(sarcasm)

It's revenge against anyone with certain kinds of visual impairments and/or concentration issues because the ex-spouse of the author which turned out to be a terrible person had such.

(sarcasm try 2)

It's revenge against anyone using JS on the net with the author trying to subtle hint that JS is bad.

(realistic)

It's probably on of:

- the website is a static view of some collaborative tool which has that functionality build in by default

- some form of well intended but not well working functionality add to the site as it was some form of school/study project, in that case I'm worried about the author suffering unexpected very much higher cost due to it ending up on HN ...

Hi, author here. In case you really want to know: no, it’s custom-made and works exactly as intended. There are two main reasons:

1. Fun. Modern internet is boring, most blog posts are just black text on white background. Hard to remember where you read what. And you can’t really have fun without breaking some expectations.

2. Sense of community. Internet is a lonely place, and I don’t necessarily like that. I like the feeling of “right now, someone else reading the same thing as I do”. It’s human presence transferred over the network.

I understand not everybody might like it. Some people just like when things are “normal” and everything is the same. Others might not like feeling of human presence. For those, I’m not hiding my content, reader mode is one click away, I make sure it works very well.

As for “unexpectedly ended up on HN”, it’s not at all unexpected. Practically every one of my general topic articles ends up here. It’s so predictable I rely on HN to be my comment section.

I like your content but I do think you need to rethink #1. Fun is usless if no one wants to show up because they are annoyed.

Count me too to the group of "I was so distracted that I stopped reading."

Then the second thought was: I should again start to block js by default as much as I can.

2. I only understood that it was actual other people's mouse cursors when I read that here. So it didn't really engender a sense of community, although after some time I did think you are very good at modelling actual human mouse movements. Now that I know it, it's pretty neat though.

Same. I didn't realize it was other people until I came here. Then... I went back to the page and had fun trying to follow other people's cursors.

The author has several other writeups:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The cursors will only be a problem during front page HN traffic. And the opt-out for people who care is reader mode / disable js / static mirror. Not sure if there's any better way to appease the fun-havers and the plain content preferrers at the same time. Maybe a "hide cursors" button on screen? I, for one, had a delightful moment poking other cursors.

It's tracking every visitors' cursor and sharing it with every other visitor.

Why would a frontend developer demonstrate their ability to do frontend programming on their personal, not altogether super-serious blog? I meant that rhetorically but it's a flex. I agree, not the best design in the world if you're catering for particular needs, but simple and fun enough. You should check out dark mode.

In that vein, I think it's okay if we let people have fun. That might not work for everyone, but why should we let perfect be the worst enemy of fun?

> Why would

because it shows that they don't understand important design aspects

while it doesn't really show off their technical skills because it could be some plugin or copy pasted code, only someone who looks at the code would know better. But if someone care enough about you to look at your code you don't need to show of that skill on you normal web-site and can have some separate tech demo.

I assume the creator didn't anticipate this amount of readers at the same time and having one or two other cursors on the page does sound fun and not too distracting. They should probably limit the maximum amount of other cursors displayed to a sensible amount

Not every website, even technical ones, need to have an eye towards professional advancement. Sometimes they're just for fun. I welcome it, as it's a thing that gets more rare on the web as time goes by.

Considering the dark mode is effectively flashlight mode, I think it's reasonable to assume the blog's owner just likes to have a bit of fun.

Lighten up.

> people don't get hired to have fun

Living by that motto is hugely self-destructive.

Creative expression allows us to push ourselves, both in what we think we can do, and often the technical aspects about how we do it too. Even if the idea doesn't stick, you've tried something new.

In a world of Tailwinds and Bootstraps and the same five templates copied again and again and again, let's celebrate the people willing to push things and learn from their inevitable but ultimately valuable mistakes. And let's have some fun along the way.

I don't know what you people are talking about. I'm just glad I always browse with Javascript turned off. If you didn't see the writing on the wall and permanently turn Javascript off around 2006, you have no right to complain about anything.

Meanwhile, ironic irony is ironic: "Hey, idiots! Learn to use Unicode already! Usability and stuff! Oh, btw, here is some extremely annoying Javascript pollution on your screen because we are all still children, right? Har har! Pranks are so kewl!!!1!"

Are you alright?

I stopped in the middle of reading the post just for this. It was so distracting I was unable to focus on the text. It's a fun gimmick, but the result is that someone who wanted to read the post, stopped in the middle.

I got a good laugh out of it.