Comment by DiggyJohnson

DiggyJohnson May 11, 2021 parent

Is "harmful" the best word here? I feel like inaccessible much better describes the issue at hand.

cyril_st_john May 11, 2021

Interesting concern for HN commenters to have given the number of "X Considered Harmful" articles that make it to the front page here.

losvedir May 11, 2021

Yeah, I was wondering that, too. UX can cause harm, for example, certain kinds of contrast and lights for folks with epilepsy, but I'm not sure that the complaint here rises to that level.

If you can't use something, you could argue that it causes "harm" to your well being or job prospects or something.

But I agree that "harmful" should probably stick to more significant, mostly physical effects.

But, of course, here we are on HN discussing it, so it had its desired effect...

wrren May 11, 2021

Harm now means 'negative to any extent'.

Red_Leaves_Flyy May 11, 2021

This is not an example of the definition of a word changing.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/harm

shlant May 11, 2021

yea I was a bit taken back by multiple uses of "harmful" and then "catastrophic"

kevingadd May 11, 2021

If Discord suddenly stopped working for me, while it wouldn't be catastrophic it would be quite bad. I use it as my main channel of communication with many contacts, and I use it for work. I have secondary contact channels for plenty of people (twitter, email, etc), but not all.

I can imagine a person having more of their life exist on Discord and if it suddenly became unusable for them due to these changes, it would be a catastrophe. Some people literally can't pay rent without Discord, since they use it to prepare content for work or to collaborate with their team.

shlant May 11, 2021

I don't want to diminish any significant impact it may have on its users, just remarking on the language feeling a bit intense. Hopefully they take the complaints seriously.

andrewzah May 11, 2021

That’s their fault, not discord’s. Apps existed before discord, and will exist after.

kevingadd May 11, 2021

I think in this case the changes are making an existing situation worse, so by changing it Discord's design team is inflicting harm.

The product itself is not harmful, just inaccessible, but describing the changes as harmful seems right.

I have to use Discord every day for work, so if this redesign was interfering with that I'd be pissed. (I pay for a third-party Discord client for this and other reasons)

dahfizz May 11, 2021

harm /härm/ noun : physical injury, especially that which is deliberately inflicted.

Nobody is inflicting any harm by choosing a bad color palette.

kevingadd May 11, 2021

The word "harm" means many things. Just google "consumer harm", for example, and the top result is a government agency using the word harm to describe non-physical injury:

https://www.fdic.gov/resources/supervision-and-examinations/...

mking1024 May 11, 2021

You're being a bit disingenuous here. Other definitions of harm include: "have an adverse effect on" and "actual or potential ill effects".

tobr May 11, 2021

You’re conveniently skipping over the secondary definitions, which includes “actual or potential ill effect or danger”.

tux3 May 11, 2021

A second poster replies that elements are slightly harder to read.

I don't have terribly good eyes, but I'm happy to say I don't feel like I've suffured permanent eye damage from the discord UI :]

When OP says incredibly harmful and catastrophic I think they're just describing their feelings and how important it is to them.

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