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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

This format—with each paragraph fading as you scroll, and large changing images alongside—is borderline unreadable.

Somewhat ironic in a blog post that (I think) is about tradeoffs between text and formatting.

All that work to animate the little bits of data on the canvas, but greying the text was so irritating I closed the page. You don't realize how often your eyes jump back to previous sections until that ability is taken away from you.

It seems like they wanted to make sure the reader knew which paragraph corresponded to the current version of the image/plot. Maybe they could've gotten the effect they were after by setting a border or background on the presently relevant paragraphs.

Or even using the top as a kind of progress marker so you know where you are (or just reading from the middle of the page) only for the text to turn grey as you read it.

It is so unnecessary and distracting. I quit reading after the first scroll as my eyes were pulled away from the text.

That's why I hate things like auto-rotating image/news carosels or Windows "live tiles". Having them manually triggered is fine but a) I may be half-way through reading a headline; and b) if I'm reading something off to the side it draws my eye for a moment, disrupting my workflow.

On top of that, the content itself—a spectrum of lean to rich—isn't all that informative, especially compared to its solemn presentation as the result of some kind of deep meditation.

Also:

> Imagine how many ideas are held back because their authors don’t have the right tools to express them

Ironic when only the first paragraph is shown when JS is disabled.

I switched to Reader Mode in the hope of getting something more usable, but the screenshots of the Nat Friedman and Tailwind websites take up a bunch of space between every paragraph of content, making even Reader Mode awkward to navigate.

This. This looks fine as a some sort of demo and when opened on 14" macbook but on 27" monitor this is just torture.

Not happening to me on mobile, weird.

On iPhone as you scroll the page is blank, with paras appearing after a short delay.

This comment made me curious, but I still wasn't ready for how comically bad it is. On my large screen monitor, that single paragraph looks infuriatingly bad. It's so much wasted space that it detracts from anything else.

I initially closed the tab immediately, as I assumed that the greyed-out text was indicative of a paywall.

It's a slideshow. I actually kinda like it.

Even in slideshow format there's no need for this distracting nonsense. Something like https://idlewords.com/talks/our_comrade_the_electron.htm is perfectly fine.

I actually find that much more distracting since you can see the images ahead of time, but to each their own.

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