Why was Unity Connect so bad?

I recently found out about Unity Connect and thought it was a cool idea but I realised it shut down and not a lot of people liked it. I was just wondering what made it so bad?

For starters it replaced a very functional system that was equally very simple to use with one that required both the people posting jobs as well as the people responding to them to jump through multiple hoops to do so. Worse yet the system it replaced was taken down months before Connect was in a state ready to be used.

First impressions are very important. Thanks to the above when Connect was launched the majority of people who would have used it at the time already had formed a very negative opinion of it and very few of them ever left that opinion behind even when they started using it.

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Basically, forums were much easier to deal with in comparison, connect was very awkward/hard to use, plus gave impression of being poorly written.

You could read this thread:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/my-first-experiences-with-connect.510808/

Ohhhh ok makes sense. What were these hoops that people had to jump through?

Awesome, thank you so much!

I don’t remember the fine details any longer but basically account creation was a very lengthy process. I remember creating my account with information that would have been sufficient for sites like Linkedin only for Connect to state that it needed yet more information and validation. Thus the first time I used it was the last time.

Unity Connect was a solution for a problem that did not exist. There are numerous job posting options, many of which are better, many of which are properly vetted. For quick jobs you can just use GameDevClassifieds but if you go beyond that you’ve also got Gamasutra and others.

The question ultimately ends up being “what did Unity Technologies bring to the table that was a benefit here?” and the answer ultimately ended up being “nothing aside from brand recognition.”

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This was a really interesting thread. My takeaway from it is that Unity is terrible at listening to their customers. Wow.

I tried to give input from day one but was entirely ignored so I stepped back to let Unity shoot itself in both feet instead of drawing on 3 decades of my experience in this field.

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That’s the Unity way of doing things! Reading just your post, I wasn’t sure whether
you are talking about Connect or about the “Lithium incident”.

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Or Enlighten. Or the 4.6 UI going canvas based. Or any other number of things Unity has done, really.

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Unity spends a lot of money on this but still no free moderator license :wink:

Are you even using Unity? :stuck_out_tongue:

It feels there’s a sizeable amount of people here who don’t really use Unity by choice anymore.

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I looked at Connect when it first came out, and I didn’t understand what they were trying to do with it. It looked like it was trying to be a social media platform without the social part. I’m sure it improved later, but I never bothered to check it out again.

It doesn’t even solve that problem because if I want to use a social media platform where I don’t talk to people and that I hate using I can just go to LinkedIn

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