Pop-ups 2.0: Snap is lame and user-hostile
As a customer and evangelist for his products, I’m pretty cheesed off with Matt Mullenweg (someone I like enormously, having met him in San Francisco when I volunteered at WordCamp) and the Automattic team for imposing the dreadful Snap page preview bug (it sure ain’t a feature) on all Wordpress.com blogs. As someone who has a few blogs hosted on Wordpress.com, and who has multiple clients using Wordpress.com, I am - to put it mildly - less than impressed with the fact that something so intrusive and interruptive has been applied to my blogs and my clients’ as an opt-out add-on.
Adriana has good posts about this here and here, and Alec also does a good job with Snap.COM is EVIL and must DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!!!.
Matt seems to think that the question is whether people like Snap or not, which distracts from the real issue: its blanket imposition on all Wordpress.com customers. Matt himself has identified the feeling of control as one of the keys to why this version of the web is so great - so why abandon that completely with Snap?
Don’t take control of my blog and tell me that the onus is on me to put it back to the state I had it in before you started fucking around with it without my permission or knowledge.
The golden rule is that you always enable customers (read: users) to do things on their own terms, not on your company’s. I expected better from WordPress.
Filed under: Blogging, Life, Technology, Tools, Treating Customers Well
Is that what those things are? Holy crap is that annoying.
Hear hear - intrusive and not particularly helpful…
Jackie,
(I posted this comment — sans minor edits — on Alec’s blog… but since you bring the discussion over here I follow suit)
It sounds like you have a wordpress.com blog (with domain mapping). Wordpress.com is a free hosted service that is operated in a community spirit:
On Dec 29th Wordpress enrolled 10% of their users in a trial with Snap Previews. The response was overwhelmingly positive.
On Jan 13th Snap Previews was therefor made available to all their members. Again, the accolades seem never ending…
My point: Matt *is* actively soliciting and responding to user feedback. I can certainly relate to your feeling but let’s be real — if you are using a hosted solution you are bound to experience changes from time to time… and if you don’t like the results of the popular votes, or require complete control, you would probably be better off downloading and hosting your own code…
Re: Snap Preview’s lameness — I would love to better understand what it is about the *functionality* that does you so wrong… but in an effort to not waste your time I encourage you to actually read up on it rather than regurgitating the points that has already been addressed.
Cheers.
–
Erik Wingren
Snap UX Research
It sounds like you have a wordpress.com blog (with domain mapping). Wordpress.com is a free hosted service that is operated in a community spirit:
It sounds like you take me for an ignoramus. Re-read my post. I have several blogs, some with WordPress installed on my own server, and some which are hosted by WordPress.com. What part of my post led you to believe that I did not know that WordPress.com is free and hosted? As for “operated in a community spirit,” try NOT talking in PR-speak. I am well-acquainted with WordPress - as I said in my post - I even went to San Francisco and volunteered at WordCamp last year. So save your patronising language for someone who deserves it.
Say whatever you want about the seemingly neverending accolades (which I can’t really see for all the seemingly neverending complaints from customers), the point remains the one I made quite strongly in my post: Don’t take control of my blog and tell me that the onus is on me to put it back to the state I had it in before you started fucking around with it without my permission or knowledge.
Do you think Matt agrees that his customers should fuck off if they don’t want him imposing - without permission or warning - interruptive and intrusive ‘features’ on their blogs? Do you think Matt agrees that it’s unrealistic for WordPress.com customers to expect control over how their site looks, without interference from his team? I’ll have to email him and ask. If so, I can say with certainty that I will yank my clients off his platform without hesitation.
Snap’s lameness isn’t hard to understand, Erik. I don’t need to “read up on it” to know how it behaves. Again, save the patronising speech for an actual retarded child.
Snap is interruptive.
Snap is intrusive.
Let’s not get too distracted by how much your product sucks, though, Erik; as with anything in life, opinions can vary on this. I mean, some people actually wear Crocs, which I think are hideous and offensive, but no one’s FORCING ME TO WEAR CROCS. That is the point: This bug was forced on WordPress.com users, whether they liked it or not, in clear violation of the spirit into which people like me became WordPress customers (and generated further business for Automattic by getting our clients onto WordPress products). THAT is the point, and it’s one that Matt Mullenweg ultimately has to answer for, not you. Save your insistences of how great your product is for someone who is interested.
As someone who, in the teeth of (it sometimes seems) mass condemnation from every blogger in the world, uses and really likes Blogger, I find this amusing.
Snap might be useful for pointing at pictures. For pages of text, it is utter crap.
Erik,
Your comment is a really good defense of why Matt emailed all his users to tell them about Snap and tell them how to switch it on if they wanted. Great. But that’s not what he did.
> I can certainly relate to your feeling but let’s be real — if you are using a hosted solution you are bound to experience changes from time to time
I use Blogger. I just made the change from old Blogger to new Google-Blogger. Not one single change has occurred. Ha.
I also use Haloscan. They regularly roll out new features. They have never, ever turned any of them on automatically. Ha. Ha.