NOTE: This suggestion is not recommending the Scratch Team should implement new features for the sake of implementing them. Features implemented should still follow the design goals and be good, but they can still implement suggestions that go with the design goals and is a good suggestion.
This suggestion is going to be a bit different today, as this suggestion is for the ST to rethink their mentality of ‘less features improves user experience’

Recently, a user questioned the scratch teams about this in the suggestions forum. They said the following:

apple502j wrote:

According to the Scratch Team, “reducing the number of features often improves the user experience”. The Scratch Team should reject all feature suggestions and try to remove existing features as best as they can to improve the user experience.

This made me severely question this as I don't agree with it.
“The priority list”
The priority list in scratch is flawed. Whilst I do understand server work, site performance and making the site safe are important issues, but these should only be ranked higher than new features to an extent. The problem is, is that these 3 things on the priority list are constantly pushing down new features, and with no new features, the community and educators start to have second thoughts using scratch due to it becoming stale, making them reconsider over rivals in the block-based coding market, like Snap! and beetle blocks. Will dark mode ever be implemented? It is always said it is being considered, but then the Scratch Team get no work done because they talk about it for ages and then they have to do server work. And when it comes near the top of the priority list again - oh wait, surprise surprise, it has been pushed down again.

Dark mode is not even hard to implement. It is just a few CSS changes, isn't it? Surely professional developers can implement something even better than the teenage amateur coders did, and what they did was like 4 dark modes and tonnes of options.

I saw this post by Paddle2see a while back, saying the Scratch Team do care about the studio page being cluttered affecting people with special needs. Surely this is a big issue as Scratch is a place for all types of people, but even this concerning issue seems to have no work.
Less chat, more work
With features, the ST talks about it a lot and then decides if it's a good feature for scratch. However, this process is far too slow, and they may think differently to the community - and the community is what matters.

Like the2000 said, it is a shame that teenage coders who are not pros have made more progress on the site than pro coders. And why is that? The teenagers want people to have the best scratch experience with toggles and cool features? But I'm starting to wonder, do the scratch team want that?

Another reason is that the ST take too long in adding things whilst the teenagers do stuff very quickly. But is that a bad thing? More features, the better.
So yeah, the Scratch Team should think less and implement more. Do you remember Scratch Lab? If you do, congratulations, because I don't think the Scratch Team do. How long does it take for feedback? A year? I do not think it does, and of course, they have already made the blocks.

A major problem with the studio update was that there were no actual new features, so they had to say that they implemented an already existing suggestion.

dertermenter wrote:

I think the scratch team should not think that the block palette needs to be limited … blocks that may actually be confusing.

I disagree.
I don't really think that the ST will limit blocks, as such they have facts on why that it's rejected. They're happy to discuss a block suggestion and accept it.

dertermenter wrote:

blocks that may actually be confusing.

A complete contradiction to Lightin's sticky:

Lightin wrote:

* High Ceiling: Even though it's easy for someone who is new to programming to get started with Scratch, it should still be possible to make complex stuff.

source

How many blocks are we thinking here? I don't think it needs to be more limited, instead I think there should be more categories. This has been brought up before by (gosoccerboy12, maybe?). The community mostly rejected this as

random user wrote:

We don't really want to scroll while picking a category.

This also ties in to 'Bring back the 2016 build look'; because if we were going to add more above the blocks, there would be less room for blocks.
There should be more categories: i.e. Operators should be separated into booleans and reporters, etc.

Full support.

No offence but less features decreases the user experience.
The mode of new scratchers 12 and at that age you should be able to handle a lot more than is currently available.

I joined Scratch seven years ago. In those seven years, they have added new blocks once. It seems like new blocks were more common in the earlier days of the website, which is strange considering that they actually had an excuse not to add blocks back then; the editor had to be reinstalled for every update, and users might get sick of having to constantly reinstall the editor. Yes, the offline editor still exists, but I would estimate that at least 99% of Scratch website users primarily use the online one. Maybe 2.0 was a nightmare to add new blocks to, but the 3.0 source code is public and I know that you can add a new block to Scratch 3.0 in under a few minutes if you have any clue what you're doing.

And it's not like they've added everything important either; what's a programming languages without split strings, substrings, or even exponents? How can you call something a programming language if, after 18 years of development, it can't even calculate exponents?

Remove signatures! They add too much to the user experience and are often confused for being part of the post! They get the yeet!
Tbh, I'm against this part of the ST's mentality. More features≠a bad user experience

Steve0Greatness wrote:

Tbh, I'm against this part of the ST's mentality. More features ≠ a bad user experience

Well, I think that too many features can be a bad thing, but Scratch seems to love using “we think that having less features can enhance the user experience” as an excuse for not making any progress in the past two years on a language which desperately needs new features.

apple502j wrote:

According to the Scratch Team, “reducing the number of features often improves the user experience”. The Scratch Team should reject all feature suggestions and try to remove existing features as best as they can to improve the user experience.

I saw that post Lol. But anyways, yes, adding features doesn't make it bad. For example. To add on to Han's post,

han614698 wrote:

There should be more categories: i.e. Operators should be separated into booleans and reporters, etc.

That I strongly agree. Sub categories would improve scratch a lot. It would make it easier to find specific blocks, and give people a better understanding of what the blocks do. If the sT mentality right now is what the OP said it is, then that means that all suggestions are rejected, but they aren't.

han614698 wrote:

There should be more categories: i.e. Operators should be separated into booleans and reporters, etc.

Why? It's not like the operators section is overflowing with blocks. This would just make things unnecessarily confusing. The current categories are great as they are. Also, there are booleans and reporters outside of operators. Would they be moved into these new sections too?

Support! We should remove the addition block because it has such an easy workaround:

set [a v] to [1]
set [b v] to [1]
set [answer v] to (a)
repeat (b) // basically 1+b = answer. Does not work with decimals and negative numbers but you get the idea 
change [answer v] by (1)
end 

My point is that the Scratch Team shouldn't think the opposite of the truth.

BrowserExtension wrote:

Support! We should remove the addition block because it has such an easy workaround:

set [a v] to [1]
set [b v] to [1]
set [answer v] to (a)
repeat (b) // basically 1+b = answer. Does not work with decimals and negative numbers but you get the idea 
change [answer v] by (1)
end 

My point is that the Scratch Team shouldn't think the opposite of the truth.

That's not really the problem. I rarely see the Scratch Team rejecting things because “they're workaroundable”, I usually just see them… not adding anything.

Bump

BrowserExtension wrote:

Support! We should remove the addition block because it has such an easy workaround:

 //Does not work with decimals and negative numbers

My point is that the Scratch Team shouldn't think the opposite of the truth.

Oh well then

set [value 1 v] to (6)
set [value 2 v] to (5.2)
set [result v] to (0)
set [increase v] to (0)
repeat until <<(round (value 1)) = (value 1)> and <(round (value 2)) = (value 2)>>
change [increase v] by (1)
set [value 1 v] to ((value 1) * (10))
set [value 2 v] to ((value 2) * (10))
end
repeat (value 2)
change [result v] by (value 1)
end
set [result v] to ((result) * ([10^ v] of (increase)::operators))

untested
Yeah, support. That doesn't sound very intuitive - scratch is a feature, why not remove it?
the forums are a fea-

mybearworld wrote:

the forums are a fea-

the forums are a fiasco? lol

the2000 wrote:

I joined Scratch seven years ago. In those seven years, they have added new blocks once. It seems like new blocks were more common in the earlier days of the website, which is strange considering that they actually had an excuse not to add blocks back then; the editor had to be reinstalled for every update, and users might get sick of having to constantly reinstall the editor. Yes, the offline editor still exists, but I would estimate that at least 99% of Scratch website users primarily use the online one. Maybe 2.0 was a nightmare to add new blocks to, but the 3.0 source code is public and I know that you can add a new block to Scratch 3.0 in under a few minutes if you have any clue what you're doing.

And it's not like they've added everything important either; what's a programming languages without split strings, substrings, or even exponents? How can you call something a programming language if, after 18 years of development, it can't even calculate exponents?

Exactly!

bump

there are a lot of mentalities that need to be changed with regards to the scratch team, and if said statement is true, this is definitely one of them
modders exist, kids can just use scratch mods, driving away the audience (i would mention modshare but no one, not even jacob, cares about it)

Banana

Support. I think both 2.0 and 3.0 updates removed about as many features as they added.

Support. This mentality is basically just trying to avoid updates to be brutally honest.
Where would we be in Scratch without updates or features:
Picture this, we're back in Scratch 1.0, Loves and Faves got removed as they are a feature. There are only a blocks left as the rest were classed as features:

go to x: (--) y: (--)

when green flag clicked

switch costume to [ --v]

and

set [ --v] to [--]

You can't comment, the forums don't exist

Just imagine.

Nothing is permanent.