(cache)Websites And Software Designs / They Changed It Now It Sucks

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TheyChangedItNowItSucks/WebsitesAndSoftwareDesigns

If a design of a major Web site gets changed, it can likely cause upsetness and confusion. No exceptions. This can even lead to more changes being rushed through to alleviate complaints about the original change. Perhaps the site unexpectedly rolls out a new layout, decides to put features behind a pay wall that were free before, or aggressively tries to force users to download apps to use a site that used to work fine without them. Whether a large change or a subtle one, there is bound to be some griping. One technique to curb the complaining is to keep a "classic" version of the site up for a period of time, before slowly phasing it out and forcing people to switch over to the new version gradually rather than overnight (Yahoo!, Wikia/Fandom, MySpace and Facebook all have tried this technique, with mixed results). This also gives developers time to weed out all the bugs with the new version and fix the more serious user complaints. Most of the time the complaining dies down after a while when people get used to it, but on very rare occasions, like if a more popular competitor moves in, this reaction can be fatal for a website.

Facebook 3.0 was infamously criticized for vastly redesigning the site. Two groups opposed to the change got over a million fans each.
- Then it was their changing of "Becoming a Fan" to "Liking". This resulted in dozens of groups and pages requesting that they change it back.
- It also happened with the change of the chat feature to only show people that you chat with a lot (regardless of if they are online) and nobody else, however that feature was quickly changed to just show the people you chat with the most at the top and show everybody else online under them.
- Every Facebook updates has been met with hostility by at least one person, whether justified or not.
- The timeline, to the point that whenever someone's profile was changed to it without them asking to do so, many a status update went up complaining about it.
- Almost no one likes the Facebook messenger app, and will go out of their way to rate it one star in the Google app store. It used to be messaging on Facebook worked just fine on mobile without the need of an app, just like using it on a desktop or laptop, but Facebook took away the ability to use messages on mobile just to force people to download the app, which has a funny way of crashing in the middle of typing a message.
- Forcing everyone to default to "Top Stories" is this for those who prefer a chronological news feed. It's especially bad on the mobile app, where the "Most Recent" option is buried in the settings.
- The "Facebook Animal Ban". To cut a long story short, the site had a rule against the sale of live animals in their policies but, recently, that rule was changed to include pages and groups and that adoption, rehome, or, as some found out, animal services posts were subject to the rule change. Because "animal + mentions of money = sale" to the algorithms, a lot of groups and pages were zapped into oblivion and people started switching to other sites.
- Spoofed in this video.
It has been argued that this reaction played a major role in the downfall of MySpace, and as a result, the increased popularity of Facebook. To wit:
- This was the reaction of many users when MySpace allowed anyone, not just 14- and 15-year-old users, to have private profiles. Complaints ranged from "If I want privacy I'll go to Facebook!" and "MySpace should be for users over 18 and have absolutely no privacy whatsoever!" In short: features that cater to users concerned about their privacy always ruin MySpace.
- Then there was the "MySpace 3.0" update in 2008, MySpace's first attempt to become just like Facebook, featuring a dramatic overhaul of the homepage, and taking away most of the ability to customize one's profile. For a while this only affected newly-made profiles. Then they began aggressively forcing people who still had their 1.0 profiles to upgrade (along with basically taking away the ability to edit their pages at all until they did upgrade). The number of outcries of They Changed It, Now It Sucks! was no small number, and users who hadn't already moved to Facebook (mostly because they liked MySpace's customization) began moving there in droves. This didn't go unnoticed by the site, who showed some signs of begrudgingly back-pedaling a bit and allowing a "downgrade" to 1.0 to please the few who hadn't abandoned them for Facebook yet. But the site never quite recovered, and was faced with a downward spiral from then on.
- The CEO replacing founder Tom Anderson then changed the site's direction towards being entertainment-based in 2010, stating that MySpace is "no longer a social network but Social Entertainment". It was the last straw for a lot of users. The changes only hastened their downfall in the end, and Newscorp ended up selling MySpace to an obscure advertising agency for a fraction of what it paid for the site in its heyday.
- When the new owners revamped the site in late 2012, any change at all from what it had become was generally seen as positive. Except that to access the "New" MySpace people have to create new profiles. The New MySpace is generally just like Facebook's timeline only it scrolls sideways. Customization of profiles has completely vanished too. There aren't many people left to complain about it though, as so far it's failed to make an impact and bring people back. However, some people are angry about the nonchalant way MySpace simply deleted years worth of blogs, comments and messages without any warning whatsoever. But, presumably because most of the complainers didn't use the site anymore, the complaints were ignored.
This also happened when LiveJournal announced that their invite-code system would be discontinued. From now on, anyone, just anyone, could sign up for a free LJ account. The expected influx of teenyboppers and fake anon accounts did happen, but LJ managed to survive. Mass exoduses have been threatened (and somewhat carried out, with users changing to new LJ-like services) every time LJ pulls something new, such as pop-up ads, Strikethrough '07 (suspension of thousands of user accounts after some trolls posing as Moral Guardians pointed out pedophilia content — which turned out to be, for the most part, fan fiction) and the sale of LJ to the Russian company SUP. Despite user complaints, LJ manages to carry on and is still the largest and most popular service of its type.
- Also, commenting via Twitter or Facebook.
- Then there was the redesign of the commenting system, removing subject lines and changing the way icons work so they only showed up if there was one keyword. The subject line thing in particular was controversial, as they were often used to denote triggering material in a comment.
While Poser's new editions tend to be met with mostly positive community reactions, Poser's cousin DAZ Studio (which is essentially a freeware stripped-down version that uses the same content) tends to explode whenever a new version is released. DAZ Studio 4 sent angry ripples across the community when it first became available both for stability issues and a very different content layout. The poster child feature of the release (a system to re-fit clothing and props between characters of different sizes and genders) was locked away at a price of almost US$100 (half for loyalty program members).
- Many Web communities, such as ShareCG, also host 'model loyalty'. When previous primary base figures Victoria 3 and Michael 3 were re-released as Victoria 4 and Michael 4, many Poser and DS fans became enraged because the new models didn't fit into the old V3/M3 clothing, hair and props. Since a longtime Poser/DS artist might have hundreds of dollars of content for the previous 'main' models, these users often rage at the new content and stick to their old kits. Fear of this was palatable when Smith Micro announced Genesis: a single, androgynous model for DAZ Studio 4 to replace all past models. This was less severe when SM announced that Genesis would be backward-compatible with previous version clothing.
DeviantArt receives a giant influx of complaints annually every time a new version of the site is launched. With the seventh iteration, over 3,000 deviants have "rejected" this news. Made even more ridiculous by the fact that version 7 brings very little changes compared to the switch from 5 to 6. Yet people seem to flip out more than back then.
- To be fair, the main complaint seemed to be that the "search" bar had been removed for some reason. It has been returned to us, and the complaining has, for the most part, stopped.
- Deviants were particularly displeased when the site greeted 2015 with a new logo. Same goes for the rebranding of Premium membership to Core membership. And replacing tags with hash tags. We're Still Relevant, Dammit! was a common complaint in the case of the latter.
- The Eclipse redesign was savaged upon its reveal, far more than any of the other redesigns before it. Reasons included the dark theme being seen as too dark (even causing some users to have headaches), the number of tags being limited to 15, huge lag problems, everything being way too big, and giving regular members the customization that previously required them to become CORE deviants. Many lamented that the redesign felt geared solely toward professional artists and mobile users instead of the core community. It didn’t help when it was announced that the redesign would be permanent in May 2020.
Retro Junk had its layout changed, and removed some sections. People complained that it didn't even look like the site that members knew and loved.
Often invoked by fans of evolving items on the avatar and forum site Gaia Online - despite the fact that the entire point of the EIs is that they undergo dramatic changes every few weeks.
In May 2013, Flickr updated its photo-viewing layout, design and controls. Again, complaints aplenty (and few, if any, compliments on Flickr's big new selling point - a colossal 1 Tb of storage space).
Windows OS is prone to the Star Trek Movie Curse, as Microsoft will come up with some radical redesign of their OS, then realize their mistakes after a year or so, then re-tool it in the next version to make it less infuriating.
- Windows XP's revised Start menu—which was optimized for navigation by mouse and functioned quite differently to previous incarnations—forced users to relearn everything they'd been doing instinctively for the last half-decade, which must have rather offset any theoretical gain in productivity. However, XP/Vista users could revert back to NT4/2000/Win9x style. This criticism died down later on.
- Their next OS, Windows Vista, was a radical change from XP, but despite its many improvements and new features and the time since its release, allowing hardware to be able to support it comfortably and users to adjust to it, people still rejected Windows Vista with very little or no reason. Hell, so many businesses continued to use XP that its support life was be at least 13 years (2001-2014).
  - The reason many businesses used XP well into the mid-2010's is that many older programs relied on XP's "security" model (or lack thereof), which in practice largely amounted to "anybody can do anything". Many older applications choked and died on Vista; many applications and proprietary software was built around glitches and bugs with older versions of Windows. Fix the bugs, and the software no longer runs. Add another problem with hardware manufacturers not having drivers (software that tells the OS what's plugged into the computer and how to use it) compatible with Vista. For most businesses "Buy the latest version of every piece of software and hardware your business relies on, assuming a Vista-compatible version is even available, and retrain all your users" was a complete non-starter, as was "rewrite all your custom developed software".
- These same fans praised Windows 7 as "Vista done right", even though it continued using many of the features and changes Vista introduced, but didn't change as much about the operating system than Vista did. It helped that in the time between the releases of Vista and 7, a lot of software and hardware had been updated to support Vista and 7, which made 7 much more usable at the time of its release than Vista. Even then, a big chunk of older software and hardware still relied on Windows XP or were prohibitively expensive to upgrade, which kept many people and business using XP for several more years.
  - And the reverse happened, with people complaining about the Windows 7 Beta cutting out features from Vista.
- And there was the whole business of requiring more powerful hardware than some brand-new machines had at the time. Many such systems were sold — with Vista, because Microsoft refused to give them any other option — anyway. That Dell actually sued Microsoft for the ability to continue selling machines with XP is telling.
  - Distilling the Vista problem was the "Ribbon" interface for Microsoft Office 2007, which was added to new versions of many of Microsoft's other programs. The internet raged with the voice of a thousand IT people who had to retrain employees once they inevitably upgraded. It is, from a complete newcomer's perspective, better to be more graphical and icon-laden, but people had gotten so used to the menu system for over a decade that it was quite jarring.
- Admittedly, computer operating systems of all varieties are a rare example of why the "They Changed It, Now It Sucks!!" brigade sometimes has a point. Time that workplace users have to spend learning to use a new or altered function is time they no longer have in which to do their actual job.
- Then Windows 8 removed the Start Menu, replaced with a Start screen. Inevitably, there was a backlash saying that Windows was becoming too "tablet-y".
  - Even Windows 8's logo got this. It fits with the color scheme of the OS, but it's not the iconic Flying Windows logo.
  - Some of the complaints were justified, since the interface and wording semantics are geared towards touchscreen interfaces, not the older input devices like keyboards, mice, and trackpads. You don't "tap" on a button in an OS with these inputs (well, if you exclude that you technically "tap" a mouse or trackpad button).
  - There is also the Windows Store, which discourages the usually open nature of the PC and requires certification for all its apps. Gabe Newell, head of Valve Software, openly expressed his dislike of this decision and stated that the Steam Box would allow users to run any OS on it because of this. On a similar note, Marcus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft, was actually offered to make the game a Windows Store app. He refused and told Microsoft to "stop trying to ruin the PC as an open platform" and even went so far to say he'd rather it not work on Windows 8 at all than have it certified. (Not that it matters anymore due to a port of it now being available on the Windows 10 store.)
  - The Windows 8.1 Consumer Preview brought back the Start Button, but not the Start Menu. It's easy to add it with a (free) program like Classic Shell, though.
  - Windows 10 brought back a proper Start Menu, but inevitably received complaints due to its design. Windows 10 also draws complaints for its automatic updates and questionable attitude towards user privacy.
Google decided to simplify their logo on September 1, 2015. Once again, complaints came flowing in that claimed that it "looked like a toddler did it".
The "new and improved" Trimble 3D Warehouse. In conjunction with SketchUp 2014, Trimble released a redesigned 3D Warehouse. This site, unfortunately, was built from scratch. As expected, the new site lacked key features present in the original Warehouse, most notably the Ratings and Reviews, which also happened to be the only form of easy communication of any kind on the site. User reactions were almost entirely negative, and some said they would leave until the problems were fixed. Many others are burning in anger, because even though Trimble said these changes would be made, they refused to act on them.
vBulletin 4. The changes to the style and features were not popular to say the least, going far enough to start haters for the software including multiple blogs against the company. But it was part justified, in that before the former manager left, there was a completely different set of screenshots of what the software was going to be like, which apparently many of the customers preferred to the finished product.
- And again with vBulletin 5. People hated the new look, they hated the features (and in some obvious cases, the removal of well used ones) and they certainly didn't think it was worth the cash, causing people to switch away to rival software and talk about the death of the company. The fact they then sued a competitor for making a Spiritual Successor to the old version of vBulletin 4 didn't help their case either...
The change in design from Apple's Safari browser for Windows between versions 3 and 4. Safari 4 featured a so called "Windows-native" look so it looked more like a Windows program. Which was then rendered moot by Google Chrome using the same rendering engine as Safari (WebKit), hence the only reason to install Safari anymore is to make your computer look like a Mac.
At one point in time, Digg used to have a similar theme and logo kind of like Reddit with a webpage like Fanfction.Net but this changed when developers rolled out V4 in 2010 in an attempt to be "bold" (as the CEO put it). This didn't go as planned because the new layout had a lot of bugs, glitches, and got rid some of the features that made the site what it was, so a lot of "Diggers" left Digg for its competitors.
Wikia in general. They took away the nice spread that they had, they moved images, search bar, things went all over the, making it look horrible in comparison to what it was just a few days before the change. And then there was the "Wikia New Look". No one liked it. Then they completely did away with the older "Monaco" skins and forced everyone to use Wikia New Look anyway.
- More than four years later, they hadn't learned any lessons. A new header, which was always white even when a wiki had a dark theme, drew universal derision. Everybody hated it, and it was broken to boot.
  - And then they did it again, with a major change to the layout - as major as the Monaco to Oasis change. Thankfully, a lot of this was rolled back, only to be repeated about three years later.
- Starting in 2016 they began to transition into changing their name to Fandom (the site was known as "Fandom Powered By Wikia" for two years) in an effort to promote their spin-off website, a generic pop-culture themed clickbait site with news and reviews of whatever is popular, phasing out the name Wikia. This caused a fair amount of griping, especially since not all of their wikis are centered around a particular fandom.
  - The griping continued, when Fandom geared up to migrate the domains of all its wikis from Wikia to Fandom, burying Wikia forever in 2019. Some legitimate complaints include the lack of brand recognition with the more generic "Fandom" name, SEO concerns as the wikis may be harder to search for on Google, and the fact that the name itself can have negative connotations, is less professional-sounding and makes its wikis less likely to be taken seriously as a resource. Predictably these concerns were brushed off by those in charge.
  - It seems management finally got the hint, at least somewhat, and after migrating all the domains to Fandom opened Wikia.org for their wikis that are about history, science, religion or other more serious topics and not about a particular fandom. New wikis that fall under these categories can be migrated to that domain by request, alleviating one of the most legitimate complaints about the name-change to Fandom.
- In 2020, FANDOM decided to create an Unified Community Platform, that will eventually migrate wikis to it (not changing "fandom.com" to "ucp.com", but instead the updates themselves). This update includes the removal of wikitext from message walls, the (possibly temporary) removal of article comments, and the avatars being changed to a circular shape. Backlash ensued when other parts of the update such as the removal of Recent Wiki Activity in favor of a "Recent Changes" page were discovered by Fandom users, with users complaining that they couldn't see some updates such as comments and blog posts on Recent Changes.
  - Even though it isn't initial, it'll migrate every wiki. Wikis created after March 11, 2020 are already migrated.
The switch of many of the wikis related to The Other Wiki from the longtime Monobook skin to Vector by default (along with a more WYSIWYG editing interface) got a few longtime Wikipedians annoyed, but usually minute changes to the site's "puzzle piece" logo are much more noticed and have to be rolled out carefully.
Oh, Neopets, Neopets, Neopets. Every change is met by rage by the players, even if it's something as a simple as taking out a feature that never got used. Most prominently, people hated the NC Mall, the customization option, the revamp of the Neopet designs, and Viacom buying Neopets.
Even TV Tropes itself can be subject to this. The most complained about changes are locking off anonymous editing (wasn't our fault, though), splitting objective and subjective tropes, and the renaming of the "Crowning Moment of X" tropes. The latter would probably not have being so ferociously opposed if Linkara hadn't used the term not long before.
- A trope getting renamed can be subject to this, as can text formatting changes like the removal of strikethrough, color, and size options. The strikethrough ban was undone with the change in administration, but colors and size are seemingly gone for good.
- Deleting various tropes, taking away Troper Tales, importing articles onto other wikis, deleting subpages for Just For Fun pages, the Image Pickin' threads replacing or removing beloved trope page images, huge changes to tropes after putting them through Ask the Tropers and/or Trope Repair Shop, renaming Too Soon to Distanced from Current Events, and making Ear Worm an in-universe only trope have caused tropers to riot.
- Not to mention the increasing push towards more mainstream and professional-looking articles. Some users felt that it took away a lot of the community feel of the site.
- The creation of the Manual of Style, along with making "Natter" verboten, caused some tropers to get angry, feeling it took away the World of Snark stance of the site.
  - So did banning "Word Cruft" and the whole concept of beginning examples with "This Troper", with tropers believing it also took away the conversational tone of the site.
- The Second Google Incident led to numerous works pages being cut.
- After drewski and itcdr took over from Fast Eddie in late 2014, one of the first things they proposed was a major layout redesign. As this would be only the third layout the site has had in its entire history and replaced the longest-lived of those three, some users reacted about how you'd expect. The new, fancier graphics made the site load somewhat slower for some people, and the reorganized buttons made it a lot harder to navigate the site as many became confused about the new layout. Seeing that most users could not login during the first day because of technical issues didn't help matters.
- Guideline changes can also cause this, like the ban on whited-out Trope Names even when they were spoilers by themselves, such as Death Tropes on character pages, or not allowing zero context examples even when the Trope Names speak for themselves. Seeing how many whited out names and zero context names that are still on this site, it seems that many tropers would like it to stay the way it was.
- 1.3 redesign was even more controversial, with many complaints centering around the size of the sidebar area, the bland colors on main pages and the garish colors on subpages, along with miscellaneous smaller issues.
Ubuntu was designed specifically to be a user-friendly, Windows-like Linux distribution, one that would be accessible to first-time Linux users without hindering power users. It was successful; as of this writing, Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro, and the third most widely-used computer operating system in the world (behind Windows and Mac OS). However, beginning in 2010, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, began making curious, largely arbitrary interface changes to the desktop (moving window controls from the right side to the left, among other things) in the name of progressive design. The most radical of these changes was the introduction of the Unity desktop in April 2011. Unity is a mobile phone-like interface that was once used in Ubuntu's now-discontinued netbook editions; its adoption has polarized the user base amid complaints likening Unity to beta software, calling it buggy, unpolished, clumsy, and prone to crashing. Despite these claims, Canonical has stated their intention to continue developing Unity and eliminate the "classic" Ubuntu desktop altogether. As a result, other, similar Linux distros have been seeing an influx of new, ex-Ubuntu users who want nothing to do with Unity.
- Thankfully, these issues were addressed. There has always been a KDE-based version (Kubuntu), and thanks to the fact that it got forked right after it was abandoned in favor of GNOME 3, there is a spin (Ubuntu MATE) that includes the classic Ubuntu desktop.
- However, in 2017, Canonical announced that they were abandoning development of Unity and switching Ubuntu back to GNOME starting with the 17.10 release. This prompted another one of these reactions, as many users had grown accustomed to Unity or felt that it had grown the beard since its introduction, or didn't like GNOME 3 (which is by itself a case of this trope, see below for the reasons why).
For many years, GNOME was the most popular and well-regarded desktop environment (DE) for Linux and came standard on many distros, including Ubuntu. While versions 1 and 2 of GNOME used a very traditional desktop interface, GNOME 3 went back to the drawing board and introduced an extremely simplified design that removed most of the traditional desktop features such as the task bar and applications menu, and relegated most of their functions to an "Activities Overview" that required a button push or mouse movement to activate. The reaction was overwhelmingly negative at first, and while some users eventually warmed up to the change, others jumped ship to other DEs like KDE, Xfce, or MATE, with the latter being a fork of the old GNOME 2 code base. The rift in the Linux community created by GNOME 3 remains to this day.
In 2011, Tumblr redesigned their dashboard. Almost immediately after the change took place, many regular users came to loathe the dashboard's new look, saying that it was too ugly and cluttered. In addition, there were tons of posts (some of them have over 1 million notes) demanding Tumblr to change back to the original dashboard look.
- And then there was the revamped ask system, which changed several things, including limiting asks to one per hour, limiting characters to less than 100, reducing it from 10 to 5, and banning links from the askbox. The changes were (and still are) so widely hated that they prompted a "blackout" in early September 2011.
- They later initiated a 250-post-per-day limit. This angered users so much that they vehemently refused to acknowledge any good points of new limit.
- In September 2012, they changed their dashboard look again. Like in the previous dashboard change, users loathed the new dashboard look, saying that it confused them to find something that they wanted to find but couldn't find and thought that it was a useless change instead of changes that many users have asked for.
- The tagging function change. Instead of showing tags on the dashboard sidebar, it showed the tags as a drop-down feature on the search box. Naturally, many users complained about the change.
- The changed posting interface had people screaming about horrible it was from day one, with the complaints ranging from making it difficult to make photosets, to putting GIFs into reblogs, especially from GIF makers and roleplayers who used Character Blogs. It got to a point where users started petitions in protest of the changes, asking them to revert to the original interface.
- On the dashboard at least, chat posts were changed to use courier font as opposed to the arial-esque font that is used for everything else. People were mainly confused by it, as it didn't match the other font.
- In October 2013, the dashboard sidebar change (which had its round corners removed and new icons) earned the ire of many, as it made simple things, like checking followers, tedious to do.
- Rinse and repeat on October 30, 2014. Among others, the change of a shade of background color and fixing the top bar did not go well with most users.
- In January 2015, the interface changed again into a border-less UI with the text toolbox now popping up when highlighting text and switching the post/close buttons, among other things. Most users reacted accordingly, due to the pop-up text tools being harder to navigate when making posts.
- In September 2015 they went and changed the way the post look from the descending posts to layered posts driving many people from their site and deactivating their accounts. To be fair it looks an awful lot like social media giants like Facebook and Twitter now that these changes have taken place. And they don't seem to be going away any time soon.
- In December 2018, Tumblr announced that it would be banning pornographic material. While the Tumblr CEO stated that it was mainly to combat against child pornography (which is very Serious Business), the new rule was also used as a catch all for anything that is deemed NSFW since the algorithms can't tell what's harmful porn and what was not (for added irony, the very post that announced the changes was flagged by algorithms). Needless to say, lots of people cried out in protest over the change and there were also people whose posts were flagged as being NSFW, despite the content being perfectly innocent and clean. As a result, Tumblr saw its user base drop severely.
AutoCAD is a unique case of this trope being an Inverted Trope. When it got its "ribbon-like" interface in 2009, [1]◊, people were satisfied, but this is justified since graphic designers' work is fairly skilled and they need to be doing several things at once.
- Actually there were plenty of people complaining about it, but Autodesk wisely kept options in for people to revert to their old icon-interface, so most people just jumped through the needed hoops and kept using the icon system. The color schemes for the icons are rather limited and sometimes hard to read though.
British radio station Web sites. Where do we start?
- Orion Media in the Midlands, for using WordPress rather than FirstMediaWorks — apparently people liked the ASP.NET-based sites, even though the design can be mimicked in PHP or Ruby on Rails/Python.
- Bauer Media are a constant victim of this trope, with people saying the 2001-2005 design with the "on-air now" icons on left-hand side was the best (and this was in the days before social media arrived!)
- GMG Radio's new-look Real Radio XS and Smooth Radio site were criticized for being harder to use than Real Radio. Example: see Real Radio Yorkshire.
As of December 2011, Yahoo! no longer just allows users to stay logged on for two weeks without first typing a nearly illegible CAPTCHA code. It is possible to sign in through Facebook, but that requires signing into Yahoo! on every visit.
- The redesigned Yahoo! homepage, with its miles-long news feed, wasn't well received. Nor was its revamped email system, which was called an Obvious Beta. Most people clung to Yahoo! Mail Classic for as long as they could before being forced to upgrade. Due to the site rushing in unpopular changes in an attempt to slow its steady hemorrhage of users, one can see eerie parallels with what happened with Myspace (and just like Myspace, they ended up being bought out in 2017).
- People expressed disdain for Yahoo's Sept. 2013 logo redesign and downvoted its reveal video on YouTube.
- After the reveal of the redone Yahoo Mail in October 2013, more backlash ensued, with complaints that it looked more like Gmail and unread mail no longer being bolded. In particular, the removal of the tabs feature, which allowed for multi-tasking, proved to be a deal breaker for many users, demanding it be put back. Most of these issues have since been taken care off, including the tabs feature, which can now be enabled through the settings menu.
- Throughout 2016 Yahoo wanted to force users to use their mobile email app (which also included ads alongside a data hungry news feed that couldn't be disabled) rather than routing their Yahoo email through a generic email app. Even desktop users were harassed by popups, every time they logged in, warning that for "security reasons" non-Yahoo app access would soon be blocked. User outcry on Yahoo's feedback page was ongoing, and once they implemented their block countless non-Yahoo apps began receiving masses of 1-stars in Google Play for being "broken". It didn't take long for Yahoo to receive the message and backpedal the unpopular block.
- Yahoo! Instant Messenger 10 was another one that was met with rage—especially over the fact that you no longer got a taskbar button flash when you got a new message, and the absolutely baffling lack of any way to tell whether your contacts were online or offline. Yahoo! Instant Messenger is possibly the only instant messenger to lack this feature. Even the most basic chat programs had at least a crude version in which if you saw someone's name, they were online; if you didn't, they probably weren't.
People started fleeing Stumbleupon to go to Tumblr once Stumbleupon got rid of photoblogging.
AOL users fear change profoundly. When AOL 9.0 was released, the AOL Web site was changed to the blue and curvy look of the more recent version. Users called the tech support line and shrieked for weeks. When it finally died down, AOL 9.0+ was released, the website was again changed... The only change was the 9.0 / 9.0+ logo, and a very slight change in the color blue of the Web site. And users called the tech support line and shrieked for weeks, claiming that the changes were costing them money and making their children cry.
Apple's decision to drop Rosetta support from Mac OS X 10.7 [Lion] broke at least two popular applications: Color It! and TNT Basic. TNT Basic, at least, was rewritten from scratch to run natively on Intel Macs.
- When Apple released macOS 10.15 [Catalina] in 2019, it broke 32-bit applications, such as PySolFC and Stencyl.
Gawker Media's (including Gizmodo, io9, Kotaku, Jezebel, etc.) site overhauls in 2011 caused much outcry that took a while to settle down. The two biggest complaints were the redone homepage (which allowed articles to be "featured" like on most regular news sites, as opposed to the blog format) and numerous bugs in the commenting system (including issues like comments not posting, replies to comments being posted as separate comments, embedded images and videos not showing up, etc.). The layout was later changed to something more similar to the original lay out.
- The switch to Kinja caused even more outcry. The Kinja commenting system was organized horizontally rather than vertically like most websites. Most of the criticism was about the new system making it harder to report trolls. Many users just left the site altogether. For example, on Jezebel, the weekend open threads used to get upwards of 1000 posts, and after the change they struggled to get to 300, even after the comments were changed to something more viewer friendly.
Every time Newgrounds gets a redesign, there's always a split in the fanbase. When they changed the slogan from "The problems of the future, today!" to "Everything, by everyone", there was backlash. Every time anything is changed, there is either backlash or a user split.
When Image-Line removed pattern blocks in FL Studio 10, the user base wasn't exactly pleased.
When LibreOffice, the free-office suite alternative to Microsoft Office, released version 4.0, they removed the "Insert Horizontal Rule" function, replacing it with a complicated series of instructions involving styles and formatting in order to place a horizontal rule bar there. Many users were outraged that they took something simple (one click as opposed to a series of steps) and made it into something complicated and useless (the altered horizontal rule bar sometimes doesn't show when converted to HTML). Some users stuck with LibreOffice 3.6 for this reason alone. Three years later, the Horizontal Rule was restored in LibreOffice 5.1. ^note
When I Can Has Cheezburger updated their format, it was not well received by many users of the site, especially after the company's claims of adding requested features and listening to the fanbase.
- The Set Phasers To LOL channel going from sci-fi and fantasy memes to general pop culture. They've since split pop culture and sci-fi/fantasy back to their own pages, but as unlisted channels (meaning they're not on the drop-down menus or the channel listings at the bottom of the page).
Club Penguin gets this reaction a lot more than you'd expect. It started with the banning of the heart and skull emoticons, which caused such fan backlash they had to change it back. Once Disney bought out the company, they made major changes such as redesigning The Dojo and changing the secret agent missions. Censorship also went rampant.
Internet Brands (see vBulletin 4 and 5 above) were also hit by this when they 'redesigned' Audi World, a car discussion site. They changed the software from the site's custom solution to vBulletin, then the users revolted and jumped ship to a new site called Quattro World that was running the original software. this is a blog post describing what happened.
GetGlue went through this twice. First when the site was retooled to be focused only on TV and movies, with music, games and books ignored entirely. The old site was kept online and remained usable, though it was no longer updated.
- When GetGlue was acquired by i.TV and rebranded as "tvtag", it was announced that users would no longer be able to order physical copies of their stickers, which would be replaced by animated GIFs. The aforementioned old version of the site was also taken offline. This was... not received well, and it ultimately killed the site.
Digital Spy's December 2013 revamp was widely disliked. The old logo was gone, replaced with one that was almost identical to AOL's. The site layout changed. And the forum was redesigned - but lacked a vertical scrollbar, even though it was too wide for a 1024x768 resolution display, making it impossible to navigate, affecting tablets and older computers adversely.
Radio-Info.com was a forum run by a mom-and-pop operation where users could express their thoughts about anything radio, from programming to engineering to FCC policy. It was then bought by Streamline Publishing, who changed the site’s URL to RadioDiscussions.com and later gave it a top-to-bottom redesign. Naturally, many long-time users hated the changes. Some members’ posts seem to disappear, while others couldn’t log in at all. Then on Dec. 3, 2013, Streamline announced that it had shut down the site, saying it was “an economic decision.”
FanFiction.Net became much more strict with its guidelines in 2012, taking down thousands of stories and accounts for supposed plagiarism, meaning copyright violations or posting stolen stories. Given the nature of fan fiction, the distinction between originality and plagiarism is a blurry line indeed. While taking down stories that are simply novelizations of a work or fan fictions stolen from someone else is a reasonable measure, stories can be taken down for something as minor as using a few lines of dialogue from the original work. At any rate, thousands of users left the site in an exodus after the crackdown. The fact that the Image Manager feature, which displays pictures next to the story info, was introduced at the exact same time (thus changing the look of the story lists and forum pages that the users had gotten accustomed to over the years) did not help matters, and neither did having the categories listed in order by popularity instead of alphabetical order (it's much easier to find a certain category with the latter than the former).
Perfect World Entertainment's utilization of Arc Games, a redone game launcher, and modifying their site for cell phone and tablet use, was met with major disdain. The loudest of the bunch were the players over at Star Trek Online and seemed to trickle into other games such as Champions Online and Neverwinter. PWE refused to back down from any of the changes and players prepared themselves to Rage Quit the second everything goes fully live.
The Mary Sue got this bad in June 2014 when it merged with Geekosystem. The site had been geared toward female geeks and its articles were given through a feminist lens, but after the merger, which though being planned for a long time behind the scenes seemed to come out of nowhere for readers, the site strove to be more "inclusive". Its tagline, "A Guide for Geek Girl Culture", was removed. Articles brought over from Geekosystem were more gender-neutral or male-centric, and more numerous. The uproar among fans was huge, many accusing the site of a sort of Network Decay. Commenters from Geekosystem clashed with the Mary Sue commenters as well, and many a Flame War was had. To make matters worse, the editors did not address any of the changes or the problems people had with them for over two full weeks, by which time it was too little too late for many. Problems that female geeks have with the site's new direction are highlighted well in this article by Feminspire. Things balanced out over the next few months as the site back-pedaled to regain its fanbase, though the new gender-neutral tagline ("The Nexus of Pop Culture and the Uncharted Universe") and layout remained the same.
- Similar uproar occurred in May 2016 when the financially struggling site implemented a subscription service, banned ad block and redesigned its layout all at the same time. It was only after commenters threatened a mass exodus (due to hating the new layout and the ads being intrusive and potentially full of malware) that the site owner himself Dan Abrams wrote an apology article, and backpedaled on some of the changes.
In 2014, the social networking site Foursquare announced that they'd Retool to actively compete with Yelp by becoming a Yelp clone itself, which meant taking away many distinctive features from their Foursquare app, including mayorships and points, and putting their most iconic feature, check-ins, into another app called Swarm. Many longtime Foursquare users reacted negatively to this.
Many people got annoyed when Answers.com got redesigned to a slideshow format because of the very difficult to use interface of the site along with having to click on the "next" button every time they want to go to another part of the answer.
On May 15, 2015, the Closing Logos Group Wiki announced that, due to a multitude of troll attacks and bugs, they would be moving from WikiFoundry to Wikia. The massive change in design and style earned plenty of criticism from users. It certainly didn't help that nearly every one of the website users and moderators disliked the change, yet it continued on anyway until it was eventually cancelled.
- Then, it was announced on June 18, 2015 that it would start again. Once again, this was not dealt with positive criticism. The cancellation of this was even faster.
- Also in 2018, they got rid of their popular Scare Factor and Cheesy Factor notations by a way of a site wide poll (meaning that their famous list of Nightmare Logos had to go in accordance). It was such an unpopular decision, that the moderators had to keep the names of those who voted in favor of it anonymous for their own safety.
- Their move to Miraheze (a MediaWiki-based hosting platform) was met with considerably warmer reception, though, as by 2020 Wikifoundry was becoming outdated fast due to an insistence on Flash (it also helps that most everyone was getting tired of all the crashes Wikifoundry was enduring, with a threat by Travis Derouin, the owner, being the straw that broke the camel's back). The decision that year to only allow full access to the site to those with accounts also gained a backlash. However, some minor backlash for the Miraheze move ensued when it was pointed out that Miraheze was also home to many wikis that had been booted off Wikia (for example, the "reception wikis" such as Awful Movies Wiki).
In 2013, Adobe announced that it would drop standard support for its products and move onto the creative cloud system where consumers can pay for Adobe's software on a monthly basis, enabling them to sync their files on the cloud and receive more frequent updates. The move was met with massive outrage from the community since not only they could no longer keep their Adobe software on their computers, but cutting their subscription would also mean losing access to their synced files.
Some users reacted the way you would expect when ToonZone redesigned its forums in June 2015 (and in a much lesser case, the entire website), calling it "lifeless", "ugly" and simply "unappealing'' (directly taken from the forums).
This is the general fan opinion of the July 2015 Webkinz update. Many dislike that it became more like a mobile app, with pets making requests for things that must be completed within a certain time limit.
- Not to mention the fact that the happiness, hunger, and energy bars drained faster, thus forcing you to spend more time and money on your pet than ever.
Cracked changed its main color from dark red to dark blue sometime late 2013 to early 2014; there were also some font changes, and the home page was redesigned. Long-time users have been screeching about it ever since. In mid 2017, some features like certain articles were locked behind a subscriber paywall and then some time after that, the ability to up or downvote comments were also tucked away behind a subscription. People were not happy.
In The New '10s, most major Linux distributions switched from the old init system that starts all the operating system processes to systemd. While everyone agreed that the old init system was a mess, many old-school administrators were not happy about this, with some calling for boycotts. Another group created a fork of Debian without systemd. These people cited systemd's alleged bloat, violation of "The Unix Philosophy" and one of the key systemd developers being a Jerkass. Systemd does make it easier to manage services in Linux, and with its adoption it looks like it's here to stay.
In October 2015, it was revealed that Go Animate was moving to HTML5 and, by doing so, eliminate everything that had nothing to do with Business. This meant cartoonish characters like the Lil' Peepz and those from Comedy World would be lost forever. This action was done because it was pretty much sick and tired of being the laughingstock of the Internet community, as its biggest supporters were its Periphery Demographic - kids and young teens who took a big liking to the cartoonish style, even more so with the users who attack "baby shows" like Caillou and Dora the Explorer. The changes were met with incredible displeasure from the fanbase, though the website is sticking to its guns.
Internet Explorer was touted as the worst internet browser for years until Microsoft completely scrapped it in Windows 10 and replaced it with Microsoft Edge. While Edge is a definite improvement over Explorer, Edge does not have advanced options or features that Explorer had, which means anyone that wants to get more out of the browser has to use a registry hack.
Miiverse, Nintendo's social network site & app, saw a massive amount of backlash towards its redesign on July 29, 2015, to the point where many have abandoned it in favor of Kik. This immense backlash is the result of quite a plethora of factors:
- Posts were now organized into four categories: Play Journal entries, drawings, discussions, and in-game posts. While this made it easier to find posts of a specific type, Miiverse users felt that communities became trickier to navigate.
- Whenever a user entered the old Miiverse with suspended software, they would be taken to the software's community so they could make a post about it. After the update, the user would be taken to a screen asking if they want to write a new entry in their Play Journal. The community of interest can still be accessed by clicking on its name in said screen, but Miiverse users find accessing it to be more tedious as a result.
- After the update, users were no longer able to make posts exclusive to their Activity Feed. Activity Feed posts were a user's way of sharing thoughts with their followers and keeping a semi-private archive of posts & drawings. With Activity Feed posting eliminated, anyone who wishes to make a miscellaneous post on Miiverse is limited to the YouTube community and whatever game community has currently derailed from relevance to its game. Because everyone can see these posts without having to follow the posters or look at their profile, Miiverse users felt that they were effectively stripped of their content privacy.
- In response to complaints about the site's 2-minute time limit between posts, Nintendo replaced it with a daily limit of 30 posts, thus killing the ability for users to efficiently chat with one another.
- In late 2017, Nintendo announced they were getting rid of Miiverse entirely with a replacement coming in the near future. Predictably, everyone cried foul, believing that Nintendo killed its communities for no reason.
Less than a day after it was announced, Twitter received considerable amounts of backlash for deciding to switch from chronological timelines to algorithmic, popularity-based timelines. The main problem with this system that people are pointing out is that it would cause many users to be overshadowed by big-name brands & celebrities, who tend to have far greater amounts of followers, likes, and retweets than the average Twitter account.
Did You Know Gaming?: Twitter is a platform where creators can inform their audience unfiltered. An algorithm would stagnate growth for small artists & businesses. Even for DYKG - with millions of followers overall - growth constantly decreases on social media as algorithms are updated. For small businesses and creators, growth will have to come from shameless publicity stunts or blind luck.
Comic Book Resources got taken over by new owners in August 2016, who immediately axed all of the columns that were the site's unique selling point.
Niche.com is a website that explores colleges and high schools across the U.S. through student surveys. You could learn about everything, from fun activities to greek life to famous alumni. Then in October 2016, the site got a major overhaul, and was stripped down to a bare-bones version of itself. The in-depth overviews of each school were removed and several the student surveys were either no longer viewable in full detail or removed altogether.
Photobucket was used by many as an image hosting service, but starting on June 26th 2017, third-party hosting (which was what many used the site for) was disabled for all users by default, replacing all such images with this error message◊. To re-enable it? Pay a hefty subscription fee of $399 a year. Suffice to say, many angry users came out with accusations of Photobucket resorting to blackmail.
In June 2017, Patreon changed its logo from an orange "P" to a navy and salmon line and dot. Some users disliked the new logo design, with opinions of being "too minimalist" and "barely recognizable". Here is an image on how a minimalist branding update works.
Any of your favorite websites that was originally made for desktop viewing and then been redesigned for mobile viewing is bound to attract lots of hate and criticism.
In October 2017, almost 14 years after its opening, Hardcore Gaming 101 underwent a complete redesign from a simple "web 1.0" HTML database to a Word Press-based modern and streamlined design. Fans of the redesign say the old site was too archaic-looking and difficult to be taken seriously as an informative portal. Detractors say it was at least visually distinct and now looks like every sub-par gaming blog under the sun, and also complain that several unique features had to be removed, making it less interesting to browse and less complete, especially in regard to the huge amount of screenshots and some of the more curious features (and many, many articles somehow didn't survive the transition and can only be found on the archived original site).
In February 2018, Google Images decided to remove the "View image" button from its image previews — and add a copyright disclaimer as well — after an agreement with Getty Images. This change noticeably confused many users, to the point where some inevitably complained.
In 2018, Google changed the UI of some of its major products, including Gmail, Google News, and Chrome, to use its Material Design, which some users have criticized as ugly and unintuitive.
Wrestlingdata.com and cagematch.net are two of the most popular websites for professional wrestling afficionados in the world. Although based on Germany, their in-depth biographies on professional wrestlers across the world became a huge appeal to fans overseas. However, in the mid-to-late 2010s, Europe began enforcing increasingly strict image copyright laws; because of this, cagematch.net was forced to drop all of its images in January 2017, and wrestlingdata.com followed suit in May 2018. The latter has been slowly restoring its image database from scratch, now with all pictures checked for copyright, but the former remains without photos.
Popular graduation photographers Lifetouch has a database of various photos of graduating students at high schools. But in 2019, the website took down every gallery predating 2016. The photos are technically still there, but they are inaccessible without an exact URL.
Movie box office reporting site Box Office Mojo got a complete overhaul in October 2019. The result was panned for replacing the iconic 2000s design with a simplified, modern one, as well as moving a large portion of its content behind the IMDbPro paywall. It doesn't help that the redesign is incredibly buggy with several box office record pages placed out of order or inaccessible.
YouPic got this reaction when, sometime in about 2017 or 2018, they changed from unlimited photo uploads to limiting photo uploads to one per 12 hours, unless photographers bought a premium membership (which is about $119 a year and hard to cancel).
Billboard.com got this when in late 2019, they began locking articles and even individual record and singles charts behind paywalls, meaning those without a subscription can only view the Top 3 songs on almost any major Billboard chart (other than the Hot 100) in any week.
Taken to extremes when Encyclopedia Dramatica was replaced by OhInternet, a SFW website that exclusively catalogued internet memes a'la Know Your Meme. Whether you think it was for the best or worst, and no matter which side of the argument you were on, it's pretty safe to say that taking a website beloved by its fanbase for being as vulgar and offensive as humanly possible and populated by Trolls, purging practically everything and rendering countless users' hours worth of contributions moot, and replacing it with something completely different was going to end poorly. Ultimately defied as OhInternet trucked on for a couple of years but went down in late 2013 while Encyclopedia Dramatica was restored by its former userbase from web archives and user-maintained backups.
YouTube changing their policy in late 2019 to force creators to mark their content as either "for kids" or "not for kids" garnered a lot of vitriol after it was revealed that it was due to the COPPA bill, potentially resulting in thousand-dollar fines if videos were not marked to indicate that they aren't for a demographic YouTube wasn't even made for in the first place. Many were also not happy that the new rules were essentially shelving the blame and responsibility onto creators for what YouTube did. Videos marked as "for kids" won't be able to use features like comments, end cards, or the mini-player in the mobile app, since they all store data from users, and most of the options for sharing videos (like the ability to appear in recommended) will be disabled, making it much harder for channels to grow. The rather vague guidelines for what qualifies as "for kids" didn't help, with several gray areas not covered, carrying the risk that a video with adult content might be fined for not being labeled as "for kids" because it contains elements that could be considered suited for children, best summarized by Jeremy Chinshue. Fingers were pointed at YouTube Kids Channels and parents who let their kids watch videos unattended for ruining the platform for everyone. Attention was also drawn to dead and small-time channels who in no way would be able to handle the fines, with people fearing that deleting all their content was the only way to escape it.
- When the changes went into effect in January 2020, it turned out to be just as bad in practice as it sounded on paper. As predicted, not only were many videos and channels with content clearly not meant for kids or barely kid-friendly to begin with, especially when considering that certain countries outside of the US have looser standards on what is considered "family-friendly", falsely flagged as such (potentially leading to kids being exposed to stuff that they shouldn't be), but it was also discovered that the disabling of these video features was implemented without the creators' consent and/or knowledge. This means that if a creator had long left the site and their videos or even their channel as a whole was flagged as "for kids", their legacy is pretty much going to be snuffed out and there is nothing that can be done about it. In addition, videos can get flagged as "made for kids" even if said video is already age-restricted, which should already imply that it might not be suitable for children. It's possible for YouTube to also mark a video as "for Kids" manually and permanently. Understandably, the entire community was (and still is) up in arms about the mismanaged and misaimed censorship.
- The changes made to the monetization policy on August 30th/31st 2016, where You Tube could label videos (as well as whole channels) as "not advertiser-friendly" for including content such as controversial opinions, violence, partial nudity, sexual humor, and even swearing, quickly drew hatred due to its very Orwellian nature. The policy has since been amended multiple times to restrict even more content, making it even harder for creators to monetize their videos.
Even this very wiki has had many current and former users complain about the changes made over the years, such as the removal of the "Wall Bangers" tab and the Troper Tales feature, the changing of many tropes to In-Universe Examples Only, huge changes to tropes after putting them through the Trope Repair Shop, the removal of certain tropes, and the stricter enforcements of the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement. Many users liked to misuse the site to complain about media, real life events and people, and characters they did not like and bash them, and were very annoyed they could no longer complain or snark. Other tropers were annoyed by changes to trope names, preferring the old ones. Other changes include removal of Flame Bait and stricter enforcement of the rules. Some complaints are understandable or related to aesthetic changes to the website. Others are related to strict enforcement of the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement. Regardless of whether or not some of these gripes are understandable, many users overreact and abandon the wiki.

They Changed It Now It Sucks / Websites And Software Designs

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