Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
-
Well, right is a term relative to centre which is relative to left.
No it's not. It can be relative to anywhere. If drag's on the left side of a room, then the center of the room is to the right.
-
No it's not. It can be relative to anywhere. If drag's on the left side of a room, then the center of the room is to the right.
-7 and -9 are both numbers… but none of them are at zero or above. They are both negative, just by varying degrees.
Are you referring to yourself as “drag” or is that a typo?
-
-7 and -9 are both numbers… but none of them are at zero or above. They are both negative, just by varying degrees.
Are you referring to yourself as “drag” or is that a typo?
Directions do not have an absolute reference point. There is no center of the universe. Numbers do. That's why numbers aren't like directions. Don't use numbers as an example when numbers have something directions don't.
-
Directions do not have an absolute reference point. There is no center of the universe. Numbers do. That's why numbers aren't like directions. Don't use numbers as an example when numbers have something directions don't.
I was trying to be analogous to help you understand… either you don’t want to understand or you’re not willing to understand or… there’s something else going on here.
-
I was trying to be analogous to help you understand… either you don’t want to understand or you’re not willing to understand or… there’s something else going on here.
You chose a bad analogy because you don't understand. That's what's going on here. You think the overton window isn't culturally relative
-
You chose a bad analogy because you don't understand. That's what's going on here. You think the overton window isn't culturally relative
So you can understand up or down but struggle with left and right?
-
If I understand the way the Fediverse works correctly, global content viewed by members of an instance gets cached on that instance. So even though this thread is "on" lemmy.world, because I'm participating here there's also a copy on sh.itjust.works and that copy gets passed to me.
Among the instances sh.itjust.works is defederated from, there's one called "rape.pet". I'm okay with The_Dude saying "No, you can't get there from here" to shit like that.
ok, yeah, kinda hard to argue with that. Not sure what a good middle ground would be.
-
ok, yeah, kinda hard to argue with that. Not sure what a good middle ground would be.
The very best we can do is have vigilant grown adults in charge. We can likely agree that child bestiality or other word combinations that feel illegal to even type should be isolated, but on the spectrum of "Hitler was right" "Mao was right" "Che was right" "Washington was right" do you say "Nope we don't accept that kind of shit around here?" There are people who will draw the line in the same place from either side of it. Like I say, that line is somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there and that's not a unique problem to the Fediverse; it's a problem with humans, and I don't think you can solve it, only sidestep it through totalitarianism.
-
While I understand and largely agree with your point, I think it's worthwhile to question whether it's reasonable that this is the way people expect the Internet to work.
Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack, so that unless you're somewhat tech-savvy, you can't tell the concept of app apart from the concept of server. Not unlike how Android and iOS have been obscuring many basics of the system to the point that some people don't even know what a filesystem is.
Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved, rather than just "the way things work" and that we need to cather to it. Mostly because FOSS services will always, invariably, struggle to adapt to a conception of the internet optimized for consumption and nothing else.
I agree that people nowadays might struggle to understand what, for instance, a third-party app is, but I also think it's too an unreasonably low bar to just let it be, and have FOSS forever playing acrobatics to somehow adapt to it.
Whether Lemmy should be the one leading this struggle is a whole another argument lol. Somehow forcing people to understand this with Lemmy in particular, without changing anything of the larger culture, will just cause people to not use Lemmy outright.
But this cannot be the way it works. Everyone using the internet needs some bare minimum tech literacy.
Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack,
I fully agree here. Whatever software they have developed, is not rocket science, and mostly based off of existing standards.
Gmail, Outlook, etc... just a bunch of *DAV servers on top of an emailing service, paired with some SSO. Same goes for Reddit/X/FB. A simple DB just storing some info and doing some fancy sorting based on that info.
Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved
Yes!
But, on the other hand it's a two-fold sword.
Corps are making money off of peoples lack of knowledge, and this has been the way of how "offering a service" is being done probably since human history... and yes, it pisses me off as well, especially when it comes to human health and nutrition, etc...
But....
Say, you hire contract workers, to build a house, bc. you don't know how to do it yourself. Then you need to hire someone else to approve the quality of the work that's been done, since again... you lack the knowledge. After you've moved in, something breaks, again... you hire someone to fix it.
Now, at what point do you start learning about all the components involved in a built house? electricity, plumbering, walls, etc... and most importantly, do you even care in learning so or not?
And some people, just don't care. They simply don't. Even if the concept of a topic is very easy to grasp, they simply lack the interest in knowing about how it works.
-
In the EU there is some amount of data protection and privacy rights, so that matters to quite a few people. Commercial outfits handle those distinctions behind the scenes (eg, US users vs EU users get different amounts of privacy). On the fediverse, the user has to figure this out themselves.
Beyond that, I agree with everything you say. Some of the instances don't even have the name "Lemmy" in the domain or brand which makes it confusing. Or maybe they're not Lemmy but just ActivityPub compatible. I have no idea. You can also get unlucky picking a "bad" server. I first joined Kbin.social because it had the best UI at the time but man, it rarely worked and totally put me off.
Yes! I as well started my Lemmy journey on kbin first.
Back when the API changes were introduced in Reddit, everyone on Reddit kept about lemmy.
Then, in the comments you read stuff like "Lemmy are a bunch of tankies, kbin is better, yada yada"...
Great, now you're already torn between two sides, without even knowing about the basic concepts of how they both work.
You then go to one Lemmy server, and see how bad the UI is, then you check out kbin, and it feels nice.
Well, and the rest is history...
-
Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack,
I fully agree here. Whatever software they have developed, is not rocket science, and mostly based off of existing standards.
Gmail, Outlook, etc... just a bunch of *DAV servers on top of an emailing service, paired with some SSO. Same goes for Reddit/X/FB. A simple DB just storing some info and doing some fancy sorting based on that info.
Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved
Yes!
But, on the other hand it's a two-fold sword.
Corps are making money off of peoples lack of knowledge, and this has been the way of how "offering a service" is being done probably since human history... and yes, it pisses me off as well, especially when it comes to human health and nutrition, etc...
But....
Say, you hire contract workers, to build a house, bc. you don't know how to do it yourself. Then you need to hire someone else to approve the quality of the work that's been done, since again... you lack the knowledge. After you've moved in, something breaks, again... you hire someone to fix it.
Now, at what point do you start learning about all the components involved in a built house? electricity, plumbering, walls, etc... and most importantly, do you even care in learning so or not?
And some people, just don't care. They simply don't. Even if the concept of a topic is very easy to grasp, they simply lack the interest in knowing about how it works.
Say you hire a company to build a house. You don't have the skills or the know-to, but at some point, you'll have to deal with some inevitable aspects of building a house, if only to discuss them with the workers. Say they "force" you to deal with plumbing, for example by including it in the budget. Imagine if you not only don't know how plumbing works, but also what plumbing is. Maybe you've never had to think about it before. What would you do? Would you go to another company that doesn't force you to deal with it, perhaps by not even providing it in the first place?
Say for the sake of argument that this becomes a generalized problem, and companies use it as an excuse to no longer provide plumbing in new houses, as a cost-saving measure. Most people don't seem to care. Over 10 years pass by, and people have gotten used to expect not having running water at home. "It sucks, but that's the way it is I guess".
Now, a community-driven initiative arises to build cheaper houses, complete with running water. Can you imagine most people refusing participating, because building a house with running water implies having to know that plumbing supplies water? That the mere thought of it is already too complicated, and that maybe having fresh water at home is only for people whose special interest is plumbing?
You need some elementary knowledge on things, if only to exist in the world. The Fediverse, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is not that complicated once you grasp the most basic concepts of the internet.
While I won't deny outright that open-source devs most of the time don't think about making their software accessible to the wider public, and that some aspects of decentralized social media still have to be ironed out (duplicated communities on Lemmy are a pet-peeve of mine); these issues are often heavily blown out of proportion. Besides people honestly not understanding some concepts, I think there is also some deliberate anti-intellectualism going on with this topic in particular. People who spend their afternoons troubleshooting Windows just so that their computer games run at 60 FPS suddenly don't know what a website is when Mastodon is mentioned.
I'm pretty certain that this "Fediverse is too complicated" mantra would not have worked at all before 2010.
-
Yes! I as well started my Lemmy journey on kbin first.
Back when the API changes were introduced in Reddit, everyone on Reddit kept about lemmy.
Then, in the comments you read stuff like "Lemmy are a bunch of tankies, kbin is better, yada yada"...
Great, now you're already torn between two sides, without even knowing about the basic concepts of how they both work.
You then go to one Lemmy server, and see how bad the UI is, then you check out kbin, and it feels nice.
Well, and the rest is history...
The whole process was a massive time and energy drain in the end with no benefit. I don't think anyone with a life would pursue something like this any further. I trialled-and-errored my way to Lemmy.world while I was out of work. Otherwise I'd still be on Reddit.
-
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?
It's depressing how many top level comments or replies are about how people like that there is a technical barrier gatekeeping lemmy. Are yall actually leftists or do you just pretend to be while worshipping your own version of social hierarchy in which us nerds are on top?
-
"...especially when they have average intelligence."
People with average experience struggle with the new paradigm. Nothing to do with intelligence and that kind of elitism is the reason I first bailed on lemmy.ml. I would have thought that someone with average intelligence would recognise how many of the worlds problems today stem from people punching down.
The idea that intelligence has no impact on computer skills and the ability to quickly learn computer skills is magical thinking. Intelligence differences are real and the solution is to make easy explanation to help people learn. I am not among the most intelligent people on Lemmy, the intelligence of the average Lemmy person probably at least an IQ above 115. It's not about elitism, it's about accessibility. I have terrible coordination. If someone tries to teach me advanced tennis, it would be bad, but if someone recognizes my coordination limits and is like, the goal is to just hit the ball once, then perhaps I have fun with tennis.
-
The idea that intelligence has no impact on computer skills and the ability to quickly learn computer skills is magical thinking. Intelligence differences are real and the solution is to make easy explanation to help people learn. I am not among the most intelligent people on Lemmy, the intelligence of the average Lemmy person probably at least an IQ above 115. It's not about elitism, it's about accessibility. I have terrible coordination. If someone tries to teach me advanced tennis, it would be bad, but if someone recognizes my coordination limits and is like, the goal is to just hit the ball once, then perhaps I have fun with tennis.
If I understand you right, you're saying that you support making software like Lemmy accessible for users of all types. I agree completely.
A little unrelated, but "intelligence" is not a singular thing and nobody is "intelligent" or "not intelligent". Also, because we each have our own limitations, we're not really qualified to evaluate the abilities of another person since we tend to reference ourselves in doing so. IQ is now increasingly seen as not fit for purpose by academics and professionals of education. And all this without mentioning IQ's history is in the support of eugenics. So if the experts are abandoning the idea of IQ, we can do the same and stop beating each other over the heads with it. Then we can get on with focussing on accessibility, which as you say is where our priorities should be.
-
So you, a normal person, join and instantly when a meme or comment allude to being altruistic, you leave?
Lol, the lack of self-awareness in your comment is astounding. You immediately jumped to interpreting them in the least charitable way possible, instead of just asking them to clarify like a normal person. You are exactly the type of leftist that pushes a lot of people away from using Lemmy.
Who needs conservative saboteurs when you have leftists to do their work for them?
Nah, I was talking about their ficticious person in their example scenario.
Since they are obviously here I thought that was obvious.
But I can see you are very self aware yourself and not at all bothered by why altruism scares you
-
I get you.
But honestly come I'm kind of liking the vibe here and it's not just a meme feed. More often than not you can have a real conversation with somebody you disagree with, you concied, they concied, learn a little bit about each other, follow a couple people maybe block a few assholes.
The first few redis exoduses filled the place with the people with the lowest tolerance for bullshit. Every time Reddit has a new Exodus, We get topped off with the next level of people that just want to watch everyone be pissed off.
I agree. I think it's some kind of effect that also has me not wanting to live in a big city. When you see new people every day then never again, it's like you eventually lose some humanity
-
Your #4 seems inaccurate, unless you were just walking us through your changing perspective as you joined.
This place is very left leaning and I’m sure it’s loaded with people who happily call themselves socialists while shouting down the MLs/tankies.
The main difference afaik is that they support authoritarians.
Lemmy has little reactionary people, but your definitions on who is authoritarian or who or what is "good" or "evil" have been manufactured by the mainstream media.
If you ever wonder on how to prevent foreign or capitalist interference into elections and mainstream social media, you will find yourself looking to China and Russia for inspiration.
Instead Lemmy has cut off any dissent from the actual socialists, those who oppose the systems that created the conditions for the rise of neofascism. People can't even imagine or tolerate other ways of managing power. Therefor Lemmy is a failure.
-
When the Orcs are raping elderly women and their sons. Then murdering them. They deserve the name. Just so you’re aware. There’s a reason they are called this. They earned it.
You can use extreme examples about any group, like black americans, or chinese, japanese or vietnamese enemies and then use derogatory names for the whole group.
Doing that is called racism. Example: You're a racist, like a nazi. Since we're on lemmy, all lemmy users are nazis. See how stupid that is to say?
Once a war starts, law and order goes out the window and war crimes are inevitable, as well as awful death and destruction and untold suffering.
And Russia is not solely responsible for starting this war. Should others who helped to start it not be held accountable?
Also, the civilian death toll in the Ukraine war is still lower than the death toll in gaza or the (second) iraq invasion. It's also hypocritical to dehumanize Russians but not USArians.
-
You can use extreme examples about any group, like black americans, or chinese, japanese or vietnamese enemies and then use derogatory names for the whole group.
Doing that is called racism. Example: You're a racist, like a nazi. Since we're on lemmy, all lemmy users are nazis. See how stupid that is to say?
Once a war starts, law and order goes out the window and war crimes are inevitable, as well as awful death and destruction and untold suffering.
And Russia is not solely responsible for starting this war. Should others who helped to start it not be held accountable?
Also, the civilian death toll in the Ukraine war is still lower than the death toll in gaza or the (second) iraq invasion. It's also hypocritical to dehumanize Russians but not USArians.
Never heard of soldiers in the USA rape and murder elderly women in conflict zones. Orks are named so for a reason. They are monsters.
