The Bard in Green

I read a really good article recently about how people from different generations process information differently and so their UI preferences are wildly different.

The gist of it was

• A Boomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books. There are too many ads for books, so they tune them all out. They choose one by an author they know, that their friends said was good.
• A Gen Xer / Millennial walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They check the various authors they like, check that the cover art is appealing and read the backs of the different books, figuring out which one they want to read, then they buy that one.
• A Zoomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books, and feel bombarded by the ads for books. They check the authors the influencers they subscribe to on Youtube and Tik Tok say are good. They grab one of those based on the color of the cover, ignore the back and the cover art, flip it open to a random page, read that page and if what they read grabs their their attention they buy that book, but if it doesn’t, they move on.

As a result, each of these people will prefer to interact with vastly different UX.

Of course these aren’t hard and fast rules, set in stone and there are tons of exceptions, but it’s a definite trend.

The Lemmy demographic skews hard to the older Millennial / Gen X demographic and is mostly people who were on reddit 15+ years ago. It’s UI appeals to those people.

Even if so, they may see that as a plus. Twitter survived the massive cutting / culture change that Elon brought to it (as a gross little shadow of it’s formal self, but the vultures don’t care).

I was once a Facebook using programmer guy like you, then I took an arrow to the knee did some work for Meta and got a close up and personal look at their internal culture. It beyond pissed me off and creeped me out. I just couldn’t.

Now, people have to text me to invite me to events and parties and stuff. I don’t know what’s going on with major chunks of my friends group half the time. I have to get my news and gossip the old fashioned way.

Before my Meta subcontractor experience, I spoke like you. But after, I don’t even miss it. Thinking about logging on to Facebook is like fingernails on a chalk board.