So, I just loaded up the front page to be greated with wall of text and giant 'like' buttons my first reaction "wtf has happened here? omg... do not want!"

I always go directly to the index page, so I never look at the main page.

It took me ten minutes to find those "thumps up" icons. I saw a list of whatever articles (or whatevers) about Jesus (judging by the icons) but couldn't for the life find those thumbs up icons. When I realized those Jesus icons are the said icons.

YAY!

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.

One tip. click on the top stories dropdown since as people begin to vote / view particular stories that list will change. One of the things I have to add is link tracking as well to find out what stories people are visiting the most.

For now we're trying to come up with a best approach to deal with story duplicates.. I think community moderation will probably be used ultimately though. Maybe a "duplicate" link? I think the login site you are talking about is gamesindustry.biz. Those types of sites might also need to be tagged for "login required" or something. This is iteration #1 and will be improved over time. Right now we are trying to streamline our site and make it more industry relevant.. so you are going to see a different Gamedev.net as time goes on where content has to be easier to create and moderate. It became pretty clear that making people jump through a lot of hoops to do things like create an article will never yield as good of a result as letting people have their own blogs and just picking out the ones that look good. The rate of journal entries far exceeds the rate of article submissions.

Ultimately our hope is to get to a point with news that we can begin to create areas of the site that are much more current in providing information to you. So if we had an XNA "hub" of sorts you'd get XNA related news, articles, etc. from around the net without having to wait for users here to come up with the original content. Then we can use our forums and blogs here as a way for people to locally discuss the content area.

Consider this a first step and one that we'll learn from and adapt to make it work for our community. But we reached a point where we think it's more valuable to have a variety of news sources.

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

Getting people to use it is problem number one. So "liking" something had to be very easy, and very obvious that we wanted people to do that. What I'm finding though is that I may actually find a story interesting and noteworthy but I may not actually "like" it. e.g. "Company XYZ fires 1000 employees"

The "likes", comments, and views are all factored in when coming up with the top news views. So over time (this is day one) we'll be able to start exposing in different ways some of the more important game development news stories of the day rather than just the generic stream.

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.

I'm not quite following this logic. The industry affects how games are developed, and vice versa. GameDev.net is about all things game development, and it's important to know what's happening in the industry as well as how to make games.

The value the voting system brings is customization, which appears to actually address your complaint. To start, you will be able to filter by the top rated news and hide the news you don't care about. In time, that means we will be able to start customizing news according to your interests. It also means you can find out what other GDNet visitors view as important or relevant to game development.

Don't like like buttons in general. (I think I've only ever clicked on 3 in my life).
Don't like the giant like buttons on front page.
Not interested in clicking not interested for every article I'm not interested in.
Not interested in whether or not other people have a positive opinion about an article.
Like the news section layout.
Like ability to add images to posts.

I figure that the giant buttons will eventually be shrunk down and that it's mostly about making us users aware and going through all the initial phases of a new feature. But I think in the mean time if I'm wanting to check out any news it'll be in the news section.

Mike has made a blog post regarding this new feature in the Staff Journal

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?

One way to look at it is "what's the added value". Why would I go to GDNet to get my impersonal linkspam, when it's already a solved problem? Having a writer actually collate linkspam into an editorial adds value to it and gives me a reason to pay attention.
I understand you may not have the resources to hire editors, but replacing them with a feed collector seems as sad as the people betting their capital on making the next FaceBook - why compete with something that's already in place?

Where's the actual GDNet content gone?

It's too slow to load, has little that interests me there, and keeps me from what I actually do want from gamedev.

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.

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

drowning in a sea of impersonal linkspam, which I can get from Google Reader.[/quote]What's the sales pitch for why we'd come to GDNet for crowdsourced content rather than read reddit's or stackoverflow's or a personal selection, or other wannabe digg's?

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.
And lastly, the frontpage is going to be looked at to streamline it - ...

News is transient, so in a few days time it doesn't really matter if an uninteresting item is hidden, because it will be buried anyway.

the front page's new obsession with "likes" looks completely ridiculous

The front page is too much for me these days

The UI for liking and displaying the number of likes needs to be less prominent.

Can you get rid of the thumbs up and like .. 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

greated with wall of text and giant 'like' buttons my first reaction "wtf has happened here? omg... do not want!"

I figure that the giant buttons will eventually be shrunk down[/quote]

The front page is too much for me these days anyhow.

Yep. Front page looks completely ridiculous. Especially at sub 1024 window widths. It all stacks vertically like a tower of fail.


This site is starting to remind me of one of those sites that pops up when you mistype an URL like (off the top of my head) www.FixMyCar.com.

Right, so if you look through any of my posts concerning the new site, you'll see that my reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. So I hope that you'll realize that it's not out of fear of change when I say "the new news section is awful." The new news section is awful. When I looked at the old front page, I got the impression that there were actual people running the site picking out things that were actually interesting. Now it's just a giant homogenous wall of links none of which entice me to even click them much less "like" them.