a “San Diego” tag, there are tags for La Jolla, Encinitas, El Cajon, Escondido, San Marcos, etc. just to name a few. Who’s to say that if I found a really interesting taco stand in El Cajon I would tag it “El Cajon” as opposed to general “San Diego” or vice versa?
This type of granular evisceration of geo-location is what I think people feel most shaken by when they say the regional boards have been “deleted”.
Great explanation Ipse. It baffles me when people say they can get everything they
once had on their regional board by following the tag for that city. I guess they just can’t grasp what the tagging thing has done. To me it’s like trying to create an Excel spreadsheet but never having all the possible columns included in your line totals. Just when you think you’ve got all those cars corralled you find out you missed one or two.
I might be wrong but my understanding is that even if you write about the taco stand in El Cajon (and tag it with the El Cajon tag) it will automatically get the San Diego tag since you created it on the SD board (if you created it on another board it gets moved and gets the San Diego tag)
They could functionally re-create (pretty much) the old regional boards by requiring location tags for topics about restaurants and other location-specific things and making more granular location tags such as La Jolla or Oakland children of top-level location tags such as San Diego or SF Bay Area, but if they wanted to do that, why bother to delete the regional boards in the first place?
For anyone who’s unclear on the difference between a board (now “community”) and a tag, here’s what a board URL now looks like:
A board is a required property of a topic (now called “post”), which is to say that every topic belongs to one and only one board. Most of the topics from the old regional boards have been dumped into the giant Restaurants & Bars board.
Here’s what a tag URL looks like:
Tags are optional properties. Each topic may have any number of tags, or none.
But you see, for most of us, this is just entertainment and information to pass a few minutes at a time, a few times a day. My fragile little mind is full, and even if there is a bit of limited space remaining, it isn’t going to be wasted learning how to re-use a site to make it sort-of-possible to use the way I used to use it, especially because but for our content, the site owner doesn’t have a product. Time consuming remedial education to allow someone else to make money off of me with little to no satisfaction of the end product on my part is not my time well-spent.
I understand completely. I guess part of me just enjoys watching a train wreck OR got enough out of the site to hope it could survive in spite of itself. I still go there but the quality (interest level for me) has gone down the drain. I was always more interested in the topical boards than the regional ones, so that focus change didn’t bother me as much as a user. And perhaps I found CH to be more easy to use and more relevant for me than eGullet, so I was more willing to live with the ethical (?) issues that made so many leave permanently.
FTC and HO are more my speed and I’m spending more and more of my web time here and there. Based on who’s on these new boards I’m certain the level of discourse will be higher than CH. My only negative, because I spend the vast majority of my site time on a small, older iPhone, is that (for me anyway) CH is actually easier (after all their modifications) in following conversations than this format because of the lack of nesting here. IE- I have no idea which of my posts you were replying to, only that it was to me.
