It was a poor design, that altered the UX in a significantly negative fashion due to a lack of understanding of what Wikipedia is.
I'd be like someone doing a very swooshy automobile design, and then moving the clutch to the passenger's side, just for kicks.
Also, in general I believe that hacker culture should tend towards cutting through the bullshit. You have no expectation of courtesy except for the courtesy of honesty on the Internet.
Harsh criticism is the quickest way to let someone know they're doing the wrong thing, and the fastest way to get your point across.
While you would probably be naive to expect courtesy on the Internet, there is no reason not to offer it.
It's no harder to write a courteous and constructive criticism than it is to write a harsh and mildly condescending one. The former can serve to foster creative discussion while the latter often kills it.
You earn respect and the courtesy of others falls out the other side. And even with all the trolls, anonymous bluntness and dens of iniquity that exist on the internet, there are plenty of ways to engage in positive or constructive feedback loops.
But if you've got a bad product (in this case a poorly executed and thought-out speculative redesign promotional piece) and you actually host it on a .com domain name for said product, it stands or falls on it's own merit.
Had this been a forum post or addressed to a design community with a culture of courteous discourse, I would decry the lack of respect and courtesy provided free expression, but as it stands, this was a cynical and misguided top level domain attempt that failed and should be called out as such.
No it's not. If you're silent only the praise is represented in the discussion. If five people like it and a hundred more hate it, I'd like to hear from the latter crowd as much as or more than the former.
Agreed. A lot of terrible design practices get voted to the top here. Since it isn't a design-centric board and because we can't downvote (and it's rude to downvote without stating the reason anyway, generally), the best way to convey bad practices is through writing a reply. A good portion of people here have never had to deal with a real design critique and don't know the lingo.
At the same time, this redesign is supposed to be an advertisement for this agency, so much so that they bought a domain for it. It's not just something they did for their mother's crochet club. It is supposed to show the depth at which the agency thinks. It is supposed to show their design chops. It is supposed to illustrate that they can tackle large problems. It fails, incredibly, at every single one. In an industry where everyone bandwagons onto concepts and ideas due to a lack of their own, this behavior needs to be called out. The scale at which they completely botched this project is astounding and people need to stop thinking colors and minimalism will solve information issues.
Take for instance the thread on .Mail (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4291803). The designer does good work, but didn't display the app as well as he could have. The discussion delves into everything from ways to better present the information to does this app even have a place in the ecosystem to I would never use this !@#$%!! While a good portion of the comments are harsh, if you drill down to the intent, there's a lot of good stuff there.
These are the conversations I love about HN, even though they tend to be a little dry. I've yet to find a more passionate group of people who understand the web and have played with and built enough of their own products to know what they're talking about. And not to generalize, but that's how the programmers I've worked with tend to be, and I love that about them.
While some people might see this Wikipedia redesign as a playful experiment and treat it as such, it's intention was to sell you on the agency's talent. When you look at it through that lens, there's a lot to complain about and I don't think it's out of bounds to do so when we all work in this industry and these are the types of people we're (indirectly) competing against.
I'd be like someone doing a very swooshy automobile design, and then moving the clutch to the passenger's side, just for kicks.
Also, in general I believe that hacker culture should tend towards cutting through the bullshit. You have no expectation of courtesy except for the courtesy of honesty on the Internet.
Harsh criticism is the quickest way to let someone know they're doing the wrong thing, and the fastest way to get your point across.