Underlined: My Opinions On The New Site

Here We Go...

I miss Figment. There I said it.

I met some of my closest friends there. I evolved from wanting to write scripts to have finished the first draft of a novel, became Featured Fig (for those who don’t know, basically I was featured on the homepage for a while), and entered contests left an right, doing decent for the most part. It was home to me when I went through the hardest parts of my life, when my depression was at it’s strongest, and helped me grow more as a writer than anything else did.

But now Figment is gone (I cried the day it was shuttdown). Underlined is here, and I was a little nervous. Will it be as good? Maybe better?

*sigh*

I think it is a good site.

There are things I think need to be fixed. I have a list of suggestions, but first, here is what I love about the site:

-This site works on MOBILE. Figment had a mobile site, but it was buggy and not all the same options were there. As someone who can only access websites from a cellphone or tablet w/keyboard (as I am doing right now), this is a godsend.

-It’s flashier. DUDE. IT LOOKS FABULOUS. I will always feel nolstalgic about the old site, but blue is my favorite color. In all seriousness however, it is cleaner looking, and honestly, I prefer the design.

-The moderators are more active. As some of you know, @alystorm posted a book on here explaining a little problerm in the terms and conditions (thank you for reading them, Aly… I don’t know you that well but thanks anyway), and Underlined responded the SAME DAY it was posted and is adressing the issue. They are going to revise the terms and conditions and fix the issue than many members on here weren’t too happy about. They listen. They love hearing

critism and are actively trying to fix the site. That is another step above Figment.

I still however do have some critisms.

-Maybe add an autocorrect function? I miss spelling errors easily, haha.

-Private chatting is something everyone on Figment has always wanted. The thing is, on Figment, we could at least make private discussions in the groups, but there are no groups here… maybe add a private chat feature?

-As far as the censoring issue, I do think it is breaching on our freedom of speech/creativity. Possibly add a setting where the the language is censored, but you can go onto your profile and turn off the censoring? That, I believe to be a good happy medium. One thing everyone loved about Figment was that you weren’t actually censored. We had freedom of speech. I know Tumblr has done this where accounts are naturally in Safe Mode unless you turn it off yourself.

-The biggest problem, which I know you’ve heard already, is that the navigation needs some work. Maybe a library on here? A “Suggested For You” thing that shows you stories based on your reading preferences? A way to access stories you favorited that others wrote? Perhaps even way to search users, so it isn’t super hard to find my friends?

Other than that, I think this site is great. Figment was amazing, but Underlined is (hopefully) going to continue improving on what we had. And hopefully, this site can be more successful than the last.