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?
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?
The vast majority of users don’t like the old.reddit view, else reddit would have that as default.
It was the default for a very long time. Reddit changed that because it prevented them from monetizing the site that easily. And the admins seemed to dislike what RES could do with the old Reddit look.
Are you suggesting that businesses only change things based on what their users want? Because that’s obviously nonsense. Enshitification finds a way regardless of what the consumer wants.
Two things can be true at the same time.
Yes reddit doesn’t care about their users.
But also the old reddit is worse for the vast majority of people
I have friends who still only use old.reddit and refuse to switch to new UI.
This is me. Frankly, I’m surprised people are choosing to use the new UI, but I guess maybe they only discovered reddit when it had the new UI.
Would they be interested in Lemmy? Them using old.reddit shows that they would probably like it here
I already tried getting them on. Maybe https://old.lemmy.world/ can help.
How old are those friends of yours?
I mean… old (it’s in the name). Does it matter? What’s your point?
How old are you, out of interest? Your posts in your similar thread about default viewing experience makes it seem like you want an Instagram-style image browser rather than the link aggregator which Reddit and Lemmy actually are.
I’m 32 and work in tech, The reality is the vast majority of people won’t want to use old.reddit style UI
I’m comfortable powering through shitty UI/UX etc. I’ve even built them myself, but others won’t settle for shitty UI
You and your friends are old I assume, and got used to the old.reddit UI, and didn’t want to change.
Most people are used to modern UI, and won’t want to change to old UI, just like you don’t want to change either. We should better cater for average people.
You’re thinking like a designer for a slick, centralised, profit-and-growth-seeking company (no shade, I’m guessing that thinking literally makes you good at your job). The fediverse is entirely about choice; if different instances want to have a different default look and feel then that’s great and new users can pick one they like the look of, but insisting that everyone should have the one that you think is best isn’t a meaningful or helpful change.
You seem to be conflating “the vast majority” and “people my age”. They are not the same.
You’re also making a lot of global UX preference claims in this thread without sources or data to back them up.
Look I don’t have any data to back it up, only my experience and many others (eg. https://lemmy.ca/comment/14524858)
I’m also not going to go try and dig up all the evidence to try and prove this to you. I am a IT professional and have been part of developing many web apps that see tens of thousands of users per day. We would do AB testing to see what works for users and what gets a better click through rate etc.
As soon as a user needs to think, they drop off like crazy, that’s just a fact you can look up good UX design. It’s also a fact that joining lemmy requires a lot of thinking and tweaking etc. to get to a good place.
I’ve been using lemmy for months now, and I’m still not happy with the UI even after tweaking and trying many different things.
That was my point. A number of times in this thread, you’ve stated your opinion as “a fact” or expressed it as obviously correct. It’s possible to get your point across without the condescension and acknowledging it’s your opinion.
I agree that the nature of federation on Lemmy and other federated social networks is complicated. Resolving that is no easy task. However, your stance in this post seems to be the burden of choosing your instance should be removed or streamlined by randomization. I personally disagree - while there is a hurdle to having to choose an instance and that is a barrier to entry, it’s also valuable in them learning that this isn’t just another platform under a single umbrella.
My opinion as a IT professional who’s been involved with UX & UI for 12 years. Just google ‘Good UX principles’ and you’ll see Lemmy breaks so many of them.
I’m sorry but you’re wrong, Lemmy breaks basic UX principles the UX is bad on multiple levels, that’s just the reality, all I’m saying is we should do something about it.
I don’t have the answer to a perfect solution, but something needs to be done to smooth out the process of joining and getting used to the platform.