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why the bbc is going down the pan

mauvais said:
This, in terms of decision making, is not actually about trans people or LGBTQ or other forms of protests. This is managerial incompetence manifesting in a variety of different kinds of collateral damage in pursuit of defending the corporation against claims of bias, which in itself is sort of understandable but also an unwinnable war. I really think it's not considered or consulted or a deliberate wedge (though it absolutely may now be used as one), they just have no idea what they're doing.

A positive is that it will very likely backfire in short order and the consequences and concessions of that will lead to (small) improvements in that management culture. It's already happening but unfortunately it seems to take these episodes of stupidity to move the dial.

In terms of actual bias and conflicts of interest, a certain culture is already entrenched - senior political reporters behave in particular ways that actually ought to be rightly curtailed by this stuff, although it remains to be seen both whether they are the target (rather than say, Gary Lineker) and whether they will be subject to anything meaningful in practice.
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It's a very specific subset of "claims of bias" that it addresses of course - basically rw/Tory ones, and even then a subset of those, specially around culture war issues (the use of "virtue signalling" confirms that). I agree that it's not specifically aimed at LGBTQ or BLM etc but it does end up being that; the management might not be actively hostile but they don't care either. Attacking minorities is the point of the culture war rhetoric and they're deliberately playing to it.

It's certainly not going to help them - amazing that anyone would even think it still. The massive amount of sucking up over Brexit and the election has just led to even more pressure to conform. It's not purely driven by the desire to submit and please though, I think some significant parties really do agree.
 
equationgirl said:
Ive been noticing those wretched fonts too. Seems to be ok on the main front page but descends into this serif font which is hard to read for me.
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mauvais said:
The former is Helvetica, the latter [serif] is Reith (Serif). Everything is migrating to the latter but it gets done one component at a time - in this case, articles before indexes.
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There's a puff-piece article on the bbc website somewhere.
 
It’s probably all done by committees or something isn’t it? I note the main news page still has a different font to the sub pages - how long does it take to roll out a font ffs?

There’s loads of half baked stuff like this. For example I go to the page for a radio programme, and click listen now expecting it to start playing, and it redirects me to the BBC sounds webpage for that programme where I need to click play again. This has been the case for years. It’s redolent of too many cooks in different kitchens spoiling the broth.
 
It's not really 'design by committee', no.

"how long does it take to roll out a font ffs?"

This is classic 'how hard can it be?'. A long time.

Cross-product journeys and integration of all the things it does could be much better. This is reflective of independent product silos. 'Too many cooks' is lazy nonsense though.
 
mauvais said:
Cross-product journeys and integration of all the things it does could be much better. This is reflective of independent product silos. 'Too many cooks' is lazy nonsense though.
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No one outside the BBC cares about independent product silos. Websites should be oriented around their users not their operators, especially if a lot of time and effort goes into considering accessibility.
 
Yes, and everybody knows this; surprisingly enough you are not the first person to think of such things. Doing anything about it takes time. As for changing a font, how hard can it be? Well, when each component part of a website was built at different times and is hosted on different infrastructure, some of which is destined for the bin ASAP, it takes a long time to change a single element of design. Amongst everything else that's going on.

This gives you some idea: Moving BBC Online to the cloud
 
mauvais said:
Yes, and everybody knows this; surprisingly enough you are not the first person to think of such things. Doing anything about it takes time. As for changing a font, how hard can it be? Well, when each component part of a website was built at different times and is hosted on different infrastructure, some of which is destined for the bin ASAP, it takes a long time to change a single element of design. Amongst everything else that's going on.

This gives you some idea: Moving BBC Online to the cloud
Click to expand...

It's impressive the BBC’s Design+Engineering team spent years completely rebuilding the website. Still not sure why the font on one BBC News page needs to be different to that on other BBC news page for several months. Obviously the rebuild didn't solve that problem.

I'm not meaning to have a go. It's just frustrating that I find myself using the BBC less and less these days, which is not what I want to happen, but it's like a death by 1000 cuts when all the little things like this add up to it just being easier to go elsewhere.
 
mauvais said:
Yes, and everybody knows this; surprisingly enough you are not the first person to think of such things. Doing anything about it takes time. As for changing a font, how hard can it be? Well, when each component part of a website was built at different times and is hosted on different infrastructure, some of which is destined for the bin ASAP, it takes a long time to change a single element of design. Amongst everything else that's going on.

This gives you some idea: Moving BBC Online to the cloud
Click to expand...

Jesus fucking Christ, the BBC have drunk the Cloud-flavoured Kool-Aid now too? I guess it was inevitable given the Tory predilection for stuffing money into the pockets of private sector shysters.
 
NoXion said:
Jesus fucking Christ, the BBC have drunk the Cloud-flavoured Kool-Aid now too? I guess it was inevitable given the Tory predilection for stuffing money into the pockets of private sector shysters.
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This is a bit of a weird thing to say. The vast majority of computing services have moved to being provisioned on the cloud, which is holistically problematic - everything is on Amazon or similar - but entirely normal in software engineering. Hosting your own datacentres is increasingly weird and expensive.
 
mauvais said:
This is a bit of a weird thing to say. The vast majority of computing services have moved to being provisioned on the cloud, which is holistically problematic - everything is on Amazon or similar - but entirely normal in software engineering. Hosting your own datacentres is increasingly weird and expensive.
Click to expand...

Yes, it costs money to do a job properly. But it's cheaper to make real life supervillain cunts like Bezos richer while also giving them all the keys to your kingdom. Just because it's become the new normal in software engeering doesn't make it any less stupid or short-sighted.
 
There's definitely some truth to that. Not sure you can really level it specifically at the BBC though. The entire industry is geared around it.
 
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