I have a couple of complaints about the blog posts.
The section should below the pack information on the overview page. Most of the time, when I’m looking at the overview page, it’s to compare the percentages in each expansion. Now, though, to see it, I have to scroll past the blog section, which takes up a lot of space, especially on mobile. Most other websites have posts like these on the bottom of the page for the same reason, which is that it’s not the main content you’re looking for when you visit the site.
Why did you have to add AI ‘art’ to it??? I’ll be honest, I don’t need to see an image that takes up as much space on the page as the actual text in the article anyways. You get across the same information with or without the image anyways, and using an AI image that honestly looks really bad kind of detracts from the visuals and just feels lazy. Even ignoring the ethical implications of AI ‘art’, the images just look bad, and it’s really not even worth it to add them to the articles as they aren’t that long in the first place. I’m also pretty sure that the posts themselves are written by AI? Which feels kind of insulting to the user base if that’s true.
Yea, I’m also not a fan of the blog. Now it’s less active and maybe my points will be less relevant, but these were my feelings when it was introduced:
The AI level in some posts is really too much in my opinion. This can be seen the most in posts like this or this. It makes the site look very cheap and that it doesn’t care about the quality.
I also don’t understand what is the benefit of publishing on blog over the community, they seem to serve the same purpose. The only additional function for blog is displaying displaying the posts on the front page. But it looks to me that this exact feature just backfired on the site with the low quality of the posts.
Another aspect is that adding additional features, like the blog, splits the efforts into more and more topics, and when you don’t have a big team working on the project, it makes every of these topics receive less and less attention. And the end effect is you end up with multiple features that all work rather crappy. I’m not here to point out all the issues with the site, but just to name a few: “recently modified” collection order that doesn’t really work because the cards are grouped by expansion; “bulk update” button that I don’t know why would anyone update their collection in a way this feature works; the page taking 2 seconds to load with multiple flashes when you randomly click some buttons, etc. I know the nature of open source is that some people just drop you random PR with improvements that are nice, but they all come with the cost of maintaining them – and they do need to be maintained, where now not much effort is put into that.
To summarize, I think it is much more important to ship good quality features than to ship as many nice to haves that work questionably. And the blog falls into the second category, draining time from improving the existing user experience.