7 ms·

Thankfully my monkey brain is stronger than my lizard brain when it comes to things like infinite scroll, modals and other horrible UI features that nobody in t

Thankfully my monkey brain is stronger than my lizard brain when it comes to things like infinite scroll, modals and other horrible UI features that nobody in their right mind should add to any website. Even just a couple of minutes of twitter usage makes me rage quit the whole website. Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it. Oh and once I tried to use Quora. It asked me to log in before I even knew what kind of a website it is. Now I hate Quora with a passion even though I'm not even sure what kind of a website it is exactly. I can only imagine it's full of modals, infinite scroll and other features that makes my skin go green and pants purple. So I only end up getting addicted to websites that are simple and old fashioned enough like HN and wikipedia (as long as I don't click a cursed en.m.wikipedia link by accident). Btw, on youtube each time I click subscriptions it defaults back to the grid view. I want a list. Monkey wants list! YOUTUBE AAAAAAARHGFHGHGHFFG-

Nimitz14 5y ago
> Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? So you think the standard should be to keep a video playing even if one's scrolled past it? Are you insane?
- phit_ 5y ago
  not op, but yes when I actively unmuted it, it should keep playing
- shakna 5y ago
  There's a bit more subtlety and tradeoff here. For example, I doubt most people watching a video on YouTube would like the video to stop playing when they scroll down. If they wanted to pause it, they'd pause it. They also probably don't want the video to transition to the next, whilst they're reading threads. If you're in an infinite loop stream however, you do probably want it to pause or stop, without intervention, as you've scrolled away and dismissed the video. However - you may not want that to happen whilst you're still in-thread with the video. If you're looking at comments on the video, you probably still want it to continue. But if you reach the bottom of the thread, you probably don't want to have it pause and have to find the start of the thread to continue playing it, just because you scrolled an inch too far.
  - Nimitz14 5y ago
    That's fair, as always context matters. But I feel it was implied the context of our discussion was infinite scroll pages like twitter (he specifically mentioned that), tiktok, instagram etc.
    - shakna 5y ago
      That's true - which is why I spent the majority of the comment speaking about a situation in an infinite scroll where you do not want the video to automatically pause.
- corobo 5y ago
  Why decide? Gimme a toggle in the settings to pause or throw it into the corner when I scroll past a video I've pressed play on Personally I prefer it to pause, but I don't really watch many videos on Twitter
- alpaca128 5y ago
  The only insane thing is to have an algorithm guess whether I want to watch the video or not, instead of just letting me decide with a single damn click. Autoplaying videos that stop playing after scrolling is one of the worst UX crimes in history of UX. At the same time in 2022 I still cannot prevent "autoplay" of animated gifs that bombard my senses in every feed unless I outright block literally everything other than text. And the sad thing is that software quality in general is most likely just as bad, only not as visible.
mr_mitm 5y ago
This is something I also noticed a lot and find it equally infuriating. I can only guess why things are like this: you and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood. You know what a server is, what HTML is, what a browser history is, how cookies work, etc. But some manager wants to tap into the huge market of technically illiterate people who don't even know what a browser is, for whom a smart phone is nothing less than black magic. The manager tells his devs to just "make it work" for the most challenged user, to abstract away all these nuances of how a browser works. They use test groups to find out how my grandma expects a website to work and they basically make a smart phone converge towards one of those gizmos you saw on Star Trek, and then you get something like the Twitter interface.
- danuker 5y ago
  > something like the Twitter interface. Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value. I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value. It doesn't work like that. Stratechery explains why. Aggregators aggregate users and even power users like to talk to/be listened to by a lot of people. So Twitter and Youtube and the like don't even need to target power users, in general. They need to target the greater population, and once that population is captive, if you want to have any kind of audience as a publisher, you're wrangled to where the users are, you're captive, too. Apple does the same thing with devs. They primarily target not super sophisticated middle to upper class users with decent disposable incomes. Since they "own" a huge amount of these users, developers have to build applications for them if they want to make money. And then developers are second class citizens on Apple platforms. Apple removes an API overnight? Better get cracking to fix your app ASAP. Apple doesn't support modern CI/CD platforms? Have Amazon stack up consumer desktops in a warehouse to kind of work around that.
Beltalowda 5y ago
> I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it. I thought I was the only one with this habit hah! IMHO this "close modal when clicking outside of it" is a UX pattern you need to be careful with in general, because it's easy to "miss" a click and accidentally close something, even without this habit. It's okay for some things that are truly temporary (i.e. delete confirmation dialogs and the like), but clearly not everything. But hey, old.reddit.com still works, and is mostly okay. > I don't click a cursed en.m.wikipedia link by accident I got this extension to automatically redirect them: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ – also useful for some other things like redirecting Reddit to old.reddit.com, and PostgreSQL documentation links to /current/ rather than /9.4/ and such which still frequently show up in search results.
- srik 5y ago
  I share your affinity to the older reddit ui but why bother using an addon for redirecting when you can opt out of the redesign in settings instead.
  - Beltalowda 5y ago
    This way I don't need to sign in or remember cookies.
  - SilasX 5y ago
    Because a) they randomly toggle your setting back, and don’t respect it at all on mobile, and b) features are slowly breaking on the old UI as well: gallery links not working, the “report” button taking seconds to load and then having a modal that breaks interoperability and hijacks Esc.
    - efreak 5y ago
      > hijacks Esc I hate squarespace with a passion for this. I'll be loading a forum or other page and hit esc to stop the page from loading. It works--but a few seconds later, it prompts me to log into the CMS/management. As far as modals go, I actively want modals to respond to esc. I don't want to have to reach for my mouse to close a pop-up. Modal popups are the only thing that should hijack esc.
corobo 5y ago
> On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it I'm not one of those people who paints but this has got me so many times. Honestly I'm not even one of the people that hates the redesign (Admittedly because I spend less time there now) but that has dinged me so many times. Why is everything a modal? The "This page looks better in the app" message on mobile is a well earned diss aimed at their web designers
firasd 5y ago
Yeah this happens to me on Reddit as well. Twitter used to be like this too where a tweet opened like a "lightbox" but a couple years ago they changed it so that clicking a tweet goes to a page with the individual tweet. Generally in UX I like to avoid this concept of dialog boxes, modals etc but everyone ends up re-learning that after naively implementing things in this "A screen pops up over another screen" manner
andrepd 5y ago
Re twitter and reddit and YouTube: old.reddit.com and nitter.eu and newpipe/invidious respectively. All these projects show we're patently far from the only ones who get driven up the fucking wall by absolutely brain-dead design being pushed over the user's wishes.
- demindiro 5y ago
  With LibRedirect[1] you automatically get redirected from twitter et al. to these instances. [1]: https://github.com/libredirect/LibRedirect https://github.com/libredirect/LibRedirect
blable2 5y ago
Explain "Paints" as this primate can't understand.
- stack_framer 5y ago
  Clicking text and moving the cursor for the sole purpose of highlighting that text.
- PopAlongKid 5y ago
  Selecting the text as if you were going to copy it
aeno 5y ago
completely off topic, but you're not Jan Marsalek[0] by any chance? the Wirecard criminal that is wanted by Interpol? :) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Marsalek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Marsalek
hutzlibu 5y ago
"Oh and once I tried to use Quora. It asked me to log in before I even knew what kind of a website it is. Now I hate Quora with a passion even though I'm not even sure what kind of a website it is exactly." Quora used to be good. A place where you can ask any question and if it was interesting enough, interesting people answer. Like a good question about wikipedia, made Jimmy Wales answer directly. But over time it all became very generic and force login to read anything, made me not visit at all anymore.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
maydup-nem 5y ago
quora used to ask for login only when you followed a link while already on quora (so opening from google search wouldn't prompt a login). you could just copypaste url and look at the thread. but not anymore, they closed this off since recently. fuck them, community-driven websites shouldn't become fenced off like that because some lizard brain correlated compulsory login with registration count. +1 on reddit "modal" bs, i don't paint, but simply like to click shit from time to time. it's horrible. +1 on rage quitting bullshit sites out of disgust.
- shakes_mcjunkie 5y ago
  The old Reddit design was just so much better. As a long time front end dev I know this can be an annoying take. But product teams push out so much redesigning that's just unnecessary and this happened with Reddit. The official app has less functionality and is less intuitive and the new website is a garbage fire of pushing you "related content". I guess I'm glad that kept old.reddit.com at least.
  - traviscj 5y ago
    The original seems to have been designed with different goals in mind. I have no doubt that the new ux better optimized their new goals, I just don’t agree that the new goals were as useful to me personally.
- exciteabletom 5y ago
  You can still work around the Quora BS by appending `?share=1` to the URL
  - maydup-nem 5y ago
    thanks, that's good to know
amelius 5y ago
It seems your monkey brain is not very happy.
Alex3917 5y ago
> On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it. The whole point of modals is to enable the user to close them by clicking outside of them. So this way if you want to show new users something like an onboarding tutorial, they can just click outside of the modal if they are like "WTF is this??", rather than needing to look for the close button. The fact that many people abuse them doesn't negate the fact that they are, if used correctly, actually a better experience for the user.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  The way Notion does this is annoying as hell. I am in a data entering view and there is no "submit" button??
- Arrath 5y ago
  That may be the point, but it sure is annoying behavior that I don't particularly want in this use case! I'll often click and close out of a thread just by trying to get focus back on the window so I can scroll down, and its annoying as all hell.
datavirtue 5y ago
It's why they want us back in the office. The executives do the same thing, so they know.
ar_lan 5y ago
> I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. My old mentor used to do this too, and I really never understood why. Since then, I have seen others do it too, occasionally. It looked more like a fidget than anything helpful. I once tried it just to see if this was some hidden technique I was missing out on, but I didn't notice anything particularly helpful - it didn't help me keep focused on the text or anything, and it distracted me personally. I'm very curious what the benefit is, or at least the reason? From an apparent lizard brain :)
- jabroni_salad 5y ago
  on wide pages it helps my eyes find the next line. It's not really something I do conciously though and I'm barely aware that I am doing it.
- solarmist 5y ago
  I do it when I'm reading something, but my attention isn't fully (or is difficult and requires back and forth with references) on it to mark either the paragraph I'm on or the sentence I just finished reading.

Nimitz14 5y ago

> Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? So you think the standard should be to keep a video playing even if one's scrolled past it? Are you insane?

phit_ 5y ago
not op, but yes when I actively unmuted it, it should keep playing
shakna 5y ago
There's a bit more subtlety and tradeoff here. For example, I doubt most people watching a video on YouTube would like the video to stop playing when they scroll down. If they wanted to pause it, they'd pause it. They also probably don't want the video to transition to the next, whilst they're reading threads. If you're in an infinite loop stream however, you do probably want it to pause or stop, without intervention, as you've scrolled away and dismissed the video. However - you may not want that to happen whilst you're still in-thread with the video. If you're looking at comments on the video, you probably still want it to continue. But if you reach the bottom of the thread, you probably don't want to have it pause and have to find the start of the thread to continue playing it, just because you scrolled an inch too far.
- Nimitz14 5y ago
  That's fair, as always context matters. But I feel it was implied the context of our discussion was infinite scroll pages like twitter (he specifically mentioned that), tiktok, instagram etc.
  - shakna 5y ago
    That's true - which is why I spent the majority of the comment speaking about a situation in an infinite scroll where you do not want the video to automatically pause.
corobo 5y ago
Why decide? Gimme a toggle in the settings to pause or throw it into the corner when I scroll past a video I've pressed play on Personally I prefer it to pause, but I don't really watch many videos on Twitter
alpaca128 5y ago
The only insane thing is to have an algorithm guess whether I want to watch the video or not, instead of just letting me decide with a single damn click. Autoplaying videos that stop playing after scrolling is one of the worst UX crimes in history of UX. At the same time in 2022 I still cannot prevent "autoplay" of animated gifs that bombard my senses in every feed unless I outright block literally everything other than text. And the sad thing is that software quality in general is most likely just as bad, only not as visible.

mr_mitm 5y ago

This is something I also noticed a lot and find it equally infuriating. I can only guess why things are like this: you and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood. You know what a server is, what HTML is, what a browser history is, how cookies work, etc. But some manager wants to tap into the huge market of technically illiterate people who don't even know what a browser is, for whom a smart phone is nothing less than black magic. The manager tells his devs to just "make it work" for the most challenged user, to abstract away all these nuances of how a browser works. They use test groups to find out how my grandma expects a website to work and they basically make a smart phone converge towards one of those gizmos you saw on Star Trek, and then you get something like the Twitter interface.

danuker 5y ago
> something like the Twitter interface. Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value. I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.
- oblio 5y ago
  > Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value. It doesn't work like that. Stratechery explains why. Aggregators aggregate users and even power users like to talk to/be listened to by a lot of people. So Twitter and Youtube and the like don't even need to target power users, in general. They need to target the greater population, and once that population is captive, if you want to have any kind of audience as a publisher, you're wrangled to where the users are, you're captive, too. Apple does the same thing with devs. They primarily target not super sophisticated middle to upper class users with decent disposable incomes. Since they "own" a huge amount of these users, developers have to build applications for them if they want to make money. And then developers are second class citizens on Apple platforms. Apple removes an API overnight? Better get cracking to fix your app ASAP. Apple doesn't support modern CI/CD platforms? Have Amazon stack up consumer desktops in a warehouse to kind of work around that.

Beltalowda 5y ago

> I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it. I thought I was the only one with this habit hah! IMHO this "close modal when clicking outside of it" is a UX pattern you need to be careful with in general, because it's easy to "miss" a click and accidentally close something, even without this habit. It's okay for some things that are truly temporary (i.e. delete confirmation dialogs and the like), but clearly not everything. But hey, old.reddit.com still works, and is mostly okay. > I don't click a cursed en.m.wikipedia link by accident I got this extension to automatically redirect them: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ – also useful for some other things like redirecting Reddit to old.reddit.com, and PostgreSQL documentation links to /current/ rather than /9.4/ and such which still frequently show up in search results.

srik 5y ago
I share your affinity to the older reddit ui but why bother using an addon for redirecting when you can opt out of the redesign in settings instead.
- Beltalowda 5y ago
  This way I don't need to sign in or remember cookies.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Because a) they randomly toggle your setting back, and don’t respect it at all on mobile, and b) features are slowly breaking on the old UI as well: gallery links not working, the “report” button taking seconds to load and then having a modal that breaks interoperability and hijacks Esc.
  - efreak 5y ago
    > hijacks Esc I hate squarespace with a passion for this. I'll be loading a forum or other page and hit esc to stop the page from loading. It works--but a few seconds later, it prompts me to log into the CMS/management. As far as modals go, I actively want modals to respond to esc. I don't want to have to reach for my mouse to close a pop-up. Modal popups are the only thing that should hijack esc.

corobo 5y ago

> On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it I'm not one of those people who paints but this has got me so many times. Honestly I'm not even one of the people that hates the redesign (Admittedly because I spend less time there now) but that has dinged me so many times. Why is everything a modal? The "This page looks better in the app" message on mobile is a well earned diss aimed at their web designers

firasd 5y ago

Yeah this happens to me on Reddit as well. Twitter used to be like this too where a tweet opened like a "lightbox" but a couple years ago they changed it so that clicking a tweet goes to a page with the individual tweet. Generally in UX I like to avoid this concept of dialog boxes, modals etc but everyone ends up re-learning that after naively implementing things in this "A screen pops up over another screen" manner

andrepd 5y ago

Re twitter and reddit and YouTube: old.reddit.com and nitter.eu and newpipe/invidious respectively. All these projects show we're patently far from the only ones who get driven up the fucking wall by absolutely brain-dead design being pushed over the user's wishes.

demindiro 5y ago
With LibRedirect[1] you automatically get redirected from twitter et al. to these instances. [1]: https://github.com/libredirect/LibRedirect https://github.com/libredirect/LibRedirect

blable2 5y ago

Explain "Paints" as this primate can't understand.

stack_framer 5y ago
Clicking text and moving the cursor for the sole purpose of highlighting that text.
PopAlongKid 5y ago
Selecting the text as if you were going to copy it

aeno 5y ago

completely off topic, but you're not Jan Marsalek[0] by any chance? the Wirecard criminal that is wanted by Interpol? :) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Marsalek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Marsalek

hutzlibu 5y ago

"Oh and once I tried to use Quora. It asked me to log in before I even knew what kind of a website it is. Now I hate Quora with a passion even though I'm not even sure what kind of a website it is exactly." Quora used to be good. A place where you can ask any question and if it was interesting enough, interesting people answer. Like a good question about wikipedia, made Jimmy Wales answer directly. But over time it all became very generic and force login to read anything, made me not visit at all anymore.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

maydup-nem 5y ago

quora used to ask for login only when you followed a link while already on quora (so opening from google search wouldn't prompt a login). you could just copypaste url and look at the thread. but not anymore, they closed this off since recently. fuck them, community-driven websites shouldn't become fenced off like that because some lizard brain correlated compulsory login with registration count. +1 on reddit "modal" bs, i don't paint, but simply like to click shit from time to time. it's horrible. +1 on rage quitting bullshit sites out of disgust.

shakes_mcjunkie 5y ago
The old Reddit design was just so much better. As a long time front end dev I know this can be an annoying take. But product teams push out so much redesigning that's just unnecessary and this happened with Reddit. The official app has less functionality and is less intuitive and the new website is a garbage fire of pushing you "related content". I guess I'm glad that kept old.reddit.com at least.
- traviscj 5y ago
  The original seems to have been designed with different goals in mind. I have no doubt that the new ux better optimized their new goals, I just don’t agree that the new goals were as useful to me personally.
exciteabletom 5y ago
You can still work around the Quora BS by appending `?share=1` to the URL
- maydup-nem 5y ago
  thanks, that's good to know

amelius 5y ago

It seems your monkey brain is not very happy.

Alex3917 5y ago

> On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it. The whole point of modals is to enable the user to close them by clicking outside of them. So this way if you want to show new users something like an onboarding tutorial, they can just click outside of the modal if they are like "WTF is this??", rather than needing to look for the close button. The fact that many people abuse them doesn't negate the fact that they are, if used correctly, actually a better experience for the user.

wintermutestwin 5y ago
The way Notion does this is annoying as hell. I am in a data entering view and there is no "submit" button??
Arrath 5y ago
That may be the point, but it sure is annoying behavior that I don't particularly want in this use case! I'll often click and close out of a thread just by trying to get focus back on the window so I can scroll down, and its annoying as all hell.

datavirtue 5y ago

It's why they want us back in the office. The executives do the same thing, so they know.

ar_lan 5y ago

> I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. My old mentor used to do this too, and I really never understood why. Since then, I have seen others do it too, occasionally. It looked more like a fidget than anything helpful. I once tried it just to see if this was some hidden technique I was missing out on, but I didn't notice anything particularly helpful - it didn't help me keep focused on the text or anything, and it distracted me personally. I'm very curious what the benefit is, or at least the reason? From an apparent lizard brain :)

jabroni_salad 5y ago
on wide pages it helps my eyes find the next line. It's not really something I do conciously though and I'm barely aware that I am doing it.
solarmist 5y ago
I do it when I'm reading something, but my attention isn't fully (or is difficult and requires back and forth with references) on it to mark either the paragraph I'm on or the sentence I just finished reading.