Hacker News Reader

Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

I just think that automatically-updating "views" counter is awesome. A little distracting, but cool to watch it update in real-time.

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Interesting, as I had the complete opposite reaction. I found it distracting and had to scroll it off the screen to be able to focus on the content of the article.

Putting blinking things in the periphery of vision is a very well known pattern when you explicitly want to draw people's attention. If this were email notifications, blink away. But it's actively drawing the reader away from the core purpose of the site--reading the damn article--without adding anything of value.

"Oh, other people are coming here? Social validation! I'm reading the right things! Now what was I reading?" Complete malarky.

Fortunately though it's at the top of the article, so you've scrolled past it almost immediately, right?

I have a large monitor

You might want to work on improving your ability to focus. If you're that easily distracted, then you might need to work on mindfulness. It isn't like it's banging a gong every time the number changes.

You might want to work on being a little less pedantic.

Or you know, somebody could have a legitimate condition like a vestibular disorder. :(

Everything that's old is new again... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_counter

That was my initial reaction as well. Pretty interesting concept. Front page Hacker News web traffic to your website in real-time.

I totally dig it too, but I wish it counted without highlighting yellow. Neat feature, but a bit distracting.

This is an implementation of socket.io, right?

Seems to hold up pretty well.

If anyone else wants this on their blog/site (like I did), I created a quick JS plugin that does the same thing: http://hitsy.io/

"Just include the following JS script (~135kb)". Ugh

Of which, 130kb is from Firebase :(

Congratulations, you're the 9,999,999th visitor!

I agree though, it can be a little distracting, but it's out of sight with a little bit of scrolling.

I thought so too, but then I realized I'm viewing this on mobile with a very limited battery life and the smallest data plan ever.

While I'd be a fan of the feature on a desktop this is the kind of thing that makes me want to see uMatrix work on Android.

These features are never implemented as opt-in and the only way to opt-out is with something like uMatrix.

I think that if somebody is talking about UI design, there shouldn't be an annoying, randomly highlighting yellow object taking my attention. It is really bad UI design. Who benefits from this information? Nobody else but the writer of the article.

I tried to read the article for 15 seconds but the highlight just made me close the whole thing.

view = f(data) + counter

It's cool, but I disagree about "awesome", considering how many CPU cycles it probably takes to keep that thing updated in more-or-less-realtime.

Is there a shortage of CPU cycles I don't know about? I knew California was having some water shortages, but now CPU Cycles too!

Actually, there is. Contrary to what ninja rockstar hipster Wangular.js devs like to believe, not everyone runs an i7 on a gigabit fiber line. Little useless counters like that (who the hell cares how many people have viewed a page anyway? I sure as hell don't, and can surely survive without being bombarded with attention whoring) tend to add up. And even for those who do run an i7 and a gigabit fiber connection, it's invariably in response to little bullshit widgets like these clogging up CPU cores and network connections.

Sure, go ahead, downvote my comment while dismissing it with snide remarks. You're just contributing to the reasons why people disable Javascript or relegate it to on-demand / click-to-play functionality.

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