What do you hate about Vox?
I’d like to know why the Vox Question of the Day isn’t ever “what do you hate about Vox?”
Dave Winer had a pretty interesting idea:
Start with a two-person video crew, like Andrew and Joanne, in New York, and every Tuesday, rain or shine, go to Times Square and interview 20 or 30 people, asking a very simple query. Tell me about a product, service or company you hate, and why. Then on Wednesday morning, release a video, very well branded, through every channel imaginable, with the best interview from Tuesday. By best I mean most enthusiastically hateful. The company who most screwed someone recently, told graphically and personally, from the point of view of a user.
There’s a lot to be learned from all of your users, even the not-so-satisfied ones.
In the interest of fairness, here’s my list of gripes about Vox…
- No autosave ala GMail — which I just learned…
- Update: Turns out they do — it just didn’t work for me…
- No external comments — come on, comment spam’s a problem, sure, but this locked down register-or-else policy is your solution? Which leads me to…
- Social network silos suck! Yes, all of them, not just craptastic MySpace, but each and every one, but I just don’t see a viable alternative out there until microformats are adopted and the tools to create it all mature…
Other minor inconveniences:
- No local access — even though I can’t submit posts, it’d be nice to be able to compose them and edit the old stuff offline. I know this is a hard problem, but workable — and would be a requirement if it weren’t for the fact that the tool stinks to begin with, leading me to..
- Update: In all fairness, they do have some nice APIs for these kinds of tools to be developed…
- Writing in this dumbed down editor without the ability to edit the HTML is obnoxious — don’t treat me like a fifth grader…
- Update: Turns out you can write the whole post in HTML and submit it — not as good, and not readily apparent from the UI, but it’ll do…
- Permalinks use the first title of a draft — it annoys the hell out of me even though it’s my fault for being lazy…
- Spell-checking is woeful, with more false positives than the MPAA’s pirate-sniffing superdogs…
That’s about all I have for now. Have at it, SixApart. In the meantime, I’ll be looking for a worthy alternative.
Update: And…I’ve…found it. Thus far, WordPress has gracefully handled everything I’ve thrown at it. To be fair, a Vox employee, Pants Party, was right on top of my post and responded almost immediately in a candid and helpful way, but I think I’m just too big a geek to give up that much control.