It is? How do you know?

Old fogeys tolerate change. They’ll grumble, but they’ll stay around - either because they’ll get used to it or the change is considered impractical by the majority of users.

When the Tumblr influx came over, the new users had all of these expectations of features that they found on Tumblr, such as blocking certain feedback.

If you’re able to show site analytics for how new users handle the site, say for example how long they stick around, that’d be great.

Oh good, I...

It's a matter of audience. Artists (and furries on the edge of orgasm) specifically don't care much about GPU, they just want to see a clear preview of a picture to consider if it's worth their click. They are the main audience, and the old design was simply not friendly to them, let alone "perfect".

How many programmers worried about RAM such as yourself visit the art portal, though? Is it even worth the man-hours adding a toggle for a subset of an audience that, frankly, might not even be all that relevant? How often do you visit that portal yourself?

https://youtu.be/0tJGk4ofc18

I have top agree that seeing some things with gradients to bubble things out and others being flat does look a bit weird, although I wouldn't really be of much help to "fix" anything that I would say should be changed if I were asked.

If you open the picture in a new tab then you don't have to scroll so much. I usually do that.

Now hold up. That's not what you originally said nor what I object to. ;-)

You originally stated you didn't like the old design because it was, in your words, "clunky" compared to the new one. You are now changing your statement to say you don't personally prefer it. Two entirely different statements! Your first statement is objectively false, whereas your new one is a subjective statement, one of personal preference, and thus has no objective truth value.

Maybe it wasn't your original intent and you were just bad at wording, but that is what you said.

Here's the thing though. You don't even need to be a programmer or any sort of technology expert to experience the negative effects. If your machine is tight on resources, or say you have a bunch of tabs open or whatever, then yes it all adds up and you will experience poorer performance from your web browser compared to a site design which didn't do that.

Which is why it partly doesn't make sense why this design has taken on so much on sites designed to be used on smartphones, which themselves do typically tend to be more resource-restricted. So what you end up with is literally more lag, more chug, more chunkiness, more clunkiness, as well as a reduced ability to index or "pick up where you left off". Which I guess people just become accustomed to or tend to accept, but it doesn't have to be that way!

As for another thing I've seen someone state, very legitimate I might add, that they prefer the newer design because it has larger thumbnails. Well there is no reason you couldn't use a paginated design but with the larger thumbnails!

And ultimately these are all design decisions, but since much of the code already exists, there really isn't any good reason this couldn't be handled on a user-by-user basis, perhaps some setting people toggle in their account preferences, as to which UI they prefer. Again, the backend is entirely the same regardless of the UI. There is zero good reason the entire site must go all one way or all the other. Give the users choice!

As to how often do I visit the art portal on this site? Not often, compared to the others, but I do know what a nightmare endless scrolling designs are from having used other sites which force that design. I can't imagine how you're supposed to keep up with things that way as there is effectively no way to bookmark where you are so you can return to that exact spot later, and beyond a certain amount of scrolling you're just not gonna want to keep scrolling for days, keeping in mind the longer your browser is running and the further you scroll, the greater chance your browser's just going to up-and-up crash at some point as typically *ALL* that stuff is taking up system resources!

I don't even think it's good design for smartphone users (again, because if it's clunky enough that's the experience desktop users have, then smartphone users will surely have even a worse experience!) but it just seems to be popular at the moment. It's a design fad.

If you like that design, or don't have problems with it, or never seem to encounter problems with your browser locking up (even with tons of tabs or windows active all at once) on endless scroll type design sites, then more power to you, and that's cool, but you probably also have a pretty decent PC and/or only ever scroll a little bit and/or are so accustomed to lag that you just accept that as "normal". At least one of those.

So again, personal preference? Cool. You can like what you like. Technical issues? Yes there are some. But however, why not just let everyone set their own preference for it is what I say! Because it's really not that much more work, especially when most of it's already been done anyway. And while we're at it, why not a paginated option that has the newer larger thumbnails? Again, not really that much more work to implement.