| UX isn't often a high priority, either among management or among devs (who often prefer backend or algorithmic stuff to UI tweaking). But more often than not, you also have purposeful dark patterns and enshittification, usually for user data collection, advertisement, increasing addiction & interaction, funneling recommendations, making unsubs harder, etc. That's almost certainly the reason the consumer apps you mentioned (AppleTV, Reddit, and YouTube) have such shitty experiences. You're not really their customer, you're just a product who happens to pay them money too, and it's more profitable for them to control your journey and push you towards the most profitable avenues for them (via recommendations) than to really maximize your enjoyment of the platform. AppleTV is especially bad in this regard, being a content aggregator among different channels & content networks, so they're incenventived to pay-for-play their recommendations and pit publishers against each other for your eyeballs, while simultaneously charging you to view those shitty recommendations. They get to profit from both sides! For Github, are you sure it's even a frontend thing? Seems like a lot of the complexity in their app is backend, especially when you ask it to a dynamic diff between two random commits or whatever. I see similar latencies just using Git commits against a repo in the cloud. Meanwhile, something like using VScode running in Github is reasonably performant. ------------- Side note: In my personal experience, a lot of smaller "boutique" apps from smaller companies and lone wolves have a much higher focus on UX, often because their business models revolves around it, attracting users through a superior experience instead of forcing the product on users by selling to management. There is still a small but vibrant market for macOS desktop apps, for example, many of which have decent enough UX, like the bundled ones in Setapp (https://setapp.com/apps). That's what you get when you the user are the primary customer, which is almost never the case in most consumer-facing big FAANG services. IMO it's why Dropbox used to be so much nicer than Skydrive (or whatever it's called now, the bundled Microsoft service); they started as a user-facing service before pivoting to enterprise (original YC app: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/dropbox). I find Discourse (the forum software) to be much nicer to use than Reddit or Google Groups, too, because they sell ONLY a UI and not advertising. For Git stuff, there are many nice paid Git clients out there. For Github in particular, there's also some third-party integrations (like in Jetbrains IDEs) that can help make reviews/comments more seamless, though I still sometimes prefer Github's official UI. At a certain scale, winning over users' hearts is no longer the prime driver of profit, and that's when companies start enshittifiying, especially if they're VC or publically owned and need to scale :( Small bootstrap businesses usually stay nicer for longer. |
Well where do we draw the line here? I'm not even talking about diffs etc.: Just browsing through a repo and looking at single files is noticeable slow. As an end user I don't really care if it's the network request latency or because inefficient DOM rendering, it's not a great UX. For example loading this site here: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gsutil/blob/master/te... took 1.26 seconds. And it's like that for any file or folder. Gitlab seems to have a similar initial load time however only once, after that it's faster.