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it's a shame substack continues to get more and more visually bloated. I remember when it first launched, thinking the site looked really clean and simple. i fi
by alphabet9000 4y ago
it's a shame substack continues to get more and more visually bloated. I remember when it first launched, thinking the site looked really clean and simple. i figured it was only a matter of time before the simplicity went away, and it became more like Medium.com (in a bad way). it seems like there is a very predictable model for how a site like this devolves:
- it starts ultra clean, posts have a title and body, maybe (reluctantly) a share link appears somewhere on the page .
- then "modern" looking custom web fonts are added, making elements on the page flicker/move around when the page opens.
- then the entire site adds a sticky header that animates as you scroll up and down.
- then the site is rewritten using some client-side rendering framework that requires javascript to run 'correctly'.
- then a popup modal is added to every single page asking you to subscribe or sign in.
(substack is currently here)
- then "reading time indicators" (e.g. "5 min read") are added to the top of every story
- then "related" stories are inter-spliced throughout the text of the story.
- then it becomes hard or impossible to even find the actual content of the story, as the entire site is engulfed in "related" content
- berkle4455 4y agohey those product managers gotta earn their equally bloated compensation packages.
- passwordoops 4y agoPM here, and though I've only worked on delivering one web app, I was forced to follow this model because "we have a UX designer for a reason". At some point the future vision of the UI was getting so unnecessarily bloated, our UX genius independently came up with Clippy, but if he were a fox... Luckily we were sold and I got a new job because I knew I was gonna lose that fight
- AlbertCory 4y agoThe PMs, and the senior engineers. "Leave well enough alone" is never a winning pitch. We see this phenomenon literally everywhere. The Patent and Trademark Office just replaced their perfectly usable Search page with something vastly more complicated, and incomprehensible at first glance. When I was researching my article about Twitter and firing all those engineers, I looked at the R&D spending for Proctor & Gamble and other consumer products companies. It's usually 1-2% of revenue. They spend their money on marketing, where it belongs when your product is mature.
- BurningFrog 4y agoYou may be right, but percent of revenue is a terrible measure.
- AlbertCory 4y agoWhat do you think is better?
- BurningFrog 4y agoNot sure what the economists call it, but if a business spends $8M producing goods they sell for $10M, the money they can potentially spend on research is $2M, not $10M (the revenue).
- AlbertCory 4y agoI was going to answer this, but too many accounting questions: Is the $8M "cost of goods sold", i.e. variable costs, or does it include the fixed costs (buildings, salaries, utilities, etc.)
- BurningFrog 4y agoYeah, there is a lot of detail, and I don't have a perfect formula. My point was that OP equated revenue with profit, which is clearly and substantially wrong.
- AlbertCory 4y agoOP was me, wasn't it? I said "It's usually 1-2% of revenue."
- BurningFrog 4y agoOh, I didn't realize you're OP :) Yeah, I read that as "of all the money they could spend these greedy bastards only spend 1-2% on R&D", but in reality their "disposable income" is much less the revenue. Did I miss your point in some way?
- Banditoz 4y agoHopefully an alternative frontend project pops up for it soon.
- blowski 4y agoYou missed out the bullet point where someone posts a variation of this comment on Hacker News.
- sofixa 4y ago> then "reading time indicators" (e.g. "5 min read") are added to the top of every story Many CMSes and static site generators include this and it's genuinely useful (it matters if an article is a short read or something that needs to be saved for later because it requires 30 minutes reading). Is it really "bloat"?
- syntheticcorp 4y agoBrowsers already include this feature in a coarse grained (but utterly sufficient) manner in the form of a scroll bar.
- sofixa 4y agoThe scroll bar that some OSes hide and that cannot know if there's a massive picture or a map or 50 of them? Not nearly the same thing.