I really like the page design, very clear and non-flashy. Looks like time was well spent delivering features and good performance instead of building a "beautiful" page.
Same here. The fact that it's so lightweight + being FL/OSS is what pulled me from Github.
Developers are using macOS despite it continually removing features from developers, and are even in some cases defending Apple's decisions. I believe that this design actively harms the adoption of Sourcehut. There are definitely other things Sourcehut should do if they want more of GitHub's and GitLab's marketshare, changing their UI (or adding an alternative UI) is an important part of that process.
SourceHut has been designed deliberately and for a specific purpose. The simplicitly of its appearance is a feature.
But my point is about mass-adoption. What I personally think of the UI isn't very important - as you say, "Design is in the eye of the beholder". But I would argue that if GitHub were to release a redesign identical to SourceHut in 2020, we'd see the largest exodus of GitHub users (for personal projects at least) ever - far, far, FAR more than any other time GitHub has changed their UI.
You can argue that GitHub and GitLab have UI that degrades a developer's experience. You can argue that their designs are FADs, and even that eventually they might change their design to be more similar to your's. And all of those arguments may be right. But right now, I'd argue that this design hurts mass adoption, and even though what design language is "in style" is completely a FAD, following the FAD does help adoption, and entire companies (e.g. fast-fashion like H&M) make tons of profit on FADs (even when they do horrible things - like how fast fashion is bad for the environment, some of GitHub's actions are bad for open source, the Apple example, etc).
I think your numbers are great evidence that you will get users with your current design, and I think that were you to release a GitHub clone (design-wise), you'd lose most of your users and would still struggle to gain non-GitHub users. I don't think there's a way to satisfy both camps of users, but perhaps a "colorful" and "minimal" theme may help? This is not as important as other things you are doing such as the things mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103662 but I do think it would help with mass-adoption (which may even be a non-goal, or may be far less important than other goals - that's totally fine too, I'm not trying to judge you or say you're completely wrong, just pointing out something which I feel is missed in these design discussions on HN).
> You seem to be stuck with confirmation bias: Just because the way things are doesn't mean they're optimal
I'm afraid you haven't understood my words. I'm not talking about optimal, in fact, optimal is explicitly made a non-goal in my comment. You can tell me about VHS vs Betamax, and all I can say is I had never even heard of Betamax until I saw people talking about it on HN. You can tell me Plan 9 is better than Linux, or that (insert obscure brand here) is better than Heinz. Mass-adopted solution != optimal solution. Mass-adoption doesn't even require products to attain local optima, let alone global optima. I use an obscure toothpaste that comes in tablets in glass bottles - totally obscure, likely will never reach mass-adoption, but it is better.
I was not aware that mass-adoption was not a goal of SourceHut, and I mistakenly assumed it was. Without mass-adoption as a goal, I can totally see how this mentality you expressed makes perfect sense, and I personally agree with it for less-well-adopted things that I use too: "If it does survive, then we all progress. If it doesn't, it was a great experiment"
Sure, no worries, there are no personal feelings attached to these comments.
>But my point is about mass-adoption
Mass adoption is not a goal of sr.ht.
>if GitHub were to release a redesign identical to SourceHut in 2020, we'd see the largest exodus of GitHub users
STRONG disagree.
But given that sr.ht isn't supposed to be for everyone anyway, it doesn't matter what would provoke an exodus on GitHub.
Thanks for sticking with your values! It is so refreshing. I hope to start using sr.ht soon.
Sure, I want stuff to look nice too, but only if it doesn't ruin the user experience in other ways like making the site slower to load and use
From memory it was mostly locked scrolling, slow page loads, awful rendered video, etc. Ironically i recently saw Google with the same problem on their new Phone product page (a few months back).
It seems Designers are being given too much freedom with completely no concern for practical implementation. No one on the dev side stands up and says "but that'll lag like mad" - they just implement the bloated slow mess to spec; and god knows performance is never in spec.
So yea, i might agree with the GP comment - i do prefer "modern" look over that of Sourcehuts.. if it worked. But as it stands, Sourcehut's UI is faster than every modern UI i deal with, and i want things that work - first and foremost. Fast.
Modern pages suffer here.
That said, you can have a "modern" UI (although not UX) from SourceHut with only CSS changes. You can write all the CSS needed for a modern UI without doing it wrong like Apple did, and (if you know what you're doing) without adding megabytes of bloat. Add caching to the mix, and SourceHut would be just as fast but look more modern.
I've switched from a mac and iPhone to Linux and Android, and as you can tell, I'm still on HN. Clearly, design isn't absolutely everything to me. But the notion that aesthetics "get in the way for the most part" is one I and most other developers I know in real life disagree with. I'd argue that HN's aesthetics get in the way. I personally have used browser extensions to change the HN CSS, due to how much I dislike the UI.
I have HN set to 125% by default and its great.
It’s one of the main reasons I left Sourcehut. No slight intended — I think Drew has built something really useful and I’ve even submitted a patch to fix a design bug. But ultimately I prefer GitLab’s visual polish.
If you want more market share build a product for the entire world, which does not run on the newest fancy version of iOS.
That's odd. Last quarter (July–September) the Mac grossed more than it ever has in one quarter: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/10/apple-reports-fourth-...
Think about it.
During a global pandemic, countries shutting down and the global economy not doing so well to say the least, the Mac at 36-years old grossed a little over $9 billion. That's more than either the iPad or the Apple Watch.
It seems that people working from home for the foreseeable future bought a lot of Macs.
Should be interesting now that M1 Mac laptops are reported to have blow away performance and last as long as 20 hours on a single charge.
And these Macs come with a BSD-derived development environment and will likely run Linux in a VM faster than comparable Intel machines can run it natively.
The truth is there are some outstanding UX/UI designers and there are some really bad engineers who design terrible unfriendly shit. The reverse is more common from what I’ve seen.
Saying engineers are bad at design is fine. Most people are bad at things they don't practice, and we know most engineers don't practice design.
Saying UX/UI designers (two separate groups with totally different backgrounds) are bad at design is maligning an entire field and suggesting a team hierarchy where engineers make all decisions.
The parent said it is more common for engineers to be good at UI design than for UX/UI designers to be good at it. The last two sentences say it plainly.
Is it not UX, is it not design? Why does design have to be graphical, and why does "UX/UI designers" get to say what it is? How can a tool even exist without an interface? And if a tool is used, surely it has a user ;)
> most engineers don't practice design
Citation needed.
No, I'm using a common definition of it. I'm using the same one that the person I responded to was using, which is the type of design for which people hire UX/UI designers.
People don't hire UX/UI designers to design CLIs. Maybe they should, but they don't. Is it UX and UI? Sure. But we're talking about an industry term at this point, not 100% of everything that is designable.
> Why does design have to be graphical, and why does "UX/UI designers" get to say what it is?
I honestly don't know who or what you're arguing against right now. This seems totally tangential to the comment I replied to.
Companies hire engineers to write code and designers to create GUIs. Those are the domains we're talking about. I don't disagree with you philosophically at all.
> > most engineers don't practice design
My meaning was unclear here.
I meant that most engineers don't study and repeatedly practice design, meaning that they don't have feedback loops with their designs. The goal is releasing their code, not building their skill at design.
Designers, on the other hand, will create many iterations of something with feedback along the way, sometimes in an academic setting.
Even setting that aside, most engineers work at large corporations where design is a bureaucratic process that engineers aren't expected to change. They just write the code.
> Citation needed.
No, it's not. First of all, I've in the software industry for 20 years, so I'm going to lean on first-hand experience here.
Second, the burden of proof is on the person making the more uncommon claim. The inverse of "most software engineers don't practice design" is "most software engineers do practice design," and the latter would be more surprising to the typical person.
Unless, as mentioned above, you expand the meaning of "design" far beyond what the original thread was about, which was web UI design.