Letters to the Editor
-
It's About Laziness
My guess is, Scott Adams is phasing out his input completely in the long run. First he offers people to write their own punch-line, then the whole text. Eventually he will not offer any text at all, just a few sketches from his drawers and let people fill in the rest. As a final step he just offers an empty three-panel template to be filled by his fans.
Sounds ridiculous? Why, everyone of us enjoys supermarkets, where we have to do all the work - even the cashier's job is already down to the customer! - and then pay for it. In marketing lingo: 'You lower the expectations, we lower the prices.' Unfortunately the prices always go up ...*
*Not quite true but needed as a punch-line.
-
only problem is the new site sucks
The comments section is full of people complaining that the new site doesn't work. It works for me but it loads so slowly that I've taken it off my daily reading list.
-
The problem...
The problem, at lest for me, was that Dilbert started melding into my real life while working at a 'big-ten' university.
I had so many things happen that would be perfect Dilbert material.
One: I was a 'new hire' that didn't rate an office with a view but the last office available in my division had a window so to quell the near riot and negate the possibility of moving someone from another division into that office, a cubicle wall was constructed to cover the window. YES you read that right.
Time after time, incident after incident, that suck ass job proved that humans being will be more than capable to sink to new and inane levels of petty bickering. Well, and couple that with a boss nearly a total copy of the pointy haired boss, and his boss wasn't much better, and someone could understand that the Dilbert strips that I read were counterproductive. They hit way to close to home.
Also the new Dilbert site sounds like it proves its own point: management always thinks you can do twice as much with half the expenditures and it sounds like they've skimped on servers and maybe some software to handle the task of running the site.
-
Steve is not happy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFE2CCfAP1o
-
Yes, it sucks
What is this current obsession with highlighting reader supplied content? I go to Dilbert.com because I want to read Dilbert strips. You know? Those things that Scott Adams draws and writes? I don't care which strips are most popular. I don't care how many stars other readers might give a particular strip. I have no interest in wading through a bunch of alternate punchlines supplied by readers.
What I would like to be able to do, and used to be able to do relatively easily until the site was redesigned, is read the strips in published order. There tends to be something of a storyline that develops each week and I often visit on Fridays in order to read that week's strips. It used to be that you could click on "Read Past Strips", click on a date in the calendar and then read through the strips in order. Now it's: click on "Strips" (and hope that the date on which you want to start reading is listed on that page or you're forced to do a date based search), click on a particular strip, wait for it to load, enjoy said strip, click the back button to get to the list of strips, click on the next one, wait for it to load, etc.
Lately it seems to me that every web redesign I come across makes it harder to do the thing that I visit that page to do and/or buries the unique asset that the site provides (e.g., the writing of Scott Adams) and spotlights the contribution and comments of the site's readers. Comment sections and blogs (and, yes, letter pages where I'm typing this rant) abound. Why do publishers think that providing more of what's already abundant is going to attract more readers?
(Note to the LA Times: there are approximately 4,397,214 places on the web I can go to read other diner's reviews of local restaurants. There is only one place I can go to read the the opinion of your professional critics. Why do you make it so hard to find the latter and so easy to find the former? Why bury your unique assets? Why should I bother to visit?)
-
New Dilbert Site Re-design
Some of the points raised here are valid, but overall they seem to be a bit harsh. It seems like the Dilbert.com re-design has initiated a feeding frenzy amongst a group of Scott’s fans!!!! I for one give Scott alot of credit for taking risks in trying to bring Dilbert into the 21st Century.
Check out the response to user feedback that Scott actually posted on his blog: (http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/new_web_upgrade_feedback/)
Hopefully the improvements to the site will be completed soon.
-
Build your own "Meat"
There's a rudimentary site that allows one to make your own "Red Meat - from the secret files of Max Cannon" strip. It's a pretty fun diversion - but I don't know if it's officially sanctioned:
http://monkeydyne.com/rmcs/buildmeat.html
-
it just doesn't work
The only way I can visit the new site is to first turn off javascript. Otherwise I see the strips for a fraction of a second, then the screen becomes all white. (I suppose I could turn off each of my Firefox plugins to see if one of them is the culprit, but I won't.)
-
This is nothing that new
I think this is sort of an echo of the modern Internet community, gradually seeping into the mainstream. If you've been on forums like Something Awful, there is a whole mode of communication built around distorting cultural artifacts by adding text to famous or iconic images or placing existing work in a different context so as to give it an entirely new meaning - what the Situationists called detournement. In webcomics specifically, the reader community of Achewood constantly edits and reposts images from the comic (and elsehwere) in the context of exchanges on the forums, often with hilarious results. This kind of unintentionally collaborative comedy is, I think, one of the unique new things to emerge from the Internet (along with things like tubgirl, unfortunately).