Okay, so that did not go well.
Let's not kid ourselves, the Kinja rollout lived up to all the hype, which is to say that it was awkward, clumsy, and not terribly conducive to what we do, or perhaps I should say, what we did. So, it's over, right? We're all going to be writing stuff for Bleacher Report next week.
Pardon me, but I've seen this movie before, and it was directed by Michael Bay that time, too. When the last redesign rolled out, we all freaked out. It was buggy as shit (remember when "IMG Fail" wasn't just a dig at me?). Hearts were gone. So were our messages. The "expand all replies" option was gone. For a while, we didn't even have a blog view option, so shit was all muddled up and confused. There was a featured comment thing that, frankly, I guess never got fully worked out.
But that all got fixed. And it seems pretty silly now when I look back at how much hand-wringing went into an aesthetically pleasing and ultimately pretty successful refresh.
Kinja is different, of course. The previous redesigns were largely site redesigns that only incidentally affected the world of comments. Kinja is a wholesale revision of the comment section. A casual reader might not have noticed the difference today. We all did. And, one would think, that when one sets out to specifically revise a comment section, they would hopefully take into account the opinions and needs of the commentariat. Yeah, that didn't happen here. Clearly, this redesign was not done with Deadspin commenting mores in mind.
But, we are here at another crossroads. Things will either get better, or they won't. We can make the best of it, tell some funny jokes, adapt what works to fit the new design, or we can act like a bunch of shitty Gawker commenters and throw shit all over the place. You are free to do what you choose. I'm going to give this every chance to work. And, if it doesn't, I'm going to totally change my tune and rip on everyone involved.
