I-smel 2013-05-20 10:41:12

The new split between "My facebook friends" and "a bunch of users" is actually a huge point that I didn't think about.
Deviantart basically doesn't have voting or ratings or anything, even though they do sort by popularity and let users write comments. The scary lack of discoverability might totally be negated by everyone already being a part of a dozen social circles anyway... So switching to the "submit and done" style might end up working out.

Obviously there's a million more things to think about before actually deciding on that, or making a move on it, so fuck.

TomFulp 2013-05-20 11:05:35

@I-smel - The fear of switching to a "submit and done" model is that it would majorly alienate the remaining people in the community who keep the judgment system working. And a lot of those guys also give submissions initial feedback that they may not have gotten. It's a shrinking population of people but they are awesome people who love the site and have kept it moving for the 13 years since the automated Portal launched. There could be plenty more roles to fill, though - we could still have a discovery engine that rewards early voting and reviews, it just can do it without being part of an official "live or die while waiting in the shadows" process.

Of course part of the intent of making under judgment content wait in the shadows is that too many peoples' opinions of NG have been shaped by viewing the "Latest Submissions" in previous layouts... They click on a bunch of shitty movies, and walk away with the opinion that NG is a site full of shitty movies. In an attempt to put a bigger spotlight on the better content, the potentially shitty new content has gotten further out of reach.

Watching shitty content can be fun though. There's stuff we talk about to make it a more social experience, although a lot of that comes in the form of streaming video feeds in chat situations, so you need to get those people to be able to watch a streaming feed but also vote and comment on the submissions indirectly because they are just hanging out in a chat room watching one long stream. All stuff we can potentially tackle with some of the social stuff we're building, but maybe it's all completely wrong.

Psychopath 2013-05-20 11:28:07

The problem with the utterly excessive amount of submissions in the Flash Portal can easily be attributed to one thing and one thing only; the video player. Fuck that piece of garbage, it allows for the absolute minimum amount of effort on the authors part which leads to idiots uploading SONGS to the Flash Portal instead of the Audio Portal. Even Let's Plays are starting to get submitted.

Not only that but there's also the issue of HTML5 games being submitted, in an attempt to make the site more relevant all the staff ended up doing was creating a massive excess of different file formats. However, the HTML5 games aren't nearly as much of a problem as all the MP4 files people prefer over Flash because the mere act of copying and pasting the Newgrounds preloader is "too hard".

Seriously, count the number of movie submissions that don't use that video player as opposed to the one's that are SWF files. The problem isn't that this place isn't popular enough, it's that it's trying to copy Youtube and the people of that ilk are migrating over with the same expectations. It's being saturated by morons because it's catering to morons.

Even if killing the video player with a rusty knife wasn't enough to fully fix the issue, I'm willing to bet it would get rid of a large chunk of the problem as people would be forced to going back to learning how to use Flash and formatting FLV files before they uploaded their shit, something of which almost none of them will do.

TomFulp 2013-05-20 11:47:57

@Psychopath - less and less people have finished cartoons in SWF format nowadays and no one will ever be able to convince me that it's a mistake to allow animations to be submitted in video format. Too many great animators have requested it over the years and submissions such as Lucky Day Forever, Starbarians and The Reward wouldn't exist on NG without it.

Also I will counter-argue that the SWF format hurt NG over the past few years more than the video format. Have you ever noticed how big the "Watch it on YouTube!" button is on most SWF submissions nowadays? It's waaaay bigger than the PLAY button and usually bigger than any NG logos people include. When a casual visitor opens an SWF movie on NG, they are more likely to click the big YouTube button than the PLAY button because YouTube is what they know, it's obvious that is what you click to watch a movie on the web.

AndyOfTheArcticDucks 2013-05-20 11:50:20

Regardless of if the content on the front page submissions feed which is now the Classic Portal was shitty, it did really give everyone a lot more exposure, and I think it helped a lot of not so recognized artists become fairly big. The thing is more about having it at your fingertips and it being the first thing to greet you instantly like it was before. The redesign isn't shit, it's great but that one little thing I think should have stayed, the new users will become too casual otherwise and only check the frontpage and not look beyond that. "Classic Portal" is like saying "Old Portal", nobody will venture there. Also, maybe it's just me but "Social Experience" has become an absolutely horrifying buzzword to me equal to getting a lot of irrelevant noise about everyone you don't even like and also that everyone can see everything you do. I don't think that's what you mean, but when sites aim to implement "social experiences", it usually ends up in a troublesome direction. You're so naked on the internet nowadays and I'd prefer if NG would be a haven from all that.

I-smel 2013-05-20 12:06:45

Having all the new stuff rotate into a constantly live channel is probably what would most get me to watch it. Especially if there were a mute thumbnail on the front that was always on, like a live stream of "NOW PLAYING"- cos I totally did watch everything on NG Bytesize.
That could be a really interesting new concept.

The part I'm not totally excited about is where it's a chat room- cos I've used the existing chatroom and it's usually the same xXsmokedogg420Xx talkin about garbage with some anime guy for 2 hours. You'd have to think about other ways you could help make it a more social experience, like having everyone's votes be visible, and surfacing what's trending in the chat and highlighting when the author's in the room etc. You'd have to design a bunch of small ideas that'll whip up activity and conversation out of people.

One thing that might help is if it wasn't constantly on. I get that that's the whole idea- but you might get a more concentrated, active crowd if it was presented as a live show on weekends, and the rest of the week was a countdown. Cos then instead of having a bunch of sparse "Is anyone here" messages every day, you'd definately know when people are on. And having it be the same URL as the existing chat would mean there'd always be at least a dozen people there.
Having a limited time-slot is a better way to get everyone to meet in one place at once.

Anyway this idea COULD all be completely wrong, but I think doing it right could feel like something brand new. Then again I thought the giant slideshow-box up top was gonna be a hot new banger, so I might just be a giant idiot.

TomFulp 2013-05-20 12:12:57

@Gerkinman - I was asking for it when I mentioned the YouTube videos in the blog post, it even crossed my mind as I was saying it. And we have been planning embeds for ages now and it's kinda crazy that we still haven't gotten them going. And that sucks about the professional liabilities associated with NG, I always have to wonder how much we've been stunted because of certain types of content that have been popular on the site over the years.

Artist news should probably show up in the Follow Feed on the front page. The reason it doesn't right now is a matter of prioritizing that space with content vs news - if someone clicks the full feed it includes news, but that is a smaller number than people who view the latest on the front page.

One longterm question will be whether the Artist News box should even exist on the front page if we extend the feed box and include news from artists you follow. Maybe the remaining space would be better served by exposing people to more content, if that leads to people discovering new artists and following them, vs seeing news headlines from people they might not care about. Or maybe some artists are actually being discovered by their news posts vs their content, hard to say on that one, now I feel like I'm rambling... But one thing that has come up is that the Incoming list could go higher up, which would push the Artist News further down, so it brings up the question of the priority of the Artist News space.

We could also have better publicized FOLLOW buttons on people. The multi-author system has always made that a big more tricky; on YouTube it's easy to attribute a submission to a single person and push all the follow promotion to them, but on NG we have a lot of stuff with a list of people you might want to follow and it becomes less focused as a result. We could still put a laser on the primary owner of the project, though.

FightingSeraph 2013-05-20 12:16:26

While I don't like how this site has been going in the past few years, I see where Tom is coming from. On the other hand, I'm not convinced of Mpeg's superiority and think that when artists become more free of restraints; they become hobbled rather than liberated.

AndyOfTheArcticDucks 2013-05-20 12:41:15

If stuff that was shit and usually went in blammed or barely in orange, but was seen anyway, had a negative impact being on the front page, but the stuff that went in or just under blue or green had a good impact on the site, why not just draw a line somewhere at strong orange score and have a feed with everything above that in a visible spot on the front page?

SickDeathFiend 2013-05-20 13:29:00

Doom Project part 2 would solve all newgrounds problemoz ;D :D :O

VidGameDude 2013-05-20 15:04:01

yes---v

Psychopath 2013-05-20 17:19:14

@ Tom Fulp

Those submissions could have existed if the file size for SWF files were bigger or if the authors knew how to use parent filing.

Also, several of those people who feature the Youtube buttons also tend to link to their Newgrounds accounts; example: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/PsychopathUltimate">http://www.youtube.com/user/PsychopathUltimate </a>

I hate it when anyone tries to justify the player by cherry picking; only a handful of decent authors have used the video player so far, everyone else mostly abuses it by misplacing a song, uploading let's plays and hilariously enough, still photos of artwork without any musical accompaniment.

@ gerkinman

Tell me, what possible kind of restraints could an MP4 file possibly free you from as opposed to a SWF file? Can you program your own video player in an MP4 file? No. Can you add subtitles into an MP4 file? None that anyone else can see. Newgrounds has a bigger file size available for that file format than a SWF file? Well that's a fault of the website and not the format, also, parent filing.

Don't tell me you think there's no other way to submit live action videos to Newgrounds, Numa Numa, AlmightyHans and myself could readily prove you wrong.

MindChamber 2013-05-20 17:37:21

who's uploading letsplays?

I-smel 2013-05-20 18:08:27

Alright guys look- having the video format is a none-conversation cos it plays on iPads and it's better at streaming content than a big fat loading bar. It doesn't give a shit about framerate, it doesn't crash everything over 4 minutes on export, you can submit something made in basically any software you like, it scales much better and plays much more easily at fullscreen on a high resolution, blah blah blah.

Although it's hilarious that people are just now uploading their Lets Plays and image slideshows.

Vert 2013-05-20 18:35:52

@Tom: I couldn't agree more, it the new site format has left the whole blam/save system pretty broken, in the sense that the list is perpetually grey in the 'classic portal'. And, what's worst, it makes it a lot harder for really good content creators to be highlighted and shine through, which has always been a part of the appeal of NG.

Essentially, apart from a very hardcore like myself, no one cares about voting power any more, so the incentive to save and blam (particularly when so few movies are blammed), has been reduced to close to zero, with a subsequent accumulation.

So, and I'm just throwing out ideas here, why not create new incentives to have people discover great movies/games? Why not make it so that every day, people can bet on what they'll think will be the top 5 movies/games for that day and whoever picks the most right ones gets front page exposure? Or perhaps make it so that they get access to some type of reward? Or that they get recognized somehow? Or why not create a new group of mods who are dedicated towards this single task, again with some sort of reward scheme? Such as having <this movie/game> made by <this creator> found by <this user> appear on the front page? Or even have some small, monetary reward in place?

Of course, <I> still care about the points system and I judiciously deposit (almost) every single day and too drastic a departure, without some sort of compensation (after so many movies and games, I think I developed at least a modicum of a critics skill), would upset quite a few people like me, who you allude to your post. But if it's for the good of the site, I'd understand and accept it, albeit, and I'm being completely honest here, it might make me stop coming as frequently.

MindChamber 2013-05-20 18:53:08

@I-smel I'd to laugh too, can either one of you link me to one lets play on here?

NoLanLabs 2013-05-20 20:29:56

When I started uploading games here back in mid-2011, the portal system still seemed to be working pretty well. Games would pass in maybe four or five hours, max. I remember a game i uploaded in early 2012, just after the redesign, taking like 9 hours to get through, which seemed really long at the time, and things have only gotten worse since then. I don't know how much of that is the redesign and how much is just changing trends in the Web, but it doesn't seem like the Web has changed that much in just 2 years.

That's about all I have to add. I really liked the green-blue system, because having a game turn green was always a thing to shoot for, but that might just not work anymore.

TurkeyOnAStick 2013-05-20 22:23:02

Since this is still on frontpage I may as well lump in my thought.

The community that view content are predictable.
Currently if you leave them on their own, the most popular stuff in the art portal is a) stuff on frontpage, b) stuff with a huge fanbase already, and c) shitty anime boobs. There is some other cracking stuff, but the vast majority of users aren't adventurous and won't explore the portals. That's a shame.

There needs to be more incentive for Mr/Miss Casual User to explore, and get them to notice the hidden gems. Such as an option to "Recommend for Frontpage" - people can still vote, but they can also vouch for whether a video or game should be showcased. If it gets picked for showcase, their opinion matters and they can level up something similar to a flagging whistle.

Luis 2013-05-21 00:08:29

read my comment to this on youtube by clicking here

Luis 2013-05-21 00:11:37

On a SERIOUS note, the under judgement stuff is a weird BIG issue... its tough because internet mannerisms have changed over the years ( as they should, it is the internet after all) and the way people have come to interact with websites have changed. For the better or worse is up to interpretation of course, but they have.

Its a slippery slope though, cause part of the personality of NG is in the blam/save system, but maybe it needs tweaking, not a total overhaul, but a haul of some sort. That doesnt mean much for a guy who never got past the first tier of experience points leveling up i know but i cant be crazy in thinking that. What exactly should happen i dont know :(