What exactly do you have against delicious' new interface ? I continue using it as I always did, and except for the design I barely see any difference.
1. I used the Delicious plug-in for Firefox. It no longer worked with the "social" part of social bookmarking: I got no suggestions when I clicked on a link.
2. The tagging was completely broken in the plug-in; the plug-in, unlike the new interface, still accepted spaces to separate tags. The new site considered EVERY set of tags to be one big unique tag, so several MONTHS of tagging had to be fixed by hand. There are TONS of complaints about this change, and Avos has ignored them all.
3. The secure RSS feeds were limited to 10 items. I use these as feeds for common links (news, comics, what have you) and several of my link folders were truncated by the arbitrary limit. They kept trying to fix this, but seemed to be incapable. When I realized I'd missed nearly a month of one of my favorite comics, I was quite annoyed.
4. Links were just lost several times; I would bookmark something, and two days later look for the bookmark and it would be gone.
I rarely went to the site, so the design changes were irrelevant to me. It looked like they were trying to make it into a Reddit or Digg or equivalent, though, and having the site move further in that direction and away from how I wanted to use it just seemed like a terrible idea.
But the core problem was that they broke their own API and the core functionality that caused me to want to be there to begin with.
Now in Pinboard I don't get to use the Delicious plug-in any more, but everything else Just Works. The site is clean and easy to use. Pinboard also offers an "archive everything" option that's awesome; so many old links eventually go bad, and having an archive of everything you care enough about to link is just cool.
They killed the 'network' feature, which was the only feature I used really. I didn't really use the bookmarking.
I used it as a kind of lo-fi Hacker News. I was following the bookmarks of a bunch of interesting people. It would aggregate all the bookmarks of the people I follow into one list.
I found that it was a great way to find interesting stuff on a variety of topics. It was a fantastic complement to HN, so I'm really bummed that they killed it. :-(
I'd love to see pinboard implement this (if they haven't already).
There is a lot of difference. They've basically killed the social bookmarking and moved more towards those funny-pics, funny-videos portals pointing towards different sies.
Slightly unrelated, but what you should say is visuals instead of "design". It would be pretty impossible for you to actually mean "design" and have your statement be sane.
the whole usability of tagging [completely unnecessarily] changed. their own bookmarklet (and functionality on their site) changed so that when you press the save button it saves right away, and then you have a option to add tags.
i'd find my self quickly adding and then having to find my link and editing it.
what is the benefit of these changes? why would you do that to all your users?
Maybe I'm missing some key feature here ?