Change is great as long as it's for the better...

Posted to the "Get Satisfaction" feedback site. Please leave feedback for Buzznet there...

(NOTE: IF YOU READ THE COMMENTS TO THIS JOURNAL ON OLD BUZZNET THEY WON'T MAKE SENSE. ON NEW BUZZNET EACH ONE I HAVE IN QUOTES HAS A LINK TO SOMEONE ELSE'S POST ABOUT THE BETA SITE... THEY AREN'T ALL MY OWN COMMENTS!)

Other popular sites gain a lot of praise and users because of the amount of customizations possible (and ease of posting content). I think it's HUGE mistake to not only remove the ability to use custom CSS, but to further limit being able to change the colors of everything in the content area of our profiles. 

If anything, I expected in an update that Buzznet would step up to compete with sites like Tumblr and Wordpress and we'd be able to use a myriad of custom themes both official and those contributed by the programming community. To be incredibly blunt, my Tumblr blogs are damn pretty, and as much as I hate feeds, they do it better and my content looks a million times better on my page, plus it's painfully simple to add different types of content without having to navigate away to secondary (or ever tertiary, or more) pages to find a photo upload screen etc. Seen my Wordpress blogs? Gorgeous. Full of options, endless themes and widgets for everything you can imagine... and they can be as simple or as complex as people's individual levels of web abilities. 

While Buzznet offers a lot more in the way of content management, it was organized better on the old site, and we had all our controls (our sidebar) right there on every page of the site, with an immediate link to a dashboard of preferences...no chutes and ladders thru multitudes of uncategorized links to find options. We could customize our pages to a far greater extent. We had better layouts available to choose how to present our content to the rest of the world, and we had better navigation tools to get people to our content from our main page. 

I will say it 100x... an activity/post feed is content, not site navigation. It should be presented in a framework of other content and navigation and not the central defining feature of the site. Tumblr is pretty but it discourages community and promotes micro communities of followers/followings compartmentalized from other users on the site. 

While Buzznet will still be programming "Buzzworthy" content feeds, the change has gutted the unique communities and easy interaction with complete strangers of common interests that made Buzznet different and unique among all the other sites on the Internet. It has hidden content other than "of the moment" from other users and the entire world by burying it in feeds or behind loss of navigation, removing previews to lead people further into our galleries, hiding our older posts and body of work, stripping our band communities of any sense of history or depth by limiting what content is even accessible amoung years of contributions. 

Buzznet should absolutely continue to change and absolutely do what it must to have a structurally sound foundation to exist on, but in remaking the site, the things that WORKED, that made us UNIQUE and a more desirable place to be than all the other sites, that made finding new content and easily sharing content and ideas easy, should be considered essential to retain, even if they get new programming to support them.

Have you made a post about the new Buzznet? Please add a link to it in the comments...