I thought I was the only one with this habit hah!
IMHO this "close modal when clicking outside of it" is a UX pattern you need to be careful with in general, because it's easy to "miss" a click and accidentally close something, even without this habit. It's okay for some things that are truly temporary (i.e. delete confirmation dialogs and the like), but clearly not everything.
But hey, old.reddit.com still works, and is mostly okay.
> I don't click a cursed en.m.wikipedia link by accident
I got this extension to automatically redirect them: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ – also useful for some other things like redirecting Reddit to old.reddit.com, and PostgreSQL documentation links to /current/ rather than /9.4/ and such which still frequently show up in search results.
Nope. I think I would gladly institute capital punishment for people who institute pop-ups on highlighted text. "Oooh, you highlighted a passage of text, would you like to tweet it (with a link to source and user tracked)?"
No. I was reading that. ** off.
Outlook.com is particularly as depending on my random clicks I can end up with "new email + quote" or "new Note" or some other thing.
Some things I've managed to murder with adblock rules but really I'd just like my browser to not show the relevant triggers.
In addition to highlighting and "painting" the text, I often click and drag the highlighted text around. If some text is dragged onto the code view in Firefox, the dropped text seems to be treated like URLs, and opened either in new tabs or in the current tab.
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/uploads/666d09080e20ea8...
Alternatively, if you feel like rebuilding Firefox yourself, it looks like nsBaseDragService.cpp _might_ help you with preventing stuff from being dropped anywhere; I haven't read the whole file, but going by the name, overriding aCanDrop and mCanDrop to false might help. See lines 62, 84, 92. This _might_ allow you to continue dragging stuff around but disable dropping stuff.
[1]: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/nsBaseDr...
But yeah, my wife will go batshit when trying to read the same thing over my shoulder. "Just stop, I can't read when you do that"
With a well curated selection of subreddits (and removal of a lot of the "default" ones) it's actually really good. My brain naturally starts going "these links aren't really interesting anymore" after 100-200 links, and I task switch as a result.
I hate squarespace with a passion for this. I'll be loading a forum or other page and hit esc to stop the page from loading. It works--but a few seconds later, it prompts me to log into the CMS/management.
As far as modals go, I actively want modals to respond to esc. I don't want to have to reach for my mouse to close a pop-up. Modal popups are the only thing that should hijack esc.
WHYYYyy
Nooooo they do not do this. If they did, modern UIs wouldn't confuse my elderly parents much worse than old ones did.
Dear all tech companies (but looking at you, Google, since they won't stop buying cheap Android phones): every time you decide to have some full-screen horseshit notification pop up on an action, instead of doing the usual thing (say, a "hey, update this for new stuff!" thing) I get a fucking phone call to help "fix it". Goddamn stop it, the rest of us hate that too (my intent was to open the app to do something, so don't get in my way) but it's usability poison for the olds.
That includes those new tabs in Firefox every time there's an update. It's confusing. Stop it. Oh, and FF, bring back normal-ass menus, because my parents (unfortunately) use Windows. Browsers have proven Apple right all along with forcing the top-of-screen "file, edit, view..." menu, since apparently even major vendors can't be trusted to do the sane thing with those instead of cramming it all in some mysterious kitchen-sink button-opened dropdown.
Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value.
I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.
It doesn't work like that. Stratechery explains why. Aggregators aggregate users and even power users like to talk to/be listened to by a lot of people.
So Twitter and Youtube and the like don't even need to target power users, in general. They need to target the greater population, and once that population is captive, if you want to have any kind of audience as a publisher, you're wrangled to where the users are, you're captive, too.
Apple does the same thing with devs. They primarily target not super sophisticated middle to upper class users with decent disposable incomes. Since they "own" a huge amount of these users, developers have to build applications for them if they want to make money. And then developers are second class citizens on Apple platforms. Apple removes an API overnight? Better get cracking to fix your app ASAP. Apple doesn't support modern CI/CD platforms? Have Amazon stack up consumer desktops in a warehouse to kind of work around that.
I have experienced it myself, and anyone else can theorize all they want, but they can't invalidate my experience.
As an example, I can no longer use YouTube for tutorials, because they have no dislike signal visible to me, and as such, I can't judge whether they are worth watching.
I can not stand Reddit's new UI. But even with the old UI, the massive amount of users attract a lot of heavy-handed moderation, which also turn me off. I use it for "entertainment" and not "research" or "speech".
Even though HN has much fewer users, it is among the few platforms where I can use it for real speech, like deep insight.
Many platforms have such a low signal-to-noise ratio that I am wasting my time on them, and don't find them useful for neither entertainment nor speech. I don't care what Stratechery says I like, when clearly I know myself better.
Hopefully this doesn't make me some kind of elitist or something, but I specifically never link to Hacker News or mention it on my social media accounts because I don't want HN to become "watered down" like so many previously high-value content sites/forums have been over the decades. I'll just share the linked article if I want to share something I found here.
Endless scrolling is an explicit rejection of skeuomorphism.
Old UIs were designed exactly in the way you describe. And old people liked them. The traditional desktop experience has never really been dethroned.
> and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood
Y'all, with your expert knowledge, know there's a dialog element in HTML, right?
I'm not one of those people who paints but this has got me so many times. Honestly I'm not even one of the people that hates the redesign (Admittedly because I spend less time there now) but that has dinged me so many times. Why is everything a modal?
The "This page looks better in the app" message on mobile is a well earned diss aimed at their web designers
+1 on reddit "modal" bs, i don't paint, but simply like to click shit from time to time. it's horrible.
+1 on rage quitting bullshit sites out of disgust.
Quora used to be good. A place where you can ask any question and if it was interesting enough, interesting people answer. Like a good question about wikipedia, made Jimmy Wales answer directly.
But over time it all became very generic and force login to read anything, made me not visit at all anymore.
All these projects show we're patently far from the only ones who get driven up the fucking wall by absolutely brain-dead design being pushed over the user's wishes.
My old mentor used to do this too, and I really never understood why. Since then, I have seen others do it too, occasionally. It looked more like a fidget than anything helpful. I once tried it just to see if this was some hidden technique I was missing out on, but I didn't notice anything particularly helpful - it didn't help me keep focused on the text or anything, and it distracted me personally.
I'm very curious what the benefit is, or at least the reason? From an apparent lizard brain :)
The whole point of modals is to enable the user to close them by clicking outside of them. So this way if you want to show new users something like an onboarding tutorial, they can just click outside of the modal if they are like "WTF is this??", rather than needing to look for the close button. The fact that many people abuse them doesn't negate the fact that they are, if used correctly, actually a better experience for the user.
I'll often click and close out of a thread just by trying to get focus back on the window so I can scroll down, and its annoying as all hell.
So you think the standard should be to keep a video playing even if one's scrolled past it? Are you insane?
Autoplaying videos that stop playing after scrolling is one of the worst UX crimes in history of UX. At the same time in 2022 I still cannot prevent "autoplay" of animated gifs that bombard my senses in every feed unless I outright block literally everything other than text.
And the sad thing is that software quality in general is most likely just as bad, only not as visible.
For example, I doubt most people watching a video on YouTube would like the video to stop playing when they scroll down. If they wanted to pause it, they'd pause it. They also probably don't want the video to transition to the next, whilst they're reading threads.
If you're in an infinite loop stream however, you do probably want it to pause or stop, without intervention, as you've scrolled away and dismissed the video.
However - you may not want that to happen whilst you're still in-thread with the video. If you're looking at comments on the video, you probably still want it to continue. But if you reach the bottom of the thread, you probably don't want to have it pause and have to find the start of the thread to continue playing it, just because you scrolled an inch too far.
Personally I prefer it to pause, but I don't really watch many videos on Twitter
I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it. Oh and once I tried to use Quora. It asked me to log in before I even knew what kind of a website it is. Now I hate Quora with a passion even though I'm not even sure what kind of a website it is exactly. I can only imagine it's full of modals, infinite scroll and other features that makes my skin go green and pants purple.
So I only end up getting addicted to websites that are simple and old fashioned enough like HN and wikipedia (as long as I don't click a cursed en.m.wikipedia link by accident). Btw, on youtube each time I click subscriptions it defaults back to the grid view. I want a list. Monkey wants list! YOUTUBE AAAAAAARHGFHGHGHFFG-