Freesound Forums

It's awful.
Beyond awful.

Listen.

I know the internet is designed for young boys who need to have perfect new good shiny toys or they go insane, and I am not the kind of old woman who hates new things because they are new. But I hate a huge amount of new tech because it is bad, because it does fewer things worse than it's prior implementation, and no amount of re-learning (which takes time! and effort!) can fix.

To say nothing of the fact that's on the user to do, and not the provider.
So I will try to be as terse and objective as possible, even though the latter doesn't proper exist.

Aesthetic complaints aside -
I agree that it looks awful, I agree that it creates less room, I agree that it makes it harder for power-users... The people who use the site in the first place, to find sounds that are specific, falls prey to the nightmarish stupidity of 'endless scrolling == good' that so many UI-designers who probably buy bitcoin in bulk think is great practise...

The implementation of the new UI is an accessibility nightmare that makes it difficult for elder users or the impaired to access the site.

And I'm sure whatever corporation bought out Freesound is smirking and thinking - right, well, you can go die then.

You aren't going to be young forever.
You aren't going to have perfect health, forever.
At some point you will need to have functional sites without ornamentation, without JS everywhere, without extraneous crap.

It will happen sooner than you think.

Since you will do what other 'non-profit' sites do, as Wikipedia did, and force this mess upon us, I just want to let you know in no uncertain words how I feel.

You will not fix this. You do not care.
I understand that innately.

At most, you will make a concerned social media post, with an emoticon attached, because if it cannot be said in two-hundred and fifty-six characters, it's not worth saying.

And everyone will move on.

Within ten years, I imagine this place will just be another dumping ground for tech-boy toys and their 'totally revolutionary' iterative-generated sound clips. It will be impossible to find anything recorded by humans, despite the fact that iterative technology will not have improved meaningfully in that time (and will not ever), it will not matter that 99% of the loops generated sound exactly alike, because 'taking away a fun thing from our users is worse then killing them...'

Or something.

I have written and re-written this, and this is the nicest way I can possibly word this.

The only weapon I have left is my words.
Should this disappointment reach you, don't 'talk' about it.
Don't express 'empathy' - a viper that does not exist.

Consider taking action.
Consider fixing the problem, by not creating a solution nobody asked for and that is not needed. Consider leaving the old UI as an option.

You will do none of these things, I know.

But for as long as these forums exist - a year? Five years?
I want to register my disappointment. I'm sure in cost-cutting measures they'll be replaced with a 'private freesound discord' where we can go listen to young people swear and do anything but talk about sound design and use, and it will be quietly scrubbed when corporate realises there doesn't need to be any way to contact support at all.

Every day, I regret ever enjoying technology at all.

Hey, I read your post and you do have some really valid criticism. And, I do understand your frustration so thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I'm mainly replying to address the following thing you said:

I'm sure whatever corporation bought out Freesound is smirking and thinking - right, well, you can go die then.

No corporation has bought Freesound.org, it remains a non-profit organisation run by the Music Technology Group out of the University Pompeu Fabra Barcelona (MTG UPF) https://www.upf.edu/web/mtg

Not sure if what you wrote was 'tongue-in-cheek' but I just wanted to clear that up

Just so you know, the developer team are very open to listen to feedback from the community - https://freesound.org/help/about/. The codebase is open-source on Github. Personally I'm not a developer, but I do help out with the site voluntarily behind the scenes so I know first hand that the developing team are doing their best trying to make something more modern whilst keeping it as functional as we have become used to.

Freesound is listening to the community, as you can see in the sticky thread in this sub-forum https://freesound.org/forum/beast_whoosh_beta_ui_feedback/44013/

Regards,
Sam

Frenetica wrote:
I hate a huge amount of new tech because it is bad, because it does fewer things worse than it's prior implementation, and no amount of re-learning (which takes time! and effort!) can fix.

You raised a lot of excellent points and did well to describe the trajectory of the average internet community, right down to the Discord full of nonsense... but I want to talk about this quoted point specifically. It's THIS. This is what I've been going on about from the beginning. They want to make the layout useful and make the site better, but to do that, the layout not only has to offer a substantial increase in functionality, it has to do it without handicapping or destroying any existing functionality.

If I turned in that new UI to an employer after 5 years of time, I would expect to be fired, and I would be. That's the simple truth - not some overly harsh criticism that I pulled out of my ass - but they can't handle it. I'm sure they worked hard on that UI, but hard work alone has no merit. It has to be thoughtfully and intelligently directed toward a useful end.

Well, I had made up my mind not to interact with this forum or community again, but I wanted you, Frenetica, to know that you are in good company. Every other veteran user I've talked to about this is in agreement. Will that truly be taken into consideration? No, we'll get more stock-sounding messages like the one I got in the other thread.

People come on here and download stuff, and then they make videos, podcasts, they score films, they make music and so much more. I've personally heard albums of songs that wouldn't have been inspired or ever made without the sounds I posted. Good memories are being formed, people are learning to express themselves, and people are attaining a sense of mastery and creating things they can be proud of and look fondly back upon. There must have been thousands of such instances across the history and userbase of this site. The fact that people across the world are doing all this because of us is one of the greatest honors we could hope to attain.

When you have a situation like that, it makes little sense to change. You might damage or hamper the process. We put such precious things behind glass and in museums. Otherwise, stuff gets harder to find, it takes more time and effort, and that kills the inspiration and the enthusiam people would otherwise have. Some of humanity's best ideas are had and acted upon within the span of minutes and we must help this process along. People need quality materials they can access and use quickly and hassle-free. That's exactly what Freesound is built for and what it's good at! So, whatever comes of this debacle, I hope it's something that understands these points better than I do.

Finally, if worst comes to worst... I did contact Archive.org to see if they had plans to change anything about their site, monetize it, or allow users to monetize on it, and got a definitive no answer. So for those who make a lot of stuff and need somewhere to put it, that remains an option. I haven't really used it yet and I imagine the workflow is very different. I only mention this last point as a way to help out other creatives.

Headphaze wrote:
Lots of well-thought out stuff;

Hey, Sam -

Thanks for wading through my grumbling. I'm fully aware they haven't been bought out in the classical sense, and I'm grateful the patient moderators decided to greenlight this post instead of chucking it into the incinerator. I do watch the yearly financials, however, and I remain concerned that even though the organisation remains a non-profit, that funding has increasingly come from actors who prefer self-enacted chilling effects. E.G, how a lot of sites are self-censoring so-called NSFW content...

Which everyone supports, because think of the children, get the filth off the street, etc, only it's rarely 'filth' that's censored, but generally sex or gender minorities, or vulnerable populations. I actually am semi-active on git, though my coding days are long behind me, and I couldn't claim to make a better UX then they/their hires did. UX is hard!

Problem is, the previous UX was good enough, I'd argue even pretty close to the platonic ideal for an archival site. Being as neutral as I can be, even if I gave the best feedback I could, AND my advice was good, AND it helped the greatest range of users, AND I had the development team listen, I think the final product would still have a higher-then-average chance of turning out crummy. I'll repeat it, UX is hard. And I don't criticise here just because I'm spiteful or cruel, but because, well, I think it is going to be very difficult to offer full functionality in regards to what I'm used to with a UI designed to do the exact opposite, and a UX designed to encourage features that -

If not directly monetised, certainly benefit monetisation now or in a future date.

All that said, after writing some particularly bloodthirsty poetry, I feel better.
I can be a sore old cuss at the best of times. Thanks for wading through that, and I appreciate your constructive answer. My opinions haven't changed, but they shouldn't need to, to say thanks for approaching in good faith.

strangehorizon wrote:
Quite a lot!

I'm pretty much in the same boat. I feel bad that my sole forum post is me grouching, as I don't particularly like that the internet has gotten crueller in my years, not less. But at the same time, it is brutally disappointing to see all this happen. I don't want to go on, anymore; the staff made the decision to let this post stand, and like you said, and I said in my answer above, UI is hard. We've said our piece; what'll happen, happens.

But I did want to answer this and mention I've mulled over the archive for future endeavours. I'm actually working with a relative to go through my own (unuploaded) samples and field recordings if and when I finally croak, possibly up on bandcamp as a public resource. The problem is the same as all digital architecture faces; it's fundamentally less permanent than traditional archiving, and far easier to be lost. Anyway, I imagine that's probably one of the reasons I feel so strongly about this. Freesound has offered so much, whether to producers, recorders, archivists -

Anyway. Said I wouldn't go on any further, went on quite well enough.

Wanted to leave on something positive:

strangehorizon wrote:
So, whatever comes of this debacle, I hope it's something that understands these points better than I do.

Mmn-hmn.
None of these are easy things to answer.
Chances in accessibility affect userbases, affect archival, effect a great manner of things we can't easily predict. Grousing like I did is easy - doing well is much more difficult. Here is to hope, elusive as it is. I'll see you all on the flipside.

I've tried the new user interface, and for what it's worth, I prefer a screen where more text information is on the screen and the images aren't so intrusive.

Thanks for running experiments, and for asking for our feedback - I appreciate that a lot.

But I prefer the earlier version.

Hi Frenetica, Sam, Strangehorizon, Thimblerig,

Both Sam and Strangehorizon know me, but I don't think I interacted with you before Frenetica and Thimblering. You might have seen my name in many places here (blog posts, forum posts, github) because I've been leading the Freesound team at the Music Technology Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra for many years now. I started to use Freesound almost 15 years ago, even before I started my academic research about Freesound and I got involved with the Freesound team at the university in 2010. I'm providing this context because I think this might make it easier to understand the rest of my message. I'll try to answer to some of the things mentioned in this conversation, mostly addressing Frenetica's comments.

First of all, let me say that, as Sam pointed out, we do listen and respect all opinions and would never censor them. Even if the opinions are very negative. In fact, negative opinions typically help us more because we can make improvements. If you've been reading the other existing threads with feedback about the new UI (the most active beeing this https://freesound.org/forum/beast_whoosh_beta_ui_feedback/44013/), you'll have seen how many users have expressed their opininos and I answered to all of them, always offering detailed explanations about our points of view. I also implemented many of the suggestions for improvement that were made in this thread (including changing font colors, layout improvements, adding a "grid" mode in the search page to display more results at once and scroll less - even less than with the "old" UI -, adding more information to the "horizontal" sound displays, etc.), and I always said that we would be open to further suggestions to continue improving (even after the "old" UI gets retired).

The way in which opinions are expressed though is important, and sometimes when I read a message like the one Frenetica posted (and some which Strangehorizon posted in the other thread) I have the feeling that maybe you are not fully aware of who is behind Freesound and who is receiving these messages. Freesound is a project that was started in 2005 at the Music Technology Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Freesound is being developed and maintained by researchers (like me) of this research group. There is not a single person hired to work on Freesound only. Our dedication to Freesound is motivated by our love for the project itself. And, form the Freesound team, I'm practically the only one who is atually involved in its development and maintenance. We put a lot of effort to keep Freesound alive with the minimal resources we have, and we still manage to find time to make improvements (or what we think are improvements). We're not a corporate with any hidden intentions, we're not a group of young boys that want to be cool and want shiny toys.

I've already explained in the other threads the reasons why we needed to make a new UI so I'm not going to go into details about that. I will nevertheless mention that when working with the UI/UX designer who made the new version, we always prioritized usability over form. Leaving graphical design considerations aside, the basic Freesound UX is left unaltered (front page, search page, sound page, user page). There is no relevant functionality that has been lost (and If we missed something, pelase let us know), and we actually added a lot of functionality, much of it specifically thought for pro users (see https://freesound.org/help/faq/#what-are-the-new-features-brought-by-the-new-user-interface). The reason we did not want to turn Freesound upside down with the new interface is precisely that we think the current Freesound works very well and wanted to keep all the good things it has.

I'm very happy to discuss as much as needed the changes we are introducing. But I think it will be more productive dissusing specific issues so I can provide better answers and, if you want, you can provide more constructive feedback (which might help actually changing things). Maybe you mention issues for which our answer will be that we will not change them, but at least if that is the case I'll be able to explain you why.

We do care about Freesound, not only professionally but also personally. I know that you also care deeply about Freesound. I think strangehorizon has put it perfectly on the messagea above why we care about Freesound. This is one of the best places on the internet (if not the best!), and its philosophy is not chaning at all with the deployment of the new interface. Hopefully with time (and improvements) you'll be able to use the new interface with the same comfort as you are using the "old" one.