It’s a very easy change to default ‘Auto expand media’ to true for half of new users, and see what effect it has over a few months. It’s also a fun experiment with no real drawbacks.

Writing the code to do that is very easy, determining what metrics are actually important and impact user success and what metrics accurately track user success is much harder.

I do generally agree though! Personally I just asked the instance admins of lemmy.ca to redirect lemmy.ca/r/... URLs to lemmy.ca/c/... URLs (rather than 404ing), as a tiny user facing feature for Redditors coming over, and they did it in a second.

It’s not that popular of a concept on here, probably since there’s massive selection bias (everyone here evidently found a way to struggle through), but you’re completely right and I find that that lazer focus on usability is one place that Open Source advocates and projects often struggle with.

And personally, I think it’s because most open source projects are built and run by programmers since they’re the ones who can build an open source project, whereas a consumer facing site like Reddit / FB / TikTok/ IG, would be planned out and designed by a product manager, working closely with a designer and market researcher, and then get programmers to build that for them.

It’s a model that’s really difficult to pull off though in a community primarily consisting of programmers volunteering their free time, but I think it’s worth keeping that in mind. Open Source projects that are consumer facing (and especially ones that rely on network effects), really need to work hard to stay in that user facing headspace.

Doesn’t even talk about them being UTC -3.5: