> the animation and the scroll-sensitive layout (vs. just having a series of static diagrams) makes it unpleasant for me to read.
I totally agree; I don't understand the fascination HN has with these types of sites. It all feels like extraneous design just for the sake of it, rather than actually making anything easier or better to understand.
I think sites/pages like this hold an important role, presenting information to people who have trouble visualizing concepts or need visual aid to better assimilate information is important and sometimes, a simple 2D rendering or a dry graph just isn't enough.
And if you need a 3d graph, you're only a handful of lines away from smoothing out your presentation, so why not?
There's also the more subjective aspect, I think adding the effort to make something look nice and slick, animated well, could be both an interesting challenge and a relaxing pass-time. It's pleasing both to make and digest, in a way, it sits in an intersection of design, art and technique and as an added bonus, could help capture the attention of someone who struggles with short attention spans even better!
I am a long time CS player, but I did briefly play one of the new CoD games, before they went crazy with Nicki Minaj skins and bong-guns.
A person was so convinced I was cheating, they started doing OSINT on me while still in a match, and they found my old UnKnOwNcHeAtS account as some kind of proof that I am cheating (that account was 12 years old by that point).
I abhor cheating, and I have a lot of interest in computer science, so of course I wanted to see how all of it works and did my research during my youth, taking care to never compromise the competitive integrity of the games I played, but if you look around, there is not a single game that I can recommend to people anymore.
Games like Escape From Tarkov are so busted, cheaters are stealing the barrels off people's guns and crashing their game/PC on command.
My beloved counter-strike's premier competitive game mode has a global leaderboard that acts as a cheat advertisement section within the game.
Games like Valorant are a cut above the rest on account of their massively invasive anti-cheat, but are nowhere near as clean as most fans claim, I mean, you could write a cheat for the game using nothing but AHK and reading the color of a pixel.
There is a whole industry of private matchmaking for counter-strike, built solely on the back of their anti-cheat and promises of pro-level play to the top players.
EDIT: I found the screenshot, it was MPGH not UnknownCheats, but yeah, they also had a game ban on their account.