I like it so far, it looks much better.  Should be nice when you get the bugs ironed out.

Excellent work, Simon. The next generation of Betterhumans looks extremely exciting.

Just testing the rating functionality.

Where's the breakthrough news items? Still gonna be here?

I am pleasantly surprised with the design :)

Good Job Simon

Did you disable forum signatures?

Breakthrough News made the site accessible to a broad spectrum of the public.  I joined just now so I could post my comments.  Before, I could share your site with confidence.  Now, I'm concerned that I'll only be able to share the site with friends interested and forgiving enough to sift through what could no doubt turn into a mighty, barely coherent, and self-stroking pissing contest.  I truly hope you have something worthy of all the new promotion.  The old site was fantastic.  Ever hear of "New Coke"? If it isn't broken...

this is sad. the rantings in blogs and forums were not what i was coming to betterhumans for. i read up on it occasionally, but i saw it more like "extras". the main reason i visited this page was because of the newsfeed which collected articles of interest in a neat package.

i also fully agree with astral_clipper that the value betterhumans had as a source of interest for "outsiders" has now been all but erased. it used to be a site which i frequently referred others to, but i have dubts that this will continue as i feel better with referring newcomers to proper articles.

until the next revision, farewell.

First impressions after 5 minutes of playing around is NO!

That might change in the next 5 minutes but I'm sorry, I agree with astral_clipper. It looks far worse than it did, a lot less professional and nowhere near as accessible. I loved how straight forward the front page used to be. As a part time web designer I was inspired by the old site. This looks like one of those crappy free forum sites. And what's with the logo? Why is the arrow pointing down?

The extra features I've seen look good, don't get me wrong. I like the favourites and the fact it shows me what posts I'm involved with. The overall experience should be improved.

Sorry Simon, but looks wise it's definately a step backwards.

Yuk, yuk yuk!

The lack of news articles as its own subsection is a valid concern.  Personally I'm willing to let this new approach play out and see how it goes.  But I think some sort of article categorization (e.g.; news, blog) may be in order to accommodate those who come here primarily for the news.

Wow, this appears to be a big change. Can't rest, can you Simon? :)
Just a thought-- old profiles can still be pulled up in Google cache.

235959, article categorization is a great idea for blogs.  That way opinions can be separated from real hard 'news'.

Simon, I also need the news story I submitted yesterday back. Please PM it to me ... I didn't keep a copy and would like to post it on my blog.

One more idea!  If possible, there should be something that prevents each person from having more than ONE main article appear on the Betterhumans home page PER DAY. That way everyone will have more fair exposure than someone who keeps hammering out articles faster than the norm.  We don't want the front page of the site to be all about one or two people's ideas dominating everyone else's.

The logo could probably lose the down arrow and go back to being all on one even level, perhaps slightly chromed.

Keep up the great work, Simon! :}

I like this look! It's much less busy than the old interface. Everything seems to have a clearly labeled section on the page--less superflous graphics. Perhaps some may disagree, but I've always preferred a minimalist page layout. There is a tendency to jam far too much on a root page; this forgets to the purpose and power of hyperlinks. Keep it simple and people will find what they need.

Although I miss the old breaking news, I think I agree with Simon's experiment to let users put news right in their own blogs and just send this to the root page. Hopefully this will give us a nice mix of news and editorial. It should also give users another reason to keep adding to their own blogs--aside from pontifications--making this site a sort of metablog. I think this might enlist the users of this site to act as amateur journalists that add content to this site--sort of a slash, digg or boing.

And it supports autodiscovery of the RSS/Atom feeds!

Consider this a strong vote in favor of the new changes.

If I might speak for Simon, I believe a major reason for this change is to encourage a more collaborative environment. Take a look at a successful sites like Slashdot or Kuro5hin. They're completely user driven, popular, and informative. I would urge the Betterhumans readership to stick with the site over the next several weeks to get a sense of where this is going.

That being said, better organization is always welcome. Simon: would it be possible to give the site sub-headings much like they do at Kuro5hin (http://www.kuro5hin.org)?

The staff of Betterhumans, one of the largest transhumanist community and news sites, have rolled out their latest site redesign: I'm very excited to announce the launch of the new Betterhumans. The new site marks a transition to an even more community-driven

It seems as if you went from the main transhumanist news site to a specialised bloging comunity with a forum. I think that we realy don't need that. It is great that we have blogs and the comunity, and that the comunity contributes greatly, but if we want blogs, we can go elsewhere, and if we want news, this is (was) the site. I think removing the dedicated news reports is a mistake. The news reports are why this comunity exists in the first place, if it wasn't here, i would spend my time elsewhere. I'm staying, but I don't like it.

Does anyone know of a good breakthrough news site they can link me to? Blogs don't interest me very much.

p.s. I also think that graphically this new site is much less appealing.

I have to say, I'm very unhappy about the removal of the breaking news.  While I appreciate the blogs, I found that their reactions to the breaking news was my way in to the dialog, not the dialog as a way into the news.  Previously, I could log on, see what cool news is happening and if I desire read what others had to say about the subjects.  However, relying on blogs to distill interesting news introduces the possibility of personal biases - injecting these personal opinions into what are, in effect, science reports seems to lead down the path which ultimately leads to 'fox news' style slanting.  The members' opinions add color to the raw news, but being forced to dig though blogs to pull out bullet-pointed headlines of interest is tedious and time consuming.  Also the idea that more popular and trusted bloggers would take over for the news points turns this into a slanted, personality driven site, rather than an unbiased portal to get news on the subjects, allowing users to dig in to the biases if they so desire. The "will not!"/"will too!" sniping between bloggers is also tedious, so pushing blogs to be the central focus of this site's user experience is just... unfortunate. Lastly, I check this site from work - 10 minutes browsing is one thing, but an hour of digging to get a few unbiased nuggets of news doesn't work for me.

Love the new design. It's a much more respectable look. The glassy-eyed lady that used to grace the header always struck me as way too juvenile.  

Reading through these comments, I think BH's visitors have divided into two camps. Those with RSS/Atom/news readers and those without.

Those with readers may not really need a breaking news section on the root page because, if there was one, they'd just subscribe their reader to it. As such they wouldn't have to load the site directly at all. They'd just open their reader and follow up on the links that look interesting, bypassing BH entirely. Those with readers instead come to the site to read stuff that is unique to the site, not just find links that lead elsewhere. I'm in this camp. Breaking news is not as important to me as it might have been 5 years ago before RSS broke big.

Basically RSS readers reduce the need to browse sites to get links to other interesting pages on the Web.

But there are still plenty of folks without readers who still use the method of quickly scanning the root pages of sites to get their daily link dose, without editorial or commentary. I think a breaking news section should still be provided for them.

I think this shouldn't be hard to to do. Simon could just find a daily list of interesting, relevent articles and compile of list of headline links, each with a brief abstract, to put on a section at the top or bottom of the root page. This should satisfy the needs of BH visitors without access to Atom/RSS.

What do you think?

PS: I second the vote that the old logo gal was a little too spacey, pop-album-coverish. And the new BH logo could do with some more pizzaz--maybe something that suggests evolution or cultural change.

I think having article categorization would be a fair balance between the objective of community driven content and the concerns about those who are here primarily for the news.  BH has the opportunity to revive the hard news content and improve it by basing it on the user moderation model.  This may pose problems down the road, as sites like digg have shown; users sensationalize news, link to their ad-driven sites, or post things as news when they clearly are not, etc.  It seems that the user base here is responsible enough to not inappropriately tag articles as news, so we may not have as much of a problem.  And there seems to be some level of moderation available anyway.

Some category ideas: news, commentary, exploration (invention, brainstorming, speculation), other (blog variety; rants, general).  I would also advise multiple category selection, for example someone might be posting news with some commentary appended to it.  But the news category should be strictly defined as being hard news that was recently reported on a site adhering to journalistic standards, or something to that effect.  Then those who come for the news can select "news" (or everything but "other") either on the site or on their rss reader.  It's certainly worth a try, and would probably resolve the expressed concerns.  This site needs news and the people that come here for the news.  We should do what we can to facilitate them.  So if you're one of them, what suggestions do you have?

Regarding the new design, I find it to be much more aesthetic.  I'm not as picky about the triangle.  I might highlight NE point for effect by adding a tail or tip, but either way the logo is much better than before.

I've just started digging around on the new site. Not bad. You mentioned a few months ago in another post that you had plans to include website bookmarking as a new feature. (see below) Is that feature included on the new design anywhere?



11-02-2005, 6:46 AM 1789 in reply to 1788  

Simon

Joined on 03-07-2005

Posts 201
Points 0

RE: Interesting Websites for Betterhumans
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Heh. This is a good time for me to mention that for the future, I want to integrate a social bookmarking tool like Delicious into Betterhumans.com so that members can learn about neat sites from other members and even subscribe to other members' bookmarks.

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