For a long while, platforms have been making tons of usually pointless, often harmful changes to their UI. Reddit & Discord provide tons of examples.

  • Reddit’s video player changes have been an issue for as old as time.
  • Discord has forced their new mobile UI, which I absolutely despise.
  • Reddit’s new logo looks uncanny. (I wouldn’t say the 3D character in general looks awful, and a couple of the expressions are honestly quite cute, but what they went with just doesn’t look good).
  • A while back, Discord made messages with multiple images display them in this stupid grid layout that resizes & crops them to death.

And that’s not mentioning all of the other changes that don’t seem to actually accomplish any purpose.

So, why do you think they do this? Is there some good reason to it that I’m missing? Is it strategic business stuff? My personal theory is that they need to have the UI designers doing something and so roll out pointless changes to justify paying them.

  • umbraroze@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    I literally just looked at Reddit for the first time in ages.

    What the fuck.

    Here’s the thing: Reddit’s UI design has always been shitty. Old Reddit was fucking garbage, so admins cheerfully asked RES folks to fix their shit. (Instead of, you know, hiring them.) New Reddit? Always been shit, and nobody’s going to fix it.

    This Newer New Reddit? I… I don’t think they even know at this point. What. What’s going on.

    If they ask critique from the community, some AI bot will AI-pat the admin’s arse and AI-splain the remaining AI-users that things will be just fine. (Now, “things actually getting better” has literally never happened as far as Reddit or its user interface has ever been concerned, as you should well know if you’ve ever been a human Reddit user.)