I talk a lot about how “empathy” in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn’t care, but it’s important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding “why” some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.
This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise “wow, steve. you really care about people don’t you?”
I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are…
https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232
Freedom means not having a choice in website color scheme.
“b-bht what good is it having the freedom to do what I want if I can’t force other people to agree with me?! I thought I was the king?!”
@fasterandworse He has probably fired every employee that has accommodations or visible disabilities, except for the one person he had to rehire because he enraged an entire country after firing him.
I mean dark mode aside, the dude is a proud eugenicist, so I can’t imagine accessibility is one of his priorities.
Yep, totally agree. I shared this link with no surprise that he’s like this. Just wanted to highlight one of those moments that are a giveaway to this kind of person.
I’ve successfully convinced front-end designers to have empathy in the past, especially younger ones who really hadn’t spent time thinking about other people’s tech needs. Hell, back when I was A Youth™️, I had my own boneheaded takes about people who use tech in a way I don’t (vi/emacs wars, lol, I’m old).
But yeah, exactly, Musk isn’t in “assume good intent” or “teachable moment”. He has for years been 100% in “when people tell you who they are, believe them.”
I like how you put it. When you spend enough time around these people you can hear them drop a lie about their lunch and have enough information to know they will screw anyone over in a heartbeat.
Musk is changing Twitter to be what he thinks is cool, not what anyone else thinks is necessary
If you’ve already set tens of billions of dollars on fire, might as well have some fun with it.
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He got publicly embarrassed by a disabled person, I know that much. But he would have been like this anyway.
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he got transphobic far earlier, one of his kids came out and he’s been malding since
Nothing is going to change with this perpetual man child until the world stops paying attention to his little tantrums.
The Simpsons song “just don’t look” repeats endlessly in my head.
Probably the best piece of advice the Simpsons ever accidentally gave out. Imagine if we all did.
Thanks for bringing back that memory.
It was nice back when the Simpsons used to be good. Now it’s just celebrity cameos with name drops instead of playing original characters.
That’s not being shallow, it’s being an ableist, like much of society, so lets not sugar coat things.
Dark mode makes me irrationally angry. Doesn’t matter what app or service it is, I just despise it. I can’t even really explain why. It just looks so bad.
It does have a habit of showing up in software designed For Gamers, so that would go a way in explaining that.
Dark mode & Dark side
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For some it’s just personal preference, for some with vision issues it’s unreadable
What’s the benefit to removing one and forcing everyone to use the other?
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If “X” can’t handle a light mode and a dark mode, then that’s not a very good sign…
You’re acting like they need to code a whole new app rather than a single if/then statements with different color values.
Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?
don’t underestimate the work that goes into maintaining two UI themes on that level. Every new thing has to cater for both themes by the designers. Those colour values are easy for devs IF the css is built to accommodate. It very rarely is… and by rarely I mean never, but say rarely to appease the devs seeing this who think they’ve built something that accommodates it.
For the love of… they are freaking twitter! It is one of the most used user interfaces in the world! I think they can spring for the necessary dev resources to maintain a UI that can support multiple modes.
maybe this… thrilling??? discussion of who’s 10x enough to maintain the site theme is better suited to the orange site @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
I was looking for the mute button a long time ago
Thanks for @ing me!
I wouldn’t know to block you otherwise, makes it super convenient.
What are you trying to say? That twitter doesn’t have enough money to develop in a modern design system? It’s not a matter of BS mythical 10x developers. Although according to elon all the non 10xers were fired I guess.
You set up a table for each.
If you’re adding one thing that needs a color value, you just add a color to each table rather than a single color…
It’s honestly not complicated or time consuming. Especially when two versions already exist…
ok, tables and colour values. Sounds good.
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I’m not the one saying ridiculous things like taking away “light mode” would free up resources…
So comparitively speaking, yeah, I’m practically an expert.
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Compared to the backend development, sure.
It’s also not like they’re creating it from scratch, it already exists. The muskrat is literally just saying he’s going to get rid of it, not just not develop it.
It’s not exactly the hardest part of the job… It’s a CSS file with altered colours.
If he didn’t fire everyone except his H1B slaves this wouldn’t be an issue.
Ah, well, if it’s less work for the tech team, excluding disabled users is a reasonable compromise!!!
/s
nothing wrong with not having one. Having one and removing it because you like the dark mode better, on the other hand? He’s been told that every design decision has to consider light and dark. Just like he’s going to be told that the web app requires more dev resources for browser compatibility testing, accessibility, performance etc and more design resources for responsiveness and stuff like mouse vs touch.
If he drops light mode he can cut more staff for sure. If he drops web, he can cut even more. He will do it.
but anyway, light mode/dark mode are a great example of corps doing something good in the bare minimum way. Before apple or whoever branded black backgrounds and white text as “dark mode” implementing an alternative UI theme based on accessibility concerns on a major web app would have been impossible to get approved.
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I’m speaking in the sense that he’s a desperate idiot trying to make twitter cost him as little as possible. He’s walking around that hell hole asking for ideas on cutting costs.
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Except if you cut development costs your app will suffer, and thus be less profitable. If people don’t want to use your app because it’s a pain to use, then you’re cutting out a part of your userbase… and thus a source of profit.
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but fascism is a core functionality!
I personally prefer it. I’d be surprised and annoyed if it went away.
That said, I don’t get too het up if an existing site/service only has dark mode.
I clicked the button that deshittfied the thread but since that deleted the warning I posted too:
reconsider before having a 10xer slapfight here
