Whatever Happened to Profile Customization? 

I've resorted to making my own website so I can express myself as much as possible. I actually have two; one is an actual portfolio for professional use that has more tasteful design choices (while still keeping a good amount of color and expression), and the other, more personal one, is bright pink, CSSed to death, and gay as hell. I just wish I could "embed" that gayness everywhere else lol.

omg hi lexi!

That feeling when you put so much s*** to your MySpace page it takes 10 minutes to load was magnificent 😊

Designers then: "lets add some stuff" Designers now: "lets delete some stuff"

Ohmygod hi Lexi :3

Same community would be bullied off websites in the early 2000s

​@@reesetubeNot necessarily. There have been safe corners on the internet for queer people since the Usenet days

@@reesetube ah the irony, still miss those days...

I know i love it!

@@reesetube not really, it depends on the site

Every app is trying to be tiktok 💀

I would gladly take more shock sites if it meant the internet had more personality again.

I design website for some clients. The reason why we make website similar to one another is because of the thing called Jakob's Law. Basically, users would prefer a website to work the same way as other website they're familiar with. Which is why you put search bars on top, hamburger bar opens up a menu, etc. But again, this is all to make more profit so yeah. Soulless. Don't become a designer, be an artist. Designers were supposed to be enemy of artists before AI came in. Now it's too late. Everything is minimalistic, low-effort, and soulless.

And now they want ai assistants to be the one to go to place for all information 😭

Y'all BitView is right there

You can do more customization if you're willing to do some client side stuff. Not everyone can see it, but people who have the same plugin can see it so it's something ig.

@@PastaZ0neAct1 I just wish Discord would stop breaking Better Discord once a week, with the occasional fun ones every couple months or so where it breaks so badly and everyone has to rewrite everything

@@bubbadoo10 Yeah, I stopped using better discord because of that. I enjoyed using it, but it just breaks literally all the time

@@jootersblaccat Ye, the minor ones where it's just a quick reinstall nbd even if it's like a weekly issue at least It sucks, but I don't think there is anything they can do, when Discord changes all their shit like they seem to like to do

If you want to learn html, there's neocities at least

And sometimes phone internet in some countries are slower than Wi-Fi, which makes website slower and take longer to load

@@Kalitayy this too! so much to consider.

So, it's about efficiency and convenience, the need to cater to as wide as an audience as possible in order for the service/product to maximize revenue.

I agree! I took a web development class and they also explained this as an accessibility issue as bright clashing colors do inpact readability and screen readers may have trouble reading more eccentric fonts

Honestly, smartphones have been the bane of the internet. They're just not suited to general internet usage. Their format fundamentally is only suited to hyper-simplistic designs and limited experiences.

woah its the roblox dude

How do you only have 8 likes?

same

Me too, Dude. Me too.

I'm remember their header "You're a unique snowflake" when making the announcement.

i actually seriously considered becoming a ui/ux designer but this is one of the reasons why i ultimately decided against it. it's hard for me to force myself to do something when i have no creative freedom. i don't think anyone in this career should feel bad though! we all gotta do what we gotta do to put food on the table.

as a casual artist and someone interested in ui/ux design, i wish they're not mutually exclusive, and i feel they're probably not but latest trends just say they have to be modern ui is much like brutalist architecture imo: it does nothing but look mildly pleasing but more importantly get the job done. there's a priority towards being clear and concise because after all that's what most people are after. this honestly makes sense for most websites, including corporate websites since i feel they can consider any sort of color more than necessary would be immature and they want to maintain an air of professionalism; i can sort of see it in services or goods because it's not strictly necessary, but i still wish more social media allowed you to personalize your stuff more than just a custom bio of at most 180 characters, especially since we're far out of the age of personal websites and forums and in the age of centralized social media yes accessibility is a concern but like you do not need to give everyone full html control of their own pages, just ideally let people set custom colors, banners and backgrounds and layout their page how they want to even if still within the constraints of the software, and for accessibility just add a plain design mode as an optional setting personally while i do still like following ux rules i also tend to go wild on styling things when i both feel like i can, and when it's appropriate to, such as my personal neocities and my wikipedia userpage, and for everything else i try to take the limits of design as far as i could (such as discord bios) tl;dr modern ui design is the digital version of brutalism. there is a time and a place for them but not in social media oh and also more personal websites would be cool anyway, i wish we can bring back the geocities era

⁠@@Melecie"getting the job done" is literally what's been destroying art. Cutting corners in the name of efficiency had snowballed into AI art-putting the lowest amount of effort into something, as long as it "gets the job done" I still think that UI/UX design and design as a whole is a detriment to art. The only reason why I didn't resort to AI art, but instead graphic design, was simply because when I was 14, AI art didn't exist yet. It's basically the same thing, steal graphics from real talented artists, rearrange them a little bit, and boom you got something aesthetically-pleasing. If you wanna bastardize it even more, you have UI design, which takes no skill or talent. I consider my work as a UI designer as completely worthless outside of the corporate setting. At least programmers can code their own games or whatever. But UI designers? We depend on our clients and bosses to give us what they expect from a website. We're just a bunch technicians trained to operate a software like Figma because no one else wants to do it.

⁠@@randymoon if you can be an artist, you should always try to be an artist. I think it should be the default. Society has put too much value on tech, since UI design is a part of it. Anyone can learn how to operate Photoshop or Figma, but not everyone can make art. It takes no skill or talent to become what I am today, but someone who's learning art for 5-10 years may not be able to become an artist. That's what makes artists special. When you create something not because of yourself, but because of what a person wants you to, you're not creating art, you're creating a meaningless, worthless product

⁠@@randymoonI agree that we shouldn't feel bad about taking this career. But we designers should still feel ashamed because we only contribute more money to corporate entities, but nothing of value to the world.

you could also search for videos inside of the channel as well

@@sunsetman22 you can still do that

Or that you could leave messages on their community section, or PM them, I did that so many times with people at the time.

​@@Badusername2000 not on the mobile app :( or at least I don't know how

​​@@Pherioxus Yesss, the PM feature was actually nice 🥺 Edit: And I loved the channel comments too!

I miss it sm :[ I get that in some cases it poses a copyright issue but it isn't like modern Spotify embeds aren't a thing! Or just compose your own music, I've seen two websites that are still up do that, it was very cool! Something about your own website having its own theme song just hits different, it makes it feel more immersive, like those cool audio visual rooms in museums. My dumb little carrd feels so empty without bg music

Instagram recently added this feature and i was so happy about it lol

2007 mood 🥲

instagram finally has that back, hopefully give it another 10 years and they might give us more customisation

I wasnt around when that was popular but i wish that was still a thing! I could put whatever song im fixated onto at the moment in the description and tell people about it. I can still do that but i feel like people would say "Who asked?" Or assume im trying to be cockyjust cus i wanna talk about the things i like TwT

just had a hard flashback to the little videotron automated booth at the corner three blocks east of me with the robot arm pulling VHS tapes out for me from the library racks and giving it to me.

oh my god i love them :D

Pretty sure they built a petabyte server just for the Internet archive, as shifty as it is I’m grateful IA even has that much shit

I hope both sides of your pillow are cold and that you will eat the most delicious dish ever in the next few days

Not sure how you came to this information. Because it's absolutely false. The Internet Archive (and Wayback Machine) stores their in an archive format called "WARC", an extension to ARC created in 1980s. WARC was specified in 2008. They are sort of ZIP files but with extra information attached. These are used for both storing and serving. The Wayback Machine is essentialy a "WARC viewer", in the sense that the content is stored in these WARC files, and when you request the resources it will retrieve and _stream_ the data from the archive to your browser. The reason why it's slow comes down to a number of factors such as bandwidth, latency (including everything that happens inbetween you and the server), the priority of the request and "freshness" of the resources you're requesting. Magentic tapes may be used for long-term storage, compared to digital formats (like Hard drives, SATAs, CDs, DVDs, Blueray, etc.). But they have a big flaw; reading from them frequently will _degrade_ them, since they are mechanically spun in a tape drive. And they are not cheap either, nor can they store a lot of data for the size compared to digital formats. It would also require a lot of maintenance, which would end up costing a lot in the end! However, The Internet Archive does not confirm (nor deny) whether they have any data stored on magnetic tapes (or equivalents), or _what_ they have decided to store on those tapes-maybe some of it is in the Arctic World Archive, but I could not find any information on this.

worse than this, i am an user who likes to read the reblogs and comments on other people's posts, and too often i find myself going to the /blog address because i can't seem to access anything written by people on that otherwise, so i often end up just staying in the newer page without the customization to access it.

@@Wilker_uwu I hate the /blog address so much I still remember how angry I was when they introduced it

I didn't even leave because of the nsfw ban, I left because of how bad the ads were once Yahoo bought the company, not in quantity, but I stayed on the science side of tumblr and when I'm suddenly being mass recommended promoted posts about some teenage romance filling my feed in-between entomology and climatology posts, I knew I had to leave because bruh

Wii U also had music for everything the fact it had so many Eshop themes was wonderful that along with Miiverse made everything feel like a community but now every game is much more hallow

The fact we can’t even create a pfp on the switch from assets from different games drives me insane, LET ME COMBINE MY MARIO AND SPLATOON ICONS

Also, 360 and PS3 had these type of customizations as well and they were pretty awesome.

The problem isn't that you can't do that. The problem is that there's no point in having a website if nobody is going to visit it, starting a forum if nobody is going to use it, etc. There are forums that still exist. Their last post was five years ago.

@@seigeengine Gonna be honest, that's just an excuse. There are tons of blogs, portfolios, and other websites online that are currently running and active right now. Learning how to get people to visit is on you as an individual just like any other website. Hell the whole point of neocities is to be a social place where people can visit your site. People want to winge about how social media is toxic or people not being able to be free online/being at the whim of these services and businesses. Then when you actually got to do the work for it, people try to find a reason not to do it. Back in the day, people made websites just to create them and express themselves and they found ways to get people to find them if they desired that. Some of the sites were very well designed, some weren't, but the point was creating your own space in the infinite World of the internet. As for forums, though it is definitely a lesser used method of online social spaces. That doesn't mean that there aren't any that are currently running right now with their own communities chilling out. I found one literally a couple of days ago that is incredibly active and just very tight-knit. All depends on where you look.

@@ArtsyFoxo No, it's the core fucking concern. Nobody goes to random neocities pages. It's a fundamental shift in how people interacted with the internet. Personal websites are basically relics. Nobody goes to them. You either put your content on the major platforms or nobody pays attention to you. A perfect example of this in action is how every webcomic used to have it's own website. Now they're all in the same couple of places. That wasn't because the creators got lazy, or it was cheaper. It's because people stopped going to those individual websites, and there was no inflow of new viewers because nobody goes to individual websites for webcomics anymore. You can posture about how that's your fault, but the reality is that the ecosystem has shifted, and if you want to go it on your own, you're fighting an uphill battle to just not completely fail, never mind achieve meaningful success. Even old services like geocities and myspace kind of demonstrate this. They were already demonstrating a drive towards centralization. Forums are a bit of a funky case, because they evolved rather than went away. What is Reddit, really, other than a variant of forum? Discord has forumish characteristics as well as being chat rooms. The traditional concept of a forum, however, is basically done. There are still niches where forums are used, but they're very much niches. Anyone trying to tell you that kind of forum isn't dead is conning you.

@@ArtsyFoxo that's just bitview

what's the link to your website and/or forum?

America takes pride in the illusion of individuality, you’ll be cast out if you are actually unique. Same with Canada.

@@ColdBaltBlue yes, though it depends on the context.

America celebrates conforming selfishness not individualism.

USA likes individuality if its the vibes you would get at a walmart or target, if its not what is in a luxury or outlet mall they don't want you.

I'd argue the USA very much does not value individuality, and never has. The USA oscillates between periods of mass-conformism and mildly competitive conformism.

wdym ended up, ofc ui/ux courses will tell you to avoid standing out as much as possible so you can be taken more seriously by corpo. do your own chaotic thing, especially if its your art portfolio which is supposed to showcase who you are

Why not just don’t latch to social media at all or Atleast use something decent like cohost SpaceHey is an unmoderated mess, a PHP experiment kept up for too long The entire community which isn’t just raiders are tumblrinas It’s a bad website and the only reason people still use it is because it thrives off the name of MySpace which it barely resembles

spacehey is pretty much only good for the customization lmao. the people there are fuckin demented

a lot of the people there are weird, i just block all the weird ones

@@covencockroach twitter is full of demented people too but you can't customize squat so that means it still sounds better. lol

I would love this tbh

Thats never gonna happen It would be a net money loss. Its not.fun but the big reason why thr internet is like that is money

@@flow185 : If the growing popularity of a search engine like Wibly is any indication, it's up to individuals what kind of internet they are a part of -- web 3.0 and web3 (and their successors) probably aren't going to disappear, but that doesn't mean web 2.0 can't thrive in its own right. *Edit:* I'd be willing to bet for people that have offline personal pursuits or creative hobbies, a web 2.0 diet would be really beneficial.

Yet another commie site for losers. Neeeext

artfight mentioned !!! ,,,!!!!1!!!!2!🎉🎉

you have to pay for customization on artfight is the thing. which is fine, considering what artfight is, but it's not a free feature. thought i'd point that out!

@@charlotties_ oh thank you for clarifying i didn't know that

Try Spacehey. I tried it because I missed those days & it delivers but I'm way to old now to relate to anyone there lol.

There is a myspace copycat called spacehey if you’d like to experience it

Random users might not be able to do it, but they can certainly hire someone who can do it for them: artists.

@@Kalitayy A broken page has reputational damage for the website itself, and not just the user that made it. While technically a competent artist could be hired by users, in practice many are just going to do things the quick and dirty way and not care about the edge cases.

⁠@@gyroninjamoddernow that you brought edge cases, an UI/UX designer's job is to handle edge cases. But do you think average users care about them? All I'm seeing is that users just want beautiful websites

@@gyroninjamodder Your entire spiel basically only applies in the current regime. Nobody treated a bad myspace page like it was myspace's fault, because we understood that each page was customized. And if the designers know customization is a core feature, they're not going to get arbitrarily butthurt when people use that feature.

@@seigeengine Yes, it applies to the current times because everyone's standards have increased by a lot. And due to competition it's hard to go to a solution that is worse. Now these platforms are mainstream and are used by a very wide demographics of people. Everyone from kids to elderly people who don't know how to use a computer are expected to be able to use it.

Thank you for bringing up Flair! I feel like no one talks about the stuff that used to be on Facebook. I have so much nostalgia for things like Food Fight, where you could " purchase" different things and throw them at your friend's pages, or the little rabbit widget you put on your page and deck out in armor. I had almost convinced myself I had made up all these different games and things you could add to your profile. I really feel like things started to go downhill when they got rid of them. :(

@@syrup_n_waffles DESPERATELY do I miss silly little pre-smart phone, pre-microtransaction widgets and virtual pets. Google used to, a thousand years ago, let you set a custom version of the Google search page (I think called My Google?) where kid me LOADED it with virtual pets and useless little toys.

You're a graphic designer. Well, I'm a UI designer. I'm supposed to be your worst enemy because we make website clean and responsive, thus making them bland and soulless. UI design is an inherently evil skill to have.

@@KalitayyDude, and I promise I say this with sincerity, I really think you need to talk to someone. You have been all over the place utterly shitting on yourself and it’s really, really unhealthy. And that’s not even going into how UX/UI design absolutely has artistry to it when allowed to (I forget who it is but check out the designer gushing over *just* the stamina wheel from Breath of the Wild). Artists and designers are not polar opposites and your skill set isn’t “evil”. Please, treat yourself better.

just checked it out! really cool stuff

Not a commie but you’re not wrong

I’ve been on SpaceHey since it’s launch, modern SpaceHey is a mess which only thrives off the name of a platform it will never live up to, I would recommend you leave it as soon as you can

Who cares, everyone keeps calling things cringe that people enjoy. DO IT! STICKERS ARE NOT CRINGE!

@URnightmares162 thank you :]

Real

woah, a shame. thanks for the heads up.

SpaceHey is a SJW unmoderated gore ridden mess that thrives off the name of a platform it will never live up to use something else

OMG HI CARY HI HI HI