> when it's done well

It's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful.

Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain.

And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to have it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".

It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time.

The web is already slow. No need to deliberately spend effort to make it even slower.

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MoonWalk 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time."

And this is what people have become way, WAY too tolerant of. The deliberate theft of customers' time. While this is obviously a very minor example, there are lots and lots of others that aren't.

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stefanfisk 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agree 100%!

I’m a fast scroller and skimmer. Info scroll down and the text is not there I’ll just assume that the site is shot and close it. Ain’t nobody got 200ms to wait for a god damn fade in when there’s an infinite amount of sites out there to discover.

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arcfour 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't have a strong opinion either way on the effect, but I do have to say that I always find it amusing how fatalistic HN can sometimes be over the most minor cosmetic inconveniences, couching them as "wasting (large amounts of) humanity's time" and "disrespecting people" as if we're talking about something far more serious than little animations on a webpage.

I mean, you might not like it, and that's fair and understandable, but is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.

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knorker 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, like the other commenter I would just close the page instead of enduring it.

But yes, in fact if this page succeeds then it's wasting human life on things as productive as spam phone calls. People have solved the latter by simply not answering for unknown numbers.

Not sure what you mean by "fatalistic". To the point where I'm not sure that's the word you mean. It's fatalistic as in fate. Maybe you mean morbid?

Standing in line at the DMV is also all "counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all"? But even at the DMV it's (hopefully) not done maliciously.

> cosmetic inconveniences

Sometimes things suck. That's not remotely as frustrating as knowing that someone went out of their way to make your life worse.

> is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.

If we capped all laptop CPUs to 600MHz, would it really be that big of a deal? Maybe they did it because of the acoustic preference of not needing to spin the fans as much, and therefore you are not allowed faster CPUs?

	▲	arcfour 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They didn't go out of their way to make your life worse. They went out of their way to design something they thought you would like, but you didn't like it.

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slopinthebag 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".

This is the wrong conclusion. The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero - much different from stealing 1 day from 38 people or 1 hour from 912.

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smohare 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]