5 ms·
All my clients wanted a carousel, now it's an AI chatbot
- cjs_ac 5mo agoI think an important subtlety here is that clients/‘normies’ look at different websites to us, so the taste in websites that they cultivate is different to ours.
- wuhhh 5mo agoI stress over this with my own website-for-work. If I make the developer’s version of my site, who am I talking to? Other devs. If I make the version that appeals to agencies and casual users, there’s a constant voice in my head trying to drag me back to something simpler, lighter, judging me for that threejs hero section. As with all things, I guess it’s a matter of finding the right balance. Web development sure is in a very strange place and transitioning hard right now - off topic but I’m seeing more and more people looking for work and fewer and fewer job postings, especially for freelancers like myself. But maybe I’m not advertising AI bot integrations hard enough.
- drawfloat 5mo agoAre casual users crying out for ai chat bots? From my experience the only stakeholder pushing for those is the business themselves.
- rienbdj 5mo agoBring back lightbox!
- operatingthetan 5mo agoMy partner works at a nonprofit and they paid some consultant for a chat bot. The next month they were surprised they got a $2000 bill for the API use and at first wondered if the bot was really popular. The analytics reveled that very few conversations were happening. The consultants apparently had the bot load and fed it an immediate prompt which greeted the user. This was happening on every page load. Bad consultants, bad bot.
- raverbashing 5mo ago"Bad consultants" you mean, that's the average consultant
- not_that_d 5mo agoThe amount of consultants that are very known and have large presence on developer communities and give a lot of talks and have no idea how to approach real world problems is impressive.
- yencabulator 5mo agoI am only surprised that the "consultant" didn't manage to insert themselves in the money flow.
- enos_feedler 5mo ago“It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind” This sums up everything driving the tech sector right now. From execs at big tech to nobodies on X. EDIT; if I think about the nature of it. The visibility fight is the decreasing attention with increasing channels and noise. Visibility tactics go to the extreme. And the fear of looking behind comes from the previous tech cycles and the thoughts around what if you had missed those? And maybe those with the most fear are the ones that did.
- stuaxo 5mo agoWell, the marketing from the AI companies is working.
- enos_feedler 5mo agoThats the clever nature of the companies. They are playing on peoples fear to drive adoption. Its a bit sickening to me
- Thanemate 5mo ago"Adopt or be left behind" and the quality of the thing you're adopting relies heavily on how much training it receives by the users who are scared of being left behind.
- grebc 5mo agoIt’s FOMO and it works every couple of years because the execs who buy in are different to the last lot of execs who got promoted/canned.
- bambax 5mo ago> right now It's always been like this. I used to build websites in the 90s and it was exactly like that. It was also horrible. People who had no tech background whatsoever making decisions on which tech to use (PHP vs ASP vs ColdFusion, remember those?); overpaying agencies to make HTML "templates" that had to have round corners everywhere. Etc. Not everything's great today, but it's a little less bad I think.
- h05sz487b 5mo agoThe obvious solution is to implement a mock chatbot that answers from a set of pregenerated wrong answers. Noone will know the difference.
- grebc 5mo agoGenius.
- eterm 5mo ago> No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content Your clients seem to have got what they wanted, or at least someone who has learned to write like one.
- efilife 5mo agoCome on, this is clearly human-written People have been writing like this for very damn long
- eterm 5mo agoIt isn't "clearly human-written" at all, the entire blog looks like LLM output, right from the very first post. I'm not witch-hunting, there are just a lot of witches.
- efilife 5mo agoI just went through some of the posts and you are right. It's very suspicious, but I would say it's right at the edge of being plausibly written by a human. If it's LLM, then it's the first one I'm aware of that got me this good. I am usually the first one to point out that something reeks of LLM writing here (which I'm kinda ashamed of, considering how much I've been doing this). Tbh the whole smolweb concept by this person seemed kinda weird right when I discovered it was a thing. It seems to not really be a thing but the person is really trying to convince you that it is
- surgical_fire 5mo agoHonestly, despite the regular "not X, just Y" constructs, I actually think it was written by a human. Or at the very least mostly written by a human. Something about how the argument and rationale builds up does not scream LLM to me.
- eterm 5mo agoYou may be sleeping on just how good LLMs have got at writing blog-posts. Go ahead and ask your favourite one this: > Can you draft a blog post titled, "All my clients wanted a carousel, now it's an AI chatbot!" > Don't search the web, just go with vibes. I did, and this was the result: https://richardcocks.github.io/chum/blogexample.html https://richardcocks.github.io/chum/blogexample.html Okay, not quite there, very much more obviously LLM than the OP, but a bit of tweaking, some feedback to drop the headings and the table, and: https://richardcocks.github.io/chum/blogexample2.html https://richardcocks.github.io/chum/blogexample2.html And that's with zero blog-writing "skills", with no memories, a fresh incognito session and only the title to prompt. Complete with call-out: > The feature was never really about the users. It was about the client feeling like they were keeping up. The technology changes. The psychology doesn't. Complete with the horse-shit, "Honest dispatches from a decade in the web trenches"
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mananaysiempre 5mo ago> Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy. > [...] > I've started asking clients a simple question when they bring it up. Not to be difficult, just to understand. > [...] > It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind. > [...] > No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content, clear and immediate. It’s been long enough that this might even have plausibly come from a human with LLM writing overrepresented in their brain rather than an LLM. But either way there’s this record-scratch feeling that I experience on each one of these, and (fittingly) it just completely knocks me out of the groove, requiring deliberate effort to resume reading. And, I mean, none of these is even bad in isolation, but it sure feels like we’re due either a backlash where these patterns become underused even when appropriate, or them becoming so common they lose their power (is syntax subject to semantic bleaching?). Or perhaps both. Socioliguists are going to have a blast.
- franga2000 5mo agoLLMs don't "own" this writing style. By definition they can't - they were trained on human writing after all! People wrote like this before and that's fine. You might not like the style, but saying it's because LLM writing has infested their brain is wrong, dismissive and dehumanising.
- mananaysiempre 5mo agoLLMs don’t own these expressions in the same sense that McDonald’s doesn’t own salt: they are undoubtedly making use of a strong reaction that humans have had—have been having—long before; but they did develop a way to mash that button on an industrial scale like few before them. (With of course a great deal of help from humans, be it via customer surveys or RLHF; or you could call it help from Moloch[1] in that the humans unwittingly or negligently assembled themselves into a runaway optimizer.) So I think it’s fair to say that LLMs do own this style, as in the balance of ingredients, even if they do not own the ingredients themselves. And anyway nothing in the social perception of language cares about fairness: low-class English speakers did not invent negative agreement (“double negatives”), yet it will still sound low-class to you and even me (and my native language requires negative agreement). As for being dehumanizing, perhaps I did commit the sin of psychoanalysis at a distance here, but I’ve felt enough loose wires sticking out of my brain’s own language production apparatus that I don’t think pointing out the mechanistic aspects reduces anyone’s humanity. For instance, nobody can edit their own writing until they forget what’s in it—that’s why any publishing pipeline needs editors, and preferably two layers of them, because the first one, who edits for style and grammar, consequently becomes incapable of spotting their own mechanical mistakes like typos, transposed or merged words, etc. Ever spotted a bug in a code-review tool that you’ve read and overlooked a dozen times in your editor? Why does a change in font or UI cause a presumably rational human being to become capable of drawing logical inferences they were not before? In either case, there seems to be a conclusion cache of sorts that we can’t flush and can’t disable, requiring these sorts of actually quite expensive hacks. I don’t think this makes us any less human, and it pays to be aware of your own imperfections. (Don’t merge your copy- and line editors into a single position, please?..) As for syntactic patterns, I’ve quite often thought of a slick way to phrase things and then realized that I’d used it three times in as many sentences. On some occasions I’ve needed to literally grep every linking word in my writing to make sure I haven’t used a single specific one five times in a row. If you pay attention during meetings or presentations, you’ll notice that speakers (including me!) will very often reuse the question’s phrasing word for word regardless of how well it fits, without being aware of it in the slightest. (I’m now wondering if lawyers and witnesses train to avoid this.) Language production is stupidly taxing on the brain (or so I’ve heard), so the brain will absolutely take every possible shortcut whether we want it to or not. Thus I expect that the priming effect I’m alleging can be very real even before getting into equally real intangibles like “taste”. I don’t think it dehumanizes anyone; you could say it dehumanizes everyone equally instead, but my point of view is that being aware of these mechanical realities of the mind is essential to competent writing (or thinking, or problem solving) in the same way that being aware of mechanical realities of the body is essential to competent dancing (or fighting, or doing sports). A bit of innocence lost is a fair trade for the wisdom gained. (Not that I claim to be a particularly good writer.) [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- halflife 5mo agoThese chatbot and google login are my most hated feature of current web. Obviously it just a script embedded in the page, so it has not actual place in the design. So the effect, especially on mobile, is this dance of starting to read a page, have it obscured by annoying popups, and trying (and failing) to close the popup with the hidden 12x12 pixels x button. Just like the entire ads market, it’s all forgery to drive up clicks so owners can say to the clients that there is interaction. Don’t get me started on the recent YouTube ads on iPad that place a banner that sits on top of the video, hiding subtitles, and closing it is behind a menu that requires you to be a brain surgeon specialist in order to interact with, instead of clicking the ad itself. I currently have 15 tabs in safari for ads that I inadvertently clicked.
- menno-sh 5mo agoMy favorite (read: what makes me want to send the website's owner a glitter bomb/GDPR data request, whichever's worse) is when they have a chat window that plays an audible notification sound every 5 minutes, but only after they apparently sense that the tab has since been buried in a stack of 30+ other tabs. I eventually got bored telling those chatbots to "go fuck yourself" so I've now picked up the admittedly fun micro-hobby of jailbreaking customer support bots.
- ludicrousdispla 5mo ago>> A way of saying: we're keeping up. Back in the day, websites could just put up an animated "under construction" gif.
- Ozzie-D 5mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- pocksuppet 5mo agoShow your clients McMaster-Carr. It's not "simple". It is efficient.
- djeastm 5mo agoI love the site, but it's also worth noting that because it is not mobile-friendly it can afford to take full advantage of its efficient catalog nature and not feel the need to make compromises. Sometimes I wish we had said "browsers are for desktops, apps are for tablets/phones" and never tried to combine the two.
- oezi 5mo agoI mostly agree but some recent experiences with voice chat bots give me pause: Fedex has now a voice bot when you call and it is kind of good and fast. I mean faster than navigating their website. It picks up directly after some boilerplate. It can understand me. With website chatbots we could have similar leaps if they are done well and have access to CRM/ERP etc. to actually help you.
- dbuxton 5mo agoI had the same experience with chatbots, but we shipped a chatbot module a year ago that helps with complex config questions by reading and answering based on a Salesforce Experience site. I was skeptical but it gets a 68 NPS from users, even if we do get the occasional "why are you investing in AI I hate it" coming through the feedback channel. As ever, the issue is "what problem are you solving". If it's that you want more people to put their hand up and talk to you/order something, chatbots seem like a bad solution. If it's that you have a ton of complex docs that people have to read in order to implement and use your product, it's not the solution but it's probably part of a solution.
- luke5441 5mo agoIf you have the docs public assuming a good search engine you don't need the chat bot since users can use e.g. Google AI.
- try-working 5mo agoI've built chatbot demos for big corps like Walmart and other non-tech brands. What they want is "something that looks AI." The problem with chatbots is they don't work.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Martin_Silenus 5mo agoGirl, give them ELIZA, they won't even notice.
- tosti 5mo agoHow does them ELIZA make you feel?
- K0balt 5mo agoSo the solution is: simple, beautiful, effective websites with no unnecessary complications. And certified hand calculated hashes, to show that you invested heavily in the presentation. Human POW. Brb off to launch my new blockchain.
- foxglacier 5mo agoWait, websites were adding cookie banners when they didn't need them just to look modern?! Those bastards! Could there also be newsletter signup pop-ups on sites that won't even send you any spam but they do it to look cool?
- gherkinnn 5mo agoThe carousel also had a political component: you can have every exec's pet project above the fold on the start page. Users develop banner blindness and scroll past without noticing. In an odd way everybody wins. > The real irony is that building something genuinely simple, something that loads instantly and says exactly what it needs to say and nothing more, is often harder than bolting on a chatbot. But that's invisible work. Nobody sees the restraint. This applies to almost anything. Sadly.
- smelendez 5mo agoThe best was when the carousel rotated on its own with no user controls, so you had to wait for it to get to the content you actually wanted.
- gerdesj 5mo agoTry a really daft innovation: a phone line staffed by real people.
- armenarmen 5mo agoThis will be considered ultra premium in about 3 years
- pdntspa 5mo agoI am so sick of monkey-see monkey-do in business.
- daveguy 5mo agoIn a world of carousels, banners, and chatbots. Be a McMaster-Carr. Wait. That requires having a desirable and non-manipulative product or service? Hmmm... Lots of business in for a rough time.
- copypaper 5mo agoSame reason why WordPress is the de facto for businesses. You can create a "full" website with a few clicks and add some plugins to make it look complete despite it running like shit. It's all perception.
- ikidd 5mo agoI had a company trying to sell me some farm management software, looked good, but every page had a chatbot window that hovered in the bottom middle and could not be dismissed. Took up like 20% of the readable area. Sales guy called me up to see how the trial was going and I said I wasn't going to continue with it because of the chatbot. He tells me I wasn't the first person he'd lost sales to because of it, but the owner was married to having that always visible as it was. I have no compunctions about using AI, frankly, but when I don't need or want it, it needs to fuck off.
- ReplyFastDev 5mo ago[flagged]