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Comment by dailyanchovy | Hacker News Reader

Nice writeup, but the title flashes to '(1) New Message' and back twice a second. That's kind of silly in my opinion, from whom do I expect the message? I assume from the chatbot at the bottom right corner.

Even so, to talk to it I would need to grant it access to some personal information.

It all ends up leaving a bitter aftertaste. Whatever the message was, why not place it in a block of text somewhere less distracting.

I appreciate the writeup however.

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This junk is appearing on more and more web sites, at least this one is clearly a bot.

Plenty of sales sites will pretend a human is sending you a message, try and talk back and all of a sudden you're in a queue waiting for a reply.

Another anti pattern for web.

Yeah. The sad thing is, I've never used a single chatbot that was actually helpful. I naturally don't go looking for conversations with chatbots, but recently more and more companies decided to shut down their email address. So the only way to resolve an issue is by wither talking to a chatbot and then a person (hopefully), or by phoning them (and I'd rather not).

Some chatbots even refuse to let me talk to a person at all due to a bug (the dutch water utility service). Another asks you to write a message to the human representative and then discards it due to a bug (bol.com).

I've had some success finding the pages or processes I need on a site with virtual assistants, but the design of the website had failed in the first place if I had to resort to that.

Well don't be rude, say hi, you never know if it's a person on the other end. In that case it's ok to open up about the current events in your dogs' life.

It's a billion-dollar anti-pattern that's been sanitized as "conversational commerce". Several large orgs have Intercom, Drift or other popups infesting their site....by choice!

> This junk is appearing on more and more web sites, at least this one is clearly a bot.

This is the first time I've seen a page flashing the title like that. Extremely annoying and I closed the page before reading the article to the end. It reminded me of the times when pages used to do that with the browser status bar on the bottom of the window.

Add these to your hosts file and the page will load a lot faster, too:

   0.0.0.0 js.driftt.com
   0.0.0.0 send.webeyez.com sec.webeyez.com
   0.0.0.0 splitting.peacebanana.com flaming.peacebanana.com

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