Traditional multi-page apps/sites are inherently better suited to serving content, especially textual content. SPAs only ever make sense for true "apps", which a blog is not.
Yes. And some quantity of designers and implementers have overgeneralized from "this is useful on high interactivity sites" to "this is wonderful; we should do it everywhere". Also, the frameworks they use, not wishing to reinvent the wheel, probably only offer one way to do things now - that being SPA. Because they don't want to maintain 2 ways of doing things either.
The other "benefit" of SPA, as well as the slow load times, is the execrable performance on older computers. If they work at all, that is; they have a bad habit of being dependent on having the latest and greatest version of the browser - or worse yet, require something that not all up to date browsers support at all.
One other thing to consider is that, from the corporate dev's point of view, the site they're working on could become high-interactivity at any time. Being "agile" means being ready for new requirements, so it's easy to see why teams might be tempted to just go SPA from the start, even if the product is, at least for now, just a blog.
I agree mobile is key, and I have the opposite set of preferences. I like reading more on desktop and I preferred the old layout.
I am increasingly frustrated by the "mobile first" design paradigm taking over the web. Because it often means "mobile first ... desktop can just use mobile too". The desktop version of substack is not different at all from the mobile version.
I almost only read on mobile and I don't really care about the design change. Both SSC and ACX work and look fine on mobile (as least as of 2016). What does annoy me is the impermanence of the comments on Substack. If I leave the page open on the comments and come back the next day it takes forever to load and it almost never jumps to the place where I left off. This was not a problem with WordPress.
Yes this is my **major** complaint about substack vs WordPress. The load time is longer and that small friction shows up a lot. Impermanent collapsed/ expanded comments is another issue but the bigger one for me in comment load time.
We need some kind of intermediate server that just generates the HTML of the comment section (or a subthread) in the background and people can load that pre-rendered cached version easily.
Does Heroku-node let you do that? I've basically already written from scratch all the Javascript [1] to create a comment page from the Substack JSON so I just need a place to deploy it.
*EDIT* It could technically be pre-built on your local machine in the background. I'm concerned about burning a lot of cycles locally that are never used because that's part of what the Substack UI does badly but I could come up with a decent compromise.
I can see the results of just 2.5 games at a time, but the single column, lots of space, large logos/characters probably makes it easy to scroll on mobile.
Look at the old version. I can see 8 games at once in 2 columns:
So, forgetting for a minute that I wasn't going to be able to see your point because im on my phone, I clicked through to the current MLB site and thought "that's odd, I can see 7 games without even scrolling down." Then I remembered and turned on Desktop View. "Odd, now I can see even more games." This was followed by another forehead slap and me realizing to turn my phone from portrait to landscape. "There it is!" It really is terrible...
Hearing this from someone other than myself feels validating -- although I would phrase it less as "increasingly frustrated" and more as "psychotic rage that can only be ameliorated by taking the last five years of web designers, loading them on a spaceship, and lauching it into the sun." Incoming rant warning.
It's not just the SSC->Substack thing. Web design in general has gotten actively hostile to readability, and I blame a lot of that on mobile. Part of it is the form-factor difference. On a PC, vertical space is priceless and horizontal is cheap -- yet narrow designs with huge fonts, wide line spacing, and extra-tall images have become so prevalent that I feel like I need to override the CSS on every other site I touch. And there are sticky headers everywhere. Whoever invented that abortion of a misfeature is in dire need of a thermite suppository. *There are miles of empty space along the side of the page, use *that* instead of trying to forcibly occupy ~10% of my actual usable space.* Jackass.
All of those -- and there's a much longer list than that -- are things that only make even *bad* sense on mobile, with its flipped aspect ratio. Mobile-only is the modern Web's version of "this site designed for Internet Explorer". Everyone who matters is on a phone; everyone else can go take a long walk off a short pier.
The second problem is that everything wants to be an app, including Substack. So you get sites reinventing, overriding, or otherwise disrupting standard browser features with javascript garbage, constructed in such a way that the now-in-name-only 'website' breaks immediately if you turn it off. Substack *crawls* by comparison to SSC. Thankfully, it only partially breaks in the absence of JS -- comments disappear -- but like many sites, it makes a point of nagging you to turn the shithose back on. No. I turned javascript off for a reason. Whining about it is strong evidence that *you are the reason*. If I trusted you not to defecate on my experience the moment I took your suggestion, it wouldn't be off.
....so yeah. It's not that SSC was a paragon of good design, and it's not about the minimalist look; the look-and-feel isn't the issue. I preferred SSC because Substack is a web application emulating a phone app emulating a browser for the bog-simple, 1990s task of *displaying a post and any responses to it.*
Things like NoScript, uBlock Origin, Stylus, and uMatrix are increasingly non-optional. Modern web design is an act of war on the user. If one would still participate, the browser is a trench that requires defending.
Yes, all true. My speculation is that if we compare Web programming to Detroit we are in the 1970s chrome & tailfins era -- everyone competes to deliver some new random funky feature yearly -- New in the '74 Olds! Power doorlocks! -- and assorted chromed flash, and we are awaiting the equivalent of Toyota, the economical option that just runs and runs, to arrive on the scene and cause a great reset.
It's strange that blog comments, a thing that was perfected in the 90s by CmdTaco fresh out of college, to run on computers with 10^-5 the power of modern machines, are still clunky and occasionally broken here despite the enormous wages I am sure Substack pays its JS programmers. In their defense, it wouldn't surprise me if they aren't given much liberty to focus on plain reliability and speed, because someone in the front office wants them to drop everything and add some chrome and a tailfin or two.
> blog comments, a thing that was perfected in the 90s by CmdTaco fresh out of college, to run on computers with 10^-5 the power of modern machines, are still clunky and occasionally broken here despite the enormous wages I am sure Substack pays its JS programmers
Those enormous wages are part of the problem, because they contribute to the alienation of the software-developing class from the technological proletariat.
Most of my work involves connecting to various servers remotely, and the speed of the box that my keyboard and screen are physically connected to doesn't matter at all, so a six-year-old laptop that wasn't top the line even when it was new serves me just fine.
But some websites take more than a minute of clunky loading animations to show up on that machine, and I used to wonder how anyone could put up with that. Until I saw a colleague open it on her beefy workstation and it rendered basically instantly.
In the screenshot, Vladimir compared using Substack to wading through water. Now imagine Substack employees having to wade through that same water to get anything done. They wouldn't be able to move fast enough, but still break things. And if highly-paid employees are slowed down, their enormous wages are wasted money for the company. So they get speedboats, and barely even notice that the streets are flooded and children are drowning.
Anyways, I don't care much about the layout, because I just read the RSS feed, which is its own kind of alienation, I guess.
I'm not convinced the difference in processing power has that much to do with it. Something, maybe, but "don't actively break the user's UI" is not a concept that should have much to do with site performance.
Motherfucking Website and Better Motherfucking Website should be required reading for all web designers.
I've experienced too many times where lack of performance becomes no performance. The UI was written with the implicit (and incorrect) expectation that an operation always completes in a certain amount of time -- which it does, on developer boxes!
Run on a normal machine, those assumptions stop working, a call fails somewhere and the error condition breaks the app until it's restarted.
I love this comment. Is there some kind of Toyota cult we can join to help summon the Eternal One? I will pull or not pull Andon Cords all day if it will get us closer to clean website design.
> And there are sticky headers everywhere. Whoever invented that abortion of a misfeature is in dire need of a thermite suppository.
It gets much worse. A lot of sites use a header that vanishes when you scroll down and comes back when you scroll up! This is an abomination; it makes it nearly impossible to position particular text at the top of the viewing window, which is what I want to do.
Ugh, yes. The original perpetrator of *that* offensive pessimization should be forced to play a version of transparent Newcombs' where both boxes contain tigers.
Thankfully I don't see that on Substack, but it's possible my array of browser armor is stopping it. When that fails, I have a bookmarklet set up to nuke sticky headers manually. I would link it, but I can't figure out how to do links in ACX comments, and Google is not enlightening me.
I just did a little experiment on google-chrome: if you edit the chrome binary to change the last two occurrences of the words "sticky" and "fixed" to "stciky" and "fxied", the reappearing and floating toolbars on google, substack, and a few others that I've tried so far, all disappear, while still appearing at their proper positions at the top of the actual page.
I'm sure this will break things somewhere, but I'm not sure I care enough; or rather, I prefer it enough that I'm quite happy to maintain a second separate installation and profile for such things.
I work in web development and perhaps I would find it more rage inducing if my job didn't require me to work with the people you want to launch into the Sun.
I can rant for days about all the shitty ideas web designers come up with. I had to pick my battles though, and substack does at least avoid the one thing I will fight to the death about: modals (or website sanctioned popups for those who don't know the term).
For some reason designers love modals on desktop. But because things had to work on mobile, that modal just becomes a full screen modal. Which makes it look no different than navigating to another page. Sometimes designers even want full screen modals on desktop (WTF!).
Modals of course break all web navigation expectations, because if you click the 'back' button on the browser you aren't going 'back' from the modal, you are going 'back' from the base page. I tell them this, and EVERY TIME they say 'oh well it will be fine they can just click the X to close the modal'. And EVERY TIME once it gets into the hands of users they use the back button like they expect to on nearly all web pages, and then a bug gets opened to "fix the back button on this page".
So then I have to write some shitty javascript to subvert and break basic web navigation, so that when this stupid modal is open and a user clicks the back button it doesn't go back in the browser it just closes the dumb modal.
To top it all off I'm pretty sure that the modal paradigm is so popular because its the only way for designers to actually design a clean page from scratch rather than dealing with the accumulated crap from sidebars, headers, and notifications.
Modals are one of the longer-list items that didn't make it into the rant. They go in the same bucket with sticky headers as unforgivable atrocities. I nuke them on sight. And javascript subverting web navigation is one of the reasons I keep it off by default.
Both are functionally attempts at a hostile takeover of my browser. I think that might be the root conflict in the war -- it's a war for control of my interface in the same sense that modern advertising is a war for control of my attention. Individual actors can improve the situation slightly by providing an API (which substack, I note, does not), but that is of limited use when the API is provider-specific. It potentially allows others to write a non-terrible client, but few are willing to do that if it will only work against a single site.
I blame Apple for modals. I seem to recall they were a (then strange) feature of Apple's early OS UI, different from everybody else, and they were freaking proud of it. I guess the logic was that these ephemeral messages could be displayed, dealt with, and dismissed without messing up the Zen garden elegance of their windowing system. Or maybe they just loved popping open little windows because they could. Who knows? My first exposure to a windowing OS was X, and X didn't encourage these little mushroom-like monstrosities -- that's why you kept a console window open, to collect in one place anything the kernel had to say to you outside of an application. So they still annoy me. Having them within an application (or, worse, website) is even dumber. It tells me you can't be bothered to design a UI which allows the user some routine and intuitive way of knowing your (the application's) status at a glance. . It's like traffic engineers designing stop lights that spring out of the street from randomly placed manholes right into the middle of traffic, whenever conditions suggest some kind of traffic flow control is advisable.
At least Substack isn't at the point of https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ (yet?), but SSC > ACX on Substack because of web bloat. Trying to load ACX on a weak LTE or Wi-Fi connection is awful. Less "modern web" (/JS) bloat on SSC makes the experience much faster, and much better.
The problem isn't what SSC does better. It's what Substack (and most of the "modern web") is doing worse.
That makes a lot of sense. I prefer to respond as well as read, and I never voluntarily produce text on mobile, unless it's as short as a text message or tweet, e.g. "running late, sorry".
So anything that improves mobile at a cost of dis-improving desktop is pure dis-improvement to me.
I find that the substack page lags and glitches terribly when reading the long open threads on mobile. Which is a very difficult thing to do with rendering plain text on a modern device, and implies they are doing something insanely inefficient.
I have the same problem. Long comment threads are basically unreadable and I therefore ignore the open threads, despite previously being a frequent open thread user on the old SSC.
There's so much javascript junk on substack (or any site designed after 2010) that I had to disable javascript to be able to read it on my (very old) phone. I didn't install the app because $£#% apps.
The fact that I can even see some lag on a text+img website on my gaming PC tells me that buying a more expensive phone will not solve the problem.
I can't really add much to this, but it gives me an opportunity to link to one of James Mickens' old USENIX posts, so that is a positive contribution to the world.
Read it through Feedly, or on an iOS device via Safari reader. I have no problems with it on mobile.
The big problem w/ substack is that it provides lousy mechanisms for completion it’s, or anyone who, for whatever reason, wants to read stuff within a particular date range. A semi-endless scrolling feed, anchored at “now”, and with no quick way to jump large distances or to a particular date, is not an “Archive” regardless of what substack marketing thinks!
I have experienced this myself over 15 years of blogging. And honestly - people always just like the band's old shit, the old sound. It's not more complicated than that.
I suspect that's right for the cosmetic aspects. But there are functional differences too, each of which seems small, but all of which are relevant. (Links to posts, links to comments, browsable archive, fully-loaded comments rather than appear-as-you-scroll, etc.)
None of those things seem small. Links to comments especially are important.
A related issue is that when you have a page open for a long time (like to read through lots of long comments) and then page reloads or the browser closes and opens again, it loses your place because the comments are not all expanded.
I guess the problem is that it’s a blogging platform that is designed as though it were a social media platform. For social media, content is treated as largely ephemeral, so that people aren’t looking for a full chronological history of it, but it is instead delivered by algorithm.
Right, I think that's a big part of the problem: Substack's design is modeled on sites like Facebook whose objective is to be maximally addictive, not for thoughts of enduring intellectual value, nor to make it easy to navigate complex information spaces. Systems that do a better job of these (IMHO more worthwhile) objectives include IDEs, paper books, Wikipedia, Jupyter, legal briefs (just check out the table of contents of any Supreme Court amicus brief!), and Excel.
The archive page still sucks. Should give me columns, so I can just fullscreen on 4k and get max information density.
Not that I have ever seen that anywhere ever, but it's just how you'd organize a list with hundreds to thousands of entires, if you actually care about helping people find things as fast as possible.
Interesting! For those who aren't going to click the link: eBay users revolted when the company changed the background of some pages from yellow (which, seriously?) to white. So eBay changed the color back to yellow, and then slowly faded the yellow over a period of months. This time, no one complained.
Yeah, I feel WordPress nostalgia. Reminds me of when the MR-centered blogosphere was a lively, rude Conversation, when Robin Hanson linked to PUA blogs, when Mencius Moldbug still wore a cape.
Yeah, I think it's mostly this, along with response bias on the survey. Everyone who has ever redesigned a website knows that touching a single pixel is going to elicit a howling response from a very vocal minority. And that minority is going to be extremely eager to register their unhappiness in a survey.
Personally, I think the Substack site looks better. But my main take is...shrug.
Sure, I wouldn't expect 100% of people to prefer the new site if going in blind. The truth is, both designs are pretty vanilla. How strong is your preference?
Fwiw, the old site pretty clearly violates a bunch of basic typesetting and usability principles. The contrast between font and background is often too low. The use of white space and line spacing is inconsistent. It mixes serif and san-serif fonts in a way that I find a bit jarring, although clearly that is delving into the territory of personal preference. The column seems too wide for ideal readability. More than anything else, it's really dated looking, with the embossed font on the blog roll, etc.
I'm not suggesting this proves the new site is better, but Scott is certainly right when he says that the old one is slapdash and amateurish and the new one has benefited from some basic professional attention to detail. Ultimately, they are both columns of text on a page, the differences just aren't all that great, and it is very common for people to reflexively oppose changes in web design for reasons that are somewhat mysterious to me.
Eh, that's a bit simplistic. I agree, design trends are often driven by the boredom of designers seeking novelty, with little or no regard for the value to the consumers of design. On the other hand, web standards and capabilities have evolved radically over the past twenty years and continue to do so. Devices used to access the internet have evolved radically. Also, users themselves have evolved as they become accustomed to different technologies and UI affordances. Whatever its charms, Geocities doesn't cut it today.
Also, aesthetics do matter on the margin. The embossed fonts on the old SSC blog roll surely aren't really hurting anyone, but they are dated and kind of ugly and changing them also doesn't hurt anyone.
So, sure, change for the sake of change alone shouldn't be done heedlessly or on a whim, but the entire concept of something being outdated is hardly invalid.
I think the original claim is that it doesn't make sense to criticize something as aesthetically "outdated" if it functions as well as something newer. Do you have a better response to "what's wrong with the fonts being dated" than "but they *are* dated"?
>"[on the old site]... The contrast between font and background is often too low."
Comparing the screenshots of the old versions and the current version as displayed, I think the opposite, for the main article text.
I found a word which is present in this article, and the first screenshot ("thought"), made cropped bitmaps and compared them zoomed in. The bars on the 't's and the top of the 'g' are blurry in the substack article font, while all strokes are evenly dark on the SSC article font.
This is the case if you compare other letter pairs individually - on ASX the lower case 'e' is especially bad, the central line being almost invisible; it's practically a 'c'!
Overall this makes the text look a bit faint, even though it's larger and darker in places.
To be clear, I can read both without too much trouble, but the old site text is definitely easier to read.
The main article text is black on white in both cases, which is the highest possible contrast.
I was talking about the blue text on gray in the blog roll, the white text on light blue in the header, and the gray text on gray in the byline. I haven't run them through a contrast checker, but I have no doubt they will fail standard accessibility guidelines, probably by a lot.
I'm not sure exactly what you are looking at, but you seem to be zooming in on some of the font anti-aliasing. This isn't really a valid thing to do -- most fonts are vectors that are designed to scale up and down infinitely. Converting them to bitmaps destroys this ability, and so of course they will look terrible when blown up.
The readability of a body of text is not determined solely by contrast between background and a solid block of the text colour. My point is that the font affects this, and therefore the font used for body text is very important to the overall impression you get of a primarily text-based website.
I don't particularly care about the header; in everyday use its legibility is practically irrelevant. But since you bring it up I think both the SSC headers are perfectly readable, and more recognisable as others have said.
The reason I was enlarging images to look at the pixels was to study why the font substack uses is less legible at the size it's displayed at on a monitor. I think this is entirely valid, it reveals that some of the strokes are anti-aliased into a light grey smear. The fact that a font could be rendered nicely at a much higher resolution is irrelevant - what matters is what is used when you read the article.
I thought I'd make a demonstration image, which I've put on a free image hosting website: https://ibb.co/GQTcpfg
If you look at this, you can see that for the ACX font, while there are some dark areas, many parts of the letters are much lighter. The entire central stroke of the 'e' is two pixels tall, both a rather light grey. The lighter greys are where it's effectively trying to draw a very thin line, so presumably there the glyph has a line precisely placed along the edge of two rows. Rather unfortunate. At a different point size, that may not be an issue, but perhaps some other stroke would be as bad.
Presumably the SSC font was designed to avoid this problem at this size.
I guess I should say that I couldn't rule out that Scott's computer was just using a better rendering algorithm, but I don't think it's that - the comment text here looks fine, so it's just that font.
I feel like a really big part of it is just the colors. I like the pleasing dark blue banner and darker gray sides of the old website. Now everything is too pale.
It is certainly nice to anchor to a color. I still internally map SlateStarCodex to that particular shade of blue, and Unsong to yellow. It feels pleasant and familiar to see the color where it should be.
I think what I'm feeling is lack of customization and identity -- Gwern's site still feels like its own thing, even though it's black and white.
Agreed on this. As nice as substack is in a lot of ways (like being readable, having good RSS feeds, etc), it feels sterile. Especially because most newsletters default to the black-on-white or the white-on-black. The exception being Free Black Thought that uses white-on-brown.
Edges and frames, yes. It's more comfortable to walk through Paris, with its multi-story buildings crowding the street than it is to walk on the sidewalk next to a US strip-mall with an acre of parking lot between you and the nearest building.
Strange juxtaposition. Anyway I'm more disheartened by the acres of vacant compacted dirt with odd sprouts of brittle yellow grass beyond a warped and rusty chain link fence across the street from the strip mall than I am by the parking lot itself, shattered and pale though it may be. I've been in LA enough, it's a sprawling nightmare of strip after strip of urban decay gradually dissolving in the possession of a passive, lazy, incompetent population. But yeah a prefer a nice cozy log cabin over the LA version of freedom. I do love my freedoms though.
I did a test and printed this post to a pdf, and viewed it in two page view. Was much nicer to read, since I had more info available in single glance. Nicer to skim.
Their design isn't worse than your old layout. If they pushed SSC-style layout to every website, everyone would hate it.
It's like the Hugo and Jekyll custom academic themes everyone is capitulating to (yay capitulation!). The first time you see them, they look nice. Once you see them for the 10,000th time, they look incredibly boring and tiresome and you wish people were still designing their own websites.
If I ran a salad restaurant, I probably would get a lot of salad fans. If I switched to hamburgers, a lot of my fans would be angry and like the restaurant less. This isn't because of nostalgia, it's just because a salad restaurant probably attracts lots of salad-lovers.
I don't know if relevant as quite subjective, but I would usually not comment/vote and prefer substack to the old website. Maybe silent majority likes it more?
That said I do mainly read posts through the email newsletter so...
Also I don't really read anything else on substack so no way for me to be sick of it
Design-wise I think it's not much different, but on the old site I was never able to comment for some reason. I tried a few times but the comments just never appeared and at some point I gave up trying to figure out why. The Substack reset let me express my views for the first time.
There are a number of people, myself included, who believe that the user created, original and homegrown, flashy and weird and geocities-esque websites of the web 1.0 era were strictly better than the modern flat and minimalist, muted colors, tons of javascript, everything-looks-the-same websites of the web 2.0 era. I'll take https://squeedge.neocities.org/ over other websites any day of the week.
Also, in terms of functionality, the thread system of SSC was objectively better than here. It notified you about new posts in a easy and comprehensive manor, you could jump straight to them, and there were a few other nice QOL things.
Agreed - I think "good design" is actually worse than "bad design". It's like a house that's too clean - we usually think "clean" is better than "dirty", but if a house is too clean, it feels offputtingly sterile, and all the things you want to *use* are hidden away in cupboards and closets and drawers.
A smidgen of mess helps make a house feel like a home; a smidgen of "bad design" helps a blog or forum feel like a community.
"Natural organically-evolved cities tend to be densely-packed mixtures of dark alleys, tiny shops, and overcrowded streets. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: an evenly-spaced rectangular grid of identical giant Brutalist apartment buildings separated by wide boulevards, with everything separated into carefully-zoned districts. Yet for some reason, whenever these new rational cities were built, people hated them and did everything they could to move out into more organic suburbs. And again, for some reason the urban planners got promoted, became famous, and spread their destructive techniques around the world."
(The 'for some reason' is legibility.)
Quoting James Scott on Brasilia's lack of street corners in "Seeing Like a State":
"Most of those who have moved to Brasilia from other cities are amazed to discover “that it is a city without crowds.” People complain that Brasilia lacks the bustle of street life, that it has none of the busy street corners and long stretches of storefront facades that animate a sidewalk for pedestrians. For them, it is almost as if the founders of Brasilia, rather than having planned a city, have actually planned to prevent a city. The most common way they put it is to say that Brasilia “lacks street corners,”by which they mean that it lacks the complex intersections of dense neighborhoods comprising residences and public cafes and restaurants with places for leisure, work, and shopping.
While Brasilia provides well for some human needs, the functional separation of work from residence and of both from commerce and entertainment, the great voids between superquadra, and a road system devoted exclusively to motorized traffic make the disappearance of the street corner a foregone conclusion. The plan did eliminate traffic jams; it also eliminated the welcome and familiar pedestrian jams that one of Holston’s informants called “the point of social conviviality"
Indeed, I think "Seeing like a state" is more relevant here than "Whither Tartaria".
Back when every amateur blogger built their own website in Wordpress or even in raw handwritten HTML, those websites had *personality*, warts and all. But Substack is designed for scalability, which is the Internet version of what SLAS calls legibility.
Substack isn't a state, but Substack together with the other big tech platforms like Facebook and Reddit may as well be considered a state government. And they don't want quirky little street corners, they want evenly-spaced rectangular grids that are easy to administer centrally.
In addition, just to add my voice to everybody else: yes, over-use of Javascript sucks and reduces my six-core 3500MHz desktop PC to something that feels more sluggish and glitchy than the software I ran on my single-core 7.2MHz Amiga in 1985. It's amazing that "just put all the text on a single page so that searching with Ctrl-F works as it should" is apparently a complicated technology nowadays, when the simplest website built by a teenager in 1995 who just learned what HTML is, would *do that automatically without needing to do anything special to enable it*.
Yes. Here's the problem with web designers. They have to use the tools/features that look best on their resume, not the tools/features that give the best customer experience.
Blame web designers less (they're still at fault) and blame the corporations and community that releases framework after framework and fashion after fashion, and the hiring/HR who get glowy eyes when they see $SHINY_TECH on the applicant's CV. Web designers are just responding to incentives the mOvE-fAsT cult sets up.
Ah, this sounds to be the terminology for one of the main things I was thinking about!
Very on-point.
Traditional multi-page apps/sites are inherently better suited to serving content, especially textual content. SPAs only ever make sense for true "apps", which a blog is not.
Yes. And some quantity of designers and implementers have overgeneralized from "this is useful on high interactivity sites" to "this is wonderful; we should do it everywhere". Also, the frameworks they use, not wishing to reinvent the wheel, probably only offer one way to do things now - that being SPA. Because they don't want to maintain 2 ways of doing things either.
The other "benefit" of SPA, as well as the slow load times, is the execrable performance on older computers. If they work at all, that is; they have a bad habit of being dependent on having the latest and greatest version of the browser - or worse yet, require something that not all up to date browsers support at all.
One other thing to consider is that, from the corporate dev's point of view, the site they're working on could become high-interactivity at any time. Being "agile" means being ready for new requirements, so it's easy to see why teams might be tempted to just go SPA from the start, even if the product is, at least for now, just a blog.
This is actually something that substack lets you change.
Scott turned it on once, then back off again a few hours later. I absolutely hated that behavior. I gave me FOMO.
I think the key is mobile - I prefer to read on mobile and therefore highly prefer substack’s app vs. the old blog layout
I agree mobile is key, and I have the opposite set of preferences. I like reading more on desktop and I preferred the old layout.
I am increasingly frustrated by the "mobile first" design paradigm taking over the web. Because it often means "mobile first ... desktop can just use mobile too". The desktop version of substack is not different at all from the mobile version.
I almost only read on mobile and I don't really care about the design change. Both SSC and ACX work and look fine on mobile (as least as of 2016). What does annoy me is the impermanence of the comments on Substack. If I leave the page open on the comments and come back the next day it takes forever to load and it almost never jumps to the place where I left off. This was not a problem with WordPress.
Yes this is my **major** complaint about substack vs WordPress. The load time is longer and that small friction shows up a lot. Impermanent collapsed/ expanded comments is another issue but the bigger one for me in comment load time.
We need some kind of intermediate server that just generates the HTML of the comment section (or a subthread) in the background and people can load that pre-rendered cached version easily.
Does Heroku-node let you do that? I've basically already written from scratch all the Javascript [1] to create a comment page from the Substack JSON so I just need a place to deploy it.
*EDIT* It could technically be pre-built on your local machine in the background. I'm concerned about burning a lot of cycles locally that are never used because that's part of what the Substack UI does badly but I could come up with a decent compromise.
[1] https://github.com/EdwardScizorhands/ACX-simple/blob/main/src/new-ui.js I'm not claiming it's very clean
The worst part: deeply nested comment threads. At some level of nesting, you get the "read more" button.
You can't long-press and open in new tab, because apparently it's not a real link.
But opening in the current task is a disaster, because returning to the main page, everything is messed up:
The page takes up to 20 seconds to render.
Collapsed threads are no longer collapsed.
The scroll position is forgotten, or incorrectly restored.
I do not read deep discussions anymore, because I don't want to deal with this mess.
Feel the same way. This started happening 10 or so years ago I think.
For example, look at the current MLB scoreboard on espn:
https://www.espn.com/mlb/scoreboard
I can see the results of just 2.5 games at a time, but the single column, lots of space, large logos/characters probably makes it easy to scroll on mobile.
Look at the old version. I can see 8 games at once in 2 columns:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080829083105/http://scores.espn.go.com/mlb/scoreboard
So, forgetting for a minute that I wasn't going to be able to see your point because im on my phone, I clicked through to the current MLB site and thought "that's odd, I can see 7 games without even scrolling down." Then I remembered and turned on Desktop View. "Odd, now I can see even more games." This was followed by another forehead slap and me realizing to turn my phone from portrait to landscape. "There it is!" It really is terrible...
Hearing this from someone other than myself feels validating -- although I would phrase it less as "increasingly frustrated" and more as "psychotic rage that can only be ameliorated by taking the last five years of web designers, loading them on a spaceship, and lauching it into the sun." Incoming rant warning.
It's not just the SSC->Substack thing. Web design in general has gotten actively hostile to readability, and I blame a lot of that on mobile. Part of it is the form-factor difference. On a PC, vertical space is priceless and horizontal is cheap -- yet narrow designs with huge fonts, wide line spacing, and extra-tall images have become so prevalent that I feel like I need to override the CSS on every other site I touch. And there are sticky headers everywhere. Whoever invented that abortion of a misfeature is in dire need of a thermite suppository. *There are miles of empty space along the side of the page, use *that* instead of trying to forcibly occupy ~10% of my actual usable space.* Jackass.
All of those -- and there's a much longer list than that -- are things that only make even *bad* sense on mobile, with its flipped aspect ratio. Mobile-only is the modern Web's version of "this site designed for Internet Explorer". Everyone who matters is on a phone; everyone else can go take a long walk off a short pier.
The second problem is that everything wants to be an app, including Substack. So you get sites reinventing, overriding, or otherwise disrupting standard browser features with javascript garbage, constructed in such a way that the now-in-name-only 'website' breaks immediately if you turn it off. Substack *crawls* by comparison to SSC. Thankfully, it only partially breaks in the absence of JS -- comments disappear -- but like many sites, it makes a point of nagging you to turn the shithose back on. No. I turned javascript off for a reason. Whining about it is strong evidence that *you are the reason*. If I trusted you not to defecate on my experience the moment I took your suggestion, it wouldn't be off.
....so yeah. It's not that SSC was a paragon of good design, and it's not about the minimalist look; the look-and-feel isn't the issue. I preferred SSC because Substack is a web application emulating a phone app emulating a browser for the bog-simple, 1990s task of *displaying a post and any responses to it.*
Things like NoScript, uBlock Origin, Stylus, and uMatrix are increasingly non-optional. Modern web design is an act of war on the user. If one would still participate, the browser is a trench that requires defending.
Yes, all of this also.
Yes, all true. My speculation is that if we compare Web programming to Detroit we are in the 1970s chrome & tailfins era -- everyone competes to deliver some new random funky feature yearly -- New in the '74 Olds! Power doorlocks! -- and assorted chromed flash, and we are awaiting the equivalent of Toyota, the economical option that just runs and runs, to arrive on the scene and cause a great reset.
It's strange that blog comments, a thing that was perfected in the 90s by CmdTaco fresh out of college, to run on computers with 10^-5 the power of modern machines, are still clunky and occasionally broken here despite the enormous wages I am sure Substack pays its JS programmers. In their defense, it wouldn't surprise me if they aren't given much liberty to focus on plain reliability and speed, because someone in the front office wants them to drop everything and add some chrome and a tailfin or two.
> blog comments, a thing that was perfected in the 90s by CmdTaco fresh out of college, to run on computers with 10^-5 the power of modern machines, are still clunky and occasionally broken here despite the enormous wages I am sure Substack pays its JS programmers
Those enormous wages are part of the problem, because they contribute to the alienation of the software-developing class from the technological proletariat.
Most of my work involves connecting to various servers remotely, and the speed of the box that my keyboard and screen are physically connected to doesn't matter at all, so a six-year-old laptop that wasn't top the line even when it was new serves me just fine.
But some websites take more than a minute of clunky loading animations to show up on that machine, and I used to wonder how anyone could put up with that. Until I saw a colleague open it on her beefy workstation and it rendered basically instantly.
In the screenshot, Vladimir compared using Substack to wading through water. Now imagine Substack employees having to wade through that same water to get anything done. They wouldn't be able to move fast enough, but still break things. And if highly-paid employees are slowed down, their enormous wages are wasted money for the company. So they get speedboats, and barely even notice that the streets are flooded and children are drowning.
Anyways, I don't care much about the layout, because I just read the RSS feed, which is its own kind of alienation, I guess.
I had a shitty boss who was cheap and said giving us old PCs to code on made sure our software was efficient.
He *was* cheap and shitty. But on that issue, he was right. We fixed performance issues immediately because we couldn't use our software without it.
My fantasy is that every non-AAA-Game developer is forced to develop on a decade old machine.
I'm not convinced the difference in processing power has that much to do with it. Something, maybe, but "don't actively break the user's UI" is not a concept that should have much to do with site performance.
Motherfucking Website and Better Motherfucking Website should be required reading for all web designers.
I've experienced too many times where lack of performance becomes no performance. The UI was written with the implicit (and incorrect) expectation that an operation always completes in a certain amount of time -- which it does, on developer boxes!
Run on a normal machine, those assumptions stop working, a call fails somewhere and the error condition breaks the app until it's restarted.
What do you use to read the RSS feed?
Thunderbird.
I love this comment. Is there some kind of Toyota cult we can join to help summon the Eternal One? I will pull or not pull Andon Cords all day if it will get us closer to clean website design.
> And there are sticky headers everywhere. Whoever invented that abortion of a misfeature is in dire need of a thermite suppository.
It gets much worse. A lot of sites use a header that vanishes when you scroll down and comes back when you scroll up! This is an abomination; it makes it nearly impossible to position particular text at the top of the viewing window, which is what I want to do.
A lot of sites, including this one.
Ugh, yes. The original perpetrator of *that* offensive pessimization should be forced to play a version of transparent Newcombs' where both boxes contain tigers.
Thankfully I don't see that on Substack, but it's possible my array of browser armor is stopping it. When that fails, I have a bookmarklet set up to nuke sticky headers manually. I would link it, but I can't figure out how to do links in ACX comments, and Google is not enlightening me.
Yes! End this abomination now.
I just did a little experiment on google-chrome: if you edit the chrome binary to change the last two occurrences of the words "sticky" and "fixed" to "stciky" and "fxied", the reappearing and floating toolbars on google, substack, and a few others that I've tried so far, all disappear, while still appearing at their proper positions at the top of the actual page.
I'm sure this will break things somewhere, but I'm not sure I care enough; or rather, I prefer it enough that I'm quite happy to maintain a second separate installation and profile for such things.
Virgin script blocker vs chad binary modifier.
I work in web development and perhaps I would find it more rage inducing if my job didn't require me to work with the people you want to launch into the Sun.
I can rant for days about all the shitty ideas web designers come up with. I had to pick my battles though, and substack does at least avoid the one thing I will fight to the death about: modals (or website sanctioned popups for those who don't know the term).
For some reason designers love modals on desktop. But because things had to work on mobile, that modal just becomes a full screen modal. Which makes it look no different than navigating to another page. Sometimes designers even want full screen modals on desktop (WTF!).
Modals of course break all web navigation expectations, because if you click the 'back' button on the browser you aren't going 'back' from the modal, you are going 'back' from the base page. I tell them this, and EVERY TIME they say 'oh well it will be fine they can just click the X to close the modal'. And EVERY TIME once it gets into the hands of users they use the back button like they expect to on nearly all web pages, and then a bug gets opened to "fix the back button on this page".
So then I have to write some shitty javascript to subvert and break basic web navigation, so that when this stupid modal is open and a user clicks the back button it doesn't go back in the browser it just closes the dumb modal.
To top it all off I'm pretty sure that the modal paradigm is so popular because its the only way for designers to actually design a clean page from scratch rather than dealing with the accumulated crap from sidebars, headers, and notifications.
Modals are one of the longer-list items that didn't make it into the rant. They go in the same bucket with sticky headers as unforgivable atrocities. I nuke them on sight. And javascript subverting web navigation is one of the reasons I keep it off by default.
Both are functionally attempts at a hostile takeover of my browser. I think that might be the root conflict in the war -- it's a war for control of my interface in the same sense that modern advertising is a war for control of my attention. Individual actors can improve the situation slightly by providing an API (which substack, I note, does not), but that is of limited use when the API is provider-specific. It potentially allows others to write a non-terrible client, but few are willing to do that if it will only work against a single site.
I blame Apple for modals. I seem to recall they were a (then strange) feature of Apple's early OS UI, different from everybody else, and they were freaking proud of it. I guess the logic was that these ephemeral messages could be displayed, dealt with, and dismissed without messing up the Zen garden elegance of their windowing system. Or maybe they just loved popping open little windows because they could. Who knows? My first exposure to a windowing OS was X, and X didn't encourage these little mushroom-like monstrosities -- that's why you kept a console window open, to collect in one place anything the kernel had to say to you outside of an application. So they still annoy me. Having them within an application (or, worse, website) is even dumber. It tells me you can't be bothered to design a UI which allows the user some routine and intuitive way of knowing your (the application's) status at a glance. . It's like traffic engineers designing stop lights that spring out of the street from randomly placed manholes right into the middle of traffic, whenever conditions suggest some kind of traffic flow control is advisable.
Haha agreed.
+1
At least Substack isn't at the point of https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ (yet?), but SSC > ACX on Substack because of web bloat. Trying to load ACX on a weak LTE or Wi-Fi connection is awful. Less "modern web" (/JS) bloat on SSC makes the experience much faster, and much better.
The problem isn't what SSC does better. It's what Substack (and most of the "modern web") is doing worse.
That makes a lot of sense. I prefer to respond as well as read, and I never voluntarily produce text on mobile, unless it's as short as a text message or tweet, e.g. "running late, sorry".
So anything that improves mobile at a cost of dis-improving desktop is pure dis-improvement to me.
Mobile is a big reason for design changes. Scroll is messed up on a lot of sites, even desktop articles won't load everything right away.
I find that the substack page lags and glitches terribly when reading the long open threads on mobile. Which is a very difficult thing to do with rendering plain text on a modern device, and implies they are doing something insanely inefficient.
I have the same problem. Long comment threads are basically unreadable and I therefore ignore the open threads, despite previously being a frequent open thread user on the old SSC.
Try viewing it on an old laptop or PC. It is doing a lot of crazy inefficient javascript stuff in the background for sure.
Yes, ACX is unreadable on mobile, and virtually unreadable on desktop without the "ACX Tweaks" extension.
Thanks. This is actually useful.
I was unaware of the extension. Installed. Thanks for mentioning it.
I always read in the browser on mobile and I have no idea why anyone would prefer the old design over the Substack.
+1
There's so much javascript junk on substack (or any site designed after 2010) that I had to disable javascript to be able to read it on my (very old) phone. I didn't install the app because $£#% apps.
The fact that I can even see some lag on a text+img website on my gaming PC tells me that buying a more expensive phone will not solve the problem.
Yep. Modern web sucks in general, and mobile-first ideology is the number one reason.
I can't really add much to this, but it gives me an opportunity to link to one of James Mickens' old USENIX posts, so that is a positive contribution to the world.
A sample from "To Wash it all Away" ( https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/towashitallaway.pdf )
Given the unbearable proliferation of Web standards, and the
comically ill-expressed semantics of those standards, browser
vendors should just give up and tell society to stop asking for
such ridiculous things. However, this opinion is unpopular,
because nobody will watch your TED talk if your sense of
optimism is grounded in reality. I frequently try to explain to
my friends why they should abandon Web pages and exchange
information using sunlight reflected from mirrors, or the
enthusiastic waving of colored flags. My friends inevitably
respond with a spiritually vacant affirmation like, “People
invented flying machines, so we can certainly make a good
browser!” Unfortunately, defining success for a flying machine
is easy (“I’M ME BUT I’M A BIRD”), whereas defining success
for a Web browser involves Cascading Style Sheets, a technology which intrinsically dooms any project to epic failure. For
the uninitiated, Cascading Style Sheets are a cryptic language
developed by the Freemasons to obscure the visual nature
of reality and encourage people to depict things using ASCII
art. Ostensibly, CSS files allow you to separate the definition of your content from the definition of how that content
looks—using CSS, you can specify the layout for your HTML
tags, as well as the fonts and the color schemes used by those
tags. Sadly, the relationship between CSS and HTML is the
same relationship that links the instructions for building your
IKEA bed, and the unassembled, spiteful wooden planks that
purportedly contain latent bed structures. CSS is not so much
a description of what your final page will look like, but rather
a loose, high-level overview of what could happen to your page,
depending on the weather, the stock market, and how long it’s
been since you last spoke to your mother. Like a naïve Dungeon
Master untouched by the sorrow of adulthood, you create
imaginative CSS classes for your <div> tags and your <span>
tags, assigning them strengths and weaknesses, and defining
the roles that they will play in the larger, uplifting narrative of
your HTML. Everything is assembled in its proper place; you
load your page in a browser and prepare yourself for a glorious
victory. However, you quickly discover that your elf tag is overweight. THE ELF CAN NEVER BE OVERWEIGHT. Even
worse, your barbarian tag does not have an oversized hammer
or axe. Without an oversized hammer or axe, YOUR BARBARIAN IS JUST AN ILLITERATE STEROID USER. And then
you look at your wizard tag, and you see that he’s not an old
white man with a flowing beard, but a young black man from
Brooklyn. FOR COMPLEX REASONS THAT ARE ROOTED
IN EUROPEAN COLONIAL NARRATIVES, YOUR WIZARD
MUST BE AN OLD WHITE MAN WITH A FLOWING BEARD,
NOT A BLACK MAN WITH HIPSTER SHOES AND A
FANTASTIC VINYL COLLECTION.
Read it through Feedly, or on an iOS device via Safari reader. I have no problems with it on mobile.
The big problem w/ substack is that it provides lousy mechanisms for completion it’s, or anyone who, for whatever reason, wants to read stuff within a particular date range. A semi-endless scrolling feed, anchored at “now”, and with no quick way to jump large distances or to a particular date, is not an “Archive” regardless of what substack marketing thinks!
I have experienced this myself over 15 years of blogging. And honestly - people always just like the band's old shit, the old sound. It's not more complicated than that.
^probably this^
yup. people just want to show they liked you 'before it was cool'
eh, I don't think I had this take for the livejournal -> wordpress shift.
Yeah, it's just nostalgia talking. Even relatively open-minded people don't like change and remember the past through rose-tinted glasses.
I suspect that's right for the cosmetic aspects. But there are functional differences too, each of which seems small, but all of which are relevant. (Links to posts, links to comments, browsable archive, fully-loaded comments rather than appear-as-you-scroll, etc.)
None of those things seem small. Links to comments especially are important.
A related issue is that when you have a page open for a long time (like to read through lots of long comments) and then page reloads or the browser closes and opens again, it loses your place because the comments are not all expanded.
Right, this annoys me too.
Or you turn night mode on/off. Twice daily.
That wouldn't be enough to change my vote, but the lack of a single-page archive is tickling me the wrong way.
If xkcd.com/archive can link to 2600 posts in a single page with no javascript, surely this isn't beyond the means of a modern blogging platform ?
I guess the problem is that it’s a blogging platform that is designed as though it were a social media platform. For social media, content is treated as largely ephemeral, so that people aren’t looking for a full chronological history of it, but it is instead delivered by algorithm.
Right, I think that's a big part of the problem: Substack's design is modeled on sites like Facebook whose objective is to be maximally addictive, not for thoughts of enduring intellectual value, nor to make it easy to navigate complex information spaces. Systems that do a better job of these (IMHO more worthwhile) objectives include IDEs, paper books, Wikipedia, Jupyter, legal briefs (just check out the table of contents of any Supreme Court amicus brief!), and Excel.
This is great for the low standards of our time.
The archive page still sucks. Should give me columns, so I can just fullscreen on 4k and get max information density.
Not that I have ever seen that anywhere ever, but it's just how you'd organize a list with hundreds to thousands of entires, if you actually care about helping people find things as fast as possible.
Agreed.
Reminds me of the story of eBay changing their background colour from yellow to white.
https://kulor.medium.com/how-ebay-secretly-changed-their-background-colour-from-yellow-to-white-ffd9718e7bb
good post. I didn't know that
Interesting! For those who aren't going to click the link: eBay users revolted when the company changed the background of some pages from yellow (which, seriously?) to white. So eBay changed the color back to yellow, and then slowly faded the yellow over a period of months. This time, no one complained.
Yeah, I feel WordPress nostalgia. Reminds me of when the MR-centered blogosphere was a lively, rude Conversation, when Robin Hanson linked to PUA blogs, when Mencius Moldbug still wore a cape.
Yeah, I think it's mostly this, along with response bias on the survey. Everyone who has ever redesigned a website knows that touching a single pixel is going to elicit a howling response from a very vocal minority. And that minority is going to be extremely eager to register their unhappiness in a survey.
Personally, I think the Substack site looks better. But my main take is...shrug.
I didn't read SSC. I came here after that magazine article business. I like SSC's design better anyway.
Sure, I wouldn't expect 100% of people to prefer the new site if going in blind. The truth is, both designs are pretty vanilla. How strong is your preference?
Fwiw, the old site pretty clearly violates a bunch of basic typesetting and usability principles. The contrast between font and background is often too low. The use of white space and line spacing is inconsistent. It mixes serif and san-serif fonts in a way that I find a bit jarring, although clearly that is delving into the territory of personal preference. The column seems too wide for ideal readability. More than anything else, it's really dated looking, with the embossed font on the blog roll, etc.
I'm not suggesting this proves the new site is better, but Scott is certainly right when he says that the old one is slapdash and amateurish and the new one has benefited from some basic professional attention to detail. Ultimately, they are both columns of text on a page, the differences just aren't all that great, and it is very common for people to reflexively oppose changes in web design for reasons that are somewhat mysterious to me.
"More than anything else, it's really dated looking, with the embossed font on the blog roll, etc."
If there is one concept that should be banished from design circles, it is the concept of "dated looking" as a negative.
Eh, that's a bit simplistic. I agree, design trends are often driven by the boredom of designers seeking novelty, with little or no regard for the value to the consumers of design. On the other hand, web standards and capabilities have evolved radically over the past twenty years and continue to do so. Devices used to access the internet have evolved radically. Also, users themselves have evolved as they become accustomed to different technologies and UI affordances. Whatever its charms, Geocities doesn't cut it today.
Also, aesthetics do matter on the margin. The embossed fonts on the old SSC blog roll surely aren't really hurting anyone, but they are dated and kind of ugly and changing them also doesn't hurt anyone.
So, sure, change for the sake of change alone shouldn't be done heedlessly or on a whim, but the entire concept of something being outdated is hardly invalid.
Things become outdated when standards change. Thus the problem is not something's age, but that it does not live up to present standards.
Also, in terms of taking advantage of the capabilites of computer monitors web design has gone massively backwards.
I think the original claim is that it doesn't make sense to criticize something as aesthetically "outdated" if it functions as well as something newer. Do you have a better response to "what's wrong with the fonts being dated" than "but they *are* dated"?
Yes, see the response I left.
Hear fucking hear!!!
>"[on the old site]... The contrast between font and background is often too low."
Comparing the screenshots of the old versions and the current version as displayed, I think the opposite, for the main article text.
I found a word which is present in this article, and the first screenshot ("thought"), made cropped bitmaps and compared them zoomed in. The bars on the 't's and the top of the 'g' are blurry in the substack article font, while all strokes are evenly dark on the SSC article font.
This is the case if you compare other letter pairs individually - on ASX the lower case 'e' is especially bad, the central line being almost invisible; it's practically a 'c'!
Overall this makes the text look a bit faint, even though it's larger and darker in places.
To be clear, I can read both without too much trouble, but the old site text is definitely easier to read.
The main article text is black on white in both cases, which is the highest possible contrast.
I was talking about the blue text on gray in the blog roll, the white text on light blue in the header, and the gray text on gray in the byline. I haven't run them through a contrast checker, but I have no doubt they will fail standard accessibility guidelines, probably by a lot.
I'm not sure exactly what you are looking at, but you seem to be zooming in on some of the font anti-aliasing. This isn't really a valid thing to do -- most fonts are vectors that are designed to scale up and down infinitely. Converting them to bitmaps destroys this ability, and so of course they will look terrible when blown up.
The readability of a body of text is not determined solely by contrast between background and a solid block of the text colour. My point is that the font affects this, and therefore the font used for body text is very important to the overall impression you get of a primarily text-based website.
I don't particularly care about the header; in everyday use its legibility is practically irrelevant. But since you bring it up I think both the SSC headers are perfectly readable, and more recognisable as others have said.
The reason I was enlarging images to look at the pixels was to study why the font substack uses is less legible at the size it's displayed at on a monitor. I think this is entirely valid, it reveals that some of the strokes are anti-aliased into a light grey smear. The fact that a font could be rendered nicely at a much higher resolution is irrelevant - what matters is what is used when you read the article.
I thought I'd make a demonstration image, which I've put on a free image hosting website: https://ibb.co/GQTcpfg
If you look at this, you can see that for the ACX font, while there are some dark areas, many parts of the letters are much lighter. The entire central stroke of the 'e' is two pixels tall, both a rather light grey. The lighter greys are where it's effectively trying to draw a very thin line, so presumably there the glyph has a line precisely placed along the edge of two rows. Rather unfortunate. At a different point size, that may not be an issue, but perhaps some other stroke would be as bad.
Presumably the SSC font was designed to avoid this problem at this size.
I guess I should say that I couldn't rule out that Scott's computer was just using a better rendering algorithm, but I don't think it's that - the comment text here looks fine, so it's just that font.
This.
Scott could control for this by polling people who never read SSC, only ACX. This is so simple, that I hope he tries it.
I feel like a really big part of it is just the colors. I like the pleasing dark blue banner and darker gray sides of the old website. Now everything is too pale.
It is certainly nice to anchor to a color. I still internally map SlateStarCodex to that particular shade of blue, and Unsong to yellow. It feels pleasant and familiar to see the color where it should be.
I think what I'm feeling is lack of customization and identity -- Gwern's site still feels like its own thing, even though it's black and white.
Agreed on this. As nice as substack is in a lot of ways (like being readable, having good RSS feeds, etc), it feels sterile. Especially because most newsletters default to the black-on-white or the white-on-black. The exception being Free Black Thought that uses white-on-brown.
The colors helped. For me the wide open white space is too... freeing. I like the coziness of edges and frames.
Edges and frames, yes. It's more comfortable to walk through Paris, with its multi-story buildings crowding the street than it is to walk on the sidewalk next to a US strip-mall with an acre of parking lot between you and the nearest building.
Strange juxtaposition. Anyway I'm more disheartened by the acres of vacant compacted dirt with odd sprouts of brittle yellow grass beyond a warped and rusty chain link fence across the street from the strip mall than I am by the parking lot itself, shattered and pale though it may be. I've been in LA enough, it's a sprawling nightmare of strip after strip of urban decay gradually dissolving in the possession of a passive, lazy, incompetent population. But yeah a prefer a nice cozy log cabin over the LA version of freedom. I do love my freedoms though.
Yeah, the white's a bit blinding. And bland.
Information density feels lower on Substack (information per square inch).
I feel like that is everything, not just substack; probably related to optimized for mobile.
Yes. Information density seems to be roughly 60% of what it was in SSC.
Less words fit into one line.
I did a test and printed this post to a pdf, and viewed it in two page view. Was much nicer to read, since I had more info available in single glance. Nicer to skim.
Their design isn't worse than your old layout. If they pushed SSC-style layout to every website, everyone would hate it.
It's like the Hugo and Jekyll custom academic themes everyone is capitulating to (yay capitulation!). The first time you see them, they look nice. Once you see them for the 10,000th time, they look incredibly boring and tiresome and you wish people were still designing their own websites.
Also, the MIRmaids are gone! (And all the other clever and whimsical stuff from the SSC blogroll.) I'm guessing I'm not the only one missing them.
Wouldn't another word for the selection bias you speak of just be nostalgia?
If I ran a salad restaurant, I probably would get a lot of salad fans. If I switched to hamburgers, a lot of my fans would be angry and like the restaurant less. This isn't because of nostalgia, it's just because a salad restaurant probably attracts lots of salad-lovers.
In this case it's still a salad restaurant, the restaurant just did a few renovations, picked a new font for the menu, and slightly changed the name.
(and coicidentally got rid of most of the seating because users prefer to eat on the go these days)
I don't know if relevant as quite subjective, but I would usually not comment/vote and prefer substack to the old website. Maybe silent majority likes it more?
That said I do mainly read posts through the email newsletter so...
Also I don't really read anything else on substack so no way for me to be sick of it
Design-wise I think it's not much different, but on the old site I was never able to comment for some reason. I tried a few times but the comments just never appeared and at some point I gave up trying to figure out why. The Substack reset let me express my views for the first time.
The most powerful websites are disproportionately blue-colored
The old SSC was blue-colored
Actually, the Power Palette research didn't replicate.
What's that? I just see blue
There are a number of people, myself included, who believe that the user created, original and homegrown, flashy and weird and geocities-esque websites of the web 1.0 era were strictly better than the modern flat and minimalist, muted colors, tons of javascript, everything-looks-the-same websites of the web 2.0 era. I'll take https://squeedge.neocities.org/ over other websites any day of the week.
Also, in terms of functionality, the thread system of SSC was objectively better than here. It notified you about new posts in a easy and comprehensive manor, you could jump straight to them, and there were a few other nice QOL things.
Wholeheartedly agree with this—being back “bad” design!!
Agreed - I think "good design" is actually worse than "bad design". It's like a house that's too clean - we usually think "clean" is better than "dirty", but if a house is too clean, it feels offputtingly sterile, and all the things you want to *use* are hidden away in cupboards and closets and drawers.
A smidgen of mess helps make a house feel like a home; a smidgen of "bad design" helps a blog or forum feel like a community.
Look up what Kim Kardashian's house looks like. It's AWFUL, and most of the web is the equivalent that.
Your first paragraph reminds me of the whole legibility thing applied to city design, as in the SSC book review https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
"Natural organically-evolved cities tend to be densely-packed mixtures of dark alleys, tiny shops, and overcrowded streets. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: an evenly-spaced rectangular grid of identical giant Brutalist apartment buildings separated by wide boulevards, with everything separated into carefully-zoned districts. Yet for some reason, whenever these new rational cities were built, people hated them and did everything they could to move out into more organic suburbs. And again, for some reason the urban planners got promoted, became famous, and spread their destructive techniques around the world."
(The 'for some reason' is legibility.)
Quoting James Scott on Brasilia's lack of street corners in "Seeing Like a State":
"Most of those who have moved to Brasilia from other cities are amazed to discover “that it is a city without crowds.” People complain that Brasilia lacks the bustle of street life, that it has none of the busy street corners and long stretches of storefront facades that animate a sidewalk for pedestrians. For them, it is almost as if the founders of Brasilia, rather than having planned a city, have actually planned to prevent a city. The most common way they put it is to say that Brasilia “lacks street corners,”by which they mean that it lacks the complex intersections of dense neighborhoods comprising residences and public cafes and restaurants with places for leisure, work, and shopping.
While Brasilia provides well for some human needs, the functional separation of work from residence and of both from commerce and entertainment, the great voids between superquadra, and a road system devoted exclusively to motorized traffic make the disappearance of the street corner a foregone conclusion. The plan did eliminate traffic jams; it also eliminated the welcome and familiar pedestrian jams that one of Holston’s informants called “the point of social conviviality"
Indeed, I think "Seeing like a state" is more relevant here than "Whither Tartaria".
Back when every amateur blogger built their own website in Wordpress or even in raw handwritten HTML, those websites had *personality*, warts and all. But Substack is designed for scalability, which is the Internet version of what SLAS calls legibility.
Substack isn't a state, but Substack together with the other big tech platforms like Facebook and Reddit may as well be considered a state government. And they don't want quirky little street corners, they want evenly-spaced rectangular grids that are easy to administer centrally.
In addition, just to add my voice to everybody else: yes, over-use of Javascript sucks and reduces my six-core 3500MHz desktop PC to something that feels more sluggish and glitchy than the software I ran on my single-core 7.2MHz Amiga in 1985. It's amazing that "just put all the text on a single page so that searching with Ctrl-F works as it should" is apparently a complicated technology nowadays, when the simplest website built by a teenager in 1995 who just learned what HTML is, would *do that automatically without needing to do anything special to enable it*.
This, fuck web designers.
Yes. Here's the problem with web designers. They have to use the tools/features that look best on their resume, not the tools/features that give the best customer experience.
Blame web designers less (they're still at fault) and blame the corporations and community that releases framework after framework and fashion after fashion, and the hiring/HR who get glowy eyes when they see $SHINY_TECH on the applicant's CV. Web designers are just responding to incentives the mOvE-fAsT cult sets up.