It's like when a Youtuber's audience complains about how they're constantly asking you to subscribe. The reason it happens is because the statistics say it works.

As for this website, the best component is the ASCII animation in the hero and you can’t even copy that component. In fact, that nice ASCII hero is what gave me a good first impression to go thru all the components.

Temu offers people the ability to save money. If your product is "X, but cheaper" you can have a worse UI than X.

There is a reason why landing pages don't use distraction.

As a platform lead and product lead with millions of customers, be assured that you are not your customer. Never ever think of you as the focus of your website if you want to have success in business.

If you want to sell or marked and money as well as the slightest bit of seriousness is involved, you have to follow industry standards and never your own taste which is highly misleading.

Boring first is a good statement and principle to follow. Always track and A/B. There is a reason why all landing pages look the same kinda, and at least follow a certain structure.

Any deviation from it won't help you, even though you personally enjoy your personal website. You would be surprised what other visitors think about your website, how they perceive it, use it, and I mean literally everything: browser size, smartphone model, screen size, scrolling, click behavior, colors - everything.

I am so glad the psychology of online sales has matured. It is in everybody's interest to work in a trustworthy environment and using the right approach signals a company acknowledges and appreciate its customers.

I learned it the hard way, but got the lesson. I am totally different. I find many landing pages fishy, while they are the most successful there are, and like exploring on my own as well as fantastic animations.

On the other hand, I value the text only principles of everything serious from archivex and Pubmed. I am a developer fist, who loves animations sind decades. But this is bad for business. ;)

Note I'm not arguing that this is a good strategy. But given that so many people follow it I imagine it's not as bad as it appears on the surface.

They do the same with cars, where it's even more important and even more explicit. The design language has to change every couple years so that you can tell when somebody is driving a car older than 5 or so years. For example, currently we're doing blobs but with a few sharp features and muted colors. Before that it was more colorful and more metallic paint. Before that, in the 00s, it was pure blobs. Before that it was all sharp edges etc. Now sharp edges are beginning to make a comeback.

That's why I don't think we'll ever have the "one true design language". Fads and trends will continue, repeating themselves to a degree but also changing in new ways.

At work we’ve been discussing whether to migrate off our home grown component library to Material UI. I shudder at the thought, personally. However, a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product.

Like many of us I was born into a deeply customizable Internet, all of my websites were green or red on black. They were a glorious amalgam of fixed width fonts and <blink> tags. With occasional wingdings characters for fun and games and complex <table>/<tr>/<td> tags for really epic layouts. They were l33t, honestly ^_^

But, as time goes on and more and more people use this thing, converging on the one-true-UX feels like a net good thing assuming the fundamentals are right. To some degree the LLM-ization of the Internet is essentially the end game of squashing the personality out of the Internet which bootstrap started.

We’re on the cusp of spoken word being the core UX of computers with a fall back to reading the LLM transcript, neither of which benefits from <blink>

Not that I disagree with you, but I'll also offer a tradeoff.

When people expect to pick up your app intuitively, it can also just mean them using the app absent-mindedly, which can mean them skipping the manual and jumping straight to trying to tie up the support lines. Whereas if your ui asks for a user's full focus up front, yes there are downsides to that but they're also more engaged.

It’s the same game we play verbally with slang. Slang word gets made up, people use it so others know they’re in the group that uses the slang, usage spreads until it’s no longer a group indicator. You see it all the time as an age grouping. You can almost guess someone’s age by the slang they use for “good” (cool, lit, bussin, etc).

This is the same. Startups invent a new UI style to separate themselves from the incumbents, incumbents eventually copy the style, cycle repeats.

It isn't that we have a "preference" for these things, it is far more likely that a user just doesn't have their guard up 100% of the time, and these psychological manipulations are designed to cut through that.

Sure, these strategies probably net clicks, but they aren't from people who "chose" your product, they are clicks from people who were manipulated into clicking.

I suppose whether you think that is okay depends on your industry and ethics.

A stated preference isn't necessarily current or situational (I will choose to run instead of watching another 45 minutes of Youtube videos).

A situational preference is often inertia, and behavioral marketing will directly hinder the meta cognitive processes that usually give us the agency to override our default mode choices (John has been on YouTube for the last 20 minutes, what next suggestion is not likely to keep him there?)

Two agents with two different utility functions fighting each other, it's an adversarial relationship/game.

The fight is for your limited attention span.

Clickbaity titles or least informative ones, 20min of rambling for what could've been a 2min video or article, spreading the meat of the info in the later half of the video for better retention instead of the beginning, highly misleading previews at the beggining, etc ... are good for the content producer but not so much for the content viewer that has to sift through it only to reliaze that didn't care about that particular thing.

Not limited to videos, but also things to buy the meat of the technical/practical description of the product get worse and worse each year and the other proxy signals for them too.

Seems like marketing is a lot like military conflict drown the enemy in lot of noise to drop the SNR.

what's that you want to buy a 4k video projector and set a filter for it? here it is for cheaper. Oh, you wanted the actual dots on the wall resolution to be 4k instead of max supported input signal, oops.

You're used to higher price meaning better quality? guess we'll flood that price point with shitier quality progressively until we find your limit

Youtube is a perfectly "unbiased" "democratic" repository, where crazy people shouting conspiracies and prize-winning documentaries have the same thumbnail and half-line of text for you to discover if they are any good.

https://carolina.codes

https://www.flywheelgreenvillesc.com/

They can configure it to use all lowercase letters, skip em-dashes, make grammar mistakes, stop saying "it's not X, it's Y", or whatever, yet the content itself just has a fake quality to it that makes it stand out, which is why those comments still get flagged IMO.

It's really strange... I see some text with obvious tropes and sometimes I read something and there's no obvious AI trope... but it's just not human?

Exactly, that's a great way to describe it.

Unless the YT comments I've read have been bots since forever.

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy

For example, "you" was originally the formal form of the second person pronoun, and thee or thou the informal form. Many writers who try to write midieval period pieces tend to get this wrong though and just use thee or thou as a direct replacement for "you."

And then English spelling and pronunciation is just chaotic anyway.

I won't go out of my way to misspell things and I'll do my best to use the best grammar and spelling I can, but I'm not going to consult an llm or grammarly to make sure it'll get no notes from an English teacher when my only purpose is to comment on HN or write a quick update on slack.

Extremely Minimalist example: https://k.nyc/

* https://codeberg.org/growler/k/pulls/

* https://codeberg.org/growler/k/issues

User @growler writes in succinct sentences and uses only periods.

I'm having fun with the idea, in my head, that using array languages changes how you speak and write.

HN commenters have also pointed out the peculiar way ngn/k writes C:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31362512

But yeah it’s a very peculiar kind of Zen, all-encompassing.

you're literate smart... poetic; because

you read e.e.cummings

and william carlos

williams

...

fin.

this

style of

"poetry"

  rupi.
  
  without substance,
  
  but words
  aligned —
  
  on a  
  page.

https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

  <meta name="GENERATOR" content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.18828"></head>
  <body link="#800080" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000080" vlink="#ff0000"><b><font size="6">
  <p align="center">B</font><font size="4">ERKSHIRE </font>

Before mobile browsers arrived, everything was fine and nobody needed meta viewport stuff. That's why this 1997 era page doesn't have it.

Everything was fine best viewed in IE5.5 at 1024x768. Time has changed.

Who mentioned JavaScript?

Haha, this webpage on the inter network is amazing

IMO this is like judging landscaping companies for all using similar looking shovels.

Joking about something tends to require an interconnected understanding of it

When in Rome!

I remember chunked transfer encoding shipped in 1997. It's been possible since then to readily and easily stream bytes of text or chunks of html the way everyone sees LLMs do today.

I used this to write a web based telnet client in 1997, and later a text moo / chat for the web. In both cases used a frameset so your line to send was at bottom of screen, the incoming lines were server-sent as things happened server side, and scrolled the client as new lines came in.

There were other things you could abuse before that, but less reliable.

But yeah, talk about things nobody used....

Some people just like to feel superior by shaming others' work. You can easily tweak the visual output if you want to, but it's good enough for most use cases and better than what developers used to produce.

So, it's progress.

And I'm gonna be honest, I kind of want to use a few of these components for real (the ASCII art is fantastic).

Claude: “In react, make a full screen component that renders pixel squares that fade in and accumulate over a page component, taken as a target prop.”

Stupid crap like that. What’s cool is for those fullscreen tutorials or app walkthroughs, this works REALLY well to highlight the box on screen.

Feels similar to the move away from realism to impressionism as the camera became available.

The web browser APIs are in a great state nowadays.

I am torn between respect and terror.

Also, I'm curious as to when the animated gradient text started being a popular thing. I started doing it back in 2021 or so. I think I was inspired by some of Apple's webpages at the time.

https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/blob/main/research/

Personally I barf when I come across a website that looks like this and close it immediately. It's about as appealing as stock images. I also immediately think that this is for a SAAS that will be bog-slow, expensive and only integrates with github.

P.S.: The popover description is brilliant:

> The obtrusive newsletter modal every AI startup deploys. Takes over the entire viewport with a blurred backdrop. By design, neither the Escape key nor backdrop clicks close it; the visitor either submits the form inside or clicks the tiny dismissal link at the bottom. Pair with `timer` to auto-open after the visitor has skimmed a few paragraphs.