0dana
And I say this not to be particularly rude, but as someone who literally did exactly this on a website once. The draft landing page had a bunch of multicolored drawers with text in them, and when I was done, I was like, “wait..... dammit.”
Went with a more standard landing page layout for the next draft and felt a lot better.
I read (or more likely heard on a podcast) about an experiment with mice and a food dispensing button. In one case, the button reliably dispensed food every time it was pressed. In the other case, sometimes the button wouldn’t work. The mice with the reliable button didn’t do anything odd. Whenever they were hungry, they would hit the button for some food. The mice with the unreliable button however would repeatedly hit the button, and they ended up being overweight.
My feeling is that if EVERYTHING on something like HN was super interesting, we’d only be here when we were up for some interesting reads. But the fact is, not everything is. But the possibility that something EXTRA interesting might pop up keeps us coming back in an addictive type of way.