In case the author is reading, I can't read your article because of that animation at the bottom. I get it, it's cute, but it makes it too distracting to concentrate on the article, so I ended up just closing it.

I've never seen something so egregious before, it made it impossible to read without covering it with my hand.

But I realized something by attempting to read this article several times first.

If I ever want to write an article and reduce peoples ability to critically engage with the argument in it I should add a focus pulling animation that thwarts concerted focus.

It's like the blog equivalent of public speakers who ramble their audience into a coma.

It's downright awful and I'm having a hard time imagining the author proof reading their own page and thinking "yeah, that's great".

As an aside, I have an article in my blog that has GIFs in it, and they're important for the content, but I'm not a frontend developer by any stretch of the imagination so I'm really at wit's end for how to make it so that the GIFs only play on mouse hover or something else. If anybody reading has some tips, I'd love to hear them. I'm using Zola static site generator, and all I've done is make minor HTML and CSS tweaks, so I really have no idea what I'm doing where it concerns frontend presentation.

Agreed, and the fact that there is not an easy "x" to close it is even worse.

If you want to do something cute and fun, whatever its your site. But if you actually want people to use your site make it easy to dismiss. We already have annoying ads and this is honestly worse than many ads.

Also, from the bio that I can barely see he writes about "UI Design" and... included this?

I read the article but that animation was incredibly distracting. I don't even understand what it's for - clicking it does nothing. Best guess is a representation of how many people active on page.

Give in to the noJS movement, there's no animation and it's a beautiful minimalistic site if you disable javascript

I'll also add that the "night mode" is obnoxious as hell anyway.

Inverted colours would've been _mostly fine._ Not great, but mostly fine, but instead, the author went out of their way to add this flashlight thing that's borderline unusable?

What the hell is this website?

As someone who does like tonsky’s stuff sometimes: I immediately closed the article when I saw it. I’m less charitable than you: it’s not cute, it’s just annoying, and it should be able to be switched off. For me it goes into the same box as his “dark mode” setting but it’s worse because it can’t be disabled. Why should I, as the reader, put in effort to overcome something the author found “cute” just to read their words? It’s akin to aligning the words to the right, or vertically: I can read it but it’s so much work that I’d rather just not.

On sites like that, I typically just switch to "reader view" which the leaves only the interesting content.

The animation? For me it was the blinding yellow background

It also covers a whole 1/4 of the screen on mobile...

Reader mode. Don't leave home without it.

Every time something from this website is shared, this topic comes up. It's one of those things where you can't tell whether it's genius or madness. Either way, I'm pretty sure the design is deliberate(ly obnoxious).

Even worse, it exposes the city all viewers within the HTML, even if the country code is only displayed on the webpage.

Obviously, the server gets your IP when you connect but ideally it doesn't share that with all visitors. This isn't as bad as that, still concerning.

12 years later, https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ is still super useful.

Yes is horrible, this idea.

Wow, that's one of the most abhorrent web designs I've ever seen

I did document.querySelector('#presence').remove();

I wonder if it respects prefers-reduced-motion, though I don't know if I have that set in my browser, I do have it set with my OS.

My favorite websites are the weird ones that make people complain about stuff.

To all people in this sub thread: suggestion to try reader mode.

In addition, the solid yellow background is another readability impediment.

Same here, I also closed it within a few seconds.

Thanos snap it if you’re using ios

When I saw the yellow background, I knew this is the website where I read the Unicode article [1]. Sure it is. With great pain I finished it.

I mean, just the fact that the background is yellow is a terrible UX decision. Not to mention that ridiculous "dark mode". No, it's not funny. It's stupid and distracting.

[1] https://tonsky.me/blog/unicode/

In ublock origin

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