Guess so... I'll be sure not to take your next article so seriously! :)

Couple thoughts on this:

So what then does Celebrating Cities look like?

Picture a brand redesign from the imagination of a boomer couple traipsing around the developing world—the safe parts of course—collecting trinkets and patterned quilts in an effort to out-do their retiree friends back home. In essence, the ideology of the 2016 rebrand was cosmopolitan boomerism.

This claim doesn't really pan for me. Do people mostly use Uber when they are traveling, or when they are in the home city? Why bring boomers into this? Are they the primary users are Uber?

In 2016, “local” meant multicultural and vibrant independent communities. ... As we all know, the events that have transpired in the past several years have caused a semantic realignment. Those words no longer mean then what they did then. Today, ”local” harkens back to Uber’s rejected lodestar, “populist.” “Local” now means isolationist, nativist, xenophobic, and chauvinist.

I didn't know the meaning of these words changed. Maybe I missed the memo, perhaps you could provide a reference?

For instance, consider the Uber company mission statement. In 2016 it was, “Make transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone.” Fact check: false. This is highly offensive to our fellow citizens around the world who still don’t have access to clean drinking water.

Thank you for being preemptively offended on behalf of those poor folks in developing countries (I imagine its preemptive because you provided no evidence of their actual opinion).

As I said, Uber is bringing back the “U,” you’ll just never notice it. And that is, in its way, the point. If a designer can’t renounce the past, the least he can do is disguise it.

Not sure what this means. They brought back the U... But I won't notice it... and that's why they brought it back. And the designers did this because they can't renounce the past? But you just said:

But overall, the rationale for not investing in a symbol had little to do with maintaining consistency between the brand elements: typeface, logo and icon. It instead had everything to do with exorcizing any perceivable remains of the Kalanick era.

I guess they weren't exorcizing any perceivable remains of the Kalanick era.

There are some good points buried in this article. Removing the "U" seems like a bad idea to me, and the icon label mismatch is a good point. I agree with you there. But if you're going to write "serious" criticism it needs to be better than this.

Well, I was actually trying to say that any digital UI is probably going to be broken in 15 years due to outdated databases, old OSes, broken links, forgotten languages, and unpaid server bills unless it has been maintained along the way.

So if the backend technology itself is not timeless — how can the UI be timeless? Why would we want it to be timeless?

The premise of this article necessitates that software exist in some kind of stasis, but it can't.

I think this is pretty spot on, but I think technology plays an ever bigger role than you suggest.

How can UI design be timeless if the technology that it depends on is not timeless? The examples in this article are independent of any particular technology — anything that can render line and color can render a classic Swiss design. But digital UI depends on a very specific rendering engines, operating systems, input/output devices, and other very non-timeless things. (Although I will concede that some digital UIs last a lot longer than you might expect.) If you attempt to load a product from 15 years ago, I'd bet the visual style of the UI is not what will give you trouble.

I was going to write a post about the differences between engineering design and UI/UX design — but then I looked up GitHub on CrunchBase.

Maybe when DN gets $350 million in funding they can shorten their URLs. Till then we'll just have to suffer, eh? The comparison is just not meaningful, for many reasons.

Hoo have I heard these before, and not just from other people. Sometimes these are valid reasons, but you should always check yourself if you hear them.

There is some totally insane copy on their marketing site.

"just add content, it designs itself, it's your piece of a new kind of internet"

"What is the the most valuable thing yet discovered, the salt of the earth? People."

"The Internet is more than a social game, it is the culmination of this electric information age. It's shape dwarfs all industry."

Did an "AI" write this?

I guess it's a myth if you think first impressions are also a myth.

"Above the fold" is a term referring to newspapers, but maybe it's more relatable to think about book covers here.

People can open books and flip through pages without instructions. We all know how to use them. But book covers are still designed with the goal of getting you interested enough to open the book. They are not "a myth."

So, expect your users will know to scroll, and that they probably will scroll. But, the "cover" of your website is going to have a huge influence on how they think about and use your website, and it should be carefully considered.

Mike Monteiro really rubs me the wrong way for some reason. Maybe it's his abrasive, smug, always-right attitude in everything he says or writes.

The "Snapchat's UI is intentionally confusing" take is getting a little stale. It's not really that confusing. It just has the confidence to ask users to take a minute to figure out how it works. And really, it just takes a couple minutes. It's not a very complicated app.

Snapchat's UI works well for them, so I think it's fair to say it has helped them succeed (so far). But it its certainly not the only factor in their success.

What I think we can learn from it is that UX designers shouldn't be afraid of novel design patterns. Evidently, users are willing to learn how to use something new (in the right context), so we don't all need to be designing the same interactions.