On Wednesday, August 03, 2016 04:08:37 PM Ian Clarke wrote: > Certainly no harm in discussing this since Xor chose to share it, and I > agree that some of Xor's decisions here are questionable.
I am very happy if people discuss my votes instead of silently being angry :) Doesn't help me by any means to disappoint people with my votes and not have a chance to resolve that by changing my choices or at least explaining them. > One example that sticks out is this justification for saying a website > redesign would have absolutely zero value: "We have just redesigned it. > Throwing that away too soon would disappoint the volunteer authors". I find > this rationale infuriating. Our task here is not about protecting overly > fragile egos, it is about ensuring that people have the freedom to > communicate. > The idea that Freenet is a "darknet" therefore our website must be black is > similarly questionable. There is a good reason that other related projects > like Tor and I2P have gone with a light and open design. First of all something personal: I for sure considered your opinion when I cast my 0-votes on the website stuff. I am very well aware that you dislike the website a lot. I've followed all the discussions about it even though I stopped replying at some point to avoid the discussions getting more stressful. So I knew precisely that it would annoy you a lot if I vote 0. Nevertheless I did so because I think it wouldn't be nice if I was being a hypocrite with my votes just so the two of us do not argue :) So please consider my vote as a sign of the honesty I think you deserve. Now about the website itself: The reasons I provided in the comment section are not complete. I merely tried to only mention some important ones because I wanted to not exceed the 3-line length recommendation too much. To compensate for your disappointment, I'll now try to mention as many of my full reasons as possible. (I even found a new aspect from doing that, the 5.0 beer one, which I think is a really enjoyable example - thanks for making me realize this :) - To me the site just does look really good from a naked emotional point of view. Yes, honestly. I like it. It could use some minor improvements here or there, but the overall concept is great. - I explain Freenet to about 10-20 people every week, and have been doing so for years. This is because I often program in a place which is somewhere where people don't expect someone with a laptop. So I get lots of random strangers asking me what I'm doing. After a few hundreds of times of explaining Freenet even as a nerd I feel like reading facial expressions in response to different types of explanation becomes quite possible. And the result is: The "Freenet is the darknet" type of explanation results in the "ohh I get it" expression much more quickly than any other explanation. The word "darknet" has become mainstream, everyone knows it. You have to give people the stereotype they are most familiar with. Now how is this related to our current website? - I think the website looks precisely like the word "darknet" sounds. It's the dark layout, and the "network graph" background. So for people who want to try the darknet, it's really good at indicating that they're in the right place. - Personally, I spent well over a day in reconfiguring my whole workstation to have a "bright on black" theme everywhere. The core system UI, the terminal, the text editor, my IDE. I even spent hours in *manually* picking the syntax highlighting colors of my Java IDE because there was no good configuration available for download anywhere. I did that because I feel that "bright on dark" is a LOT more readable than "dark on bright". It has more contrast and it feel less tiresome to my eyes. If I nowadays run into a "bright" theme UI after looking at my dark desktop for hours, it actually even feels like hurting my eyes. It's just much less comfortable to me. So while I accept that you pulled out a study which showed that "dark on bright" seems to be the most readable color theme, I would be happy if you could acknowledge that: * The study you gave us also showed that "white on black" is very close in readability to "black on white", a lot closer than most of the other color combinations. * Humans are different and there is no absolute truth with regards to color preferences. * If we consider the "the website looks like the darknet" aspect, that aspect may very well overpower the minor disadvantage of "dark theme" against "bright theme" which the study showed. It's "Building a brand which people recognize" which overpowers the aspect of slightly less readability in average. A very good example of that is the "5.0 beer" which is insanely popular in Germany: http://i.imgur.com/092ujiX.png 5.0 is the alcohol percentage and the name of the beer. The name sucks, the can is ugly for sure. And guess what the text on the can says? "Just a simple black-and-white can ! No gold one with sophisticated imprint ! Just a simple design ! No expensive TV-advertising ! This saving goes to you ! We saved money on almost everything ! Except for the quality of the beer !" - Everyone drinks that beer here, even though it's ugly and they really don't do any advertising anywhere. It's not even cheap anymore, there are cheaper ones. But it just does look legit. You trust it to be a cheap, honest beer because it has a cheap, honest can. So we as well could be trusted to be the darknet if we look like people expect the darknet to look :) - Conceptually, as said in my other mail [1] I think Freenet still is at the point where most of our default features are boring. I don't think it makes sense or even is polite to have giant expensive advertising (= fancy website) for a product which is a lot less shiny than its advertising. (Not polite as in "spending donation money on ads before we fix our real sh*t".) And even if we forget about politeness: It just won't help us get users if they expect the greatest Web 3.0 application from looking at our website and then actually install Freenet and learn that the default content is 100% static Freesites. Everything they know from the regular Internet is dynamic content and we just do not have that at all. So before we spend any money on advertising, I think we first should get Sone or Freetalk or Filesharing bundled with the installer by default - which is why I voted for those instead :) Having said all of that, please really do not take this personally :) I trust you 100% that the website looks shitty to you. It just does look good to me, I cannot deny that. People just have different taste :| But: The good thing here is that you realized we need to have a poll on the funding allocation. This is the perfect answer to such decision problems: If by nature the different opinions cannot be reconciled - which very much is the case for color preferences probably - then we just need to have a poll and decide based on the average. So thanks for that :) [1] https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/2016-August/039133.html -- hopstolive (keyword for Ians spam filter)
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