5 ms·

I've worked on several projects where people looked at the site, which was simple and straight to the point, and people would straight up tell me they didn't ta

by avaer 4mo ago

I've worked on several projects where people looked at the site, which was simple and straight to the point, and people would straight up tell me they didn't take it seriously because it didn't have these performative UI things on it. It's like when a Youtuber's audience complains about how they're constantly asking you to subscribe. The reason it happens is because the statistics say it works.

epolanski 4mo ago
Same for clickbait thumbnails, people hate them, and yet don't really click on non clickbaity ones.
- thewebguyd 4mo ago
  In the marketing world this is called revealed preference. This stuff is A/B tested to death. Anyone trying to sell something is best served by watching people's behavior instead of listening to what they say, as the two are often different if not polar opposites.
  - 4chandaily 4mo ago
    The perspective marketing world seems toxic. From the perspective of the "consumer", it sure does feel like we are being "ignored", "tricked", or "bamboozled" when our stated preferences are ignored in favor of "revealed preference". It isn't that we have a "preference" for these things, it is far more likely that a user just doesn't have their guard up 100% of the time, and these psychological manipulations are designed to cut through that. Sure, these strategies probably net clicks, but they aren't from people who "chose" your product, they are clicks from people who were manipulated into clicking. I suppose whether you think that is okay depends on your industry and ethics.
    - thewebguyd 4mo ago
      Yeah, it is highly toxic. I'd assume that in most cases those "revealed preferences" are specifically engineered, not organic. It's taking advantage of biological reflexes and calling it a true preference.
    - Lalabadie 4mo ago
      It's behavioral marketing, vs status/aspirational marketing. A stated preference isn't necessarily current or situational (I will choose to run instead of watching another 45 minutes of Youtube videos). A situational preference is often inertia, and behavioral marketing will directly hinder the meta cognitive processes that usually give us the agency to override our default mode choices (John has been on YouTube for the last 20 minutes, what next suggestion is not likely to keep him there?)
  - gryn 4mo ago
    Better for you(the seller) vs better for me (the buyer) Two agents with two different utility functions fighting each other, it's an adversarial relationship/game. The fight is for your limited attention span. Clickbaity titles or least informative ones, 20min of rambling for what could've been a 2min video or article, spreading the meat of the info in the later half of the video for better retention instead of the beginning, highly misleading previews at the beggining, etc ... are good for the content producer but not so much for the content viewer that has to sift through it only to reliaze that didn't care about that particular thing. Not limited to videos, but also things to buy the meat of the technical/practical description of the product get worse and worse each year and the other proxy signals for them too. Seems like marketing is a lot like military conflict drown the enemy in lot of noise to drop the SNR. what's that you want to buy a 4k video projector and set a filter for it? here it is for cheaper. Oh, you wanted the actual dots on the wall resolution to be 4k instead of max supported input signal, oops. You're used to higher price meaning better quality? guess we'll flood that price point with shitier quality progressively until we find your limit
  - marcosdumay 4mo ago
    I guess in the social sciences world this is called institutional erosion... Youtube is a perfectly "unbiased" "democratic" repository, where crazy people shouting conspiracies and prize-winning documentaries have the same thumbnail and half-line of text for you to discover if they are any good.
- wnevets 4mo ago
  Its like when people say they hate politicians all the while they've been voting for the same Senator for the past 30 years.
- all2 4mo ago
  I really wish there was a way to filter out the soy-O-face thumbnails entirely. I do not like them. I do not want to see them.
  - unlogic 4mo ago
    Check "DeArrow" chrome extension.
wavemode 4mo ago
I don't think the commentary being made here is that startup websites should not be flashy. Just that, maybe they don't all need to look exactly the same as each other.
- jsdalton 4mo ago
  It seems to me the parent commenter is saying the opposite: looking exactly like each other _is_ the point. It's a form of social signaling, to indicate that a project "belongs" to the in group of high-flying successful AI hype projects. Note I'm not arguing that this is a good strategy. But given that so many people follow it I imagine it's not as bad as it appears on the surface.
  - muvlon 4mo ago
    It's a bit of in-group signaling but I think, importantly, also date signaling. A 2026 hype website looks different from a 2020 hype website looks different from a 2010 hype website. Having a generic 2026 hype website look tells visitors that you're either new or update your website's design to follow current trends. They do the same with cars, where it's even more important and even more explicit. The design language has to change every couple years so that you can tell when somebody is driving a car older than 5 or so years. For example, currently we're doing blobs but with a few sharp features and muted colors. Before that it was more colorful and more metallic paint. Before that, in the 00s, it was pure blobs. Before that it was all sharp edges etc. Now sharp edges are beginning to make a comeback. That's why I don't think we'll ever have the "one true design language". Fads and trends will continue, repeating themselves to a degree but also changing in new ways.
- dayjah 4mo ago
  I think homogeneity is an unavoidable end game for the internet (unfortunately). At work we’ve been discussing whether to migrate off our home grown component library to Material UI. I shudder at the thought, personally. However, a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product. Like many of us I was born into a deeply customizable Internet, all of my websites were green or red on black. They were a glorious amalgam of fixed width fonts and <blink> tags. With occasional wingdings characters for fun and games and complex <table>/<tr>/<td> tags for really epic layouts. They were l33t, honestly ^_^ But, as time goes on and more and more people use this thing, converging on the one-true-UX feels like a net good thing assuming the fundamentals are right. To some degree the LLM-ization of the Internet is essentially the end game of squashing the personality out of the Internet which bootstrap started. We’re on the cusp of spoken word being the core UX of computers with a fall back to reading the LLM transcript, neither of which benefits from <blink>
theturtletalks 4mo ago
It really comes down to first impression. Your website design is your company’s first impression. If the design is clean, people will believe the product is clean and robust as well. Similar to how people think things that cost more and probably high quality and better overall. As for this website, the best component is the ASCII animation in the hero and you can’t even copy that component. In fact, that nice ASCII hero is what gave me a good first impression to go thru all the components.
- zevyoura 4mo ago
  It's there: https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/ascii-hero https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/ascii-h...
  - theturtletalks 4mo ago
    Ah it’s in the hero section, kind of scanned that section but had lost interest by that point
    - vasco 4mo ago
      So the thing that made you go through all the components didn't even hold your attention enough to make your argument true
      - theturtletalks 4mo ago
        I was on mobile and a lot of the pages are overflowing. After going thru half, it got a bit annoying. I actually keep a directory of all these tailwind/shadcn registry websites and this one drew me in more than others.
- aaronharding 4mo ago
  explain why Craigslist, temu, etc. are all popular then? :p
brightball 4mo ago
I use a Substack site for the conference that I run. The popup and subscribe buttons everywhere used to annoy me...but they work. Went from 0 to almost 1,000 subscribers on an otherwise low traffic site and it's by far the best way to reach people. https://carolina.codes https://carolina.codes
- nwatson 4mo ago
  I was in the Winston-Salem Flywheel coworking for eight years, good place. I hope the Greenvile site is as good.
  - brightball 4mo ago
    Beautiful facility. They renovated the old Pepsi bottling plant. https://www.flywheelgreenvillesc.com/ https://www.flywheelgreenvillesc.com/
- SpyCoder77 4mo ago
  Another way to get a lot of traffic is getting the top reply to the top comment on the top hacker news post. Speaking of which... https://github.com/SpyC0der77 https://github.com/SpyC0der77
XorNot 4mo ago
Youtubes monetization guidelines also require it.
noisy_boy 4mo ago
My colleague vibe coded a website that looks exactly like this one. Everyone on the meeting loved it - they thought it was cool. These were IT people.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago
  The IT people know no one's really buying just off the flashy website alone - because they don't! - and that it'll get management to okay it.
sgsvnk 4mo ago
There are 2 kinds of people- people who understand tech and people who use tech, in the ratio 1:9 (or even lower?). For the 90%+ people who like using fancy tech and feel smart/intelligent, the bling on your landing page is necessary.

by avaer 4mo ago

epolanski 4mo ago

Same for clickbait thumbnails, people hate them, and yet don't really click on non clickbaity ones.

thewebguyd 4mo ago
In the marketing world this is called revealed preference. This stuff is A/B tested to death. Anyone trying to sell something is best served by watching people's behavior instead of listening to what they say, as the two are often different if not polar opposites.
- 4chandaily 4mo ago
  The perspective marketing world seems toxic. From the perspective of the "consumer", it sure does feel like we are being "ignored", "tricked", or "bamboozled" when our stated preferences are ignored in favor of "revealed preference". It isn't that we have a "preference" for these things, it is far more likely that a user just doesn't have their guard up 100% of the time, and these psychological manipulations are designed to cut through that. Sure, these strategies probably net clicks, but they aren't from people who "chose" your product, they are clicks from people who were manipulated into clicking. I suppose whether you think that is okay depends on your industry and ethics.
  - thewebguyd 4mo ago
    Yeah, it is highly toxic. I'd assume that in most cases those "revealed preferences" are specifically engineered, not organic. It's taking advantage of biological reflexes and calling it a true preference.
  - Lalabadie 4mo ago
    It's behavioral marketing, vs status/aspirational marketing. A stated preference isn't necessarily current or situational (I will choose to run instead of watching another 45 minutes of Youtube videos). A situational preference is often inertia, and behavioral marketing will directly hinder the meta cognitive processes that usually give us the agency to override our default mode choices (John has been on YouTube for the last 20 minutes, what next suggestion is not likely to keep him there?)
- gryn 4mo ago
  Better for you(the seller) vs better for me (the buyer) Two agents with two different utility functions fighting each other, it's an adversarial relationship/game. The fight is for your limited attention span. Clickbaity titles or least informative ones, 20min of rambling for what could've been a 2min video or article, spreading the meat of the info in the later half of the video for better retention instead of the beginning, highly misleading previews at the beggining, etc ... are good for the content producer but not so much for the content viewer that has to sift through it only to reliaze that didn't care about that particular thing. Not limited to videos, but also things to buy the meat of the technical/practical description of the product get worse and worse each year and the other proxy signals for them too. Seems like marketing is a lot like military conflict drown the enemy in lot of noise to drop the SNR. what's that you want to buy a 4k video projector and set a filter for it? here it is for cheaper. Oh, you wanted the actual dots on the wall resolution to be 4k instead of max supported input signal, oops. You're used to higher price meaning better quality? guess we'll flood that price point with shitier quality progressively until we find your limit
- marcosdumay 4mo ago
  I guess in the social sciences world this is called institutional erosion... Youtube is a perfectly "unbiased" "democratic" repository, where crazy people shouting conspiracies and prize-winning documentaries have the same thumbnail and half-line of text for you to discover if they are any good.
wnevets 4mo ago
Its like when people say they hate politicians all the while they've been voting for the same Senator for the past 30 years.
all2 4mo ago
I really wish there was a way to filter out the soy-O-face thumbnails entirely. I do not like them. I do not want to see them.
- unlogic 4mo ago
  Check "DeArrow" chrome extension.

wavemode 4mo ago

I don't think the commentary being made here is that startup websites should not be flashy. Just that, maybe they don't all need to look exactly the same as each other.

jsdalton 4mo ago
It seems to me the parent commenter is saying the opposite: looking exactly like each other _is_ the point. It's a form of social signaling, to indicate that a project "belongs" to the in group of high-flying successful AI hype projects. Note I'm not arguing that this is a good strategy. But given that so many people follow it I imagine it's not as bad as it appears on the surface.
- muvlon 4mo ago
  It's a bit of in-group signaling but I think, importantly, also date signaling. A 2026 hype website looks different from a 2020 hype website looks different from a 2010 hype website. Having a generic 2026 hype website look tells visitors that you're either new or update your website's design to follow current trends. They do the same with cars, where it's even more important and even more explicit. The design language has to change every couple years so that you can tell when somebody is driving a car older than 5 or so years. For example, currently we're doing blobs but with a few sharp features and muted colors. Before that it was more colorful and more metallic paint. Before that, in the 00s, it was pure blobs. Before that it was all sharp edges etc. Now sharp edges are beginning to make a comeback. That's why I don't think we'll ever have the "one true design language". Fads and trends will continue, repeating themselves to a degree but also changing in new ways.
dayjah 4mo ago
I think homogeneity is an unavoidable end game for the internet (unfortunately). At work we’ve been discussing whether to migrate off our home grown component library to Material UI. I shudder at the thought, personally. However, a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product. Like many of us I was born into a deeply customizable Internet, all of my websites were green or red on black. They were a glorious amalgam of fixed width fonts and <blink> tags. With occasional wingdings characters for fun and games and complex <table>/<tr>/<td> tags for really epic layouts. They were l33t, honestly ^_^ But, as time goes on and more and more people use this thing, converging on the one-true-UX feels like a net good thing assuming the fundamentals are right. To some degree the LLM-ization of the Internet is essentially the end game of squashing the personality out of the Internet which bootstrap started. We’re on the cusp of spoken word being the core UX of computers with a fall back to reading the LLM transcript, neither of which benefits from <blink>

theturtletalks 4mo ago

It really comes down to first impression. Your website design is your company’s first impression. If the design is clean, people will believe the product is clean and robust as well. Similar to how people think things that cost more and probably high quality and better overall. As for this website, the best component is the ASCII animation in the hero and you can’t even copy that component. In fact, that nice ASCII hero is what gave me a good first impression to go thru all the components.

zevyoura 4mo ago
It's there: https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/ascii-hero https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/ascii-h...
- theturtletalks 4mo ago
  Ah it’s in the hero section, kind of scanned that section but had lost interest by that point
  - vasco 4mo ago
    So the thing that made you go through all the components didn't even hold your attention enough to make your argument true
    - theturtletalks 4mo ago
      I was on mobile and a lot of the pages are overflowing. After going thru half, it got a bit annoying. I actually keep a directory of all these tailwind/shadcn registry websites and this one drew me in more than others.
aaronharding 4mo ago
explain why Craigslist, temu, etc. are all popular then? :p

brightball 4mo ago

I use a Substack site for the conference that I run. The popup and subscribe buttons everywhere used to annoy me...but they work. Went from 0 to almost 1,000 subscribers on an otherwise low traffic site and it's by far the best way to reach people. https://carolina.codes https://carolina.codes

nwatson 4mo ago
I was in the Winston-Salem Flywheel coworking for eight years, good place. I hope the Greenvile site is as good.
- brightball 4mo ago
  Beautiful facility. They renovated the old Pepsi bottling plant. https://www.flywheelgreenvillesc.com/ https://www.flywheelgreenvillesc.com/
SpyCoder77 4mo ago
Another way to get a lot of traffic is getting the top reply to the top comment on the top hacker news post. Speaking of which... https://github.com/SpyC0der77 https://github.com/SpyC0der77

XorNot 4mo ago

Youtubes monetization guidelines also require it.

noisy_boy 4mo ago

My colleague vibe coded a website that looks exactly like this one. Everyone on the meeting loved it - they thought it was cool. These were IT people.

ceejayoz 4mo ago
The IT people know no one's really buying just off the flashy website alone - because they don't! - and that it'll get management to okay it.

sgsvnk 4mo ago

There are 2 kinds of people- people who understand tech and people who use tech, in the ratio 1:9 (or even lower?). For the 90%+ people who like using fancy tech and feel smart/intelligent, the bling on your landing page is necessary.