Why does everything need to cater to idiots instead of making them learn? If we continue down this trend we’ll end up with keyboards with a single button to cater to some monkeys out there who can’t manage to use a proper keyboard, at the expense of everyone else’s productivity.
Because they’re not idiots but rather people with different priorities and backgrounds who were underserved previously. You might disagree that this is helpful but it’s unlikely that you know more about Slack’s users than their UX team. Treating everyone involved with respect is a much better strategy than what you’re doing.
Why does that justify conforming the user to the software? Software, especially web software, has this magical quality of doing different things for different people even at the same time.
> Treating everyone involved with respect is a much better strategy than what you’re doing.
They're not treating the users who prefer markdown formatting with respect at all. It's basically: "fuck those guys, we want to cater to a different audience".
in my experience it is not uncommon for product development to involve assertions that “some of the users are not the most tech savvy”. i’ve seen this as justification for cutting scope, which i can agree with in many situations even if i disagree with the reasoning. over all, cutting scope had been the right move.
that said, i take exception with these claims that the user is “an idiot”. it comes off as arrogant to me.
Is this the future we really want?