Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
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If coding were something I could do, I'd be tempted to run a modified lemmy instance where voting is disabled all together, and default sorting is forum style.
Edit: oh and nested replies would be disabled too. Maybe add a quote button on people's comments.
Voting being disabled is an option built into Lemmy that the admins can activate, though only a few choose to. I know Blahaj disabled down votes but not upvotes.
Also I can't test this immediately, but at least on reddit, if you highlighted text from someone's comment before hitting the reply button, it would automatically put that in quotes in your comment box.
Is that a consistent experience across lemmy though? I looked at some of those downvote-disabled instances, and then looked at posts in those instances from within an instance that still had downvotes enabled - and it appeared that people were still downvoting those posts just fine.
If it is possible to simply disable votes all together - including comment votes - I might try spending some time learning how to get that all setup and running and see how the experience is. But I would likely defederate from all vote-instances (or I don't know if there's a way to make the federation opt-in), so that community could be entirely free from voting effects.
I'm not entirely sure if this is how it works, but I believe the instance that disables down votes does not federate downvotes from other instances. So if a downvote enabled instance downvotes a post from the non downvoting instance, other users on the same instance as the downvoter will see downvotes, but other instances will not see them.
Could be totally wrong about that though!
I think all of that would be easy to add to Lemmy, they already have the sorting method for posts (New Comments), the option to sort comments as "Chat", and the option to disable voting. Maybe file a few feature requests on the Lemmy GitHub. It would be interesting to see an instance like this.
Isn't that just NodeBB?
I was looking at NodeBB as an option for that sort of thing. The problem there is it's not really structured for the kind of user-driven dynamic sub-community building that reddit and lemmy are built for.
But yes, that is essentially what I want, a traditional forum site with subreddits.
But then again, there's also the design of the posts themselves, and how they're shown on the user feed. Reddit clones put links and link access front and center, whereas there's more clicks involved in even accessing post content on a forum.
Overall I still think it'd be easier to forumize lemmy, than to lemmyize NodeBB. The latter would require too many additions and modifications, whereas the former can be done hypothetically with deletions only, well, and a few switched defaults.