Maybe it’s just because I had taken classes on web design in the late 90’s, early 2000’s, but I hate the current Reddit design because they absolutely ignore all of the basic design rules. The most egregious is wasted space.
Like, I get it; modern shit is more commonly viewed on a phone, being held vertically. That doesn’t prevent you from having a widescreen format for regular fucking screens or phones held horizontally. I can not stand having all the content squeezed into the center, leaving big open spaces with absolutely nothing in them on the margins of the page.
Naah I like the wide spaces on the left and right. It looks too cluttered otherwise with unnecessary information
We went from fixed-length elements that don’t scale with the browser, to the golden era, and then back to fixed-length elements that don’t scale with the browser.
Yea, I used old.reddit.com even on my phone and it was fine. Their new design was fucking awful the last time I saw it. On top of that it was slow as shit. You spend more time looking at that fucking stupid spinning logo than you do seeing content.
I haven’t spoken to very many people about this
Obviously not. I, a millennial prefer the “new” design. I can subscribe to communities and subreddits with already is a good way to filter content. I don’t have to look at everything that gets thrown at me. Also I do not have to be scared there is a hidden ad somewhere inbetween like when using Instagram or whatever.
I also really liked the forums from the bronze age, but those were text-based at the post level, while Lemmy also supports images and links (including thumbnails).
How can you prefer this:
over this:
What I didn’t expect was what My friend said after making a Lemmy account on her chosen website — “I don’t like it because it looks like Old Reddit. I have to click on each post to view it”.
Sometimes people tell you something and it just ends a friendship…
I’m continually surprised by how incurious people are in general. One of the first things I did when I explored Lemmy was click on the weird “+” button next to post titles, because I wanted to know what it did. And then I checked the settings to see what I could tweak.
People don’t seem to do shit like this, and it baffles me.
We aren’t taught or encouraged to explore or experiment by our educational systems. We are taught how to do something, and then don’t question it. There are tons of people that cannot meaningfully play with Lego without assembly instructions. The idea of trying something out of the norm from what they already know never enters into their head.
Like, back in the day, I literally discovered I could drag and drop files directly into the “upload” area on some websites and it would automatically post the file to the site. I didn’t even know it was possible, I just out of the blue wondered if a browser can work like a drag and drop file manager and just went ahead and did it.
I think this is based on the way short form video has taken over as being what having-the-TV-on-in-the-background was for the baby boomers. And click-then-go-back is too complex an interaction for “noise” while having your brain off, while swiping from meaningless clip to meaningless clip in shorts or tiktok works.
I don’t agree at all with the author’s approach. I’m a millennial and I came to Reddit around 2019-2020, using it a lot since the pandemic, I prefer the new reddit a thousand times. It’s not a question of interpreting the site as questions, it seems like a nonsense to me. It’s a matter of making everything more visual, I don’t stop to read the title, the community or the author, at a glance I see the vast majority of the post, if I consider it I see the rest of the information, most of the time I ignore the information, because I don’t care.
I would like to remind you that Instagram (the example given in the article) is mostly used by millennials.
I don’t stop to read the title, the community or the author, at a glance I see the vast majority of the post, if I consider it I see the rest of the information, most of the time I ignore the information, because I don’t care.
Careful, this is how popular subs/communities end up full of non-relevant stuff, because people upvote without checking if it’s appropriate! Thankfully I’ve not seen much of that here yet, but I think that’s because I tend to subscribe to smaller communities.
Yeah, I’m not sure this is the generational thing that the author is trying to make it out to be. It seems to me like one of those things that leans on personal preference.
The author’s sample for the behavior of generations is a few anecdotes from personal friends. How many friends does a person have, 3, or 30, or 300? That means n is pretty small when there’s something like 3 billion mellenials
It might be a vaguely generational thing as in people’s preference being influenced by when they hopped on board. How the website looked when they first started shapes their preference kind of thing. I started using reddit over a decade ago and vastly preferred the old layout for the same reason Foni hated it. I hated the new layout precisely because I don’t want to see all the contents all the time and I want to filter it by reading the titles first. IIRC most users who come on to reddit after new is the default preferred that over the old and the percentage of people who uses old kept shrinking over time. Now that I’m on mbin I’ve configured it to be like old reddit as well (not that it took that much effort).
Because you’re primarily looking at image posts…
Older people, 30-40s grew up when bandwidth was a limiter, we’re used to having to decide if an image is worth the bandwidth.
We just grew up with vastly different internets.
You all could just load a bunch of stuff and ignore what you didn’t want. We’re stuck in the mindset that bandwidth matters, so a bunch of stupid memes we aren’t interested taking up bandwidth and screen real estate just feels off.
It feels less like it’s being “offered” and more like it’s being shoved down our throats.
Bandwidth is going to be the new “turn off the lights when you leave” for the Oregon Trail generation. In our heads we still need to be cognizant of how much we’re using, even tho subsequent generations never seem to think about it. They’ve just never had to.
Happens to every generation in some way or another.
I’m getting annoyed that every damn thing is turning into a web app now and JS/Chrome is even infecting desktop programs that traditionally were written in a real systems language like C or C++. The technology world feels janky and bloated now, built like a house of cards where one thing is relying on 20 other things, some of them in the cloud, to work right.
Programming these days seems to be more about glueing various services and APIs together to come up with a solution instead of actually coding it.
You’re half right. There’s a lot of house-of-cards junk (see left-pad) but a lot of it is also using existing frameworks as a foundation instead of reinventing the wheel. Cryptography in particular is one wheel you should not roll yourself.
that traditionally were written in a real systems language like C or C++
I mean…
You act like people weren’t using Java for serious shit… They still do for whatever reason.
Same, millennial here and I massively prefer card view over having to click again. Similarly I want a Mastodon interface in which links are shown as link preview cards.
But, perhaps the difference is generational. I haven’t spoken to very many people about this, but what I have noticed is a shift over time from menus to feeds on the internet. Forums are dying. Users don’t want to scroll search results, they want an AI to just give them the answer. And the difference seems to be generational. Perhaps informed by our early experiences with online platforms. It certainly cannot be an absolute distinction, but a correlation seems evident from the state of the world.
Extrapolates a distinction between number of questions and answer based on age from a tiny data set, acknowleeges large scale changes over time that applies to all ages, offhandedly mentions the actual reason (early experiences with the internet), then goes back to random speculation.
What a terribly incoherent article. Capitalizing ‘Mine’ made it a struggle. Why didn’t they capitalize ‘ours’ for consistency? If I was tha author I would assume it was because of generational self centeredness or something, because everything needs to be generational conflict!
Capitalizing ‘Mine’ made it a struggle.
OP here is also the author of the linked article, and OP has very specific positions about capitalised pronouns
Well that was an interesting rabbit hole, thanks!
It’s what is called guessing. The author isn’t saying “this is how it is, it’s fact”. They are postulating and guessing. But you read it and take it as if this was a scientific paper published in a journal with a dataset = 20 or something.
Chill out dude. Not everything is rage bait.
You are misreading a fun bit of snark as anger.
I really hate that that writer capitalizes every instance of ‘Me’, ‘My’, ‘Mine’, etc… it changes my internal inflection when reading, and really fucks up the flow of the text.
Ugh, yes, that’s really obnoxious.
OP has a very niche identity.
But not capitalize ‘ours’ for reasons!
The reason is that I’m not in any groups which use capitalised pronouns as a collective. I used to be in a pantheon which used We/Us, but I’m not currently in one.
I don’t even capitalize pronouns for gods, why would I do it for you? Wait, are you saying you used to be a god?
Ok, not to pile on, but what the heck do you mean by “pantheon” in this context?
And do you speak/use any other languages that have led you to using this unique form of capitalisation?
OP also probably uses Arch. Some people are just like that, you can’t help them anymore. They’re beyond help.
Here’s an explanation of My pronouns: https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/introduction-to-capitalised-pronouns-f5140e722b48
That never uses or explains the use of “My”.
It’s actually not even explaining anything I imagined. It’s explaining, that some people want others to capitalize the pronouns used to refer to them specifically. I was thinking of a grammatical choice to always or never capitalize pronouns uniformly. But changing grammar rules on the whims of the person being written about, seems exceptionally odd. The closest I ever heard of to that, is in the spelling someone’s name.
In reality it doesn’t explain anything other than to say, some people want it that way. It never goes into actually explaining the logic of that desire. It merely tries to shame people for not doing it if requested.
Honestly that really helps with context, although I think the comparison of capitalizing other pronoubs with a capital I is based on a misunderstanding of why I is capitalized.
I is capitalized due to a common way of writing the letter to avoid confusion with similar looking letters in manuscripts donto how the letters were shaped, similar to some spellings are a result of the printing press where the letters f and s were sometimes switched.
Still it is interesting in an e e cummings not always following the common capitalizarion practices kind of way.
honestly i’m not even sure how the author of this managed to boil down feed UI preferences into “questions” or “options” or whatever. all of the same content is there, it’s just a matter of if it’s expanded or collapsed by default- merely information density. what it really comes down to is older sites collapsed things by default, newer sites expand things by default, and most people like whatever they grew up with. i’m gen z and much prefer the older style just because i was on forums and old reddit right around when my peers opened their twitter and instagram accounts. there is definitely a discussion to be had there about which format is healthier and why companies prefer the latter format these days, but to skim right past that into the bit about third parties makes me think that was the real point the author wanted to make and contorted their UI argument to get there
