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I really like the page design, very clear and non-flashy. Looks like time was well spent delivering features and good performance instead of building a "beautif

I really like the page design, very clear and non-flashy. Looks like time was well spent delivering features and good performance instead of building a "beautiful" page.

andrepd 6y ago
Do you really need anything else? To me the design is a feature itself. I don't need to load 1MB of stuff and run a heavy scripting language to display... text (of course that 1MB comes with complementary popups, banners, weird scrolling, autoplying videos, and stuff jumping around for 10s until the page loads entirely).
- Shared404 6y ago
  > To me the design is a feature itself. Same here. The fact that it's so lightweight + being FL/OSS is what pulled me from Github.
- palindrom615 6y ago
  well... yes, no javascript of sr.ht is great. just to be fair, there's no 1MB script in github or gitlab... just few kb.
systemvoltage 6y ago
We need to get out of this rut of UX/UI design. UX/UI designers’ existence itself is based on generalized condemnation of a group of people: “Engineers are bad at designing and aesthetics.” Every time that’s brought up, I roll my eyes. The truth is there are some outstanding UX/UI designers and there are some really bad engineers who design terrible unfriendly shit. The reverse is more common from what I’ve seen.
- smt88 6y ago
  So you take issue with condemnation of an entire group and then do it yourself immediately afterward? Saying engineers are bad at design is fine. Most people are bad at things they don't practice, and we know most engineers don't practice design. Saying UX/UI designers (two separate groups with totally different backgrounds) are bad at design is maligning an entire field and suggesting a team hierarchy where engineers make all decisions.
  - ylyn 6y ago
    That's not what the parent said at all.
    - smt88 6y ago
      What is "not what the parent said"? And why is your interpretation different? The parent said it is more common for engineers to be good at UI design than for UX/UI designers to be good at it. The last two sentences say it plainly.
  - iso8859-1 6y ago
    You're using a very particular definition of "design". Let's take the typical interface of unix tools (default to outputting to stdout, default to inputting over stdin). Brian Kernighan talked about his they retrofitted all tools to use this model once they invented pipes. Is it not UX, is it not design? Why does design have to be graphical, and why does "UX/UI designers" get to say what it is? How can a tool even exist without an interface? And if a tool is used, surely it has a user ;) > most engineers don't practice design Citation needed.
    - smt88 6y ago
      > You're using a very particular definition of "design" No, I'm using a common definition of it. I'm using the same one that the person I responded to was using, which is the type of design for which people hire UX/UI designers. People don't hire UX/UI designers to design CLIs. Maybe they should, but they don't. Is it UX and UI? Sure. But we're talking about an industry term at this point, not 100% of everything that is designable. > Why does design have to be graphical, and why does "UX/UI designers" get to say what it is? I honestly don't know who or what you're arguing against right now. This seems totally tangential to the comment I replied to. Companies hire engineers to write code and designers to create GUIs. Those are the domains we're talking about. I don't disagree with you philosophically at all. > > most engineers don't practice design My meaning was unclear here. I meant that most engineers don't study and repeatedly practice design, meaning that they don't have feedback loops with their designs. The goal is releasing their code, not building their skill at design. Designers, on the other hand, will create many iterations of something with feedback along the way, sometimes in an academic setting. Even setting that aside, most engineers work at large corporations where design is a bureaucratic process that engineers aren't expected to change. They just write the code. > Citation needed. No, it's not. First of all, I've in the software industry for 20 years, so I'm going to lean on first-hand experience here. Second, the burden of proof is on the person making the more uncommon claim. The inverse of "most software engineers don't practice design" is "most software engineers do practice design," and the latter would be more surprising to the typical person. Unless, as mentioned above, you expand the meaning of "design" far beyond what the original thread was about, which was web UI design.
jamescostian 6y ago
I, on the other hand, dislike this design. Consider how many devs use Apple products - proprietary products that come in a walled garden, and that in many ways go against developers. A good amount of it comes down to aesthetics. Were Sourcehut to have, say, a "2020 theme" or something, that would help lots of those devs appreciate it more. Developers are using macOS despite it continually removing features from developers, and are even in some cases defending Apple's decisions. I believe that this design actively harms the adoption of Sourcehut. There are definitely other things Sourcehut should do if they want more of GitHub's and GitLab's marketshare, changing their UI (or adding an alternative UI) is an important part of that process.
- ddevault 6y ago
  Design is in the eye of the beholder - many users find SourceHut's UI beautiful and have praised it as such. Beauty is also more than just a pretty face - SourceHut is an engineering tool, and if it elegantly and efficiently organizes information for engineers to use, that can be more important and more beautiful than an eye-catching design. In fact, an eye-catching design can often degrade the experience of engineering tools, and eye-catching elements - such as colorful buttons - are carefully and deliberately controlled for in the design of sr.ht. It optimizes getting you the information you need or helping you complete the task you came here for as efficiently as possible. SourceHut has been designed deliberately and for a specific purpose. The simplicitly of its appearance is a feature.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    More here: https://drewdevault.com/2019/03/04/sourcehut-design.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/03/04/sourcehut-design.html
  - jamescostian 6y ago
    I did not downvote you. I think it's wonderful that people love the UI of SourceHut. You've put a lot of effort in and made a product that many people love, and that is fantastic and a hell of a lot more than I can say for myself. Seriously, congrats on all you've accomplished, and thank you for all you've done for the open source community, it's quite a lot and very deserving of appreciation But my point is about mass-adoption. What I personally think of the UI isn't very important - as you say, "Design is in the eye of the beholder". But I would argue that if GitHub were to release a redesign identical to SourceHut in 2020, we'd see the largest exodus of GitHub users (for personal projects at least) ever - far, far, FAR more than any other time GitHub has changed their UI. You can argue that GitHub and GitLab have UI that degrades a developer's experience. You can argue that their designs are FADs, and even that eventually they might change their design to be more similar to your's. And all of those arguments may be right. But right now, I'd argue that this design hurts mass adoption, and even though what design language is "in style" is completely a FAD, following the FAD does help adoption, and entire companies (e.g. fast-fashion like H&M) make tons of profit on FADs (even when they do horrible things - like how fast fashion is bad for the environment, some of GitHub's actions are bad for open source, the Apple example, etc). I think your numbers are great evidence that you will get users with your current design, and I think that were you to release a GitHub clone (design-wise), you'd lose most of your users and would still struggle to gain non-GitHub users. I don't think there's a way to satisfy both camps of users, but perhaps a "colorful" and "minimal" theme may help? This is not as important as other things you are doing such as the things mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103662 but I do think it would help with mass-adoption (which may even be a non-goal, or may be far less important than other goals - that's totally fine too, I'm not trying to judge you or say you're completely wrong, just pointing out something which I feel is missed in these design discussions on HN).

I really like the page design, very clear and non-flashy. Looks like time was well spent delivering features and good performance instead of building a "beautiful" page.

andrepd 6y ago

Do you really need anything else? To me the design is a feature itself. I don't need to load 1MB of stuff and run a heavy scripting language to display... text (of course that 1MB comes with complementary popups, banners, weird scrolling, autoplying videos, and stuff jumping around for 10s until the page loads entirely).

Shared404 6y ago
> To me the design is a feature itself. Same here. The fact that it's so lightweight + being FL/OSS is what pulled me from Github.
palindrom615 6y ago
well... yes, no javascript of sr.ht is great. just to be fair, there's no 1MB script in github or gitlab... just few kb.

systemvoltage 6y ago

We need to get out of this rut of UX/UI design. UX/UI designers’ existence itself is based on generalized condemnation of a group of people: “Engineers are bad at designing and aesthetics.” Every time that’s brought up, I roll my eyes. The truth is there are some outstanding UX/UI designers and there are some really bad engineers who design terrible unfriendly shit. The reverse is more common from what I’ve seen.

smt88 6y ago
So you take issue with condemnation of an entire group and then do it yourself immediately afterward? Saying engineers are bad at design is fine. Most people are bad at things they don't practice, and we know most engineers don't practice design. Saying UX/UI designers (two separate groups with totally different backgrounds) are bad at design is maligning an entire field and suggesting a team hierarchy where engineers make all decisions.
- ylyn 6y ago
  That's not what the parent said at all.
  - smt88 6y ago
    What is "not what the parent said"? And why is your interpretation different? The parent said it is more common for engineers to be good at UI design than for UX/UI designers to be good at it. The last two sentences say it plainly.
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  You're using a very particular definition of "design". Let's take the typical interface of unix tools (default to outputting to stdout, default to inputting over stdin). Brian Kernighan talked about his they retrofitted all tools to use this model once they invented pipes. Is it not UX, is it not design? Why does design have to be graphical, and why does "UX/UI designers" get to say what it is? How can a tool even exist without an interface? And if a tool is used, surely it has a user ;) > most engineers don't practice design Citation needed.
  - smt88 6y ago
    > You're using a very particular definition of "design" No, I'm using a common definition of it. I'm using the same one that the person I responded to was using, which is the type of design for which people hire UX/UI designers. People don't hire UX/UI designers to design CLIs. Maybe they should, but they don't. Is it UX and UI? Sure. But we're talking about an industry term at this point, not 100% of everything that is designable. > Why does design have to be graphical, and why does "UX/UI designers" get to say what it is? I honestly don't know who or what you're arguing against right now. This seems totally tangential to the comment I replied to. Companies hire engineers to write code and designers to create GUIs. Those are the domains we're talking about. I don't disagree with you philosophically at all. > > most engineers don't practice design My meaning was unclear here. I meant that most engineers don't study and repeatedly practice design, meaning that they don't have feedback loops with their designs. The goal is releasing their code, not building their skill at design. Designers, on the other hand, will create many iterations of something with feedback along the way, sometimes in an academic setting. Even setting that aside, most engineers work at large corporations where design is a bureaucratic process that engineers aren't expected to change. They just write the code. > Citation needed. No, it's not. First of all, I've in the software industry for 20 years, so I'm going to lean on first-hand experience here. Second, the burden of proof is on the person making the more uncommon claim. The inverse of "most software engineers don't practice design" is "most software engineers do practice design," and the latter would be more surprising to the typical person. Unless, as mentioned above, you expand the meaning of "design" far beyond what the original thread was about, which was web UI design.

jamescostian 6y ago

I, on the other hand, dislike this design. Consider how many devs use Apple products - proprietary products that come in a walled garden, and that in many ways go against developers. A good amount of it comes down to aesthetics. Were Sourcehut to have, say, a "2020 theme" or something, that would help lots of those devs appreciate it more. Developers are using macOS despite it continually removing features from developers, and are even in some cases defending Apple's decisions. I believe that this design actively harms the adoption of Sourcehut. There are definitely other things Sourcehut should do if they want more of GitHub's and GitLab's marketshare, changing their UI (or adding an alternative UI) is an important part of that process.

ddevault 6y ago
Design is in the eye of the beholder - many users find SourceHut's UI beautiful and have praised it as such. Beauty is also more than just a pretty face - SourceHut is an engineering tool, and if it elegantly and efficiently organizes information for engineers to use, that can be more important and more beautiful than an eye-catching design. In fact, an eye-catching design can often degrade the experience of engineering tools, and eye-catching elements - such as colorful buttons - are carefully and deliberately controlled for in the design of sr.ht. It optimizes getting you the information you need or helping you complete the task you came here for as efficiently as possible. SourceHut has been designed deliberately and for a specific purpose. The simplicitly of its appearance is a feature.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  More here: https://drewdevault.com/2019/03/04/sourcehut-design.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/03/04/sourcehut-design.html
- jamescostian 6y ago
  I did not downvote you. I think it's wonderful that people love the UI of SourceHut. You've put a lot of effort in and made a product that many people love, and that is fantastic and a hell of a lot more than I can say for myself. Seriously, congrats on all you've accomplished, and thank you for all you've done for the open source community, it's quite a lot and very deserving of appreciation But my point is about mass-adoption. What I personally think of the UI isn't very important - as you say, "Design is in the eye of the beholder". But I would argue that if GitHub were to release a redesign identical to SourceHut in 2020, we'd see the largest exodus of GitHub users (for personal projects at least) ever - far, far, FAR more than any other time GitHub has changed their UI. You can argue that GitHub and GitLab have UI that degrades a developer's experience. You can argue that their designs are FADs, and even that eventually they might change their design to be more similar to your's. And all of those arguments may be right. But right now, I'd argue that this design hurts mass adoption, and even though what design language is "in style" is completely a FAD, following the FAD does help adoption, and entire companies (e.g. fast-fashion like H&M) make tons of profit on FADs (even when they do horrible things - like how fast fashion is bad for the environment, some of GitHub's actions are bad for open source, the Apple example, etc). I think your numbers are great evidence that you will get users with your current design, and I think that were you to release a GitHub clone (design-wise), you'd lose most of your users and would still struggle to gain non-GitHub users. I don't think there's a way to satisfy both camps of users, but perhaps a "colorful" and "minimal" theme may help? This is not as important as other things you are doing such as the things mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25103662 but I do think it would help with mass-adoption (which may even be a non-goal, or may be far less important than other goals - that's totally fine too, I'm not trying to judge you or say you're completely wrong, just pointing out something which I feel is missed in these design discussions on HN).