- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
“I cannot fathom how the idea of having choices could be considered, let alone by so many people to even make this into a controversy, to be bad design. That’s the very thing that makes federation great.”
Because for every choice presented, people want to know the consequences of each one before proceeding. It’s a well understood problem in sales and marketing. People do not want to put themselves in a position where they have to undo. Companies like Apple do this very well. In computer shops, the reason staff are hired is to help get the customer from “wanting a laptop” to “choosing one laptop”, rather than walk away feeling that they need to think about it more.
“Just look at a few of the most populated sites, and pick one that looks good. The choice makes 95% no difference in practice”.
Maybe if they said that on the signup page it would help. I think it would have helped me. But just because you have a sense of what “looks good” doesn’t mean the average person does. It’s the average person that I want to interact with on the internet.
When I recommend federated sites to people, I literally just pick the ones I’m already on and send the link. Problem solved. They can learn more and try new things in their own time. It’s also not hard to just tell them, “It’s like email, but for the whole internet.”
Would you consider biodiversity to also be bad ux? Maybe consider that the benefits of decentralization far outweigh the cons of your marketing programming, and that the issue is more one of education. Dumbing down and patronizing people like we need somebody to make our choices for us sounds like a solution that’s worse than the problem.
Biodiversity is great. Abandoning confused users isn’t. Those options can still exist without baffling the user.
“Marketing programming” understands the human condition and tries to facilitate people. That part - for all its other failings - is more empathetic than telling people who struggle that we refuse to “dumb down” the process for them.
It’s not empathetic. It just tries to understand human psychology well enough to manipulate consumer choices for more profits. If you want something on that philosophy, that’s what reddit is already for.
I’m not trying to say that marketing is empathetic. I’m saying that meeting people where they are at is.
Where they are is having spent most of their life in a walled garden corporate internet. What you need to understand is that all new things have a learning curve, and the process of learning needs to be accepted - rather than trying to pressure free systems into being the very thing everyone is wanting to get away from.
Freedom means having choice. Sometimes a lot of it. Sometimes that’s scary. But it’s worth embracing.
If any of that were true there wouldn’t be posts and comments here and elsewhere from professional programmers who gave up on the registration process because of bad UX. I was one of them. People don’t give up on registering here because it’s “scary”.
If you’re one of the many people here happy for this to remain a niche for tech people then that’s different.
If somebody gave up on the registration, how would you know? They wouldn’t be here to say it.
If you gave up on the registration, then how are you here? You’re inventing impossible physics to support your arguments. Are you a professional programmer for doge?
Here’s what your expert opinion is really about:
https://slrpnk.net/comment/13815707
“If somebody gave up on the registration, how would you know?” Because although I have an account here on Lemmy I can still see discussions on comparable sites.
“If you gave up on the registration, then how are you here?” Because I came back a year later after coming across a good explainer for how the fediverse works.
I’m not going to look at that link.