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Comment by frogulis | Hacker News Reader

Why does my mouse say "Visitor" when I hover over the text?

I keep getting so irritated by the cursor, that my brain completely refuses to process the contents of the page. So irritated, in fact, that I forgot I could switch to Reader Mode. I really wish they'd provided a way to disable it.

This is my site — thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, please disable the custom cursor. IME custom cursors are something that site designers tend to like, and think are pretty cool, and site visitors end up loathing. The cursor is your interface to the UI and as such isn't exactly a *part* of the UI - it's your way of saying "hey I'm here, I can do things," etc. So for a UI to take hold of it and change it is extremely jarring.

(Video games often do change your cursor of course, and part of that is because they're indeed trying to be immersive, and you're here for that experience. But such is not the case on a website.)

Happy to help!

Ah! Just a silly Easter Egg, I coded up this website when Figma was brand new. Figma is a UI design tool that allows for collaborative designing — you can see where people are in the same file with a similar cursor label.

It changes based on a few things (e.g. dark mode) + I wanted it to change when you entered a password (for my design portfolio) too but realised it was too complex.

Too easter egg; didn’t read.

That's not an 'easter egg' that's someone licking your ear, one of most subtley annoying things I've ever seen on a web site. Like an alarm clock in the locked closet you cannot open to turn off the alarm.

Hmm funny thing, if it had been opt-in (maybe by finding and clicking a semi-hidden button) I probably would've been intrigued and searched for all the variations. Just a thought.

looks like a "fun" thing there are a couple other states that change the image that gets displayed.

Clicking up top on the dark mode to get "night own" or type the Konami Code to get Konami the other 2 cases seem to be disabled

It's basically a div that is positioned next to your cursor when you move it. It's also slightly buggy because it doesn't recognize whether the cursor is actually moving across the view-port or not. No idea why they did that.

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