I have experienced this myself over 15 years of blogging. And honestly - people always just like the band's old shit, the old sound. It's not more complicated than that.
I feel like a really big part of it is just the colors. I like the pleasing dark blue banner and darker gray sides of the old website. Now everything is too pale.
Their design isn't worse than your old layout. If they pushed SSC-style layout to every website, everyone would hate it.
It's like the Hugo and Jekyll custom academic themes everyone is capitulating to (yay capitulation!). The first time you see them, they look nice. Once you see them for the 10,000th time, they look incredibly boring and tiresome and you wish people were still designing their own websites.
I don't know if relevant as quite subjective, but I would usually not comment/vote and prefer substack to the old website. Maybe silent majority likes it more?
That said I do mainly read posts through the email newsletter so...
Also I don't really read anything else on substack so no way for me to be sick of it
There are a number of people, myself included, who believe that the user created, original and homegrown, flashy and weird and geocities-esque websites of the web 1.0 era were strictly better than the modern flat and minimalist, muted colors, tons of javascript, everything-looks-the-same websites of the web 2.0 era. I'll take https://squeedge.neocities.org/ over other websites any day of the week.
Also, in terms of functionality, the thread system of SSC was objectively better than here. It notified you about new posts in a easy and comprehensive manor, you could jump straight to them, and there were a few other nice QOL things.
Substack is a giant ball of single-page-appiness, with all of the glitchy microaggressions that product managers think users love that that implies.
SSC loads, and then it's done. I can scroll around the page, find-in-page (or, google!) anything, and it all works instantly and consistently. I will gladly pay the price in lack of gloss and “user-friendly enhancement” for that alone.
I think this is a symptom of modern web dev being horrible at every opportunity. Modern websites have tons of Javascript and they are trying to be artful and fancy. This is the trend among designers, but real people just want something simple and straightforward that works.
> If they forced everyone into the standard non-customizable layout of 2015 SSC, would that be a straight utility gain?
No, because a large part of why people like the 2015 SSC layout is because it /felt like SSC/.
Substack, like almost all technology companies, is trying to make their design work for everyone. Every author, every audience. This inevitably results in a design that expresses no personality and has no distinguishing features whatsoever. That is what flat design is, that is what flat design is for, and that is also why people hate flat design.
I prefer the substack design, but liked the writing better on the old blog. I also think you nailed why in the Why Do I Suck post: you were grappling ~7 years ago with stuff I'm grappling with now, and it's well-trodden ground for you at this point that you don't need to rehash but to me it's front-of-mind.
Your old site was uniquely yours, which people like to say they value. People like to associate with unique aesthetics and your old site was definitely memorable—if every Substack used your old site's design, it would perform horribly. It's uniqueness was the main draw, even though the design was worse on its own merits.
I think if you were to look at revealed preferences in terms of engagement, Substack will actually perform better. It's clearly more designed/optimized than your old site.
I like the old SSC because (apparently counter-intuitively) I think *it* is the more minimalistic one.
Substack has a superficially minimal aesthetic, but that's just the outer veneer. It's like a Tesla vs a Lexus or a Macbook vs a Thinkpad. Their formers *look* sleek and minimal, but that's just on the surface.
One thing I hate hate hate about Substack is how hard it is to browse the archives. SSC made that really easy and really enjoyable. Substack, please just give a list of Titles and dates as links!
The comment you posted of someone speaking of their preference for the old design explicitly stated that what they liked about it was its custom, non-professional feel. Professional designers hired by a company to think hard about what constitutes good design and then implement that for everyone basically definitionally can't come up with a design that feels homey and unique for individual blogs hosted by that company.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-people-prefer-my-old-blogs/comment/6400024 <- Freddy deBoer mentions people liking "the band's old shit" as a constant of human nature - but it's worth asking *why* that's the case. Maybe idiosyncratic associations that people make with an old art style, whether that's a band's first album or your hastily-designed 2013 blog, are still intrinsically aesthetically pleasing to people who encountered that art at the right time, and there's no way for more professional artists/designers to actually create better aesthetics for that group of people.
I think other obvious "psychological" explanation besides selection bias is that your old readers are just "used" to it, and they liked it because it was familiar and associated it with the Good Old Days of your blog. Your old website and its old design are still around, and your new readers have probably gone to it to read some of your most popular old posts. Do they prefer that design? I doubt it.
I read your old blog on my RSS reader, and I read your new one in my email inbox. I was exposed to your old layout only when revisiting old pieces, and I always sort of regretted having to do it (no offense). If the article was very long I would usually try to find some way to avoid looking directly at the WordPress layout. Sometimes I would read using a browser extension to isolate the article text (Firefox also supports this natively), or sometimes I would send the article to my Kindle. So I have no nostalgia for the old layout, and this is also the first time I have ever clicked through to look at an article on Substack's own platform.
Having a unique design, good or bad, makes you distinctive, and after enough time readers develop strong and warm associations between the design and your with your voice. Sometimes on Substack I forget who I’m reading.
The old blog allowed you to read immediately. In fact, you can hit the page and begin scrolling down through endless quantities of text, reading and reading. The cost is that you are strongly led to focus on the latest post. Substack presents a bunch of headlines with perhaps very brief blurbs. You choose something interesting-sounding first and click on it.
Perhaps there's something about your audience that makes them prefer the zero-click / zero-choice experience: they are instant gratification readers, or they are always up to date on your blog, so they don't want to have to choose the latest article: *of course they want the latest article*!
I am unusual in not having a strong preference between the two interfaces.
Conflate this with reddit's redesign. An overwhelming majority of people I've interacted with prefer the old design, yet the company insists that the new one is more liked.
I guess it's probably simply just that the kind of people I interact with tend to like a different kind of thing than the majority. Selecting for content does introduce a lot of preferences
Substack wastes half of the screen and feels like it was designed for mobile or email rather than desktop viewing, probably because it was. Wordpress is built for browser. Substack doesn't allow pinch & zoom within mobile browser, presumably to force me to download the App I refuse to download on principle. Wordpress just works. Substack has a flimsy minimalist aesthetic, especially in the comments section, while Wordpress has beautiful comment boxes, obviously indented reply trees, and is overall happy to use the space it has available. Substack is all white while Wordpress has grey accents, colored comments. Substack defaults to a smaller font, especially for metadata like commenter names, comment times etc., but then DOESN'T USE THE SPACE SAVED AT ALL.
At a more abstract/kvetchy level I feel that the migration of hobbies, blogs etc. from wordpress, ipboard style individual websites to bland subdomains where the creator is just another user, and not the host, is emblematic of the fall of the old internet which I miss dearly. I think it's fair to say that your readership is probably more on the MySpace end of the scale than the Facebook one.
My explanation is that your blog caters to a subset of the population that prefers information-heavy presentation with options. I can read Chinese and love Chinese news homepages. I can scan 100 headlines in 30 seconds. My blog is like your old one, three columns of info. Someone can visit and hit a whole bunch of links off the homepage. Saves a lot of time.
Most websites trend towards mass audiences if they grow and that means a lower general intelligence. I like Yahoo Finance from around 2000. It was data heavy, very customizable. Now mostly videos, junk articles, almost never visit. It feels like its made for stupid people. Don't go on Drudge much anymore, but that site stuck with all headlines.
This is extremely common in UI design. Normally though what happens is after a period of time, people adapt, and then dislike the old design and not the new one. Your audience may be one where they enforce a logical consistency on their views, so repeat what they said before to prove they weren't wrong. Normal people just forget their old views and think their current views were the ones they always had. I suppose a survey of some sort could look for this correlation, so this is just speculative as to why people haven't come around.
I assume there was something people liked about the older, more personalised design. Perhaps on an objective level the Substack Theme is just better, it obviously has a minimalist elegance, but on a subjective level the old SSC theme probably felt more personalised? That is, crude and primitive web design has a charm that quality lacks?
I think it's (1) the excessive minimalism of solid white margins, plus (2) the shortened line length. Both hit squarely on the professional-typographer vs sophisticated-reader mismatch. The typographers are very worried about people getting distracted by stuff in the margins, and have eye-tracking data from first-time unfamiliar readers to back it up. They *don't* have longer-term data, which mostly points in the opposite direction. And similarly, there's a widespread piece of ideology which says that shorter line-lengths are better, which I think originates in research done on less-sophisticated readers with a different saccade pattern.
About the customization, whether better or worse by some consensus metric, Substack makes it more generic. There was a certain feeling of being "at home" in the old one, reaching a known place in a corner of the web. Substack feels somewhat like a newspaper.
Substack keep it generic, plain and boring to allow any/all writers to use it and for subscribers of multiple substacks to have a consistent experience. They don’t want your brand overriding their brand.
& I think people prefer something more unique and visually inspiring on a one off, but not when they have to constantly switch visuals when switching from Substack to Substack.
One thing I immediately noticed from a product-design perspective when you moved to Substack was that it is *much* harder to read through the archives on Substack. SSC had links to the next/previous article at the bottom of each article, whereas Substack doesn't seem to have this and instead intermittently shows you a 'greatest hits' or something, which I'm sure has tested very positively for engagement and delight or whatever metrics are currently trendy, but is really annoying if you want to just 'read the next page please'. On SSC itself I thought it was a bit naff having to click through 100 meetup/openthread posts to get to the next dose of insight porn, but I much prefer that to not having the option at all!
Yeah, just last week I opened SSC and had this nostalgic feeling. I had been pointed to SSC just a few months before NYT happened. It was, uhm, the first blog I ever read, and I read a lot of it ... so for me the old layout is just linked to the adventure and the fascination of discovering those texts in the first place. I also somehow like the colour.
More broadly, I think by definition it had a more 'personal' touch and at least some people who like your writings might just like that personal touch by association. Substack to me is very fine in general. It's just the same for every newsletter ... no 'oh, there's Scott's place' feeling.
One possibility: When you ask people what looks better, they think about the sites as things to look at. They assign a positive value to ornamental aspects. But when you are actually reading something, ornament is a distraction. What you enjoy when you pay attention to it and what actually helps you achieve your goals are not necessarily the same thing.
I think the key here is personalization. Substack's design is much better for a generic, unified presentation content *platform*. When you are hosting many writers and you want all of their blogs to look roughly the same, what Substack has done is clearly the correct answer.
However, your blog was not a platform. It was just yours, and that allowed it to be idiosyncratic and optimized for you and your style and content. More precisely, your blog isn't just a blog, its a centerpoint of a community and subculture. Most bloggers are not that. I like Matt Ygglesias, but I don't need a special theme to know i'm in his territory, because his territory is just his content. Your blog is/was a whole subculture, and as a sub-culture, it warrants an aesthetic differentiation that merely being a writer does not.
People always complain about design changes. Even if you do a well-constructed experiment and prove that people prefer the new design, most of the reactions you get will be complaints.
The upshot is that you need to weigh the utility of the improved design to your average user against the pain of dealing with the complaints about it.
Your web design is your face and your domain is your name. Your name should never (have) change(d), and your face shouldn't change drastically all at once. It's also unfortunate to have the same face as so many other writers. SSC's design probably looked the same as some other sites out there, but it was uniquely recognizable among the sites I frequented. Same goes for just about every blog from that era. With Substack, blogs are just content using Substack's surname and wearing Substack's one-size-fits-all face.
The fact that my peripheral vision constantly reminded me that I was reading SSC seems is analogous to how a person's face constantly reminds me I'm talking to them.
The substack page is horrifically slow on mobile. I’ll scroll and it will take several seconds to render the newly visible context. And this is on a pretty decent phone.
Modern websites (including Substack, though it's offenses in this regard are minor) are not optimized for enjoyability or readability, but rather engagement. Basically, an alignment problem - we want to reward people who create enjoyable websites, but the actual incentives reward engagement (or whatever other things are driving revenue).
I believe part of the problem is the email format. On some phones, you cannot read in portrait, you have to switch to landscape. In addition, which include screenshots of data set points, surveys, et al. Must be clicked and and they view too large to simply look at.
I don't know if this is a major problem, but it slightly irksome to me.
Could be a broader form of selection bias, wherein Substack's layout is preferable to most people but there's some weird correlation between "people who like your kind of content" and "people who prefer older-style, non-minimalist blogs".
Part of UI design is fashion. Many UI designers follow fashions in UI design, and fashions can change without them actually being an improvement.
Many of us just want to read, including the comments. Substack has more wasted space (larger font, higher line spacing, shorter line wrapping around the comments) and requires additional clicks to expand things, requiring moves away from the scroll bar.
Also, it used to be easier to see which comments you hadn't read yet. That lack makes the lengthy comments much more difficult to read through more than once.
Plus the old site had more contrast. Many of us like readability above all. "Modern" design doesn't always enhance that, especially when just made fancier.
Is it my imagination or are there more comments per post on the Substack version? Substack makes it too easy to say something -- consequently it's harder to "wade" through the sheer amount of content and perhaps the comments are less well-thought out. For example, I never once commented on a single post before the blog migrated to Substack but now I do from time to time. I know it's a dull instrument but what I wouldn't give for some sort of comment upvote system...
Maybe the problem is that substack was designed by really experienced designers, who are living in a bubble, where they produce what *they* like, receiving acclaim and the occasional award from their industry peers, and insulating themselves from any users so crass and uneducated as not to share the professional opinion. (Which IMNSHO, would be most users.)
Alternatively, the problem is that substack was designed for one-to-many interaction, with only token feedback, much like newspaper comment pages. With newspaper comments, some percent of the commenters are ranting one-topic *ssh*les, spammers, and other annoyances. Moreover some perhaps even larger percent are political opponents of some readers, and so considered by those readers as even worse than the less political problem posters. So the harder it is for readers to read other people's comments, the better for the newspaper. And if it's also hard for the original poster to respond to comments, well that's perfectly fine; if my local paper is any sample, newsies eagerly ignore anyone who tries to interact with them.
Though if I were to be specific, it's not the layout that annoys me on substack - it's the whole look and feel, including but not limited to the tools for commenters. We had better thirty years ago, before html was a thing.
I think the mere *fact* of customization explains why I prefer the old SSC design, more so than any of the actual design choices you made.
When I read a website like SSC that has its own look, I feel like I'm *located* somewhere, like I'm in a specific physical place. And there's an intimacy to it, as though someone has invited me into their home.
When I read any Substack, I don't feel like I'm "in a place" much at all. And if I am, that place is just "Substack." Likewise with Facebook and other standardized venues for content.
If every blog looked like SSC, then my reaction to the SSC design would change from "I am physically inside Scott Alexander's private salon, this is what the chairs and curtains look like" to "I am reading a blog."
Mildly interesting sidenote: tumblr (uniquely?) serves every blog in 2 versions, the Myspace-style customizable view and the Facebook-style standardized view. Consider the difference between
The latter feels more place-like intimate to me, as I've described, even though the extent of my customization goes little further than "making the background a particular shade of desaturated purple." As long as nothing else looks the same way, that's enough.
I'm pretty sure I answered "about the same" in the survey, and I stand by that. My general feeling is that the old blog was kind of ugly, but not offensively so, and the new one is nice, but not in a way that particularly stands out, so overall they're both just pretty okay. Consequently I suspect any preference for the old is nostalgia.
"Is it selection bias? My previous readership is, by definition, people who liked my old blog, so of course they like my old blog more than some new one? I’m including this because I know someone will bring it up in the comments if I don’t."
Every Substack newsletter is formatted exactly the same way in my inbox, so I'm almost afraid all the various writers' voices are running together because they have nothing visually to distinguish them from one another.
Substack is pretty good I think. The app is better. But …. I often see replies to my posts that just show the reply. The only option then is to “show thread” which goes back to the main thread, as far as I can see, and it’s not always clear what the poster was referring to.
It seems to me mostly nostalgia. Vladimir's displayed comment seems to me to read like "It was worse, in a way I was used to." (e.g. "The blog name was more quirky, harder to remember... And hey, that felt memorable!" is literally saying it being bad made it good).
Honestly this all seems like overthinking it (which is not a complaint, I'm very fond of your overthinking).
Mostly I think people just hate it when things change. I mean, what's the last time that you updated an app and went "ooh, I LOVE how everything looks slightly different now"? (And this is classically even more pronounced for autistic people...)
Now, I absolutely count myself in that camp! I like the old layout too. Change is the worst, and the old one was comfortably familiar.
My big complaint is that the comment architecture is so primitive. On SSC I could go back to a post I was interested in the next day and easily find the new comments by searching for ~new~. On ACX there is nothing at all like this, so I usually wait to read a thread until it is a few days old, and then never go back.
I never read this on mobile. The thing I don't like AFAICT is the current blog has a blank white background, identical to every other substack, without any customization or charm. It makes the text feel almost oppressive, having nothing to hem it in at all.
For me I think it's just nastalgia, but I do prefer SSC. When you first joined substack, I installed some sort of "make ACX look more like SSC" add-on, which does a pretty crappy half-job, but I still get annoyed when I read ACX on a new device without it and it just looks like substack.
my personal answer is “I’m very used to the old layout & I’m not used to the new one yet.” I do mostly read on mobile, but I still preferred the older version tbh.
This is not complicated. Your SSC layout had STYLE, and it was your personal style. Presumably your readers like your personal style, otherwise they would not be your readers (I do like it). Substack style on the other hand is minimalist, out of necessity, because it has to cater to a diverse audience, so it has no personality. EDIT: also default Substack font for articles is imho awful, though it is better in comments.
This maybe overlaps with Whither Tartaria. I weakly preferred SSC's old layout over Substack. The reason I did was specifically is that it was, in a cute way, kind of ugly and quickly thrown-together, and it made me feel like I'd found a brilliant blog that is niche and obscure, because a website as ugly and quickly thrown-together can only be niche and obscure, and thus not only do I enjoy reading a brilliant blog, but get to pat myself on the back for finding it, quite literally, "in the rough". This is pretty resistant to reality too, e.g. my enjoyment of SSC's layout and my feeling of it being something niche and underground didn't really diminish when I realized that NYT picking on a blog probably means it's not niche or underground.
At the same time, when I come back to thoughts of how warm and fuzzy the old SSC was, I do not remember that we couldn't collapse comment threads. So I guess, for me the explanation that it is nostalgia for the "band's old shit", as Freddy deBoer puts it, is correct.
Wild guess: humans are neural nets, and the high quality of the old blog caused its layout to trigger a reward function. We like the layout because we read good things there, so our brain assumes the layout must be good. All reasoning after that is our attempt to provide a logical justification for an illogical association.
If the is true, a similar or more extreme pattern should be visible in new readers who spend time on substack without seeing the old blog.
The black sans-serif text on white background feels sterile and very visually immediate. The ACX logo is way off in the corner, and there are no visual borders. The navigational structure of the site is now "list of articles + a few sidelined sections." This makes your site feel like an unformatted powerpoint where each slide is a wall of text, or maybe like an email client on default visual settings. It's just one white text surface with no layers or edges or footholds. This design makes you inaccessible.
I get that this layout is mobile-optimized, but if you are thus required to cede aesthetic vision to this umpteenth degree... why have a website at all? You could just send emails for people to read in their email apps.
In contrast, the light-blue and faint-gray color scheme with the fonts you had chosen made your articles seem like they had come from a strange book. And, there were multiple sections that contained diverse types of items - some of which I never fully understood! I liked that I had to puzzle some of it out. The old site was like an illuminated manuscript. It had layers, and pages like a book has pages, and errata, and appendices. It felt like you were writing it and simultaneously writing in its margins. Its design invited people into you.
I don't find myself wanting to comment here as much as before. Some of that is my own change in habits, but Substack's design sure made it easier to disengage.
Somewhat related to the first thing you posted. If you're a fan of a sports team, and you first fell in love with that sports team in and old, dingy arena. And then they move into a brand new state of the art arena.
I bet a lot of fans would say they preferred the old arena. Especially if a number of other teams make a similar move to similar arenas around the same time.
We associate the old design with Scott's writing (and, to borrow from the other post, when you didn't suck :-) ). Now, it's not unique. It's the same of a bunch of other writers, which we have varying levels of warmth toward.
I think Substack's is better because of text's max width & visual minimalism.
The biggest problem IMO is lack of organization through. Kinda hard to find specific texts. If at least there was a separation between cyclical stuff like Open Threads and text content...
I didn't read your old blog at the time, but I've read tons of it now. I prefer the new layout. The only way I don't prefer it is that it looks "generic" and like every other Substack. With the old one, I know who I'm reading. But you're pretty distinctive so I don't mix you up with, say, Matt Yglesias, the way I might mix him up with Noah Smith. Also, Substack is way easier to read on a phone IMO.
I think substack are trying to relentlessly focus on their core proposition rather than bells and whistles. They are very much trying to let the content be the king on mobile and desktop and as a blank canvas they aren't trying to be personalised in a nice way like SSC was. I think they will eventually allow you to customise it, but it's not core to their mission of getting writers paid.
I really don't think you did a bad job especially after the designer tweaked everything, it reminds me of gamer sites which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the end despite how important designers think they are, how it looks barely matters at all.
• Not all comments are visible when loading the page. (Or weren't when I last checked without ACX Tweaks. Now they do seem to load immediately. When they didn't, this had various consequences beyond that you have to click multiple times: you couldn't easily search in all comments, or save where you've left off by clicking the permalink of a comment.)
• When viewing the thread below a comment, the blog post isn't visible.
• No way to see which comments are new.
• No formatting in the comments.
• No way to jump to the parent of a comment.
• Inexact timestamps.
• When following a link to a comment (or just loading a page with a comment's url) it doesn't jump to the right place. (In Firefox, you can then go to the address bar and press Enter to jump to the right place. In Chromium, that reloads the page, and jumps to a wrong place again.)
• The header that is hidden when you scroll down and shown when you scroll up is annoying. (If you scroll down just a bit more than you wanted, you can't undo that by scrolling up just a bit.)
• The entire archive can't be loaded at once. On the Archive page, I have to scroll to the bottom repeatedly to get to an old post.
• SSC had nice aesthetics, ACX has none.
The ACX Tweaks browser extension (https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks/) fixes some of these problems, but not all, it doesn't work perfectly, and most people presumably don't use it.
1) I have near crippling, drop out of grad school/lost a job/have problems with tasks of daily living ADHD when my stimulant wear off. Substack's pro design has S_H_I_T implementation. Every hang up for .75 seconds. Every 1 second animation instead of just loading the page. Ever "lol I'm going to reload for no reason" event while trying to scroll back to a comment from a non-new-tabbable read more button. They are just another aggravating. Just shove a pencil in my eye.
2)Same reason a family owned Italian joint can feel like family while Olive Garden feels like a strip mall. Teams of experts aren't an assurance you'll get good art.
The old SSC layout gave me the vibes of the old bulletin boards, "internet before the Eternal September", and "this exceptionally interesting but little-known and therefore sort of pleasantly elitist thing". While uniform and minimalist layouts are likely more readable and even more aesthetically pleasing in some way, they are also a sign of times when big and often disliked corporations want to constrain people's individuality and self-expression into homogenous boxes.
1) I like knowing where I am on the internet. While simple, SSC felt like its own place. No substack feels like its own place.
2) The smaller font on SSC felt more congruent with the detailed style of writing. More content on-page helped me to keep more of the reasoning chain in-view.
3) The sidebars added loads to the culture! The local ads! The local blogs!
4) It wasn't actively bad. People weren't complaining about the old site (I expect). I think things would've been different if you'd really broken the old site somehow.
I guess what I'm saying is that the old site had a unique character (in being visually different from other blogs and having the site UI be filled with things of local-interest), it wasn't actively broken, and (I think) the smaller font was a better fit for the detailed content with long chains of reasoning.
Almost all web redesigns (well most brand redesigns too) suck by removing personality and density in favor of cleanliness. It's the same reason I hate modern architecture. Actually clunky small font websites like old reddit, ssc, and goodreads are good. (Speaking for desktop)
Actually I want to rant about the goodreads redesign since that's new. Lots of people have been complaining about this for ages but I hate the revamp. Yes it is less "ugly" but that ugliness removes a bunch of functionality or requires more clickthroughs to see info like isbn or page number.
Consider your blog. The new app removes the little sigil at the top and the colors. It's a stretch but these could be considered functionality by serving the purpose of ssc-territory/tribe signaling. The ads were all rationalist ads further encasing the bubble.
Personally, my issue with Substack (and why I never tried using it myself) is just that it's not customizable - every blog looks exactly the same, and that's no fun. Even a bunch of blue squares that you slapped together in a few days is nice because it's *yours*.
I have no way of knowing how many other people experience the same thing I do, but here it goes. Substack presents a tiny column of text with right around double the text's width in whitespace on the left and right side. The old style wrapped properly for me.
Slate Star Codex's homepage feels rich, full of content, like a library of old books full of mystery.
Astral Codex Ten doesn't. It sort of diminishes how you feel while reading certain posts.
Perhaps you might ask people: "do you think I should go back to the old layout, if Substack let me?" and see what they say. I'd say no, despite what I have just written.
In the early days on Substack, the biggest thing for me was the inability to collapse comment threads. They've fixed that, but there's still a lot of problems with comment threads, some of which I've seen other people mention. It's hard to click through to a specific comment, there's some slow-ness in the loading of comments, you can't have both the main post and the comments visible (unless it's an open thread), and so on. My guess is that a lot of this has to do with how Substack stores the comments. (As I'm writing this, I just noticed that Substack has an option to view comments "Chronological" or "New First" - I don't quite know what the difference is, but if they are sortable, then that might require some sort of data structure that makes the above problems inevitable.)
The other big thing I miss here is the whole archive feature - links to "next post" and "previous post", and links to each month of the archive, and a browsable front page of the whole archive. I think a lot of this is a self-conscious change from the world of blogs, that were seen as chronological writing, to the world of social media, which are seen as ephemeral rather than things to come back to. (It's an interestingly different pair of conceptions of what "Web 2.0" meant!)
All the visual touches and the blogroll and stuff are fine, but it's really these structural things that make the relevant difference. And it seems that Substack expects most authors to prefer things like sortable comments and ephemeral posts, rather than an archive, and that's why their thing, that is more professional, is worse for what your readers want.
Mostly the colours, honestly. Substack is a uniform, eye-searing white. Slate Star Codex had a grey frame, a bit of blue on the top, a bit of light grey on the sides. The overall effect was easier on the eyes. (But also, I don't hate the Substack layout and design. I just prefer the Slate Star Codex one.)
The latter I mercifully had yet to notice, because I've not had the urge to browse this site's archive, because if I had, I would certainly have been very annoyed at yet another instance of the far too prevalent 'lazy-loading content' paradigm. I flippantly want to say "god created scrollbars for a reason" - but basically that would just be a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that I *like* that a scrollbar tells me how much more content to expect at the bottom of the page, and this is completely nerfed by the lazy-loading content paradigm. Prefer clear pagination if we do need to chunk it for size.
I prefer the compactness, generally, and increased information on the non-single-item pages of the old format. The layout within a single post/article is fine enough (though not better). This isn't limited to SSC.
I suspect there's a signaling mechanism at play--the expense in building and maintaining a distinctive, functional blog theme acts as a signalling proxy for the quality of your blog. By contrast, appearing as a generic substack or medium blog--while functionally identical or superior to your custom theme--signals nothing other than "I signed up for an account with one of these services."
Everyone hates the new minimalist designs when you ask them about it, but they engage more with them and they're way easier to adapt to different browsing environments.
The trouble with Substack's layout models is that they are pushing very hard for writers/authors/content creators. 'Here's how you can start your own Substack! Here's how to price subscriptions!' Meanwhile, if you want to know how to use Substack to post comments, it's "Oh, here's how you subscribe to a Substack. You want to know about comment formating? Hey, here's how you start your own Substack!"
And sure, that's their business model: get people producing content that draws subscriptions that they take a slice of for their operating costs and (fingers crossed) profits. But it makes it difficult at best, and actively lousy at worst, for anyone who's a reader but not interested in creating their own Substack. Your job is to passively consume and pay for the privilege.
By contrast, even though WordPress can be a steaming pile of horseshite, the old blog was simple and did what it said on the tin. Even a fool like me could learn simple HTML tags for formating, links and so on. It didn't need bells and whistles, it needed "Here is Scott's post. Here is how we comment and have discussions" and that is what we got. Flashy but superficial design puttering-about wouldn't have contributed to that, and wouldn't do anything. Yeah, great, your paid theme is ultra-high-minimalist post-ironic Zen repurposed via Bauhaus and so achingly chic it has won design awards five years from now, but I can't find the 'sort by new' button.
I prefer the old layout, probably nostalgia. A few quick notes:
-There's a big difference between reading articles in your inbox and on a website. Substack feels perfect for email but very sparse for a website. There's no links, the commenting sucks, it feels very "read and leave" not "read and stay".
-I've found myself clicking over to other substacks a lot more on the website. Sometimes this is cool, I especially like it when I see one writer I like commenting on another writer's article (shoutout to FdB) because it brings back that old blogosphere vibe everyone is missing.
-Again, reading from the inbox, it feels very, I dunno, "special" or "professional". The inbox is where real things happen. But the website feels like "content". Like, everyone's consolidated around some standard practices which are very optimized but they "smell" like content.
From a design standpoint substack is fine. A little bit bland
From a technical implementation standpoint substack is AGGRESSIVELY bad.
Some of the open threads put my poor old desktop to its knees. It's just text on a white background, why does that require layers upon layers of shitty javascript?
FYI - from someone who does research - the way you frame that question is designed to get a specific response. You might frame the question differently: Is ACX or Substack easier to read?Easier to Navigate? From there you might actually get more pertinent results. People don't like change in their visual environments. Think of all the hand-wringing about Google's new logo, Netflix's new design, Medium's new logo, that California School's new logo, the new...[new design of something] and there is a lot of scorn for it, but it's all gone in moments. In a few months, people can't even remember that Google had a serif font and don't even care. It might be that people don't like the attachment to what SUBSTACK represents - that ACX felt more personal to them because it was designed in 2 days. It doesn't mean you have some secret visual taste because people prefer it - you definitely don't. It's what it meant to them. I don't personally care, but I deal with this all the time. A colleague calls it the, "You moved my cheese" problem.
Piles of JavaScript, horrifically bad performance (it displays text and occasional image, and it brings my computer down), unneeded elements.
http://prize.hutter1.net/ may be going too far (I would add margins at least), but SSC was for me in nearly optimal position. Substack broke several things and added nothing better at all and added plenty of JS infestation beyond what was useful or needed.
And removed useful things.
For example there is no way to see just new comments.
Dysfunctional threading - sometimes just scrolling is enough to hog my computer (16GB RAM and displaying formatted text is beyond it!).
Unwanted extra stuff: "subscribe now", subscribing to access it, subscriber-only posts.
Some of that - like trying to spam my email for no good reason, subscribing-related fluff is a direct cost of monetization.
Part of that is team of designers breaking things that worked well, partially because they actually think that it makes thing better, partially to justify their employment.
> Whenever anyone asks, people say they hate the modern minimalist designs and wish they could go back to the complicated colorful ones. But for some reason nobody ever does. Is this just the Internet version of the same general phenomenon?
I designed my personal website exactly how I like it. But it gets about 1/10000000000000000000000000000000000000 traffic of FB.
I don't think you can separate "Why I suck now" from the site thing very much. You have this overall perception among some that things have changed, and that they've changed for the worse. This may or may not be the case, but if it is:
1. You would have some people who were overall just unsatisfied, mad about the writing/topics/takes or whatever, and taking that out on both you and the site
2. Same as above, but didn't want to talk about the writing (in rationalism you can't be mean!) so they talk about the site
3. Same as 1, but they don't even realize it's writing-related; it's just a general sense of discontent
So those 3 are all possible, almost all certainly happening somewhat based on what you've written. But you also have a site that swings hard-nerd and pretty spectrum in it's readership; you know who hates change in comfortable, favorite properties? That segment.
All that to say, so long as you are comfortable with what you are writing I wouldn't worry too much - it would have probably had to have been exactly the same to not get a lot of complaints. And if it was actually the same, it probably still would have got a fair amount of complaints, just aimed at different things.
(postscript afterthought: Another thing that happened is you were gone for a long time, and the comments section broke, permanently, in the way that it will never be what it was again. You can take everything people might believe about your writing and apply it to the comments, as well)
I assume some of the more objectively better things (faster to load comments, easier to read and scroll comments) are just giving people an associated warm fuzzy about the other aspects (minor layout, color, etc.)
There's some kind of horrible stop-the-world pause on Substack that freezes the page for several seconds at its most pathological. It doesn't happen reliably and I have no reproduction steps other than scrolling around.
I get the impression that it's something synchronous in the JS that halts execution for a while, and that it causes small freezes as well as big ones. For example, while typing this comment, input has frozen for half a second multiple times, then caught up.
I don't care what the design looks like as long as the text is vaguely readable and the visual noise is kept down, but a short blog post causing the page to freeze is ridiculous. I can go to Project Gutenberg and scroll through the entirety of The Count of Monte Cristo (which would take more than 1000 pages to print) without any slowdown.
No offense, but Substack is considerably easier on my eyes :) I for one really appreciate the minimalism, I get easily distracted, so having the content surrounded by tons of links in sidebars and topbars wasn’t really my thing. Substack mostly just keeps out of the way.
OTOH, I’m not really an SSC veteran — I read a few posts in the years before ACX, but didn’t become a regular until after the transition. So I don’t really have any nostalgia for the halcyon days of SSC to go on.
Also, I can imagine how people who *can* afford to get distracted / read faster than I do might miss that link-laden context in the UI. But as for straightforward having an aesthetic preference for ACX — that doesn’t really compute. But hey, that’s how aesthetic preferences work, I guess.
My mobile experience has been that my phone browser's "show simplified view" option works more reliably on the old site but it's less necessary on the new one, which is probably a reason in favor of both WordPress and minimalism.
I don't really think there's a mystery here. Your tech friends had something like a decade and a half to optimize a set of features and layouts exactly to your readerships preferences, and substack has ... not. Two things strike me. First, the tech people who were making changes actually talked to your users directly. A lot. There were no barriers between them, and in many cases they were the same people. Substack, to the extent that they get feedback at all is probably mediated by third parties, mostly you. Second, even if substack knew how to make the perfect set of features for you, there's no reason for them to do that unless it would benefit enough of the other bloggers and therefore substack. I think most of it comes down to whoever it was that designed your old blog thought of your readers as the users, but substack thinks of the authors as the most important users. It shouldn't be a surprise that your readers prefer the former on net.
My theory is that the previous site had a better fit between form and content. Scott's pieces are long and involved; they require investment and effort on the part of the reader. The font, line-spacing and layout made the text slightly more information-dense and very slightly more difficult to read, which accords with the higher-than-usual difficulty of the content. Like having an ornate frame on a highly-detailed painting.
The Substack font, line-spacing and layout are easy to read. They appeal universally, and offer very little friction. So seeing the same high-effort writing presented in this low-friction way is jarring. Like printing a treatise by Rousseau in an Animorphs book.
Oh, it's lots of things. The old blog had more color, the old blog had more features, the old blog had more personality - this one is pale, poorly featured, and bland. Would much prefer SSC.
I prefer if each blog that I read looks different, so that I'm aware in the back of my mind who I'm reading. The context change when I go to a different blog is reflected in the different surroundings. The various associations/expectations that I have with the blog also get attached to the layout, and I get used to particular ways of interacting with the site.
So any change to site layout has short-term negatives, as I lose that familiar context and it's a bit jarring. This particular new layout is very similar to lots of other sites, so it can't grow as much into a familiar distinctive context.
Substack is far too white. SSC had colors and sidebars. Substack is glaring and barren.
I think that most people prefer websites with white backgrounds, although certain groups of people, like coders, prefer darker backgrounds. I wonder if ACX is sufficiently tech-adjacent to have mostly people who prefer dark backgrounds, or at least backgrounds with some color. It would be an interesting thing to include in a future survey.
And for a literary description of the effect whiteness can have on the human psyche, we turn to Herman Melville:
What the white [website] was to [Scott Alexander], has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching [Substack], which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the [website] that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; ... and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things—the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; ... though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.
...
Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then.
...
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
...
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino [website] was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
Why do people like your old design? Was it objectively good? It was certainly more complex and had a signature, and was not cookie cutter, and indicated an actual human cared about it. But these things are not inherently antithetical to a "clean" or "sparse" design.
As you've asked, why did Substack—in other words, everything digital—end up boring and awful? Because designers deliberately engaged in an anti-aesthetic, and anti-intellectual ideological mass preference falsification through fear and intimidation. They consciously led the entire web going to shit, and exactly zero designers (more accurately, approximately a single one) fought back against it.
I think it could have to do with the uniqueness of the SCC website, and the way that this effects information retention and engagement.
I remember noticing when I started using a kindle that things I read would sort of blur together and I would find it harder to coherently remember an individual book. Whereas a paper book has a distinct colour, size, shape, mass, smell etc associated with it.
I find a similar thing happens with substack, where there is nothing distinct between any of the blogs to latch onto. This makes it harder to kickstart the process of information sorting, and there are less sensory clues for memories to form onto.
SSC blog had its own character. Substack ones all look the same, and the design is made as lowest common denominator for a million of blogs, all alike. It's not optimized for SSC reader/writer, it's optimized for whatever criteria Substack has. Just like a lot of supermarket food tasted like crap because it's optimized by price, durability, transportability, etc. but not taste. I wouldn't say Substack design "tastes like crap", but definitely quite a bit bland.
It's not a huge deal though - I wouldn't stop reading the blog because of it.
1. Modern UX design with its obsession with whitespace and disdain for borders is a plague upon humanity.
2. The old layout had marginally more characters per line, which I think strikes a better balance there.
3. The two points above combine to make it so that on the new site, 2/3 of my monitor width is pure whitespace, while on the old site, more than half the width is being used, and even the unused parts are better since they aren't bright white lights.
I think the whole thing is just path dependency - if it had always been the other way around, no one would have minded - and also, the only people to say anything are those with strong feelings about it being bad. You solicited the comments in a way that maximizes negative feedback.
If I needed to take a stab, I'd say it's personality. The old blog with its mediocre-matched colors wasn't the prettiest thing, but it was its own thing. It was also a bit reminiscent of the 'old internet' with a lot of distinct, personal sites, which definitely helped with flair. Your substack, on the other hand, looks like any other substack. In fact, it pretty much looks like any other modern text website - if I take my glasses off, l could not tell whether it's medium or substack or even New York Times (I'm exaggerating a bit, but I hope you get the point).
That being said, there are also a few trade-offs. Mobile experience is much better on substack. Comments, on the other hand, load in chunk-wise and, as one of your quoted comments points out, does not work too well. This progressive loading is great for SEO and page speed (since your page is not ten times larger due to 500 comments), but it's not to great for reading large threads. It's quite obvious that they are a second-class citizen and are especially not optimized for the kind of in-depth discussions this readership generates.
Then, of course, there's also some nostalgia thrown in and some resistance to change, but I think the above is enough to explain a lot already.
I've debated this for my own blog. Substack is nice because of the ease of use and has the network effects as the writer's increase, it's much easier for people to sign up for other Substack's. The writing experience is also very nice.
However, landing on a Substack vs. landing on a site like Marginal Revolution/Overcoming Bias (or the old SSC) gives two distinct vibes. The Substack layout doesn't seem to incorporate "going down the rabbit hole" as much and doesn't give a great option to look through tags or categories. It just lists the latest posts in order and kinda says "good luck."
I was someone who came to your old blog relatively late, only a year or two before the switch. I don't have strong opinions one way or the other, but I did notice that the comment formatting on the the comments of your old blog was kind of broken for at least 6 months before the switch. I tried multiple browsers and it didn't fix it. No one else seemed to be complaining about it (and I asked on the subreddit but never got a response), so no one else seemed to have that issue? But it made the comments completely useless for me, so I like not having that issue on substack.
The old one had a retro, unique, weird aesthetic. New one is more generic. In a vacuum, new one would probably be better, but the old one stands out amidst the sea of identical substacks
"Meanwhile, Substack is run by tech industry veterans who probably hired a team of really experienced designers and thought really hard about every aspect of their product. It doesn’t make any sense at all for me to do a better job than them. So what’s going on?"
What's going on is that web designers are (A) aggressively bad, having developed their own culture of what websites "ought" to look like, which I suspect is driven to constant churn by the need to seem novel common to most artists, (B) adhere to a lot of stupid design principles from Apple which say you can never be too minimalist, (C) believe people don't like text, and (D) take Twitter and Facebook as models of website organization.
I would ask 3 designers. Some people hate change and are very vocal about it. Even if something is better, they want it the old way. As a usability engineer and designer, I test and ask people for their opinions by testing them. See how fast they use something. Design should stay in the background to the meaning. Get people the content they want most quickly and clearly and you have excellent design. People won't notice great design. Myself, I prefer text that I can turn to audio which allows multi-tasking. I do read on a small chromebook but I listen on mobile.
SSC felt more like a niche little community (the rationalist targeted ads were always cute, made it feel like I was in the 1920s reading an underground newspaper), whereas the design of ACX makes it feel a lot more standard.
I was immediately reminded of this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OB1g8CUdbA) I came across recently, featuring a DIY gadget built on Raspberry Pi that lets you plug in legacy hardware through ethernet connection and gives you a physical dial to find old web pages on Archive.org Wayback machine. The author checks out how various sites have changed over the years and makes notes of overall shifts in trends.
Now, I am broadly of the opinion that many old web pages tend to look ugly, but I don't think anyone will deny that they at least used to look more personable! However, my sense of ugliness relates to types of garishness (such as animated GIFs and scrolling text), and impractical design choices. In fact, I kinda dislike the modern "flat" designs what with their pure white backgrounds and all. The old SSC site comes from an era where it still felt somewhat personable but has the modern degree of practicality and elegance. Indeed, it's in various ways more practical, such as page width that I find more suited to desktop monitors, and clearer quote nesting in the comments, whereas Substack, like many modern sites, feels as though it's been designed for mobile first and foremost.
I don't like text on an endless white background. Even just a light gray background to frame the text makes things feel nicer and less sterile. A blog should feel cozy without feeling cluttered. Not having a mass of links and banners on individual post and instead confining them to the overview page is much better though.
I like clean and simple, but your substack is visually indistinguishable from many others. Even a very simple color scheme would help make this place *feel* like its your blog. At the moment, it's almost as if your posts are your just several amongst many on a common site (like thought catologue or medium).
Am I so out of touch? No, it's the maximizers with granular data who are wrong.
>It doesn’t make any sense at all for me to do a better job than them. So what’s going on?
ACX is a little under 2 orders of magnitude more profitable than SSC, right? Feels like the starting assumption shouldn't be that the designers didn't do their job right.
"Substack is run by tech industry veterans who probably hired a team of really experienced designers"
That is exactly why it's bad.
In an industry that generates so much profit that it literally does not matter whether you do a good job or a merely passable job, "experienced" does not mean "competent". It means "has internalized years of cargo cult practices".
There is no competitive pressure to make the best design - at best, there is pressure to copy the designs of the biggest companies, and those companies themselves are already big enough that people are just going to use their products regardless of how bad they look and how user-unfriendly they've become.
Nobody is going to unilaterally stop using Youtube, or Twitter, or their iPhone because of a little extra whitespace here and there, or because buttons lost their bevel, or because the website loads and runs a little bit slower due to all the extra bloated javascript running in the background. Everyone will bitch about it, but keep using the product, and so anyone who is trying to do A/B testing in these places will only get pure noise out of any measurement they're trying to make.
Fast forward a couple decades and that's how you get to the situation we're in right now, not just in web design but generally in all computer software. Everything is slower, buggier, and less usable than it should be, sometimes by multiple orders of magnitude. As a fun example, 3d video games are running enough math to compute and draw an entire three-dimensional world with tens of millions of triangles and complex interacting physics, and they're doing it SIXTY TIMES EVERY SECOND. (at least! More than twice that if you're using a 144Hz monitor). That is, they're doing it once every ~16.67 miliseconds. (6.95ms at 144 frames per second). Consider that fact, next time you open some boring 2d software on your computer and it takes a couple *seconds* to load a dozen flat buttons and images, and then you click on a menu and it inexplicably hitches for a few *hundred milliseconds*. Consider what kind of code could be written that manages to waste on the order of a billion cpu cycles, to do something we were already doing in the 1970s with computers that were at least 10000 times slower.
Software developers will often be quick to come up with excuses as to why it's actually reasonable, that everything is more complex now, and have you thought of X and Y, but there is no explanation you can come up with that explains a discrepancy this massive.
It's fully reasonable to think "these are professionals, who are being employed by very successful companies, and they are intelligent people who work very hard, so they can't possibly be doing a bad job - this must simply be the best humans can do", but it is wrong.
They are intelligent people, who work very hard, and the companies who employ them are very successful. It just doesn't matter if they do a bad job.
I think there's a trend in UI design to create things that are visually striking, minimalistic, and interactive. Sounds great! But I'd probably have used the words flashy, lacking, and cumbersome. As an example, we know that Google is not lacking for funds for good design, but here are a few changes Google has made over the years that frustrate me still to this day, maybe over a decade after some of the changes were implemented:
- Google adopted menus requiring at least two mouse clicks to do anything, while also making it impossible to cycle many links/buttons using the tab key. This gets rid of descriptive text links and compresses everything into a sleek interactive icon with snappy clickly menus. Looks great, but less usable interface.
- Gmail by default greatly expanded the margins/padding between emails, lowering the number of emails you can see on a page. It looks "clean" and "zen", but has about half the number of emails visible at a time. (Fortunately this can be turned off.)
- The new Google icons are uniform boxy rainbow line things, making all their icons so visually similar that they might as well all have the same icon at a glance. But they are vivid as anything and super recognizable for brand association.
- Google search used to have longer form descriptions for each search item, and links to a "Cached" page, "Similar pages" search, and some other features. Now they have an extremely short snippet and a hamburger menu that creates a pretty ugly popup monad that doesn't seem to have very useful information available (this is in Beta for me, not sure what others will see).
In general this oversimplifying is the trend for modern design. I imagine most "power users" that rely on a tool for better productivity don't like these sorts of changes, but I also understand that clean visuals and snappy graphics draw people in and often make it easier for new users to learn.
0. IDK, overall I just like the old one better. I don't always understand my aesthetics well enough to fully (or even mostly) verbalize why I like them, and this is one of those times. You say you have no taste, but I also have no taste, so maybe you disproportionately attract people who have no taste — and so we all like things with color and art and backgrounds, and dislike blank white featurelessness.
1. I dislike the general homogenization of the internet. Mainly the way in which everything is now on the same couple websites, and I don't really stumble across small hidden gems anymore. But less importantly (and possibly just out of nostalgia for that time), there's the aesthetics — I dislike the way everyone from you to the National Bureau of Economic Research abandoned your old unique styles and switched to the same flat minimalistic design. Even if I did think the new design was aesthetically better, then still — I don't want everyone to have the "best" design anymore than I always want to eat the "best" meal. I like variety!
2. If I hit <space> to scroll a page down, then <shift+space> to scroll a page up (or vice-versa), then I don't end up in the same place I started. I end up a few lines higher. I am possibly the only person in the world mildly annoyed by this, but you can empathize with me if you're in this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1271/. (In the analogy, Substack is the last row.)
3. Relatedly: I don't like floating headers. I find them mildly annoying. (I'd like JavaScript stuff everywhere if it led to more variety, but it seems like it doesn't.)
(The last two issues can be fixed with the "Kill Sticky" browser extension, but I have to click the button every time I go to the site.)
I do like the title images on articles. Even though they're sometimes too small for me to make out what the picture is.
In general, the more modern Web design tends to look slicker, cooler, and more elegant. Meanwhile, the old hand-coded Web design is easier to use. If you want to sell a website to investors, you need to impress them, and thus you go with the modern design. If you want to satisfy users, this is the worst decision you could make -- but users don't pay the bills, VCs do, so who cares about the users ?
Not directly related, but somehow connected. This 9 years old post discusses one very interesting difference between web design trends in Western countries vs. Japan. Here minimalism has become the norm, while over there sites continue be extremely information dense. The author makes some tentative explanations for the difference and why it remains, so worth considering:
The selection bias of most of your current readers having enjoyed your site enough to come back consistently enough to become a 'fan' is probably one part. Another is that the sleek, monetized, minimalistic design that many companies target for broadest appeal is unappealing to many seeking out substantial content due to its association with blogspam and lower quality content. While the opposite association was true of your old website (ties into first point).
For me personally, I like reading the posts better on Substack. I think that is what they’ve focused on — they sell themselves as the newsletter app (transient information). What I miss on the old site is the navigation / organization. Hopefully they will add more “blogging” (persistent information) features as they grow to encompass more blogs.
It’s much harder to find older posts on Substack, and it’s lacking the links to other blogs. This makes the blog feel devoid of context — cut off from the community of blogs. It also makes the posts feel transient and devoid of context — when I’m reading it I know it will be hard to refer back to it later, and I can’t navigate to other related posts via categories/tags.
I think the ability to add tags to posts would help a lot, as would the ability to add some persistent/pinned posts besides the about page.
"In every art form, complicated colorful designs transition to “modern” minimalist designs over time. Whenever anyone asks, people say they hate the modern minimalist designs and wish they could go back to the complicated colorful ones."
This is the opposite of the problem with SSC v. ACX. The problem is the same as the problem of old.reddit vs. new reddit. Old reddit is cleaner, more readable, and with less buttons popping out at you. Ditto the most recent youtube update. What you have is significantly reduced accessibility and usability for competent users, presumably so they can better optimize ad sales and direct very unskilled users to the right videos.
To me it's simple: the substack design just has way to much whitespace. When I view it in full screen on a wide screen monitor, about 2/3 of the screen is just pure white. I'm a dark-mode everything kind of guy, so the pure white light just burns my eyes. Your old blog had smaller margins and they were a tasteful grey- much easier to read. The text also looks like it's spaced farther apart than your old blog, so more white light there. Then it gets worse in the comment section, as comments nest inward to create even more empty white space.
Flakey theory: designers and visual-artists in general really love designs of pure white. I see it in a lot of trendy restaurants and bars, too, and on fashion models outfits. But I wish they'd understand that the white color on a SCREEN is different from the white on a wall. It's emitting light, not reflecting it, so it feels very different.
"Meanwhile, Substack is run by tech industry veterans who probably hired a team of really experienced designers and thought really hard about every aspect of their product. It doesn’t make any sense at all for me to do a better job than them. So what’s going on?"
I'm not sure you're super familiar with how the tech industry works. We are pervasively incompetent at absolutely everything. Assuming that because tech people did it, that they have expertise, and therefore worked hard and made good choices, is absurd on a level I honestly struggle to describe.
Groups ... or even individuals often do things that scratch their itch, target personal goals, satisfy departmental goals, or even corporation goals at the expense of customer service—whatever form that may be.
Let's say that Scott & Michael each lead platform design teams within XYZ.com, the latest blog-hosting site. Scott & Michael each have teams competing to design a better blogging platform. Just because Scott's team delivers a better design, internal politics may select Michael's team's design contrary to the actual corporate goal of delivering the best designed platform to the customer.
Likewise with architecture. The well-connected elite public building architects aren't out to design a building which pleases the actual public, they're out to design the building which gets noticed in the elite architectural journals, which will lead to architectural society awards, which will lead to more elite white-washing, and more elite public works projects ... ala "The King's New Clothes."
So Substack probably didn't deliver the very best platform it has in it's quiver ... it delivered the best internal political solution—for better or worse.
A better version of the selection effect: People fell in love with SSC/Scott's blogging between 2013-2016 and their formative, most passionate years of that relationship are associated with a particular visual stimuli. The new visual stimulus is associated with the later, mellower years. Naturally meditation on the former induces certain warm and fuzzy's.
It's because the font in the old blog's comments is serif and the new blog's comments are sans serif.
(Also every infinite scroll piece of shit design that I hate but has proliferated across the web despite how fucking annoying it is. But mostly the serif/sans serif.)
This is an incredibly common problem in design. If you do a user study with people who are used to something, they'll complain about just about any style change, no matter what it is. However, when you do a user study with users who haven't used either, you'll find they hate or are unable to use the old thing.
Big tech companies have learned that the solution to this problem is to introduce changes *extremely* slowly so users have time to adjust subconsciously. For example, change the shade of a color slowly over several iterations so no one notices, or move a single button at a time.
While it is possible your old design actually was better, if you want an answer to that you must run a study that removes the "no-change bias" (made this up, not sure if there is an actual name for it). Easiest way to do that is to hire a testing service that can recruit people who have seen neither, but that is expensive.
Most of your users will eventually adjust to the new design, but it could take many years before they accept and integrate it. Some will be permanently stuck in the past due to things outside of your control, like them finding help in your early blog that was very impactful in their life, causing them to attach to that old design the same way someone can end up with a permanent attachment to a particular song or scent.
>Is it something something mobile? I put no effort into optimizing my old design for mobile phones, so maybe that adds another layer of complexity. But I think at some point some web designer friend made a version that worked for mobile, so this can’t be too hard.
Yeah, the issue is that Substack's designed for portrait (mobile), so a 16:9 PC has half the screen as eye-searing, useless whitespace (SSC doesn't fill 16:9 either, but it uses more of it and the borders are at least *not white*).
At a wild guess, I'd say SSC/ACX's readership slews more toward PC than Substack's audience in general.
EDIT: Upon rechecking, SSC uses essentially the same amount of horizontal space for actual text, but it uses a smaller font for the main posts so it still fits a lot more per line. And, again, it uses the sides for something relatively dim rather than eye-searing white.
I think some of this is just learning curve stuff. Some people, particularly those who've made an investment and climbed a learning curve, will tend to prefer higher information density and quick availability of related information, useful functions, etc. For widest appeal, though, lowest common denominator will usually prevail. Think vi/emacs or a modern IDE vs Notepad.
A well-designed blog is more than just graphic design. Experts/nerds, in my experience, will favor higher information density, while noobs will prefer not to be overwhelmed.
Professional web developer here. I don't love Substack's design, but I like it MUCH better than the old ACX layout. Substack lacks personality, but it's very readable. The old site was both bland and messy. I actually applied my own CSS to it to hide a lot of the elements in the old one because I found it too noisy.
Speaking as a software engineer, you're not a professional software engineer. I don't mean that as a criticism! I mean you're playing a different game. "Correct" design for you means that you and your readers all like how we read each others' words. "Correct" design in a company means hitting deliverables, which for engineers means not reinventing the wheel and instead relying on other peoples' work. Oh and the product is designed by committee. Oh, and half that committee will turn over during the project. Oh, and sometimes the external libraries just doesn't work or don't work for your use. Oh, you might have taken on too many use cases in order to please your board. Oh, serving ads sometimes degrades your own product. And so on.
The more minimal the product, the harder it is to load it down with wrong opinions. Maybe your opinions aren't as precisely calibrated as a professional's, but you don't need that many significant digits. It's words. On a page. And the constellation of ideas that those words explore.
If someone is asking the wrong question, it doesn't matter how good their answer is. Companies aren't asking your questions, they're asking their questions. Sometimes those are close enough that you can squint and pretend they're the same. Sometimes.
On the SSC page I see your constellation of ideas on the left and a substantial piece of your content in the center, and some housekeeping on the right. On the ACT page I see a whole lot of whitespace, and your headline and your first two lines. Going out on a limb, many of us like how you explore ideas in a compounding, introspective way. One of those pages is designed to do that. One of those pages shows clickbait AND NOTHING ELSE. There's no sense that we're exploring something larger, gathering tools to understand the world. There's just the screaming void that begs a question whose answer is probably "no".
Generally speaking, I think Substack's design is better than SSC's, but - part of the reason I like SSC's design so much is the association with your writing, and I like reading your writing there because it just feels right. When I read SSC it brings me back to when I first found you and read some of your best posts. Substack doesn't ever make me go "oh, I'm now reading Scott Alexander" (though the writing style still does). I guess that's the power of differentiation, even if on its face there's an option that's "objectively" better.
For me, the biggest difference is that this doesn't *feel* different from any other substack. On the old site, it would open and I instantly would just know I was on SSC. Now, all substacks kind of blend together. The other day, I started reading one of your posts until I realized "Wait, why is SA talking about the electoral implications of a senate bill? Oh, wait, which blog is this?"
There are a bunch of other frictions too. The site is a bit slow. The login behavior often feels weird. The big "Subscribe now" button right above this comment box is an eye sore. But none of those are as big a deal as the fact that it has a different *feel*.
You should get data on new readers and which percentage of those prefer the new vs. old layout. (Even if they haven't experienced both in detail, they can still have opinions.) I predict new readers will prefer the new layout.
Frankly the fact that only 36% of old readers prefer the old layout seems really low to me, and a sign that the old layout has less sticking power/nostalgia than I would expect.
Basically my prior is much higher for people making decisions based on what they have more experience with and much lower for people evaluating the designs "objectively" in any sense.
Someone may have said it already, but the main reason why I prefer SSC’s layout is that Scott’s old posts are often worth re-reading, and the Substack archive page makes that harder, one has to scroll down for ages to get to even the not very old posts. That’s why, even though I discovered ACX first, I still have a fairly strong preference for the old design.
Every website is always getting worse, which I attribute to optimizing for mobile. (I never read anything on mobile devices.) But then other people on this thread say that SSC was better specifically because of mobile, so shrug emoji.
For me it's almost entirely nostalgia. There was something warm associated with the old design. I've spent years and years reading to it. I've read so much to it it's become engrained.
I loved the old name. Slate Star Codex felt arcane and potent in a way i feel didn't translate to AstralCodexTen.
I dont mind the substack layout nearly as much as the godawful site performance. Even on my gaming PC, let alone on my (admittedly rather cheap) phone, I have noticable delay when I scroll over the comment section. And I am 100% sure the problem is caused by abnormal CPU load, not bad internet.
Paul Skalla’s (“Lindyman”) just calls it Refinement Culture and to me it seems dead on the money. Everything trends towards sleekness so we appreciate the things that are less sleek.
Very simple thing: I like being able to scroll through multiple posts on a single page. There is a continuity to your blog that is totally lost in Substack.
When you do a series of posts on a similar topic, in SSC I can easily view all those posts in chronological order as well as see what other things were on your mind around the time you were posting them. On Substack I have to navigate back to the homepage, then navigate to the archives page, and instead of being able to ctrl+f the title of the post, I have to scroll down, wait for it to load the next set of posts, scroll down some more, wait for it to load, etc. etc. etc. until finally I find the title of the post and I can click into the next one. Godforbid I ever want to read through a series you wrote over a year ago.
I believe it has to do with the authenticity of SSC. It possessed a certain rawness, call it an early web2 aesthetic. SSC had your finger prints on it and it felt substantially more intimate. It’s cause for nostalgia now because we’ve all been drowning in a sea of refined homogeneity. Refined design (ACX) and raw self expression (SSC) connect with users in two entirely different capacities.
One big thing for me is that SSC has a nice text list of all blog posts, sorted by date and easily searchable. Substack had a dynamic list that loads more as you scroll down, meaning it's hard to find a particular older post if I want to refer to it. I usually just end up using Google if I want to find a particular ACX post.
For me, this is about feeling like you're in 'Slate Star Codex land' vs 'Substack land'. The former is far preferable, as the latter is unfamiliar, but also large and anonymous (I don't feel like I know anyone here; I don't know the 'culture', etc.).
For Facebook vs MySpace, the common layout makes Facebook feel like we are all a bunch of people interacting in Facebook-land, whereas MySpace felt like a bunch of different sites that were loosely connected together. If the goal is interaction with other blogs, maybe Substack is preferable, but for a cohesive readership and community built around the blog, I think a distinct identity is better.
On Substack all content looks the same as all other content on Substack and, indeed, all content elsewhere in the internet. Contrast with the SSC design where you as a repeat reader know right away where you are and what you're doing there. It's homey.
For me one of the major differences is that the old design had some color, and then filled the unused parts of the screen with a nice dull grey. Substack just has white, which is like staring into a lightbulb.
I think this is mostly a 'music was at its peak precisely when I was a teenager' thing. SSC was what what a lot of blogs looked like when your readers were in their formative years – in fact your blog may have got them into reading them, so that's where their idea of what a blog 'should' look like formed.
I'd also probably say that a disproportion of your readers, including myself, read on laptops, while most of the public does things on mobile. Old blog design was laptop-optimised, modern design is mobile-optimised.
The typeface here is gross and the text is (way, way) too large. The comment section code is also pure satanism. That's pretty much all it is for me, anyway.
I dislike the fact all substack pages look the same. I associated the blue with SSC, green with Marginal Revolution, etc. It allowed for some different mental context switching. Now, all substack bloggers blend together.
For me, the biggest thing is how SLOW substack is. I don't want to wait 5 seconds to load an article, and then wait 5 seconds to load comments. When I see a new substack, I don't want to click "let me read it first" then wait 2-3 seconds to find the 'top' tab.
Same reason I prefer hackernews over new.reddit, even though hackernews is purposefully made ugly. It's just quicker. I don't need fluff, I just want it to be responsive.
Your old blog was charming because of your amateurishness, not in spite of it. The fact that you designed it personally means that it had some gestaltic connection to your personality and community. The user feels this connection without being able to explain it. This is the charm of the old web.
I imagine Substack is designed by one or more teams of product managers, designers and engineers who apply established principles and careful experimentation to maximize user satisfaction and engagement. Is it any wonder that we don't vibe to it?
To me Substack feels like a corporate lounge. Sleek, clean and coldly elegant, but not exactly homely.
I don't think that Substack could do it any different. Authenticity is a primitive. You cannot engineer it. Although some have tried (perhaps the history of punk is relevant here?).
> This may be a little too cute, but I can’t help but think of Whither Tartaria? In every art form, complicated colorful designs transition to “modern” minimalist designs over time. Whenever anyone asks, people say they hate the modern minimalist designs and wish they could go back to the complicated colorful ones. But for some reason nobody ever does.
Isn't this what happened to Reddit? For the record, I joined Reddit when the new design was already in place, and I am not able to use the old one as I find it confusing.
I've discovered your blog after you moved to substack. Since then, I've read basically everything you've ever written. As someone who started with your substack stuff, I'm honestly indifferent. I guess I slightly prefer this, but it is a lot more sterile.
One thing I vastly prefer about the old layout is the tag system. Having to trawl through your posts manually to find your fictional short stories really sucks.
Hell. I like your image of the original SSC design better than the 'improved' one. Sidebars are evil, your rendition only had 1. Every time I read ACX my eyes are stabbed by these massive gutters of white on either side of the content. It's wasted space, it's aesthetically ugly, it's hard on the eyes (dark mode at least helps with this one singular complaint), the only purpose it seems to serve is to make the page longer by squishing the text into a newspaper column, and newspaper column text is hard to read.
Obviously this is all my own opinion and I seem to be in the minority if the prevalence of space-wasting empty white boxes in modern applications and sites is a halfway reasonable indicator. But for my part all these 'experienced design veterans' can go stuff themselves someplace ugly. Give me back my information dense interfaces. (though yes, you can keep all the equally eye-gouging flashy distractions)
To me it seems crazy to spend lots of time web surfing on a mobile device because the input mechanisms so far inferior to a desktop that it slows down everything you do and requires all the designers to dumb down their interfaces. If I'm away from home, it's almost always because I'm doing something that is NOT surfing the web. So all these websites are being optimized for a use case that should barely even exist imo.
I have no preference. I spent lots of time over the last seven years reading SSC as ebooks, text files, or Reader mode renderings, or in a heavily customized browser. The comments were akin to marginalia, not a conversation. So I don't really care about how it looks (and reading the comments here, there clearly wasn't a consistent user experience). However, reading ACX in the Substack app is the first time I was motivated to register and post instead of lurking, even while both the old and new comment systems seem worse to me than a threaded NNTP client. Substack reduced the height of the first step on the engagement curve and nudged me to take part. Is this a good thing when there are already hundreds of great contributors here?
I hate the modern bullshit. ALL the modern bullshit. All the stuff that slows things down and eats up screenspace. If I wanted to exaggerate somewhat, I'd say for me the best internet are the "print versions" of websites, and that I wish I could go back to browsing in Lynx. You get the idea.
Like the bar with the name of the blog popping up when I scroll up even a little. Who needs this?
Another theory is it's the distinction. SSC looked like SSC, astral codex 10 looks like every other substack.
I don't know if it's just different things are interesting or if it's a conditioned place preference kind of thing. Where you prefer the look of the website that gave you a decade of mind blowing revelations.
The old design was a product of its times. Sure, You, Scott, were not a web design specialist, but you were not writing the site from scratch, you were just putting together things created by people who were. And those people worked in a different environment and optimized for different things than the modern web designers optimize for.
I think other comments have already conclusively explained all the object-level technical reasons for which modern web design, of which Substack is but one example, is extremely awful. No need to repeat them, so straight off to meta I go.
The process that led us here can be framed in several ways, largely complementary, but emphasizing different aspects of the dynamic. Among them:
1. Desktop vs. mobile. Mobile designs optimize for their small screens and crappy input devices by simplifying user controls. Hence, thin columns, simplictic UI, dynamic loading / infinite scroll, and so on, and so on, dozens of people described it in detail already.
2. Customizability vs. intuitiveness. Or, put differently, optimization for experienced/extensive users vs. optimization for newcomers. Up to a point, newcomers aren't going to care about the loading lag or inability to do a simple text search over the entire page, or other technical problems that only start bothering you once you're a regular. The best option for catering to them is a maximally simplified site that showcases everything that's supposed to draw them in, while leaving aside complex options that might confuse them, no matter how helpful they become for the regular user. Also, there's no need to optimize for speed or responsiveness, because newcomers didn't yet learn enough automatisms to make those lags slow them down. Iterate this race to the bottom over the entire internet, and you get the modern web experience.
3. User experience vs. corporate control. Once, internet services competed for users by providing them with better tools to reach what they, users, wanted to see. Nowadays, they mostly enjoy natural monopolies of scale, so they optimize for forcing their captive users to see what they, corporations, want them to see. This isn't really Substack's goal, but again, their expert designers use paradigms evolved in internet-wide race to the bottom, so here we are.
4. Sophisticated vs. casual users. Internet was once a niche of intellectuals, professionals and hobbyists. Now, it's an everyday necessity aimed at a common person. It's not just that some options are taken away from the user, it's also that a majority of the users will increasingly have no need for them and not demand them back, leaving those who do want them a minority not worth catering to.
My suspicion is that Substack is optimized for two distinct use cases, one of which is e-mail. And it's the e-mail experience that allows frequent users maximum control at the level of their mail client, while the browser interface is basically an advertisement for the core, e-mail product, aimed at the outsiders. Great for people still employing habits formed in the days of usenet (assumedly, someone who actually reads substack newsletters in the mail please confirm), but bad for those of us who gave up on e-mail as an everyday tool and wish for an optimized experience in their browsers, because we're getting a laggy, dumbed-down, hard-to-efficiently-navigate version designed for complete newcomers.
Substack does not index comments. It is impossible to Google "site:astralcodexten.substack.com JohnWittle" to find comment threads I replied to, or whatever, the way that I could on SSC.
Instead, I am forced to use Substack's notification system... which only shows me comments over the last month. Older comments seem to just disappear into the void, unless I want to manually ctrl+f every single article
Frankly this is horrible. I can't count the number of times I wanted to look up an old conversation I had, and it was easy on ssc. On substack so far if it's older than about a month, it's been impossible if I couldn't remember the exact context.
My theory behind why Substack (and other companies) do this is because if everyone made an optimal design there would be no non-textual way to tell websites apart. So by making your design a pain in the ass to use your website becomes more memorable and recognisable and you are able to build brand recognition. This also explains why customisation is not allowed: it subtracts from brand recognition.
Brand recognition is probably very helpful in extracting money from venture capitalists so it doesn't matter if you're pissing off half your users.
Designers are like economists: very handy when it comes to the small stuff but just smile and nod and then do it your own way when it comes to the big stuff. They are taught a lot of theory that changes how they see the world, but they then become very convinced their profession is always right and in the process lose some common sense.
This is really a small thing, but you put a picture next to each post title (presumably because substack forces you to), so I click through because I want to see the picture bigger and in context. But most of the time the picture is not present in the post.
(I feel like this has come up before, but I can't find it. So I'll assume it's new to ACX / SSC.)
The house is markedly different from other houses and is decorated in an idiosyncratic way that I assume pleases the owner. The owner is also mired in legal battles with other somewhat-nearby homeowners who object to the idea of the owner decorating her house in a way that she likes. And while I believe the battle is unusual, the general legal background is not. If people were allowed to decorate their own houses, design their own buildings, etc., they might have better-looking houses, buildings, etc.
Substack has no personality or identity. It’s plain and sparse and feels very generic. Scrolling through it feels like it could just as well be showing me listicles or recipes.
I prefer Substack to Slate Star Codex for reading individual articles. The text is bigger (I have to zoom SSC at 150% to be able to read it easily), it's less "busy" (just the text, no sidebars).
On the other hand, visually I prefer the SSC. It may not be the best design ever, but it's "quiet" (I don't feel "attacked" by the colors), and more importantly, it's yours. When I read a blog article on SSC, I know that I'm on SSC by the writing and the design. When I read a blog article on Substack, you have the exact same design as everyone else. It's like being at an independant coffee shop instead of at a Starbucks. Sure the coffee shop may be a bit messy and not to your taste, but it was made by human beings, it's unique, and it says things about them. It has meaning. Starbucks on the other hand are a product of a company. They have no "soul".
Another thing is that Substack uses the serif "Spectral" font (or a backup serif font). Most people prefer sans serif to serif fonts for screens. Substack may give a better impression of "authority" (serif fonts reminds people of printed stuff, newspaper), but the font on SSC is more welcoming (and easier to read). It also, in my opinion, goes better with your writing.
Probably just change aversion. It's well known that people who have spent a long time using some design will react negatively to any new design, even objectively vastly better ones. Loss of familiarity, loss of instinct-level knowledge one has built for using the site...
Try surveying only the people who started following you in the ACX era, and you'll get a very different answer I'm sure.
The old blog was less easy to scroll through, but practicality isn't everything. This one feels less you, less like reading what a specific person wrote and more like the hundreds of sanitized other blogs we stumble upon all the time. I got used to it because your ideas are interesting and they make up for it, but for me it's like the difference between a cozy living room and a modern office with white everywhere.
Substack on desktop feels like a badly adapted mobile app, it just doesn't use all the real estate a wider screen provides, while the old design did. This is a general trend in webdesign, almost everything is made with mobile in mind so websites are tall rather than wide with lots of empty space on the sides. I know some people think that's a better for aesthetics, but it just make everything feel like twitter/instagram.
There's like... actual utilization of most of the screen on the old layout. The new layout is a center column of text with literally over half the screen space completely empty.
So yeah - I think it's a mobile thing. Websites used to be designed for 4:3 and later 16:9 screens. Now they're designed for 9:16 screens and look stupid on 16:9 screens.
(and I should note I never read your old blog, so I have no nostalgia for its layout - just nostalgia for websites that were actually designed for the screens they're being displayed on)
Caveat: I only ever use Substack's UI when I'm trying to debug or fix something. I always read from my own specially-written UI [1] and on desktop.
The #1 problem with the old site was that posting a comment reloaded the page. Substack fixed that. But it's otherwise doing too much . . . *something*, I don't know what, that slows everything to a crawl.
The old site was simple but it functioned. It got stuff done. My desktop wouldn't slow to a crawl because I had 3 tabs open to it.
I would say the old layout was a bit too cramped, cluttered, and quirky. But Substack is a bit too bit, minimal, and bland. I expect there's a happy medium somewhere inbetween.
I've been a web developer for a couple of decades, and it is *very* rare for a redesign not to inspire a backlash among regular users. It's not even rare for someone to be mad at a redesign, get used to it, forget they used to hate it, and then defend the redesign when another redesign comes along.
Obviously, some of this isn't rational, and it's just discomfort with change. But to steel man that a bit, it's often the case that people get good at using really clunky sites/features, and that continuing to use clunky-but-familiar things is, at least in the short-term, less work than acclimating to something better-but-new. It can also be the case that a redesign makes the site MUCH better and more accessible for more people (like with mobile) at a relatively slight cost to existing users who don't care about that.
Primary point being: even if a redesign is obviously better, some people will always be upset. But most of them will get used to it.
I personally like each blog I read having a slightly different feel. Makes it more than just words on a page. So a bit of individualized layout is a plus.
I think the touch of colour from the blue also helped a lot. Imagining the current layout with a bit of the old blue, I'd consider them basically equivalent with that change. White background, black text wears thin fast.
I think the key is mobile - I prefer to read on mobile and therefore highly prefer substack’s app vs. the old blog layout
I have experienced this myself over 15 years of blogging. And honestly - people always just like the band's old shit, the old sound. It's not more complicated than that.
I feel like a really big part of it is just the colors. I like the pleasing dark blue banner and darker gray sides of the old website. Now everything is too pale.
Information density feels lower on Substack (information per square inch).
Their design isn't worse than your old layout. If they pushed SSC-style layout to every website, everyone would hate it.
It's like the Hugo and Jekyll custom academic themes everyone is capitulating to (yay capitulation!). The first time you see them, they look nice. Once you see them for the 10,000th time, they look incredibly boring and tiresome and you wish people were still designing their own websites.
Wouldn't another word for the selection bias you speak of just be nostalgia?
I don't know if relevant as quite subjective, but I would usually not comment/vote and prefer substack to the old website. Maybe silent majority likes it more?
That said I do mainly read posts through the email newsletter so...
Also I don't really read anything else on substack so no way for me to be sick of it
The most powerful websites are disproportionately blue-colored
The old SSC was blue-colored
There are a number of people, myself included, who believe that the user created, original and homegrown, flashy and weird and geocities-esque websites of the web 1.0 era were strictly better than the modern flat and minimalist, muted colors, tons of javascript, everything-looks-the-same websites of the web 2.0 era. I'll take https://squeedge.neocities.org/ over other websites any day of the week.
Also, in terms of functionality, the thread system of SSC was objectively better than here. It notified you about new posts in a easy and comprehensive manor, you could jump straight to them, and there were a few other nice QOL things.
Substack is a giant ball of single-page-appiness, with all of the glitchy microaggressions that product managers think users love that that implies.
SSC loads, and then it's done. I can scroll around the page, find-in-page (or, google!) anything, and it all works instantly and consistently. I will gladly pay the price in lack of gloss and “user-friendly enhancement” for that alone.
Now, get off my lawn.
I think this is a symptom of modern web dev being horrible at every opportunity. Modern websites have tons of Javascript and they are trying to be artful and fancy. This is the trend among designers, but real people just want something simple and straightforward that works.
> If they forced everyone into the standard non-customizable layout of 2015 SSC, would that be a straight utility gain?
No, because a large part of why people like the 2015 SSC layout is because it /felt like SSC/.
Substack, like almost all technology companies, is trying to make their design work for everyone. Every author, every audience. This inevitably results in a design that expresses no personality and has no distinguishing features whatsoever. That is what flat design is, that is what flat design is for, and that is also why people hate flat design.
I prefer the substack design, but liked the writing better on the old blog. I also think you nailed why in the Why Do I Suck post: you were grappling ~7 years ago with stuff I'm grappling with now, and it's well-trodden ground for you at this point that you don't need to rehash but to me it's front-of-mind.
Your old site was uniquely yours, which people like to say they value. People like to associate with unique aesthetics and your old site was definitely memorable—if every Substack used your old site's design, it would perform horribly. It's uniqueness was the main draw, even though the design was worse on its own merits.
I think if you were to look at revealed preferences in terms of engagement, Substack will actually perform better. It's clearly more designed/optimized than your old site.
I like the old SSC because (apparently counter-intuitively) I think *it* is the more minimalistic one.
Substack has a superficially minimal aesthetic, but that's just the outer veneer. It's like a Tesla vs a Lexus or a Macbook vs a Thinkpad. Their formers *look* sleek and minimal, but that's just on the surface.
One thing I hate hate hate about Substack is how hard it is to browse the archives. SSC made that really easy and really enjoyable. Substack, please just give a list of Titles and dates as links!
The comment you posted of someone speaking of their preference for the old design explicitly stated that what they liked about it was its custom, non-professional feel. Professional designers hired by a company to think hard about what constitutes good design and then implement that for everyone basically definitionally can't come up with a design that feels homey and unique for individual blogs hosted by that company.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-people-prefer-my-old-blogs/comment/6400024 <- Freddy deBoer mentions people liking "the band's old shit" as a constant of human nature - but it's worth asking *why* that's the case. Maybe idiosyncratic associations that people make with an old art style, whether that's a band's first album or your hastily-designed 2013 blog, are still intrinsically aesthetically pleasing to people who encountered that art at the right time, and there's no way for more professional artists/designers to actually create better aesthetics for that group of people.
I think other obvious "psychological" explanation besides selection bias is that your old readers are just "used" to it, and they liked it because it was familiar and associated it with the Good Old Days of your blog. Your old website and its old design are still around, and your new readers have probably gone to it to read some of your most popular old posts. Do they prefer that design? I doubt it.
I read your old blog on my RSS reader, and I read your new one in my email inbox. I was exposed to your old layout only when revisiting old pieces, and I always sort of regretted having to do it (no offense). If the article was very long I would usually try to find some way to avoid looking directly at the WordPress layout. Sometimes I would read using a browser extension to isolate the article text (Firefox also supports this natively), or sometimes I would send the article to my Kindle. So I have no nostalgia for the old layout, and this is also the first time I have ever clicked through to look at an article on Substack's own platform.
Having a unique design, good or bad, makes you distinctive, and after enough time readers develop strong and warm associations between the design and your with your voice. Sometimes on Substack I forget who I’m reading.
The old blog allowed you to read immediately. In fact, you can hit the page and begin scrolling down through endless quantities of text, reading and reading. The cost is that you are strongly led to focus on the latest post. Substack presents a bunch of headlines with perhaps very brief blurbs. You choose something interesting-sounding first and click on it.
Perhaps there's something about your audience that makes them prefer the zero-click / zero-choice experience: they are instant gratification readers, or they are always up to date on your blog, so they don't want to have to choose the latest article: *of course they want the latest article*!
I am unusual in not having a strong preference between the two interfaces.
Conflate this with reddit's redesign. An overwhelming majority of people I've interacted with prefer the old design, yet the company insists that the new one is more liked.
I guess it's probably simply just that the kind of people I interact with tend to like a different kind of thing than the majority. Selecting for content does introduce a lot of preferences
the font choice is bad. i prefer reading substack comments to articles because the font display looks so bad on desktop.
Substack wastes half of the screen and feels like it was designed for mobile or email rather than desktop viewing, probably because it was. Wordpress is built for browser. Substack doesn't allow pinch & zoom within mobile browser, presumably to force me to download the App I refuse to download on principle. Wordpress just works. Substack has a flimsy minimalist aesthetic, especially in the comments section, while Wordpress has beautiful comment boxes, obviously indented reply trees, and is overall happy to use the space it has available. Substack is all white while Wordpress has grey accents, colored comments. Substack defaults to a smaller font, especially for metadata like commenter names, comment times etc., but then DOESN'T USE THE SPACE SAVED AT ALL.
At a more abstract/kvetchy level I feel that the migration of hobbies, blogs etc. from wordpress, ipboard style individual websites to bland subdomains where the creator is just another user, and not the host, is emblematic of the fall of the old internet which I miss dearly. I think it's fair to say that your readership is probably more on the MySpace end of the scale than the Facebook one.
My explanation is that your blog caters to a subset of the population that prefers information-heavy presentation with options. I can read Chinese and love Chinese news homepages. I can scan 100 headlines in 30 seconds. My blog is like your old one, three columns of info. Someone can visit and hit a whole bunch of links off the homepage. Saves a lot of time.
Most websites trend towards mass audiences if they grow and that means a lower general intelligence. I like Yahoo Finance from around 2000. It was data heavy, very customizable. Now mostly videos, junk articles, almost never visit. It feels like its made for stupid people. Don't go on Drudge much anymore, but that site stuck with all headlines.
I really love your old style *because* it feels homemade. It gives off a slightly quirky, small-creator vibe, and is very *you*.
This is extremely common in UI design. Normally though what happens is after a period of time, people adapt, and then dislike the old design and not the new one. Your audience may be one where they enforce a logical consistency on their views, so repeat what they said before to prove they weren't wrong. Normal people just forget their old views and think their current views were the ones they always had. I suppose a survey of some sort could look for this correlation, so this is just speculative as to why people haven't come around.
You should ask the people who have read *only* ACX which design they prefer!
I assume there was something people liked about the older, more personalised design. Perhaps on an objective level the Substack Theme is just better, it obviously has a minimalist elegance, but on a subjective level the old SSC theme probably felt more personalised? That is, crude and primitive web design has a charm that quality lacks?
I think it's (1) the excessive minimalism of solid white margins, plus (2) the shortened line length. Both hit squarely on the professional-typographer vs sophisticated-reader mismatch. The typographers are very worried about people getting distracted by stuff in the margins, and have eye-tracking data from first-time unfamiliar readers to back it up. They *don't* have longer-term data, which mostly points in the opposite direction. And similarly, there's a widespread piece of ideology which says that shorter line-lengths are better, which I think originates in research done on less-sophisticated readers with a different saccade pattern.
About the customization, whether better or worse by some consensus metric, Substack makes it more generic. There was a certain feeling of being "at home" in the old one, reaching a known place in a corner of the web. Substack feels somewhat like a newspaper.
Substack keep it generic, plain and boring to allow any/all writers to use it and for subscribers of multiple substacks to have a consistent experience. They don’t want your brand overriding their brand.
& I think people prefer something more unique and visually inspiring on a one off, but not when they have to constantly switch visuals when switching from Substack to Substack.
A plurality says it isn't much better or worse.
Most people say it's as good or better.
A large minority prefer things the way they used to be.
Sounds like a generic response to a generic question on if Now is better than Then.
One thing I immediately noticed from a product-design perspective when you moved to Substack was that it is *much* harder to read through the archives on Substack. SSC had links to the next/previous article at the bottom of each article, whereas Substack doesn't seem to have this and instead intermittently shows you a 'greatest hits' or something, which I'm sure has tested very positively for engagement and delight or whatever metrics are currently trendy, but is really annoying if you want to just 'read the next page please'. On SSC itself I thought it was a bit naff having to click through 100 meetup/openthread posts to get to the next dose of insight porn, but I much prefer that to not having the option at all!
Yeah, just last week I opened SSC and had this nostalgic feeling. I had been pointed to SSC just a few months before NYT happened. It was, uhm, the first blog I ever read, and I read a lot of it ... so for me the old layout is just linked to the adventure and the fascination of discovering those texts in the first place. I also somehow like the colour.
More broadly, I think by definition it had a more 'personal' touch and at least some people who like your writings might just like that personal touch by association. Substack to me is very fine in general. It's just the same for every newsletter ... no 'oh, there's Scott's place' feeling.
One possibility: When you ask people what looks better, they think about the sites as things to look at. They assign a positive value to ornamental aspects. But when you are actually reading something, ornament is a distraction. What you enjoy when you pay attention to it and what actually helps you achieve your goals are not necessarily the same thing.
Personally, I miss the "next post" and "prev post" links. Great for low-intensity archive binging.
The uniqueness- the blue bands and the formatting were distinctly SSC, whereas every substack newsletter looks the same.
I think the key here is personalization. Substack's design is much better for a generic, unified presentation content *platform*. When you are hosting many writers and you want all of their blogs to look roughly the same, what Substack has done is clearly the correct answer.
However, your blog was not a platform. It was just yours, and that allowed it to be idiosyncratic and optimized for you and your style and content. More precisely, your blog isn't just a blog, its a centerpoint of a community and subculture. Most bloggers are not that. I like Matt Ygglesias, but I don't need a special theme to know i'm in his territory, because his territory is just his content. Your blog is/was a whole subculture, and as a sub-culture, it warrants an aesthetic differentiation that merely being a writer does not.
It's just hipster-ism. "I liked it before it was cool."
People always complain about design changes. Even if you do a well-constructed experiment and prove that people prefer the new design, most of the reactions you get will be complaints.
The upshot is that you need to weigh the utility of the improved design to your average user against the pain of dealing with the complaints about it.
Your web design is your face and your domain is your name. Your name should never (have) change(d), and your face shouldn't change drastically all at once. It's also unfortunate to have the same face as so many other writers. SSC's design probably looked the same as some other sites out there, but it was uniquely recognizable among the sites I frequented. Same goes for just about every blog from that era. With Substack, blogs are just content using Substack's surname and wearing Substack's one-size-fits-all face.
The fact that my peripheral vision constantly reminded me that I was reading SSC seems is analogous to how a person's face constantly reminds me I'm talking to them.
The substack page is horrifically slow on mobile. I’ll scroll and it will take several seconds to render the newly visible context. And this is on a pretty decent phone.
Modern websites (including Substack, though it's offenses in this regard are minor) are not optimized for enjoyability or readability, but rather engagement. Basically, an alignment problem - we want to reward people who create enjoyable websites, but the actual incentives reward engagement (or whatever other things are driving revenue).
I believe part of the problem is the email format. On some phones, you cannot read in portrait, you have to switch to landscape. In addition, which include screenshots of data set points, surveys, et al. Must be clicked and and they view too large to simply look at.
I don't know if this is a major problem, but it slightly irksome to me.
Could be a broader form of selection bias, wherein Substack's layout is preferable to most people but there's some weird correlation between "people who like your kind of content" and "people who prefer older-style, non-minimalist blogs".
Part of UI design is fashion. Many UI designers follow fashions in UI design, and fashions can change without them actually being an improvement.
Many of us just want to read, including the comments. Substack has more wasted space (larger font, higher line spacing, shorter line wrapping around the comments) and requires additional clicks to expand things, requiring moves away from the scroll bar.
Also, it used to be easier to see which comments you hadn't read yet. That lack makes the lengthy comments much more difficult to read through more than once.
Plus the old site had more contrast. Many of us like readability above all. "Modern" design doesn't always enhance that, especially when just made fancier.
Is it my imagination or are there more comments per post on the Substack version? Substack makes it too easy to say something -- consequently it's harder to "wade" through the sheer amount of content and perhaps the comments are less well-thought out. For example, I never once commented on a single post before the blog migrated to Substack but now I do from time to time. I know it's a dull instrument but what I wouldn't give for some sort of comment upvote system...
Maybe the problem is that substack was designed by really experienced designers, who are living in a bubble, where they produce what *they* like, receiving acclaim and the occasional award from their industry peers, and insulating themselves from any users so crass and uneducated as not to share the professional opinion. (Which IMNSHO, would be most users.)
Alternatively, the problem is that substack was designed for one-to-many interaction, with only token feedback, much like newspaper comment pages. With newspaper comments, some percent of the commenters are ranting one-topic *ssh*les, spammers, and other annoyances. Moreover some perhaps even larger percent are political opponents of some readers, and so considered by those readers as even worse than the less political problem posters. So the harder it is for readers to read other people's comments, the better for the newspaper. And if it's also hard for the original poster to respond to comments, well that's perfectly fine; if my local paper is any sample, newsies eagerly ignore anyone who tries to interact with them.
Though if I were to be specific, it's not the layout that annoys me on substack - it's the whole look and feel, including but not limited to the tools for commenters. We had better thirty years ago, before html was a thing.
SSC did not have a great design, but it had a unique design. Substack, by contrast, has essentially no design.
Just another iteration of the soul vs soulless meme.
I think the mere *fact* of customization explains why I prefer the old SSC design, more so than any of the actual design choices you made.
When I read a website like SSC that has its own look, I feel like I'm *located* somewhere, like I'm in a specific physical place. And there's an intimacy to it, as though someone has invited me into their home.
When I read any Substack, I don't feel like I'm "in a place" much at all. And if I am, that place is just "Substack." Likewise with Facebook and other standardized venues for content.
If every blog looked like SSC, then my reaction to the SSC design would change from "I am physically inside Scott Alexander's private salon, this is what the chairs and curtains look like" to "I am reading a blog."
Mildly interesting sidenote: tumblr (uniquely?) serves every blog in 2 versions, the Myspace-style customizable view and the Facebook-style standardized view. Consider the difference between
tumblr.com/blog/view/nostalgebraist
nostalgebraist.tumblr.com
The latter feels more place-like intimate to me, as I've described, even though the extent of my customization goes little further than "making the background a particular shade of desaturated purple." As long as nothing else looks the same way, that's enough.
I'm pretty sure I answered "about the same" in the survey, and I stand by that. My general feeling is that the old blog was kind of ugly, but not offensively so, and the new one is nice, but not in a way that particularly stands out, so overall they're both just pretty okay. Consequently I suspect any preference for the old is nostalgia.
"Is it selection bias? My previous readership is, by definition, people who liked my old blog, so of course they like my old blog more than some new one? I’m including this because I know someone will bring it up in the comments if I don’t."
You know us too well.
Every Substack newsletter is formatted exactly the same way in my inbox, so I'm almost afraid all the various writers' voices are running together because they have nothing visually to distinguish them from one another.
Substack is pretty good I think. The app is better. But …. I often see replies to my posts that just show the reply. The only option then is to “show thread” which goes back to the main thread, as far as I can see, and it’s not always clear what the poster was referring to.
It seems to me mostly nostalgia. Vladimir's displayed comment seems to me to read like "It was worse, in a way I was used to." (e.g. "The blog name was more quirky, harder to remember... And hey, that felt memorable!" is literally saying it being bad made it good).
Honestly this all seems like overthinking it (which is not a complaint, I'm very fond of your overthinking).
Mostly I think people just hate it when things change. I mean, what's the last time that you updated an app and went "ooh, I LOVE how everything looks slightly different now"? (And this is classically even more pronounced for autistic people...)
Now, I absolutely count myself in that camp! I like the old layout too. Change is the worst, and the old one was comfortably familiar.
My big complaint is that the comment architecture is so primitive. On SSC I could go back to a post I was interested in the next day and easily find the new comments by searching for ~new~. On ACX there is nothing at all like this, so I usually wait to read a thread until it is a few days old, and then never go back.
I never read this on mobile. The thing I don't like AFAICT is the current blog has a blank white background, identical to every other substack, without any customization or charm. It makes the text feel almost oppressive, having nothing to hem it in at all.
I realize that we didn't have this feature on the old site either, but I wish I could collapse comment threads
For me I think it's just nastalgia, but I do prefer SSC. When you first joined substack, I installed some sort of "make ACX look more like SSC" add-on, which does a pretty crappy half-job, but I still get annoyed when I read ACX on a new device without it and it just looks like substack.
The old blog comments were terrible on mobile. After a small number of levels of indentation,
you
were
reading
comments
that
looked
like
this
and
they
were
really
really
really
long
because
even
a
small
number
of
words
takes
up
a
lot
of
space
when
written
one
per
line
and
commenters
were
not
really
all
that
brief
since
they
had
a
lot
to
say
my personal answer is “I’m very used to the old layout & I’m not used to the new one yet.” I do mostly read on mobile, but I still preferred the older version tbh.
This is not complicated. Your SSC layout had STYLE, and it was your personal style. Presumably your readers like your personal style, otherwise they would not be your readers (I do like it). Substack style on the other hand is minimalist, out of necessity, because it has to cater to a diverse audience, so it has no personality. EDIT: also default Substack font for articles is imho awful, though it is better in comments.
This maybe overlaps with Whither Tartaria. I weakly preferred SSC's old layout over Substack. The reason I did was specifically is that it was, in a cute way, kind of ugly and quickly thrown-together, and it made me feel like I'd found a brilliant blog that is niche and obscure, because a website as ugly and quickly thrown-together can only be niche and obscure, and thus not only do I enjoy reading a brilliant blog, but get to pat myself on the back for finding it, quite literally, "in the rough". This is pretty resistant to reality too, e.g. my enjoyment of SSC's layout and my feeling of it being something niche and underground didn't really diminish when I realized that NYT picking on a blog probably means it's not niche or underground.
At the same time, when I come back to thoughts of how warm and fuzzy the old SSC was, I do not remember that we couldn't collapse comment threads. So I guess, for me the explanation that it is nostalgia for the "band's old shit", as Freddy deBoer puts it, is correct.
Wild guess: humans are neural nets, and the high quality of the old blog caused its layout to trigger a reward function. We like the layout because we read good things there, so our brain assumes the layout must be good. All reasoning after that is our attempt to provide a logical justification for an illogical association.
If the is true, a similar or more extreme pattern should be visible in new readers who spend time on substack without seeing the old blog.
I vastly prefer the old layout.
The black sans-serif text on white background feels sterile and very visually immediate. The ACX logo is way off in the corner, and there are no visual borders. The navigational structure of the site is now "list of articles + a few sidelined sections." This makes your site feel like an unformatted powerpoint where each slide is a wall of text, or maybe like an email client on default visual settings. It's just one white text surface with no layers or edges or footholds. This design makes you inaccessible.
I get that this layout is mobile-optimized, but if you are thus required to cede aesthetic vision to this umpteenth degree... why have a website at all? You could just send emails for people to read in their email apps.
In contrast, the light-blue and faint-gray color scheme with the fonts you had chosen made your articles seem like they had come from a strange book. And, there were multiple sections that contained diverse types of items - some of which I never fully understood! I liked that I had to puzzle some of it out. The old site was like an illuminated manuscript. It had layers, and pages like a book has pages, and errata, and appendices. It felt like you were writing it and simultaneously writing in its margins. Its design invited people into you.
I don't find myself wanting to comment here as much as before. Some of that is my own change in habits, but Substack's design sure made it easier to disengage.
Old layout is comfort food. But Substack's is healthier. (Comments system aside).
Somewhat related to the first thing you posted. If you're a fan of a sports team, and you first fell in love with that sports team in and old, dingy arena. And then they move into a brand new state of the art arena.
I bet a lot of fans would say they preferred the old arena. Especially if a number of other teams make a similar move to similar arenas around the same time.
We associate the old design with Scott's writing (and, to borrow from the other post, when you didn't suck :-) ). Now, it's not unique. It's the same of a bunch of other writers, which we have varying levels of warmth toward.
I think Substack's is better because of text's max width & visual minimalism.
The biggest problem IMO is lack of organization through. Kinda hard to find specific texts. If at least there was a separation between cyclical stuff like Open Threads and text content...
I didn't read your old blog at the time, but I've read tons of it now. I prefer the new layout. The only way I don't prefer it is that it looks "generic" and like every other Substack. With the old one, I know who I'm reading. But you're pretty distinctive so I don't mix you up with, say, Matt Yglesias, the way I might mix him up with Noah Smith. Also, Substack is way easier to read on a phone IMO.
I think substack are trying to relentlessly focus on their core proposition rather than bells and whistles. They are very much trying to let the content be the king on mobile and desktop and as a blank canvas they aren't trying to be personalised in a nice way like SSC was. I think they will eventually allow you to customise it, but it's not core to their mission of getting writers paid.
I really don't think you did a bad job especially after the designer tweaked everything, it reminds me of gamer sites which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the end despite how important designers think they are, how it looks barely matters at all.
• Not all comments are visible when loading the page. (Or weren't when I last checked without ACX Tweaks. Now they do seem to load immediately. When they didn't, this had various consequences beyond that you have to click multiple times: you couldn't easily search in all comments, or save where you've left off by clicking the permalink of a comment.)
• When viewing the thread below a comment, the blog post isn't visible.
• No way to see which comments are new.
• No formatting in the comments.
• No way to jump to the parent of a comment.
• Inexact timestamps.
• When following a link to a comment (or just loading a page with a comment's url) it doesn't jump to the right place. (In Firefox, you can then go to the address bar and press Enter to jump to the right place. In Chromium, that reloads the page, and jumps to a wrong place again.)
• The header that is hidden when you scroll down and shown when you scroll up is annoying. (If you scroll down just a bit more than you wanted, you can't undo that by scrolling up just a bit.)
• The entire archive can't be loaded at once. On the Archive page, I have to scroll to the bottom repeatedly to get to an old post.
• SSC had nice aesthetics, ACX has none.
The ACX Tweaks browser extension (https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks/) fixes some of these problems, but not all, it doesn't work perfectly, and most people presumably don't use it.
1) I have near crippling, drop out of grad school/lost a job/have problems with tasks of daily living ADHD when my stimulant wear off. Substack's pro design has S_H_I_T implementation. Every hang up for .75 seconds. Every 1 second animation instead of just loading the page. Ever "lol I'm going to reload for no reason" event while trying to scroll back to a comment from a non-new-tabbable read more button. They are just another aggravating. Just shove a pencil in my eye.
2)Same reason a family owned Italian joint can feel like family while Olive Garden feels like a strip mall. Teams of experts aren't an assurance you'll get good art.
The old SSC layout gave me the vibes of the old bulletin boards, "internet before the Eternal September", and "this exceptionally interesting but little-known and therefore sort of pleasantly elitist thing". While uniform and minimalist layouts are likely more readable and even more aesthetically pleasing in some way, they are also a sign of times when big and often disliked corporations want to constrain people's individuality and self-expression into homogenous boxes.
Here's what comes to mind for me.
1) I like knowing where I am on the internet. While simple, SSC felt like its own place. No substack feels like its own place.
2) The smaller font on SSC felt more congruent with the detailed style of writing. More content on-page helped me to keep more of the reasoning chain in-view.
3) The sidebars added loads to the culture! The local ads! The local blogs!
4) It wasn't actively bad. People weren't complaining about the old site (I expect). I think things would've been different if you'd really broken the old site somehow.
I guess what I'm saying is that the old site had a unique character (in being visually different from other blogs and having the site UI be filled with things of local-interest), it wasn't actively broken, and (I think) the smaller font was a better fit for the detailed content with long chains of reasoning.
People don't like same-y-ness for things that they actually like. But they do like it for things they kind-a-like.
Almost all web redesigns (well most brand redesigns too) suck by removing personality and density in favor of cleanliness. It's the same reason I hate modern architecture. Actually clunky small font websites like old reddit, ssc, and goodreads are good. (Speaking for desktop)
Actually I want to rant about the goodreads redesign since that's new. Lots of people have been complaining about this for ages but I hate the revamp. Yes it is less "ugly" but that ugliness removes a bunch of functionality or requires more clickthroughs to see info like isbn or page number.
Consider your blog. The new app removes the little sigil at the top and the colors. It's a stretch but these could be considered functionality by serving the purpose of ssc-territory/tribe signaling. The ads were all rationalist ads further encasing the bubble.
Personally, my issue with Substack (and why I never tried using it myself) is just that it's not customizable - every blog looks exactly the same, and that's no fun. Even a bunch of blue squares that you slapped together in a few days is nice because it's *yours*.
I have no way of knowing how many other people experience the same thing I do, but here it goes. Substack presents a tiny column of text with right around double the text's width in whitespace on the left and right side. The old style wrapped properly for me.
My 2 cents:
Slate Star Codex's homepage feels rich, full of content, like a library of old books full of mystery.
Astral Codex Ten doesn't. It sort of diminishes how you feel while reading certain posts.
Perhaps you might ask people: "do you think I should go back to the old layout, if Substack let me?" and see what they say. I'd say no, despite what I have just written.
In the early days on Substack, the biggest thing for me was the inability to collapse comment threads. They've fixed that, but there's still a lot of problems with comment threads, some of which I've seen other people mention. It's hard to click through to a specific comment, there's some slow-ness in the loading of comments, you can't have both the main post and the comments visible (unless it's an open thread), and so on. My guess is that a lot of this has to do with how Substack stores the comments. (As I'm writing this, I just noticed that Substack has an option to view comments "Chronological" or "New First" - I don't quite know what the difference is, but if they are sortable, then that might require some sort of data structure that makes the above problems inevitable.)
The other big thing I miss here is the whole archive feature - links to "next post" and "previous post", and links to each month of the archive, and a browsable front page of the whole archive. I think a lot of this is a self-conscious change from the world of blogs, that were seen as chronological writing, to the world of social media, which are seen as ephemeral rather than things to come back to. (It's an interestingly different pair of conceptions of what "Web 2.0" meant!)
All the visual touches and the blogroll and stuff are fine, but it's really these structural things that make the relevant difference. And it seems that Substack expects most authors to prefer things like sortable comments and ephemeral posts, rather than an archive, and that's why their thing, that is more professional, is worse for what your readers want.
Mostly the colours, honestly. Substack is a uniform, eye-searing white. Slate Star Codex had a grey frame, a bit of blue on the top, a bit of light grey on the sides. The overall effect was easier on the eyes. (But also, I don't hate the Substack layout and design. I just prefer the Slate Star Codex one.)
Edit: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-people-prefer-my-old-blogs/comment/6400906 makes some nice points, too, about comment loading behaviour and the archive.
The latter I mercifully had yet to notice, because I've not had the urge to browse this site's archive, because if I had, I would certainly have been very annoyed at yet another instance of the far too prevalent 'lazy-loading content' paradigm. I flippantly want to say "god created scrollbars for a reason" - but basically that would just be a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that I *like* that a scrollbar tells me how much more content to expect at the bottom of the page, and this is completely nerfed by the lazy-loading content paradigm. Prefer clear pagination if we do need to chunk it for size.
I prefer the compactness, generally, and increased information on the non-single-item pages of the old format. The layout within a single post/article is fine enough (though not better). This isn't limited to SSC.
I suspect there's a signaling mechanism at play--the expense in building and maintaining a distinctive, functional blog theme acts as a signalling proxy for the quality of your blog. By contrast, appearing as a generic substack or medium blog--while functionally identical or superior to your custom theme--signals nothing other than "I signed up for an account with one of these services."
Everyone hates the new minimalist designs when you ask them about it, but they engage more with them and they're way easier to adapt to different browsing environments.
Relax. You are OK. The website is OK. The content is the thing.
My only comment on the current website is that I would like to have some html in the comment entry at least for links.
Substack is the same for everyone.
Your readers' aesthetics will not match the general public's.
The trouble with Substack's layout models is that they are pushing very hard for writers/authors/content creators. 'Here's how you can start your own Substack! Here's how to price subscriptions!' Meanwhile, if you want to know how to use Substack to post comments, it's "Oh, here's how you subscribe to a Substack. You want to know about comment formating? Hey, here's how you start your own Substack!"
And sure, that's their business model: get people producing content that draws subscriptions that they take a slice of for their operating costs and (fingers crossed) profits. But it makes it difficult at best, and actively lousy at worst, for anyone who's a reader but not interested in creating their own Substack. Your job is to passively consume and pay for the privilege.
By contrast, even though WordPress can be a steaming pile of horseshite, the old blog was simple and did what it said on the tin. Even a fool like me could learn simple HTML tags for formating, links and so on. It didn't need bells and whistles, it needed "Here is Scott's post. Here is how we comment and have discussions" and that is what we got. Flashy but superficial design puttering-about wouldn't have contributed to that, and wouldn't do anything. Yeah, great, your paid theme is ultra-high-minimalist post-ironic Zen repurposed via Bauhaus and so achingly chic it has won design awards five years from now, but I can't find the 'sort by new' button.
I prefer the old layout, probably nostalgia. A few quick notes:
-There's a big difference between reading articles in your inbox and on a website. Substack feels perfect for email but very sparse for a website. There's no links, the commenting sucks, it feels very "read and leave" not "read and stay".
-I've found myself clicking over to other substacks a lot more on the website. Sometimes this is cool, I especially like it when I see one writer I like commenting on another writer's article (shoutout to FdB) because it brings back that old blogosphere vibe everyone is missing.
-Again, reading from the inbox, it feels very, I dunno, "special" or "professional". The inbox is where real things happen. But the website feels like "content". Like, everyone's consolidated around some standard practices which are very optimized but they "smell" like content.
Strikes me as a branding issue - you are branded a certain way and it's more "aesthetically ambivalent independent-minded nerd."
The old layout is ugly and cramped and therefore on-brand. This new layout is easier to read, optimized for mobile, etc etc. That's off-brand.
From a design standpoint substack is fine. A little bit bland
From a technical implementation standpoint substack is AGGRESSIVELY bad.
Some of the open threads put my poor old desktop to its knees. It's just text on a white background, why does that require layers upon layers of shitty javascript?
FYI - from someone who does research - the way you frame that question is designed to get a specific response. You might frame the question differently: Is ACX or Substack easier to read?Easier to Navigate? From there you might actually get more pertinent results. People don't like change in their visual environments. Think of all the hand-wringing about Google's new logo, Netflix's new design, Medium's new logo, that California School's new logo, the new...[new design of something] and there is a lot of scorn for it, but it's all gone in moments. In a few months, people can't even remember that Google had a serif font and don't even care. It might be that people don't like the attachment to what SUBSTACK represents - that ACX felt more personal to them because it was designed in 2 days. It doesn't mean you have some secret visual taste because people prefer it - you definitely don't. It's what it meant to them. I don't personally care, but I deal with this all the time. A colleague calls it the, "You moved my cheese" problem.
First of all root of the problem is "hired a team of really experienced designers".
Maybe it is hot take of old fossil, but if you compare http://prize.hutter1.net/hfaq.htm#html to Facebook then the first one is far better.
Piles of JavaScript, horrifically bad performance (it displays text and occasional image, and it brings my computer down), unneeded elements.
http://prize.hutter1.net/ may be going too far (I would add margins at least), but SSC was for me in nearly optimal position. Substack broke several things and added nothing better at all and added plenty of JS infestation beyond what was useful or needed.
And removed useful things.
For example there is no way to see just new comments.
Dysfunctional threading - sometimes just scrolling is enough to hog my computer (16GB RAM and displaying formatted text is beyond it!).
Unwanted extra stuff: "subscribe now", subscribing to access it, subscriber-only posts.
Some of that - like trying to spam my email for no good reason, subscribing-related fluff is a direct cost of monetization.
Part of that is team of designers breaking things that worked well, partially because they actually think that it makes thing better, partially to justify their employment.
> Whenever anyone asks, people say they hate the modern minimalist designs and wish they could go back to the complicated colorful ones. But for some reason nobody ever does. Is this just the Internet version of the same general phenomenon?
I designed my personal website exactly how I like it. But it gets about 1/10000000000000000000000000000000000000 traffic of FB.
https://news.ycombinator.com/ and https://github.com/ are rare cases of websites where designers are not horrifically bad.
I don't think you can separate "Why I suck now" from the site thing very much. You have this overall perception among some that things have changed, and that they've changed for the worse. This may or may not be the case, but if it is:
1. You would have some people who were overall just unsatisfied, mad about the writing/topics/takes or whatever, and taking that out on both you and the site
2. Same as above, but didn't want to talk about the writing (in rationalism you can't be mean!) so they talk about the site
3. Same as 1, but they don't even realize it's writing-related; it's just a general sense of discontent
So those 3 are all possible, almost all certainly happening somewhat based on what you've written. But you also have a site that swings hard-nerd and pretty spectrum in it's readership; you know who hates change in comfortable, favorite properties? That segment.
All that to say, so long as you are comfortable with what you are writing I wouldn't worry too much - it would have probably had to have been exactly the same to not get a lot of complaints. And if it was actually the same, it probably still would have got a fair amount of complaints, just aimed at different things.
(postscript afterthought: Another thing that happened is you were gone for a long time, and the comments section broke, permanently, in the way that it will never be what it was again. You can take everything people might believe about your writing and apply it to the comments, as well)
I assume some of the more objectively better things (faster to load comments, easier to read and scroll comments) are just giving people an associated warm fuzzy about the other aspects (minor layout, color, etc.)
There's some kind of horrible stop-the-world pause on Substack that freezes the page for several seconds at its most pathological. It doesn't happen reliably and I have no reproduction steps other than scrolling around.
I get the impression that it's something synchronous in the JS that halts execution for a while, and that it causes small freezes as well as big ones. For example, while typing this comment, input has frozen for half a second multiple times, then caught up.
I don't care what the design looks like as long as the text is vaguely readable and the visual noise is kept down, but a short blog post causing the page to freeze is ridiculous. I can go to Project Gutenberg and scroll through the entirety of The Count of Monte Cristo (which would take more than 1000 pages to print) without any slowdown.
No offense, but Substack is considerably easier on my eyes :) I for one really appreciate the minimalism, I get easily distracted, so having the content surrounded by tons of links in sidebars and topbars wasn’t really my thing. Substack mostly just keeps out of the way.
OTOH, I’m not really an SSC veteran — I read a few posts in the years before ACX, but didn’t become a regular until after the transition. So I don’t really have any nostalgia for the halcyon days of SSC to go on.
Also, I can imagine how people who *can* afford to get distracted / read faster than I do might miss that link-laden context in the UI. But as for straightforward having an aesthetic preference for ACX — that doesn’t really compute. But hey, that’s how aesthetic preferences work, I guess.
I think there's def just a nostalgia factor. People generally prefer the past when asked even though it was objectively worse.
I mostly read your posts in my mobile Gmail client now, which is much better than either mobile website ever was. Substack is good.
My mobile experience has been that my phone browser's "show simplified view" option works more reliably on the old site but it's less necessary on the new one, which is probably a reason in favor of both WordPress and minimalism.
I don't really think there's a mystery here. Your tech friends had something like a decade and a half to optimize a set of features and layouts exactly to your readerships preferences, and substack has ... not. Two things strike me. First, the tech people who were making changes actually talked to your users directly. A lot. There were no barriers between them, and in many cases they were the same people. Substack, to the extent that they get feedback at all is probably mediated by third parties, mostly you. Second, even if substack knew how to make the perfect set of features for you, there's no reason for them to do that unless it would benefit enough of the other bloggers and therefore substack. I think most of it comes down to whoever it was that designed your old blog thought of your readers as the users, but substack thinks of the authors as the most important users. It shouldn't be a surprise that your readers prefer the former on net.
My theory is that the previous site had a better fit between form and content. Scott's pieces are long and involved; they require investment and effort on the part of the reader. The font, line-spacing and layout made the text slightly more information-dense and very slightly more difficult to read, which accords with the higher-than-usual difficulty of the content. Like having an ornate frame on a highly-detailed painting.
The Substack font, line-spacing and layout are easy to read. They appeal universally, and offer very little friction. So seeing the same high-effort writing presented in this low-friction way is jarring. Like printing a treatise by Rousseau in an Animorphs book.
Oh, it's lots of things. The old blog had more color, the old blog had more features, the old blog had more personality - this one is pale, poorly featured, and bland. Would much prefer SSC.
I prefer if each blog that I read looks different, so that I'm aware in the back of my mind who I'm reading. The context change when I go to a different blog is reflected in the different surroundings. The various associations/expectations that I have with the blog also get attached to the layout, and I get used to particular ways of interacting with the site.
So any change to site layout has short-term negatives, as I lose that familiar context and it's a bit jarring. This particular new layout is very similar to lots of other sites, so it can't grow as much into a familiar distinctive context.
Substack is far too white. SSC had colors and sidebars. Substack is glaring and barren.
I think that most people prefer websites with white backgrounds, although certain groups of people, like coders, prefer darker backgrounds. I wonder if ACX is sufficiently tech-adjacent to have mostly people who prefer dark backgrounds, or at least backgrounds with some color. It would be an interesting thing to include in a future survey.
And for a literary description of the effect whiteness can have on the human psyche, we turn to Herman Melville:
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CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the [Website].
What the white [website] was to [Scott Alexander], has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching [Substack], which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the [website] that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; ... and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things—the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; ... though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.
...
Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then.
...
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
...
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino [website] was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
Why do people like your old design? Was it objectively good? It was certainly more complex and had a signature, and was not cookie cutter, and indicated an actual human cared about it. But these things are not inherently antithetical to a "clean" or "sparse" design.
Could Substack look "minimal" and still have quality motifs? https://dribbble.com/shots/16022934-Substack-redesign OR https://dribbble.com/shots/16038753-Substack-logo-redesign indicate perhaps it could. So why would it not. What would compel such a well-funded team to simply not care?
As you've asked, why did Substack—in other words, everything digital—end up boring and awful? Because designers deliberately engaged in an anti-aesthetic, and anti-intellectual ideological mass preference falsification through fear and intimidation. They consciously led the entire web going to shit, and exactly zero designers (more accurately, approximately a single one) fought back against it.
You can learn about this in following two series:
Fall of the Designer: https://web.archive.org/web/20201108113232/http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/4/7/fall-of-the-designer-part-i-fashionable-nonsense
Critical Sharks: https://web.archive.org/web/20200220012356/http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/3/4/critical-sharks-part-i-you-cant-say-that
I think it could have to do with the uniqueness of the SCC website, and the way that this effects information retention and engagement.
I remember noticing when I started using a kindle that things I read would sort of blur together and I would find it harder to coherently remember an individual book. Whereas a paper book has a distinct colour, size, shape, mass, smell etc associated with it.
I find a similar thing happens with substack, where there is nothing distinct between any of the blogs to latch onto. This makes it harder to kickstart the process of information sorting, and there are less sensory clues for memories to form onto.
Contrarian take: ACX looks better, SSC is more useful.
I like having any color at all instead of literally just black text on a white background, but the substack layout isn't actively bad or anything.
SSC blog had its own character. Substack ones all look the same, and the design is made as lowest common denominator for a million of blogs, all alike. It's not optimized for SSC reader/writer, it's optimized for whatever criteria Substack has. Just like a lot of supermarket food tasted like crap because it's optimized by price, durability, transportability, etc. but not taste. I wouldn't say Substack design "tastes like crap", but definitely quite a bit bland.
It's not a huge deal though - I wouldn't stop reading the blog because of it.
1. Modern UX design with its obsession with whitespace and disdain for borders is a plague upon humanity.
2. The old layout had marginally more characters per line, which I think strikes a better balance there.
3. The two points above combine to make it so that on the new site, 2/3 of my monitor width is pure whitespace, while on the old site, more than half the width is being used, and even the unused parts are better since they aren't bright white lights.
I think the whole thing is just path dependency - if it had always been the other way around, no one would have minded - and also, the only people to say anything are those with strong feelings about it being bad. You solicited the comments in a way that maximizes negative feedback.
If I needed to take a stab, I'd say it's personality. The old blog with its mediocre-matched colors wasn't the prettiest thing, but it was its own thing. It was also a bit reminiscent of the 'old internet' with a lot of distinct, personal sites, which definitely helped with flair. Your substack, on the other hand, looks like any other substack. In fact, it pretty much looks like any other modern text website - if I take my glasses off, l could not tell whether it's medium or substack or even New York Times (I'm exaggerating a bit, but I hope you get the point).
That being said, there are also a few trade-offs. Mobile experience is much better on substack. Comments, on the other hand, load in chunk-wise and, as one of your quoted comments points out, does not work too well. This progressive loading is great for SEO and page speed (since your page is not ten times larger due to 500 comments), but it's not to great for reading large threads. It's quite obvious that they are a second-class citizen and are especially not optimized for the kind of in-depth discussions this readership generates.
Then, of course, there's also some nostalgia thrown in and some resistance to change, but I think the above is enough to explain a lot already.
I liked the prominent tab listing corrections in the old version. Showed you were different from most public thinkers.
I've debated this for my own blog. Substack is nice because of the ease of use and has the network effects as the writer's increase, it's much easier for people to sign up for other Substack's. The writing experience is also very nice.
However, landing on a Substack vs. landing on a site like Marginal Revolution/Overcoming Bias (or the old SSC) gives two distinct vibes. The Substack layout doesn't seem to incorporate "going down the rabbit hole" as much and doesn't give a great option to look through tags or categories. It just lists the latest posts in order and kinda says "good luck."
I was someone who came to your old blog relatively late, only a year or two before the switch. I don't have strong opinions one way or the other, but I did notice that the comment formatting on the the comments of your old blog was kind of broken for at least 6 months before the switch. I tried multiple browsers and it didn't fix it. No one else seemed to be complaining about it (and I asked on the subreddit but never got a response), so no one else seemed to have that issue? But it made the comments completely useless for me, so I like not having that issue on substack.
People associate the memory of intellectual satisfaction and joy of their favorite post with the layout of the old blog.
The old one had a retro, unique, weird aesthetic. New one is more generic. In a vacuum, new one would probably be better, but the old one stands out amidst the sea of identical substacks
"Meanwhile, Substack is run by tech industry veterans who probably hired a team of really experienced designers and thought really hard about every aspect of their product. It doesn’t make any sense at all for me to do a better job than them. So what’s going on?"
What's going on is that web designers are (A) aggressively bad, having developed their own culture of what websites "ought" to look like, which I suspect is driven to constant churn by the need to seem novel common to most artists, (B) adhere to a lot of stupid design principles from Apple which say you can never be too minimalist, (C) believe people don't like text, and (D) take Twitter and Facebook as models of website organization.
I would ask 3 designers. Some people hate change and are very vocal about it. Even if something is better, they want it the old way. As a usability engineer and designer, I test and ask people for their opinions by testing them. See how fast they use something. Design should stay in the background to the meaning. Get people the content they want most quickly and clearly and you have excellent design. People won't notice great design. Myself, I prefer text that I can turn to audio which allows multi-tasking. I do read on a small chromebook but I listen on mobile.
SSC felt more like a niche little community (the rationalist targeted ads were always cute, made it feel like I was in the 1920s reading an underground newspaper), whereas the design of ACX makes it feel a lot more standard.
I like the old layout more. I dunno why. It’s not a big deal though.
I also like “Slate Star Codex” more than “Astral Codex Ten”.
I was immediately reminded of this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OB1g8CUdbA) I came across recently, featuring a DIY gadget built on Raspberry Pi that lets you plug in legacy hardware through ethernet connection and gives you a physical dial to find old web pages on Archive.org Wayback machine. The author checks out how various sites have changed over the years and makes notes of overall shifts in trends.
Now, I am broadly of the opinion that many old web pages tend to look ugly, but I don't think anyone will deny that they at least used to look more personable! However, my sense of ugliness relates to types of garishness (such as animated GIFs and scrolling text), and impractical design choices. In fact, I kinda dislike the modern "flat" designs what with their pure white backgrounds and all. The old SSC site comes from an era where it still felt somewhat personable but has the modern degree of practicality and elegance. Indeed, it's in various ways more practical, such as page width that I find more suited to desktop monitors, and clearer quote nesting in the comments, whereas Substack, like many modern sites, feels as though it's been designed for mobile first and foremost.
I don't like text on an endless white background. Even just a light gray background to frame the text makes things feel nicer and less sterile. A blog should feel cozy without feeling cluttered. Not having a mass of links and banners on individual post and instead confining them to the overview page is much better though.
I like clean and simple, but your substack is visually indistinguishable from many others. Even a very simple color scheme would help make this place *feel* like its your blog. At the moment, it's almost as if your posts are your just several amongst many on a common site (like thought catologue or medium).
There's a phenomenon called the Mere Exposure Effect where people start to like a thing more just because they're familiar with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
If someone spends a bunch of time on layout A, and then they suddenly switch to layout B, they'll tend to prefer A just because it was first.
Not sure if that's the only thing that's going on, but it's probably a contributor.
Am I so out of touch? No, it's the maximizers with granular data who are wrong.
>It doesn’t make any sense at all for me to do a better job than them. So what’s going on?
ACX is a little under 2 orders of magnitude more profitable than SSC, right? Feels like the starting assumption shouldn't be that the designers didn't do their job right.
"Substack is run by tech industry veterans who probably hired a team of really experienced designers"
That is exactly why it's bad.
In an industry that generates so much profit that it literally does not matter whether you do a good job or a merely passable job, "experienced" does not mean "competent". It means "has internalized years of cargo cult practices".
There is no competitive pressure to make the best design - at best, there is pressure to copy the designs of the biggest companies, and those companies themselves are already big enough that people are just going to use their products regardless of how bad they look and how user-unfriendly they've become.
Nobody is going to unilaterally stop using Youtube, or Twitter, or their iPhone because of a little extra whitespace here and there, or because buttons lost their bevel, or because the website loads and runs a little bit slower due to all the extra bloated javascript running in the background. Everyone will bitch about it, but keep using the product, and so anyone who is trying to do A/B testing in these places will only get pure noise out of any measurement they're trying to make.
Fast forward a couple decades and that's how you get to the situation we're in right now, not just in web design but generally in all computer software. Everything is slower, buggier, and less usable than it should be, sometimes by multiple orders of magnitude. As a fun example, 3d video games are running enough math to compute and draw an entire three-dimensional world with tens of millions of triangles and complex interacting physics, and they're doing it SIXTY TIMES EVERY SECOND. (at least! More than twice that if you're using a 144Hz monitor). That is, they're doing it once every ~16.67 miliseconds. (6.95ms at 144 frames per second). Consider that fact, next time you open some boring 2d software on your computer and it takes a couple *seconds* to load a dozen flat buttons and images, and then you click on a menu and it inexplicably hitches for a few *hundred milliseconds*. Consider what kind of code could be written that manages to waste on the order of a billion cpu cycles, to do something we were already doing in the 1970s with computers that were at least 10000 times slower.
Software developers will often be quick to come up with excuses as to why it's actually reasonable, that everything is more complex now, and have you thought of X and Y, but there is no explanation you can come up with that explains a discrepancy this massive.
It's fully reasonable to think "these are professionals, who are being employed by very successful companies, and they are intelligent people who work very hard, so they can't possibly be doing a bad job - this must simply be the best humans can do", but it is wrong.
They are intelligent people, who work very hard, and the companies who employ them are very successful. It just doesn't matter if they do a bad job.
I think there's a trend in UI design to create things that are visually striking, minimalistic, and interactive. Sounds great! But I'd probably have used the words flashy, lacking, and cumbersome. As an example, we know that Google is not lacking for funds for good design, but here are a few changes Google has made over the years that frustrate me still to this day, maybe over a decade after some of the changes were implemented:
- Google adopted menus requiring at least two mouse clicks to do anything, while also making it impossible to cycle many links/buttons using the tab key. This gets rid of descriptive text links and compresses everything into a sleek interactive icon with snappy clickly menus. Looks great, but less usable interface.
- Gmail by default greatly expanded the margins/padding between emails, lowering the number of emails you can see on a page. It looks "clean" and "zen", but has about half the number of emails visible at a time. (Fortunately this can be turned off.)
- The new Google icons are uniform boxy rainbow line things, making all their icons so visually similar that they might as well all have the same icon at a glance. But they are vivid as anything and super recognizable for brand association.
- Google search used to have longer form descriptions for each search item, and links to a "Cached" page, "Similar pages" search, and some other features. Now they have an extremely short snippet and a hamburger menu that creates a pretty ugly popup monad that doesn't seem to have very useful information available (this is in Beta for me, not sure what others will see).
In general this oversimplifying is the trend for modern design. I imagine most "power users" that rely on a tool for better productivity don't like these sorts of changes, but I also understand that clean visuals and snappy graphics draw people in and often make it easier for new users to learn.
In order of importance:
0. IDK, overall I just like the old one better. I don't always understand my aesthetics well enough to fully (or even mostly) verbalize why I like them, and this is one of those times. You say you have no taste, but I also have no taste, so maybe you disproportionately attract people who have no taste — and so we all like things with color and art and backgrounds, and dislike blank white featurelessness.
1. I dislike the general homogenization of the internet. Mainly the way in which everything is now on the same couple websites, and I don't really stumble across small hidden gems anymore. But less importantly (and possibly just out of nostalgia for that time), there's the aesthetics — I dislike the way everyone from you to the National Bureau of Economic Research abandoned your old unique styles and switched to the same flat minimalistic design. Even if I did think the new design was aesthetically better, then still — I don't want everyone to have the "best" design anymore than I always want to eat the "best" meal. I like variety!
2. If I hit <space> to scroll a page down, then <shift+space> to scroll a page up (or vice-versa), then I don't end up in the same place I started. I end up a few lines higher. I am possibly the only person in the world mildly annoyed by this, but you can empathize with me if you're in this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1271/. (In the analogy, Substack is the last row.)
3. Relatedly: I don't like floating headers. I find them mildly annoying. (I'd like JavaScript stuff everywhere if it led to more variety, but it seems like it doesn't.)
(The last two issues can be fixed with the "Kill Sticky" browser extension, but I have to click the button every time I go to the site.)
I do like the title images on articles. Even though they're sometimes too small for me to make out what the picture is.
In general, the more modern Web design tends to look slicker, cooler, and more elegant. Meanwhile, the old hand-coded Web design is easier to use. If you want to sell a website to investors, you need to impress them, and thus you go with the modern design. If you want to satisfy users, this is the worst decision you could make -- but users don't pay the bills, VCs do, so who cares about the users ?
Not directly related, but somehow connected. This 9 years old post discusses one very interesting difference between web design trends in Western countries vs. Japan. Here minimalism has become the norm, while over there sites continue be extremely information dense. The author makes some tentative explanations for the difference and why it remains, so worth considering:
https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/
The selection bias of most of your current readers having enjoyed your site enough to come back consistently enough to become a 'fan' is probably one part. Another is that the sleek, monetized, minimalistic design that many companies target for broadest appeal is unappealing to many seeking out substantial content due to its association with blogspam and lower quality content. While the opposite association was true of your old website (ties into first point).
For me personally, I like reading the posts better on Substack. I think that is what they’ve focused on — they sell themselves as the newsletter app (transient information). What I miss on the old site is the navigation / organization. Hopefully they will add more “blogging” (persistent information) features as they grow to encompass more blogs.
It’s much harder to find older posts on Substack, and it’s lacking the links to other blogs. This makes the blog feel devoid of context — cut off from the community of blogs. It also makes the posts feel transient and devoid of context — when I’m reading it I know it will be hard to refer back to it later, and I can’t navigate to other related posts via categories/tags.
I think the ability to add tags to posts would help a lot, as would the ability to add some persistent/pinned posts besides the about page.
It's the neoreactionaries. Reject ACX modernity. Embrace SSC tradition.
"In every art form, complicated colorful designs transition to “modern” minimalist designs over time. Whenever anyone asks, people say they hate the modern minimalist designs and wish they could go back to the complicated colorful ones."
This is the opposite of the problem with SSC v. ACX. The problem is the same as the problem of old.reddit vs. new reddit. Old reddit is cleaner, more readable, and with less buttons popping out at you. Ditto the most recent youtube update. What you have is significantly reduced accessibility and usability for competent users, presumably so they can better optimize ad sales and direct very unskilled users to the right videos.
Your readers are crazy. The new layout is way better
To me it's simple: the substack design just has way to much whitespace. When I view it in full screen on a wide screen monitor, about 2/3 of the screen is just pure white. I'm a dark-mode everything kind of guy, so the pure white light just burns my eyes. Your old blog had smaller margins and they were a tasteful grey- much easier to read. The text also looks like it's spaced farther apart than your old blog, so more white light there. Then it gets worse in the comment section, as comments nest inward to create even more empty white space.
Flakey theory: designers and visual-artists in general really love designs of pure white. I see it in a lot of trendy restaurants and bars, too, and on fashion models outfits. But I wish they'd understand that the white color on a SCREEN is different from the white on a wall. It's emitting light, not reflecting it, so it feels very different.
"Meanwhile, Substack is run by tech industry veterans who probably hired a team of really experienced designers and thought really hard about every aspect of their product. It doesn’t make any sense at all for me to do a better job than them. So what’s going on?"
I'm not sure you're super familiar with how the tech industry works. We are pervasively incompetent at absolutely everything. Assuming that because tech people did it, that they have expertise, and therefore worked hard and made good choices, is absurd on a level I honestly struggle to describe.
Take the Outside View on this one.
SSC was Web 1.0. ACX is Web 2.0. Web 1.0 is better than 2.0 for minimally-interactive sites.
Groups ... or even individuals often do things that scratch their itch, target personal goals, satisfy departmental goals, or even corporation goals at the expense of customer service—whatever form that may be.
Let's say that Scott & Michael each lead platform design teams within XYZ.com, the latest blog-hosting site. Scott & Michael each have teams competing to design a better blogging platform. Just because Scott's team delivers a better design, internal politics may select Michael's team's design contrary to the actual corporate goal of delivering the best designed platform to the customer.
Likewise with architecture. The well-connected elite public building architects aren't out to design a building which pleases the actual public, they're out to design the building which gets noticed in the elite architectural journals, which will lead to architectural society awards, which will lead to more elite white-washing, and more elite public works projects ... ala "The King's New Clothes."
So Substack probably didn't deliver the very best platform it has in it's quiver ... it delivered the best internal political solution—for better or worse.
A better version of the selection effect: People fell in love with SSC/Scott's blogging between 2013-2016 and their formative, most passionate years of that relationship are associated with a particular visual stimuli. The new visual stimulus is associated with the later, mellower years. Naturally meditation on the former induces certain warm and fuzzy's.
A good 4 seconds for OT comments to load for me
I just miss the cool blue banner at the top
Maybe it's like the interior design in like a fancy hotel or something vs. the intimacy of being in someone's home.
It's because the font in the old blog's comments is serif and the new blog's comments are sans serif.
(Also every infinite scroll piece of shit design that I hate but has proliferated across the web despite how fucking annoying it is. But mostly the serif/sans serif.)
TL;DR: humans don't like change.
This is an incredibly common problem in design. If you do a user study with people who are used to something, they'll complain about just about any style change, no matter what it is. However, when you do a user study with users who haven't used either, you'll find they hate or are unable to use the old thing.
Big tech companies have learned that the solution to this problem is to introduce changes *extremely* slowly so users have time to adjust subconsciously. For example, change the shade of a color slowly over several iterations so no one notices, or move a single button at a time.
While it is possible your old design actually was better, if you want an answer to that you must run a study that removes the "no-change bias" (made this up, not sure if there is an actual name for it). Easiest way to do that is to hire a testing service that can recruit people who have seen neither, but that is expensive.
Most of your users will eventually adjust to the new design, but it could take many years before they accept and integrate it. Some will be permanently stuck in the past due to things outside of your control, like them finding help in your early blog that was very impactful in their life, causing them to attach to that old design the same way someone can end up with a permanent attachment to a particular song or scent.
>Is it something something mobile? I put no effort into optimizing my old design for mobile phones, so maybe that adds another layer of complexity. But I think at some point some web designer friend made a version that worked for mobile, so this can’t be too hard.
Yeah, the issue is that Substack's designed for portrait (mobile), so a 16:9 PC has half the screen as eye-searing, useless whitespace (SSC doesn't fill 16:9 either, but it uses more of it and the borders are at least *not white*).
At a wild guess, I'd say SSC/ACX's readership slews more toward PC than Substack's audience in general.
EDIT: Upon rechecking, SSC uses essentially the same amount of horizontal space for actual text, but it uses a smaller font for the main posts so it still fits a lot more per line. And, again, it uses the sides for something relatively dim rather than eye-searing white.
I cannot tell you why with any confidence, but the SSC format helps me get to a contemplative/intellectual mindset.
The slick/minimalist Substack format puts me in a 'make clever comments and score points' mindset.
And for most of your content, I prefer to be in the former state. So I prefer the SSC format.
Or maybe it's just nostalgia, and I'm just rationalizing everything else.
I think some of this is just learning curve stuff. Some people, particularly those who've made an investment and climbed a learning curve, will tend to prefer higher information density and quick availability of related information, useful functions, etc. For widest appeal, though, lowest common denominator will usually prevail. Think vi/emacs or a modern IDE vs Notepad.
A well-designed blog is more than just graphic design. Experts/nerds, in my experience, will favor higher information density, while noobs will prefer not to be overwhelmed.
Professional web developer here. I don't love Substack's design, but I like it MUCH better than the old ACX layout. Substack lacks personality, but it's very readable. The old site was both bland and messy. I actually applied my own CSS to it to hide a lot of the elements in the old one because I found it too noisy.
Speaking as a software engineer, you're not a professional software engineer. I don't mean that as a criticism! I mean you're playing a different game. "Correct" design for you means that you and your readers all like how we read each others' words. "Correct" design in a company means hitting deliverables, which for engineers means not reinventing the wheel and instead relying on other peoples' work. Oh and the product is designed by committee. Oh, and half that committee will turn over during the project. Oh, and sometimes the external libraries just doesn't work or don't work for your use. Oh, you might have taken on too many use cases in order to please your board. Oh, serving ads sometimes degrades your own product. And so on.
The more minimal the product, the harder it is to load it down with wrong opinions. Maybe your opinions aren't as precisely calibrated as a professional's, but you don't need that many significant digits. It's words. On a page. And the constellation of ideas that those words explore.
https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
If someone is asking the wrong question, it doesn't matter how good their answer is. Companies aren't asking your questions, they're asking their questions. Sometimes those are close enough that you can squint and pretend they're the same. Sometimes.
On the SSC page I see your constellation of ideas on the left and a substantial piece of your content in the center, and some housekeeping on the right. On the ACT page I see a whole lot of whitespace, and your headline and your first two lines. Going out on a limb, many of us like how you explore ideas in a compounding, introspective way. One of those pages is designed to do that. One of those pages shows clickbait AND NOTHING ELSE. There's no sense that we're exploring something larger, gathering tools to understand the world. There's just the screaming void that begs a question whose answer is probably "no".
(obligatory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
Because, guess what, Wikipedia uses your old format too.
Generally speaking, I think Substack's design is better than SSC's, but - part of the reason I like SSC's design so much is the association with your writing, and I like reading your writing there because it just feels right. When I read SSC it brings me back to when I first found you and read some of your best posts. Substack doesn't ever make me go "oh, I'm now reading Scott Alexander" (though the writing style still does). I guess that's the power of differentiation, even if on its face there's an option that's "objectively" better.
For me, the biggest difference is that this doesn't *feel* different from any other substack. On the old site, it would open and I instantly would just know I was on SSC. Now, all substacks kind of blend together. The other day, I started reading one of your posts until I realized "Wait, why is SA talking about the electoral implications of a senate bill? Oh, wait, which blog is this?"
There are a bunch of other frictions too. The site is a bit slow. The login behavior often feels weird. The big "Subscribe now" button right above this comment box is an eye sore. But none of those are as big a deal as the fact that it has a different *feel*.
You should get data on new readers and which percentage of those prefer the new vs. old layout. (Even if they haven't experienced both in detail, they can still have opinions.) I predict new readers will prefer the new layout.
Frankly the fact that only 36% of old readers prefer the old layout seems really low to me, and a sign that the old layout has less sticking power/nostalgia than I would expect.
Basically my prior is much higher for people making decisions based on what they have more experience with and much lower for people evaluating the designs "objectively" in any sense.
While we're at it, I really hate the new minimalist LessWrong design too! I miss the greens and dark greys!
Someone may have said it already, but the main reason why I prefer SSC’s layout is that Scott’s old posts are often worth re-reading, and the Substack archive page makes that harder, one has to scroll down for ages to get to even the not very old posts. That’s why, even though I discovered ACX first, I still have a fairly strong preference for the old design.
Every website is always getting worse, which I attribute to optimizing for mobile. (I never read anything on mobile devices.) But then other people on this thread say that SSC was better specifically because of mobile, so shrug emoji.
I just want more blue. It's too bright now.
For me it's almost entirely nostalgia. There was something warm associated with the old design. I've spent years and years reading to it. I've read so much to it it's become engrained.
I loved the old name. Slate Star Codex felt arcane and potent in a way i feel didn't translate to AstralCodexTen.
I dont mind the substack layout nearly as much as the godawful site performance. Even on my gaming PC, let alone on my (admittedly rather cheap) phone, I have noticable delay when I scroll over the comment section. And I am 100% sure the problem is caused by abnormal CPU load, not bad internet.
Paul Skalla’s (“Lindyman”) just calls it Refinement Culture and to me it seems dead on the money. Everything trends towards sleekness so we appreciate the things that are less sleek.
Very simple thing: I like being able to scroll through multiple posts on a single page. There is a continuity to your blog that is totally lost in Substack.
When you do a series of posts on a similar topic, in SSC I can easily view all those posts in chronological order as well as see what other things were on your mind around the time you were posting them. On Substack I have to navigate back to the homepage, then navigate to the archives page, and instead of being able to ctrl+f the title of the post, I have to scroll down, wait for it to load the next set of posts, scroll down some more, wait for it to load, etc. etc. etc. until finally I find the title of the post and I can click into the next one. Godforbid I ever want to read through a series you wrote over a year ago.
I believe it has to do with the authenticity of SSC. It possessed a certain rawness, call it an early web2 aesthetic. SSC had your finger prints on it and it felt substantially more intimate. It’s cause for nostalgia now because we’ve all been drowning in a sea of refined homogeneity. Refined design (ACX) and raw self expression (SSC) connect with users in two entirely different capacities.
One big thing for me is that SSC has a nice text list of all blog posts, sorted by date and easily searchable. Substack had a dynamic list that loads more as you scroll down, meaning it's hard to find a particular older post if I want to refer to it. I usually just end up using Google if I want to find a particular ACX post.
For me, this is about feeling like you're in 'Slate Star Codex land' vs 'Substack land'. The former is far preferable, as the latter is unfamiliar, but also large and anonymous (I don't feel like I know anyone here; I don't know the 'culture', etc.).
For Facebook vs MySpace, the common layout makes Facebook feel like we are all a bunch of people interacting in Facebook-land, whereas MySpace felt like a bunch of different sites that were loosely connected together. If the goal is interaction with other blogs, maybe Substack is preferable, but for a cohesive readership and community built around the blog, I think a distinct identity is better.
On Substack all content looks the same as all other content on Substack and, indeed, all content elsewhere in the internet. Contrast with the SSC design where you as a repeat reader know right away where you are and what you're doing there. It's homey.
For me one of the major differences is that the old design had some color, and then filled the unused parts of the screen with a nice dull grey. Substack just has white, which is like staring into a lightbulb.
I think this is mostly a 'music was at its peak precisely when I was a teenager' thing. SSC was what what a lot of blogs looked like when your readers were in their formative years – in fact your blog may have got them into reading them, so that's where their idea of what a blog 'should' look like formed.
I'd also probably say that a disproportion of your readers, including myself, read on laptops, while most of the public does things on mobile. Old blog design was laptop-optimised, modern design is mobile-optimised.
The substack font is just bad. It's so unpleasant to read. But bad fonts seem to be "in" at the moment.
The typeface here is gross and the text is (way, way) too large. The comment section code is also pure satanism. That's pretty much all it is for me, anyway.
I dislike the fact all substack pages look the same. I associated the blue with SSC, green with Marginal Revolution, etc. It allowed for some different mental context switching. Now, all substack bloggers blend together.
For me, the biggest thing is how SLOW substack is. I don't want to wait 5 seconds to load an article, and then wait 5 seconds to load comments. When I see a new substack, I don't want to click "let me read it first" then wait 2-3 seconds to find the 'top' tab.
Same reason I prefer hackernews over new.reddit, even though hackernews is purposefully made ugly. It's just quicker. I don't need fluff, I just want it to be responsive.
Perhaps this is more like indie vs. corporate.
Your old blog was charming because of your amateurishness, not in spite of it. The fact that you designed it personally means that it had some gestaltic connection to your personality and community. The user feels this connection without being able to explain it. This is the charm of the old web.
I imagine Substack is designed by one or more teams of product managers, designers and engineers who apply established principles and careful experimentation to maximize user satisfaction and engagement. Is it any wonder that we don't vibe to it?
To me Substack feels like a corporate lounge. Sleek, clean and coldly elegant, but not exactly homely.
I don't think that Substack could do it any different. Authenticity is a primitive. You cannot engineer it. Although some have tried (perhaps the history of punk is relevant here?).
> This may be a little too cute, but I can’t help but think of Whither Tartaria? In every art form, complicated colorful designs transition to “modern” minimalist designs over time. Whenever anyone asks, people say they hate the modern minimalist designs and wish they could go back to the complicated colorful ones. But for some reason nobody ever does.
Isn't this what happened to Reddit? For the record, I joined Reddit when the new design was already in place, and I am not able to use the old one as I find it confusing.
I've discovered your blog after you moved to substack. Since then, I've read basically everything you've ever written. As someone who started with your substack stuff, I'm honestly indifferent. I guess I slightly prefer this, but it is a lot more sterile.
One thing I vastly prefer about the old layout is the tag system. Having to trawl through your posts manually to find your fictional short stories really sucks.
Hell. I like your image of the original SSC design better than the 'improved' one. Sidebars are evil, your rendition only had 1. Every time I read ACX my eyes are stabbed by these massive gutters of white on either side of the content. It's wasted space, it's aesthetically ugly, it's hard on the eyes (dark mode at least helps with this one singular complaint), the only purpose it seems to serve is to make the page longer by squishing the text into a newspaper column, and newspaper column text is hard to read.
Obviously this is all my own opinion and I seem to be in the minority if the prevalence of space-wasting empty white boxes in modern applications and sites is a halfway reasonable indicator. But for my part all these 'experienced design veterans' can go stuff themselves someplace ugly. Give me back my information dense interfaces. (though yes, you can keep all the equally eye-gouging flashy distractions)
To me it seems crazy to spend lots of time web surfing on a mobile device because the input mechanisms so far inferior to a desktop that it slows down everything you do and requires all the designers to dumb down their interfaces. If I'm away from home, it's almost always because I'm doing something that is NOT surfing the web. So all these websites are being optimized for a use case that should barely even exist imo.
I have no preference. I spent lots of time over the last seven years reading SSC as ebooks, text files, or Reader mode renderings, or in a heavily customized browser. The comments were akin to marginalia, not a conversation. So I don't really care about how it looks (and reading the comments here, there clearly wasn't a consistent user experience). However, reading ACX in the Substack app is the first time I was motivated to register and post instead of lurking, even while both the old and new comment systems seem worse to me than a threaded NNTP client. Substack reduced the height of the first step on the engagement curve and nudged me to take part. Is this a good thing when there are already hundreds of great contributors here?
The "wading through water" feeling aside...
I hate the modern bullshit. ALL the modern bullshit. All the stuff that slows things down and eats up screenspace. If I wanted to exaggerate somewhat, I'd say for me the best internet are the "print versions" of websites, and that I wish I could go back to browsing in Lynx. You get the idea.
Like the bar with the name of the blog popping up when I scroll up even a little. Who needs this?
Another theory is it's the distinction. SSC looked like SSC, astral codex 10 looks like every other substack.
I don't know if it's just different things are interesting or if it's a conditioned place preference kind of thing. Where you prefer the look of the website that gave you a decade of mind blowing revelations.
The old design was a product of its times. Sure, You, Scott, were not a web design specialist, but you were not writing the site from scratch, you were just putting together things created by people who were. And those people worked in a different environment and optimized for different things than the modern web designers optimize for.
I think other comments have already conclusively explained all the object-level technical reasons for which modern web design, of which Substack is but one example, is extremely awful. No need to repeat them, so straight off to meta I go.
The process that led us here can be framed in several ways, largely complementary, but emphasizing different aspects of the dynamic. Among them:
1. Desktop vs. mobile. Mobile designs optimize for their small screens and crappy input devices by simplifying user controls. Hence, thin columns, simplictic UI, dynamic loading / infinite scroll, and so on, and so on, dozens of people described it in detail already.
2. Customizability vs. intuitiveness. Or, put differently, optimization for experienced/extensive users vs. optimization for newcomers. Up to a point, newcomers aren't going to care about the loading lag or inability to do a simple text search over the entire page, or other technical problems that only start bothering you once you're a regular. The best option for catering to them is a maximally simplified site that showcases everything that's supposed to draw them in, while leaving aside complex options that might confuse them, no matter how helpful they become for the regular user. Also, there's no need to optimize for speed or responsiveness, because newcomers didn't yet learn enough automatisms to make those lags slow them down. Iterate this race to the bottom over the entire internet, and you get the modern web experience.
3. User experience vs. corporate control. Once, internet services competed for users by providing them with better tools to reach what they, users, wanted to see. Nowadays, they mostly enjoy natural monopolies of scale, so they optimize for forcing their captive users to see what they, corporations, want them to see. This isn't really Substack's goal, but again, their expert designers use paradigms evolved in internet-wide race to the bottom, so here we are.
4. Sophisticated vs. casual users. Internet was once a niche of intellectuals, professionals and hobbyists. Now, it's an everyday necessity aimed at a common person. It's not just that some options are taken away from the user, it's also that a majority of the users will increasingly have no need for them and not demand them back, leaving those who do want them a minority not worth catering to.
My suspicion is that Substack is optimized for two distinct use cases, one of which is e-mail. And it's the e-mail experience that allows frequent users maximum control at the level of their mail client, while the browser interface is basically an advertisement for the core, e-mail product, aimed at the outsiders. Great for people still employing habits formed in the days of usenet (assumedly, someone who actually reads substack newsletters in the mail please confirm), but bad for those of us who gave up on e-mail as an everyday tool and wish for an optimized experience in their browsers, because we're getting a laggy, dumbed-down, hard-to-efficiently-navigate version designed for complete newcomers.
Substack does not index comments. It is impossible to Google "site:astralcodexten.substack.com JohnWittle" to find comment threads I replied to, or whatever, the way that I could on SSC.
Instead, I am forced to use Substack's notification system... which only shows me comments over the last month. Older comments seem to just disappear into the void, unless I want to manually ctrl+f every single article
Frankly this is horrible. I can't count the number of times I wanted to look up an old conversation I had, and it was easy on ssc. On substack so far if it's older than about a month, it's been impossible if I couldn't remember the exact context.
My theory behind why Substack (and other companies) do this is because if everyone made an optimal design there would be no non-textual way to tell websites apart. So by making your design a pain in the ass to use your website becomes more memorable and recognisable and you are able to build brand recognition. This also explains why customisation is not allowed: it subtracts from brand recognition.
Brand recognition is probably very helpful in extracting money from venture capitalists so it doesn't matter if you're pissing off half your users.
Designers are like economists: very handy when it comes to the small stuff but just smile and nod and then do it your own way when it comes to the big stuff. They are taught a lot of theory that changes how they see the world, but they then become very convinced their profession is always right and in the process lose some common sense.
This is really a small thing, but you put a picture next to each post title (presumably because substack forces you to), so I click through because I want to see the picture bigger and in context. But most of the time the picture is not present in the post.
> If they forced everyone into the standard non-customizable layout of 2015 SSC, would that be a straight utility gain?
Yes.
I would say the primary difference is that the comments on SSC look fine and the comment layout on substack is terrible.
Secondarily, the gray on SSC is nicer than the bright white on substack.
As to Tartaria, it's worth mentioning the Flintstone House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flintstone_House
(I feel like this has come up before, but I can't find it. So I'll assume it's new to ACX / SSC.)
The house is markedly different from other houses and is decorated in an idiosyncratic way that I assume pleases the owner. The owner is also mired in legal battles with other somewhat-nearby homeowners who object to the idea of the owner decorating her house in a way that she likes. And while I believe the battle is unusual, the general legal background is not. If people were allowed to decorate their own houses, design their own buildings, etc., they might have better-looking houses, buildings, etc.
Substack has no personality or identity. It’s plain and sparse and feels very generic. Scrolling through it feels like it could just as well be showing me listicles or recipes.
I prefer Substack to Slate Star Codex for reading individual articles. The text is bigger (I have to zoom SSC at 150% to be able to read it easily), it's less "busy" (just the text, no sidebars).
On the other hand, visually I prefer the SSC. It may not be the best design ever, but it's "quiet" (I don't feel "attacked" by the colors), and more importantly, it's yours. When I read a blog article on SSC, I know that I'm on SSC by the writing and the design. When I read a blog article on Substack, you have the exact same design as everyone else. It's like being at an independant coffee shop instead of at a Starbucks. Sure the coffee shop may be a bit messy and not to your taste, but it was made by human beings, it's unique, and it says things about them. It has meaning. Starbucks on the other hand are a product of a company. They have no "soul".
Another thing is that Substack uses the serif "Spectral" font (or a backup serif font). Most people prefer sans serif to serif fonts for screens. Substack may give a better impression of "authority" (serif fonts reminds people of printed stuff, newspaper), but the font on SSC is more welcoming (and easier to read). It also, in my opinion, goes better with your writing.
Probably just change aversion. It's well known that people who have spent a long time using some design will react negatively to any new design, even objectively vastly better ones. Loss of familiarity, loss of instinct-level knowledge one has built for using the site...
Try surveying only the people who started following you in the ACX era, and you'll get a very different answer I'm sure.
The old blog was less easy to scroll through, but practicality isn't everything. This one feels less you, less like reading what a specific person wrote and more like the hundreds of sanitized other blogs we stumble upon all the time. I got used to it because your ideas are interesting and they make up for it, but for me it's like the difference between a cozy living room and a modern office with white everywhere.
Substack on desktop feels like a badly adapted mobile app, it just doesn't use all the real estate a wider screen provides, while the old design did. This is a general trend in webdesign, almost everything is made with mobile in mind so websites are tall rather than wide with lots of empty space on the sides. I know some people think that's a better for aesthetics, but it just make everything feel like twitter/instagram.
For those who want to take matters into their own hands with some CSS: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/slatestarsubstack/
There's like... actual utilization of most of the screen on the old layout. The new layout is a center column of text with literally over half the screen space completely empty.
So yeah - I think it's a mobile thing. Websites used to be designed for 4:3 and later 16:9 screens. Now they're designed for 9:16 screens and look stupid on 16:9 screens.
(and I should note I never read your old blog, so I have no nostalgia for its layout - just nostalgia for websites that were actually designed for the screens they're being displayed on)
Caveat: I only ever use Substack's UI when I'm trying to debug or fix something. I always read from my own specially-written UI [1] and on desktop.
The #1 problem with the old site was that posting a comment reloaded the page. Substack fixed that. But it's otherwise doing too much . . . *something*, I don't know what, that slows everything to a crawl.
The old site was simple but it functioned. It got stuff done. My desktop wouldn't slow to a crawl because I had 3 tabs open to it.
[1] https://github.com/EdwardScizorhands/ACX-simple but I haven't put out a release in a long time. I haven't implemented "REPORT", for example.
I would say the old layout was a bit too cramped, cluttered, and quirky. But Substack is a bit too bit, minimal, and bland. I expect there's a happy medium somewhere inbetween.
Clicking on a comment link takes me to that comment maybe 20% of the time.
Emotional attachment. "I liked their early stuff." We attach to an aesthetic when the content moves us.
I've been a web developer for a couple of decades, and it is *very* rare for a redesign not to inspire a backlash among regular users. It's not even rare for someone to be mad at a redesign, get used to it, forget they used to hate it, and then defend the redesign when another redesign comes along.
Obviously, some of this isn't rational, and it's just discomfort with change. But to steel man that a bit, it's often the case that people get good at using really clunky sites/features, and that continuing to use clunky-but-familiar things is, at least in the short-term, less work than acclimating to something better-but-new. It can also be the case that a redesign makes the site MUCH better and more accessible for more people (like with mobile) at a relatively slight cost to existing users who don't care about that.
Primary point being: even if a redesign is obviously better, some people will always be upset. But most of them will get used to it.
I personally like each blog I read having a slightly different feel. Makes it more than just words on a page. So a bit of individualized layout is a plus.
I think the touch of colour from the blue also helped a lot. Imagining the current layout with a bit of the old blue, I'd consider them basically equivalent with that change. White background, black text wears thin fast.
https://xkcd.com/1172/