For a long while, platforms have been making tons of usually pointless, often harmful changes to their UI. Reddit & Discord provide tons of examples.

  • Reddit’s video player changes have been an issue for as old as time.
  • Discord has forced their new mobile UI, which I absolutely despise.
  • Reddit’s new logo looks uncanny. (I wouldn’t say the 3D character in general looks awful, and a couple of the expressions are honestly quite cute, but what they went with just doesn’t look good).
  • A while back, Discord made messages with multiple images display them in this stupid grid layout that resizes & crops them to death.

And that’s not mentioning all of the other changes that don’t seem to actually accomplish any purpose.

So, why do you think they do this? Is there some good reason to it that I’m missing? Is it strategic business stuff? My personal theory is that they need to have the UI designers doing something and so roll out pointless changes to justify paying them.

  • rushEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    I think the point is more that those which are fine with UI changes will not go to their nearest community to tell everyone about it. Rage is a much better motivator for things like that, see the “simplification trend rage” where everyone is going mad about Simple Logos despite many of the same companies having had simple logos in the past before Skeumorphism was a design trend.