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Comment by snicky | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying loading spinners will be the signature of our time?

It might be a function of my age but I find the lottery app in Europes ability to scan the barcode so fast from the camera on my phone that I don't trust it. It's almost as if I don't trust things that happen too fast with my 20+ years experience with IT

just this week, I put a minimum 200ms wait time on a loading spinner, because otherwise we thought it felt "buggy" because it was completing too quickly!

Monsters!

y'know, I felt like a monster doing it, but it weirdly is way more satisfying to use

it goes from "wtf just flickered on my screen" to "wow, that loaded really fast!

The alternative is to show no spinner at all when something is that fast, of course...

haha you're not wrong

but it's an async process that could take longer, so then you get into "well if it's <200ms we won't show a spinner, but if it takes longer we will..."

it's a settings page where you're clicking toggles, and each toggle saves automatically when you hit it. so when you click one, you get a short spinner, then a check mark when it succeeds. feels right to me when I'm using it

There should be a short delay (200ms to 500ms) before showing a loading spinner, and if the operation completes in that time you can avoid showing it at all. But if it takes longer than that, the spinner should be shown for a minimum of 500ms or so, to avoid a sudden flash of the spinner.

I wrote a React hook called usePending[1] for this once. It's surprisingly difficult to get right.

[1] https://gist.github.com/cmmartti/4f7833292b9d277685fc0813532...

wow, wait, this is awesome. I think I might drop this in instead. thank you!

I feel the same way about the one here in Australia -- I always double check it's scanned the correct numbers. Haven't been cheated out of millions yet, unfortunately.

Surely, you're not saying that the system is rigged to say "You're Not A Winner"?

People are nostalgic about bad 90s web design, but I don't think anybody is arguing that it's superior to anything newer. I can't imagine that people will look bad fondly on cookie banners, intrusive ads, janky page layout shifting, or anything else that I consider a hallmark of modern web design.

There will always be bad things people look back on and hate but that doesn't mean there won't also be bad things people look back on and get nostalgia for. Non-media query adapting layouts, janky scrolljacking pages, an over-abundance of CSS transition/animation effects come to mind. I'm sure there will be plenty to look back on. E.g. people don't look back at the 2000s web and only think pop up ads, flash vulnerabilities, and browser crashes.

Look at the people talking about how they're finding the weekly release schedule for HBO and AppleTV is a welcome relief from binging, which everyone loved when Netflix started doing it. But a weekly release schedule was largely an artefact of the limitations of broadcast TV.

Isn't it also partly because a weekly release puts everyone watching the show on the same page? This fosters better discussion and group culture, and creates a shared sense of anticipation.

<blink>Maybe!</blink>

I'm sure loading spinners will be used to some aesthetic purpose in the future

Waiting for the day in AR when you get loading spinners above people's head as they are trying to remember who you are and why they know you before giving up and just saying "Hey man! Good to see you again!"

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