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Comment by mmanfrin | Hacker News Reader

Sincere plea to everyone who does frontend: please knock it off with the on-select rich media shit. I am a compulsive selecter (and I know there are others like me). I like to select text as I read and it's jarring to have annotations pop up on the side as I do it.

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Huge +1 to this. Selecting text is how I visually and mentally keep track of where I am. I've found the Firefox Reader mode (or various equivalents) work around this 80% of the time, but I rage-close websites that have this and have somehow managed to defeat reader mode.

As someone who's been doing frontend for 15+ years: I hear you. I wish the designers and PO's would hear you too. I am doing what I can to push back on these things, and so are every other frontender in my team. Keep giving this kind of feedback to websites if they ask for it. It's the best ammunition we have.

Author here - yeah I hear you. I love the hypothesis interactions when they happen on my site but the UI is a little aggressive (especially on mobile). All about tradeoffs unfortunately.

FWIW I posted a little UX teardown of the different annotation platforms here if you're interested: https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/12/annotations/

Are you a double-clicker or just selector?

I'm a double-clicker and I know of many others. I don't know many "selectors". In that spirit, they should just ignore double-clicking in whatever they wanna present for selections.

Both. I do this up-and-down selection where I select from above and then from below big chunks of text, and then occasionally (I think when I'm concentrating on a specific sentence) I'll doubleclick a word a bunch to select the word and then the paragraph back and forth.

(not to disagree...) It's hypothes.is integration.

https://web.hypothes.is

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