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Some news from LWN

lwn.net

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Re: Some news from LWN

#51

Post by r3bl »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #11
espadrine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be honest: if you had not written this comment, would you have subscribed in six months if they started looking like Medium 2.0?

The complaints in this thread are mostly things like spacing and broken layouts, not fancy web X.0 fads. Hacker News is stylistically simple, but they still pay attention to making the content readable without strain.

I disagree with the HN comment. I always look at it at 140% zoom on my desktop, I had to add some CSS rules using Stylish to make it look a bit more eye-appealing to me (nothing fancy, I just prefer reading on a dark background), nested comments are a beautiful thing for a discussion, but they're a mess when you're on a smartphone that nobody figured out how to adjust properly...

Re: Some news from LWN

#52

Post by mherdeg »

There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article or on the web page that hosts it (http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/).

I was able to find the link from the front page, but it's kind of hidden -- https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info which says "Get started! The first step is to log into LWN. If you do not yet have an account, please create one now; otherwise, please log in to continue:". Which seems like a lot of steps to pay them money.

Re: Some news from LWN

#53

Post by omginternets »

paganel wrote: post #19
bflesch wrote: post #4

I've never been a subscriber of this page and I don't think I am their real target audience. But I'm a professional programmer and I have been using Linux for around 15 years. I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the s…

> Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the site's UX at all. For me that's a feature, not a bug. I'm interested about the content itself, not about with what color or what font that content is presented as.

Forgive me, as I truly mean no offense, but this is silly.

Good design makes the content more evident and less tiring to read. The two go hand-in-hand.

Do you favor poorly written articles simply because you're interested in the "content"? I expect not, so why the latent notion that "function = good" and "form = useless"? It's intellectually lazy.

Re: Some news from LWN

#54

Post by 1_2__3 »

pasiaj wrote: post #12
pubby wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements Really? I've always viewed plain HTML sites in the complete opposite way. They tend to have really good, well thought-out content. There's no filler or clickbait with them.

Compare LWN and Hacker News. Both are very simple, but the comment section of Hacker News has an emphasis on content, and metadata is showed in a very simple and toned down way. ("7 minutes ago" vs TIMESTAMP). On LWN there is unnecessary and redundant metadata accentuated! Everything on HN is clearly thought out, and almost nothing on LWN is.

Some of us vastly prefer a time stamp to an utterly useless relative measurement displayed.

Re: Some news from LWN

#55

Post by [deleted] »

pasiaj wrote: post #12
pubby wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements Really? I've always viewed plain HTML sites in the complete opposite way. They tend to have really good, well thought-out content. There's no filler or clickbait with them.

Compare LWN and Hacker News. Both are very simple, but the comment section of Hacker News has an emphasis on content, and metadata is showed in a very simple and toned down way. ("7 minutes ago" vs TIMESTAMP). On LWN there is unnecessary and redundant metadata accentuated! Everything on HN is clearly thought out, and almost nothing on LWN is.

[deleted]

Re: Some news from LWN

#57

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

bflesch wrote: post #4

I've never been a subscriber of this page and I don't think I am their real target audience. But I'm a professional programmer and I have been using Linux for around 15 years. I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the s…

You can't seriously expect a site that used to be named "Linux Weekly News" to have decent UI/UX.

Re: Some news from LWN

#58

Post by allendoerfer »

Okay, let's fix this, here are some suggestions they could think about:

- Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old subscribers.

- Improve the conversion rate. There is a middle ground between newsletter modals and burying the method to subscribe.

- Introduce a few new products. As far as I can see, at the moment it is just "in depth news for OSS, especially kernel hackers". Maybe they could package some parts of this up for different audiences (security notices, content partnerships etc.).

- Some marketing tactics. "Invite a new subscriber to get this badge." SEO could be improved, too.

Re: Some news from LWN

#59

Post by ausjke »

I have been a subscriber for years but stopped the subscription last year, it's just that I'm doing less kernel related development these days.

lwn could do better though, make the website visually better, have a mobile app, do some beginner friendly kernel corner and such, also add a save-my-favorite-articles function under my account(last time I checked there is no such thing), adding tag support,etc. In fact just moving to wordpress will probably solve many of its website "issues" so it can focus on the content as it has been for a long time. You need the landing page stay up to date to attract new and young subscribers.

Re: Some news from LWN

#60

Post by randac »

mherdeg wrote: post #52

There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article or on the web page that hosts it ( http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/ ). I was able to find the link from the front page, but it's kind of hidden -- https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info which says "Get started! The first step is to log into LWN. If you do not yet have an account, please create one now; otherwise, please log in to continue:". Which seems like a…

At least they tell you the price before making you create a login!

I ran into this gem recently:

https://www.flograppling.com/signup?next=/

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