Experimenting with a design idea for a low-stimuli chat client, specifically the visualization of unread messages and notifications (I cannot sufficiently express my burning hatred for anxiety-inducing bright-red-background notification counts)
Some of the ideas that went into the design: the exact notification count doesn't actually *matter*, but you may want to know whether someone just pinged you once or repeatedly; and you might want to get a general idea of whether there's been conversation since the ping, or not. All of those states can be represented with these three dots, without yelling "look at me!" at you all the time.
@forestine The only description I have for design choices like that is "utterly disrespectful of people's time and energy", to be honest, it speaks of a callous sense of self-importance, simply assuming that everyone must always want to read their articles with the greatest haste... it's probably one of my least favourite tech developments of the past decade or so
@joepie91 the environment canada weather app has them now under a 'messages' tab. the 'messages' are articles about the weather 🤦