Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

With respect I feel like the author is missing a whole bunch here about the point of a website.

It's not just content/info/data, it's a performance (in the creative sense).

Brands spend a lot of time honing their appearance - not just fonts and colours but the whole composition and visual pacing - their entire "say something without saying anything at all" aspect etc. Just walk through any place with physical shops and really look at how the stores have worked on their appearance and how they present themselves to customers. They're not just selling a product, they're selling a lifestyle/feeling/etc/etc. They're not just going to give that creative control away to some LLM.

Another way to think of it is instead of people watching a movie or play when they go to the cinema or theater, they're just given the script to read. Same information but the entire artistry of both the performers and the directors is totally absent, leaving it up to each reader to imagine the delivery of lines or the scene's setting etc.

I think on HN and in tech in general people seem to forget that "the first bite is with the eye", and that is why "normal people" never liked or used RSS. The desire to leave our mark and to create (and view!) visually appealing things seems to be pretty innate in humans - we've been doing it since cave paintings. I struggle to think of a world where we just hand that over to AIs and humans have zero creative control.

To add to this, the OP's vision benefits the user -- reducing a business's value to its actual raw value as a service rather than a brand. For me, it sounds great.

But the business's incentives are in the exact opposite direction. That opposite direction is the whole point of branding. They want their service to have a vibe, a personality, something you irrationally value beyond its raw value as a service.

> something you irrationally value beyond its raw value as a service

Sometimes that feeling is the value. Sure my plants don’t care if they live in a cheap plastic pot off Amazon or a nice pot from the overpriced gardening store selling at a 200% markup, but I care. Sitting in my balcony surrounded by cheap disposable clutter feels different than enjoying the outdoors amidst quality vibes.

That's not irrational at all!

Some things are commodities, some are not. The point is only that it's in the interest of commodity businesses to convince you they are not selling commodities. That sleight of hand doesn't prevent genuine quality and artistry from mattering in many cases, including, in your case, pots.

Presentation of data and a story is a very important part of the service. That's why we have a mix of pictures, tables, paragraphs, etc. It's why UX is so important in general.

This is a very good point, however I'm on the other side of it (or at least across the boundary, perhaps not polar opposite).

Performance may be worth a lot today but I feel it will be less and less. I mean "we" don't like the "performance" of Windows (copilot everywhere, a setup process taking ages with dozens of offers you don't want), we don't like MacOS' performance (weird corners ;), inconsistent icons, icons disappearing behinds notches, no tiling)

I like Hackernews because it's so minimal, I just changed the bar to be gray instead of orange, otherwise it's perfect for my needs. Imagine some performer making this a beautifully crafted site, I'd go for any of the alternatives we see coming by every now and then.

Movies are perhaps different, although for me they are often about the lessons, did they change my view on things? That can often be condensed a lot more (for me that usually means drop a lot of the emotional finery, ie, I like TNG and Voyager more than Discovery because there is less crying and close-ups of crying people's eyes, ok, Discovery also has a lot less moral discussions).

Maybe I'm not normal, but to me my own UIs sound good, more efficient, more (useful-) information dense, so I need to spend less time navigating. It's why I use Nix and Gnome and (to a lesser degree) FireFox. It clicks more for me, but I can think of ways to improve them (yes I will soon try Niri). It's why people like chatting with their agents that are hooked into everything (Home Assistant to email to joblisting sites). Where's your beautiful UI in that workflow? Just give me a good API. Personal assistant/agents may be toys for nerds at the moment, but they're going to be big imho.

One argument against mine is perhaps that I also get used to tools and setups at some point, even though I don't consider them optimal at first, they become optimal. Perhaps because there is a deeper vision behind them.

All in all, perhaps we're both right. But people here seem to be very much on the company side (not surprising), but I don't care about your company, I care about information. That's why I have ad blockers, throw articles and long lists into LLMs and increase the contrast on your "beautiful" gray on gray text.

Buried in your prose is certainly a point shared with your average website visitor: they want the information, they don't want to be wowed with complex animations. But they also don't want no styling. There is a middle ground between looking like lynx and having some flair.

> Maybe I'm not normal

You definitely are not normal, if we define normal as "the vast majority of people". If web developers took your feedback seriously it would be detrimental to the experience of almost everybody. But I think that you knew that.

<devils-advocate-mode>Meh, more and more people will get information relevant to the decisions they have/want to make via their agents, not via your work-of-art-website. Deal with it.</devils-advocate-mode>

> I think on HN and in tech in general people seem to forget that "the first bite is with the eye", and that is why "normal people" never liked or used RSS

I think HN reflexively shoots down any idea or prediction with a bias to the incumbent.

Generally, a technological advancement will render some previous ways of working useless or outdated. People value convenience way more than a curated experience but I'm not disagreeing that brand differentiation would still exist.

A company that offers a meaningfully better experience in the long term will outcompete a company that focuses too much on aesthetics.

If they get generative UI right, where the UI provider can also give their own flavour and have some differentiation but also allow enough personalisation to afford the user better experience, it will happen.

Some bets don't work (like RSS) but some bets have worked - like the Amazon e-commerce model. A person in 1985 could have shut Amazon's idea down the same way you have.

Convenience is often curated experience. That is apart what was already there when humans emerged (which is of course still the biggest part), everything human experience was curated by previous humans. But of course even curated crafts get thrown and replace with other different experiences.

You're right, but are also ignoring that branding, appearance, etc., is simply not important to some people. They prefer function over form, which is where I think the author is coming from. They're wrong in thinking that most people share this opinion, and the idea of LLMs creating UIs seems awful to me, but as you can see from the comments here, this is appealing to some. It's niche, but this website is not exactly mainstream.

I partly share this opinion because most branding and UIs, products that are primarily marketed as a "lifestyle", etc., are obnoxious. Yes, appearance is a factor of anything we interact with, but when using technology my primary thought is if it solves a practical problem. Not if it's broadcasting an image, or even if it's enjoyable to use. The latter is important, but often companies prioritize it over functionality, which is backwards to me.

So starting with a mostly functional product, and giving me the choice of how to style it, is appealing to me. This is why I still use RSS, custom style sheets, the CLI and simple GUI wrappers, etc.

There is an audience for this type of product, but it's of the magnitude of a rounding error, so naturally most companies don't, and likely shouldn't, focus on this segment.

I totally agree that there is an often loud minority calling for this sort of thing: "I am an expert. I don't need styling or white space. I want every last square centimeter of space filled with 8pt font. I demand information density!" (aside: these are also the same people who say that JS-based UIs are slow and server-side HTML is faster, despite the fact that backend latency is 99.999% of the problem but that is another discussion...)

And yet, in my lived-experience at an unnamed Big Co when we did lots of UXR work in the on-call, monitoring, and incident management software/tooling, when it came to people being the primary on-caller handling a page for an incident when the company is losing millions for every minute of downtime that the 8pt font information dense UI they said they wanted actually led to increased stress, more mistakes, longer time-to-mitigation etc. Turns out that a carefully and deliberately designed UX and information architecture and - gasp - white space (that was all carefully and minutely tuned to specific CUJs over many rounds of research and prototyping) is really important.

Even if you have all the information available, just throwing stuff at the screen doesn't always help IME. Less is often more.

Nice analogy with movies, but essentially it’s a category error. Movies are media, not interfaces. You consume movies, but _use_ websites. A movie is immutable. A website is dynamic. As a matter of fact, even movies follow a very common structure, from narrative, to format specs and credits. Directors and actors fit their performance to these constraints. Movies are arguably way more standard than websites.

I think OP has envisioned a situation half way between what we now have and what will soon be the actual reality and that his idea will just be quickly skipped over.

I don't think website design will go away, but I do expect that people will soon be ordering products and booking holidays through AI chats instead of doing it themselves, which will require the kind of manifests he's talking about, but will skip the UI layer completely.

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