Comment by wilsonnb3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wilsonnb3 | Hacker News Reader

> It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.

This is only true because the UX of mastodon, Gemini, GrapheneOS, and other darlings of the non-commercial web crowd are so bad that the only reason to use them over commercial alternatives is ideological.

Which, for Gemini at least, is intentional.

So I guess I agree that the web is fracturing but the post makes it sound like some kind of battle between the commercial side and the 'tech savvy's side, as the post refers to it, when really it is just a minority of tech ideologues rejecting commercial tech, a tale at least as old as Stallman and not particularly interesting.

Like the famous scene from Mad Men:

Tech Savvy Web: "I feel bad for you, commercial web"

Commercial Web: "I don't think about you at all"

When Meta did not launch Threads in Europe, the Tech Media who had previously declared how Mastodon is a failure because its signup process is just too complicated for normie users (you have to choose a server!!) published helpful articles à la “Here’s how you set up a second US app store account, configure a VPN on your phone and fake your Insta-Account to US in 347 simple steps”

> This is only true because the UX of mastodon, Gemini, GrapheneOS, and other darlings of the non-commercial web crowd are so bad

I don't know... many "commercial websites" are really, really slow. Slack, for one, regularly takes seconds to show me a few text messages. A big bloated website I absolutely hate is HelloFresh: I see how they may think it looks good, but loading it feels like I'm compiling a kernel or something. Facebook has an infinite wall, and regularly when I scroll it just makes me jump somewhere else (and therefore I lose this one post that was looking interesting in the middle of those ads).

On the other hand, SourceHut may look "old", but it is so snappy, it's refreshing. And I find the UX really good. It just removes the glossy, useless UI stuff.

It's common to assume around here that most people care about snappy UIs and corporations are just dumb and give in to designers who need to justify their paycheck, but... what if that isn't true? What if the people who care about load times in apps like Slack are a tiny minority, and the majority actually likes the "glossy, useless UI stuff"?

It's easy for a native computer user who grew up with (or before) Windows 95 to dismiss the gloss as frivolous, but given that the glossy products constantly beat out the minimalist ones it's hard not to suspect that modern computer users have a different set of values.

We have that assumption because we’ve worked first hand with managers, developers and designers that don’t care about load times and “snappiness”.

We know from experience, a lot of work gets signed off as soon as they can put a tick in the box to say it’s done and not when it’s actually done well! ;)

Exactly this. Seeing from the inside how products are being built, I strongly doubt that it is ever proven that users want the bulky, shiny, slow stuff.

> but given that the glossy products constantly beat out the minimalist ones

Another theory would be that the glossy products have a much better marketing than the minimalist ones. Nowadays, people just don't see you if you don't have a heavy marketing. IMO it has nothing to do with the quality of the product.

> What if the people who care about load times in apps like Slack are a tiny minority

Haven't you ever heard of somebody (not tech-savvy) buying a new smartphone because their current one is "too slow"? I have. It just feel like those people accepted that "the phone is too old, so it is now slow" (just like they have been taught to accept that most software is buggy). Where I don't. The phone is slow because the programs it runs are (unnecessarily, IMO) bulky. And most software is full of bugs, which makes it pretty bad.

Gemini does not have UX, so it isn't "bad". That is better than having bad UX. Some client software might have bad UX, but that depends which client software you are using.

It doesn't have a UI but it definitely has a UX - TLS required, no embedded images or videos, very basic support for user input, etc.

Theoretically a client could choose to ignore some of that but it's not really a Gemini client anymore.

Straight from the FAQ, emphasis mine:

> Rather than trying to decide whether Gemini is about turning the clock forward or backwards, it's better to think of it as trying to deliver a particular online user experience that its fans think of as not being old fashioned, out of date, or obsolete, but not modern, cutting edge, or innovative either.

O, OK, I suppose I made a mistake, thank you for correcting me.

> TLS required

I don't like this I think it should be optional and a different URI scheme should be used for TLS vs non-TLS. The same port number could theoretically be used (due to the format of the TLS initial data, it cannot be confused with a valid Gemini request), but as far as I know the existing software (e.g. stunnel) does not do that.

> no embedded images or videos

I think it is good to not have embedded images and videos. You could have a user setting to display embedded images for local files only or to not display embedded images at all (I think this is similar to what the Gempub specification says).

> Theoretically a client could choose to ignore some of that but it's not really a Gemini client anymore.

I think it still can be Gemini client if it is still Gemini protocol and file format just as well.

I've come to understand that there's irony in that Mad Men scene, in that the second speaker actually felt quite threatened by the first.

UX of Gemini bad? I've seen browsers with far more complex settings in average.

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