Anyone else think the front page's new obsession with "likes" looks completely ridiculous?

Also, where's the actual GDNet news content gone, like the daily, or week[end]/[day] reading?

The front page is too much for me these days anyhow. I go straight to gamedev.net/index, and if I see a reference to something interesting located on the front page I'll go back. Otherwise, it's too slow to load, has little that interests me there, and keeps me from what I actually do want from gamedev.

I don't mind something like community feedback aggregating stuff that is of interest to the community itself, and possibly me as well. I do mind having that be so overwhelmingly what is assumed I want that it crowds out other content though.

There's a separate news section now that you can drill down to specific areas. Most of the actual content seems to have gone into the general news section.

My personal opinion is that if I wanted to be viewing the new stuff from kotaku, gamasutra, etc. I would be looking at those sites rather than gdnet. I rather expect gdnet's front page to be focused on stuff that's gdnet exclusive rather than things I could see in a more friendly format somewhere else. Yes, most of the stuff in the posts like the gdnet daily were just links to somewhere else, but at least someone on gdnet wrote something original for it.

I'm not a fan either -- in my opinion:

1. The UI for selecting what category you're viewing needs some improvement.
2. The default-selected category should contain only -- or at least strongly emphasise -- stuff from GDNet (which I believe is now "general news") rather than whatever it is now.
3. The UI for liking and displaying the number of likes needs to be less prominent. Perhaps it could be left as-is but shoved over to the right, or it could be shrunk and put down with the comments and "not interesting" links. Apart from displaying the number and presumably hoping I'll be more likely to click into a story which has lots of likes, I'd also be interested to know if the data is actually used for anything like post-ordering, etc. -- if not, it definitely needs de-emphasis.
4. Being able to remove stuff is cool -- but I'd like to know, and think people should be easily able to find out
   • if such changes persist after leaving the change.
   • if such changes alter what I see in future -- will they hide stories from a similar category, or from the same source, or what?

I agree with SiCrane that in general when I want to see contents from other sites I'll visit those sites, or be subscribed to their feeds.

I assume it's still a work in progress though, and that further changes and explanation should be coming.

I suggest adding more featured journals to the front page until someone starts writing news for the site.

The gamedev dailies and trips to weekend journalland were always easily accessible with the old layout; now'days I tend to skip straight through to Active Content. I enjoy reading them but think that they need to stand out more because at the moment they be drowning in a sea of impersonal linkspam, which I can get from Google Reader.

2c

I suggest adding more featured journals to the front page until someone starts writing news for the site.

True gdnet news was maybe 4-5 posts per week. With as much that goes on in the industry this doesn't cover enough ground for us to call what we have news. Our objective for the site is to be a source of game development information first and foremost.

While very few people like change around here, it's hard to argue that sites like reddit, digg, stackoverflow, etc. are attracting more viewers. I think in our old mindset we thought it was uber important for us to produce original news content (and even original articles). But honestly, who cares where the news comes from? We had maybe 3-4 unique posts per week which will continue to show up in the stream.. BUT, everything else was essentially reposts from other news sites. So in addition to the 3-4 posts we natively had per week, we'll be focusing on a subset of game development news sources (I removed Kotaku btw) that are relevant to the site.

The "likes" are prominent because that's what we wanted out of the UI.. people to vote. The view is actually unique and permanent to individual user accounts. e.g. if you say a news item is uninteresting it will be gone from your view of the news forever as long as you are logged in. For the first iteration of this system we'll be measuring down votes rather than acting on them to get an idea of what kind of threshold we would need in order to remove an article from the front page. So for now we're in a data collection state and will be analyzing what you guys find interesting/uninteresting and trying to tweak our news to reflect that.

And lastly, the frontpage is going to be looked at to streamline it - things like the journals are becoming far more important and relevant than the articles section right now.

Can you get rid of the thumbs up and like, I don't really see what value it brings ??? The fact I or anyone else personally likes or dislikes an item of news brings what to the site? It feels way too social media, I think it's wrong for a site that is supposed to be informative and educational to be dressed up like a social platform...we always say use the right tool for the right job...

For me I come to Gamedev to read news and get help on issues I have relating to game development not the industry in general.

Is there anything that can be done about getting the same story imported from multiple different sources, or is that something that will be left up to community moderation?

It's also pretty annoying when a story has no further information on the "read more" page, and visiting the actual site reveals a login is required to view the full story. Given the new direction I assume you probably want to still list those items, but could something be added to the UI to indicate that this is the case before having to click through two sets of links (one to "read more", one to visit the actual site), even if it's done by manually listing those sites as being treated differently?

Looking forward to seeing how the new system goes, 'though I'm still not really a fan of how in-your-face the voting UI is.

For the first iteration of this system we'll be measuring down votes rather than acting on them to get an idea of what kind of threshold we would need in order to remove an article from the front page.

So if I understand correctly, the intent is to measure how many people remove each story from the front page, and if x amount of people (where x is a number still to be determined) remove a particular story that story will then be removed for everyone? Sounds like a good way to clean out some of the cruft, as long as people actually use it. I would think given this is the method of cleaning up what appears in the feed that it should be made more -- rather than less -- prominent than "likes".

Is the count of "likes" going to be used for anything -- ordering of articles on the page perhaps -- or is it just for show?