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Comment by jonahx | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy the politically laden, existentially fraught spin being sold here....

"Users have to accept the spelled out mantra and change their attitude before accessing the next piece of information."

"The user should transform themselves into a “doer,” rather than being considerate, evaluating options"

"Before proceeding, users should identify with this new aristocratic class."

C'mon. It's just a way to visually emphasize an important next step.

Is the text sometimes self-indulgent and annoying? Yeah, it's marketing copy. That's nothing new.

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It's infantilizing, though. Compared with marketing copy of old. Much of which can just be laid at the feet of a corporate nanny state that infantilizes everyone. Which is ultimately a political point.

Can you link to some examples of "marketing copy of old"? I'm curious to know how it differs.

Oh I mean, everything from the Marlboro man to "Just Do It" to Apple's "Think Different" was basically a corporate hook carefully crafted to be an appeal to individualism - although Apple threaded a needle with respect to exactly whom they chose to glorify as exemplars. The marketing pablum of the past decade that appeals to tribal identity, or a lack of sense of self searching for identity, (socially conscious identity or its opposite number), and which talks down to people, is bad marketing plain and simple. It's also corrosive to a state of affairs in which people learn to take responsibility for their own decisions, as it places the onus or impulse on external structures. I'd much rather hear that I'm a rugged individual for smoking Marlboros than that I'm joining a burgeoning herd by "exploring" some new NodeJS framework. But hey, I was conditioned to reject authority in the age when rejecting authority was genuinely difficult and not a paved road. And my generation's ad agencies had to write campaigns that contended with that, which as deceitful and devious as they were, reflected a reality about our society's impulse to rebuff control which largely no longer exists.

Rejecting authority is never "a paved road" or easy otherwise it would not be authority. The world has moved on since the 60s and individualism has had disastrous effects on society and nature (even if it also brought great advances and freedom to some parts of the world)

Compared to what? Maybe if some true communitarianism had existed in the modern, mechanized world, outside a few small pockets, and had proven it was beneficial to society and nature over an individualist paradigm, we could say that. But the only large-scale organization of people we've seen other than one based on individual liberty is authoritarianism. And if you want to talk about environmental wreckage and social inequality, the former USSR and the current growth model in China are hardly models to aspire to. I suppose the closest we've seen to an eco-friendly, communitarian autoritarianism would be Nazi Germany, which only came at the price of, you know, the mass murder of every individual within reach who was different from their model or disagreed with the leader.

I find it interesting that you insist there is no value to word choice on buttons in this comment, but your previous comment thread four hours prior (and ongoing) on another post delves into very pedantic semantics on naming types. Would you please explain the difference between the two cases?

> Would you please explain the difference between the two cases?

Absolutely!

You'll notice my complaint about the BPY article is not about its griping over semantically incorrect uses of buttons -- I'm fine with that! My complaint is ascribing those incorrect uses to deep dark political and cultural forces, or viewing them as harbingers of societal change. That interpretation strikes me as self-indulgent nonsense.

People are styling semantic "links" as visually prominent buttons because it's a practically effective way to direct the eye, and hence a practically effective marketing strategy. Most of them don't even know what semantic html is. So this is all explained by humans taking actions to accomplish their immediate goals and not caring about things like the html spec that aren't directly relevant to those goals.

The typical landing page with big type, punchy explanations, social proof and CTA buttons evolved mostly because it works.

Initially I felt the same but I changed my mind mid-read.

The topic of "links should not be styled as buttons" is well-known to everyone who has or had to do frontend web dev, at least I think so.

And the reasons for that as well.

The common violation of this rule on landing pages and CTA-like interstitials is also well-known to every designer or frontend dev who has to work on pages that sell something, I guess.

This essay presents these tradeoffs and developments in UX, and makes a very good point aboit button texts and an annoying next step in this evolution of commercial UX design that I never could quite put my finger on.

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