10 ms·

Flashing elements alienate users

230 points by feross 3y ago

WirelessGigabit 3y ago
And as I scroll down and read the article you present me with a popup to subscribe, alienating and enraging me.
- laserbeam 3y ago
  To be fair, that's just substack, it's not the author's fault.
  - scblock 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - riwsky 3y ago
      Requires to? No. Pays “very large, much larger than I would have thought possible”[1] amounts of money to? Yes. Power to the guy, though. He’s earned it. [1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-to-the-discussion https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-t...
    - PontifexMinimus 3y ago
      Substack is less garbage than Wordpress (which I stopped using a few years ago when they brought in their new editor).
    - perch56 3y ago
      Out of the endless streams of garbage on the interwebz, Substack is the last place I’d call out.
      - Semaphor 3y ago
        EH, regarding blogging platforms, it’s better than Medium obviously, but it’s still way worse than Wordpress.
    - labster 3y ago
      Yeah. Scott writes well enough he should be working for the New York Times.
      - johnfn 3y ago
        The irony of saying this when Scott got into a multi-year long debacle because the NYT threatened (and then eventually did) dox him.
  - hsn915 3y ago
    Substack let's you turn that off (as the author).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - gwillen 3y ago
      According to the comments, the author has only just today learned that Substack added this new popup without asking him, after he got them to disable the previous popup. So hopefully you're right that it's possible for him to turn off.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        Link to that thread since it is pretty far down: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-flashing-element-on-your-site/comment/17841101 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-flashing-element...
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  But they disclaim that :-) > Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine.
- tkems 3y ago
  Agreed. I have never and will never enter my email into one of those popups. Just let me read the content in peace! I also hate that there isn't an X. While I now know that I can just click outside the box, my first time I had to read the entire box to figure out to click the "Continue Reading" link. Enraging to say the least.
  - thesuitonym 3y ago
    Apparently they get a 10% conversion rate, which marketers think is worth being the worst people in the world.
    - Grothendank 3y ago
      A 10% conversion rate would be incredible. If that were the case, it would be hard to be angry at people for exploiting this factor. However, I would be very surprised if the conversion rate of a popup signup sheet is even 2%. And there is a similar negative conversion effect: If any article asks me to sign up for anything, I stop reading that article immediately, and move on to an article that respects my attention. Yes, I am in a small minority. But I also share many links with my peeps, and I never share links with popups. I hope that puts pressure on authors to share things freely.
  - gxnxcxcx 3y ago
    > I also hate that there isn't an X. I have a keyboard shortcut assigned to uBlock Origin's element zapper and now everything has an X. No permanent rules made, and when overdone just reload page to try again.
- johnfn 3y ago
  ...which you can trivially dismiss with a single click. And critically, when you do this, it doesn't come back - that's the difference between the substack modal and what the author is talking about.
  - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
    It comes back on every substack that I read. If I find it interesting I will subscribe to it via RSS. They don't need to have my email address which initially they'll only use for this stubstack, and then for recommendations, and later on they'll sell it to the highest bidder.
- MBCook 3y ago
  My latest MASSIVE pet peeve is headers and footers that appear or disappear as I scroll on my phone. So when I go to scroll up, all of a sudden the header appears and moves everything I was looking at so I lose my position. Then when I go to scroll down they all disappear and everything moves yet again.
  - eviks 3y ago
    Yeah, those are awful. Can't wait for mobile browsers to finally get ublock origin extension so you could delete those elements Though that'd still be tedious :(
    - cwillu 3y ago
      Firefox on mobile has ublock origin, and yes, it is quite tedious given how the UI ends up working on mobile.
    - Larrikin 3y ago
      Firefox on Android has had this for years. Personally I prefer AdNauseam so I can be combative instead of passively blocking.
    - Grothendank 3y ago
      You might enjoy this benchmark: https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/zebad6/a_few_android_w_ad_block_browser_benchmarks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/zebad6/a_few_andr... Some highlights: - Vivaldi is suprisingly fast and has good ad blocking - Kiwi plus the Ublock Origin extension (UBO) might be /even faster/ - Firefox also allows UBO, but sadly it is relatively slow
    - MBCook 3y ago
      Well the other option appears to be having them always visible so my 6.1” phone feels like the original 3.5” iPhone with the keyboard up. As we all know, it is completely impossible to have the header and footer just scroll with the content the way it used to in the 90s.
  - gumby 3y ago
- amatecha 3y ago
  Right, I'd love to read the post but some BS I didn't read popped up and covered the entire page with some ~80%-opacity overlay and I closed the page. It's 2023, I don't look at sites that do this shit anymore. (before you say "lol I guess you don't browse the web", you're right. I look at Mastodon, my email, a couple forums and HN/Lobsters. the web is ruined.)
- lapcat 3y ago
  Disabling JavaScript on substack.com solves that problem. Also use some CSS to hide #nojs-banner
  - zajio1am 3y ago
    But that also disables comments there.
- seydor 3y ago
  I am lucky enough to get another one for cookies
- retrac98 3y ago
  Came here looking for this comment.
- ben0x539 3y ago
  Yeah so you put in the address of the author or site owner or something, standard procedure.
- Yvain 3y ago
  I'm the author of the article. This was added by Substack without my knowledge (it doesn't show up to me since I'm already subscribed) and I think I've disabled it now. Please check to confirm that it is disabled.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Thanks for looking in to this. This is not disabled. I loaded the page a few minutes ago and it gave me the fullscreen popover. It appears about halfway down the page. I just re-loaded to check and there was no popover. When I load the page in a private browser session I still get the popover. So there appears to be a cookie that remembers the dismissal. e: I cleared the substack cookies and my main browser session still doesn't get the popover but private sessions do.
nnf 3y ago
I can’t use a website with flashing anything, and especially so when I’m writing. Then I realized the CMS I make was doing this with a “saving draft / draft saved” notice above the content area and couldn’t believe I’d done this very thing without realizing how annoying it was. I still wanted to display the info, so I tried a few different techniques and ended up settling on a slow (~2-second) fade in and fade out. The result, at least for me and the people I’ve asked to try it out, is that goes completely unnoticed unless you’re looking for it, which is what I wanted initially but hadn’t taken the time to try it myself beyond ensuring the notice appeared and disappeared at the appropriate times.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  How about permanent text with "last saved: " and the time saving completed. Updated text is usually less jarring.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- strogonoff 3y ago
  Design is about communication. Watch out for cases where what you want to communicate as a designer is not the same as what you should communicate. I believe almost every “Saving…” indicator is an instance of that discrepancy. They were appropriate back when on-the-fly saving was a fresh UX revolution, but today they’re nothing but self serving: us weathered designers, who grew up when the floppy disk icon actually represented the real thing, bragging about how cool our app is—it saves your draft on the fly! No need to press buttons, can you imagine? Nowadays, as devices are constantly connected, latency is low, and constant saving has become the dominant and intuitive behavior, what the user needs to know is not that stuff’s constantly being saved; what the user needs to know is the extraordinary situation where you fail to save it. This, if I may be so bold, is what you should be communicating—and if you ask me how, I might suggest a single, completely unchanging line of text informing the user that their draft is being constantly saved (though ask yourself if even that is required; it might not be if you are dealing with digital natives) and an obvious, flow-interrupting error state when that doesn’t work as intended.
quickthrower2 3y ago
I guess the website in question is a Wordpress theme and the admin kept the default theme options but replaced the slider pics.
sneak 3y ago
uBlock Origin has a "block element" item on the context menu that allows you to excise any element on a page. I use it all the time on things I find undesirable.
wyager 3y ago
For corporate products, it's easy to see why this would happen so often; there are a hundred tacky people with no sense of taste for every one person with a strongly developed sense of taste. The people with taste have finite political capital in their organization, and they aren't going to spend it all fighting the constant stream of tacky crap. The only way around this is to find a tasteful design czar and invest them with a huge amount of political capital. Steve Jobs held this role when he was alive. It's rare, unfortunately, that arrangements like this emerge.
- pomian 3y ago
  I agree. But I think we have attribute a lot of that design simplification to Jony Ive.
nl 3y ago
More than half (55%) of the people surveyed don't notice them or find them only a little annoying.
- userbinator 3y ago
  That's because they've been desensitized to it. Unfortunately, those people are also likely to be the ones who can barely read actual text anymore, precisely because being exposed to obnoxious UI has also caused them to pay less attention overall.
- Grothendank 3y ago
  If 30% of your users hate the interface so much that they immediately leave your service, then sure, you can say "70% of our users have no problem with our strobing call to action". But that does not stop the problem - 30% of your potential revenue base is walking away, when you could retain them.
- someweirdperson 3y ago
  People who love flashing websites could not even participate. It looks like all the possible answers were for different levels of being annoyed. I doubt there are many, but the result is probably skewed.
  - plewd 3y ago
    There's bias in pretty much every poll result, but I doubt the reason you provided has much of an effect. People who truly "love" flashing elements (I don't believe they exist) will just choose "I barely notice these", and it wouldn't affect the conclusion.
- lozenge 3y ago
  This is the tyranny of the majority.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    It's not even that. This is justifying self-serving annoyances by saying they're under the threshold of anger for >50% of the users.
jacobsenscott 3y ago
Not just websites - the whole desktop is infected - bouncing dock icons, slack notifications, etc. You need to opt out of all of it to get a sane place to work. Also, like most other people who will be commenting here, I'll suggest using ublock origin and not adblock.
- nullc 3y ago
  I've really been disappointed with gnome on this, not only is it full of difficult to disable annoying notifications, they appear on top of and cover part of the screen. Yet at the same time it has little to no affordance for unobtrusive non-disruptive ones like a mail or chat tray icon that changes color when you have unread messages. A lot has been said about enshittification, but free software desktop environments shouldn't have any profit motive to abuse their users in this way. I've wondered if it's a case of second-hand enshitiffication: commercial products like windows adopt abusive patterns because the user is the product, then free software cargo cults it because they think if the big players do it that it must have value/been user tested/etc.
  - jackson1442 3y ago
    I think you’re right on the money- gnome is trying to make the desktop environment more familiar to new users so they’re implementing poor design choices that Microsoft, Apple, et al. have made.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Recently, you also have free software LARPing big companies by adding telemetry to FLOSS, because asking users for feedback (or reading the damn issue tracker) isn't professional enough anymore - everyone in the big leagues is Data Driven™. Er, did I say issue tracker? That's quickly becoming a thing of the past - the newest trend seems to be, "we can't help you here, join our community Discord instead".
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      This really does make me worry about FLOSS applications. I am afraid I'll have to start treating it all with the default level of suspicion that Windows and Android apps get.
laserbeam 3y ago
The "draft saved" complaint sounds very weird to me, especially as I once had to implement a similar feature in an editor. When editing, one needs to convey to users when it's safe to close the app without a risk of data loss. You might want to tell users that connectivity is down and stuff can't sync right now, but "draft saved" also confers some psychological safety that everything is OK. That I don't need to wonder about the state of my editing. I can safely leave and return. There are ways to make that flash more or less. There are even basic ways regular editors do this by visually including a star at the end of a filename. But it will still need to display somehow if it's an environment where you're not hitting ctrl+s manually. Not having some indication is worse than it flashing. If someone asked me that flashing question, I would also say they are annoying and would probably stop using the site, HOWEVER, I would not have considered this, or other similar status indicators related to my work, that toggle automatically to be part of the problem.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  Arguably you could hide the info under a button or an actionable item. If the main use case is informing whether the page/app can be closed, letting the user check before closing would do the trick (and potentially force save at that timing if sync was pending).
  - deelly 3y ago
    For example, you can show this info when user move cursor to close button.
- jbay808 3y ago
  As a Substack writer, I find it very distracting. Part of the reason is that when my eyes are looking at the body text, the motion happens in my upper peripheral vision. That's also where tab heading notifications are (eg. an incoming Google Hangouts message). So as I write I keep subconsciously looking up to see what's happened, only to find it's just another "draft saved".
- ben0x539 3y ago
  > Not having some indication is worse than it flashing. I figure it's more that there's no one-size-fits-all thing. "Normally", that isn't a problem, because you just switch to another program that suits your preferences/takes good care of your brainworms. It just becomes frustrating when companies tie their services to uncustomizable programs (like for instance a website) narrowly designed for their archetypical user persona. ... but beyond that there has to be a better way to do this?? Surely this particular thing has been designed to death a million times. I think with Google Docs, I get to assume everything is saved all the time, so this is the default state that doesn't need to take up space on the screen. In the risky situation where I alt-f4 before the save call returned success or whatever, I get the javascript popup telling me stuff wasn't saved and I can cancel and wait a few seconds. In the other risky situation where the save call just keeps failing for a prolonged amount of time (because my wifi died, usually), I think it says that somewhere in the UI, and it seems like a good enough justification to grab attention to me.
seydor 3y ago
Did youtube.com recently add a blurry background behind the video, or is my screen broken?
- mulmen 3y ago
  I have noticed a lot of subtle UI changes recently. Youtube and Steam specifically. I assume this is because it is the end of a quarter and teams have to ship something for promos. In a couple weeks the experiments will be over and we can go back to a few months of stability until Q3. But watch out, this is intern season, so the stuff you see in September is going to be really wild.
  - seydor 3y ago
    Cant you guys do your promotions in another way? Like, running a marathon or a poker game or something. It's annoying
    - mulmen 3y ago
      I don't make the rules but it is my turn to deal.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    My wife to me, last night: "Why the hell did they just change Google on computers look like the phone version?". I was confused for a minute, until she pointed her finger at relevant part of the screen - indeed, the "images / videos / news / ..." selectors are now styled as rounded buttons. I rarely use Google search these days, so I didn't notice, but the question is justified - what's the point? It's just more visual noise, and likely more bloat to generate it.
- jackson1442 3y ago
  Yes, this is called “ambient mode” and can be disabled in settings.
  - seydor 3y ago
addled 3y ago
My company's employee portal currently sports not only two carousels (on different timings, of course), but also a huge banner with a countdown clock. That's just above the fold. There's a 3rd carousel if you scroll down.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dehrmann 3y ago
But so many fond memories. https://web.archive.org/web/20220405120606/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/blink https://web.archive.org/web/20220405120606/https://developer...
- chrisbolt 3y ago
  Example: <blink>Why would somebody use this?</blink>
Sai_ 3y ago
Both Reddit and Twitter show a fake notification indicating some activity directed at you like an @mention or a reply but are actually just a trick to get you to open the notifications tab/popover. Stopped using Twitter and reddit the second I realised this. Infuriating subterfuge just to put some inflated engagement metric in their decks.
- dash2 3y ago
  Twitter's infuriating thing is that it flashes up "7 notifications" when you first load the page, then hides it for a few minutes, then shows it again. This is so tricksy. I assume they are trying to reward you for staying on the site.
  - Sai_ 3y ago
    I can’t imagine this sort of trickery is going to help them in the long run - they are training their users to mistrust and eventually ignore them. It’s like a furniture shop advertising a “going out of business” sale or a shepherd boy crying wolf twice. People wise up to this and become more open to alternatives. Surely, even VCs and investors know not to take DAUs and MAUs and click rates at face value. Who are these companies trying to con?
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > Who are these companies trying to con? The stock market. VCs are looking at these metrics not just as indicators of company's health and growth trajectory, but also, at the later stage, as indicators of the company's ability to generate returns - which often involve the company being acquired or going public.
    - verve_rat 3y ago
      Is is never about the company as a whole, it is the incentives of the middle manager that is rewarded for "increasing engagement" or some other bullshit metric.
- deelly 3y ago
DharmaPolice 3y ago
I think this is a sub-category of a wider problem which permeates web/software/app design and that's hubris. Most sites/programs/apps are designed with the assumption that they're way more important than they really are. It's like the little kid who demands their parents immediate attention/action over the slightest thing which they consider hugely important. And while it's understandable (maybe even endearing) with a small child it's just annoying when it's a web site/piece of software made (presumably) by intelligent adults. Obviously there are exceptions but start by assuming I don't want you to change my default programs/subscribe to your newsletter/have your program or website pop-up or play sounds without asking/take a tour of your new features/flash text on my screen/create multiple non-hidden folders in the root of my home folder/install multiple services that need to be running constantly/receive marketing push notifications or texts/watch unskippable cut-scenes in games etc...
- andsoitis 3y ago
  Everyone seeks attention... in some form. That's ultimately the point of communication. It is to change the views of others, or to challenge, or to ask for answers. Communication is a means of influence. I don't think it is hubris. It isn't that they assume greater importance. To assume means to have considered. Instead, I think they either don't think so consciously OR they exert actions that are meant to derive more power/status/etc.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Communication is a means of influence. But not only that. Or even mostly that. In my experience, it's primarily a means of cooperation. Except when it comes to commerce, but most modern commerce is inherently manipulative in nature.
- ben0x539 3y ago
  I fear the wider, wider problem is that hubris pays off, it's not economically optimal for most sites to show this humility you'd like to see. Someone decided it's worth it to annoy us grumpy nerds in order to sell fractionally more stuff to the statistically average user. I don't think apps/sites are getting worse about this, it's that they're getting better at optimizing for users who aren't me. It's probably just deeply frustrating/alienating to have to use products that you're not the target audience for (and that's increasingly almost all products). (To be clear this isn't meant as derision of the 'statistically average user', it's perfectly justified that not everything is built to suit me, the protagonist of reality.)
VikingCoder 3y ago
No, not every flashing element on every site alienates and enrages users. This is a site: https://poncle.itch.io/vampire-survivors https://poncle.itch.io/vampire-survivors It has about as many flashing elements as possible, and it endears users.
- ben0x539 3y ago
  It doesn't have any flashing elements until you click the thing, that's probably what counts.
- waqf 3y ago
  > it endears users This time I am speaking solely for myself, but your grammar alienates and enrages me.
  - VikingCoder 3y ago
    yeah, I shared that thought way too late in my day, lol
bullfightonmars 3y ago
This was the tipping point for me with the reddit app that caused me to move to Apollo. The Reddit app had been trending down in reading quality for years. I was already annoyed with all the awards cluttering up comments, but then they added flashing elements to comments and I noped out to Apollo. If Apollo really goes away I don’t think I will come back, after 15 years of reading reddit, I have pretty much stopped reading it at all over the past few weeks.
- jackson1442 3y ago
  Same here. I actually somewhat liked seeing awards in Apollo before they added more beyond silver/gold/platinum. But even the badges got to be too bothersome. Now I open the official app and see animations and red backgrounds and “that’s hot” all over the comments. Who asked for this?
mediumsmart 3y ago
It’s really winwin all the way. The dev can show the flashy they made, the ublock keeps the site visitor numbers unaffected enabling moneys for further flashy, the authors can write about it and we get to comment on the issue. Next.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Also the devs of the library the dev uses get more Github stars and attract more attention, and it becomes more likely such libraries get used in future projects, leading to increased codebase complexity, leading to better pay and greater demand for software developers. Wins all the way!
gumby 3y ago
Gifs in text posts are also dreadful and I’ve never seen them add to a post.
userbinator 3y ago
Proxomitron, the original web filtering proxy from 2 decades ago, already had a "Freeze GIF animation" filter, along with "Blink to Bold" and "Flash animation killer", among others. It was clear back then that a lot of users already hated this stuff. Now we have even more annoying CSS and JS animations which are a lot more difficult to block effectively. On the other hand, I find HDD activity lights and a status monitor displayed in the corner of the screen to not be distracting, so I think context has a lot to do with it --- something that is trying to get your attention unnecessarily, vs. something that is changing but not hard to ignore.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > Proxomitron Oh man, that's quite a nostalgia-trip right there. Setting up custom rules/transformation was probably one of the main things that steered me into a software-development career, along with client-side scripts for Starseige:Tribes. Apart from advertisement/privacy stuff, I remember using it to customize and streamline the appearance of web-forums I often visited. (e.g. TribalWar and AntiOnline.)
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > something that is trying to get your attention unnecessarily, vs. something that is changing but not hard to ignore. Also, signal vs. noise. The physical blinkenlights on your computer and the status monitors correlate to a signal that is occasionally useful, rarely if never of negative utility, and is simple enough to eventually be processed "in the background". At worst, your brain just filters it out; at best, you gain a subconscious awareness / "feel" for the state of your machine (though I found this used to work much better with the noise made by HDDs, and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load). Also, predictability. Aforementioned indicators have very little variability. It's just a time series signal. You quickly learn that it will just keep flashing or scrolling continuously - it won't suddenly start changing colors or shapes, nor will it render words you have to read. This, I believe, is also critical for the ability to offload paying attention to such indicators to your unconscious. In contrast, most of those web flashing annoyances are to a large or small degree unpredictable - they vary from site to site, they vary within a site, and you rarely spend enough time with them to learn to trust they won't surprise you.
smcameron 3y ago
The one exception I can think of is a single blinking underscore to represent a cursor. There is one on the top of this page: https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/ https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/ Modern browsers don't render it though.
smcameron 3y ago
The one exception I can think of is a single blinking underscore to represent a cursor. There's one at the top of this page: https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/ https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/ in the little "vi" window thing. Modern browsers don't honor the blink tag though.
- bandrami 3y ago
  I've seen a site that successfully used a blinking red "WARNING" div above a section telling you how to do something that could brick your router if you did it wrong.
readyplayernull 3y ago
Being similar to z-fighting, this should be called attention-fighting: two or more elements need our attention while occupying the same space. That said, I remember about flashing character codes in old computers, invented before bold/underline text. Also the Internet of the 90s abused of blinking gif images.
Lammy 3y ago
> There’s no easy way to block the element with AdBlock without also removing important functional elements of the editor. uBlock Origin can do this, either by removing an annoying class from an element or by modifying an element's style directly: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#subjectstylearg https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#... https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#subjectremove-attrarg-subjectremove-classarg https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#... Here are a couple of my personal custom rules as example: watchpeopledie.tv##div.tilt-1:style(animation: none !important;) homestuck.com##p.o_chat-log:remove-class(disp-n) homestuck.com##div.o_chat-container:remove-class(active)
tiku 3y ago
The cookie popup enrages me.
- nicbou 3y ago
  And the newsletter one
LinAGKar 3y ago
Reminds me of my gym's site (https://www.stc.se/ https://www.stc.se/), where the centerpiece is occupied by a useless looping montage, while the main function of the site (the booking system) is pushed into a hidden-by-default sidebar. I've had to block the video with uBlock to be able to use the site, since it's so distracting.
lozenge 3y ago
There is a way to stop this, in theory. The prefers-reduced-motion CSS query. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
RobotToaster 3y ago
It's enraging that everyone decided popups were so annoying that most browsers shipped with blockers for them, but now we get dozens of java script popups instead.
matricaria 3y ago
I still wonder if flashing elements and the constant nudging is worth it. I sometimes think I'm the only one but apparently there are about 15 % that are heavily annoyed by this. And those are users that you either lose completely or that block every unnecessary item on your website with ad blockers or reader mode. I can't stand using Reddit on a mobile browser constantly asking if I want to install their app. Fortunately, there are alternative frontends such as Libreddit or teddit [2]. I hope they survive the API war. [1] https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit [2] https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit
creata 3y ago
I'm not at all an expert on survey design, but "How much do flashing or changing elements distract from your enjoyment of websites?" doesn't feel like an unbiased question.
wodow 3y ago
I don't think I'm alone in considering blinking keyboard cursor/carets as the original sin of this. Here's an long-running collection of how to disable flashing cursors everywhere, from vi to Vscode: https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink > Software development is not an easy task, and often after a painful process of writing a program developers feel they should share their pains with users, so they put a part of own sufferings onto the shoulders of users in a method similar to the Chinese water torture - blinking cursors.
- IanCal 3y ago
  Cursors are fine to me, and frankly important. Flashing is "LOOK HERE IT'S IMPORTANT YOU KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING HERE" and what happens when I press almost any button is a solid reason for grabbing my attention. I shouldn't have to search in a big pile of thin lines to see the specifically slightly differently shaped thin line to know what's going to happen when I type - let my visual system use the optimised "MOVING" alarms to let me know. Making me hunt or test where my cursor is by making a change is far worse to me. Interesting to know that some people find it hard. Does the default behaviour I see while typing (no blinking unless you pause) help?
yxre 3y ago
One thing that annoys me and I was hoping to find in the article is layout shifts as you are trying to read the page. You see it a lot on low-quality news sites where you start reading then an ad appears pushing content down the page forcing you to re-adjust. Its such a bad pattern, and it's so common on poorly coded sites.
zajio1am 3y ago
I wonder why browser developers are compliant with this. Everyone accepted that <marquee> or <blink> was horrible, but this knowledge does not stop them to add support for animated GIFs, CSS animations, video autoplay, and if a user disables all of this and installs NoScript to block JS-based animations, there is always some new surprising way to annoy users, like SVG animations.
jamesfisher 3y ago
Similarly awful: those Giphy gifs that "writers" add to their business reports, content marketing etc. Never funny, always distracting. Try making your writing entertaining instead.

230 points by feross 3y ago

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

And as I scroll down and read the article you present me with a popup to subscribe, alienating and enraging me.

laserbeam 3y ago
To be fair, that's just substack, it's not the author's fault.
- scblock 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - riwsky 3y ago
    Requires to? No. Pays “very large, much larger than I would have thought possible”[1] amounts of money to? Yes. Power to the guy, though. He’s earned it. [1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-to-the-discussion https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-t...
  - PontifexMinimus 3y ago
    Substack is less garbage than Wordpress (which I stopped using a few years ago when they brought in their new editor).
  - perch56 3y ago
    Out of the endless streams of garbage on the interwebz, Substack is the last place I’d call out.
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      EH, regarding blogging platforms, it’s better than Medium obviously, but it’s still way worse than Wordpress.
  - labster 3y ago
    Yeah. Scott writes well enough he should be working for the New York Times.
    - johnfn 3y ago
      The irony of saying this when Scott got into a multi-year long debacle because the NYT threatened (and then eventually did) dox him.
- hsn915 3y ago
  Substack let's you turn that off (as the author).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - gwillen 3y ago
    According to the comments, the author has only just today learned that Substack added this new popup without asking him, after he got them to disable the previous popup. So hopefully you're right that it's possible for him to turn off.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      Link to that thread since it is pretty far down: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-flashing-element-on-your-site/comment/17841101 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-flashing-element...
quickthrower2 3y ago
But they disclaim that :-) > Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine.
tkems 3y ago
Agreed. I have never and will never enter my email into one of those popups. Just let me read the content in peace! I also hate that there isn't an X. While I now know that I can just click outside the box, my first time I had to read the entire box to figure out to click the "Continue Reading" link. Enraging to say the least.
- thesuitonym 3y ago
  Apparently they get a 10% conversion rate, which marketers think is worth being the worst people in the world.
  - Grothendank 3y ago
    A 10% conversion rate would be incredible. If that were the case, it would be hard to be angry at people for exploiting this factor. However, I would be very surprised if the conversion rate of a popup signup sheet is even 2%. And there is a similar negative conversion effect: If any article asks me to sign up for anything, I stop reading that article immediately, and move on to an article that respects my attention. Yes, I am in a small minority. But I also share many links with my peeps, and I never share links with popups. I hope that puts pressure on authors to share things freely.
- gxnxcxcx 3y ago
  > I also hate that there isn't an X. I have a keyboard shortcut assigned to uBlock Origin's element zapper and now everything has an X. No permanent rules made, and when overdone just reload page to try again.
johnfn 3y ago
...which you can trivially dismiss with a single click. And critically, when you do this, it doesn't come back - that's the difference between the substack modal and what the author is talking about.
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  It comes back on every substack that I read. If I find it interesting I will subscribe to it via RSS. They don't need to have my email address which initially they'll only use for this stubstack, and then for recommendations, and later on they'll sell it to the highest bidder.
MBCook 3y ago
My latest MASSIVE pet peeve is headers and footers that appear or disappear as I scroll on my phone. So when I go to scroll up, all of a sudden the header appears and moves everything I was looking at so I lose my position. Then when I go to scroll down they all disappear and everything moves yet again.
- eviks 3y ago
  Yeah, those are awful. Can't wait for mobile browsers to finally get ublock origin extension so you could delete those elements Though that'd still be tedious :(
  - cwillu 3y ago
    Firefox on mobile has ublock origin, and yes, it is quite tedious given how the UI ends up working on mobile.
  - Larrikin 3y ago
    Firefox on Android has had this for years. Personally I prefer AdNauseam so I can be combative instead of passively blocking.
  - Grothendank 3y ago
    You might enjoy this benchmark: https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/zebad6/a_few_android_w_ad_block_browser_benchmarks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/zebad6/a_few_andr... Some highlights: - Vivaldi is suprisingly fast and has good ad blocking - Kiwi plus the Ublock Origin extension (UBO) might be /even faster/ - Firefox also allows UBO, but sadly it is relatively slow
  - MBCook 3y ago
    Well the other option appears to be having them always visible so my 6.1” phone feels like the original 3.5” iPhone with the keyboard up. As we all know, it is completely impossible to have the header and footer just scroll with the content the way it used to in the 90s.
- gumby 3y ago
amatecha 3y ago
Right, I'd love to read the post but some BS I didn't read popped up and covered the entire page with some ~80%-opacity overlay and I closed the page. It's 2023, I don't look at sites that do this shit anymore. (before you say "lol I guess you don't browse the web", you're right. I look at Mastodon, my email, a couple forums and HN/Lobsters. the web is ruined.)
lapcat 3y ago
Disabling JavaScript on substack.com solves that problem. Also use some CSS to hide #nojs-banner
- zajio1am 3y ago
  But that also disables comments there.
seydor 3y ago
I am lucky enough to get another one for cookies
retrac98 3y ago
Came here looking for this comment.
ben0x539 3y ago
Yeah so you put in the address of the author or site owner or something, standard procedure.
Yvain 3y ago
I'm the author of the article. This was added by Substack without my knowledge (it doesn't show up to me since I'm already subscribed) and I think I've disabled it now. Please check to confirm that it is disabled.
- mulmen 3y ago
  Thanks for looking in to this. This is not disabled. I loaded the page a few minutes ago and it gave me the fullscreen popover. It appears about halfway down the page. I just re-loaded to check and there was no popover. When I load the page in a private browser session I still get the popover. So there appears to be a cookie that remembers the dismissal. e: I cleared the substack cookies and my main browser session still doesn't get the popover but private sessions do.

nnf 3y ago

I can’t use a website with flashing anything, and especially so when I’m writing. Then I realized the CMS I make was doing this with a “saving draft / draft saved” notice above the content area and couldn’t believe I’d done this very thing without realizing how annoying it was. I still wanted to display the info, so I tried a few different techniques and ended up settling on a slow (~2-second) fade in and fade out. The result, at least for me and the people I’ve asked to try it out, is that goes completely unnoticed unless you’re looking for it, which is what I wanted initially but hadn’t taken the time to try it myself beyond ensuring the notice appeared and disappeared at the appropriate times.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
How about permanent text with "last saved: " and the time saving completed. Updated text is usually less jarring.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
strogonoff 3y ago
Design is about communication. Watch out for cases where what you want to communicate as a designer is not the same as what you should communicate. I believe almost every “Saving…” indicator is an instance of that discrepancy. They were appropriate back when on-the-fly saving was a fresh UX revolution, but today they’re nothing but self serving: us weathered designers, who grew up when the floppy disk icon actually represented the real thing, bragging about how cool our app is—it saves your draft on the fly! No need to press buttons, can you imagine? Nowadays, as devices are constantly connected, latency is low, and constant saving has become the dominant and intuitive behavior, what the user needs to know is not that stuff’s constantly being saved; what the user needs to know is the extraordinary situation where you fail to save it. This, if I may be so bold, is what you should be communicating—and if you ask me how, I might suggest a single, completely unchanging line of text informing the user that their draft is being constantly saved (though ask yourself if even that is required; it might not be if you are dealing with digital natives) and an obvious, flow-interrupting error state when that doesn’t work as intended.

quickthrower2 3y ago

I guess the website in question is a Wordpress theme and the admin kept the default theme options but replaced the slider pics.

sneak 3y ago

uBlock Origin has a "block element" item on the context menu that allows you to excise any element on a page. I use it all the time on things I find undesirable.

wyager 3y ago

For corporate products, it's easy to see why this would happen so often; there are a hundred tacky people with no sense of taste for every one person with a strongly developed sense of taste. The people with taste have finite political capital in their organization, and they aren't going to spend it all fighting the constant stream of tacky crap. The only way around this is to find a tasteful design czar and invest them with a huge amount of political capital. Steve Jobs held this role when he was alive. It's rare, unfortunately, that arrangements like this emerge.

pomian 3y ago
I agree. But I think we have attribute a lot of that design simplification to Jony Ive.

nl 3y ago

More than half (55%) of the people surveyed don't notice them or find them only a little annoying.

userbinator 3y ago
That's because they've been desensitized to it. Unfortunately, those people are also likely to be the ones who can barely read actual text anymore, precisely because being exposed to obnoxious UI has also caused them to pay less attention overall.
Grothendank 3y ago
If 30% of your users hate the interface so much that they immediately leave your service, then sure, you can say "70% of our users have no problem with our strobing call to action". But that does not stop the problem - 30% of your potential revenue base is walking away, when you could retain them.
someweirdperson 3y ago
People who love flashing websites could not even participate. It looks like all the possible answers were for different levels of being annoyed. I doubt there are many, but the result is probably skewed.
- plewd 3y ago
  There's bias in pretty much every poll result, but I doubt the reason you provided has much of an effect. People who truly "love" flashing elements (I don't believe they exist) will just choose "I barely notice these", and it wouldn't affect the conclusion.
lozenge 3y ago
This is the tyranny of the majority.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  It's not even that. This is justifying self-serving annoyances by saying they're under the threshold of anger for >50% of the users.

jacobsenscott 3y ago

Not just websites - the whole desktop is infected - bouncing dock icons, slack notifications, etc. You need to opt out of all of it to get a sane place to work. Also, like most other people who will be commenting here, I'll suggest using ublock origin and not adblock.

nullc 3y ago
I've really been disappointed with gnome on this, not only is it full of difficult to disable annoying notifications, they appear on top of and cover part of the screen. Yet at the same time it has little to no affordance for unobtrusive non-disruptive ones like a mail or chat tray icon that changes color when you have unread messages. A lot has been said about enshittification, but free software desktop environments shouldn't have any profit motive to abuse their users in this way. I've wondered if it's a case of second-hand enshitiffication: commercial products like windows adopt abusive patterns because the user is the product, then free software cargo cults it because they think if the big players do it that it must have value/been user tested/etc.
- jackson1442 3y ago
  I think you’re right on the money- gnome is trying to make the desktop environment more familiar to new users so they’re implementing poor design choices that Microsoft, Apple, et al. have made.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Recently, you also have free software LARPing big companies by adding telemetry to FLOSS, because asking users for feedback (or reading the damn issue tracker) isn't professional enough anymore - everyone in the big leagues is Data Driven™. Er, did I say issue tracker? That's quickly becoming a thing of the past - the newest trend seems to be, "we can't help you here, join our community Discord instead".
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    This really does make me worry about FLOSS applications. I am afraid I'll have to start treating it all with the default level of suspicion that Windows and Android apps get.

laserbeam 3y ago

The "draft saved" complaint sounds very weird to me, especially as I once had to implement a similar feature in an editor. When editing, one needs to convey to users when it's safe to close the app without a risk of data loss. You might want to tell users that connectivity is down and stuff can't sync right now, but "draft saved" also confers some psychological safety that everything is OK. That I don't need to wonder about the state of my editing. I can safely leave and return. There are ways to make that flash more or less. There are even basic ways regular editors do this by visually including a star at the end of a filename. But it will still need to display somehow if it's an environment where you're not hitting ctrl+s manually. Not having some indication is worse than it flashing. If someone asked me that flashing question, I would also say they are annoying and would probably stop using the site, HOWEVER, I would not have considered this, or other similar status indicators related to my work, that toggle automatically to be part of the problem.

makeitdouble 3y ago
Arguably you could hide the info under a button or an actionable item. If the main use case is informing whether the page/app can be closed, letting the user check before closing would do the trick (and potentially force save at that timing if sync was pending).
- deelly 3y ago
  For example, you can show this info when user move cursor to close button.
jbay808 3y ago
As a Substack writer, I find it very distracting. Part of the reason is that when my eyes are looking at the body text, the motion happens in my upper peripheral vision. That's also where tab heading notifications are (eg. an incoming Google Hangouts message). So as I write I keep subconsciously looking up to see what's happened, only to find it's just another "draft saved".
ben0x539 3y ago
> Not having some indication is worse than it flashing. I figure it's more that there's no one-size-fits-all thing. "Normally", that isn't a problem, because you just switch to another program that suits your preferences/takes good care of your brainworms. It just becomes frustrating when companies tie their services to uncustomizable programs (like for instance a website) narrowly designed for their archetypical user persona. ... but beyond that there has to be a better way to do this?? Surely this particular thing has been designed to death a million times. I think with Google Docs, I get to assume everything is saved all the time, so this is the default state that doesn't need to take up space on the screen. In the risky situation where I alt-f4 before the save call returned success or whatever, I get the javascript popup telling me stuff wasn't saved and I can cancel and wait a few seconds. In the other risky situation where the save call just keeps failing for a prolonged amount of time (because my wifi died, usually), I think it says that somewhere in the UI, and it seems like a good enough justification to grab attention to me.

seydor 3y ago

Did youtube.com recently add a blurry background behind the video, or is my screen broken?

mulmen 3y ago
I have noticed a lot of subtle UI changes recently. Youtube and Steam specifically. I assume this is because it is the end of a quarter and teams have to ship something for promos. In a couple weeks the experiments will be over and we can go back to a few months of stability until Q3. But watch out, this is intern season, so the stuff you see in September is going to be really wild.
- seydor 3y ago
  Cant you guys do your promotions in another way? Like, running a marathon or a poker game or something. It's annoying
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I don't make the rules but it is my turn to deal.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  My wife to me, last night: "Why the hell did they just change Google on computers look like the phone version?". I was confused for a minute, until she pointed her finger at relevant part of the screen - indeed, the "images / videos / news / ..." selectors are now styled as rounded buttons. I rarely use Google search these days, so I didn't notice, but the question is justified - what's the point? It's just more visual noise, and likely more bloat to generate it.
jackson1442 3y ago
Yes, this is called “ambient mode” and can be disabled in settings.
- seydor 3y ago

addled 3y ago

My company's employee portal currently sports not only two carousels (on different timings, of course), but also a huge banner with a countdown clock. That's just above the fold. There's a 3rd carousel if you scroll down.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

dehrmann 3y ago

But so many fond memories. https://web.archive.org/web/20220405120606/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/blink https://web.archive.org/web/20220405120606/https://developer...

chrisbolt 3y ago
Example: <blink>Why would somebody use this?</blink>

Sai_ 3y ago

Both Reddit and Twitter show a fake notification indicating some activity directed at you like an @mention or a reply but are actually just a trick to get you to open the notifications tab/popover. Stopped using Twitter and reddit the second I realised this. Infuriating subterfuge just to put some inflated engagement metric in their decks.

dash2 3y ago
Twitter's infuriating thing is that it flashes up "7 notifications" when you first load the page, then hides it for a few minutes, then shows it again. This is so tricksy. I assume they are trying to reward you for staying on the site.
- Sai_ 3y ago
  I can’t imagine this sort of trickery is going to help them in the long run - they are training their users to mistrust and eventually ignore them. It’s like a furniture shop advertising a “going out of business” sale or a shepherd boy crying wolf twice. People wise up to this and become more open to alternatives. Surely, even VCs and investors know not to take DAUs and MAUs and click rates at face value. Who are these companies trying to con?
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > Who are these companies trying to con? The stock market. VCs are looking at these metrics not just as indicators of company's health and growth trajectory, but also, at the later stage, as indicators of the company's ability to generate returns - which often involve the company being acquired or going public.
  - verve_rat 3y ago
    Is is never about the company as a whole, it is the incentives of the middle manager that is rewarded for "increasing engagement" or some other bullshit metric.
deelly 3y ago

DharmaPolice 3y ago

I think this is a sub-category of a wider problem which permeates web/software/app design and that's hubris. Most sites/programs/apps are designed with the assumption that they're way more important than they really are. It's like the little kid who demands their parents immediate attention/action over the slightest thing which they consider hugely important. And while it's understandable (maybe even endearing) with a small child it's just annoying when it's a web site/piece of software made (presumably) by intelligent adults. Obviously there are exceptions but start by assuming I don't want you to change my default programs/subscribe to your newsletter/have your program or website pop-up or play sounds without asking/take a tour of your new features/flash text on my screen/create multiple non-hidden folders in the root of my home folder/install multiple services that need to be running constantly/receive marketing push notifications or texts/watch unskippable cut-scenes in games etc...

andsoitis 3y ago
Everyone seeks attention... in some form. That's ultimately the point of communication. It is to change the views of others, or to challenge, or to ask for answers. Communication is a means of influence. I don't think it is hubris. It isn't that they assume greater importance. To assume means to have considered. Instead, I think they either don't think so consciously OR they exert actions that are meant to derive more power/status/etc.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Communication is a means of influence. But not only that. Or even mostly that. In my experience, it's primarily a means of cooperation. Except when it comes to commerce, but most modern commerce is inherently manipulative in nature.
ben0x539 3y ago
I fear the wider, wider problem is that hubris pays off, it's not economically optimal for most sites to show this humility you'd like to see. Someone decided it's worth it to annoy us grumpy nerds in order to sell fractionally more stuff to the statistically average user. I don't think apps/sites are getting worse about this, it's that they're getting better at optimizing for users who aren't me. It's probably just deeply frustrating/alienating to have to use products that you're not the target audience for (and that's increasingly almost all products). (To be clear this isn't meant as derision of the 'statistically average user', it's perfectly justified that not everything is built to suit me, the protagonist of reality.)

VikingCoder 3y ago

No, not every flashing element on every site alienates and enrages users. This is a site: https://poncle.itch.io/vampire-survivors https://poncle.itch.io/vampire-survivors It has about as many flashing elements as possible, and it endears users.

ben0x539 3y ago
It doesn't have any flashing elements until you click the thing, that's probably what counts.
waqf 3y ago
> it endears users This time I am speaking solely for myself, but your grammar alienates and enrages me.
- VikingCoder 3y ago
  yeah, I shared that thought way too late in my day, lol

bullfightonmars 3y ago

This was the tipping point for me with the reddit app that caused me to move to Apollo. The Reddit app had been trending down in reading quality for years. I was already annoyed with all the awards cluttering up comments, but then they added flashing elements to comments and I noped out to Apollo. If Apollo really goes away I don’t think I will come back, after 15 years of reading reddit, I have pretty much stopped reading it at all over the past few weeks.

jackson1442 3y ago
Same here. I actually somewhat liked seeing awards in Apollo before they added more beyond silver/gold/platinum. But even the badges got to be too bothersome. Now I open the official app and see animations and red backgrounds and “that’s hot” all over the comments. Who asked for this?

mediumsmart 3y ago

It’s really winwin all the way. The dev can show the flashy they made, the ublock keeps the site visitor numbers unaffected enabling moneys for further flashy, the authors can write about it and we get to comment on the issue. Next.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
Also the devs of the library the dev uses get more Github stars and attract more attention, and it becomes more likely such libraries get used in future projects, leading to increased codebase complexity, leading to better pay and greater demand for software developers. Wins all the way!

gumby 3y ago

Gifs in text posts are also dreadful and I’ve never seen them add to a post.

userbinator 3y ago

Proxomitron, the original web filtering proxy from 2 decades ago, already had a "Freeze GIF animation" filter, along with "Blink to Bold" and "Flash animation killer", among others. It was clear back then that a lot of users already hated this stuff. Now we have even more annoying CSS and JS animations which are a lot more difficult to block effectively. On the other hand, I find HDD activity lights and a status monitor displayed in the corner of the screen to not be distracting, so I think context has a lot to do with it --- something that is trying to get your attention unnecessarily, vs. something that is changing but not hard to ignore.

Terr_ 3y ago
> Proxomitron Oh man, that's quite a nostalgia-trip right there. Setting up custom rules/transformation was probably one of the main things that steered me into a software-development career, along with client-side scripts for Starseige:Tribes. Apart from advertisement/privacy stuff, I remember using it to customize and streamline the appearance of web-forums I often visited. (e.g. TribalWar and AntiOnline.)
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> something that is trying to get your attention unnecessarily, vs. something that is changing but not hard to ignore. Also, signal vs. noise. The physical blinkenlights on your computer and the status monitors correlate to a signal that is occasionally useful, rarely if never of negative utility, and is simple enough to eventually be processed "in the background". At worst, your brain just filters it out; at best, you gain a subconscious awareness / "feel" for the state of your machine (though I found this used to work much better with the noise made by HDDs, and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load). Also, predictability. Aforementioned indicators have very little variability. It's just a time series signal. You quickly learn that it will just keep flashing or scrolling continuously - it won't suddenly start changing colors or shapes, nor will it render words you have to read. This, I believe, is also critical for the ability to offload paying attention to such indicators to your unconscious. In contrast, most of those web flashing annoyances are to a large or small degree unpredictable - they vary from site to site, they vary within a site, and you rarely spend enough time with them to learn to trust they won't surprise you.

smcameron 3y ago

The one exception I can think of is a single blinking underscore to represent a cursor. There is one on the top of this page: https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/ https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/ Modern browsers don't render it though.

smcameron 3y ago

The one exception I can think of is a single blinking underscore to represent a cursor. There's one at the top of this page: https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/ https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/ in the little "vi" window thing. Modern browsers don't honor the blink tag though.

bandrami 3y ago
I've seen a site that successfully used a blinking red "WARNING" div above a section telling you how to do something that could brick your router if you did it wrong.

readyplayernull 3y ago

Being similar to z-fighting, this should be called attention-fighting: two or more elements need our attention while occupying the same space. That said, I remember about flashing character codes in old computers, invented before bold/underline text. Also the Internet of the 90s abused of blinking gif images.

Lammy 3y ago

> There’s no easy way to block the element with AdBlock without also removing important functional elements of the editor. uBlock Origin can do this, either by removing an annoying class from an element or by modifying an element's style directly: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#subjectstylearg https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#... https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#subjectremove-attrarg-subjectremove-classarg https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#... Here are a couple of my personal custom rules as example: watchpeopledie.tv##div.tilt-1:style(animation: none !important;) homestuck.com##p.o_chat-log:remove-class(disp-n) homestuck.com##div.o_chat-container:remove-class(active)

tiku 3y ago

The cookie popup enrages me.

nicbou 3y ago
And the newsletter one

LinAGKar 3y ago

Reminds me of my gym's site (https://www.stc.se/ https://www.stc.se/), where the centerpiece is occupied by a useless looping montage, while the main function of the site (the booking system) is pushed into a hidden-by-default sidebar. I've had to block the video with uBlock to be able to use the site, since it's so distracting.

lozenge 3y ago

There is a way to stop this, in theory. The prefers-reduced-motion CSS query. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

RobotToaster 3y ago

It's enraging that everyone decided popups were so annoying that most browsers shipped with blockers for them, but now we get dozens of java script popups instead.

matricaria 3y ago

I still wonder if flashing elements and the constant nudging is worth it. I sometimes think I'm the only one but apparently there are about 15 % that are heavily annoyed by this. And those are users that you either lose completely or that block every unnecessary item on your website with ad blockers or reader mode. I can't stand using Reddit on a mobile browser constantly asking if I want to install their app. Fortunately, there are alternative frontends such as Libreddit or teddit [2]. I hope they survive the API war. [1] https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit [2] https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit

creata 3y ago

I'm not at all an expert on survey design, but "How much do flashing or changing elements distract from your enjoyment of websites?" doesn't feel like an unbiased question.

wodow 3y ago

I don't think I'm alone in considering blinking keyboard cursor/carets as the original sin of this. Here's an long-running collection of how to disable flashing cursors everywhere, from vi to Vscode: https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink > Software development is not an easy task, and often after a painful process of writing a program developers feel they should share their pains with users, so they put a part of own sufferings onto the shoulders of users in a method similar to the Chinese water torture - blinking cursors.

IanCal 3y ago
Cursors are fine to me, and frankly important. Flashing is "LOOK HERE IT'S IMPORTANT YOU KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING HERE" and what happens when I press almost any button is a solid reason for grabbing my attention. I shouldn't have to search in a big pile of thin lines to see the specifically slightly differently shaped thin line to know what's going to happen when I type - let my visual system use the optimised "MOVING" alarms to let me know. Making me hunt or test where my cursor is by making a change is far worse to me. Interesting to know that some people find it hard. Does the default behaviour I see while typing (no blinking unless you pause) help?

yxre 3y ago

One thing that annoys me and I was hoping to find in the article is layout shifts as you are trying to read the page. You see it a lot on low-quality news sites where you start reading then an ad appears pushing content down the page forcing you to re-adjust. Its such a bad pattern, and it's so common on poorly coded sites.

zajio1am 3y ago

I wonder why browser developers are compliant with this. Everyone accepted that <marquee> or <blink> was horrible, but this knowledge does not stop them to add support for animated GIFs, CSS animations, video autoplay, and if a user disables all of this and installs NoScript to block JS-based animations, there is always some new surprising way to annoy users, like SVG animations.

jamesfisher 3y ago

Similarly awful: those Giphy gifs that "writers" add to their business reports, content marketing etc. Never funny, always distracting. Try making your writing entertaining instead.