It's a personal blog made for fun. Both features made me smile. What's the problem? The kind of attitude you're displaying here just depresses me. Makes me lose faith in humanity.

The problem for me (not parent) is that it is distracting to the point where I gave up reading the article. I have ADD, and it just made it impossible for me to focus on the content, which is unrelated to whether or not I may find it amusing as an idea.

Edit: and yes, I could've used Reader Mode of course, but I didn't think of it at the time.

At the very least it should be toggleable. It's distracting and impedes readability.

Ostensibly, the goal of writing a blog post is for others to read it.

Literally ALL major browsers support reader mode nowadays.

Reader mode is much much more than just "turn off other people's pointers".

Makes it even better, yes.

Chrome's "reader mode" sucks.

Advertising company’s browser makes it hard to remove advertising: news at 11.

Don’t use Chrome then.

It is.

Use reader mode in your browser.

I personally don't think it should be toggleable, it is their choice how to setup their site. You eigther like or you don't.

But you can easily remove the dom element that displays the cursors if the content is interesting to you and the cursors are the only thing preventing you from reading it..

In a perfect world it would respect the user's motion preference (maybe it does?)

It does not.

It's just distracting. I didn't read to the end because it got so annoying. Now I don't give you any shit if you want to do fun shit on your private blog (hell mine was only accessible via telnet for quiet some time) but don't expect people to not be annoyed. :)

Everything is annoying to somebody. Software doesn't have to always be optimized to minimize annoyances. Sometimes it's just fun to optimize it for your own amusement, and a personal blog (which this is) gets a pass from me.

>Everything is annoying to somebody. Software doesn't have to always be optimized to minimize annoyances.

This is just not true, but in any case, don't get your point. The author has all the right to add anything to his blog, it's just that a lot of people will find it annoying and will stop reading, like some people mentioned here.

If the author thinks the cursors are worth the people not reading the actual content, then good for him.

And by the same token many will find it the signature of a distinct and memorable personality and be more likely to recall it over the long term. If they like adding quirks that create a lasting impression to a subset of people, good for them!

> This is just not true

Which part? The second sentence is just my opinion, and you're free to disagree. :)

My point is that somebody will always find reasons for not wanting to read an article. Whether that's because they don't like the color scheme, font, or any other style choice. You can't please everyone with design. I think we can agree that that statement is objectively true.

So given that, a personal blog is the right place to do whatever pleases the author the most, instead of optimizing for metrics that impact engagement, or whatever nonsense KPIs developers are asked to optimize for in their day job. People interested in the content can always choose to consume it however they prefer instead (thankfully, the web is still open in this sense). In this case you can disable JavaScript, use reader mode, a custom stylesheet, or any other barebones browser instead. Considering this article is directed at a technical audience, any of these should work for you.

Hard agree. Always prioritize efficiency and standardization over everything else. The era of "personal touch" and "fun" is over.

No it's not. This is a personal blog and you are just being a software Karen in someone's back yard.

It gave me the feeling I was being observed, and I didn't like that, so I just skimmed the article and closed it as soon as possible.

It's fun if I want to have fun on the site. Not when I'm trying to read a technical article. I left half way through.

Yeah it's fun. I chased other peoples cursors

The blog looked like something discussing an important topic for the owner and not primarily for entertainment.

People lost their bearing about if and when stupid visuals ruin or not their message, derail attention. And they stopped caring as well. They just want to make something funny looking, this is a primary motivation, coming up with stupid ideas and pushing it anywhere and everywhere. I belive this is a problematic attitude in the age of pretension. Which made me to loose my faith in humanity.

For me it's simply that I don't care about the opinions of anyone who thinks this is a fun feature to overlay their text content. On a front-page or experimental sub-page? Sure. On an article? I'm done.

Might make me a killjoy but there's a time and place for everything.

The problem is that it's annoying. I agree with the first post, I am not going to read this while flies are moving in my screen. Besides, if those are other people's cursors, that's kind of creepy.

If you lose faith in humanity because of this, you should look into it.

This is the same HN that complains about the demise of the "simple internet". It was filled with things like this!

I think is the goofiest and most lovely feature. It gave me a weird sense of community presence while reading (and most people keep their cursors off the text anyway)

I kept drawing "hello" hoping for a reply.

I'm sorry we let you down :(

First thought: Mouse is dying. Came to read the comments to see what's up when I spotted all the other cursors. Interesting mind fuck.

This being HN, I doubt people are reading this on an iPad during working hours on a Tuesday across half the world.

I first saw it on https://dimden.dev, the creator of https://nekoweb.org

The feature is really fun and fitting on dimden's page; it's really distracting on this blog