techokami

Techokami

@techokami

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techokami
@techokami
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lifning
@lifning

i would imagine that most people who go into UI design do so because they're empathetic enough to want to help people use computers more easily. joining certain segments of industry and discovering how much of a sisyphean warzone it is to fight poor management decisions and let that empathy become motivation to soften the blow as much as possible rather than build a better world is surely harrowing, same as growing up wanting to be a game developer because you wanted to make the world more fun, and then getting a soul-searing job making cynical skinner boxes. one would hope that in a better world everyone motivated to make technology accessible to the masses would be empowered to use their skills to do so, rather than being stuck fighting a losing battle against the corruption of capitalism and catching flak from all the users they tried their best to protect.

but one need only look as far as the bug trackers of the GNOME unix/linux desktop environment to find unsympathetic UI designers who are nakedly hostile to any usability/accessibility concern raised by a user that comes into conflict with their own aesthetic/religious goals. each new major version of GTK minces important features in the name of "simplicity[for whom?]", or worse, changes an API in a subtler way so that instead of a user with a specific accessibility need fixing it once on their system, they get told by the GTK developers to instead beg the developer of every program they use to support their use case, which certainly is a thing to do to disabled users with limited energy. some GNOME developers went as far as to make an entire website (stopthemingmy.app) to complain about users adjusting how the programs on their own computer look, something that's often necessary to make a given application usable depending on the combination of the user's needs and the developer's omissions. is there profit motive here? it can't all be Canonical and RedHat sabotaging the usability of the entire Linux ecosystem in order to sell more support contracts to confused/frustrated sysadmins, right?

techokami
@techokami

No, it's because the hardcore user base actually cheers on this insanity without a shred of irony. And this fuels the core developers to continue the enshittification of GNOME/GTK.

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in reply to @lifning's post:

xkeeper
@xkeeper

almost every person on the planet: "nobody wants typing in a file manager's main window to start a recursive full-text search of all files in this and subdirectories"

gnome developer: and that's where you're wrong!

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matthias
@matthias

There’s an engineer’s fantasy that all applications and websites ship as unstyled semantic components that are then styled by the user’s system. These same people will join discussions on Hacker News about styling websites and say “just don’t include any CSS—native styling is always the best.”

UI design is not just picking a couple of theme colors and throwing some icons onto an application grid. Every component is picked to integrate with the rest of the application and the application’s purpose. The UI designers put work into making the app look a certain way. And so it’s disrespectful to insist that that work should be immediately thrown away as soon as the application is installed because the end user has installed some sort of “force dark mode” hack that changes the colors of all applications or replaces all icons with a different icon set.

And it’s your computer, you can do what you want, but UI developers aren’t being paid off to ask that you look at the application that they designed.

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noahtheduke
@noahtheduke

disrespectful

What's disrespectful is going into someone's house and yelling at them that they're using the chairs you built wrong.

If you want to create static art that no one touches, then make art. Don't make tools and then cry because someone "misused" them.

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lifning
@lifning

i was going to waste energy on asking whether you have ignorance or disdain of people who need to reduce the brightness coming out of their monitor so they don't get literally physically dizzy and nauseous due to disabilities but i think instead of having that conversation I'll just 🖕

how dare you compare disabled people trying to use their computer with hackernews reactionaries. get out of here

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in reply to @techokami's post:

wildweasel
@wildweasel

Coming from the kind of circles where stuff gets made and given away for free (beer), it's not about profit or even market/mind share. It's about staking territory. "This is my software, and I'm the one that makes decisions about where the mainline branch goes. I want users of my software to use it exactly the way I use it, and anybody else is using it Wrong."

The irony is that these kinds of people likely got into open source development because they were tired of the decisions getting made for them by people several pay grades above them - and rather than foster a software environment free of castes. they instead foster an environment where it's them at the top and not anybody else. Even if it's something so small as a default config value that they decided.

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