> trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the site down to a crawl.
Another good example of this is a car forum called AudiWorld after Internet Brands took it over. Initially, it ran on a super minimalistic forum script that loaded incredibly quickly and worked well for the community. It was certainly ugly yes, but it's what the members liked and had gotten used to.
Then IB came in, converted the whole site to vBulletin on a whim and pretty much killed the community there and then. The members revolted, people left the community in droves and a successor with the old software sprung up immediately to get the refugees from the site. [1]
One poorly thought out move to 'redesign' the site nearly killed a large forum and ended up creating one of its more popular competitors in the process. It's like a mini version of what happened with Digg, except possibly even worse.
It can't be worse than Digg, can it? Just as bad seems like the worst you can realistically get. Digg lost what, 95% or more of its users within months?
Another good example of this is a car forum called AudiWorld after Internet Brands took it over. Initially, it ran on a super minimalistic forum script that loaded incredibly quickly and worked well for the community. It was certainly ugly yes, but it's what the members liked and had gotten used to.
Then IB came in, converted the whole site to vBulletin on a whim and pretty much killed the community there and then. The members revolted, people left the community in droves and a successor with the old software sprung up immediately to get the refugees from the site. [1]
One poorly thought out move to 'redesign' the site nearly killed a large forum and ended up creating one of its more popular competitors in the process. It's like a mini version of what happened with Digg, except possibly even worse.
[1] http://8bit.minimal.net/post/87727243/how-to-destroy-a-commu...