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Comment by MostlyStable | Hacker News Reader

The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.

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I remember the days that Bibliogram worked for Instagram. They've given up. A decade ago I could have an RSS feed for what my friends posted, besides the toxic short-form content of IG reels that everyone is now obsessed with post Meta acquisition and their battle to compete with Tiktok.

Instagram is actively hostile to good ui. They constantly go out of their way to break extensions that add a video scrubber.

Last I was on the platform, they eventually added a tab for only chronological posts on the timeline a-la how IG used to work. But they gave no exposure to it, _and_ it completely hid the IG stories of your friends so nobody would want to use it in the first place.

Good UI makes it easier to be selective. social media owners dont want you to be selective, they are selling you to advertisers and influencers after all.

But the view apparently is Zuckerberg bought it when they were 'barely a company'

Yes - and he's utterly ruined it. And we know from his emails it was anti-competitive

Zuckerberg and his minions have changes html and obfuscate it so much, it is impossible to block ads these days. They are worst than google. Imagine google decided every video will require widevine & there is no way to block ads just like twitch.

> Instagram is actively hostile to good ui.

And that idiot, Zuck, thought he was getting a good deal when he poached former head of design, Alan Dye, from Apple. We were relieved to see him go. Our desktop OS is already making small improvements now that he's gone.

Context: the guy doesn't understand fundamentals of UX and has made MacOS worse for years.

[If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design](https://mastodon.social/@heliographe_studio/1158908195095453...)

[Apple has updated the traffic light buttons in macOS 27](https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1vr08s2/apple_has_up...)

The UI/UX is the main thing. I technically have an X-Twitter account that I rarely use, but loading plain HTML with a bit of JS beats loading a whole SPA experience just to read a post.

1:1 the same thing with Github

Nithub when?

https://codeberg.org/gothub/gothub

Diffshub is a start

Obviously such a thing would be horrible, but there is sourcehut.

    git clone

I have a side project that proxies GitHub for a simpler UI https://github.com/jmou/cgithub

It's live (best effort) at https://cgithub.jmou.workers.dev/jmou/cgithub

eh anyone going to github knows what they want. At this point it's a flex to be hosted elsewhere

Yeah, the UI is the real and only reason to use Nitter. It's a very similar situation with old reddit.

Since a couple of weeks they force you to login to use old.reddit.

My visits have dropped by about 95%

Use Redlib [1] or one of the other alternative Reddit frontends.

[1] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

At that point though, it's like why. Reddit is, well, trash. It's barely worth visiting without an account, and if you're going to make me jump through hoops to visit, it's time to accept the message of "we don't want you here" and go somewhere else.

The reason to use it is that Reddit does provide the occasional answer to questions like "how to get a Samsung SCX 3400 to run on a Raspberry Pi" (etc.).

All those have been ingested by chatgpt, which ironically provides a better user experience.

Now all that's missing is Chatlib, a self-hosted proxy for ChatGPT which makes it possible to a) query the service without leaving a personally identifiable trace and b) separate out the facts from the dreamt-up fiction. Using Redlib I at least get to see the original posts which makes it easier to separate fact from fiction.

If you're browsing Reddit for its front page, yes, that's trash. But it can be a great source for getting information on narrow, specific topics on well-moderated subreddits filled with enthusiastic and obsessive people eager to share their knowledge. It's been very helpful for me when researching coffee grinders, refrigerators, solar battery backups, headphones, and other such things.

I've been making money from reddit, and for about a decade and a half and at this point, why bother? It's basically drained and what remains is of zero value.

Redreader still works on android.

Though, reddit's been infected by you tubers and clankers to the point that it's basically useless.

Reddit infected by Youtubers sounds like pest getting cholera, i.e. Reddit did not need an infection to be a bot-infested cesspit.

It sure didn't help any. People that get their info from YouTube tend to be morons with zero reading comprehension.

The same is and has been true for Reddit for a long time, the difference lies mostly in the ideological sauce flavouring these places, i.e. Little-endians vs. Big-endians. If you're a Reddit-endian you'll despise the Tube-endians and vice versa.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

works for now. it's no longer just a redirect.

in the week or so it didn't function, I used https://photon-reddit.com/

You can use www.reddit.com (yes, this domain, not old.reddit.com) with the old UI if you set cookie "redesign_optout=true".

Thanks for that tip. Works like a charm.

Old reddit redirect extension

Same, it’s been nice if I’m honest, them doing something to old.reddit.com was always going to be the final straw.

Outside this place it was the last of the “social” media’s I used.

The only reason to use nitter is that for whatever reason twitter allows it access to its api. The UI is terrible and completely irrelevant.

I could use it without an account and know that any comment I clicked into would take me to the thread of posts under it without sponsored ads or posts.

The reason is that every copy of Nitter has a list of account tokens to log in with, and pretends to be a human using those accounts.

>the UI is the real and only reason to use Nitter.

Why is not wanting to share my reading habits with Elon not a real reason?

This is no longer possible by the way (making an account on twitter with a throwaway email)

Seriously. The UX/UI on Twitter has always been a dumpster fire.

Eh. It was pretty great in 2008, when I used my spotty cell service to tweet road trip updates by texting 40404. O tempora, o mores, etc. etc.

Haven’t had that luxury in Russia. Though being a script kiddie I’ve set up a shortcode just for myself (there were these “paid content SMS as a Service” thingies that forwarded SMS text to an HTTP endpoint you provide).

Didn't have that luxury either, but at one point, "Twilio" was the star and poster-child of startups, with their "Guerilla marketing" and completely fresh and new roles of "developer advocates" so of course everyone and their mother had been to at least one Twilio meetup, or your local meetup with a "developer evangelist" from Twilio. Lots of us built our first SMS-capable service as a "Forward this SMS to this HTTP endpoint", I too did the SMS-to-Tweet thing as the US number didn't accept my SMSes (or wasn't available, or something).

All of the WWW was better in 2008. Unironically. We've all been frog-boiled into this current hellscape.

There was a brief moment when smartphones first came out but the rest of the world's companies weren't taking them seriously yet that was a truly brilliant time and ever since then it's been nothing but downhill.

Smartphones came out in 2008. So your date aligns with the GPs.

... yes. Yes, that was the point.

Ahh sorry. My reading comprehension was obviously failing me then.

back on when websites were websites. HN of today on my phone reminds me of that.

I agree. I think the UI is the best part. It seems more responsive to me too.

Same with Redlib for Reddit, it's just so much nicer to look at.

The X app loads posts much faster than these sites, so I find the app has a better UI.

I wonder what data Elon is able to slurp up through the app that he can't get through the website. Seems like a good incentive to keep the site worse.

Shows the true cost of surveillance capitalism.

It can't suck all that much if you're not willing to give it up.

It sounds to me like they did give up on using the builtin UI.

I think it's great. My feed is people posting tech/AI news, scientific publications, videos of rockets and self-driving cars, things made with coding agents etc. It's full of people who do meaningful work as well and you can see who they are. Dark mode, ability to easily copy images, link to posts, see posts of interesting people by going to their profile. On top of that the feed algorithm is open source and actually sane. What else would I want?

It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.

> On top of that the feed algorithm is open source

Do you genuinely believe what is public is exactly what's deployed? If so, what makes that belief justified?

Why would I doubt it? if you think they are deploying something else then it's quite a claim but it's you who need to show some evidence. It works great anyway. I get a lot of junk I don't want to see on FB/Insta. Reddit is not even worth discussing. X is the only place with where you get a lot of people who work on interesting/important/big stuff and post frequently.

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