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Grumpy Website

grumpy.website

74 pointsjayhoon23 comments

One thing I like about the site itself is the pagination is numbered in descending order so any links to a specific page should always have the same content and one can pick up where one left off at a later point (assuming the same number of posts per page remains consistent). Quite rare for a blog.

Also clearly visible "visited" states for those links, so I can easily continue where I left off last visit.

Thank you! I think it’s the only way it makes sense

It is very cathartic to see someone as irritated by these things as I am. One thing that stands out to me is how surprisingly often these Big Tech companies seem to appear here. Apple and Google seem to constantly be fiddling with their UIs (on their mobile OSs and various web products) and they seem frequently incapable of implementing extremely basic stuff correctly

Yeah, you'd expect the tech giants to accumulate experience, but they seem to be the prime victims (and perpetrators) of the career progression treadmill that's keeping the industry forever stuck at junior level - i.e. it's the junior SEs that do actual work; as soon as they become barely competent at their jobs, they get promoted and told to spend time "communicating with stakeholders" and teaching the next batch of juniors.

Yeah or even to have a bit of pride. To think something like “this is Google, we can’t release this weird inconsistent UI”

something tells me - i dont know, call it a hunch...that this is likely intentional. You know how in malls, the walkways (which arent stores) seem really shitty and make people irritated...well, thats intentional, (its the Gruen transfer)...how do you do this on a device? probably by making interacting with the device passively irritating as all fuck...read the first paragraph in that link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer

It's an interesting idea actually, there's maybe no way to say for certain but I'm inclined to invoke Hanlon's Razor here and suggest that it's down to incompetence rather than malice.

However that effect you linked is really fascinating! I particularly liked the reaction of Gruen to this: "I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments."

Yeah - i am arm chair theorising 100%....agree about Hanlon's Razor...since i was introduced to that idea - i have thought of it alot - but tbh for a company the size of google, i find it really difficult to be that charitable. It's just too convenient for a dealer of ads not to use any trick in the book to further grump users to engage with more ads, which...yep...pays them.

Yeah fair enough, I totally understand. Maybe I just want the world to be less malicious and more chill than it is :-)

"Which one is selected?"

This has been a trope since the invention of GUIs. Somehow, people keep designing toggle interfaces where you can't tell which state it's in, including some high-profile apps and toolkits.

It got considerably worse with the advent of flat UIs.

In my podcast app (AntennaPod), a previous explicit [X] UI of showing what filters are enabled/disabled has been replaced by a lightly-shaded coloured UI, or so I presume.

On my monochrome e-ink tablet, the two modes are now entirely indistinguishable.

> If you extend source code with line numbers, make sure those aren’t selectable

[shakes fist at so many blogs]

Mhmm... if you don't want to make it selectable you need wonderful JS or tables to seperate it? Makes thing more complicated.

Just remove the line numbers, every editor can mark in block mode today. Some snippets won't work without further code anyways.

Something like...

.line-number { user-select: none; -moz-user-select: none; -webkit-user-select: none; }

...should be sufficient to prevent that bit from being selected without JS.

I generally think this website is great. Although I have to disagree with the google translate one: https://grumpy.website/1364

Can anyone enlighten me about what an alternative UI or design might be?

As he says, any other language. His problem is that there is no use case to translate English to English, so they should choose something else. Maybe the users last non-english language?

I thought about creating such a website for years, because most software I use is broken (sometimes intentionally) and it breaks easily. For example most applications will crumble when you will try to interact with them during animations.

When I first learned webdev some two decades ago, we had a site in Poland called "Osiołki Internetu" - "Internet's Asses" (as in donkeys). It documented particularly egregious cases of bad design, bad UX, and non-compliance with web standards (which were a hot thing back then; people used to proudly display HTML validation results as if they were medals of honor). All those websites featured on Osiołki were cases of some webdevs not knowing better (or not caring) - i.e. mistakes in the art. It dawned on me recently that, should a site like this exist today, most cases of webdev malpractice would be intentional - the so-called "dark patterns". The website would thus be documenting the other kind of Internet asses.

(2017)

Some previous discussion from 2019, a snapshot of how things have changed and not changed at all

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878292

The site appears to be continuously updated, with examples from two days ago.

I believe convention is to consider such submissions "current".

Noting previous discussions could still be useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com