I vigorously agree with the casual comment point. I think its time for reviews to have comments underneath it. So someone writes a review and people can respond to it and have a huge fight. Where you can click and expand.
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Comments
Great Suggestions. I would seriously love to have gallery folders and tags for works. When it comes to reading webcomics on Newgrounds, it can be more of a hassle than I would like. The "You may also like" section does not always has the next page to the webcomic. This forces you to go back to the artist's profile page, scroll down through their chronological entries to find the next one; and even still, you can forget which page you saw last which can force a couple rinse and repeats till you find the page you were looking for. I feel like I spend more time trying find the right pages than actually reading the comic itself, and gallery folders and tags will make a world of difference in making the site friendlier to this medium.
Sharing works is also something I believe Newgrounds also should be doing. Right now, we only know what artist and friends like on the site by looking at their profile page to see if they favorited something.
The only thing I am more apprehensive about is the casual comment section. I loved that comments need to count and are more judged by being "helpful" and "unhelpful" (of coursed that changed a little earlier this year). If it is that important to start/continue a discussion, I feel that it can be done either through personal messaging or in the forum section. At the same time, I may not be giving enough credit to the NG community in keeping things constructive and civil.
Maybe for the "more like this," there could be an option to allow the artist to edit some of the entries that are displayed there. That'd let people string comics together.
As for comments, they wouldn't be to replace reviews. Many people tend to use the review section FOR comments however regardless, a lot of my works don't get reviews but just general commentary that doesn't really offer insight. I feel like they'd fit better in a separate comment box. This would be confining them to a simple place, so people who wanna ask a question or toss an idea out without actually committing to a review can still do so.
If the creator is free to remove comments (not reviews) as they want they can kinda moderate and remove spam. For reviews this isn't necessary cause of the 1-per-work limit.
Most other platforms have some kind of comment and reply system. The idea would be making it secondary to the review system: small format, maybe limit the character count per comment, etc.
All of this would be pretty great. Although personally I'm a bit iffy on the "sharing others stuff" bit. On one hand, I do see it being useful if you want to share stuff you appreciate and bringing more visibility to it.
But on the other hand, I do also feel like the absence of that kinda keeps NG a bit more pure and different than the other sites. For the longest time NG didn't even show the amount of favorites a submission had. Also I feel like a simple "reblog/retweet" type feature would just be sorta basic and generic heheh.
Maybe it could be a review option, where if you review something, there could be a checkbox that shares your review, and the game, with your followers (as opposed to your reviews only showing up in the feeds of your NG friends). I think this would contribute to both better discussion, emphasize good reviews and critiques more, and also allow people to share shit they like. And of course if you don't like seeing reviews in your feed, you can toggle that on or off like any other feed preference.
"photosets" in the same style pixiv does theirs would be rad
I'd be down for any photoset style tbh.
Tucked into a folder like Pixiv allows for very long photosets which is great
Tilesets like Tumblr (and to a lesser degree Twitter) allow artists to get creative with the layout and have all stuff displayed at once.
Or there can be like a single picture viewable, and then arrows that let you flip between each one responsively. Could use that to sneak surprises in or keep pages hidden til they're viewed in full.
I really like the ideas and agree with most of them.
However, none of them really strike my biggest gripe with NG so far; how "hard" it is to sift through and find content. Navigating a gallery forces you to open several tabs, the favorites feed itself, while compact, also forces you to click on everything individually and when you least expect it you have 40 NG tabs open.
One way of dealing with discoverability is as you said, empowering sharing potential. Though, I'm not sure what side effects that would encompass, and that still doesn't fix the navigation flow.
Truly my only wish is for there to be more meaningful links in each art portal page, in the sense that the links lead me somewhere new that I want to be instead of putting me in a loop or sending me back. Perhaps a way to click an arrow and it swaps content, like the following piece in someone's chronological gallery (or even next tagged). This would be better for mobile and be better for UX, allowing people to focus on consuming and reviewing content rather than mapping the least time consuming way to look at someone's stuff. I love art and helping people get better but when I see a huge gallery I unavoidably end up missing a few rows due to this, so you can imagine this effect on someone normal being tripled.
I too would love to see an easier navigation with art but I am quite fine with the "Gallery" and would actually prefer to see it going even beyound, like for example fullscreen on desktop browsers with randomized entries. That would be so inspirational!
My opinion on the "regrounds" (retweets) though: This in my opinion only polarizes views to those contents which already have lots of views, whereas unknown content stays in the dust. A thing which I commonly despise from other social media platforms. Makes it harder to find undiscovered content which Newgrounds has always solved perfectly with the best content ordering in the world: Chonologically. Newest stuff comes first. If something sticks, it is good. No regrounds needed. But that's just my two cents. I'm sure Newgrounds will find a way to satisty all our needs without sacrificeing. We just need to be patient.
i'm really hopeful for the coming updates, but while i have that hope, there's also quite a few folks that are "annoyed" or dont support the changes being made to the site.
it's only a few folks but i've seen enough people going "why should we change for them?" kind of comments. i put annoyed in quotes because i dont think they're genuinely annoyed, but comments and jokes like that dont come from nowhere. as much as i want a new home to post art to, i dont want to do it at the expense of the current user base. i'm not gonna fight to make this place a new home for my stuff if they dont want me here. simple as that, really. there's other places for us to go.
That's largely why I've been tellin peers that NG still is its own thing. I definitely wouldn't wanna see NG sacrifice its identity to try and conform to something different.
I've tried to list and explain ideas that don't compromise what NG is, while also hopefully spurring more activity in the site.
NG tbh has had a huge number of changes in the past 5 months, so it could be that, since more are on the way, long time users are just reluctant to adapt.
Part of the resentment I also feel comes from the critique platform NG has. Critique is good, but a lot of people here don't realize that you don't have to accept every criticism you receive, and if you point this out they think you're just after 'like' culture, not realizing that their critique just isn't that good. That's a problem everywhere online, but it's kinda prevalent on NG cause it puts reviews and ratings in such high priority. But, that's something that's best solved by education, not necessarily platform changes.
That's kinda a tangent though.
Most of these changes have been pretty harmless. I certainly wouldn't mind some more tweaks to the feed. What I'd like to see overall though is an improvement on the audio and art portal quality control system. Scouting is a useful tool in theory but ut could be a lot better.
I'm glad new people are enjoying their stay here without trying to completely make this website into theirs. Newgrounds has more of an edge to it and it would be a huge blow if people wanted to dull those teeth.
YEEEETTTTT THATS A VERY GOOD WISHLIST TOM THE SANTA CLAUSE OF NEWGROUNDS MAKE THAT SH*** HAPPPENN
When it comes to gallery and folders there are playlists. If there's a set or something I uploaded I usually make a playlist for it and put a link to the whole playlist in the descriptions.
Tbh I literally only just found out about playlists yesterday.
And I've been on here for almost 3 years.
But gallery sorting tools of some form would be a way to sort things much faster, and easily between multiple groupings. Ideally the gallery could also be altered so you don't have to go between new pages just to view different uploads.
Another thing I'd love to see, is navigating through user's gallery via arrow keys. Whenever I want to chech out what an artist has in store, I need to open the images in new tabs, 5-10 at a time, and browse that way.
This would be excellent. It'd work really well if you could sort a gallery by tags, and then browse between images that have the tag with the arrows.
Would make comics on NG super easy to read.
@ninjamuffin99 That sounds like an excellent way to do it.
Just noting that Inkbunny allso does Photosets, but they're a furry-only site, so I'm never surprised that many haven't heard of it.
They allso do it a little differently from Pixiv.
I do wish more sites would use that sort of feature, as it is *very* usefull.
Allso wish more sites would allow sub-folders in Galleries, (like Furaffinity, and Eka's Portal do) allowing for such crazed antics as putting all of a given character in a folder.
(yeah yeah, tags can do this to *some* extent, assuming your site has a robust tagging system and search)
TomFulp
I'm hoping we manage to address a lot of these items in 2019! Have plans for pretty much everything here.
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