Yep

[branchandroot]

The only thing I really have to say about AO3's latest contretemps is: I told you so~

When a platform is so fucked up that the only way to make it run is to take out the navigation, then it's time to think real hard about who's been driving development.

Comments

[mitsuhachi]

This is probably a stupid question, because I know jack all about site programming, and also the answer is probably "bullshit politics", but...Why can't they just do the tags like delicious? That's super useful and user-friendly, and they don't seem to have the site problems AO3's current model is giving them.

[branchandroot]

Not that I can give an authoritative answer, because the real answer is buried in black-box meetings. But I think there's a horrible confluence of "the interface must be simple and uncluttered!" and "it will only upset people if we show them how we scramble around and hack at things trying to make this all work" and "/obviously/ we can do it /better/ (despite being totally inexperienced and having an apparent aversion to asking or looking up how to do shit)".

So most of the tag tree is utterly invisible to the users and the wranglers have to bust their asses trying to make users' (forcibly ignorant) choices work sensibly, and never mind the right and left hands, the freaking thumb doesn't know what the first finger is doing. A lot of the essential infrastructure that delicious employed is probably in place--it's just invisible and being manually shoe-horned by an artificial extra layer of labor because no one can see what they're doing and all the users are driving blind. One reason that crowdsourced databases work is that people can see what other people have done, and a general consensus emerges about how we label things. AO3 deliberately shut that off.

Ideally, this particular issue is vast and bad enough that it may prompt some re-evaluation of that rat's nest, but personally I doubt it.

[mitsuhachi]

So basically they decided to take a perfectly fuctional and useful system, made it more complicated, cut out the parts that made it work in the first place, replaced them with volunteers who may or may not have the information (or interest) to make useful connections in tagging and are generally treated like shit regardless, and then deal with their clusterfuck by removing basic functionality and also massively limiting people's access even though number of users isn't even the major factor?


...Seriously?

[branchandroot]

Yeah, that about covers it, really. Oh, and didn't take the help of, like, top-ten-in-world type of experts, when it was offered. Oh, and don't forget the part about "wrote code so incredibly bad that generating a sidebar formed two thirds of the site load".

It is a clusterfuck of truly epic proportions.

[mitsuhachi]

Woooooooow. Just. Wow.