Green Rants: Hugg 2.0 is an ugly baby throwing up all over your shoes
I didn’t say it, the angry green trolls over at Green Rants did- Hugg 2.0 sucks.
Even an ugly baby is kinda huggable.
But not this one: the new Hugg 2.0. It’s the latest incarnation of the Digg-wannabe from Treehugger, now a proud member of the Discovery’s Planet Green network.
You’d think Treehugger’s new corporate masters would expect a little more polish for something they just laid out $10 million to acquire. Or perhaps they were in such a hurry to dump Hugg’s previous configuration — a buggy, spammy, neglected mess — that the new site’s sterile, Web 1.2 presentation didn’t matter.
Letting the inmates run the asylum
No to speak ill of the dead, but the original Hugg gave new meaning to the term user generated content — as in, set up the site and never touch it again. Its rickety Pligg underpinnings always felt as if they might fly apart at any moment; features (such as reporting problems to the administrator) were broken or yielded cryptic error messages; and its pages were loaded with blog spam touting high-performance automobiles, vacation packages, and pitches for multilevel marketing schemes. It was all wrapped in an eye-searing electric green color scheme that would leave a nasty afterimage if you stared at it too long. Which few people did, judging from its long and obvious decline in participation.
I’ve used Hugg from the start- I was even the first green blogger to break their existence after they tried to have a nice quiet soft launch- and I’ve always gotten the impression that Hugg was something someone over at TH threw together in a weekend and then let sit. I hope at least a little bit of the big cash flowing in from Treehugger’s sell out to the Discovery Channel flows Hugg 2.0’s way.
Hugg 2.0 needs food badly! (three points for you if you get this weak Gen X gamer reference)
