Frustrating UX and Changes Over the Years
[Note that it's not technically a Dating Site.] The site used to be quite friendly in the early days with many nice and chatty people. The ability to see uploaded images for their avatar (and many used their own photos back then) provided a more personable vibe than Reddit, and typically with more casual responses than Quora. It often appealed to me for shooting the breeze with many trivial Q&As like whether people enjoy pineapple on pizza (and often with many humorous responses). Unfortunately, it seemed to devolve over the years. Many nice members left, and the site's design likewise seemed to accumulate questionable design changes to counter this. Included among them are official LLM bots that respond to everyone's questions, and their long-winded responses always appear at the top, requiring us to scroll down a lot to even see human responses. A frustrating design is that the site offers no ability to edit what we write (questions, answers, and comments). We can adapt to that with more proof-reading in advance, as with e-mails. Unlike e-mails, the site also replaces some of what we write automatically prior to submission, and does not even let us see a preview of the final, replaced result it'll submit for our answers and comments beforehand. I once wrote an answer to a Health question where I used "BF" as an acronym for "body fat", yet when I submitted my response, it replaced all such instances of "BF" with "boyfriend". I initially thought I made the clumsiest typos using "boyfriend" all over the place, so I tried to post an apology and corrections by replying to my own answer in a comment along with some clarifying details. Nonetheless, I ended up getting "boyfriend" all over again in the comment I posted before I realized this wasn't a typo on my part, but an auto-replacement made by the site on the server end. The site offers the feature to post anonymously for both Qs and As. This sounds good in theory, and started off being used reasonably enough for users to courteously ask sensitive questions. Nonetheless, as the community began to devolve, many started to lean heavily on the feature to become anonymously more abusive. This interacted perversely with a change that allowed people asking Qs to delete answers freely as they wish. In my case, as one who favors multi-paragraph responses, this often resulted in numerous situations where I'd initially take extra time to write and proof-read an answer, only to have the anonymous Asker immediately delete my work (and now with no idea of who they are to avoid answering their Qs in the future). Another change made to the site is that when users block us (and it's often quite mysterious as to why; perhaps some viewed me as a troll because my post put "boyfriend" repeatedly in a Health response), they made it so we can no longer respond to their Qs. We can't tell if we're blocked in advance and can still attempt to write a response to their questions. Regardless, when we request to submit our answer, the site tells us that we can't post it because we're blocked by the user. Similarly, that results in cases where we might spend half an hour proof-reading and thinking about a careful reply, only to realize we're not even allowed to post it (even for others who haven't blocked us to see). This often made me so irritated that I ceased to write detailed responses for a while. Admittedly, I acted immaturely at times with terse, sarcastic responses when I was becoming cranky about seeing my lengthy post hastily deleted with no ability to recover my work, although it's difficult not to be in a foul mood when the site is punishing us for taking time to offer carefully thought-out responses. Very often, I suspected the increase in toxicity and trolling was a snowball effect of a complex interaction with the site's design, since it's very difficult to be encouraged to be on our best behavior at all times when the people making the greatest effort can be the most punished by it. Despite the frustrating design and changes over the years, I tolerated the site since there were still some fun users here and there. Nevertheless, they recently made it so that we can't even ask Qs in our original wording. A bot reviews it and replaces what we typed for our question and title of our post. This created such horrible misunderstandings on a Q I asked (my original wording posed this as a humble beginner question, while the bot replacement made it sound like I was asking it sarcastically). I initially thought the responses I received were so mean-spirited and non-sequitur, only to realize that the question I originally asked had been replaced. I had enough by then; so much needless friction was caused by the site replacing what I wrote for me, only to then deny me the ability to edit or even delete the result.
By John S.