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"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them." - Brian Eno

snicky 4y ago
Are you saying loading spinners will be the signature of our time?
- alpark3 4y ago
  I'm sure loading spinners will be used to some aesthetic purpose in the future
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Waiting for the day in AR when you get loading spinners above people's head as they are trying to remember who you are and why they know you before giving up and just saying "Hey man! Good to see you again!"
- mywacaday 4y ago
  It might be a function of my age but I find the lottery app in Europes ability to scan the barcode so fast from the camera on my phone that I don't trust it. It's almost as if I don't trust things that happen too fast with my 20+ years experience with IT
  - ketzo 4y ago
    just this week, I put a minimum 200ms wait time on a loading spinner, because otherwise we thought it felt "buggy" because it was completing too quickly!
    - janc_ 4y ago
      The alternative is to show no spinner at all when something is that fast, of course...
      - ketzo 4y ago
        haha you're not wrong but it's an async process that could take longer, so then you get into "well if it's <200ms we won't show a spinner, but if it takes longer we will..." it's a settings page where you're clicking toggles, and each toggle saves automatically when you hit it. so when you click one, you get a short spinner, then a check mark when it succeeds. feels right to me when I'm using it
    - b112 4y ago
      Monsters!
      - ketzo 4y ago
        y'know, I felt like a monster doing it, but it weirdly is way more satisfying to use it goes from "wtf just flickered on my screen" to "wow, that loaded really fast!
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      There should be a short delay (200ms to 500ms) before showing a loading spinner, and if the operation completes in that time you can avoid showing it at all. But if it takes longer than that, the spinner should be shown for a minimum of 500ms or so, to avoid a sudden flash of the spinner. I wrote a React hook called usePending[1] for this once. It's surprisingly difficult to get right. [1] https://gist.github.com/cmmartti/4f7833292b9d277685fc08135326e8a3 https://gist.github.com/cmmartti/4f7833292b9d277685fc0813532...
- CharlesW 4y ago
  <blink>Maybe!</blink>
- rodgerd 4y ago
  Look at the people talking about how they're finding the weekly release schedule for HBO and AppleTV is a welcome relief from binging, which everyone loved when Netflix started doing it. But a weekly release schedule was largely an artefact of the limitations of broadcast TV.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    Isn't it also partly because a weekly release puts everyone watching the show on the same page? This fosters better discussion and group culture, and creates a shared sense of anticipation.
- farnsworth 4y ago
  People are nostalgic about bad 90s web design, but I don't think anybody is arguing that it's superior to anything newer. I can't imagine that people will look bad fondly on cookie banners, intrusive ads, janky page layout shifting, or anything else that I consider a hallmark of modern web design.
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    There will always be bad things people look back on and hate but that doesn't mean there won't also be bad things people look back on and get nostalgia for. Non-media query adapting layouts, janky scrolljacking pages, an over-abundance of CSS transition/animation effects come to mind. I'm sure there will be plenty to look back on. E.g. people don't look back at the 2000s web and only think pop up ads, flash vulnerabilities, and browser crashes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tombert 4y ago
I think this is broadly true, but not as true as the quote would imply. For example, people like 8-bit pixel art and chiptune music, but I don't think anyone misses the 10+ minute load times of the Commodore 64 (or even the 3 minute load times of the PS1). People like the goofy 90's internet with marquee and blink tags, but most people don't miss eight hundred popups happening with every website. People miss the pops and ticks and hiss of vinyl, but I don't think most people miss how expensive and risky music was pre-Spotify[1] (Youtube Music, Apple Music, etc). I think this quote is being a bit selective with what they're choosing to remember. Yes, there are certain idiosyncrasies and limitations that people grow fond of, but I think there are just as many things that get supplanted and that rightfully get left in the history books. [1] There were multiple times where I would end up paying upwards of $20 for an album because I liked a single on the radio, only to find that the rest of the album is completely awful. Piracy was honestly made this experience measurably better, and Spotify and its ilk basically made something superior to piracy, completely supplanting it for me.

snicky 4y ago

Are you saying loading spinners will be the signature of our time?

alpark3 4y ago
I'm sure loading spinners will be used to some aesthetic purpose in the future
- dylan604 4y ago
  Waiting for the day in AR when you get loading spinners above people's head as they are trying to remember who you are and why they know you before giving up and just saying "Hey man! Good to see you again!"
mywacaday 4y ago
It might be a function of my age but I find the lottery app in Europes ability to scan the barcode so fast from the camera on my phone that I don't trust it. It's almost as if I don't trust things that happen too fast with my 20+ years experience with IT
- ketzo 4y ago
  just this week, I put a minimum 200ms wait time on a loading spinner, because otherwise we thought it felt "buggy" because it was completing too quickly!
  - janc_ 4y ago
    The alternative is to show no spinner at all when something is that fast, of course...
    - ketzo 4y ago
      haha you're not wrong but it's an async process that could take longer, so then you get into "well if it's <200ms we won't show a spinner, but if it takes longer we will..." it's a settings page where you're clicking toggles, and each toggle saves automatically when you hit it. so when you click one, you get a short spinner, then a check mark when it succeeds. feels right to me when I'm using it
  - b112 4y ago
    Monsters!
    - ketzo 4y ago
      y'know, I felt like a monster doing it, but it weirdly is way more satisfying to use it goes from "wtf just flickered on my screen" to "wow, that loaded really fast!
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    There should be a short delay (200ms to 500ms) before showing a loading spinner, and if the operation completes in that time you can avoid showing it at all. But if it takes longer than that, the spinner should be shown for a minimum of 500ms or so, to avoid a sudden flash of the spinner. I wrote a React hook called usePending[1] for this once. It's surprisingly difficult to get right. [1] https://gist.github.com/cmmartti/4f7833292b9d277685fc08135326e8a3 https://gist.github.com/cmmartti/4f7833292b9d277685fc0813532...
CharlesW 4y ago
<blink>Maybe!</blink>
rodgerd 4y ago
Look at the people talking about how they're finding the weekly release schedule for HBO and AppleTV is a welcome relief from binging, which everyone loved when Netflix started doing it. But a weekly release schedule was largely an artefact of the limitations of broadcast TV.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  Isn't it also partly because a weekly release puts everyone watching the show on the same page? This fosters better discussion and group culture, and creates a shared sense of anticipation.
farnsworth 4y ago
People are nostalgic about bad 90s web design, but I don't think anybody is arguing that it's superior to anything newer. I can't imagine that people will look bad fondly on cookie banners, intrusive ads, janky page layout shifting, or anything else that I consider a hallmark of modern web design.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  There will always be bad things people look back on and hate but that doesn't mean there won't also be bad things people look back on and get nostalgia for. Non-media query adapting layouts, janky scrolljacking pages, an over-abundance of CSS transition/animation effects come to mind. I'm sure there will be plenty to look back on. E.g. people don't look back at the 2000s web and only think pop up ads, flash vulnerabilities, and browser crashes.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tombert 4y ago

I think this is broadly true, but not as true as the quote would imply. For example, people like 8-bit pixel art and chiptune music, but I don't think anyone misses the 10+ minute load times of the Commodore 64 (or even the 3 minute load times of the PS1). People like the goofy 90's internet with marquee and blink tags, but most people don't miss eight hundred popups happening with every website. People miss the pops and ticks and hiss of vinyl, but I don't think most people miss how expensive and risky music was pre-Spotify[1] (Youtube Music, Apple Music, etc). I think this quote is being a bit selective with what they're choosing to remember. Yes, there are certain idiosyncrasies and limitations that people grow fond of, but I think there are just as many things that get supplanted and that rightfully get left in the history books. [1] There were multiple times where I would end up paying upwards of $20 for an album because I liked a single on the radio, only to find that the rest of the album is completely awful. Piracy was honestly made this experience measurably better, and Spotify and its ilk basically made something superior to piracy, completely supplanting it for me.