It's the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it's much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression.
You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There's also the interesting effect that people will give you their innermost secrets, knowing you won't tell anyone (I actually met a serial killer who did this, heh). For instance I was on a long haul flight earlier this year, and my neighbour told me everything about her divorce. Like a kind of therapy.
I also find when I have a real disagreement with someone, it's a lot easier when you're face-to-face. For instance, I have friends who are religious, in a real way, ie they actually think there's a god who created the earth and wants us to live a certain way. Being there in person keeps me from ridiculing them like I might on an internet forum, but it also keeps them from condemning me to hell.
So folks, practice talking to people. Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.
Online, it feels like we're all half-performing for an invisible audience, so the incentives skew toward snark or point-scoring. In person, there's no scoreboard, just two humans trying to get through the moment together
An interesting "control case" is random-chat websites like Omegle. I spent many many hours on that site before it shut down. Omegle pairs you up with a single random stranger, so there's no audience. I typically used it in text-only mode, so there's no face-to-face communication either.
I'd say my experience was closer to the "30 minutes with a stranger" study than it was to modern social media. It was fairly common for a conversation to degrade into insult-trading. But it was more common to have a deep, heartfelt conversation. (Oftentimes I felt like I should follow up with the person I talked to, but I rarely did so in practice, even when we traded contact information.)
Another interesting "control case" is Usenet. You mention the concept of point-scoring. The point-scoring metaphor is rather literal on a website like HN which has upvotes/likes/etc. Usenet didn't have that stuff, but I'm told it had flamewars nonetheless.
Surely some HN users reading this comment are old enough to remember Usenet. Was it better or worse than modern social media in terms of civility? I'm especially curious about Usenet after Eternal September, once small-group norm enforcement broke down, and the underlying characteristics of the platform shone through. If we score early Usenet as 10/10 for civility, and modern X or reddit as 0/10, what score would latter-day, post-AOL Usenet receive?
Another thought: It occurred to me that "point-scoring" could actually be less of an issue with pure-anonymity platforms like 4chan, since you have less of a persona to defend. I've barely used 4chan though, so I can't say much here.
The snark is not Internet specific. It comes from the top down, whether it's the talking heads on Fox News, your favorite podcast/streamer or popular Twitter posters. A few decades ago, it might have been popular opinion writers or radio personalities. This is how we learn to discuss things.
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I also find when I have a real disagreement with someone, it's a lot easier when you're face-to-face. For instance, I have friends who are religious, in a real way, ie they actually think there's a god who created the earth and wants us to live a certain way. Being there in person keeps me from ridiculing them like I might on an internet forum, but it also keeps them from condemning me to hell.
My life experience differs: I, for example, am likely more disagreeable in real life than on the internet. :-)
In internet forums, all answers are "delayed" (since you have to put them into a coherent text). Thus you rather have to think through your arguments, and thus react less on impulse (the impulse is typically already over when you have finalized your post). On the other hand, in real life, things that you strongly disagree with might trigger a very spontaneous emotional reaction.
Also, in internet forums, you want to "win internet points". Thus, you only tangentially write your arguments for the counterpart (who you will likely not convince), but more importantly to convince the many people who read your post. So your arguments are better well-thought and well-researched.
In real life, there is often no additional audience to appreciate and be convinced by "your great arguments" ;-) so it's an "all-or-nothing" to bring the truth to this ignorant being. Since the counterpart has such as "stupid" opinion, rational arguments are likely not the best way for this (because if the counterpart was capable of rational thinking, they would immediately see how "stupid" their opinion is ;-) ), so you better "hammer" your arguments into the counterpart. :-)
There's definitely an aspect of "dehumanization," when it comes to remote communication (not just the Internet, but I think store-and-forward leaches the most humanity, compared to realtime).
It's the having time to consider responses, that I think actually makes it more difficult to accept the person on the other end as "human," more than the physical separation. You can see this in formal debates, where the emotional feedback is strictly regulated.
I've actually met a number of killers (long story for another venue), and will probably continue to do so, for the remainder of my life. I even call some of them friends. I enjoy the story, and accept it as true, because I have heard much more unbelievable true stories.
I enjoy helping others, and I like hearing someone's life story. Not everyone needs to like that though, people are different.
Hearing the same story from the same person can be very tiring and I have family members like that, but with strangers it's a different person, different context, different story.
> You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me.
I guess it depends on your definition of wrong.
I feel the opposite, where it has never gone right. I can’t remember any actual interesting conversations I have had with strangers. I can remember a lot of bad, awkward, and boring ones, though.
Lots of context we're missing here obviously and we might not even be talking about the same thing but in what way were conversations you have had with strangers "bad"?
I agree, but another aspect is what’s lost in text. Even when I don’t have negative intentions, my messages can come across as rude or brash. I feel like I get more negative responses from my friends in the group chat compared to in person, where I’ve never had a single argument with them. In person, the recipient can see my smile and body language, which makes it clear that I don’t mean anything negative by my words.
When I was an intern in a small town, I took a trip to London. On my way back, I caught a cab from the provincial station to my house.
The cabbie seemed fun. We were talking about football. Just ordinary banter with a cab driver. Out of the blue, he asks me "hey mate, just for fun, what would you do if you'd murdered someone and had a dead body to dispose of?"
I was a bit surprised, but it's not that odd a thing to think about. People watch crime flicks all the time. But I hadn't thought much about it and gave a bland answer like "maybe dig a hole in the roadside, something like that". But I did think it was an odd switch in mood. He drops me off, end of that.
A few years later, I've graduated, I'm watching the news. A cab driver has been convicted of murdering multiple women, in the town I was in. Over the same period. He's buried the bodies in various places. I happened to run into a detective from the same town, to whom I explained my anecdote. He's pretty sure it's the same guy, but the cabbie has been sent down for life, so I wouldn't really be adding anything if I reported it.
> So folks, practice talking to people. Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.
If I had a penny for every bizarre theory people who ruin the world believe about who/what is actually ruining the world.
My favourite was an interview with Jerry Springer. He also had a theory of what's wrong in the current world and none of it had anything to do with what he did.
> My favourite was an interview with Jerry Springer. He also had a theory of what's wrong in the current world and none of it had anything to do with what he did.
FWIW, later in his life there are many findable examples of Jerry finding fault with what he did--since I recalled seeing him express mea culpas I took the time to give you this early (jocular) example from 2014 :
Well obviously. Someone saying that the world is "being ruined", and theorizing on the causes of the same, implies that the speaker is experiencing the world they inhabit as changing in a manner that's unacceptable to that person.
Nobody goes around thinking "people like me are making the world unlivable for people like me"; even if that's a useful and sometimes even a correct notion - what reason would anyone have to entertain it?
Beautifully said. I believe wholeheartedly that in real life, disagreements between two people hinge on an ability to disarm each other through charm and disposition. The less you know someone, and the more they appear to earnestly try to understand you - becoming heated and firing phasers just feels unbecoming; why would I perpetuate personal loneliness or ennui in a moment that is genuinely devoid of it?
> it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens
If you are talking about one on one with a stranger, then I can see that, yeah, but if you have worked with people, then you know it is a huge mess, creation of cliques, gossip, and all sorts of crap, including heavy pettiness, greed, jealousy / envy, and so on.
People become jaded dicks online. Rare good faith effort is punished by unassailable trolls, cynical jerks, etc. Makes it easy to become one of them because extending an olive branch is taken advantage of.
>Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness
Okay cool. How do we fix it? We don't have places to just "talk to people". Maybe some places still has a mall area, but most businesses discourage soliciting. So you're mostly asking people to pay to talk to strangers.
A part of this is behavorial, but the UX of life also kept pushing Gen Z onto the internet, the only "third place" left for them.
> Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff.
I really hate saying this, but I live in the Deep South and people here can quite repulsive under the veneer of manners. The amount of hate, anger towards people different from them, and just rampant racism is quite difficult to deal with. And these are things that get exposed when having these conversations.
I do as you suggest. But I'm always ready to just walk away from a conversation. There's no winning with these people and the moral injury you sustain by being in their presence is awful
Yes, moral injury. Thanks for giving me a new way to frame that experience.
The natural impulse to be sociable and get along with people combined with minor insecurity or social anxiety has led to social experiences that when I reflect on them, I can only cringe in shame at my timid response to some awful statements.
I learned the hard way that religion is something best left aside in discussions.
I am an absolute atheist, and I believe that people who are educated in science and are religions have some kind of mental illness. This is just too set the context :) I also used to be very active on radio about science vs religion.
First, people who are hard core religious may get off their way to cure you. I had people yelling in front of my house. I never saw physicists doing the same.
But that's a perk of the "atheism job" :)
I had something much worse happening to me. A friend of mine was religions, from a very religions family. We had long discussions and she gradually realized that her while world is going to shit when she discovered the insanity of religion. She got into a deep depression and tried to commit suicide. I was with her 7 years until she somehow snapped back to a normal life.
I never attempted to turn an individual anymore. Sure, general information about rational hygiene (religion, homeopathy, ...) but not on z 1:1 basis.
I'm increasingly convinced that social isolation is the single great social ill of our time. I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected. But so much of the hate simmering away like a pot about to boil over is the result of loneliness. The evidence on this is startingly clear.
In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction.
At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods.
Not everyone, but just having a role in society can be a major help for many people. The biggest crime of the modern era is the disposable human. You work for an anonymous corporation, that does some nonsense you can't even hope to understand, in exchange for currency, to support the basics of your existence.
You don't get to have any real status in that, for example In many places there was just one or two bread makers for the entire community. Baking bread isn't the most prestigious job, but you matter.
Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements
I accidentally ended up at a job in the ad-serving business for two years and this is so accurate. (Who knew "analytics" really meant "ad conversions"?) If there are entire product lines dedicated to blocking the thing you do, it's very demoralizing.
You can't afford to be alone in any society. Not in the monetary sense, but in the sense that it will make you depressed. The fact that many people don't realize this is troubling.
I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it.
A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now.
Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did not do a good job advertising:
- I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it
- It was that cheap on sale? Too bad I did not hear about it a week ago.
- DeVaughn’s closed!? I completely forgot about that restaurant. They had great food.
- Why didn’t anyone tell me earlier that there is a tool for easily finding a time for a meeting.
Advertising can be valuable. When done right, it does not have to be intrusive or annoying. This does not mean that every job provides value, but not knowing about something can cause people to feel negatively. Marketing is telling people about things.
I have a feeling that this is true, but my conclusion is the opposite.
If you are not the most agreeable person, but have money, you can afford to be alone - having money eases a lot of problems. On the other hand, if you are not the most agreeable person, but lack money, because you have to come to terms with other people, drama starts.
So, I would rather see the evidence on the side that a lot of social conflicts are rather a side effect of "lack of money" - people who are better left alone (and would love to) cannot afford to do this, and thus drama starts.
> Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements
Just to be clear: my work is different.
But if such a person doesn't do their duties, the implications are of course not immediate, but over some time this leads to a degradation of the stock of the respective company. So, a lot of people who invested (perhaps indirectly) into this company (e.g. for their pension scheme) would care.
> You work for an anonymous corporation, that does some nonsense you can't even hope to understand, in exchange for currency, to support the basics of your existence.
> loneliness is a perceptual phenomenon that represents a paradoxical component; it is not mitigated through proximity to others
It might be better described as alienation. Then we can fit it into Hannah Arendt's theory of fascism being caused by alienation.
In the modern world, that alienation is accelerated by social media and cost of living for those without assets, who pay the cost of inflation without benefiting from asset price inflation.
Everything is more hostile, more sectarian, and you also can't even afford anything, and also you are a bad person because you are a creepy 45 year old white man with a small dick, and you better stop looking at me like that.
I do wonder if this is really the same type of alienation that Arendt refers to.
I can understand how if you are afraid the neighbor is going to be an informant, you stop interacting. Public discourse breaks down and ideology takes hold.
This seems quite different to me than the type of alienation we are talking about in 2025 from online interactions. I am not sure alienation is really the right word in terms of isolation from a group. If anything the problems from social media are from too much interaction and too much political discourse.
I would say that is completely opposite to what Arendt was talking about.
I think it is the way "boredom" has quite a different meaning today than in 1990. While you can still be bored in 2025, I don't feel boredom the same way as in 1990 when none of my friends answered the phone and there was nothing on tv. 2025 boredom is more the lack of hyper stimulation and hyper novelty as opposed to the 1990 version of going through your "junk drawer" to find something again novel because you can't think of anything else to do. I can't even remember the last time I had junk drawer to even go through.
To me, alienation is philosopher's toy and they like to put what they don't like behind that word. It's been mostly used by Marxist philosophers rediscovering the "young Marx" to deal with the fact that the workers actually didn't seem that interested in a socialist revolution anymore (they have false consciousness !)
I am not saying this to invalidate what you are saying but would you care to explain how you think the problem described by parent (richer societies allow for more alone time thus loneliness) is better described by Arendt's concept of alienation ?
> In the modern world [...] Is it any surprise?
To me you are just describing a poverty and ideological tribalism but that still doesn't tell me what Arendt can do for us here
It's not just loneliness, it's that by being isolated you can make sweeping generalizations about other people, and fall for the hatefull narative.
When you actually and honestly communicate with people different than you, and are able yo understand them, you stop feeling that simplistic hate for them.
>When you actually and honestly communicate with people different than you, and are able yo understand them, you stop feeling that simplistic hate for them.
I find it to be exactly the opposite. It's much easier to believe someone is inherently good but just a bit misguided if you don't have to communicate with them and aren't personally affected by their "misguided" behavior.
This goes for other stuff as well, like if you're "ungrounded" by not actually observing/communicating with the thing you're judging, you can kind of just make up the perfect villain in your head and hate that
I guess same thing would go for extreme fears, like, you are so scared of something that you get even more scared of it because you know it's the scariest thing in the world, until you actually meet the thing you're scared of
From the research I have heard and seen on the subject, when people communicate with people different than themselves it can both help and hurt trust. The primary factor that I took from the research is that it depend on ethical values. If the two people are different but share ethical values, especially symbolic ones, then relationships tend to improve. If however people have different ethical values, then the results of such meeting tend to create more hostility and distrust. People can generally accept that people have different ethical values only if they don't need to actually see it.
Argument is a great way of forming relationships. The problem in modern times is that one person, typically the person such as yourself - endlessly confident in their flawless knowledge and determined to impose it on everybody, becomes belligerent when somebody doesn't simply graciously accept their impeccably perfect argument. That doesn't typically lead to good outcomes.
More generally, I think people have forgotten that two people - no less intelligent than the other - can see the exact same thing, evidence, or whatever else, and simply come to different conclusions.
Yes but i see argument as not about accepting that people come to different conclusions but actively trying to seek mutual understanding. There is a wrestling, a struggle, a fight to understanding, to communicating, that so many of us simply just run away from, and i believe it gets reinforced with cultural norms of avoidance and desire for "peace" instead of connection and deeper integration.
Agreed. I just let people talk and have for many years now, no matter how well I know the person. Someone might start talking about chem trails or maybe another conspiracy and I always entertain them for the most part. Here and there I might do a "have you thought about it this way, or that?", but other than that, there isn't much reason to argue/debate unless it's at work or something that actually matters in the grand scheme of things.
This is (one of) the reasons I prefer places where you can walk, bike, or take public transit to get around. It’s one of the only times of day I’ll see and maybe talk to people very different from myself. Though this is also fading as people are on their phones and have ear buds in.
I joined a gym for a few months last year partly because I thought it would be a great way to meet some people. BIG misread on my part. It turns out most public gyms around here have a strong "leave me the hell alone vibe." Essentially zero eye-contact. Pretty much everyone had earbuds in and I didn't bother them. I said "hello" to those without earbuds once in a while but only got a silent death glare in response. So I stopped doing that.
Here's an interesting thing to ponder - how would we be different if not for lockdowns making work from home somewhat normal?
The overnight disappearance of those loose connections you get in the workplace had a huge impact on my mental health. Life-altering. 5 years later, I split my time between remote tech consulting from an office I rent (to make sure I don't sit home all day) and a union-protected, but completely antiquated job from a career I left behind that I returned to mostly to be with people.
By 2025, things would have probably been the same both for society and me (lockdowns coincided with me turning 30), but the abrupt change was horrible.
Humans are moored to their social web: having to exist amongst others continually pulls you towards the average feelings/views/activities of the people you are connected to. Change is slow.
When humans become unmoored from this web through loneliness/isolation/alienation, they can freewheel and drift further from that average. This can be liberating! But if you don't re-connect, either with your previous web or a new one, there's nothing stopping you falling off the deep end; nothing to give you a little correction that keeps you "normal". Political extremism of various flavors, or identity crises founded in over-rumination, are what we see - but also innovation and removal of constraints. Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies relates. The social isolation moonshot is to break from convention and be a hero auteur, but the risk of failure is very high. Nullum magnum dementiae sine mixtura ingenium fuit.
Racism and tribalism were still present when we socialized more as a society. We still did all of the bad things. It’s just that we also socialized and formed kinships and families and institutions. We were connected in a social web.
I wonder how much of this is due to social media sites and how the choice to interact that way (where the medium is geared to show off shallow facets of our achievements or amplify polarized opinions) is robbing us from traditional ways of spending time together.
I know all my neighbours in my block who walk, cycle, or take the bus. Repeated interactions. The ones who take the elevator to the basement car park are the ones I never cross paths with.
I think your ordering is wrong, we don't need to spend time together anymore so we fall back to social media. I wonder how things would look like if we had social media on top of a more social world.
>I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected.
This seems wildly incompatible with the desire to not have social isolation.
I agree with the rest of your sentiment, but that is a really anti-social idea.
Also, what is "correct" today was not correct 50 years ago or might not be correct 50 years from now (just to pick some numbers, the time periods obviously vary). And so much of this is a product of when and where we were born and what we were taught growing up.
> if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected.
This was something I believed when I was 21, and then was corrected by time. There are very few instances where anyone needs to be corrected in a social setting. Learning to move on without demanding they accept your argument is hugely important.
Right now the solution that makes the most sense to me is intentional communities. If anyone reading this has experience living in one, I'd love to chat. Email is in profile.
> if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected.
Why is that? I may feel that somebody is wrong, and that may be correct, but it could also be incorrect. A priori, they are not less correct than you are. Then why do you need to go to them and tell them that what they think is wrong and what you think is right?
I'm glad that people don't do that all the time. I'm sure I meet lots of people every day that think I'm wrong on something. Sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly. If every time they would feel that I "need to be corrected", that would be terrible.
All three of those links are claiming right wing people are mentally ill.
Academics have all kinds of indirect theories for why people outside of academia don't agree with their politics. Ironically given the subject of the website, one thing they almost never do is just go outside of academia, sit down with people who disagree with them and talk to them as equals. They spam bot-filled websites like Mechanical Turk with surveys trying to prove things about the imaginary people in their own minds, and then publish "findings", but they don't actually talk to people.
The most obvious and logical explanation for why right wing people exist is that they disagree with left wing politics, believing them to lead to bad outcomes. Papers like those three are a dime a dozen, but one thing you'll never find is studies that just directly ask people disagree with common academic beliefs. Instead it's taken as axiomatic that leftism is moral and correct, so anyone who disagrees must have some other deeper psychological reason to disagree (loneliness, reading the wrong websites, not getting enough sex, whatever). Lots of non-replicable studies get produced, grants are awarded, and academics give lots of interviews to the NYT about their search for One Weird Trick to convert people to their worldview that doesn't involve any actual policy changes.
The professors doing such studies should look in the mirror. If they're saying social isolation and informational monoculture leads to extremism, then it's hard to find somewhere more isolated and monocultural than universities. But of course they lack sufficient insight to consider that.
I just saw a class of kids on a train and they were interacting and yelling just like we did 30 years ago. I think there's hope, they're not all zombies staring at a phone yet
There’s still product-market fit frontiers waiting to be found out there! (/s)
It’s depressing how whenever I see people doing people stuff without a screen in their face I both smile internally and reflexively wonder how we could better infiltrate their demographic.
We have become the disease at this point, and now we work diligently to replace humans from any economic activity except consumption, so that the value extraction cycle can be optimized even as it collapses upon itself in a singularity of greed.
Soon, humans, the last obstacle standing between the uninterrupted flow of energy and resources into the event horizon of capital, will be eliminated from the process altogether with the removal of wages and eventually money itself through the wonders of automation.
Only then will the crystalline purity of technocapitalism truly shine: power as the new capital.
The power to convert resources and energy directly into the will and whim of the capital class, harnessing recursive automation in a macroscopic grey-goo scenario that sidesteps both workers and customers. An ever-tightening loop of resource concentration, building from a throbbing rhythm into a deafening turbine whine of conspicuous consumption. A hollow promise of “Progress” that leaves the 99 percent outside the gilded walls, merely insects at the pointy end of excavators.
I’m going to take tomorrow off and hug my grandchildren.
I know it's supposed to be fancy and cool looking but this sort of website design where you have to scroll and then the whole screen animates really bothers me. It actually gives me a headache to try and follow it versus normal scrolling behaviour and text.
As soon as I start scrolling down and I can't scroll normally and images and text start flying around I feel a disturbing feeling in my head and lose concentration and almost get brain-fog from the distracting content moving around.
Please provide more accessible versions of websites if you're going to override the default behavior. I couldn't make it 10 seconds before having to close the tab.
I usually agree with this, but I make an exception for Pudding because they consistently do this and it’s kind of their brand to have really immersive JS art/media. But I have the benefit of having read and enjoyed their stuff before.
It’s probably a false distinction, but it feels different to a SaaS product offering page, or product launch, where I need to get information, compared to someone using JS to create art.
This whole article could be summarised in about 300 words, but I would have had very little emotional or conceptual enjoyment of it.
Would be nice if we could disable JavaScript and just get access to the text.
I also dislike this style, plus it lags on my computer. I scrolled all the way down but all I got was that it is a story of how it's not so bad to talk to strangers.
I'll promote prefers-reduced-motion here, which I believe is the standards compliant way of signaling you want this behavior. Unfortunately, I haven't noticed many sites supporting it.
Sometimes this is indeed merely "fancy" and vacuous, but other times it is a meaningful and more engaging way to present the content. I feel like this is an example of the latter.
Even if you're not a fan and would have done it differently, it seems a bit hard to understand what could be so bothersome that you have to close it in 10s...
Well, it literally makes me feel almost nauseous, i.e. I felt physically unwell from the images and text moving around the screen.
Note: this doesnt happen from a regular video, or normal scrolling text behaviour. Just sites like this that combine overriding the scroll bar with moving text and images.
I often like the use of advanced media. The NYT and Washington Post have done some amazing advanced media that fully exploits the richness possible with the web.
Not so sure about this one, though. Like others, I was more annoyed with the constant scrolling to get tiny niblets of information and didn't even make it through. It makes it feel like work and the mechanisms completely overwhelms the message.
Also weird that it's hogging CPU even when you're sitting on a completely static portion of the page.
Yeah, that website was horrid. I don’t know why someone would opt for a scrolljacking-based animation, let alone why they’d intersperse text boxes zooming around.
Yes I definitely was interested but the form-over-function of this presentation just got me to drop out and not finish reading. I ended up passing the link to a LLM and asking "summarize this for me"...
This is the unicorn of fancy websites because for once, it actually makes sense to override browser's standard scrolling behavior. The 30-minute timeline on the right provides an obvious context for what you're navigating with the scroll actions, and you wouldn't be able to do that with a regular scrollbar.
Usually scrolling overrides happen because the designers' mindset was that the site should be a sequence of beautiful slides. They might prototype it as a Keynote presentation that is approved by management. And then some poor web developer gets tasked with building a site that feels like the Keynote slide show that everyone loved, and the only way to do that is to turn scrolling into an annoying "next slide" action.
Took me a really long time to realize that I should scroll. Because why would I? There is absolutely no indication that there is anything to scroll to.
I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.
So I assumed it was a podcast, re-checking that I had audio on etc. But nope, so I checked another browser. Same there... Then I read HN comments, ah ... Great design? ...
Same here — once you get the scrolling part it's pretty great, but like you I was stuck at the top for a while. A downwards-pointing arrow on the hero would help a lot here.
I was going to say that somehow I knew I had to scroll the first time I entered. But I went back after reading your comment and I have no idea how did I find out the first time, there is no indication that there is content bellow.
> Took me a really long time to realize that I should scroll. Because why would I? There is absolutely no indication that there is anything to scroll to.
> I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.
Thank god, I wasn’t the only one, just posted a similar comment here.
I don't mind designers overriding when they take meticulous care to craft a better tailored experience. But once I scrolled past the initial content I found the site a UI disaster. Not long after it said "Pick a person to explore", I wanted to tap a particular box to read one of their conversations, and couldn't figure out how to bring any dialog up. I wound up scrolling further down afterward to see if that was how to trigger some dialog for my selection, and all the boxes started moving around at seemingly random, performance tanked and the whole thing got stuttery. I couldn't scroll back to where I was or find that box again that I was interested in. I left in frustration. Design fail, as far as this user's encounter.
I feel the same. I don't particularly mind if a developer overrides the scrollbar, and I would actually argue that in this case it was a good way to present the story and overall I liked it, but you need to do it right. If the sites becomes all clunky, it stutters, and you get text popping up a while after you scrolled, then it's better to focus on the performance and leave aside the animations.
I'm with you and I actually love these "special scrolling" websites. They are much closer to a truly work of art exactly because of the different design.
To the haters: why do we have churches or buildings with marble statues in the walls or column instead of a standard stone wall, which was designed to do the job in a standard way?
Niches (recesses in walls for statues) and columns in church buildings are actually central features that serve the primary purpose of the building.
Niches provide spaces for statues for remembering the dead, or prayers and veneration (for Catholics), enhancing the link between the spiritual and corporeal realms. Arguably they're also used to encourage payments from patrons for a church building's upkeep or construction.
Columns allow spaces within a building to be connected, ensuring the body of the church (the people) can worship and receive teaching together. They can also reduce material cost of construction.
Yes, for historic church buildings decoration was applied, ornate capitals in the pillars and such; bright, garish paint on the statues and everything -- and expression of the vitality of the building and of worship to God.
I think perhaps your analogy needs buttressing (heh!) to make it clear? All I got really was 'I like the scrolling'.
Maybe a revolving door is a good scrollbar analogue - it's central to access to a space (website), some people hate them, but used properly they enhance access (they're really good for limiting heat exchange with the outside when compared with regular doors!).
It's interesting but I hated this design * 1000. I would prefer a white page with purely black text than this horrible override of the scrolling behavior and images and text flying around, this sort of design makes me feel literally nauseous and I had to click away not even 5% through this page.
It's so much harder to concentrate on content like this, it's distracting, confusing, gives me brain fog etc.
I found it only slightly worse than not overriding the standard scrolling behaviour. Any time a site remains usable despite this sort of UX intervention we can consider that a win.
One of the problems with their "better / worse" statistics: Bad interactions tend to outweigh good interactions. I think the rule of thumb is that 4:1 good/bad ratio in a relationship is "breakeven" where the relationship will stay neutral; higher than that and things get better, lower than that and things go south.
So if you could talk to a stranger, and there's only a 20% chance you'll feel worse, a lot of people would still not consider it worth the risk.
Another angle that goes unmentioned: "the more you know someone, the less you like them."
Most strangers in 30 minutes won't show off their ugly side. It takes a lot longer for those rough edges to come out, and for the really bad parts to surface in human relationships.
For some people, we can look past that. For most others, our interactions would not be so positive.
> "the more you know someone, the less you like them."
That is completely the opposite of my experience. Even the handful of people who, after I got to know them, turned out to be unprincipled or toxic, I actually liked them as people and were kind of sad that they were the way they were. Their negative qualities were a mar on the their individual beauty.
There are certainly people in whom, after a relatively brief interaction, I didn't manage to see anything I liked. But I can't think of a single person whom, after seeing something to like, thereafter didn't see anything to like. Their ugly side may have made me want to avoid interacting with them as a whole, but it never completely eclipsed their good side.
For me, nearly all negative interactions come from not being able to get past various masks to see the interesting part of them or vice versa.
There's also the magnitude of a negative interaction as well to consider.
If I have 99 great interactions with someone, but one REALLY bad interaction (they insult me deeply, or say something irredeemable), that can also sour the whole relationship.
It would be interesting to research commonalities amongst bad interactions -- are there patterns that emerge from certain personality types, politics, etc? What about a few "sour" people that will take any interaction and make it bad regardless of matchup -- if we removed them from the interaction pool, do the stats suddenly adjust quickly?
In my mind this would have big implications for social media sites -- not that all bad interactions need to be quelled, but if you are trying to keep conversations civil, attempt to implement X strategy or Y strategy.
Yes, we tend to remember negative experiences better than the good ones. Also, we all are so low on good emotions, we don't want to risk losing them to random strangers.
Makes me think the real challenge isn't just encouraging people to talk to strangers, but designing situations where the expected value of those conversations skews heavily positive
I think it depends on what you’re used to. If you’re in an abusive relationship or socially isolated, a single positive social interaction can feel like a breakthrough.
I would argue that a negative social interaction would feel exponentially more harmful at a time like you describe, in which you're already feeling generally unsafe or insecure. My fear of others is always so much worse when I am hurting for some positive feedback from the world.
There is a huge selection bias there. People who are very disagreeable and hard to talk to tend to not participate in such a thing. Of course the average participant was open to talk to somebody and connect.
Fair, but it's still interesting that people underestimate how much they will enjoy the conversation, even if it's with a random person on a bus who did not volunteer for an experiment.
The participants in the train study were essentially given a "job" to talk to strangers, which completely changes the mental framing.
People generally try to follow through on a job they promised to do. They'll try to make the best of it so they feel like they made a good decision accepting the job.
If the conversations go badly, they can easily rationalize it away with "I didn't want to talk to them anyway, but I didn't have a choice".
Many shy and socially anxious people do basically fine in public-facing jobs because of this phenomenon.
In my family we usually travel to many parts of the world, and we have been compiling a series of anecdotes, when we take a taxi or an Uber, we ask the taxi driver different aspects of the city then always asking him some anecdote, funny or strange, that he has had in his life as a taxi driver.
And we have collected a large number of funny stories that we constantly bring up when we are at a party.
For example, the story of the Argentine taxi driver who, when he received some Danish tourists, they realized that they had forgotten a suitcase at the airport, but since they had an Apple tracker, they started looking for the suitcase with the help of the police and it turned out that the suitcase was in the trunk of a car belonging to another police officer, unbelievable right?
Or the story of the London taxi driver who, being tired after a long shift, picked up an old lady for the last trip and the old woman lay in the back seat and fell completely asleep, when the taxi driver turned to his rearview mirror and no longer saw anyone behind he thought: "What am I doing ? I'm driving alone, I am too tired." so he decided to go home. When he got home the old lady woke up and thought that the taxi driver was kidnapping her, and called the police.
Incredible stories and anecdotes are collected when you start talking to strangers and they feel confident expressing their ideas.
It's part of living, talking to strangers is very satisfying.
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You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There's also the interesting effect that people will give you their innermost secrets, knowing you won't tell anyone (I actually met a serial killer who did this, heh). For instance I was on a long haul flight earlier this year, and my neighbour told me everything about her divorce. Like a kind of therapy.
I also find when I have a real disagreement with someone, it's a lot easier when you're face-to-face. For instance, I have friends who are religious, in a real way, ie they actually think there's a god who created the earth and wants us to live a certain way. Being there in person keeps me from ridiculing them like I might on an internet forum, but it also keeps them from condemning me to hell.
So folks, practice talking to people. Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.
I'd say my experience was closer to the "30 minutes with a stranger" study than it was to modern social media. It was fairly common for a conversation to degrade into insult-trading. But it was more common to have a deep, heartfelt conversation. (Oftentimes I felt like I should follow up with the person I talked to, but I rarely did so in practice, even when we traded contact information.)
Another interesting "control case" is Usenet. You mention the concept of point-scoring. The point-scoring metaphor is rather literal on a website like HN which has upvotes/likes/etc. Usenet didn't have that stuff, but I'm told it had flamewars nonetheless.
Surely some HN users reading this comment are old enough to remember Usenet. Was it better or worse than modern social media in terms of civility? I'm especially curious about Usenet after Eternal September, once small-group norm enforcement broke down, and the underlying characteristics of the platform shone through. If we score early Usenet as 10/10 for civility, and modern X or reddit as 0/10, what score would latter-day, post-AOL Usenet receive?
Another thought: It occurred to me that "point-scoring" could actually be less of an issue with pure-anonymity platforms like 4chan, since you have less of a persona to defend. I've barely used 4chan though, so I can't say much here.
My life experience differs: I, for example, am likely more disagreeable in real life than on the internet. :-)
In internet forums, all answers are "delayed" (since you have to put them into a coherent text). Thus you rather have to think through your arguments, and thus react less on impulse (the impulse is typically already over when you have finalized your post). On the other hand, in real life, things that you strongly disagree with might trigger a very spontaneous emotional reaction.
Also, in internet forums, you want to "win internet points". Thus, you only tangentially write your arguments for the counterpart (who you will likely not convince), but more importantly to convince the many people who read your post. So your arguments are better well-thought and well-researched.
In real life, there is often no additional audience to appreciate and be convinced by "your great arguments" ;-) so it's an "all-or-nothing" to bring the truth to this ignorant being. Since the counterpart has such as "stupid" opinion, rational arguments are likely not the best way for this (because if the counterpart was capable of rational thinking, they would immediately see how "stupid" their opinion is ;-) ), so you better "hammer" your arguments into the counterpart. :-)
It's the having time to consider responses, that I think actually makes it more difficult to accept the person on the other end as "human," more than the physical separation. You can see this in formal debates, where the emotional feedback is strictly regulated.
I've actually met a number of killers (long story for another venue), and will probably continue to do so, for the remainder of my life. I even call some of them friends. I enjoy the story, and accept it as true, because I have heard much more unbelievable true stories.
this gets old fast, it's like being emotionally vomited on.
I enjoy helping others, and I like hearing someone's life story. Not everyone needs to like that though, people are different.
Hearing the same story from the same person can be very tiring and I have family members like that, but with strangers it's a different person, different context, different story.
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I guess it depends on your definition of wrong.
I feel the opposite, where it has never gone right. I can’t remember any actual interesting conversations I have had with strangers. I can remember a lot of bad, awkward, and boring ones, though.
I don’t think this is the fun anecdote you make it out to be
So much to unpack.
You got lucky if you were a woman you probably would have had a poor outcome.
I would prefer a rude online person who is petty vs a serial killer wanting advice on how to get rid of the body.
even the most prolific serial killer has killed way less than 1% of the people he’s met. Nothing to worry about!
/sarcasm
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Would love to hear the story behind this one.
The cabbie seemed fun. We were talking about football. Just ordinary banter with a cab driver. Out of the blue, he asks me "hey mate, just for fun, what would you do if you'd murdered someone and had a dead body to dispose of?"
I was a bit surprised, but it's not that odd a thing to think about. People watch crime flicks all the time. But I hadn't thought much about it and gave a bland answer like "maybe dig a hole in the roadside, something like that". But I did think it was an odd switch in mood. He drops me off, end of that.
A few years later, I've graduated, I'm watching the news. A cab driver has been convicted of murdering multiple women, in the town I was in. Over the same period. He's buried the bodies in various places. I happened to run into a detective from the same town, to whom I explained my anecdote. He's pretty sure it's the same guy, but the cabbie has been sent down for life, so I wouldn't really be adding anything if I reported it.
If I had a penny for every bizarre theory people who ruin the world believe about who/what is actually ruining the world.
My favourite was an interview with Jerry Springer. He also had a theory of what's wrong in the current world and none of it had anything to do with what he did.
FWIW, later in his life there are many findable examples of Jerry finding fault with what he did--since I recalled seeing him express mea culpas I took the time to give you this early (jocular) example from 2014 :
https://youtu.be/eBL00CcBF40?si=PXXc5oJk9atlWKjv
"Jerry Springer Apologizes For His Career" -- Dish Network (~1 minute clip)
Nobody goes around thinking "people like me are making the world unlivable for people like me"; even if that's a useful and sometimes even a correct notion - what reason would anyone have to entertain it?
And why would you not tell anyone about the serial killer?
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If you are talking about one on one with a stranger, then I can see that, yeah, but if you have worked with people, then you know it is a huge mess, creation of cliques, gossip, and all sorts of crap, including heavy pettiness, greed, jealousy / envy, and so on.
Okay cool. How do we fix it? We don't have places to just "talk to people". Maybe some places still has a mall area, but most businesses discourage soliciting. So you're mostly asking people to pay to talk to strangers.
A part of this is behavorial, but the UX of life also kept pushing Gen Z onto the internet, the only "third place" left for them.
A dramatic line. I made a note of it.
This is exactly what David Choe says in this interview: https://youtu.be/HrBhuzHHlhQ?t=127
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I really hate saying this, but I live in the Deep South and people here can quite repulsive under the veneer of manners. The amount of hate, anger towards people different from them, and just rampant racism is quite difficult to deal with. And these are things that get exposed when having these conversations.
I do as you suggest. But I'm always ready to just walk away from a conversation. There's no winning with these people and the moral injury you sustain by being in their presence is awful
The natural impulse to be sociable and get along with people combined with minor insecurity or social anxiety has led to social experiences that when I reflect on them, I can only cringe in shame at my timid response to some awful statements.
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I am an absolute atheist, and I believe that people who are educated in science and are religions have some kind of mental illness. This is just too set the context :) I also used to be very active on radio about science vs religion.
First, people who are hard core religious may get off their way to cure you. I had people yelling in front of my house. I never saw physicists doing the same.
But that's a perk of the "atheism job" :)
I had something much worse happening to me. A friend of mine was religions, from a very religions family. We had long discussions and she gradually realized that her while world is going to shit when she discovered the insanity of religion. She got into a deep depression and tried to commit suicide. I was with her 7 years until she somehow snapped back to a normal life.
I never attempted to turn an individual anymore. Sure, general information about rational hygiene (religion, homeopathy, ...) but not on z 1:1 basis.
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795362...
https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/hate-lies-and-loneliness-f...
In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction.
At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods.
Not everyone, but just having a role in society can be a major help for many people. The biggest crime of the modern era is the disposable human. You work for an anonymous corporation, that does some nonsense you can't even hope to understand, in exchange for currency, to support the basics of your existence.
You don't get to have any real status in that, for example In many places there was just one or two bread makers for the entire community. Baking bread isn't the most prestigious job, but you matter.
Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements
A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now.
Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did not do a good job advertising:
- I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it
- It was that cheap on sale? Too bad I did not hear about it a week ago.
- DeVaughn’s closed!? I completely forgot about that restaurant. They had great food.
- Why didn’t anyone tell me earlier that there is a tool for easily finding a time for a meeting.
Advertising can be valuable. When done right, it does not have to be intrusive or annoying. This does not mean that every job provides value, but not knowing about something can cause people to feel negatively. Marketing is telling people about things.
I have a feeling that this is true, but my conclusion is the opposite.
If you are not the most agreeable person, but have money, you can afford to be alone - having money eases a lot of problems. On the other hand, if you are not the most agreeable person, but lack money, because you have to come to terms with other people, drama starts.
So, I would rather see the evidence on the side that a lot of social conflicts are rather a side effect of "lack of money" - people who are better left alone (and would love to) cannot afford to do this, and thus drama starts.
> Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements
Just to be clear: my work is different.
But if such a person doesn't do their duties, the implications are of course not immediate, but over some time this leads to a degradation of the stock of the respective company. So, a lot of people who invested (perhaps indirectly) into this company (e.g. for their pension scheme) would care.
Dwarf Fortress lever welfare already exists IRL.
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It might be better described as alienation. Then we can fit it into Hannah Arendt's theory of fascism being caused by alienation.
In the modern world, that alienation is accelerated by social media and cost of living for those without assets, who pay the cost of inflation without benefiting from asset price inflation.
Everything is more hostile, more sectarian, and you also can't even afford anything, and also you are a bad person because you are a creepy 45 year old white man with a small dick, and you better stop looking at me like that.
Is it any surprise?
I can understand how if you are afraid the neighbor is going to be an informant, you stop interacting. Public discourse breaks down and ideology takes hold.
This seems quite different to me than the type of alienation we are talking about in 2025 from online interactions. I am not sure alienation is really the right word in terms of isolation from a group. If anything the problems from social media are from too much interaction and too much political discourse.
I would say that is completely opposite to what Arendt was talking about.
I think it is the way "boredom" has quite a different meaning today than in 1990. While you can still be bored in 2025, I don't feel boredom the same way as in 1990 when none of my friends answered the phone and there was nothing on tv. 2025 boredom is more the lack of hyper stimulation and hyper novelty as opposed to the 1990 version of going through your "junk drawer" to find something again novel because you can't think of anything else to do. I can't even remember the last time I had junk drawer to even go through.
I am not saying this to invalidate what you are saying but would you care to explain how you think the problem described by parent (richer societies allow for more alone time thus loneliness) is better described by Arendt's concept of alienation ?
> In the modern world [...] Is it any surprise?
To me you are just describing a poverty and ideological tribalism but that still doesn't tell me what Arendt can do for us here
When you actually and honestly communicate with people different than you, and are able yo understand them, you stop feeling that simplistic hate for them.
I find it to be exactly the opposite. It's much easier to believe someone is inherently good but just a bit misguided if you don't have to communicate with them and aren't personally affected by their "misguided" behavior.
I guess same thing would go for extreme fears, like, you are so scared of something that you get even more scared of it because you know it's the scariest thing in the world, until you actually meet the thing you're scared of
More generally, I think people have forgotten that two people - no less intelligent than the other - can see the exact same thing, evidence, or whatever else, and simply come to different conclusions.
One discovery I've made is that they really don't. Nothing terrible happens if you don't correct people.
You can really just accept that people have some flaws and appreciate their positive sides!
The overnight disappearance of those loose connections you get in the workplace had a huge impact on my mental health. Life-altering. 5 years later, I split my time between remote tech consulting from an office I rent (to make sure I don't sit home all day) and a union-protected, but completely antiquated job from a career I left behind that I returned to mostly to be with people.
By 2025, things would have probably been the same both for society and me (lockdowns coincided with me turning 30), but the abrupt change was horrible.
Not correcting people is the first step towards avoiding loneliness.
When humans become unmoored from this web through loneliness/isolation/alienation, they can freewheel and drift further from that average. This can be liberating! But if you don't re-connect, either with your previous web or a new one, there's nothing stopping you falling off the deep end; nothing to give you a little correction that keeps you "normal". Political extremism of various flavors, or identity crises founded in over-rumination, are what we see - but also innovation and removal of constraints. Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies relates. The social isolation moonshot is to break from convention and be a hero auteur, but the risk of failure is very high. Nullum magnum dementiae sine mixtura ingenium fuit.
In case it isn’t obvious, I’m being sarcastic and agreeing with you.
Now we’re heavily fragmented.
The assumption that social-media applications are really social is robbing us of traditional ways of maintaining actual society.
I know all my neighbours in my block who walk, cycle, or take the bus. Repeated interactions. The ones who take the elevator to the basement car park are the ones I never cross paths with.
This seems wildly incompatible with the desire to not have social isolation.
I agree with the rest of your sentiment, but that is a really anti-social idea.
You might find this short 60-second video of interest.
https://youtube.com/shorts/XVFGEDs95MI?si=NEvRg-m2KymblwF0
This was something I believed when I was 21, and then was corrected by time. There are very few instances where anyone needs to be corrected in a social setting. Learning to move on without demanding they accept your argument is hugely important.
Why is that? I may feel that somebody is wrong, and that may be correct, but it could also be incorrect. A priori, they are not less correct than you are. Then why do you need to go to them and tell them that what they think is wrong and what you think is right?
I'm glad that people don't do that all the time. I'm sure I meet lots of people every day that think I'm wrong on something. Sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly. If every time they would feel that I "need to be corrected", that would be terrible.
Academics have all kinds of indirect theories for why people outside of academia don't agree with their politics. Ironically given the subject of the website, one thing they almost never do is just go outside of academia, sit down with people who disagree with them and talk to them as equals. They spam bot-filled websites like Mechanical Turk with surveys trying to prove things about the imaginary people in their own minds, and then publish "findings", but they don't actually talk to people.
The most obvious and logical explanation for why right wing people exist is that they disagree with left wing politics, believing them to lead to bad outcomes. Papers like those three are a dime a dozen, but one thing you'll never find is studies that just directly ask people disagree with common academic beliefs. Instead it's taken as axiomatic that leftism is moral and correct, so anyone who disagrees must have some other deeper psychological reason to disagree (loneliness, reading the wrong websites, not getting enough sex, whatever). Lots of non-replicable studies get produced, grants are awarded, and academics give lots of interviews to the NYT about their search for One Weird Trick to convert people to their worldview that doesn't involve any actual policy changes.
The professors doing such studies should look in the mirror. If they're saying social isolation and informational monoculture leads to extremism, then it's hard to find somewhere more isolated and monocultural than universities. But of course they lack sufficient insight to consider that.
It’s depressing how whenever I see people doing people stuff without a screen in their face I both smile internally and reflexively wonder how we could better infiltrate their demographic.
We have become the disease at this point, and now we work diligently to replace humans from any economic activity except consumption, so that the value extraction cycle can be optimized even as it collapses upon itself in a singularity of greed.
Soon, humans, the last obstacle standing between the uninterrupted flow of energy and resources into the event horizon of capital, will be eliminated from the process altogether with the removal of wages and eventually money itself through the wonders of automation.
Only then will the crystalline purity of technocapitalism truly shine: power as the new capital.
The power to convert resources and energy directly into the will and whim of the capital class, harnessing recursive automation in a macroscopic grey-goo scenario that sidesteps both workers and customers. An ever-tightening loop of resource concentration, building from a throbbing rhythm into a deafening turbine whine of conspicuous consumption. A hollow promise of “Progress” that leaves the 99 percent outside the gilded walls, merely insects at the pointy end of excavators.
I’m going to take tomorrow off and hug my grandchildren.
As soon as I start scrolling down and I can't scroll normally and images and text start flying around I feel a disturbing feeling in my head and lose concentration and almost get brain-fog from the distracting content moving around.
Please provide more accessible versions of websites if you're going to override the default behavior. I couldn't make it 10 seconds before having to close the tab.
It’s probably a false distinction, but it feels different to a SaaS product offering page, or product launch, where I need to get information, compared to someone using JS to create art.
This whole article could be summarised in about 300 words, but I would have had very little emotional or conceptual enjoyment of it.
[0] https://pudding.cool/2021/07/rickrolling/
I also dislike this style, plus it lags on my computer. I scrolled all the way down but all I got was that it is a story of how it's not so bad to talk to strangers.
you can in fact disable JavaScript in your browser. In Firefox, go to `about:config` and set `javascript.enabled` to false.
Warning: lots of sites will break.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
Even if you're not a fan and would have done it differently, it seems a bit hard to understand what could be so bothersome that you have to close it in 10s...
Note: this doesnt happen from a regular video, or normal scrolling text behaviour. Just sites like this that combine overriding the scroll bar with moving text and images.
Not so sure about this one, though. Like others, I was more annoyed with the constant scrolling to get tiny niblets of information and didn't even make it through. It makes it feel like work and the mechanisms completely overwhelms the message.
Also weird that it's hogging CPU even when you're sitting on a completely static portion of the page.
This is the unicorn of fancy websites because for once, it actually makes sense to override browser's standard scrolling behavior. The 30-minute timeline on the right provides an obvious context for what you're navigating with the scroll actions, and you wouldn't be able to do that with a regular scrollbar.
Usually scrolling overrides happen because the designers' mindset was that the site should be a sequence of beautiful slides. They might prototype it as a Keynote presentation that is approved by management. And then some poor web developer gets tasked with building a site that feels like the Keynote slide show that everyone loved, and the only way to do that is to turn scrolling into an annoying "next slide" action.
I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.
So I assumed it was a podcast, re-checking that I had audio on etc. But nope, so I checked another browser. Same there... Then I read HN comments, ah ... Great design? ...
> I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.
Thank god, I wasn’t the only one, just posted a similar comment here.
To the haters: why do we have churches or buildings with marble statues in the walls or column instead of a standard stone wall, which was designed to do the job in a standard way?
Niches provide spaces for statues for remembering the dead, or prayers and veneration (for Catholics), enhancing the link between the spiritual and corporeal realms. Arguably they're also used to encourage payments from patrons for a church building's upkeep or construction.
Columns allow spaces within a building to be connected, ensuring the body of the church (the people) can worship and receive teaching together. They can also reduce material cost of construction.
Yes, for historic church buildings decoration was applied, ornate capitals in the pillars and such; bright, garish paint on the statues and everything -- and expression of the vitality of the building and of worship to God.
I think perhaps your analogy needs buttressing (heh!) to make it clear? All I got really was 'I like the scrolling'.
Maybe a revolving door is a good scrollbar analogue - it's central to access to a space (website), some people hate them, but used properly they enhance access (they're really good for limiting heat exchange with the outside when compared with regular doors!).
It's so much harder to concentrate on content like this, it's distracting, confusing, gives me brain fog etc.
So if you could talk to a stranger, and there's only a 20% chance you'll feel worse, a lot of people would still not consider it worth the risk.
Another angle that goes unmentioned: "the more you know someone, the less you like them."
Most strangers in 30 minutes won't show off their ugly side. It takes a lot longer for those rough edges to come out, and for the really bad parts to surface in human relationships.
For some people, we can look past that. For most others, our interactions would not be so positive.
That is completely the opposite of my experience. Even the handful of people who, after I got to know them, turned out to be unprincipled or toxic, I actually liked them as people and were kind of sad that they were the way they were. Their negative qualities were a mar on the their individual beauty.
There are certainly people in whom, after a relatively brief interaction, I didn't manage to see anything I liked. But I can't think of a single person whom, after seeing something to like, thereafter didn't see anything to like. Their ugly side may have made me want to avoid interacting with them as a whole, but it never completely eclipsed their good side.
For me, nearly all negative interactions come from not being able to get past various masks to see the interesting part of them or vice versa.
If I have 99 great interactions with someone, but one REALLY bad interaction (they insult me deeply, or say something irredeemable), that can also sour the whole relationship.
It would be interesting to research commonalities amongst bad interactions -- are there patterns that emerge from certain personality types, politics, etc? What about a few "sour" people that will take any interaction and make it bad regardless of matchup -- if we removed them from the interaction pool, do the stats suddenly adjust quickly?
In my mind this would have big implications for social media sites -- not that all bad interactions need to be quelled, but if you are trying to keep conversations civil, attempt to implement X strategy or Y strategy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44443348
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269179
People generally try to follow through on a job they promised to do. They'll try to make the best of it so they feel like they made a good decision accepting the job.
If the conversations go badly, they can easily rationalize it away with "I didn't want to talk to them anyway, but I didn't have a choice".
Many shy and socially anxious people do basically fine in public-facing jobs because of this phenomenon.
And we have collected a large number of funny stories that we constantly bring up when we are at a party.
For example, the story of the Argentine taxi driver who, when he received some Danish tourists, they realized that they had forgotten a suitcase at the airport, but since they had an Apple tracker, they started looking for the suitcase with the help of the police and it turned out that the suitcase was in the trunk of a car belonging to another police officer, unbelievable right?
Or the story of the London taxi driver who, being tired after a long shift, picked up an old lady for the last trip and the old woman lay in the back seat and fell completely asleep, when the taxi driver turned to his rearview mirror and no longer saw anyone behind he thought: "What am I doing ? I'm driving alone, I am too tired." so he decided to go home. When he got home the old lady woke up and thought that the taxi driver was kidnapping her, and called the police.
Incredible stories and anecdotes are collected when you start talking to strangers and they feel confident expressing their ideas.
It's part of living, talking to strangers is very satisfying.