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Comment by incognito124 | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: do people like having their websites move around while scrolling? Just show me the text

I think it can be fine if it's more of a marketing thing that I'm only going to view once and that doesn't have too much reading. Think of it like a promotional video that I can view at my own pace. But you have to have a good reason for it, cause there are lots of downsides.

And never use it for anything important, or that I might want to go back to multiple times.

This site is probably an example of a bad use case, cause it's the front page and I can't access the links without scrolling. Not to mention that it's broken on my device.

I think it can be nice when most of the content is static and there are a few flourish animations tied with scrolling. But IMHO any time any notable portion of content is being animated it is distracting at best or hurts the ability to read at worst.

I hate it. Easily my least favorite kind of interactive content.

When I'm reading? No. I don't want a unique experience to consume your text context.

There are some websites where this is done and it's really cool, but I'm not there to read text on those websites.

I actually find it a bit nauseating.

Developers should implement https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref... :)

Wow, didn't know there were settings for this, thanks. I do suffer from motion sickness a bit.

I think there are people who like the aesthetic. I don’t think many put thought to whether they objectively like the concept of it.

Given the choice of a page with information readily available or a page where you have to scroll and it does whacky animations to present the information.. I don’t think many would choose that.

I'm really not a fan of the image sequence that loads in the background and the scrolling of the page is hijacked to move between the "animation" scrolling the image sequence. If anything, that should be a left/right scroll when the element is active or at least on element:hover. Stopping the expected page scroll to now start "animating" this media element until the end which then releases the scrolling back into the expected behavior is clearly designed by sociopaths and sadists.

I don't typically like it, but I believe that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has done some interesting infographic-style articles that did it well. Edit: Found some![0]

But as is usual with these things, people on HN are not the typical consumer of these things

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/interactives has many, the first one I clicked on was an example https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-28/almost-one-in-ten-peo...

I frequently close the tab when I encounter this stuff. Sometimes I'll just disable JavaScript.

Well, most website developers forget or have not checked the existence of (prefers-reduced-motion), which should disable all animations when a user preference is detected.

Burn it with fire

Apple website

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