Really great design.

This is the unicorn of fancy websites because for once, it actually makes sense to override browser's standard scrolling behavior. The 30-minute timeline on the right provides an obvious context for what you're navigating with the scroll actions, and you wouldn't be able to do that with a regular scrollbar.

Usually scrolling overrides happen because the designers' mindset was that the site should be a sequence of beautiful slides. They might prototype it as a Keynote presentation that is approved by management. And then some poor web developer gets tasked with building a site that feels like the Keynote slide show that everyone loved, and the only way to do that is to turn scrolling into an annoying "next slide" action.

Took me a really long time to realize that I should scroll. Because why would I? There is absolutely no indication that there is anything to scroll to.

I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.

So I assumed it was a podcast, re-checking that I had audio on etc. But nope, so I checked another browser. Same there... Then I read HN comments, ah ... Great design? ...

I don't mind designers overriding when they take meticulous care to craft a better tailored experience. But once I scrolled past the initial content I found the site a UI disaster. Not long after it said "Pick a person to explore", I wanted to tap a particular box to read one of their conversations, and couldn't figure out how to bring any dialog up. I wound up scrolling further down afterward to see if that was how to trigger some dialog for my selection, and all the boxes started moving around at seemingly random, performance tanked and the whole thing got stuttery. I couldn't scroll back to where I was or find that box again that I was interested in. I left in frustration. Design fail, as far as this user's encounter.

It's not great design. It's a dirty hack that might work for some people, but is a non-standard practice that abuses JavaScript to achieve a certain effect. Overriding scrolling behavior might work if you're scrolling with a mouse or trackpad at a consistent speed, that that might even work for a majority of the site's visitors, but for others it breaks. If you press the PageDown key to get to the next page, it doesn't work. If you scroll half a page down using another key combination, it doesn't work. If you use a text-based browser, it doesn't work. I didn't test it using a screen reader or other types of browsers, but I can't imagine it would work that well there, either.

I'm with you and I actually love these "special scrolling" websites. They are much closer to a truly work of art exactly because of the different design.

To the haters: why do we have churches or buildings with marble statues in the walls or column instead of a standard stone wall, which was designed to do the job in a standard way?

It's interesting but I hated this design * 1000. I would prefer a white page with purely black text than this horrible override of the scrolling behavior and images and text flying around, this sort of design makes me feel literally nauseous and I had to click away not even 5% through this page.

It's so much harder to concentrate on content like this, it's distracting, confusing, gives me brain fog etc.

I found it only slightly worse than not overriding the standard scrolling behaviour. Any time a site remains usable despite this sort of UX intervention we can consider that a win.

But here the timeline gives the scroll a clear purpose