Dice is going to have a lot of unused server capacity. Maybe they'll let it go cheap.

Without the value provided by the first, they're not going to make money from the second.

It's not so much that the whitespace on the side is distracting (you're right, it is) but more that because it wastes space, it makes each comment take up more vertical space and reduces the information density. That makes it harder to see the whole picture. OK, in a thread with hundreds of entries, it's hard to see the whole picture anyway, but anything that makes it worse is not helpful. The whitespace on the sides is far more destructive in this respect than collapsing the line breaks is constructive, and collapsing those line breaks makes it harder to read even if it does slightly improve the density.

And I agree with you about sigs. Up until about 2 days ago, I had never made use of the sig capability. I'd love to be able to go back to ignoring it again.

When I tested, not only did the sig not show up on the beta site, but none of the HTML I added to the post was visible either. Italics and such for emphasis.

Why not?

Are you saying that in 2018 user expectations are going to be lower?

What the trend of your new design is pointing to is a lower information density. If you believe that such low density will meet the expectation of your users, that seems to indicate you are expecting different users.

Thanks for telling us you don't want us anymore.

I've got to say that the initial post on this topic perpetuates one of the paradigms that is sticking in the craws of Slashdot users. We are not an audience. We might be users, we might be members, we most certainly are contributors. But we are not an audience.

If you persist in thinking of us that way, then you're going to get it wrong. You serve an audience differently than you serve contributing members of a community. Most of the complaints hinge on that difference.

If we were an audience, we'd be coming here for the articles. Most of the complaints are about the comment system, how difficult it is to follow a conversation, how difficult it is leave a comment, etc. I come here, most of us come here, to read what my/our fellow slashdotters have to say. The value here is the community, and the most important contributors are other members, not the site or the editors.

If you don't get that straight, then you aren't going to "get" why we're upset, so there's no chance that you'll deliver us something that we can live with. And that community is going to vanish, leaving you with nothing of value.

You can take suggestions and maybe reduce the implosion, but unless you understand *why* we're upset, you're going to be heading in fundamentally the wrong direction.

Let me endorse this. It's a very well thought out opening post for a discussion, and both Slashdot staff and users could benefit from reading it.

I might read Slashdot occasionally on my phone, but it's very aggressive about forcing me to the mobile site. And I won't do that.

So, as it is now, no, I don't read on my phone.

You're right. This should be promoted to the main site. There are more details that other commenters could add, but this is a terrific summary.

I just saved that comment and went to look on the beta site to see how it was rendered. HTML formatting is gone. Line breaks are (like I said in the comment) collpsed. Sigs are gone.

Those are features that are fundamental for a techie site. Javascript sliders? Really, not so much.

And I didn't care for the threshhold sliders, in fact I had them disabled. I've been Slashdotting for quite some time with Javascript turned off. Ever since those sliders showed up, in fact.

I'm confused about what you're saying abou the font size. It sounds like you're saying it's too small. I have the opposite problem. If the font were smaller, and there were less whitespace (or should I say, "pale green space?" The lack of contrast hurts my eyes ) I wouldn't have to scroll so much. The new layout has a problem with density of presentation in general.

And despite what I just said about there being too much whitespace, there is *less* whitespace where it really needs it. Line breaks between paragraphs are now collapsed so you end up with an undistinguished mass of text even if the poster did put line breaks in to make it more readable.

Good point about the user info. I also prefer the dark title bar on each comment to give a sharp visual separation between comments.

Along with bringing back the user metadata, real timestamps. I've always hated sites that tell you "roughly" how long ago the post was. If they want to tell us exact how long ago it was (three years, eleven months, six days, nine hours and sixteen minutes ago) it would be annoying, but less annoying than "almost 4 years ago." But better, just put the timestamp.

What do you mean, UIDs don't matter?

I get a *badge* in my profile that says I have a 5 digit UID.

Whee!