Flashing elements alienate users | Hacker News Reader

Flashing elements alienate users

astralcodexten.substack.com

230 pointsfeross146 comments

I think this is a sub-category of a wider problem which permeates web/software/app design and that's hubris. Most sites/programs/apps are designed with the assumption that they're way more important than they really are. It's like the little kid who demands their parents immediate attention/action over the slightest thing which they consider hugely important. And while it's understandable (maybe even endearing) with a small child it's just annoying when it's a web site/piece of software made (presumably) by intelligent adults.

Obviously there are exceptions but start by assuming I don't want you to change my default programs/subscribe to your newsletter/have your program or website pop-up or play sounds without asking/take a tour of your new features/flash text on my screen/create multiple non-hidden folders in the root of my home folder/install multiple services that need to be running constantly/receive marketing push notifications or texts/watch unskippable cut-scenes in games etc...

Everyone seeks attention... in some form. That's ultimately the point of communication. It is to change the views of others, or to challenge, or to ask for answers.

Communication is a means of influence.

I don't think it is hubris. It isn't that they assume greater importance. To assume means to have considered. Instead, I think they either don't think so consciously OR they exert actions that are meant to derive more power/status/etc.

> Communication is a means of influence.

But not only that. Or even mostly that. In my experience, it's primarily a means of cooperation.

Except when it comes to commerce, but most modern commerce is inherently manipulative in nature.

I fear the wider, wider problem is that hubris pays off, it's not economically optimal for most sites to show this humility you'd like to see. Someone decided it's worth it to annoy us grumpy nerds in order to sell fractionally more stuff to the statistically average user.

I don't think apps/sites are getting worse about this, it's that they're getting better at optimizing for users who aren't me. It's probably just deeply frustrating/alienating to have to use products that you're not the target audience for (and that's increasingly almost all products).

(To be clear this isn't meant as derision of the 'statistically average user', it's perfectly justified that not everything is built to suit me, the protagonist of reality.)

You're right there are obviously economic incentives driving this but I think (in general) the things that annoy us grumpy nerds also annoy everyone else - we just might be more conscious about what specifically is going on. Over the years I have helped out many non-tech savvy relatives/colleagues/friends and things like changing program defaults, changing home pages, browser desktop (or mobile push) notifications, too frequent business newsletters, etc have been a common source of rage and stress - made worse because the person doesn't always know how to stop the problem. In fact, we're shielded from some issues - imagine how bad it is for users without adblockers.

But you're right - there's no easy way to deliver negative feedback for these negative practices - so they will presumably continue where commercially it's profitable (and not prohibited). I can hardly boycott every company/product which displayed arrogant behaviour - I'd have to live a hunter gatherer lifestyle by the end of the year.

I reject this notion based on close to 20 years of consistent observation of and participation in the web development industry. In that time I can count on one finger the number of times I've seen credible AB tests even attempted, and even then the initiative was abandoned because none of the client's staff were interested in interpreting the results of their testing. All of that is to say in nearly two decades of building websites I've never even heard of a client attempting to make results-oriented decisions based on actual data about how their website looked or performed. 100% of the drivers of obnoxious website behavior that I have personally witnessed have been overeager marketing department heads and designers refusing to come to terms with the limitations of the medium.

That's honestly great to hear. I've not been super convinced of the way I've seen AB tests used to justify decisions but I figured it's just me not liking the results, and that the prevalence of shitty websites means that the businesses with good websites are just not competitive and disappear.

My tentative conclusion is that these people know something about human nature that we don't.

I have a friend who runs a small e-commerce business and is largely non-technical. I've found that I couldn't ever do the same because I don't think like he does.

Apparently the average person is way less grumpy than I am about things like right to repair or planned obsolescence.

Case in point: to him an e-book reader is just an appliance, like a dishwasher, which performs a specific function. He doesn't care that he can't upload whatever file to the device because he would never use that feature.

"Apparently the average person is way less grumpy than I am about things like right to repair or planned obsolescence."

That is obvious. Otherwise we would not have glued in batteries, spyware everywhere as part of mainstream OS and ads in the start menue.

But to me a e-book reader is also just an appliance, that should perform one specific function. Displaying books. But I simply happen to know what a file format is, so I know that there is no reason to limit that, so they can try to lock me in to their store.

Exactly. An ebook reader is an appliance.

I view an ebook reader telling me I can't read a format of books the same as if a dishwasher told me I couldn't wash a certain brand of plates. Completely unacceptable.

or, more realistically, allowing only one brand of detergent. oh wait, printers already do that (with ink, not detergent)

Perversely, and without exception, all of those anti-features you mentioned were implemented the kinds of individuals that find them offensive and refuse to engage with them where possible. I feel like this says something about the state of personal integrity either in industry or society writ large.

> Apparently the average person is way less grumpy than I am about things like right to repair or planned obsolescence.

More likely is that the average person feels powerless in the face of technology and doesn't know how to change things or doesn't even fully understand the issues.

Try to substitute "grumpy" with "informed".

The success of this website which has rejected all "best practices" for more than a decade should tell you something. No profiles. No awards. No visible karma (anymore). No post footers. No popups. No ajax. No images. No colors. Only italic and pre for markup, and italic arguably is superfluous.

buddy, this website doesn't make money and is funded by a billionaire VC.

This site makes an unbelievable amount of money because it helps YC startups attract talent, it promotes YC companies, and most of all, it encourages founders to apply to YC.

nah, it doesn't make any money.

It still provides value

Which is different than making money.

I think that none of the top 10 most valuable (to me) websites generate any sort of direct revenue (many, not even indirect) to their owners.

But they're immensely valuable.

Okay it doesn’t make money if you believe ads don’t make money. Because this place is a giant ad for YC.

My view is that the design of this site, targeted at niche users, is not alienating because it is designed by people from the same niche. It's great for that purpose much like niche tools like git or whatever are for people in the right niche, but I don't think you can apply this strategy when designing something that needs to have mass appeal for its business model to work.

The success of this website is that it doesn't have to be successful along the same metrics as substack or reddit or tiktok to fulfill its purpose.

> It's probably just deeply frustrating/alienating to have to use products that you're not the target audience for (and that's increasingly almost all products).

This. As every day goes by, more and more software becomes deeply annoying to use because of this. This is mostly a problem with Windows and mobile, fortunately, but is increasingly an issue with Linux.

Somebody needs to write an updated Big Red Fez because modern devs clearly don't understand the idea. 20 years ago the problem was sites didn't have a banana; the problem now is sites are nothing but bananas. But the impact is the same.

I agree with this point and often see in the language used. Most companies seem to think we are all on the same page but we aren't.

I bought a tool recently and it came with a registration card. All I had to do was scan it. The problem was scanning it took me to what looked like an error message but maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was search page. I have no idea.

Yeah, but they do all those things in your second paragraph because they work!

The sites who don't do those things don't get the sale, whether that sale is email addresses, new products or more engagement.

It's a sad state of affairs.

Both Reddit and Twitter show a fake notification indicating some activity directed at you like an @mention or a reply but are actually just a trick to get you to open the notifications tab/popover.

Stopped using Twitter and reddit the second I realised this. Infuriating subterfuge just to put some inflated engagement metric in their decks.

Twitter's infuriating thing is that it flashes up "7 notifications" when you first load the page, then hides it for a few minutes, then shows it again. This is so tricksy. I assume they are trying to reward you for staying on the site.

I can’t imagine this sort of trickery is going to help them in the long run - they are training their users to mistrust and eventually ignore them.

It’s like a furniture shop advertising a “going out of business” sale or a shepherd boy crying wolf twice.

People wise up to this and become more open to alternatives.

Surely, even VCs and investors know not to take DAUs and MAUs and click rates at face value. Who are these companies trying to con?

> Who are these companies trying to con?

The stock market.

VCs are looking at these metrics not just as indicators of company's health and growth trajectory, but also, at the later stage, as indicators of the company's ability to generate returns - which often involve the company being acquired or going public.

Is is never about the company as a whole, it is the incentives of the middle manager that is rewarded for "increasing engagement" or some other bullshit metric.

Oh, exactly same with Facebook. "You got a message/news!", nope, I did not.

old.reddit.com does not do this.

Proxomitron, the original web filtering proxy from 2 decades ago, already had a "Freeze GIF animation" filter, along with "Blink to Bold" and "Flash animation killer", among others. It was clear back then that a lot of users already hated this stuff. Now we have even more annoying CSS and JS animations which are a lot more difficult to block effectively.

On the other hand, I find HDD activity lights and a status monitor displayed in the corner of the screen to not be distracting, so I think context has a lot to do with it --- something that is trying to get your attention unnecessarily, vs. something that is changing but not hard to ignore.

> Proxomitron

Oh man, that's quite a nostalgia-trip right there. Setting up custom rules/transformation was probably one of the main things that steered me into a software-development career, along with client-side scripts for Starseige:Tribes. Apart from advertisement/privacy stuff, I remember using it to customize and streamline the appearance of web-forums I often visited. (e.g. TribalWar and AntiOnline.)

> something that is trying to get your attention unnecessarily, vs. something that is changing but not hard to ignore.

Also, signal vs. noise. The physical blinkenlights on your computer and the status monitors correlate to a signal that is occasionally useful, rarely if never of negative utility, and is simple enough to eventually be processed "in the background". At worst, your brain just filters it out; at best, you gain a subconscious awareness / "feel" for the state of your machine (though I found this used to work much better with the noise made by HDDs, and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load).

Also, predictability. Aforementioned indicators have very little variability. It's just a time series signal. You quickly learn that it will just keep flashing or scrolling continuously - it won't suddenly start changing colors or shapes, nor will it render words you have to read. This, I believe, is also critical for the ability to offload paying attention to such indicators to your unconscious. In contrast, most of those web flashing annoyances are to a large or small degree unpredictable - they vary from site to site, they vary within a site, and you rarely spend enough time with them to learn to trust they won't surprise you.

> and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load).

This affected me about 5 minutes ago so this drew my attention - I find this more directly now. Fans had increased, but I've plenty of cores so nothing else was slow. I then checked and found some linting process that I'd killed was still running in the background using up a couple of cores.

I do kind of miss things like dialup tones and knowing how things had gone wrong by sound. I wonder if there's other fun ideas around that. I'm picturing either a ferrofluid or textured display that becomes more grumbly as my computer works harder. I can't hear disks thrashing now we're on solid state but big steady waves of water vs turbulent waves feels like a good analogy.

As much as I dislike skeuomorphism, I sometimes dream of recreating those noises.

More than that - on the list of projects to in spare time (read: retirement, if I'll live that long), which surprisingly I haven't seen anyone do already, is a system performance monitor that exposes metrics as sounds instead of graphs. A cross (or a blend) between fan noises, HDD murmur, and the bridge of Enterprise-D[0] - an ambiance of non-distracting sounds, but every single one correlated with an actual system metric - so that you'll learn to "feel" the machine by the sound this monitor makes (much like many drivers learn to "feel" their car by how it sounds).

If you (or anyone else) knows of "prior art" / some implementation of this idea, please let me know. Indicators in the tray, or semi-transparent graphs in the corner of a screen, generally don't work for me - my visual system just filters them out without parsing (except when they overlap something I care about, or find their way onto a screenshot, at which point I become annoyed). However, I believe sound would work for me, as it's a nice, additive channel, not very busy while I'm working, and such ambiance could actually substitute for pink noise (or the video from [0], which I sometimes use in lieu of noise).

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XajaCX88NnU

> I find HDD activity lights and a status monitor displayed in the corner of the screen to not be distracting

I find those greatly distracting, personally. HDD activity lights belong on the box itself, not on the screen.

I can’t use a website with flashing anything, and especially so when I’m writing. Then I realized the CMS I make was doing this with a “saving draft / draft saved” notice above the content area and couldn’t believe I’d done this very thing without realizing how annoying it was.

I still wanted to display the info, so I tried a few different techniques and ended up settling on a slow (~2-second) fade in and fade out. The result, at least for me and the people I’ve asked to try it out, is that goes completely unnoticed unless you’re looking for it, which is what I wanted initially but hadn’t taken the time to try it myself beyond ensuring the notice appeared and disappeared at the appropriate times.

How about permanent text with "last saved: " and the time saving completed. Updated text is usually less jarring.

Design is about communication. Watch out for cases where what you want to communicate as a designer is not the same as what you should communicate.

I believe almost every “Saving…” indicator is an instance of that discrepancy.

They were appropriate back when on-the-fly saving was a fresh UX revolution, but today they’re nothing but self serving: us weathered designers, who grew up when the floppy disk icon actually represented the real thing, bragging about how cool our app is—it saves your draft on the fly! No need to press buttons, can you imagine?

Nowadays, as devices are constantly connected, latency is low, and constant saving has become the dominant and intuitive behavior, what the user needs to know is not that stuff’s constantly being saved; what the user needs to know is the extraordinary situation where you fail to save it.

This, if I may be so bold, is what you should be communicating—and if you ask me how, I might suggest a single, completely unchanging line of text informing the user that their draft is being constantly saved (though ask yourself if even that is required; it might not be if you are dealing with digital natives) and an obvious, flow-interrupting error state when that doesn’t work as intended.

I'd disagree personally, but only because I recently found out the hard way that a wordpress plugin I use doesn't have autosave. It's not as universal as one would think.

I assume the reason you found out the hard way is that you in fact intuitively expected it to work that way.

I mostly agree that the app should only be communicating when exceptional things happen (like failing to save the draft), and my solution of an unnoticeable (but discoverable) status message is meant to give confidence to the users who aren’t very technical and consciously wonder if their work is being saved, which describes much of my target market. The messaging also differentiates these areas from the parts of the app where there’s no concept of a draft and so where auto saving doesn’t happen.

How about the case where the network is slow, so the save operation hasn't failed yet, but it will be interrupted before completing if the user closes the webpage?

You can’t avoid that with the indicator either. Closing windows by accident or due to a crash happens. Consider using window.onclose and saving to local storage to avoid data loss.

That said, you could use a separate mode for users with bad network. That mode may require more changing and distracting UI elements. I am not prepared to say whether it is a good solution though.

Maybe instead of saying "saved" to users of your app you need to say them "NOT SAVED" in big red letters? Draft saved regularly is an expected behavior, it is futile to notify people about it. If they wouldn't annoyed by it, they would stop noticing it, it is how human mind works, it doesn't notice predictable patterns.

From the other hand if draft was not saved, it is a rare case when something went wrong, and users want to know about it.

The "draft saved" complaint sounds very weird to me, especially as I once had to implement a similar feature in an editor.

When editing, one needs to convey to users when it's safe to close the app without a risk of data loss. You might want to tell users that connectivity is down and stuff can't sync right now, but "draft saved" also confers some psychological safety that everything is OK. That I don't need to wonder about the state of my editing. I can safely leave and return.

There are ways to make that flash more or less. There are even basic ways regular editors do this by visually including a star at the end of a filename. But it will still need to display somehow if it's an environment where you're not hitting ctrl+s manually.

Not having some indication is worse than it flashing.

If someone asked me that flashing question, I would also say they are annoying and would probably stop using the site, HOWEVER, I would not have considered this, or other similar status indicators related to my work, that toggle automatically to be part of the problem.

Arguably you could hide the info under a button or an actionable item. If the main use case is informing whether the page/app can be closed, letting the user check before closing would do the trick (and potentially force save at that timing if sync was pending).

For example, you can show this info when user move cursor to close button.

As a Substack writer, I find it very distracting. Part of the reason is that when my eyes are looking at the body text, the motion happens in my upper peripheral vision. That's also where tab heading notifications are (eg. an incoming Google Hangouts message). So as I write I keep subconsciously looking up to see what's happened, only to find it's just another "draft saved".

> Not having some indication is worse than it flashing.

I figure it's more that there's no one-size-fits-all thing. "Normally", that isn't a problem, because you just switch to another program that suits your preferences/takes good care of your brainworms. It just becomes frustrating when companies tie their services to uncustomizable programs (like for instance a website) narrowly designed for their archetypical user persona.

... but beyond that there has to be a better way to do this?? Surely this particular thing has been designed to death a million times. I think with Google Docs, I get to assume everything is saved all the time, so this is the default state that doesn't need to take up space on the screen. In the risky situation where I alt-f4 before the save call returned success or whatever, I get the javascript popup telling me stuff wasn't saved and I can cancel and wait a few seconds. In the other risky situation where the save call just keeps failing for a prolonged amount of time (because my wifi died, usually), I think it says that somewhere in the UI, and it seems like a good enough justification to grab attention to me.

In most cases, it's better to bring attention to when something is not normal and/or have a faded indicator. That indicator matters because different programs have different conventions about how stuff gets saved, and you want users to not second guess your conventions.

It's perfectly OK to add a star char the moment the user starts typing and removing it once they save. For many who are easily distracted, it's horrible if something like "saving draft...." appears and disappears every couple of seconds.

If the network is down or syncing fails for other reasons, display a warning, preferably in red so the user notices. But don't spam if everything is going fine.

> When editing, one needs to convey to users when it's safe to close the app without a risk of data loss.

Wouldn't it be better to put up a warning dialog if the user tries to close the app when there's still state to be saved?

> There’s no easy way to block the element with AdBlock without also removing important functional elements of the editor.

uBlock Origin can do this, either by removing an annoying class from an element or by modifying an element's style directly:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#...

Here are a couple of my personal custom rules as example:

  watchpeopledie.tv##div.tilt-1:style(animation: none !important;)
  homestuck.com##p.o_chat-log:remove-class(disp-n)
  homestuck.com##div.o_chat-container:remove-class(active)

For corporate products, it's easy to see why this would happen so often; there are a hundred tacky people with no sense of taste for every one person with a strongly developed sense of taste. The people with taste have finite political capital in their organization, and they aren't going to spend it all fighting the constant stream of tacky crap.

The only way around this is to find a tasteful design czar and invest them with a huge amount of political capital. Steve Jobs held this role when he was alive. It's rare, unfortunately, that arrangements like this emerge.

I agree. But I think we have attribute a lot of that design simplification to Jony Ive.

Not just websites - the whole desktop is infected - bouncing dock icons, slack notifications, etc. You need to opt out of all of it to get a sane place to work. Also, like most other people who will be commenting here, I'll suggest using ublock origin and not adblock.

I've really been disappointed with gnome on this, not only is it full of difficult to disable annoying notifications, they appear on top of and cover part of the screen. Yet at the same time it has little to no affordance for unobtrusive non-disruptive ones like a mail or chat tray icon that changes color when you have unread messages.

A lot has been said about enshittification, but free software desktop environments shouldn't have any profit motive to abuse their users in this way. I've wondered if it's a case of second-hand enshitiffication: commercial products like windows adopt abusive patterns because the user is the product, then free software cargo cults it because they think if the big players do it that it must have value/been user tested/etc.

I think you’re right on the money- gnome is trying to make the desktop environment more familiar to new users so they’re implementing poor design choices that Microsoft, Apple, et al. have made.

Recently, you also have free software LARPing big companies by adding telemetry to FLOSS, because asking users for feedback (or reading the damn issue tracker) isn't professional enough anymore - everyone in the big leagues is Data Driven™.

Er, did I say issue tracker? That's quickly becoming a thing of the past - the newest trend seems to be, "we can't help you here, join our community Discord instead".

This really does make me worry about FLOSS applications. I am afraid I'll have to start treating it all with the default level of suspicion that Windows and Android apps get.

Can also happen due to hiring developers from those environments.

I worked for a company that tasked some developers who'd previously worked for a phone manufacturer to add a feature to disable location services. In review it was noticed that they implemented something that told the user it was disabled but still sent the location back but with a location disabled flag set. When the privacy concern was raised with the developer they responded that this is how its always done.

> I've really been disappointed with gnome on this

I personally can't stand Gnome in a million different ways, but that you can't actually customize it sufficiently is really the core reason why I refuse to use it.

I agree. There's entirely too much animation all around, and notifications are a plague. But at least you can (usually) make it all stop.

There is a way to stop this, in theory. The prefers-reduced-motion CSS query. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

It’s really winwin all the way. The dev can show the flashy they made, the ublock keeps the site visitor numbers unaffected enabling moneys for further flashy, the authors can write about it and we get to comment on the issue. Next.

Also the devs of the library the dev uses get more Github stars and attract more attention, and it becomes more likely such libraries get used in future projects, leading to increased codebase complexity, leading to better pay and greater demand for software developers. Wins all the way!

My company's employee portal currently sports not only two carousels (on different timings, of course), but also a huge banner with a countdown clock.

That's just above the fold. There's a 3rd carousel if you scroll down.

I'm not at all an expert on survey design, but "How much do flashing or changing elements distract from your enjoyment of websites?" doesn't feel like an unbiased question.

More than half (55%) of the people surveyed don't notice them or find them only a little annoying.

That's because they've been desensitized to it.

Unfortunately, those people are also likely to be the ones who can barely read actual text anymore, precisely because being exposed to obnoxious UI has also caused them to pay less attention overall.

If 30% of your users hate the interface so much that they immediately leave your service, then sure, you can say "70% of our users have no problem with our strobing call to action". But that does not stop the problem - 30% of your potential revenue base is walking away, when you could retain them.

People who love flashing websites could not even participate. It looks like all the possible answers were for different levels of being annoyed.

I doubt there are many, but the result is probably skewed.

There's bias in pretty much every poll result, but I doubt the reason you provided has much of an effect.

People who truly "love" flashing elements (I don't believe they exist) will just choose "I barely notice these", and it wouldn't affect the conclusion.

This is the tyranny of the majority.

It's not even that. This is justifying self-serving annoyances by saying they're under the threshold of anger for >50% of the users.

I read the pie chart as this:

Only 11.5% barely notice them or can completely tune them out. 88.5% are annoyed by them with varying degrees of annoyance.

This was the tipping point for me with the reddit app that caused me to move to Apollo. The Reddit app had been trending down in reading quality for years. I was already annoyed with all the awards cluttering up comments, but then they added flashing elements to comments and I noped out to Apollo.

If Apollo really goes away I don’t think I will come back, after 15 years of reading reddit, I have pretty much stopped reading it at all over the past few weeks.

Same here. I actually somewhat liked seeing awards in Apollo before they added more beyond silver/gold/platinum. But even the badges got to be too bothersome. Now I open the official app and see animations and red backgrounds and “that’s hot” all over the comments. Who asked for this?

Gifs in text posts are also dreadful and I’ve never seen them add to a post.

The cookie popup enrages me.

And the newsletter one

The one exception I can think of is a single blinking underscore to represent a cursor. There is one on the top of this page: https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/ Modern browsers don't render it though.

But so many fond memories.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220405120606/https://developer...

  Example: <blink>Why would somebody use this?</blink>

I still wonder if flashing elements and the constant nudging is worth it. I sometimes think I'm the only one but apparently there are about 15 % that are heavily annoyed by this. And those are users that you either lose completely or that block every unnecessary item on your website with ad blockers or reader mode.

I can't stand using Reddit on a mobile browser constantly asking if I want to install their app. Fortunately, there are alternative frontends such as Libreddit or teddit [2]. I hope they survive the API war.

[1] https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit [2] https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit

I don't think I'm alone in considering blinking keyboard cursor/carets as the original sin of this.

Here's an long-running collection of how to disable flashing cursors everywhere, from vi to Vscode: https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink

> Software development is not an easy task, and often after a painful process of writing a program developers feel they should share their pains with users, so they put a part of own sufferings onto the shoulders of users in a method similar to the Chinese water torture - blinking cursors.

Cursors are fine to me, and frankly important. Flashing is "LOOK HERE IT'S IMPORTANT YOU KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING HERE" and what happens when I press almost any button is a solid reason for grabbing my attention. I shouldn't have to search in a big pile of thin lines to see the specifically slightly differently shaped thin line to know what's going to happen when I type - let my visual system use the optimised "MOVING" alarms to let me know.

Making me hunt or test where my cursor is by making a change is far worse to me.

Interesting to know that some people find it hard. Does the default behaviour I see while typing (no blinking unless you pause) help?

It's enraging that everyone decided popups were so annoying that most browsers shipped with blockers for them, but now we get dozens of java script popups instead.

Reminds me of my gym's site (https://www.stc.se/), where the centerpiece is occupied by a useless looping montage, while the main function of the site (the booking system) is pushed into a hidden-by-default sidebar. I've had to block the video with uBlock to be able to use the site, since it's so distracting.

I wonder why browser developers are compliant with this. Everyone accepted that <marquee> or <blink> was horrible, but this knowledge does not stop them to add support for animated GIFs, CSS animations, video autoplay, and if a user disables all of this and installs NoScript to block JS-based animations, there is always some new surprising way to annoy users, like SVG animations.

The one exception I can think of is a single blinking underscore to represent a cursor. There's one at the top of this page: https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/ in the little "vi" window thing. Modern browsers don't honor the blink tag though.

I've seen a site that successfully used a blinking red "WARNING" div above a section telling you how to do something that could brick your router if you did it wrong.

One thing that annoys me and I was hoping to find in the article is layout shifts as you are trying to read the page. You see it a lot on low-quality news sites where you start reading then an ad appears pushing content down the page forcing you to re-adjust.

Its such a bad pattern, and it's so common on poorly coded sites.

Being similar to z-fighting, this should be called attention-fighting: two or more elements need our attention while occupying the same space.

That said, I remember about flashing character codes in old computers, invented before bold/underline text. Also the Internet of the 90s abused of blinking gif images.

Did youtube.com recently add a blurry background behind the video, or is my screen broken?

I have noticed a lot of subtle UI changes recently. Youtube and Steam specifically. I assume this is because it is the end of a quarter and teams have to ship something for promos. In a couple weeks the experiments will be over and we can go back to a few months of stability until Q3. But watch out, this is intern season, so the stuff you see in September is going to be really wild.

Cant you guys do your promotions in another way? Like, running a marathon or a poker game or something. It's annoying

I don't make the rules but it is my turn to deal.

My wife to me, last night: "Why the hell did they just change Google on computers look like the phone version?". I was confused for a minute, until she pointed her finger at relevant part of the screen - indeed, the "images / videos / news / ..." selectors are now styled as rounded buttons. I rarely use Google search these days, so I didn't notice, but the question is justified - what's the point? It's just more visual noise, and likely more bloat to generate it.

Yes, this is called “ambient mode” and can be disabled in settings.

Nice. It's in the settings within the video player, not burger-menu settings if anyone is looking.

I do wonder what problem this thing solves

Similarly awful: those Giphy gifs that "writers" add to their business reports, content marketing etc. Never funny, always distracting. Try making your writing entertaining instead.

uBlock Origin has a "block element" item on the context menu that allows you to excise any element on a page.

I use it all the time on things I find undesirable.

I guess the website in question is a Wordpress theme and the admin kept the default theme options but replaced the slider pics.

And as I scroll down and read the article you present me with a popup to subscribe, alienating and enraging me.

To be fair, that's just substack, it's not the author's fault.

Substack let's you turn that off (as the author).

According to the comments, the author has only just today learned that Substack added this new popup without asking him, after he got them to disable the previous popup. So hopefully you're right that it's possible for him to turn off.

Link to that thread since it is pretty far down: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-flashing-element...

But they disclaim that :-)

> Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine.

Agreed. I have never and will never enter my email into one of those popups. Just let me read the content in peace! I also hate that there isn't an X. While I now know that I can just click outside the box, my first time I had to read the entire box to figure out to click the "Continue Reading" link. Enraging to say the least.

Apparently they get a 10% conversion rate, which marketers think is worth being the worst people in the world.

A 10% conversion rate would be incredible. If that were the case, it would be hard to be angry at people for exploiting this factor.

However, I would be very surprised if the conversion rate of a popup signup sheet is even 2%.

And there is a similar negative conversion effect: If any article asks me to sign up for anything, I stop reading that article immediately, and move on to an article that respects my attention.

Yes, I am in a small minority. But I also share many links with my peeps, and I never share links with popups. I hope that puts pressure on authors to share things freely.

> I also hate that there isn't an X.

I have a keyboard shortcut assigned to uBlock Origin's element zapper and now everything has an X. No permanent rules made, and when overdone just reload page to try again.

My latest MASSIVE pet peeve is headers and footers that appear or disappear as I scroll on my phone.

So when I go to scroll up, all of a sudden the header appears and moves everything I was looking at so I lose my position. Then when I go to scroll down they all disappear and everything moves yet again.

Yeah, those are awful. Can't wait for mobile browsers to finally get ublock origin extension so you could delete those elements Though that'd still be tedious :(

Firefox on mobile has ublock origin, and yes, it is quite tedious given how the UI ends up working on mobile.

Firefox on Android has had this for years. Personally I prefer AdNauseam so I can be combative instead of passively blocking.