Why are you actively making the UI worse?
Originally written .
It was fine as it was, and even if it wasn't, unless you've made obvious and universally liked changes, you've failed as a human being if you push those update to grandma and me.
Discord has changed its UI. Again. This time the desktop version is so borked I decided to install a theme for the first time, and even though that theme is also broken, it's less broken than vanilla Discord. That alone hopefully tells you how much Discord has fucked up. If I'm willing to accept something from some rando on the Internet which is actively broken, over your supposedly finished and polished Product™, then you've failed at capitalism. Or won, I guess.
I'm still salty over the font change back in 2022. I still have to do a little dance every time Discord updates in order to change it back to the old font, since every single, goddamn time it updates, it will reinstate the new font, and I'll notice it instantly, and I fucking hate it. Now, thanks to the recent UI changes, that dance just got a little bit longer, and doesn't even get me to the same place I was before. Hopefully the relevant people involved in those themes can keep up with Discord's hostile UI changes.
Whoever is responsible for this should be shot. Someone should do a Luigi over this, if only to discourage future regressive updates and this horrible aspect of software culture. This change significantly reduces accessibility, and is the shoddy work of someone who has no experience in UI design, and anyone with even the slightest hint of experience in that field could tell you that, assuming they still have a brain that hasn't become management-pilled or whatever. This is naught more than change for the sake of change, which is itself user-hostile.
It's these kinds of changes that make me consider buying an Android phone just to be able to install an older version of Discord on my phone. I've managed to deal with the phone version of Discord, mostly by limiting my usage of it, but if they're gonna fuck me on desktop, things get harder. Thank god that there are workarounds, but they're just that: workarounds. Not fixes. And certainly not permanent fixes, given that Discord can just come out of the woodwork yet again, bringing an even bigger dildo and more tabasco sauce along with them.
If you're gonna change it, then fucking listen to feedback. There are plenty of things to do, even just from an accessibility point of view, most of which aren't hard. You don't need to tear the whole thing down; the thing that your users either like, or have at-least gotten used to, to something they're very much not used to.
Most of my favourite websites have not changed significantly in over 15 years. That stability is a feature, and a fantastic one at that. Changes to those are not welcome in my eyes, and I actively avoid them whenever possible. That's what you should strive for in good UI design. Stability is key. Maybe take a hint from the third-party offerings? They're filling a niche you're clearly failing to capture. I'd love a super-lightweight version of like DiscordMessenger, or the ability to revert hostile UI changes as I now do with Vencord, just as standard, or even better, that they aren't forced at all. But these kinds of things probably require a move away from Electron an over to an entirely different development environment. But at-least the result from that kind of change might end up being positive in the end, unlike this 'UX developer' driven design. And if you're gonna spend money on things anyway, rather than just continuing to be a stable platform and keep a treasure chest of money for a rainy day, you might as well spend it on useful developers, rather than people who just rearrange the UI in order to justify their own existence.
This whole thing reminds me of several anecdotes on Hacker News, one of the few places I can consistently read about people being mad about needless change in user interface design without it it stopping wholesale at 'it be bad', although the comments I've read in other places regarding this particular Discord update have been surprisingly informative, but that's probably a result of Discord fucking up so many basic things that they're easy to notice, rather than people in general being good at noticing specific problems.
One anecdote was about how they were using Linux because they can deal with problems they have with their distro, because its caused by very human problems: lack of development time, lack of other resources, disagreements, licensing, whatever else it may be. These are understandable even when you don't have the full picture, and while you may disagree with the allocation of resources, or think that some person blocking a pull request is completely wrong, their case is rarely completely without merit, since otherwise they probably would have been ignored after a little while. On the other hand, on whatever other operating system which is controlled by a corporation, so both Windows and MacOS, and both iOS and Android, there, you can be fucked by some high-ranking douche deciding that they need some graph to point up, and no matter the consequences to the user experience, no matter how pyrrhic their victory will be, they will do it, and they will catch you in their crossfire, and there's little you can do about it. And given the choice, would you rather have something suck because of understandable and hopefully fixable reasons, or do you want something to suck because of an executive you will never in a million years be able to convince otherwise, who decided to make your life in particular worse today? I know what I prefer.
Another anecdote was about how people get up in arms about disabling Windows Update, or whatever else. How many times has an update broken something for you? I know I don't have enough digits on my body to count that. How many times has an update fixed something for you? Or even better: how many times has an automatic updated fixed something for you, as compared to an update you decided to install specifically because it fixed something you cared about? If you remove the cases where I installed an update specifically fix something, and only count automatic or otherwise incidental updates, I might need my second hand to count, but only just. For curated updates to fix specific problems, that goes up by a lot, but those cases rarely even had automatic updates back then (they do now on my Linux machine though). Can't blame people for disabling updates on their phone if they've experienced it becoming much slower after an update, and barely ever experienced an update which actually fixed something they cared baout. Yes, yes, security updates, whatever. I've written a bit about that already.
The third one I thought about was change fatigue. It is real, and probably impacts people a lot more than you think, especially if you include grandmas, people with accessibility needs and whatever else. If even Joe Public gets annoyed by change for change's sake, then imagine how bad it is for the Grandma who just recently got used to their online bank's web-interface, only for it to change again, because fuck you, that's why. Users experience the hostility of UI changes on a regular basis, and the impact of security updates are vague, so the value proposition for an individual user isn't very hard to make out, and doesn't lean in favour of updating if the user is given a true choice in the matter. But they usually aren't. Instead, they're abused by their platforms.
I don't like the idea of moving to Revolt, even ignoring the fact that it might lack features I need, since I doubt a transition to that will work well. I am willing to host a server for it, but it's not gonna get perfect uptime, it's gonna be yet another thing to deal with in my life, the networking effects will be smaller given it will be another transition to yet another platform, yada yada yada. Hopefully it doesn't come to that, but Discord sure is working to push me in that direction.
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