The initial skimming took only 5 minutes or so. But with the new design, I can’t do it. The gawker site tries to tell me what to read, rather than me making the decision.

The commenting system which used to be the best part is also almost useless. 

The search filed, which used to work quite well, hardly works anymore, so I have to go to google and search, because lifehacker is incapable of searching its own site, or shows me too many results (even when I’m searching an already read post and know the title of the post and searching based on keywords from title, and yet the search fails to give me good results)

Fast forward to now, I can’t remember the last time I visited them. So much for a redesign.

I was (am) a starred commenter on Gawker. I haven’t visited since the redesign and don’t plan to.

What is most interesting to me is that Denton squandered a key FREE asset.

Fool.

But no. Tell your Faithful Readers they *have to* and there’s no choice (okay, yes, there is a ‘classic view’, but how easy is that for most people to get to?)– mass defections all around.

You should also consider that a large amount of US users have been going to the Canadian site, and there’s even a Firefox plugin that keeps it from redirecting you to the US version. Not sure how that would affect these charts…

He had the hubris to dismiss them as “peasants” in a “ghetto” … an awesomely infelicitous choice of words even if it were true, and they reacted by decamping en masse to a variety of other places like http://www.crasstalk.com, where many of the long-time Gawker commentariat went; fugitives from Jezebel gather in a ghetto of their own, as do subgroups from various other Gawker sites. (Full disclosure: I was a frequent visitor to Gawker for a few months but by no means a member of the A-list group.)

Now it’s not nearly as much fun, and the moderation — previously largely a matter of self-policing — has become draconian and arbitrary, which seems more like a top-down hissyfit than anything else. At crasstalk and elsewhere, the commenters have created new, not-for-profit spaces which are created (and supported financially w/o advertising) by themselves. There seems to be a surprising degree of let’s-move-on sentiment instead of the over-the-top gloating one might expect — not that there’s absolutely no karmic satisfaction at Denton’s swift comeuppance, but not nearly as much as you’d think.

It will be interesting to see whether Gawker’s traffic really does recover to anything even close to its historic highs, as it will offer at least a tentative answer to the question of whether Denton is correct that commenters are essentially interchangeable, or whether the “deserters” are right when they contend that comment quality is a very important ingredient in Gawker’s success until the last few weeks. Superficially, thanks to wholesale distribution of the yellow stars (!!!) that signify Gawker’s most outstanding commenters, a casual visitor might see the redesign, with all its frustrating bugs, as the main problem, it will only be when the smoke clears that the commenters’ role will become clearer.

One thing DOES seem clear already, however: Denton has squandered a key asset, because unless I am much mistaken, very few of the defecting commenters will ever be lured back whatever incentives may be dangled before them.