text links there, I believe they should have stayed, and removing them was like yanking the rug out from under all the DUers who used them. The text links would be helpful for newcomers used to seeing text links to the home page on message boards, too, and they're standard on message boards.
And we disagree very much on the home page. I posted a long OP on this in GD the other day. I think the new home page makes DU look much less interesting and conveys less about the site than it did before.
But the items on it don't change very often -- it's certainly not the most dynamic page on the site. It's not where you go to see what's happening right now.
One of the reasons that's true is that the new design buries LBN beneath other stuff, including The Left Column, which is older news and analysis and changes pretty slowly.
I occasionally checked the Latest Threads page, but not often. The LBN stories posted by Democrats were always the first thing I checked, and I didn't care which DUers posted them, didn't need need to see their names, always wanted to see the source of the news and a snippet. (Just seeing headlines in some views of DU4 is a very poor substitute, and seeing 10 instead of 25 LBN stories on the DU4 home page is also very damaging to its effectiveness, IMO.) So I often returned to the DU3 home page to see the latest additions to LBN. I always wondered why The Left Column had the same stories that had been posted on LBN maybe a day earlier, and I rarely looked at the Left Column because I didn't want to reread a selection of older news curated by someone.
But to me the home page is, and always has been, a place to get a taste of the different things that are going on at DU over the last 12-24 hours.
We agree on that. But we disagree on whether the new design accomplishes that.
My OP in GD:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218381548
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