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Comment by andy99 | Hacker News Reader

In case the author is reading, I can't read your article because of that animation at the bottom. I get it, it's cute, but it makes it too distracting to concentrate on the article, so I ended up just closing it.

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I've never seen something so egregious before, it made it impossible to read without covering it with my hand.

But I realized something by attempting to read this article several times first.

If I ever want to write an article and reduce peoples ability to critically engage with the argument in it I should add a focus pulling animation that thwarts concerted focus.

It's like the blog equivalent of public speakers who ramble their audience into a coma.

https://neal.fun/stimulation-clicker/

> I've never seen something so egregious before

Streaming comments on YouTube give it a run for its money, what absolute garbage.

Thankfully that can be collapsed.

Do you mean the live chat? Those are, appropriately, for live streams. They do replay afterwards as depending on the type of stream the video may not make complete sense without them (and they're easy enough to fold if they don't have any value e.g. premieres).

I think the same blog used to show you the cursor position of every other reader on your screen. Surprised that's been removed.

> I've never seen something so egregious before

You should check how comments work on niconico.

It's downright awful and I'm having a hard time imagining the author proof reading their own page and thinking "yeah, that's great".

As an aside, I have an article in my blog that has GIFs in it, and they're important for the content, but I'm not a frontend developer by any stretch of the imagination so I'm really at wit's end for how to make it so that the GIFs only play on mouse hover or something else. If anybody reading has some tips, I'd love to hear them. I'm using Zola static site generator, and all I've done is make minor HTML and CSS tweaks, so I really have no idea what I'm doing where it concerns frontend presentation.

Probably the only way to do this is to convert the gifs to an actual video, and add some js that will unpause/pause on mousein/mouseout and touchstart/touchend

Agreed, and the fact that there is not an easy "x" to close it is even worse.

If you want to do something cute and fun, whatever its your site. But if you actually want people to use your site make it easy to dismiss. We already have annoying ads and this is honestly worse than many ads.

Also, from the bio that I can barely see he writes about "UI Design" and... included this?

I read the article but that animation was incredibly distracting. I don't even understand what it's for - clicking it does nothing. Best guess is a representation of how many people active on page.

Give in to the noJS movement, there's no animation and it's a beautiful minimalistic site if you disable javascript

So Tonsky's punishing us for leaving JavaScript enabled?

I'll also add that the "night mode" is obnoxious as hell anyway.

Inverted colours would've been _mostly fine._ Not great, but mostly fine, but instead, the author went out of their way to add this flashlight thing that's borderline unusable?

What the hell is this website?

I'm sure this feature is a joke, not intended to be usable. It's a personal blog.

As someone who does like tonsky’s stuff sometimes: I immediately closed the article when I saw it. I’m less charitable than you: it’s not cute, it’s just annoying, and it should be able to be switched off. For me it goes into the same box as his “dark mode” setting but it’s worse because it can’t be disabled. Why should I, as the reader, put in effort to overcome something the author found “cute” just to read their words? It’s akin to aligning the words to the right, or vertically: I can read it but it’s so much work that I’d rather just not.

On sites like that, I typically just switch to "reader view" which the leaves only the interesting content.

The animation? For me it was the blinding yellow background

It also covers a whole 1/4 of the screen on mobile...

It covers 90% of the screen on iPad

Reader mode. Don't leave home without it.

Even worse, it exposes the city all viewers within the HTML, even if the country code is only displayed on the webpage.

Obviously, the server gets your IP when you connect but ideally it doesn't share that with all visitors. This isn't as bad as that, still concerning.

Every time something from this website is shared, this topic comes up. It's one of those things where you can't tell whether it's genius or madness. Either way, I'm pretty sure the design is deliberate(ly obnoxious).

12 years later, https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ is still super useful.

Wow, that's one of the most abhorrent web designs I've ever seen

Yes is horrible, this idea.

I did document.querySelector('#presence').remove();

Yeah I just popped into devtools and added "display: none" to the CSS. It was crazy distracting.

I wonder if it respects prefers-reduced-motion, though I don't know if I have that set in my browser, I do have it set with my OS.

My favorite websites are the weird ones that make people complain about stuff.

To all people in this sub thread: suggestion to try reader mode.

In addition, the solid yellow background is another readability impediment.

Same here, I also closed it within a few seconds.

Thanos snap it if you’re using ios

When I saw the yellow background, I knew this is the website where I read the Unicode article [1]. Sure it is. With great pain I finished it.

I mean, just the fact that the background is yellow is a terrible UX decision. Not to mention that ridiculous "dark mode". No, it's not funny. It's stupid and distracting.

[1] https://tonsky.me/blog/unicode/

Let the web have a bit of personality. It's ok if you don't like this particular website, plenty of other places to be.

In ublock origin

tonsky.me##.container

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