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Comment by jamescostian | Hacker News Reader

I, on the other hand, dislike this design. Consider how many devs use Apple products - proprietary products that come in a walled garden, and that in many ways go against developers. A good amount of it comes down to aesthetics. Were Sourcehut to have, say, a "2020 theme" or something, that would help lots of those devs appreciate it more.

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.

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FWIW I am attracted to Sourcehut's aesthetic exactly because it's not a "2020 theme", so I've been using it and paying for it. Pages are simple and functional. Github makes me feel tired, overwhelmed, and it requires too much scrolling and reading what looks like ad copy.

While i do generally like Github, i find the Apple portion of the GP comment especially funny - as parts of their website is one of the worst experiences i've had on the modern web.

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.

I'm a web developer, and I actually agree completely about their scrolling and page loads. Absolutely awful on both counts! That said, Apple already has mass adoption, and dealing with those UI inconveniences is considered acceptable in exchange for the OSes they provide (by their users - just look at how so many of them vote with their wallets). If Apple.com were a popular website, I'd say they'd be in trouble, but their real money comes from their (non-web-frontend) software.

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 can't speak for everyone, but I didn't pickup macOS because it's shiny. I picked it up because it's UNIX/BSD while also having a lot of proprietary software like Photoshop (without using Wine). That and the hardware is pretty good.

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

Design is in the eye of the beholder - many users find SourceHut's UI beautiful and have praised it as such. Beauty is also more than just a pretty face - SourceHut is an engineering tool, and if it elegantly and efficiently organizes information for engineers to use, that can be more important and more beautiful than an eye-catching design. In fact, an eye-catching design can often degrade the experience of engineering tools, and eye-catching elements - such as colorful buttons - are carefully and deliberately controlled for in the design of sr.ht. It optimizes getting you the information you need or helping you complete the task you came here for as efficiently as possible.

SourceHut has been designed deliberately and for a specific purpose. The simplicitly of its appearance is a feature.

More here: https://drewdevault.com/2019/03/04/sourcehut-design.html

I did not downvote you. I think it's wonderful that people love the UI of SourceHut. You've put a lot of effort in and made a product that many people love, and that is fantastic and a hell of a lot more than I can say for myself. Seriously, congrats on all you've accomplished, and thank you for all you've done for the open source community, it's quite a lot and very deserving of appreciation

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. All things can get stuck in a local optima and it takes guts to challenge the status quo to get out of it. This "undoing" is what we call innovation. Whether it survies the undoing or not - that's upto the users who adopt this product. If it does survive, then we all progress. If it doesn't, it was a great experiment. Thanks for empathizing with what Drew is doing.

>> You can argue that GitHub and GitLab have UI that degrades a developer's experience. [...] And all of those arguments may be right. But right now, I'd argue that this design hurts mass adoption

> 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"

>I did not downvote you. I think it's wonderful that people love the UI of SourceHut. You've put a lot of effort in and made a product that many people love, and that is fantastic and a hell of a lot more than I can say for myself. Seriously, congrats on all you've accomplished, and thank you for all you've done for the open source community, it's quite a lot and very deserving of appreciation

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.

I disagree with your disagreement ;) Yes, there could be an exodus, many people think they need web2.0.

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.

In some ways it makes me happy that great products aren't popular :) I feel like I am part of an exclusive club of exceptional people that make great products. See: https://suckless.org/ -> Great products, but not popular.

Do you like HN's design? It gets the job done, right? Why do we need aesthetics? It gets in the way for the most part.

No. Especially on a non-mobile screen. I used to have better-than 20/20 vision, I would guess that I now have around 20/20 vision. I find the text to be too small on the home page and scrunched up. I'm on a 4k monitor, and the front page stops at "30" and wants me to click "More" instead of loading in more posts automatically (and loading in even more as I scroll). I find this inconvenient and wasteful - I'd much rather each post take up more height, and I'd strongly prefer a "infinite" scrolling system. Even if I was on a 1080p monitor, I'd rather have each post on the front page take up double the amount of vertical space it does now than have it's current UI. The loss of information density would be (to me) well worth it.

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.

Zoom in.

This. :)

I have HN set to 125% by default and its great.

90% here! I'm not on a 4K, though.

Because I enjoy using things I find aesthetically pleasing more than things I don’t.

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.

not only do I see fewer macbooks every year among the affluent crowd as more and more people just seem to go straight for linux or WSL machines, this is particularly untrue for much of the developing world, where most of the developers of the future will live (or already do, IDK). And let me tell you those people appreciate a simple, fast loading webpage.

If you want more market share build a product for the entire world, which does not run on the newest fancy version of iOS.

not only do I see fewer macbooks every year among the affluent crowd…

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.

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