This site has never cared about good design. If they did, they would have dropped the infinite scroll-style pages as soon as everyone complained about them. They only started autoplaying videos because they figured out how to get around some ad blockers (for now).

Yeah, I just saw that comment in the other thread.

Personally, I think that the thread is fine here. What I do have a problem with is that we were told by GS staff that the news section would NOT have non-gaming news in it. I came here wondering if some of the staffers were just getting lazy and not properly filtering things or if GS was, once again, ignoring its users. And yes, that last line comes across in a harsh tone, but the fact that we keep getting ignored (unwanted content expansion, infinite scrolling pages, etc.) is much more insulting.

I'm also noticing that several comments, all of which have been reasonable criticisms that do not violate the ToU, have been removed. If you do not want dissenting opinions, say so and lock the thread. Removing those opinions silently is not a good sign.

@digitaldame: Yes, I read that. Unfortunately, that doesn't bring anything new to the discussion and all of the reasons for the change have pretty much been completely debunked by people here (some of whom are also web developers, or in my case, usability/user experience experts).

@digitaldame: Perhaps you could share with us specific reasons why you (i.e. GS devs) found the old site to be deficient. As evident from most of the comments here, we disagree with your assessments.

This is all well and good, but completely misses one of the key negative issues with the redesign: people don't read more than one article like this. Period. End of story. The site is not an RSS feed, so please stop treating it as one. Saying that other sites do it and that's why you are doing it is one of the worst reasons I can think of. If you have legitimate statistics and analytics which show a positive user experience for this change, then please share this as it goes against current usability guidelines and best practices for website design.

Here is the biggest problem with that approach: you assume that people WANT to transition to other articles. On average, I read about 3-5 articles per day here. These are typically not consecutive articles, nor are they topically related. People do NOT read articles like this; they read an RSS feed like this.

As evidenced by those above me, the site is once again trying to throw out the baby with the bath water. People come here to read articles and read the (ranging from psychotic to hilarious) comments on the articles. If you want to disable comments, just do it. Hiding them and making them more difficult to get into is a very poor practice.

And if everyone else jumped off a cliff would you too? :)

Seriously though, this is not a good reason. Have you done any usability analysis, A/B testing, surveys or any other research as to what the impact for the site and its users would be? I have yet to see a neutral opinion on this change here, let alone a positive one. The last time this change was "tested" on us, it was also lambasted. While I am glad that opinions are being solicited now, once again, it is being done after the fact.

Let me ask you a simple question: do you read articles this way? Why? Do you enjoy scrolling past an article that doesn't interest you in order to see if the next one does?

I imagine the most people here visit once a day (for me, once dinner). You are going to get much more ad exposure from people viewing the news listing page and individually opening and viewing the articles they want to read. Doing an infinite scroller like you have now is going to lead to reader fatigue and attrition.

Also, as a final piece of feedback, let us downvote articles. Hide the downvotes if you want, but let us give you feedback that we don't like certain games/articles/writers in some way. Upvotes without downvotes is pointless and everyone sees that.

The problem is that continuous scrolling is not how people digest content like this. This sort of content presentation only works for top-level, quickly digested bits like titles and synopses (see Mashable's website for an example of this). For actual articles, there is no reason to show more than one article at a time, as other articles are going to be unrelated or not interesting for the reader.

For me, my workflow is to go into the news section, spawn off new tabs for the 5 or so articles that interest me and move on. I'm not going to read other articles below, even if it is one that I already opened in a new tab, because I am never going to look past the comments section. I'm probably not the only one who goes into articles just for the comments too, which is now more irritating as those don't auto-load now.