I've never really paid attention to usernames. Like I'll notice someone's name, out of familiarity.

But if I noticed you, it's because I liked what you've written in the past.

If I hated someone's writing... I wouldn't think about them at all.

The reality is, the masses, the real world, the average person. Is an asshole.

It doesn't reflect in the real world, because people learn to hide their assholeness at a very early age (Or they learn how to get punched in the face).

On an anonymous forum. You don't have to hide your assholeness.

Frankly it's amazing the site never devolved into 4chan. I attribute that to all the people doing free labor --> mods.

Sometimes a topic gets too popular, it drowns out all the other topics. At that point, aren't they just a glorified version of r/llm?

I'll give you one personal example:

The year Caitlin Clark was drafted to the wnba.

r/wnba went from a subreddit of 9000, to eventually 200k subs.

We were bombarded with CC posts every hour.

- Some of it was trolls staging a race war (this was during US elections).

- Some of it was genuine CC fans, who wanted to talk about CC.

- Some of it was bball nerds, who you know... wanted to talk about a bball player in a bball forum (regardless of who that bball player happens to be).

So what happened was, at any given day, 80% of the front page was CC content.

At that point, we might as well have been r/caitlinclark.

So the mods did something drastic and controversial. They banned all "low effort" CC content.

WTF does "low effort" mean? It pretty much meant 99% of CC posts got removed.

The forum went back to something that resembled a bball forum. That talked about other players. And other teams. Not just Caitlin Clark.

Bears are the same thing as bulls. Just the opposite.

You can look like a degenerate wallstreetbets gambler, being a bull, buying puts.

You can equally look like a degenerate wallstreetbets gambler, being a gay bear, shorting the stock.

The "beauty" of our modern stock market, is it provides both sides the avenue to lose stupid amounts of money.

With something like subreddits, people congregate because of a common interest. There's a clear topic on what people should be chatting about.

I don't know how far you'll get slotting a bunch of strangers with no clear direction on the topic.

How does the island hoping work? I don't see a "Change island" button. I'm assuming it's because there's only 1 island right now?

I'd imagine he thought the blog was mostly going to be about UI. "Haha, a blog talking about UI, with bad UI. Isn't that funny!"

Like there's no way the flashlight UI was done for usability purposes. It has to be a joke.

Edit: I'm not implying it's a good thing.

It's a joke that did not drop. Given the audience is trying to read text. And he's making it annoying to read text.

It's like a stand-up comedian telling a joke, in a wild accent; where the audience cannot discern what he's saying.

I just looked it up. 2023 was when it started. I'm surprised Android even allows something like this.

You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.

Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).

The whole desktop market is cratering.

I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile.

Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs.

So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.

- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.

- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.

- They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them.

- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.

- The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup.

How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas.

Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.

Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them.

The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.

Half the readers here work for the FANGS.

"Don't talk shit about the hand that feeds you" and all that.

Which is, in order for some rando to fix the bug; a company would need to give access to their codebase to some rando.

And they don't wanna do that.

See this is the thing that software devs don't "get" about UI design.

It's the exact thing the original author is trying to communicate.

You CAN have a powerful tool. And still have it be user friendly for normies!

You hide away it's complexities. So it's not INDTIMIDATING for new users.

You know what. I'm going to reinstall gimp. Just to prove my point.

Let's compare photoshop with gimp.

Before I begin, let me preface. Modern photoshop is an enshitified piece of garbage. I would never use it.

But this is nothing to do with enshitification. That's a whole different thing.

Ok let's start:

- I grab a random image from imgur. Copy paste. Ctrl-V. Both apps passed the test. I was a little worried gimp couldn't even do this.

- On load this is what photoshop looks like: https://imgur.com/a/3uYsm2h

- On load this is what gimp looks like: https://imgur.com/a/DnPcRTc

First impressions:

- GIMP is ugly as fuck. It looks outdated. There's information overload on the left side. Too much shit happening. Too much text squashed together. INTIMIDATING.

- In contrast, photoshop has a more minimalist look. There is a "Layers" window on the right. New users don't need to touch it.

- There is a "Size & Position" window. This is key. Notice how there's only 3 things inside that window. Notice how it's not squashed with all the other shit on the left. Think about that. Why did the designer do this? Because those 3 things are what 90% of normies are looking to do.

- This is exactly what the original author was talking about, with the TV remote. The most common operations should be sectioned off at the top of the remote. Similarly, the most common operations in photo editing should be sectioned off, in clear view.

Ok, Step 2. Let's try and crop this image. A common operation:

- Photoshop. Click the crop button. Shows you a bit more complexity in it's settings. You don't have to touch it. It gives you a helpful grid UI: https://imgur.com/a/tLjL6en

- And then it has a blue "Done" button at the bottom. Finished easy.

- GIMP. We start with a brush by default??? Whoops I accidentally drew on the picture. I didn't want to do that. Thank god I know ctrl-Z.

- So it's that cross thing right? That's the move button. Nope that's not what I want to do :(

- It must be the one next to it. The rectangle. Ok, some random corner thingies appear in the corners. I click on one of the corners. The image gets split into two. But now what? WTF do I do now: https://imgur.com/a/f7TTHJs

I can go on and on and on and on, criticizing gimp's terrible UI design. I hope, the little I have demonstrated, is a tease into what UI design is really about.

The people who specialized in non-software domain, and wrote their own projects, are amazingly talented.

They are not specializing in 1 field. They are so smart, they've managed to specialize in 2 fields.

I bet you they also suck at UI design. And wrote projects like Handbrake.

It's totally understandable.

I don't expect them to have the time to specialize in THREE fields. There is an opportunity cost to everything.

Photoshop is good UI design. A normie can use photoshop the same way they use MS paint.

Albeit it just loads slower.

A normie doesn't need all the bells and whistles. They can just use photoshop like a glorified MS paint.

You can't do that with GIMP. It's actually really fucking annoying, if you try to use GIMP to do a MS paint job.

Excel is a simple intuitive UI.

I use 10% of Excel. I don't even know the 90% of what it's capable of.

It hides away it's complexity.

For people that need the complex stuff, they can access it via menus/formulas.

For the rest of us, we don't even know it's there.

Whereas, Handbrake shoves all the complexity in your face. It's overwhelming for first time users.

Which is a rare thing in this space. Linux is rough around the edges, to say the least. You don't need me telling you. We are in a thread about how open sources software suck at UI design. We could use more people like you in this space.

The men aren't fussed with the "hacker" label. It sounds cool. It's like when people mistakenly think all Asians know Kung Fu or something. The Asian guy isn't complaining lol.

There's definitely stigma/sexism that deter women away from this field. But I think opportunity cost is a factor, gravely overlooked.

Society demands a lot from women, when it comes to appearance. The bar is set very high.

So high, you don't have the time to be a good programmer AND pretty. Unless you won the genetic lottery.

I follow women's basketball avidly. Some of the women are not pretty. They are just very good at basketball. It's refreshing to see women be valued, not just because of their beauty.