Kiwa

You can if you let people customize it. Many sites offer personalized themes, colour schemes, or otherwise just don't lock down their website to actively prevent people with personal issues from adjusting the website to better suit their personal needs. This has, quite literally, been an unforced error entirely of their own design. An "old.reddit" style of preservation, or simply not removing the "remove the /game from your url" feature would have appeased plenty of people. So would letting people tweak and adjust the abysmal colour scheme and style of the website. But the staff just seems vehemently opposed to literally anything that isn't "hey, which of these minorly different shades of white on black hurts your eyes less". It's absolutely insane to watch.

As a member of the alleged vocal minority who won't just "get used to it" the staff's attitudes over an unpopular sitewide decision has convinced me pretty much to just stop using this site even if they do revert the UI. Just as a final note: it's awfully hard to trust a data driven argument when the only person who has the data is the one saying their data is correct. I could say I have data that proves unicorns exist so anyone who says they don't is wrong, but if I don't show people my unicorn data then it's pretty moot. Maybe we are just a vocal minority, or somehow mobile users are the most important userbase for this site despite someone earlier saying it was less than 50% of the users who used mobile. But I genuinely don't believe anything I read on the internet without evidence. Especially not when the person saying them is being very defensive in the first place.

I've been using this site for like...seventeen years? I probably did the math wrong. This is, quite literally, the second time I've even touched these forums. I'd say that's a pretty solid representation of a good chunk of the userbase: people are here for mods for their favorite games, not a greater social media experience. I had no clue there was a beta or an overhaul for the website in progress. I only log in to get a mod then I close my tab. I, daily, have like 30+ notifications from this site no matter how often I clear them that have nothing to do with anything I'm interested in so I'm not going to sift through them because I don't care about games I've never heard of and never will play, or who won what contest I didn't know happened or what's popular right now. I never thought the search needed to show other categories of media because this is a mod site. I use it for mods. I've literally never had issues with the old search. Unless you are, very explicitly, the kind of person who wants to treat this site like a social media platform and thus are already the kind of person primed to sign up for and engage with any betas it might have: it's simply not going to reach the majority of the userbase. And then because a handful of power users think it's fine, it gets foisted on everyone else because once they finish that beta they're not course correcting when everyone else has a taste and thinks it blows - a scenario that's played out across the internet pretty consistently these past few years, from youtube to reddit and beyond.

The search alone is awful. It's so big, obtrusive and clunky when before it wasn't. UI elements for mod pages are just kind of ugly and the overall design feels quite literally like a mobile website design I half-assed in college for a web design course I didn't have any interest in. It's functional, but it blows; and while one user probably doesn't matter in the long term: the fact that I don't like the website, and feel its design actively gets in my way of using it just means I'm going to use it less. Between steam workshop, individual modder discords, patreons and git repositories, this site was essentially just a convenient place to get everything in one go. When it stops being convenient I stop returning.