Hacker News Reader

The reading experience is awful, but it's fun to see where other people come from and how we cursor each other :D

It would be a fun “check this out” feature.

But it’s horrible UX.

I understand the design decision though as seems like a fun hack to include. Especially when there’s probably only 1-4 other people on there. So I expect to the author it’s usually just cool to see someone else is there reading with you and not the current level of distraction.

This is one of the single most offputting novelty features ever. It's straight out of those of those collaborative canvas applications, but at least there it serves a legitimate function.

You are not wrong. But it also reminds me that the early web was full of things like this. Where everyone was just kind of playing around. Doing fun things. Not all of them worked. In fact most of them were terrible. But now many web pages are fairly sterile full of ads and looking for a buyout of some VC benefactor. That GeoCities/Myspace style of internet can be fun. Crazy off-putting and 'my eyes are bleeding', but fun.

wow... i am grumpy today :)

Now imagine what websites are tracking that they don't show you.