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As someone who randomly highlights words and lines when they read, I can't stand sites like Medium that display that annoying toolbar with the Twitter icon ever
by dlandis 9y ago
As someone who randomly highlights words and lines when they read, I can't stand sites like Medium that display that annoying toolbar with the Twitter icon every time you highlight something. Terrible UX in my opinion.
- nerdywordy 9y agoI'm glad there is another random highlighter out there. Medium & kin infuriate me with the popup toolbar.
- _asummers 9y agoMedium and SBNation are my two worst offenders. I have custom CSS rules I install whenever I see a site do this to just hide the div they're trying to show me.
- Nicksil 9y agoAbsolutely! The New York Times website has a similar "feature:" When the user double-clicks, the font changes size... I ended up developing an ad hoc plug-in which intercepts and suppresses the Event.
- samfriedman 9y agoFinally someone else who's been peeved by the Times' web reader! What's worse is that it captures mouse drag, so that I can't highlight words: dragging to the sides is hijacked to load previous/next article. Terrible design.
- mkl 9y agoYes, this is very frustrating! I often select a word to mark my place when going off to do something else. Can you share your solution?
- trw19 9y ago@mkl If you use Chrome desktop then see if my above post helps .. without the need for extensions/plugins.
- trw19 9y agoIt took me ages to figure out but there is a solution to this NYT website fubar that works for me on desktop browsers. In Chrome this appears to be due to the Times site responding to 'touch events' when the browser reports that the device is touch capable. When the device is touch capable the double-click-on-a-word is interpreted as a zoom attempt of sorts. And right-click doesn't work either. Even if the input was with a non-touch mouse (Or maybe they're assuming everybody is using a Mac Magic Mouse always). If you disable the touch-events-api in Chrome (chrome://flags/#touch-events) then Chrome will not report that the device is touch capable. And the NYT website will respond normally to the normal mouse interactions. This has been working for me for the past year. As for why Chrome might be claiming your input is a touch-event ... for my situation, my best guess, so far, is that this happens since the laptop has a touchpad. (My laptop doesn't have a touch-screen.) So even though I actually used an external USB mouse to interact with the browser the browser seems to report that the device is touch capable which the NYT website interprets as must-be-touch-only-always. Firefox has a similar setting called "dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled" I believe though I haven't tried this with FF. Hope that helps.
- rconti 9y agoOdd sidenote -- when I was growing up in the world of Mac Classics and Windows 3.1, the Mac users were the highlighters of the group. I was a Windows (okay, DOS->Windows->Linux) guy, so I didn't. I started using OS X in around 2002 and became a highlighter. I always wondered why.
- yuchi 9y agoHappened to me too. Most of us became mac users with Mac Books, and they always had an incredibly responsive touchpad. I believe it’s enough responsive to let us express our finger tics through it. The cursor actually become an extension of the finger.
- dfee 9y agoPerhaps it’s because the highlighting - being a cooler shade of blue - is less jarring and easier on the eyes. Windows: https://www.wintools.info/images/ccp/Highlight-default.png https://www.wintools.info/images/ccp/Highlight-default.png Mac: http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Quick-Look-highlight.png http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Qu...
- lucideer 9y agoCurrent macOS user, but only a very recent convert, and I've been a highlighter as long as I can remember. Though I was previously a Linuxer, so maybe it's non-Windows or terminal correlated.
- SllX 9y agoFor me it was the reverse. I was a random highlighter since I was a kid on Windows machines, but after I bought my first Mac the behavior just kind of stopped. I also had another habit I dropped, in part because Mac OS X never supported it, but on Windows I would middle click in the middle of the screen and position the cursor just under the, well, scroll anchor I guess I could call it, leaving the page to auto scroll at a comfortable speed while I took my hands off the mouse and just read. If I recall correctly, if I did it just right, then the page would not just auto scroll, but highlight everything along the way.
- djtriptych 9y agoSo interesting. I didn't know anyone did this at all until I observed a friend of mine reading something online in the early 2000s. Really curious about what percentage of web readers do this.
- lucideer 9y agoI'm sure the many siloed SaaS offerings with click heatmaps know, but I wonder is there an open source of such data.
- Sholmesy 9y agoI am one of these readers, and didn't realise I would do it until recently (subconsciously double clicking, on sections I am reading). I'm glad there are others, given the (although w/ heavy selection bias) responses here on HN, there might be more than you think.
- blahyawnblah 9y agoI do that too. It also kind of makes the "popular highlights" or whatever it is kind of meaningless.
- taytus 9y agoAnd so easy to solve. Just add a "do not show again" option. That's it.
- petercooper 9y agoI know it's weird, but I actually appreciate it. Not because I find their contextual tools useful, but because it's chipping away at this annoying habit and I do it far less than I used to.
- rurp 9y agoI'm curious why you think highlighting text is a bad habit. I find it useful for quickly finding my place after looking away from the screen.
- petercooper 9y agoIt's a bad habit for me. The OP said "As someone who randomly highlights words and lines when they read" which sounded more like my own tic-like random highlighting than anything useful, like yours.
- rurp 9y agoThe odd thing is that I highlight lines haphazardly as well. I hate the popups on Medium because I constantly highlight text without thinking about it. At some point I noticed that it helps me keep my place as my attention bounces around. The selections seem pretty random even to me, but I'm sure there is some sort of subconscious process going on. Maybe it's the same for you? Or not. I have no idea but just thought it was kind of interesting.
- Waterluvian 9y agoI HATE that. Even worse are some wikis like the ROS wiki that if you click on text to highlight it, it enters edit page mode. Aghhhhh!
- nkings 9y agoFullstory tracks "rage clicks", which is a fairly noisy stat to look through, as the vast majority of these are highlighters doing their thing.
- bhauer 9y agoI've observed that behavior in others but never done it myself. As someone who doesn't randomly highlight as I read, I nevertheless agree that a toolbar that appears on highlight is obnoxious for a reading-oriented site. (Meanwhile, I can appreciate Microsoft Word's similar toolbar on highlight, which is especially useful in touch and pen-oriented workflows.) I am idly wondering about the underlying reason people do random highlighting. I assume it's just a "tick" as they say. But I wonder if it has anything—even in small part—to do with the bad contrast on a lot of sites and the fact that browsers render highlighted text with good contrast. Even on high-contrast sites like Medium, the bright background combined with dark text can be tiresome on the eye, meaning that highlighted text will invert that yielding a more comfortable white text on blue. As someone who doesn't randomly highlight text, I often intentionally highlight text to quickly and nearly-effortlessly correct bad color selections by the site's designers. If I did this more often, I could see it developing into a habit.
- mykeliu 9y agoMy focus wanders quite a bit when doing anything in general, so I highlight text when reading webpages to help anchor my attention and forcefully keep track of where I am. Otherwise, my eyes tend to jump around the page in a horribly ineffective attempt to speed-read and I miss a lot of details.
- gnicholas 9y agoThe reading behavior you describe is common among people who use my startup’s software, which assists visual tracking when reading. Sorry if this is taking things too far off-topic, but hopefully this is helpful for some of the people who highlight while reading on-screen. http://www.beelinereader.com/individual http://www.beelinereader.com/individual
- compuguy 9y agoI wanted to try this, but apparently your Firefox extension is not version 58 compatible at the moment.
- zodPod 9y agoCan I ask what your goal is when highlighting? Is it based on the word or is it so you don't lose your place or what? I only ask because I don't do it but I sometimes find it difficult to read large amounts of text on screen and I've not a quick solution to it yet. I'm curious if this would work for me.
- lucideer 9y agoI can't speak for everyone, but for myself and people I've discussed this with in person, it's not intentional; it's more of a tick. That said, I find it does come in useful for keeping track.
- fiatpandas 9y agoSpeaking for myself, it's completely out of my control. I highlight randomly while reading, and the highlights aren't necessarily focused on the section I'm reading. And just because I highlighted something doesn't mean I will pause and look at it. Maybe I enjoy the colored aura of highlighted text flashing and changing in my periphery. I've never seen someone in person doing it, but I've read other accounts online. And this is definitely the most I've ever thought about it. It's interesting to read other people highlighting to keep their place. I've never thought to do that. I normally just scroll the paragraph I'm on to the top of the browser.
- waleedka 9y agoI do it to mark where I'm at in the post if I need to switch to something else temporarily. Makes it easier to continue from where I left of.
- intrasight 9y agoThe beauty of the web is that you own the presentation tier. Anything that bothers you should beat into submission with GreaseMonkey.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoOr nuclear option with NoScript to liberate yourself from these annoyances.
- intrasight 9y agoThat'll just prevent scripting. With GreaseMonkey you can fix html and css you don't like, and have those changes made every time you visit a site.
- ProfessorLayton 9y agoI do the same thing, although I wouldn't consider it random. I use to to keep track of where I am on the page. Highlighting really helps with poorly formatted pages, where the article is too wide to comfortably read and follow onto the next line [1]. [1] https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
- williamdclt 9y agoFirefox reader mode is doing quite a good job for that. I suppose there's Chrome extensions that do a similar thing!
- RobertRoberts 9y agoI would add that it has a terrible commenting navigation system.
- floriferous 9y agoI actually created an account on Medium only in the hopes of finding an option to disable this horrible feature, needless to say I was disappointed!
- e2e4 9y agoAm a big fan of highlighting myself, btw http://diigo.com http://diigo.com is great for keeping the highlights (p.s. happy paid user).
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 9y agoAlso a hyper highlighter and I loathe those websites. It makes me want to turn off Javascript.
- waleedka 9y agoIt gets worse, actually. People often, accidentally, click on the pen icon after highlight some text and end up highlighting that text permanently for all readers. And you, as the writer of the post, have no ability to remove that highlighting.
- timoth3y 9y agoI thought I was just me that had this inexplicable habit. Glad to hear I'm not the only one.
- midasz 9y ago"I did not want to post this snippet on Twitter ffs". I know exactly what you are talking about, drives me and others insane - but I can't help it.