@TW_Tones Let me try to address some of your points.
I’d argue that huge majority of users are aesthetically sensitive in one way or another, otherwise commercial websites wouldn’t invest so much money and time into optimizing every little detail and doing A/B tests of seemingly pointless stuff. They of course do that to optimize sales, but that’s no different then to optimize for TW users.
I’ve made this huge post about my thoughts on what could be possibly improved from the UX/Web Design perspective by comparing how similar commercial products design their front page - Derailing elephant - comparative analysis of TW front page
This actually plays into another problem with TW, community fragmentation. I initially started with just a standalone file thinking it’ll be good enough. By the time I wanted to host it in some capacity, I’ve stumbled upon the information that TiddlySpot is dead and I think for a while there was no TiddlyHost, and I must’ve read somewhere in some older Google Group thread that there is no hosting service currently, so when I stumbled upon TiddlyHost I just incorrectly either assumend it’s not working or it’s not worth the time.
Looking at it now, and looking from the perspective of an informed developer, I see the following things that would stop be from using it:
- No easily visible Pricing information – if it’s free I’d like to understand the extends of its freedom and if it’s donation-based or selling-your-data-based.
- No clear information about the limits - what’s the max allowed file size, transfer limits etc.
- The front page is a little bare in a way that in my inspires lack of confidence in either quality or consistency of the service. It’s difficult to explain, probably something to do with how it feels more lika a companion piece to TW than its own standalone hosting service, if that makes sense.
- I also saw some posts about Auto Save not working which sounds to me like it always sends the whole wiki upon save, and I really like having it save only whatever changes.
Right now the reason I wouldn’t switch is because I like having full control over my wikis and already made the time and money investment. I’d be happy to switch if some things were there, but maybe I shouldn’t derail this thread even more.