What I didn’t expect was what My friend said after making a Lemmy account on her chosen website — “I don’t like it because it looks like Old Reddit. I have to click on each post to view it”.
Sometimes people tell you something and it just ends a friendship…
I’m continually surprised by how incurious people are in general. One of the first things I did when I explored Lemmy was click on the weird “+” button next to post titles, because I wanted to know what it did. And then I checked the settings to see what I could tweak.
People don’t seem to do shit like this, and it baffles me.
I think this is based on the way short form video has taken over as being what having-the-TV-on-in-the-background was for the baby boomers. And click-then-go-back is too complex an interaction for “noise” while having your brain off, while swiping from meaningless clip to meaningless clip in shorts or tiktok works.
We aren’t taught or encouraged to explore or experiment by our educational systems. We are taught how to do something, and then don’t question it. There are tons of people that cannot meaningfully play with Lego without assembly instructions. The idea of trying something out of the norm from what they already know never enters into their head.
Like, back in the day, I literally discovered I could drag and drop files directly into the “upload” area on some websites and it would automatically post the file to the site. I didn’t even know it was possible, I just out of the blue wondered if a browser can work like a drag and drop file manager and just went ahead and did it.
But, perhaps the difference is generational. I haven’t spoken to very many people about this, but what I have noticed is a shift over time from menus to feeds on the internet. Forums are dying. Users don’t want to scroll search results, they want an AI to just give them the answer. And the difference seems to be generational. Perhaps informed by our early experiences with online platforms. It certainly cannot be an absolute distinction, but a correlation seems evident from the state of the world.
Extrapolates a distinction between number of questions and answer based on age from a tiny data set, acknowleeges large scale changes over time that applies to all ages, offhandedly mentions the actual reason (early experiences with the internet), then goes back to random speculation.
What a terribly incoherent article. Capitalizing ‘Mine’ made it a struggle. Why didn’t they capitalize ‘ours’ for consistency? If I was tha author I would assume it was because of generational self centeredness or something, because everything needs to be generational conflict!
Capitalizing ‘Mine’ made it a struggle.
OP here is also the author of the linked article, and OP has very specific positions about capitalised pronouns
Well that was an interesting rabbit hole, thanks!
It’s what is called guessing. The author isn’t saying “this is how it is, it’s fact”. They are postulating and guessing. But you read it and take it as if this was a scientific paper published in a journal with a dataset = 20 or something.
Chill out dude. Not everything is rage bait.
You are misreading a fun bit of snark as anger.
I don’t agree at all with the author’s approach. I’m a millennial and I came to Reddit around 2019-2020, using it a lot since the pandemic, I prefer the new reddit a thousand times. It’s not a question of interpreting the site as questions, it seems like a nonsense to me. It’s a matter of making everything more visual, I don’t stop to read the title, the community or the author, at a glance I see the vast majority of the post, if I consider it I see the rest of the information, most of the time I ignore the information, because I don’t care.
I would like to remind you that Instagram (the example given in the article) is mostly used by millennials.
Because you’re primarily looking at image posts…
Older people, 30-40s grew up when bandwidth was a limiter, we’re used to having to decide if an image is worth the bandwidth.
We just grew up with vastly different internets.
You all could just load a bunch of stuff and ignore what you didn’t want. We’re stuck in the mindset that bandwidth matters, so a bunch of stupid memes we aren’t interested taking up bandwidth and screen real estate just feels off.
It feels less like it’s being “offered” and more like it’s being shoved down our throats.
Bandwidth is going to be the new “turn off the lights when you leave” for the Oregon Trail generation. In our heads we still need to be cognizant of how much we’re using, even tho subsequent generations never seem to think about it. They’ve just never had to.
Happens to every generation in some way or another.
I’m getting annoyed that every damn thing is turning into a web app now and JS/Chrome is even infecting desktop programs that traditionally were written in a real systems language like C or C++. The technology world feels janky and bloated now, built like a house of cards where one thing is relying on 20 other things, some of them in the cloud, to work right.
Programming these days seems to be more about glueing various services and APIs together to come up with a solution instead of actually coding it.
You’re half right. There’s a lot of house-of-cards junk (see left-pad) but a lot of it is also using existing frameworks as a foundation instead of reinventing the wheel. Cryptography in particular is one wheel you should not roll yourself.
that traditionally were written in a real systems language like C or C++
I mean…
You act like people weren’t using Java for serious shit… They still do for whatever reason.
I am 38 years old, I remember perfectly when downloading a single song could easily take a week, porn was exclusively photos because online videos were unimaginable and streaming hadn’t even been invented yet. I don’t understand why you’re still worried about that right now, photos, videos, games, movies, everything moves online in a matter of seconds, downloading at +10Mb/s on emule is today normal. I have gotten used to it normally.
Anytime someone is generalizing a group like a generation…
It’s usually understood that exceptions exist.
Ok, I might be the exception, but as I said before, Instagram has its main user base among people of my generation. I don’t think those users care about bandwidth at any level.
I don’t stop to read the title, the community or the author, at a glance I see the vast majority of the post, if I consider it I see the rest of the information, most of the time I ignore the information, because I don’t care.
Careful, this is how popular subs/communities end up full of non-relevant stuff, because people upvote without checking if it’s appropriate! Thankfully I’ve not seen much of that here yet, but I think that’s because I tend to subscribe to smaller communities.
I would never upvote without seeing what community it is in. It wouldn’t happen to me on Lemmy but the Reddit algorithm spent weeks showing you stuff from that sub and it was something I hated, maybe over time I ended up doing what you said, but for now I still have the habit of doing it.
I had the opposite experience, I was always told that if I upvoted certain things I’d see more of it, never seemed to make a difference!
Same, millennial here and I massively prefer card view over having to click again. Similarly I want a Mastodon interface in which links are shown as link preview cards.
Yes, a link without a preview is unpleasant
Millennial here. I’ve been consuming Reddit, and now Lemmy, almost exclusively on my phone and for me it’s card view all the way. Often the graphic content is more important than the title and opening posts only to find out it’s not funny or interesting feels like a waste of time. Only when I find a post interesting enough that I want to comment or see the comments, I open it. Instances or communities that I don’t like go on the blocklist.
If I really need to use Reddit, I open old Reddit in the browser with an extension that turns it into a mobile friendly site with card view. The new design has always felt sluggish and bloated to me, but not because of the card view.
When Lemmy came around, I didn’t stop using Reddit.
steps aside to dodge rotten tomato
I saw a new place to go visit and explore, and I haven’t been given a reason to leave. I actually post more here than Reddit because the conversations feel more genuine, but I still browse both. No reason not to.
I haven’t been using reddit, but no shade from me for using it. I know it’s difficult finding communities on Lemmy that are similar for some topics. Episode discussions have been hard to find for most shows. I still prefer Lemmy because like you said it feels more genuine.
Something I hadn’t considered to possibly be generational. When I was on Reddit, it was always old Reddit. I can’t imagine anyone using card view, I thought maybe that existed for iPads or devices with large screens.
I also don’t see appeal in instagram or TikTok like the author though as well.
I don’t necessarily get the consideration of “decision fatigue”. If you chose not to decide you still have made a choice. The choice then of allowing the app to just show you whatever can’t really be put on decision fatigue in my opinion.
Card view is great for porn. Otherwise, yeah, old Reddit is the better layout.
I haven’t spoken to very many people about this
Obviously not. I, a millennial prefer the “new” design. I can subscribe to communities and subreddits with already is a good way to filter content. I don’t have to look at everything that gets thrown at me. Also I do not have to be scared there is a hidden ad somewhere inbetween like when using Instagram or whatever.
I also really liked the forums from the bronze age, but those were text-based at the post level, while Lemmy also supports images and links (including thumbnails).
How can you prefer this:
over this:
I definitely think the newer design looks better, although it is less functional and has more unnecessary crap. I definitely prefer the compact view over the the card view. Back when I still used Reddit I used the old design with custom css though.
I’m mobile so I am much faster scrolling. I guess that’s an important point, most people probably use their smartphones browsing Instagram etc. Also I use Voyager for browsing Lemmy on PC, no reddit for me
New Reddit is only marginally better on mobile than on desktop. Old Reddit still blows it out of the water. 2 posts per page vs. 8 when I just checked. Not to mention new Reddit is just a lot slower in general and mixes links to other posts into the comments of the one you’re looking at.
It seems people have different preferences and there are some millenials that want to watch just funny cat images and don’t mind looking at the less funny cats from time to time. The article we are talking about (do we?) draws shitty conclusions based in shitty data (“people within my bubble”).
I don’t care about the article. I’m asking you because you’ve stated your opinion that new reddit and I literally cannot understand it even when I try looking from other perspectives. There is nothing I can see that is better about new reddit. I don’t mean that to be confrontational towards you or to say you are wrong in it. I just would like to understand because it seems more and more things are going towards similar designs and I hate it.
Without seeing actual statistics, both accounts are anecdotal. But it’s my experience that I have had a lot less interaction of people who prefer new Reddit and a lot more with people who prefer old Reddit. Many Lemmy instances host old Reddit inspired front ends. I’m not aware of a single front end for Lemmy that strives to emulate new Reddit
I think Voyager is one of the most popular Lemmy web frontends. I haven’t used reddit for a long time but it seems to be more similar to the new than old design… I honestly don’t talk about reddit designs with people in the real world
To be fair I don’t talk about Reddit/Lemmy front ends with anyone except in meta discussions as well.
I used Apollo/use Voyager as well, my experience in the early days after the API migration on the voyager community was that most people used the compact view and card view was more for iPad usage
I use Voyager, but I have it set to compact view.
In My opinion, the best design is usually one that gives users a choice in the design.
I switched Lemmy instances in part because lemmy.ml doesn’t have the old.lemmy (mlmym) interface available. For a while, mlmym had an official standalone site that could be used to access any Lemmy instance in the mlmym interface, but once they shut that down I was disappointed in going back to the standard Lemmy web UI that doesn’t stretch to use your entire screen width. I used some userscripts to make it better but finally ended up moving to lemmy.today because they run mlmym on old.lemmy.today.
It’s basically the old Reddit interface and that’s how I viewed Reddit for 12+ years, on desktop and on phone. Also, the mlmym/old Lemmy interface actually fits better on portrait phone screens than old Reddit as it hides the sidebar.
I hate Reddit’s awful card UI. I don’t want giant pictures everywhere. Let me read the headlines and then click to expand if I want. The overly media heavy Times Square looking overstimulation of modern web design is atrocious.
honestly i’m not even sure how the author of this managed to boil down feed UI preferences into “questions” or “options” or whatever. all of the same content is there, it’s just a matter of if it’s expanded or collapsed by default- merely information density. what it really comes down to is older sites collapsed things by default, newer sites expand things by default, and most people like whatever they grew up with. i’m gen z and much prefer the older style just because i was on forums and old reddit right around when my peers opened their twitter and instagram accounts. there is definitely a discussion to be had there about which format is healthier and why companies prefer the latter format these days, but to skim right past that into the bit about third parties makes me think that was the real point the author wanted to make and contorted their UI argument to get there
