I hate the damage that Apple seems to have done in this regard. I also hate it when apps hide features because “they’re for power users and regular users won’t understand them”.
Sure, there’s a difference between UX being so bad that it’s frustrating to use and “we need to simplify things because we don’t want to scare the users”.
Lemmy UI has its problems to solve and features to add, but it’s not bad, even on mobile. I’ve been using it extensively and it does fine all things considered.
Anyways, at this point I believe there’s even a benefit to making a UI a bit ugly and scary, so you end up with a higher quality of users instead of quantity, as cold as it might sound.
Edit: I didn’t mean to just talk about Lemmy. That was just an example and I understand that for a social platform numbers are important. My rant was more general in regards to the dumbing down of UI in all areas.
What apps are you referring to specifically here? Any examples?
I’m guessing the way the official app and new reddit has everything so large. I prefer to view reddit posts as a list where I can look over a lot of posts at a time and engage with the ones that look interesting. 3rd party apps and old reddit are good for this, but new reddit and the official app are clearly intending for me to mindlessly scroll through content looking at every single post in the feed. I can only see a 1-2 posts at a time, and it makes it very slow to find content worth my time.
Lemmy needs all the users it can get imo.
If we start taking a “well, we don’t want those people” stance, then it’s going to fizzle out.
And it’s all well and good people saying “I don’t want an overly large community!”, but you need frequent activity or it’s not a real community.
A community with say five posts a day and four active commenters is essentially dead.
Five posts a day isn’t bad as you put it. You’ve been for years overstimulated by Reddit’s abundant content. Many of us have been contributing to lemmy perfectly fine; we see reccurent usernames and profile pictures, we grow compassionate and sincere with each others thanks to this familiarity.
Not everything should keep on mindlessly growing. Not growing fast enough isn’t a problem, yet our modern, capitalist lifestyles make it seem so. That said, I am not against lemmy’s ongoing growth per se.
I get where you’re coming from in terms of attracting quality users. I think the devs definitely should prioritise fixing bugs and crashes over graphic design (which I’m sure they do). At the same time I think we need a satisfying design that is unique to Lemmy, in order to enjoy scrolling through feeds and communities.
Umm… No? There is no correlation between quality of user and their willingness to trudge through a bad UX.
I think there is an important difference between UX and UI here.
In terms of UI I fully agree with the poster here. Over architected and designed uis are annoying and cumbersome. I’ve seen too many designers over design for the sake of design.
UX however is a different matter. User eXperience should be brain dead simple. Follows the actual customer quote - “the customer is always right”, meaning if the customer thinks there should be a button here that does the thing, there probably should be. Even if it breaks some design rules, obviously the experience demands it.
This is an incredibly selfish mindset to have. “The site is simple enough for me to understand and navigate it, so anyone else that has trouble for whatever reason can just go pound sand.”
