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Comment by mpalmer | Hacker News Reader

With the calm, respectful understanding that everything is subjective and there's no accounting for taste -

and in my personal capacity -

I do not understand how cutesy anime characters have been deemed sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne enough to be displayed to literally every single person who visits my site.

With apologies to fans of the art style, it is a negative signal to me. I do not prefer to use Cloudflare for things like this, but I would not use Anubis unless I could disable the imagery, and every time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"

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It's the kids. They all like the anime. Not at all like the serious teams I worked with at IBM and DEC that slapped trek logos over everything.

Define kids? I know plenty of Gen X and elder millennials into anime

I think the GP is speaking tongue-in-cheek; it's a fun little joke

There are boomers, and there are kids.

Kids as in "kids these days" and "get off my lawn".

Only the ones that are still kids mentally.

Unlike you that commented no less than 25 times in this very thread, a lot of those calling this "DRM" and even "malware", the irony is palpable.

In the radiology department at Westchester Medical Center, all of the portable X-ray machines have little nametags on them that read, variously, "Enterprise", "Voyager", "Defiant", etc.

Cloud-native KTDs (Kids These Days) will never know the joy of lovingly naming all the machines in the building by theme and caring for them like a kennel of slightly sickly pets.

"Cassiopeia is down" - emotional event, especially if she never comes up again. AWS instance 54653-345r3453-34234, meh. Sure, we got more nines, but at what cost?!

It has simply been normalized and for a lot of smaller scale sites, that this was first made for, being a little less professional isn't a problem.

But for situations where a company simply won't use Anubis because of its branding then they do sell a unbranded version.

https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper

What an ingenious approach for a sustainable OSS project: serve the free version with playful art that you enjoy and that expresses your individuality, but which some people are bound to find triggering/improper; sell a bland lifeless corporate edition to those people.

> some others would find triggering/improper

I guess the main point is branding clash if you're a large company website (most companies care a lot about how their brand is shown, if they care about spacing/padding around their logo they also care about what pictures are shown when joining), hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art. (though resentment could build up if actual humans get frequently unexpectedly rejected as bots by this system, not sure if this actually happens however, didn't ever for me at least)

The approach they took here looks very reasonable from that standpoint indeed.

Branding clash also happens with Cloudflare. It’s only immediately clear when it is set up on a website you already know (e.g., Stack Overflow), but I remember when seeing it first I was visiting a new to me website and genuinely thought that’s what it looks like, and was taken by surprise when something with a completely different colour scheme, logo, typography popped up. I also recall Cloudflare did not (maybe still doesn’t) put up its own name up front on its captcha page, adding to the confusion. In any case, after a couple of times it’s no longer a problem to most people.

The resentment point is a fair one! If that happens and maintainers care about public perception of the mascot, I can imagine them wanting to change it somewhat.

> hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art

I’ve known at least one person who genuinely seemed triggered by anime-like visual style.

> hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art

Apparently a good chunk of HN is. Anubis-tan seems to me the main reason that this comment section about FFmpeg and Forgejo has devolved into a debate about Anubis; more than the intersitial page itself.

That's too bad, I wonder what's so triggering about it.

OSS projects are mostly done by people on their free time, they can do whatever they want with their mascots/branding/project. And those OSS projects tend to be significantly more respectful of users than the average modern software so on my side I tend to see those kind of harmless personal touches quite positively, sign of software that is made with the user in mind.

I think it's more that Anubis is getting in the way of accessing the content, and blocking actual humans. It quickly becomes "it's that damn anime girl again" and I suspect the mascot only increases the irritation in the same way that cutesy error messages do when you're trying to do serious work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32337520

The problem is when those choices end up on about every project making up the open source ecosystem. Nor weird tastes and fetishes don't belong there.

I fail to what hard choice there is to make. Choices are:

* use it

* don't use it

* use something else

* pay to change the picture

Easy.

> fetishes

And what fetish would that be? That's just a picture of a girl (maybe? Not sure they were ever gendered) holding a magnifying glass, if that's improper I'm not sure what is proper.

Weird tastes is what makes OSS wonderful!

Triggered people should buy their software from Microsoft

Is there anything stopping anyone from just making a fork and removing it manually?

It's MIT licensed software. You can do whatever you want as long as you comply with the terms of the license. I can also choose to allocate my time wherever I want.

People are also free to call you out on your shit tastes though.

Does your comment meaningfully contribute to the conversation?

> but I would not use Anubis unless I could disable the imagery, and every time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"

They do offer an unbranded version, botstopper. It is part of their commercial offering [0] and intended for "professional" environments

[0]: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper

Can't fault the logic. Will never use it if that's part of what they've chosen to paywall.

Once the project is sustainable (where I define sustainable as monthly recurring revenue--not one time donations--to be at $5000 USD per month as that is the point where my bank account stays flatlined not accounting for tax), an option to remove it will be added to the version you don't have to pay for.

Otherwise, it's MIT licensed software. You can remove it all you want, but I will use that as a signal to focus my time and energy as I see fit.

I appreciate the response, and your point is valid. FWIW there's no sarcasm in what I said up top; I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum.

I have been reading your stuff for a while, and if anything disproves my original point, it's your published output. cheers -

Thank you. I'm sorry if I was overly abrasive or rude, but it's getting really old. People have sent me horrible things because of this. I've had to start withdrawing from joining new places under my main identity. Just please take one femtoiota of care that the other side is also a human being with thoughts, feelings, and that they may just be incredibly tired of hearing people complain about something.

I legit didn't read any rudeness, it was a graceful retort.

> People have sent me horrible things because of this.

That sucks, and I see how it makes my (somewhat) measured reaction scan differently.

> Just please take one femtoiota of care that the other side is also a human being with thoughts, feelings, and that they may just be incredibly tired of hearing people complain about something.

Your shit rocks, your stuff on Tailscale in particular inspired me greatly, and I'm sorry you caught me seeing orange.

> Can't fault the logic. Will never use it if that's part of what they've chosen to paywall.

Is pretty damn rude. It's the kind of thing you say online but would never say face-to-face.

I'm not sure we agree on what constitutes "pretty damn rude". It was an inelegant, hastily expressed opinion.

Yes, inelegant, hasty, and with no regard to the person across the wire you're communicating with. Self serving and rude.

You are incorrectly implying that I made the comment after the author joined the thread. This is not true.

Hastiness and inelegance tends to happen when you want to trip over yourself to make a point on this site, which we're now both guilty of.

Hey, thanks for working on the software, you made something really cool!

It's kind of an ingenious way to weed out people who are engaging in bad faith. Like if you're choosing not to use a very useful piece of software because of some aesthetic sensibility, maybe I want to be able to identify you more easily.

Fwiw I like the mascot but I also don't associate this username with my actual identity because I draw anime style pixel art, so I get it.

Thank you for what you do. I have zero use for Anubis nor have I personally encountered the problem it's meant to solve, but I'll readily support the girl, she is very cute. Never listen to the blisteringly lukewarm takes of the corpo venturecapitariat.

Thank you. I swear some people here have had their innate sense of whimsy surgically removed, or it's some kind of transphobia. Either way, it's frustrating to hear the people here bitch so much about something so minor.

My head might actually explode from irony wtf.

I can't wait for it to be sustainable so I can send a PR to let people use gratuitously furry characters instead. :3

Like... imagine Anubis, but with the "anubis is overdrawn" meme.

https://imgur.com/a/RubDWrR

So on one hand you wouldn't use it as-is for anything professional, because of the artwork, but on the other, you'd be unwilling to pay to use it -- for something professional -- because removing the artwork is the paid feature?

Unbelievable.

Yeah this is a very weird logic. I would love some kind explanation of mpalmer.

IMO this makes it even worse - not only are FOSS projects now happily putting DRM on their websites, they also add ads for a commercial service.

You would be horrified to spend any time in Japan then, where such characters are used in official capacity for anything from shops to corporations to government agencies, police stations and street signs.

It's just flashing a logo as the equivalent of a loading spinner while it does things. I don't see how the specific logo could possibly be interpreted as tasteless or offensive -- I know I'll take it any day over fucking Corporate Memphis.

> very time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"

I'd hope at some point you'd start remembering whose branding it is, that would make things much less confusing for you :-)

Now imagine if the developers of sudo were behind this, now that would be the stuff of nightmares...

Yeah, imagin typoing "ls" and having a Steam Locomotive drive through your terminal! Thankfully no one implemented that. ;-)

I couldn't care less about the art, but the user-agent discrimination is far worse. Implying that anyone not using an "officially sanctioned" browser is an AI bot is such a devious scheme that I don't think even Google themselves would've come up with it.

I think you've got the logic backwards. It defaults to assuming that user agents that have "Mozilla" in them might be bots. Uncommon browsers don't get challenged. It wouldn't make sense for bad faith bots to use uncommon, easy to block user agents.

All real browsers have Mozilla in the user agent string.

The point is to allow bots that play nice and don't claim to be real browsers, as those can be identified in logs and blocked or rate limited fairly. But bad faith bots can be undistinguishable from browsers, so everyone else gets a PoW challenge to make their endeavour slower and expensive.

At least that's the spirit, of course someone will eventually just use random strings as user agents, but then again this is all a tragedy of the commons anyway.

Interesting. I guess I'll have to write an extensions to make open source websites usable again. I feel like at some point this will be "fixed" though.

How is it different from the classic corporate caricature of a person with unnatural body proportions?

It's just art style.

Not sure what you're referring to, or what you mean by "it's just art style". It's a style that is likely to clash with the website branding it precedes, in my opinion.

they're referring to the infamous Corporate Memphis style which is frequently used in big tech branding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

... and which is also reviled by many, making it an odd point to bring up.

Wow. People can get angry at anything.

> It's just art style.

Art styles aren't picked randomly out of a hat. Humans are pattern matching machines and will draw conclusions based on choice of art style or mascot.

> classic corporate caricature of a person with unnatural body proportions

Corporate Memphis is an abomination and I harshly judge any company that uses it. Everyone hates Corporate Memphis and makes fun of it.

IMHO Corporate Memphis is much worse than anime art. "You have small brain" is the message it seems to imply.

I don't necessarily disagree. But in either case the point is "it's just an art style" is wrong. People make judgement calls based on art. It's just human nature.

IMO both styles have that message.

Hmm, does the cutesy anime Octocat bother you? It's all over GitHub; admittedly, not as large, but definitely more pervasive.

My point is that people get used to such things, and stop to even notice.

The context is a bit different from a proof of work captcha that sits in front of otherwise-unaffiliated sites.

I actually _like_ this, and so does the comfyweb & weebs who are a very significant portion of the driving force behind calm, decade-long projects.

I do find the fact that anime is inescapable among mainly the American youth (not seen it as much here in Germany) to be alienating. I guess it’s just what it feels like to get old

I don't feel you're right? I'm pretty sure that Germany experienced the same 80s anime boom that was felt in other parts of Europe too, and DoKomi (German anime convention) pulls ~180,000 people, very close to overtaking Comic Con. I'm actively involved in the European anime-adjacent DJ scene so I know Germany is not some low spot within Europe at all.

I think perhaps you might be overestimating how popular anime is with Americans because of how popular it is on the Internet.

Worse, it prevents people with older browsers from even visiting the site.

Yes it's DRM but somehow acceptable now (it shouldn't be).

I respect the expression of individual taste, but it suggests strongly that the platform has not reached professional maturity.

Professional maturity: https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/kv5651/what...

~15 years ago I'd come across tweets sharing how European art teachers are struggling with cultural intrusions of anime into fine arts(lol), ~10 years ago Chinese companies started serving anime-style online games, ~5 years ago COVID kickstarted VTubers in anglosphere, now an anime art is in a major OSS like an AC/DC reference.

It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them. Anime wasn't always accepted in Japanese culture(where it was born); it always existed and was growing consistently over the entire postwar history, but there were still plenty of cancellation forces on Twitter when it launched in late 2000s.

Don't worry, companies like Apple would be having an ultra sexualized silver gimpsuit teenager mascot by 2030 and anime hate would be replaced by something by then at this rate.

Can people just not like something? Not everything is a sociopolitical debate.

> It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them

uh... no, not in my case at least.

Yes in technical sense that only wrong countries try to control wrongthink, and no in the sense that if there are chances such opinions prevail.

It'll be like insisting YOLO[1] renamed and presentation video changed up. We all kind of deserve a right to say so, and insisting anime is unprofessional and must be removed don't look that way yet, but IMO it very well could be considered insane talks in 5-10 years.

1: https://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/

Culture hasn't been monolithic for decades now; it's only fragmenting more. Broad consensus that any opinion is "insane" is becoming less likely, not the other way around.

If anything, I have only grown to hate the style more the more it is pushed everywhere.

I don't like the art either but much worse is how accepting open source projects are of putting the DRM that's behind it on their websites.

It could have been worse, it could have been a crab

Its the cool kids doing it. It's the same kind of h4x0r esthetics as the nyan cat or unicorns and beavers everywhere.

I for one don't see anything wrong with anime characters, though I suppose neither of us are likely to change our minds.

"sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne" != "wrong"

I would say you are being unnecessarily pedantic: the GP said "anything wrong", and the original comment obviously believes that there is "something wrong" which makes the choice not "sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne" (/me looking up "anodyne").

The obvious positive reading of the GP comment is that they disagree anime characters make it not "sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne".

You are replying to the GP.

I am replying to the "parent" comment which replies to the "grandparent" comment on the "original comment".

You seem to be unnecessarily pedantic too, while being wrong at the same time (I would get those relationships wrong sometimes if I thought it was clear enough).

GP is overboard42. mpalmer is GGP / OP.

I mean, Anubis does allow you to change the image to whatever you want. (edit: apparently the feature is behind a paywall unless you edit the source code)

I kinda like the Anubis girl though (as you said, subjective)

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