Announcements

Not a fan of change for change sake, will take some getting used to, but it appears to have everything there. The layout seems to provide a somewhat better ability to find stuff, maybe.

The large "recs" number wastes space, I don't think I've ever cared about that number, nor ever will, if you want to show it to stroke authors' egos or to be transparent about why something is there, then make it small and immediately after the authors name. It's not really important enough to consume that much prime real estate. Also, too much space between articles in the "Trending" and "Greatest" threads, I'd prefer more than 5 articles and less empty space. My biggest personal complaint about DU is how rapidly things disappear on the "Trending" and "Greatest" threads, especially "trending", which just seems like a device for modern short attention spans, haha (I tend to ignore "trending" stuff on all social media for that reason, just because a lot of people are looking at something *right now* doesn't make it important or useful ... it might be ... but usually not so much). Anyway, I'd make both of those 8-10 items long, and somehow try to make those a little less dynamic, especially the "greatest" thread. Maybe hold the greatest for 12-24 hours or something. I've been called away from the site, only to lose something I was interested in, many times. Also, making a column for stuff of personal interest, such as the excellent rescued cats threads, rather than intermixing them in the "Trending" with things like coups and hurricanes, would be nice. Get rid of the recs number and use that space to add in something like that, and I'd be a happier camper.

I can definitely understand the complaints about white space, in the Light Mode it's just way too much. I like the option for Dark Mode and have turned it on. I would frankly have preferred dark mode as the default, not white, it's just too blinding, and bad for the eyes. But glad to have have that setting.

Also, the font selection, while more "modern", the lines on the letters themselves are narrower and the font size overall quite a bit smaller, so it's harder to read, especially in light mode. Doesn't really scale well when I adjust the scale on my keyboard, it feels like it readjusts the font sizes within the articles to fit a certain size, rather than allow them to size up, so the headlines grow and the pictures grow, but still keeps the fonts too small for my eyes, and the change from four columns to three when scaling up is both jarring and hard to follow, without the benefit of being able to read the articles better. And the amount of white space as one scales gets really bad.

My guess is, young readers will like it more, because their eyes can tolerate it. Older readers (which are probably most of us) are going to have a harder time with it. Again, I'd default to dark mode, and let those who like their pupils shrunken to a pinprick make the change, lol.

The Feed page is interesting, not sure how much I would personally use it, but only time will tell on that.

Left Column and Latest Breaking News are not vertically aligned, and that disturbs my COPD, haha. The Forums section in the middle needs an equivalent header name, like "Left Column" and "Latest Breaking News", to state what the column is being used for.

So, in summary, overall, layout changes are pretty good, but not really necessary. The "Trending now" and "Greatest Threads" are visually, steps in the wrong direction, even if the location is better. The visuals are definitely not an improvement in light mode. The font and font size selection allows more stuff on the screen, but the narrowness of the fonts, coupled with all the whitespace, makes reading the page quite a bit harder. Dark mode helps a lot, but fonts are still too small and way too much dead space in the top half of the screen.

Thanks for woking on it and for giving a wide audience the opportunity to chime in. I know this is difficult work, and impossible to make everyone happy. I do have to say, I don't get why people feel such a need to change things that basically work quite well already.