Hacker News Reader

Comment by btdiehr | Hacker News Reader

One thing I find interesting about programming forums is without fail, a good portion of every discussion divulges into off topic, largely useless and redundant commentary on one of the following:

- Page uses JavaScript (when it doesn't need to)

- The page uses too many animations

- The page size is too large

While I love hacker news discussion for the most part, these reoccurring themes seem to never, ever die.

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If a page breaks when I have Javascript disabled I just assume I am a bizarro troglodyte and deserve it.

I don't know why people assume they somehow deserve to see the page and then complain about it.

You're not a bizarro X or Y, you just gave up on expecting that front end web developers have some professional pride and self-restraint left to not use a ton of JS frameworks plus 3rd party tracking and advertising for the simplest HTML documents.

I've occasionally been known to let my annoyance get the better of me, and post a complaint about the article. Many times it's because an article exhibits a "helpful" feature that frustrates the way I use my computer; the NY Times, for example, changes the text size when I double click to highlight a word.

I do feel like nobody's interested in hearing it most of the time, but I also feel like such a comment would naturally fall near the bottom, out of the way of any real discussion that might crop up but above the trolls. What's so wrong with having a tangential but not harmful comment on what's annoying us about the medium?

It becomes relevant when the point of a web site is completely lost due to its fluff.

In this case, I was so distracted by the constant animation/scroll pattern that I couldn’t be bothered to read to the end.

Also, the engineering mindset is such that we are going to care about the engine. Take a pilot on a scenic helicopter tour, and he's going to be at least a bit interested in your helicopter and how it functions, and have more opinions on that rather than the scenic part. Likewise, show a webpage to a group of engineers and developers... and we're going to have opinions on your site.

You can point people to dang's comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739

> A reader emailed to complain about how this and other HN discussions often become derailed by off-topic carping about blog design. I agree completely. Could there be a more classic form of bikeshedding? It would seem parodic if it weren't sadly real. This has become more of a thing on HN lately. It needs to become less of a thing.

> I don't mean to pick on you personally, or just on this one comment. (Your second sentence alone, by the way, would have been a helpful contribution.) The problem is the tedious stampedes such comments spawn.

That's because there is a big part of the HN reader community which only gets as technical as discussing the relative merits of various kinds of ovals, and maybe even sometimes the JS behind the UI. That's what they know, so that's what they talk about. And there's nothing wrong with that, really.

If we don't complain when designers do these awful things, what will motivate them to stop?

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