Re: Deliberate Usability Obstacles

This is a quick reply to Idiomdrottning:

Deliberate Usability Obstacles

njms - Ethical anti-design (WWW)

I have to say I also like the idea of ethical anti-design; without knowing the term, I implemented several of them in brutaldon¹, a brutalist Web-1.0 client for the Fediverse.

Brutaldon implements:

Pagination (infinite scroll is available in browsers with JavaScript, but it is disabled by default)

Removal of engagement numbers: no numbers are shown on posts for likes, boosts, etc., whether your posts or others’. Follower counts and ids are not shown.

Several brutalist themes devoid of all eye-candy other than basic typography, and sometimes not even that.

I do get the point that pagination may actually be even more addictive than infinite scroll, because clicking ’Next’ functions like the lever on a one-armed-bandit. Nevertheless, it does give you a point at which you’re not reading down the page, and could think twice about continuing.

I agree that a mailing list interface would be an improvement, and strongly considered writing a Gnus backend for the Mastodon API. However, I never got around to it. One of the biggest benefits would have been only having to see boosted posts once, without turning off boosts entirely. Another would be not seeing posts that you've already read in general, though you'd be able to search for them, or see them in threads with new posts.

This is all a little academic to me, as I've deleted all of my Fediverse accounts, since my experience is that it replicates many of the bad social features, as well as the bad technical features, of corporate social media.

¹brutaldon source repository (www)

²The Fediverse only solves half the problem (www)