Last.fm is not handling the feedback well, IMHO

Darsa said:
enlill said:
Last.fm do listen to suggestions, they just wont agree to to the bring back old last.fm one.
And I gues there is some number of users that wouldn't like to see the old layout too...

I'm one of the people who don't one to see the old one. It could get my computer stuck. I always wished they would get a better, faster layout. Thank god, they did.

As much as I like the new layout, the site hasn't gotten much faster (I believe page size has certainly increased alot to go over 100 kb - without images). The large amount of images don't make things fast either. However, it's not *too* slow (compare sourceforge's old site). Besides, the old site was slow too (though probably for reasons that were in the code, rather than in transmission time).

That said, there are lots of 'quick wins' yet to be made against the criticism. I'll name a few:

- Collapse-able area's: one of the big plusses on the old site
- 'play in software' button' :playing what you would get if you opened each songs' page, opened up the source, grabbed the ID out, and put all those ID's comma-seperated in a lastfm:// link, like so: lastfm://play/tracks/ID1,ID2,ID3 and so on.
- quicklink to weekly charts and further ahead the ability to put them on your profile. Personally I don't see the use of putting them there that much, but a quick link is always handy.

The latter two should take an experienced PHP programmer maybe an hour to build and intergrate (of course that's a guess, but I mean to say it should be easy). The latter would probably require javascript, which might be an argue against it (I don't know how slow the site is in IE6/7, since their javascript engine is much slower than FF3's).

Anyway, I hope to see these small changes in fairly soon (just like the change that you see which song people are listening to on an artist page, for example). I think small changes are the way to ease the anger without wasting alot of time on what could be marked as simple whining.

edit: fixing animated GIF images and transparant images, another thing I don't really care about, would be an idea (I have no idea how you broke them in the first place - to be honest, my guess is you're trying to prevent something, either an exploit or excessive use).

Babs_05 said:
One thing I liked about the old site was info was more compact and easier to see. Especially new shouts. Instantly visible. And I liked higher visibility of journals on our pages and around the site. And tag clouds of course.This is one of the main things I don't get about people complaining about the new site. Not Babs_05's post specifically but the number of people who are upset because the site looks too much like a social networking site now, versus the people who are upset because the social networking features of the site are more "hidden" now.

Both sides are in agreement that they don't like the new look, but if last.fm were to make a move to appease either side they would further alienate the other side. I think the fact that angry people are pulling the site in opposite directions is a good sign that last.fm is well placed in a medium that between the opposing extremes of "All Social" or "All Music".

I think that me and many other people like the medium there is now. Tag clouds are cool but they take up alot of page real estate, I like having a 5 top tags "ata-a-galnce" with a clickable link to the cloud if I want more just because it saves space for other data. I wish journals were more prominent but considering most are annoying memes and lists I realize I don't want to see them anyway. If people didn't use journals for such stupid annoying crap I would be much more vocal about making them more prominent.

As for shouts I'm biased because I have to clean them when they're abused. I've seen so much annoying crap people spew that the more hidden they are the better. I guess they're like Journals, and other social networking aspects of the site; if people were to use them to enhance the music site rather than devolve it into myspace I'd be much more sympathetic to them getting more visibility.

Wow, WorldFusion is still making a fuss over this? Just give it up already.

Jester-NL said:
x___________Y said:
But there's no sense they're listening and not just implementing changes they were going to anyway- paint it black was always coming back, wasn't it?The return of 'paint it black' was promised on the blog-page, only minutes after the site went live... that did not stop countless people complaining that it was missing. And there are more examples. It seems that some people can't be pleased. Hell, there are quite a few people that still think that Last.fm-staff totally killed the site and removed all the features, because they are a few clicks away, or on another page. Even now, some six weeks after the new site went live people seem to feel the need to give rather emotional feedback.
That doesn't mean that all fixes are that easy. Judging by the number of threads about 'recommendations' I guess that ain't the easiest job...


You know, you're right. Here I am complaining about the staff not seeming to listen or make clear statements when the users are just as bad, complaining about things that never really were an issue, to my eyes, and drowning out any serious comment. -_-'

I do still think this needs to be looked at so communication can be better facilitated, which I did read an interesting post by Muz on a while back- some interesting ideas in the pipeline (wish i could find it...).

Glad to finally have an update on recs too, even if someone did have to copy a post from the label forum for us to see it :/

(and I understand it's not easy making all the new features work and the old features compatible, but the reason for the emotional responses, as I'm still guilty of is due to suddenly losing our "way of life" and still being just as in the dark as to if it's eventually returning or not, and lingering resentment at losing things we could've saved if we'd had the chance (ie pages of great, carefully weeded out recs in my case) and the apparent nonchalance towards it).

probably repeating myself here again, i'll try not to return to this thread :)

gwalla pisze:
WorldFusion hasn't posted in this thread in 4 days, so I'm not sure what you're going on about.
It's not about when he last posted but the point why he is still posting. We (other users out of THE group) don't care. And it seems there is more and more voices of people who got used to the new stuff ... and they will be more since it's natural.

Kerensky97 said:
Babs_05 said:
One thing I liked about the old site was info was more compact and easier to see. Especially new shouts. Instantly visible. And I liked higher visibility of journals on our pages and around the site. And tag clouds of course.This is one of the main things I don't get about people complaining about the new site. Not Babs_05's post specifically but the number of people who are upset because the site looks too much like a social networking site now, versus the people who are upset because the social networking features of the site are more "hidden" now.

Both sides are in agreement that they don't like the new look, but if last.fm were to make a move to appease either side they would further alienate the other side. I think the fact that angry people are pulling the site in opposite directions is a good sign that last.fm is well placed in a medium that between the opposing extremes of "All Social" or "All Music".

I think that me and many other people like the medium there is now. Tag clouds are cool but they take up alot of page real estate, I like having a 5 top tags "ata-a-galnce" with a clickable link to the cloud if I want more just because it saves space for other data. I wish journals were more prominent but considering most are annoying memes and lists I realize I don't want to see them anyway. If people didn't use journals for such stupid annoying crap I would be much more vocal about making them more prominent.

As for shouts I'm biased because I have to clean them when they're abused. I've seen so much annoying crap people spew that the more hidden they are the better. I guess they're like Journals, and other social networking aspects of the site; if people were to use them to enhance the music site rather than devolve it into myspace I'd be much more sympathetic to them getting more visibility.
it is the sise of the box. comment have gone from " your music rocks" to "hay josh that was an awesome party rember when that guy was all blah blah blah and stuff and the dude did that thing lol" and they do this because they now have the space to in less lines

it is the sise of the box. comment have gone from " your music rocks" to "hay josh that was an awesome party rember when that guy was all blah blah blah and stuff and the dude did that thing lol" and they do this because they now have the space to in less lines
I don't understand how more space in the shoutbox can possibly be a bad thing. Quite often 400 characters wasn't enough for me and I had to split posts across two shouts, that doesn't often happen any more. Is "your music rocks" somehow a more valid shout than "hay josh that was an awesome party rember when that guy was all blah blah blah and stuff and the dude did that thing lol" for some reason?

LordDANEgerous said:
it is the sise of the box. comment have gone from " your music rocks" to "hay josh that was an awesome party rember when that guy was all blah blah blah and stuff and the dude did that thing lol" and they do this because they now have the space to in less lines
If I want to recommend some artists to someone (for example, for the shoutbox service at MAC), I don't want to just dump artist names there, I want to explain how and why. And I don't want to use PM, the shoutbox is quicker and PMs are likely to be missed. And other people can't read PMs.

Jahnzilla pisze:
enlill said:
gwalla pisze:
WorldFusion hasn't posted in this thread in 4 days, so I'm not sure what you're going on about.
It's not about when he last posted but the point why he is still posting. We (other users out of THE group) don't care. And it seems there is more and more voices of people who got used to the new stuff ... and they will be more since it's natural.
If you dont care, dont log into the "we hate the new look thred". Start a "we're happy with the new thred" thred.
I for one dislike it, bring back the old.
Last time I checked this is not the title of this thread. It's about last.fm staff reactions to feedback - not i don't like the new layout contest.
Also, there were topics about "loving the new layout" but that isn't sth you can really discuss. I mean what is there to add if someone likes it...
As for popularity contest ... there is a poll (not very popular assuming that only about 2-3k people voted ... and not really updated), there are "support groups" (funny thing that recently the "haters" group started to lose members ... did someone wake up?).

Darsa said:
The hate group loses members because the last.fm, staff kills them one by one >:( Hooray for conspiracy theories over a freaking layout.
Nice... any proof for that?

Jester-NL said:
Darsa said:
The hate group loses members because the last.fm, staff kills them one by one >:( Hooray for conspiracy theories over a freaking layout.
Nice... any proof for that?Ending with "conspiracy theories over a freaking layout" really should have tipped you off to the sarcasm.

The bring back the old last.fm group loses members because staying angry for a long time is tiring. Eventually, once you realize that it's hopeless and nobody cares what you have to say, defeatism sets in.

Well there's defeatism, but in using the site, there's also frustration. Depends what you're trying to do of course. So from frustration, you get anger again, only this time people drag up what they were angry about before as well as right now. Human nature. I know I've been doing it. :-(