Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
“Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter?” Hell nah! Polar opposite here.
I absolutely hate it when sites randomly redesign to look “modern” and “hip” or whatever you want to call it. Forcefully adding flashy, colorful stuff that you can’t turn off again or opt out of is a surefire way for me to dislike the site in question immediatly. Emojis, animated smileys, glitter effects, neon-colored letters, autoplay-animations, and worst of all: sound effects! Nope. Nu-uh. Get that sh*t away from me. I like my black-squared, simple layout and silent browsing experience, thank you very much.
Wait. All it takes is “it’s round and not blue or grey”?
The reason I used Reddit is Fun WAS because of its stripped down, bare bones style. I only wanted to read thoughts and opinions, and choose to view images/video/ads when I wanted to. This is absolutely a feature of Jerboa (and Lemmy) for me
I don’t know the background of OP so this is just an opinion: I feel that modern UX have become so ubiquitous and streamlined for content consumption that users who aren’t used to old-styled UIs see the lack of “sleek” design as lesser. It works doubly so that users aren’t willing to venture outside of their ecosystems and will put up with anything regardless if it’s detrimental to their experience.
Compare users of new reddit and the official app vs. users of old reddit and 3PA. I used 3PA because there wasn’t an official app and RiF matched what I was used to. It’s a similar phenomena to Apple users vs Windows/Android. People are just used to a streamlined sleek experience (which to be fair has it’s merits) but to say it’s superior or that the alternative is lesser is a large misstep in thinking.
It takes effort to go out of your comfort zone but it’s saddening to see users mindlessly, for lack of a better terms, consume
Strange, I think Lemmy highly resembles Reddit. Maybe this user is talking about an app? Ironically, the apps are what this is about.
This is an actual use case for ‘the customer is always right’. No matter how much you prefer the layout, there will be others that prefer something else. And if we want to attract more users, that’s something that we’ll need to consider.
By far the most off-putting thing about lemmy is how people think themselves too good to consider the preferences and experiences of the average user coming from reddit.
Dark grays, blues? Squared? Good. I love simplicity! Not to mention, Reddit started out like that too, and among the older wave of users old.reddit was still a favorite for that reason.
All these years, somehow, I’ve never seen new Reddit. No idea what it looks like or what it does.
Sometimes less is more when it comes to user interface.
I think Lemmy could use some more ads. I feel like I don’t have enough material things, and I don’t know what to buy. /s
I also would like to have content that makes people angry shoved in my face to keep me engaged.
Well good, maybe they’ll stay on Reddit.
I’m ok with the Lemmy plain designs.
I’m just glad it defaults to dark mode. Any site that defaults to light mode can go straight to hell.
I think the more they removed about Reddit alternatives, the more people will be reminded that there are alternatives to Reddit.
I’m here to read think and talk. I like it simple.
Yeah, for real. “But there’s no fun awards and bubbly icons and bright colors.”
Well then, go back to kindergarten.
Same, was using old.Reddit before and plan on figuring out how to use the tools I saw to redo lemmy to page layout on no stupid questions.
Someone didn’t grow up during the days of forums.
But as a designer, I understand where they’re coming from. Especially if they were using the new reddit design on the web and Apollo on mobile. At the very least though, I think Lemmy’s default UI looks much better than old.reddit (and I say that as someone who still uses old.reddit).
MOST current internet users didn’t grow up in the days of forums.
Yea that’s true. Definitely not fair to single them out.
I do use Lemmy because the whole thing with Reddit just sucked, but holy hell yeah, new Reddit looked so much better. It’s not the world, I can get used to it and it’s fine, but the preference is clear.
Reddit is ridiculously slow in the last several years. When I click CMD+F to start search I need to wait several seconds because of all the JavaScript running.
I got a bit confused: is that about the reddit app or themes of particular subreddits or something? When I first saw your post I thought you meant Lemmy was the one with overdesigned clutter. I was using old.reddit.com for web browsing and Redreader as a mobile client, and had subreddit CSS turned off so it always used the plain default theme.
I noticed after a few minutes with a mobile browser on my ultra cheap (limited bandwidth) data plan, that Lemmy uses at least 10x more data transfer than Reddit does. I figure that is a combo of being more pic heavy and having a bunch of javascript bloat. I hope to switch to some kind of plain text client soon. Lemmy is great in many ways but uses way too much dysfunctional web 2.0 tech for my tastes.
If we could get a vim version of lemmy in some way that would be awesome!
Yeah I’ve been thinking about that, both a gnus.el interface, and a web reader that is text based like lite.cnn.com .
