USA Today social redesign - 92% don't like it
USA Today introduced a completely new website complete with lots of social network features like comments, reader rankings, blogs, photos, and better search. Reader reaction? 92% don't like it. I read all 130 comments (at the time of this post) …
Context & Ripple Effects
USATODAY.com relaunched on March 4 with comments, reader rankings, blogs, photos and improved search — its own walkthrough of the new features ran the day before Don Dodge tallied 130 reader comments and found 92% against. That gap between what the site now measures (comments, rankings, photos) and what those measurements say (overwhelming disapproval) is the whole story.
The syndicated blog debate splits along the same line: Deep Jive Interests asks whether the changes are 'about 5 years too early,' mathewingram.com asks whether a newspaper can be a social network at all, and Message calls it going social only 'sorta.' Tech and media bloggers broadly praise the direction — some argue it didn't go far enough — so the hostility is concentrated among the paper's existing commenting readers, not the industry commentary class.
First-order effects
- USA Today must decide within days whether to hold the redesigned site through the backlash or walk features back; the bloggers' endorsement hands management cover to stay the course while its most engaged readers supply the opposition.
- The 92% figure comes from roughly 130 self-selected commenters, meaning the redesign is simultaneously generating record engagement and recording rejection — both numbers land on USA Today's dashboard at once.
Second-order effects
- Other newspaper publishers get a free controlled experiment: if USA Today absorbs the poll without measurable audience loss, social-feature rollouts become competitive table stakes; if it retreats, rivals inherit a documented excuse to delay their own revamps.
- The 'five years too early' framing pressures competitors on timing rather than substance — the risk isn't building social features, it's shipping them to a readership whose habits haven't moved yet.
Third-order effects
- If lopsidedly negative redesign polls keep accompanying launches that ship anyway, reader feedback hardens into ritual rather than veto, teaching publishers that backlash is survivable and lowering the bar for future unilateral interface changes.
- As news sites converge on the same comment-rank-blog checklist, differentiation shifts from having the features to moderating and curating them — where USA Today's next test will actually be decided.
The trend: News publishers are importing social-network features faster than legacy print audiences accept them, making the hostile redesign poll a recurring rite of the newspaper-to-web transition.