Design aesthetics are not insignificant. Ask anyone in marketing - there’s an entire science behind why users choose one look and feel over another. If good design doesn’t harm decentralization, there’s absolutely no reason not to optimize for it. The digital experience is largely visual, and visual experience is part of user experience. Building something that simply “works” isn’t enough - unless you’re shipping for other devs who live in terminal windows and think usability is optional. For everyone else, design is the bridge between function and adoption. If you can’t see the difference between these, and decide what feels better from a glance, then you probably wouldn’t understand what I mean.

Replies (2)

They're not insignificant, but they're the last mile - and the race has barely kicked off. At every company I've ever worked at, I've been the (often sole) developer who is banging the same drum that you are right now. We just disagree about timing and feature priority given current context. I've seen first-hand how optimizing for "the average user" and "productizing" too early literally buries a business. By that, I mean: I cofounded a company that sought to do exactly that with a tech stack that we thought was ready but simply not user-friendly enough nor product/feature-rich enough. And we went bankrupt because we were wrong; we were catastrophically premature. Even now about a year later it still would have been premature. We might have been maybe 5-10 years too early on that bet. So it's weird to (apparently?) be on _this side_ of the argument. I'm not even sure I deserve to be on this side of it, because I was making kind of a different point: it's my belief that making sure nostr hews to decentralization in its early clients is the most important thing. If it can do that with stellar design and accessible UX, all the better! In the trade-off between "very decentralized and transparent" and "less decentralized, but you don't necessarily know that and the design is great", I would pick the former every time for myself. I don't know what to do with the fact that a very beautiful and performant, but slightly more centralized, client is going to pull in more people than one that is slightly slower, slightly clunkier, slightly uglier. That seems to just be the inevitable pattern of all potential freedom tech projects. Including Bitcoin! People would rather buy an ETF than a seed plate. To me, that indicates that we're letting fiat clown world win, by granting deference to "the average user's" taste for fiat clown world products and experiences, and capitulating on principles in order to cater to that taste before the ecosystem is ready to support it properly ("properly" = without caving on decentralization).