- some sticky like and share feature on the side
- weird contrasts which are not comfy for the eyes
- too many animations (this might not count at all)
This sums up most things I hate about modern web pages actually. Why use all these things? Especially huge sticky headers are just super annoying. Please don't use them. Thanks.
Also link related: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
Does that mean they're always done well? No, things like Medium's 'please join our service/subscribe to see more from [name]' are ugly and pointless, and nothing more than a visual distraction. Sticky ads (or for that matters, ads that try to take over large parts of the page in general) are also terrible for obvious reasons.
And yes, a lot of 'fancy' design techniques just hurt the usability of the page, as seen with anything that hijacks scroll/overuses parallax effects.
But I don't think sticky elements are bad in of themselves, and they can make the site easier to use if done correctly.
Yet I must endure all of its downsides the whole time I'm on the page, from taking up precious screen real estate to the even more annoying approach of popping in and out when I scroll up/down one pixel.
Just think of how seldom you interact with the navbar of most webpages and why it then needs to follow you around the page in the off chance that it's more convenient than just scrolling to the top.
So far I remain unconvinced that it can be done well since the entire premise is flawed: my device already gives me a one-click scroll-to-top shortcut. Like inertia scrolling, it's a bad smell when every website thinks it has to bring its own implementation of feature devices should already have.
A sticky header changes how page-down works, so I have to adjust my eye movement to compensate. Because of this I consider allowing web pages to set sticky headers a browser bug. Browser devs disagree, but at least I have the tools to disable this kind of user-hostile behavior.