The problem with Gawker

It used to be that I had a handful of Gawker Media sites to faithfully visit, and often post articles here in The Mine; Jalopnik, io9, Lifehacker, Kotaku were among the list of "Daily Patrol" bookmarks.

But then they recently did a redesign of all of their sites, and my experiences with those sites turned, quite frankly, to utter and absolute shit. No longer could I simply scroll down through a day or so of posts -- or further, if I wanted -- and easily select something interesting to share here in The Mine. Instead, there's a shitty Flash interface that includes a shitty sidebar of selected stories into shitty GM-decided categories. Because of this, there's no way I can easily tell the chronology of posts; there's only what GM feeds me, including ads. And oh, the ads...

They're really, really prominent now. Before, ads were beautifully insidious and looked like other articles. Instead, ads now throb into view and chop up the look of the sites. I'm surprised GM doesn't have them SCREAM on rollover.

In short, unless one of the GM sites has an exceptional article I happen upon, don't count on them being back here anytime soon. It's sad, really. The content is good, but the presentation makes it fucked up to even chew on, much less attempt to digest.