My experience with it has mostly been on Flickr, and I hated it for this exact reason, even though that was mostly pictures not text. Sure, it's very pretty if

My experience with it has mostly been on Flickr, and I hated it for this exact reason, even though that was mostly pictures not text. Sure, it's very pretty if you just want to look at the site and not engage with it in any detailed way, like professional designers seem to intend for us, but I always wanted to look at a page of pictures and scan my attention over them systemically, finding those that interested me, being distracted by them briefly, then returning to the scan and knowing where I'd left off. Trying to do this with the "masonry" was horrible. What direction do you go in? Horizontally? Then how do you track which elements belong in which row, where you've already been? They're all interleaved. Vertically? Have fun scrolling down and down and down forever as the page loads more and more content dynamically. No, neither of those is how you're meant to engage, you're supposed to simply sit quietly and look at the big wall of pretty pictures. Giving designers a non-javascripty way to do it is nice, I guess, but I really hope the effect is that the bad layouts we already have are at least better executed technologically, rather than that the better technology encourages designers to use bad layouts more often.