Recently the Kinja gods “improved” the Oppo homepage by making the author of a post invisible until someone’s starred or commented itembiggened it (ETA: which is even worse - I hadn’t realised I’m also missing out on seeing how a posts’s been received by prior readers). No doubt there was some discussion of this here at the time - I wasn’t around, I didn’t see it.
Having lived with it for a few days, I’m finding it has a *hugely* negative effect on how many posts I click into. Previously, I didn’t really filter posts by author - there’s a few who I’ll usually pass by, but in general it’s the title and image that’ll cause me to click in or not (since they removed visibility of the first sentence or two from the homepage, which was another big mistake). However *not knowing* who the author is makes the post much less interesting, somehow. It’s surprising (to me at least), but it’s true.
HHFP came up with an analogy for Oppo which I really liked - it’s like a bunch of folks standing round shooting shit on someone’s driveway while a few of them work on a car. I guess in that analogy, the author’s handle is the equivalent of seeing their face. You may not know their name or story, but at least they’re a “person”, and thereore worthy by default of engaging with. Without a face attached to it, at a subconscious level who gives a fuck what some anonymous voice says from the crowd: that’s not a conversation starter any more.
This could actually kill Oppo for me. Which would suck - I like it here.
Is anyone else finding the same thing?