Comment by Yaina | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yaina | Hacker News Reader

I largely nodded along with the post, I think it raised a lot of valid issues about the state of non-profit software

Yet, I think one big reason why non-profit solutions are so unpopular is not primarily about marking, but about the terrible, truly terrible UX that most non-profit projects have.

As far is I can tell this has (mostly) nothing to do with constrained resources and just with the extremely technical perspectives of the maintainers.

Element is a laggy Discord clone. Signal is years behind other messengers in terms of features and general UI quality, Thunderbird is stock in the early 2000s, same as VLC, and I don't know a lot of serious artists that are using GIMP.

So, even though this is surely not the only reason why open source projects are not widely used, I think it's a huge contributing factor.

There are shining example s though, like Blender, Godot or Mastodon, that are truly open source and have a great set of features paired with nice UX and I don't think they're doing too badly :)

> As far is I can tell this has (mostly) nothing to do with constrained resources and just with the extremely technical perspectives of the maintainers.

Discord, for example, has 450 full-time employees and is valued at $7 billion. I simply don't see how small non-profit teams, many of which are run primarily by volunteer labor, can compete with that in terms of UX. How many full-time designers or UX folks are working on GIMP or VLC?

What's wrong with VLC or Thunderbird? Nothing, they got replaced by online services which provide storage/content and not just the UI (usually the UI feature set of online services is actually inferior).

Which UX is good can be a matter of opinion, some people may prefer different programs. I use a IRC client which doesn't do a lot more than display raw IRC protocol messages with syntax highlighting and a few other things (such as shortcuts, macros, filters, auto-pong, etc), and I think it is better than any web chat that I have seen (profit or not), but I am strange, anyways. But, I am the kind of guy who use Heirloom-mailx for email (one thing it has is the ability to write an attachment to a pipe; most modern programs only support files and not pipes; a lot my own software is designed to import from and export to pipes instead of files, since I think that is more useful), who want to read the RFC before using the internet, and who learned Magic: the Gathering by reading the entire Comprehensive Rules before starting the game, and disliking USB, and preferring Plain TeX instead of LaTeX; which I think are the kind of things that most people hate. So, it is a matter of opinion, I suppose.

It seems to be a lot of more modern programs seem to have worse UX, in my opinion (part of the problem is lack of documentation, too); not whether or not it is profit. At least in my experience, profit makes many things worse because they try to be mass-marketing and more trying to earn money, rather than being first the quality of the product. And also, they put too many fancy animations and stuff.

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