And now for something a little different…. You may notice that Kotaku looks a little different today and hopefully you’ll be enjoying some performance improvements. We’re switching to a somewhat slicker layout that has been designed to load the page faster and give you a smoother experience while navigating through the site.

Along with our layout change comes a change to commenting that will present your replies to our articles all the way across the page, at full-width. That’s part of the general commenting philosophy at Gawker Media to showcase the most interesting comments in a way that feels additive to the article above them. We believe readers can and do write comments that are worth reading in conjunction with the articles they’re connected to, and we will continue to try to find the best way to show them and the best way to elevate the low expectations so many people have for Internet comments.

To do that, we’re taking a half-step at the moment to only display a relatively small number of reader replies by default. As this commenting system evolves, more readers’ contributions will be made prominent again. But for the next little while you’ll mostly see reader replies that were selected by story authors or replied to by those authors. Since we want healthy discussion—pro and con—below articles, we plan to eventually highlight more replies, even beyond what the author has interacted with. But we’re starting conservatively. I’m going to thank our best and most frequent commenters in advance for their patience, since this system is pretty new to us writers here at Kotaku, as well.

Here we go!

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