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Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Wait wait wait... This implies people like new reddit... That shit makes my eyes bleed wtf

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Well I do like new Reddit. It has a dark mode and works well with different screen/window sizes. Sadly it's slow and equires JS to load the content (makes it slow).

Imo Lemmy web is most of the good parts of old Reddit and some of good parts of new Reddit. Though it's not the best UI. My favorite UI for Reddit is Redlib [1]. It's fast, works well on desktop and mobile, and looks great imo.

[1] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I read a really good article recently about how people from different generations process information differently and so their UI preferences are wildly different.

The gist of it was

A Boomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books. There are too many ads for books, so they tune them all out. They choose one by an author they know, that their friends said was good.
A Gen Xer / Millennial walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They check the various authors they like, check that the cover art is appealing and read the backs of the different books, figuring out which one they want to read, then they buy that one.
A Zoomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books, and feel bombarded by the ads for books. They check the authors the influencers they subscribe to on Youtube and Tik Tok say are good. They grab one of those based on the color of the cover, ignore the back and the cover art, flip it open to a random page, read that page and if what they read grabs their their attention they buy that book, but if it doesn't, they move on.

As a result, each of these people will prefer to interact with vastly different UX.

Of course these aren't hard and fast rules, set in stone and there are tons of exceptions, but it's a definite trend.

The Lemmy demographic skews hard to the older Millennial / Gen X demographic and is mostly people who were on reddit 15+ years ago. It's UI appeals to those people.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

I like how the GenX and millennial is the only example that isn't overwhelmed at first. I think it's definitely worth considering that those particular generations have a significantly greater ability and openness to learning new paradigms and adapting to new UXs, because that was something that was unavoidable for all of our formative years.

Due to the rapid pace of technological advancement from 1980-2010, it was simply necessary to adapt to brand new systems and interfaces every few years. And the rewards for doing so were enormous, so we naturally learned that if you took the time to figure out these new technologies and interfaces, you would be rewarded with much greater capabilities. For previous and subsequent generations, that process probably didn't shape their way of interacting with technology as much, so they're reluctant to put in a significant amount of effort in learning to use new technology.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I like new reddit. It works well, I just wish I could keep it the same as it is. I HATE Lemmy desktop UI and nearly went back to Reddit because of it. Voyager for mobile and photon for desktop. Honestly photon for both might be better but I'm apparently the 1% of people on Lemmy that actually prefer an app over a website 🤷‍♀️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

A lot of users here prefer a desktop environment that's only command line.

Apparently wanting even a GUI puts you in a minority on Lemmy.