red @red@icosahedron.website

a lot of people assume that because users can't provide input in the same language as developers, that their feedback is worthless and unhelpful, and that it's "stupid" to open the floodgates and make it more accessible to provide feedback, as the only real, true, valuable feedback comes from people who can surmount the difficulties of giving feedback.

fuck that nonsense.

people aren't stupid. try listening for once.

I've worked as a maths tutor and yeah, I'm good at maths. a lot of people consider that being good at maths makes you "smart" when I'd. honestly beg to differ that knowing how to do path integrals or find eigenvalues is more "smart" than being able to make art, or work through day to day life

and so, because so many people think on this absolute scale, they end up assuming that users who can't work through their UI are completely incompetent. and, again, that's wrong.

one thing that I like to say which I find very relevant to this is, that "stupid" and "smart" are very bad words that do nothing but hurt people

you can't be smart. you can know things. you can be good at things. but those things could never possibly be combined into one absolute, 1-dimensional scale of "stupid" to "smart," and even if you argue that knowing some things is more useful than knowing other things, that is one hundred percent relative.

user experience at its core adopts the mentality of "the user is stupid," which, ignoring the ableism behind that

there are some merits to this, like "don't assume your user has the time/energy to learn everything at once" and "don't assume your user already knows specific things about your system"

but a lot of people take this as "users' input is unimportant" which is. do you not see how counterproductive that is. do you not see how barriers to input are, worse

it's really frustrating that basically every idea I/we offer out has to be set to unlisted or private to avoid the floodgates of People's Opinions.

and like. given how right now I'm actually kind of ready to help design shit, I really want to help think of a way to make this less… awful. but out of everything discussed, I'm genuinely clueless on this one

I don't want to just, outright block people immediately. but at least thread-only mutes would help

I've started explicitly telling doctors that I can't eat gelatin because I found out that the reason why I've been nautious persistently for the past few months has been not a side effect of my medication, but a side effect of it having gelatin in it. as a non-essential filler.

and saying "I'm vegetarian" isn't enough. :|