> I dislike what some people commonly refer to as "UX", which is just pure status quo bias and survivorship bias.
The "its different so i hate it" effect is very real.
To an extent as designs are their own kind of grammar and language, as programming languages are, humans tend to adopt languages by cultural force more than anything. Its like the ribbon. People who were trained fresh on Office prototypes liked it, people who had ten years of experience with Word 98 hated it. Ribbons have some goof to them (they need to be customizable like toolbars used to be, and the layout of the buttons can get a little ridiculous), but one of the more famous examples of the whole "its different so i hate it" problem.
> Of course, Nostr also has other constraints, which are basically that the user has to be aware of keys and relays in some way or another, but because people are so deep into their status quo bias they refuse to see this as an interesting challenge and an opportunity for general enlightement, they prefer to try to hide it from themselves and from others,
I don't think common users are interested. They don't want interesting technical challenges. They want to push a button and receive bacon. Which is what Discord et all ultimately give them. It's been known for a while that even having to just download a client is already a massive barrier. On the Mumble and XMPP side we have that fight a lot; there's certain complexities guaranteed by "you have your own server" that "just trust the monolith" doesn't have, and normies overwhelmingly side with the monolith. For technical people puzzles can be interesting. Most people who aren't writing the software aren't interested and just want the phone to work.
The first part I can care about. Sometimes change is better or at least no worse. In many ways I want to *regress* UX, as the 90s style UIs had a lot more love and care behind them. Easily picked out borders, high accessibility color, customizable toolbars and sometimes automation aimed at "power users" (not just thrown a javascript kernel and told gg.) Who remembers when you could actually set what sound played when you received a message?
The second part, well, Steam and Netflix are huge testaments to how much "make the fee small and give a website with 2-3 clicks to receive bacon" are what people overwhelmingly select. Popcorn Time did something similar until getting nuked. It would be fairly ridiculous if one went to a hospital and the doctors told you that you should just pick up some study of medicine as a fun puzzle when asking for a consultation.
/ some kind of quinn
npub1uy…ucncj
2026-10-25 19:12:46 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…j397
Author Public Key
npub1uylwwkw6sa4x692fgqx20wlzlclwhcetdtnqln29xfwc3fv58dfqpucncjPublished at
2026-10-25 19:12:46 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "479b92399e751b5bd882ca703d9427b34b0eb3850befe59da65dc86ca7c375f9",
"pubkey": "e13ee759da876a6d1549400ca7bbe2fe3eebe32b6ae60fcd45325d88a5943b52",
"created_at": 1792955566,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"fee583c5b779fc6c65e6a996a9395d8d7654ea0261a45813ea944fd3d9bc2f40",
"",
"root"
],
[
"p",
"3bf0c63fcb93463407af97a5e5ee64fa883d107ef9e558472c4eb9aaaefa459d"
]
],
"content": "\u003e I dislike what some people commonly refer to as \"UX\", which is just pure status quo bias and survivorship bias.\nThe \"its different so i hate it\" effect is very real. \n\nTo an extent as designs are their own kind of grammar and language, as programming languages are, humans tend to adopt languages by cultural force more than anything. Its like the ribbon. People who were trained fresh on Office prototypes liked it, people who had ten years of experience with Word 98 hated it. Ribbons have some goof to them (they need to be customizable like toolbars used to be, and the layout of the buttons can get a little ridiculous), but one of the more famous examples of the whole \"its different so i hate it\" problem.\n\n\u003e Of course, Nostr also has other constraints, which are basically that the user has to be aware of keys and relays in some way or another, but because people are so deep into their status quo bias they refuse to see this as an interesting challenge and an opportunity for general enlightement, they prefer to try to hide it from themselves and from others,\n\nI don't think common users are interested. They don't want interesting technical challenges. They want to push a button and receive bacon. Which is what Discord et all ultimately give them. It's been known for a while that even having to just download a client is already a massive barrier. On the Mumble and XMPP side we have that fight a lot; there's certain complexities guaranteed by \"you have your own server\" that \"just trust the monolith\" doesn't have, and normies overwhelmingly side with the monolith. For technical people puzzles can be interesting. Most people who aren't writing the software aren't interested and just want the phone to work.\n\nThe first part I can care about. Sometimes change is better or at least no worse. In many ways I want to *regress* UX, as the 90s style UIs had a lot more love and care behind them. Easily picked out borders, high accessibility color, customizable toolbars and sometimes automation aimed at \"power users\" (not just thrown a javascript kernel and told gg.) Who remembers when you could actually set what sound played when you received a message?\n\nThe second part, well, Steam and Netflix are huge testaments to how much \"make the fee small and give a website with 2-3 clicks to receive bacon\" are what people overwhelmingly select. Popcorn Time did something similar until getting nuked. It would be fairly ridiculous if one went to a hospital and the doctors told you that you should just pick up some study of medicine as a fun puzzle when asking for a consultation.",
"sig": "c18f10a26760033f06678528487190ecdf3bf39d3d871e1a559e5edb6948d329e566729b1398b74dfbbe99a452f1407fff95acf6821ac1d007fe6e9cdcb427b2"
}