The spectrum of flashing element annoyingness is immense. When I took the survey I probably picked one of the two middle options, because I was imagining the constantly-moving video ads you get on some websites, or even worse, the popups that move around the screen. Stuff like the "draft saved" notifications in Gmail gets dropped several layers of visual processing before it hits my consciousness and I couldn't care less about it.
Ublock Origin doesn't have the flashing text problem, and it's generally recommended over AdBlock Plus these days, after some controversy about AdBlock letting some ads through.
Perhaps the people who program all these sites to flash hate their jobs and don't want to do them, and also know that there's no disincentive for them to spite their employers by making the web pages awful.
I imagine that most people who answered your survey were not at all imagining a single text element changing to indicate status, and were instead imagining annoying flashing banner ads, like you mentioned at the start of the post.
Along the same lines as the "just use protonmail" gmail support comments, I will throw in a recommendation for uBlock Origin over Adblock Plus. Mostly due to the "acceptable ads" fiasco, but your screenshot of the ABP interface also looks covered in, well, ads, to upgrade and share on social media and install it on all your devices. The UBO interface is mostly buttons to block things in various ways.
(Copying over all your custom filters should be straightforward)
I think on the survey, people may consider flashing elements to be things like banner ads or newsletter sign ups, so that may skew numbers. At least, I wouldn't consider the Saving Draft stuff to be what the question was asking about.
On a side note, consider using uBlock Origin instead, it has no flashing and doesn't have the controversies that Adblock does.
Edit: Ha, looks like everyone has the same thought.
If you're interested in some of what is known about causal effects of ads on websites, I cover a lot of material in my banner-ad page: https://gwern.net/ad
For the most part, I never even notice this kind of stuff. I had no idea about the flashing Google drafts message, even though I use GMail for both work and personal use. On the other hand, the alternating rabbi photos would probably annoy me.
One note: you're using AdBlock Plus instead of uBlock Origin and should stop that. ABP in 2016 started allowing certain ads and is more resource intensive while having fewer features. uBO is also open source.
I don't know if design is getting worse, but I've noticed an increase in my "wow, you are doing something so annoying I literally don't want to use your site" reactions these days.
It's gotten to the point where I'll open the dev console and delete/hide the offending element rather than put up with it.
Pretty sure I said the flashing mildly annoyed me, but I was very much thinking of the Jewish Rabbis. The Draft Saved indicator is so small, and practically the same color as the background, that it doesn't bother me. And I had to open Adblock to see it was doing that, I tune that part of the board out entirely. (Granted, that means whatever it's supposed to be doing, it isn't doing it.)
Thinking about it, I think videogames with loading screens still benefit from changing the text on them; if nothing else it tells you the thing hasn't frozen. So there are situational exceptions.
Those things drive me nuts. If there is something moving on the page, I can't read the text. Luckily, most browsers support reader mode which really helps. I also keep a post-it note handy to block things.
For technical control freaks, I've been told the answer is Stop the Madness, but I haven't tried it yet.
Flashing ads exist to maximize revenue in basically the way you'd expect. If you get paid per impression and an impression needs 5 seconds then you can get 12 ads in a minute. They also increase attention paid to the ads (which is generally quite low for banner display ads). While you find it annoying the adnets want to make money more than they want to please you. Though I expect they'll decrease as we're increasingly training users to expect to pay for content and as ad rates go down.
Flashing interface elements exist because people expect feedback on their actions. Action and reaction. If you don't give them a reaction then they think nothing happened. There's no permanent way to display it because it has to show up in response to the action. Meaning it has to change in some way on the action and then un-change to wait for new actions. If you have a different solution to this I'd be interested in hearing it. Making it an option takes some extra work but should be doable if there's enough demand people will actually switch over it.
Also, remember the median internet user is not extremely online and generally needs some degree of assistance/guidance. Accessibility and ease of use is almost considered synonymous with good design.
I really love that sometimes this blog just covers really specific personal complaints. Very humanizing. Zero irony btw, I also hate flashing elements.
I'm surprised this article doesn't seem to consider the massive selection bias inherent in the ACX survey, and assumes that 16% of survey respondents equates to 16% of all internet users. That seems like complete nonsense to me; people who like to read 10,000 word book reports are not remotely representative of the average person. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the average person likes those sorts of flashing text elements, and including them gets them more users.
(That doesn't explain why there isn't an option to turn it off though.)
Nothing worse than Facebook's messaging popups which flash to indicate that the other party is typing. It's the visual equivalent of phone music interrupted by "Your call is important to us..."
I'm working on an antidote:
https;//conntects.net
It's not finished yet, but I can safely guarantee that it won't flicker, because I hate writing JavaScript. I'm writing a social networking site in which every url is a genuine page. No infinite scrolling. No gigantic JavaScript framework upload. Instead of a single-page JavaScript app pulling in data, actual server served pages include just enough JavaScript to do whatever dropdown menus, etc. are needed on the page.
If you want to see what's new, you need to refresh the home page.
Social media is frying our brains.
But connecting with geographically dispersed friends is useful...
I don't mind a changing element as long as it is doing something useful. Reporting that my current draft has been saved is useful information.
I recall keeping the lights of my modem within view back in my BBS days. The pattern could tell me if I was connected yet, or still connecting, or if a file transfer was full or half duplex or just stuck. I normally hate flashing elements, but that had enough utility that I would bear it.
Both images showcase Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the preeminent authority in Sephardic Jewish law. One image captures his younger years, while the other depicts him in older age.
Gmail drafts flash only when there is a subject. While drafting an email, leave the subject blank. If you really need it, say to recognize a draft among a list of drafts in progress, start the email body with the subject. Once the draft is done, enter the subject, and send it off.
With respect, some feedback: low-effort personal gripe posts like this[1] lower the signal-to-noise ratio of ACX, and make it less pleasant to browse. I would like to see fewer of them.
[1] Subjectively, I would put the "block you on Twitter" post in the same category, even though it did include include some genuine insight about the incentives of journalists versus regular people.
I would add the nav bar that appears and disappears based on how you scroll to the list of offenders. Not only does it pop on and grab your attention, but if you scroll down one click too far and have to scroll up one line, it pops on, covering the exact line you were trying to read. I have custom CSS loaded for sites I frequent (including SubStack) to remove that useless element.
I have Scott's level of difficulties with websites or applications that have differently-formated information menus on the same screen at the same time.
For example, if you've ever tried to maintain a website in Wordpress: the "Posts" screen at login will have pop-ups from your plugins that appear in a white box and in a certain formatting (I think it's different for each plug-in), then you've got different kinds of posts in a hyperlink-style menu on a horizontal strip across the screen, then just below that you've got drop-down menus (in a new formating style), then below that, looking like it's a column that lines up with the drop-down menus (but not connected) is a list of your posts. Meanwhile on the left side of the screen you've got a "dashboard" with a verticle list on the left side of screen. Click on any option on the dashboard and another verticle list pops out with slightly smaller fonts and spacing.
All of this is murder on people who have difficulty making small short regular eye-movements. I hate it so much. And so much of our tech is structured like this.
Yeah, this is annoying. I'm unable to watch as I type into a brower address bar—every key stroke updates the options in an annoying drop down menu that can't be disabled. I'll typically either close my eyes or look at the wall to my left.
Empirically I'll pay at least an extra $20 not to use Frontier's website (ie, I once got a United flight that cost $20 more than Frontier, just to avoid Frontier's website), which gets to the point of so-bad-it's-funny in terms of web design. I mean, they really do everything to maximize website awfulness, not just the popups and flashing things, but that was a very stark financial illustration of what web design is worth to me.
Of course, Frontier's bad web design is meant to wring money out of people drop by drop, and I assume it's succeeding there to such a high degree that it doesn't matter how many people avoid them just for the web problems.
Just today I was annoyed, after going to the local news station's website (as I often do) to read the weather bulletin, examine the 7-day forecast, and enjoy the future radar feature, to have that morning's TV weather spot come up as a video it was difficult to close as the "x" disappeared into the radar background. I have demonstrated my fealty to the station. Why are you ruining my experience of your content? Why should the TV spot override the material presented by the same person who made the TV spot?
But that was as nothing compared to trying to cancel a streaming service and "add-on" that I had unwisely decided to take a free trial flyer on. About twenty minutes into the free trial, the thought of watching anything on Hulu/Starz became depressing and I moved to cancel. To do this you "toggle" between a check mark and a plus sign and an x, which come and go, appear and disappear. Doh, there it goes back again! Got it! No, fool, you missed it again! Oh, better luck next time!
Anyone out there with strabismus or amblyopia and have this kind of difficulty just from using software that has a lot of menus, ribbons, and pop-ups? And also hate lots of colors and low contrast?
A tool I like for these kind of things is Tampermonkey - it's an extension that lets you run arbitrary bits of code on specific webpages to modify their behavior. Obviously this is most useful if you're a programmer who can write their own scripts, but there do exist some decent repositories of scripts out there, like https://greasyfork.org . (Or if you know a web developer these things are generally quick to write)
Granted, for just blocking stuff the adblock 'block specific elements' tools probably work well enough in a lot of cases, but tampermonkey scripts are a lot more flexible. (IIRC some people use this sort of script to put back the like buttons on this site...)
Also try Javascript Manager. It works by blocking javascript for sites like your Jewish law web site but would probably break interactive sites like gmail.
Thank you for posting this. Even thought this annoyed me, I was not even aware.
I assumed these annoyance as a fact of life—as opposed to something that I can avoid (e.g. by migrating from services) and change (I design user interfaces, so I will take this into account).
Sometimes we forget that we have agency in this world, but you need to be aware first. In other words, mindfulness predates change.
“As long as you keep typing, the ‘Saving Draft’ button flashes in the upper left corner every few seconds.”
I find it bizarre anyone could care about this. I like reassurance my draft is getting saved! I’ve lost it on at least one occasion. There are people who are bothered by this? Really!?!
I think the reason I’m not bothered by “draft saved” type UI elements is that they’re responding to my interaction with the page. Like, it doesn’t bother anybody that when you type a “A”, a little “A” flicks into visibility on the screen. That’s something you did. Well, the “draft saved” thing is the same, just on a slight time delay. It’s reporting that it finished the task your keystroke assigned it. I don’t know, it doesn’t bother me.
Also, somebody should mention that web companies often thoroughly A/B test features like this, and won’t deploy one to the whole user base before they’ve collected exhaustive metrics describing the effect it has on user engagement. They are also well aware of how many people are switching to ProtonMail after a new UI feature comes out. For a feature like the “draft saved” thing, which doesn’t make them any money except via making the user experience better, you can bet it adds more value overall than it subtracts.
I had never noticed the "Draft saved" thing on gmail before. I am unbothered but understand your frustration with it.
One strategy I piloted that I thought I would share: you can just give your email the subject "Draft saved" until you're done, and then change it to what you actually want. There's still a millisecond where it goes to "Draft saving..." but this would get rid of most of the flashy/blinky thing.
I have a low tech suggestion for you Scott. "Draft saved" is on the upper left on both the Substack and gmail drafting page. Get a small piece of very opaque paper and fold it sharply in half, & drape it with the fold on top so that it covers only the part of your screen with the fucking "draft saved" blinkers. I'm not bothered by blinkers, but I cannot stand seeing my face on the screen when I'm video conferencing. It's not that I'm critical of my appearance -- well I *am,* but that's not the problem in this case -- it's that watching myself smile and open and close my mouth as I talk makes everything seem sort of derealized and fake, like I'm an actor. So I keep little folded pieces of paper near the laptop to cover my onscreen mug!
If you are bothered by having whatever else is in the upper left of the screen covered by the paper, use a transparent piece of plastic, and the stick a little piece of opaque paper just to cover the crucial spot.
Not sure if this came up yet, but the photos of the Rabbis are actually of the same Rabbi--Rav Ovadia Yosef. Just photos of him at different ages. No idea why the website creator decided to have it flip between the two, but honestly more curious about why you were on a halacha website.
Huh. I thought I hated flashing elements, but by that I mean -flashing- elements, ones that change all the time. I never even noticed the "Draft saved" thing in Gmail, not that I write messages in Gmail very often. I don't mind that. What I mind is ones that are constantly changing, or jiggling around, which is done specifically to attract attention.
I guess this comes from different levels of sensory filtration. Me and seemingly most people aren't bothered by the draft saved, which is designed to be unobtrusive. Scott has mentioned in other posts that he lives in quiet part of town and hates parties and seems to have a bunch of sensory sensitivities.
I'm normally super annoyed by "saving..." indicators, roamresearch has what I think is a good compromise; It's just a circle that's orange when there are unsaved changes, green when save is complete. I don't notice it changing unless I look at it.
As much as I approve of this message, it's not going to accomplish anything if you insist on framing it as "everyone." You are the only person I've ever encountered who feels as strongly and consistently about this as I do. I'm shocked that the survey figure for "would stop using" was 16%; I suspect that a large fraction of that 16% were thinking of more extreme cases, and would be able to ignore e.g. the Gmail/MS Word save messages, but we might just be an extremely unrepresentative sample on this particular point.
If you don't have a strong philosophical objection, presenting it as an accessibility issue is a more effective strategic approach. I'm almost certain that the inability to tune out moving/changing stimuli is strongly correlated with autism and/or ADHD. You could probably test that hypothesis fairly easily with your survey data.
At least part of the answer here is the bad tech incentives - tech companies tend to inventivise doing things regardless of whether it's a good idea. Flashing elements allow more complications, and "added draft saved notifier to Gmail app, driving a 5% improvement in gerrymandered metrics" looks much better on your perf review than "kept Gmail boring but functional after realizing it was more usable that way", or even "added option to disable the draft saved notification feature that my coworker just added and wrote a whole doc about how much it improves his gerrymandered metrics".
I don't have that problem in gmail because, like Christopher McCann, I use the HTML version of the site. Appending ?ui=html to a gmail URL will get you there, after you click past a warning saying "please don't do this".
The halacha website feels the need to constantly scroll through pictures of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (who they've also adorably made their little favicon!) because otherwise their readers might be tempted to not vote for his political party, Shas.
Here is one of the many campaign ads prominently featuring the ghost of Ovadia Yosef campaigning on his party's behalf (I want a Youtube playlist, honestly):
Obligatory Firefox proselytism : Firefox has a "read mode" integrated that removes the interface of the website when you try to read an article. It's very useful and can also be used to bypass paywalls (for example on the nyt, go to an article, unable lecture mode and reload the page, tadaa)
Bad pizza graph color scheme, otherwise good post. The number in green should be "slightly annoyed", the one in orange "will give up on the site". I know, I know, it's there in the legend, but come on!
AdBlock Plus started selling the ability to show you ads anyway, and a variety of other missteps. These days I do not recommend it to anyone; uBlock Origin is both 'pure' and works much better than ABP ever did.
>I used to think I must be the only person who worried about this; maybe it was a weird OCD thing. But I asked about it on the ACX survey . . .
I'm not sure that survey question is fair and balanced. Three out of four options state that you are annoyed by flashing elements. Only only option is (barely) positive. Then you add the three options to show that the vast majority is annoyed. That is not a good methodology. A better question would include has many positive options (don't notice at and don't care) as negative once. A 'no opinion' option would have been good as well.
Speaking for my self, once I concentrate on typing I do not register the other elements. Either I don't see it at all, or it doesn't perturb me one bit. I'd still keep the OCD option open.
Over here in the EU the law requires consent for cookies, so a lot of websites show a pop up from the bottom after load. Often this has two buttons - all cookies, or minimum required cookies. There’s also some text about why they want you to click all. Some have a third option to modify cookies. Often when trying to dismiss the pop up and hit accept all, I hit that, which brings up a full screen cookie management page.
Here was my experience yesterday. I am linked to a url (from the daily express I think). Accept cookies popup comes up, I accidentally click the modify cookies. Spend a second on that to get rid of it. Back to webpage. A popdown asks me if I want to download the app at the same time as a floating page on the bottom right shows some video of something. This is both intrusive and eats up screen estate. I try and get rid of the video but they are designed to have the tiniest x button possible. Inevitably I go to the video page. I go back to the article. The app pop down and floating video are still there, this time a different ad.
I start to read the article, which is slow to load anyway as it needs to load a dozen or so of those ads that now come both within and at the bottom of the articles, often taking up more screen estate than the article, often flickering or running previews.
The progressive loading of these ads slows the scroll which is itself annoying but within a few seconds of scrolling another floating window appears asking me to sign up for the newspaper.
Reader: I didn’t sign up for the newspaper and I did not read the article.
But! The express probably don’t care. They are making money from a few PPV ads, and I clicked on the video which is probably revenue to them. I also engaged with the cookies. From a metric point of view I’m a satisfied and engaged, and revenue producing, customer. They probably don’t even measure “scroll to bottom”.
Unrelated point, but you should seriously consider using ublock origin, AdBlock is itself a closed sourced advertising and data collection platform, it will strike deal with companies to display ads and will not block agressively enough.
Ublock gives a better experience (fewer ads) and open source.
I don't mind the "Draft saved" thing, because I get a little weird about obsessively saving files to make sure nothing is lost, but the other shit enrages me. It has reached the point where I do a good 85% of my web browsing on the computer where I have adblockers turned on. I used to look at the Internet on my phone. I don't do that much anymore.
There's a really interesting question to be dug into, about what the product incentives are within big tech companies, especially where the user is not making the primary purchase decision. One of the things I've noticed is that Google seems to be generally trending towards consistently worse UI, and I suspect that there's just no pressure to make things better for users, because the bureaucracy isn't really built for that. I've been wondering if that problem is related more to scale (big enough company means the internal incentives tend to be all bureaucratic) or if there's an additional cultural force of some sort (desire for designers to make things look aesthetically pleasing to their own eyes, desire for engineers to make changes that are functional) that exacerbates it.
Thank you for writing about this! I don't understand why everyone else isn't grabbing their pitchforks over today's heinous web design practices. Maybe it's because we don't know where the product managers and web designers live. I'm in the camp that will stop using a site that has items like: flashing anything, ads that follow you down the screen as you scroll, or "exit intent popups", the most pathetically desperate and annoying mechanism ever invented. Just because something is possible to implement doesn't mean it's a good idea!
I think I'm more sensitive to lights than most, so that may explain it.
On a related topic, do we have to have "hover everything", so that A) you have to move your mouse over the screen to find out what UI elements are available, and B) no matter where you try to place your cursor out of the way, some "on hover" element pops up to block your view? My big question is: DO THESE PEOPLE EVEN TRY OUT THEIR OWN WEBSITES? Who is actually demanding these features? Put this crap on your website and I'll remember you. Not only will I avoid buying your products, I'll seek to badmouth you every chance I get.
> They haven’t. I can no longer write things on Gmail - I have to compose on Notepad and then copy-paste to the Gmail window - because they’ve made it look like this:
As a heads up: you can also switch to hit "switch to HTML view" in the bottom right corner of the screen when gmail loads up in your browser to stop this from happening. Since you're using Notepad anyway, it's not feature-reduced.
I think we should also talk about the new message notifications. For example on Twitter chat groups, or Discord. If it's not blinking, at least there is a blue dot and maybe a number calling for your attention.
Google probably don't want you to use their email interface. It makes no money for them. You can buy a gmail address but it is expected that most power users will use it with Outlook or a similar email app.
I stopped using gmail long time ago because it became too cluttered and annoying for a power user. It probably works for majority who sends only an occasional email and that leads people to use all other google services (showing adds etc.).
Flashing ads are an irritation, more so when they feature disagreeable or offputting images. Incessant recent ads for an ear wax removal product comes to mind (unfortunately), although mercifully that now seems to have gone away.
I also see loads of ads for life insurance and funeral services, featuring wrinklies who look as old as Methusaleh and have clearly spent their declining years and possibly their entire lives working or basking in the sun. I shouldn't complain, as I'm no spring chicken myself, and ageism is a Bad Thing, but do we really need constant reminders that our days are numbered?
But the web UI feature that drives me completely potty, and compared to which flashing ads pale into insignificance, is dynamic page extensions that throw the display completely out of vertical alignment each time when the slider bar is used.
It seems that nobody in the history of the world has yet figured out a way to extend a page while leaving unmoved the content already displayed. I'm not talking about a slight jog, which would be bad enough in itself, but a massive flurry of movement after which one's place is completely lost.
Another minor irritation is a horizontal bar that slides down from nowhere and covers content when one pans the page down with the slider bar, so one has to overshoot and slide the bar back up slightly to tuck the bar away again. It must have seemed such a smart idea to whoever invented it, but it would have been better if they had kept their idea to themself!
I'd be shocked if any changes to the interface on such a central product as Gmail didn't go through A/B testing. If it passed, it means the net effect on engagement couldn't be substantial. Maybe they had bad metrics, or the effect is unobservable (e.g. annoyance/hate, not leaving the platform, though maybe they also had users rate the experience). Or maybe the weak positive effect for most users beat the negative effects for the small subset.
Save your sanity and use reader mode in FireFox - I'm sure there are extensions for other browsers, safari too has it natively integrated IIRC.
It gives you large font (customizable), simple UI, no complex flashing elements and distracting stuff as *well* as Dark Mode. All with a click of a button :)
One reason why I use Firefox (Chromium-based browsers also offer this) is to use the extension uBlock Origin, which lets you select an element of a page and block it. It used to work in Safari too, but Apple has denigrated extensions and offers just a few weak apps for ad blocking that barely work at all. It can be found at:
and manual installation instructions are there too, just scroll down. It can also be installed through the official add-on stores. The element blocking part is especially useful for me since I am using a 13" MBA, and a few banners across the bottom and top of a page mean I get to see just a few inches of a page, like looking through a letterbox. The Globe & Mail site is dreadful for this, and is quite usable once I have permanently removed the banners.removed
This is only one element of the fad of intrusive and bloated design that began with pop-up windows and has snowballed ever since.
Funny enough, it seems like the very existence of front-end and UI/UX designers as an occupation in the web space immediately made these problems much worse than they were. Between the use of enormous unnecessary design frameworks, CSS animations and integrated javascript, etc., the experience of using most sites is so much slower and worse than flat HTML used to be.
The default position seems to be that everybody has broadband so it doesn’t matter if you need to load megabytes and megabytes of scripts and frameworks and stylesheets every time you click something, and because it’s new and sexy tech it’s okay to animate everything and move elements based on cursor or window or viewport position. Of course they never count on latency, or errors in their own code, or conflicts between different elements they’ve injected, so reading a page with a few paragraphs of information you actually want becomes a trial, requiring you to install four or five different types of ad- and nuisance-extinguishing plug-in just to render pages more or less readable.
My latest favorite atrocity is Wikipedia (not that it can be trusted anymore) has enforced pop-up link previews on every wiki link that appear when you hover but don’t disappear when you move your cursor away. It’s an actual ‘screw you for attempting to read the page you’re on’ feature.
Something that may help with some sites is to configure your device to [prefer reduced motion](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion). This allows web designers to use a `@media (prefers-reduced-motion)` block to not show the animations you've indicated a preference to not be shown.
This is a fairly modern feature that designers have to go out of their way to use, but it does work in some places.
I'm convinced that UI designers etc. invariably suffer from a fatal flaw - they are not the intended user of the product they are designing. Thus we have flashing N.B. that are unhelpful, LMS that give instructors tendonitis given every task takes multiple clicks/swipes on different location of the screen (I'm looking at you Blackboard), etc. .... I could go on forever and a day about this.
First off - Text headers changing to communicate functionality are not what that survey question addresses.
Secondly - Disabling that isn't a choice, it's a tradeoff. Is the percentage of people irritated by it larger or smaller than the portion that will worry that there is no "save draft" button? I suspect that feature was added based upon feedback along the way, so what we are seeing is (at least to some degree) the result of a complex balancing act. One that does not combine well with "you can't please all of the people, and you can't put everything into an options menu".
“I have long really held the opinion that the amount of noise which any one can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity, and therefore may be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.”
This may be tangential, but speaks to the choices made by software designers needing "something to do". When I taught college math, the portal platform was built on D2L, and customized by the school's programming team. Their operation appeared to consist of meetings that always concluded with "ok, add another screen", with all hands raised.
The (corporate) Pearson software was even worse, with anything useful hidden in a labyrinth of links. I ended up coding my own website, and just adding problems and docs to it.
probably worth considering that the median ACX reader is likely to be rather more autistic than baseline and hence more sensitive to stimuli, skewing the results
This has been going on since Netscape Navigator implemented a blink element for some reason.
See also: Pretty much every restaurant website ever. I do not want animated text, I do not want fancy skeuomorphisms, and I certainly do not what a soundtrack.
For me the unifying principle seems to be that I don't like GUI elements to move.
So ... MY primary sadness is when a page is coming up and keep re-rendering as images arrive (because the HTML which could have specified width and height did not ...). This make using the page very tough until it has 'settled down.' And I can't be sure when it has settled down.
BEST is when there are *control* elements such as buttons moving around. Microsoft's Outlook client for Windows (non-web!) does this as part of the send-an-email process -- the "send" button moves while I am trying to press it!
I am annoyed, but much less so, by an image that changes (such as at the Jewish Law site). I'd prefer not, but this isn't a deal breaker.
Same with status text changing (though I'd prefer an icon in a fixed location to change or something like that).
Scott, is your problem with 'flashing' or with ANY dynamic change to the page you are using/viewing?
I believe that website is showing you two pictures of the same person, just at different ages? Or, like, definitely two visibly closely related individuals.
Genuine flashing elements would/do bother me but I don't agree that gmail and Substack "draft saved" stuff counts. Possibly this is because I'm constantly paranoid that my draft is -not- being saved and enjoy the visual placebo of it always being there in the corner but I'm also mostly confident my brain filters out stuff like the little product text on the AdBlock window.
I actually started out agreeing with the piece but then was surprised that you included the saving draft icon on Substack in the same category as seizure causing rabbi flashes. Inferences from your poll might therefore be invalid. I hate flashing but don’t place it in that category. Other people have pointed this out, but I want to keep harping on it because really that feature is one of the things that makes Substack amazing and I hope no one listens to this post.
I'm surprised there's no mention of ads that re-load themselves and cause the text you're reading to jump around and re-flow. And often these ads aren't even visible on the page, so it's totally pointless aggravation. Its the equivalent of some yanking a magazine out of your hands while youre reading. It's shockingly rude, and shocking how common this is. Lately I just ragequit.
I find them so irritating I use a whole stack of adblockers, flashblockers and image-blockers to browse the internet. Even still images distract from the text, so in order to see any kind of image in my browser, I have to do a slightly annoying two-step temporary authorization to make the image load. This works pretty well and makes the internet experience overall far less irritating, infuriating, and overstimulating. Text-only for the most part.
I have a friend whose school-age daughter has photosensitive epilepsy, and she says to check her daughter's websites for flashing elements before she can let her daughter visit them. If they're for a school assignment and have flashing elements, she has to print out screenshots for her daughter.
How do you deal with the blinking cursor in notepad? Is that not a flashing element? I was thinking like flashing banner adds, not tiny things like "draft saved". I mean like popup ads that cover text and play commercials for video games. I would have voted not bothered if asked about all but the first example in this post.
I suspect that in some cases people say they wouldn't use a website with things like this, but in practice it's just the opposite. The company I work for has one of the most annoying popups I have ever experienced. If your mouse ever comes close to switching tabs, a big window pops up saying "Wait before you go please give us your email address!" I despise it, and as soon as I was able I pulled the metrics to show that it was a pointless annoyance.
And then I found out that it is incredibly good at getting people to give us their email address. Probably the single most effective method we use for adding people to our newsletter. My spirit was crushed.
Operating systems have accessibility setting to reduce motion, which is available to the websites and if they respect it, they should disable/reduce animations.
I have a different set of issues, somewhat overlapping, that also annoy me.
Some partial solutions:
- Write custom CSS for websites. Adblock works by deleting an element. But you can also style it so that it is smaller, or is hidden. You can then inject it with an extension like stylus.
- Using some "reader mode" type of extension, which deletes extraneous non-text elements. Would have worked for your jewish site.
- Writting some custom javascript and injecting it into the website when loading it. E.g., Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter has some annoying elements, so I redirect it to the archive.is version, apply a readability plugin and then inject some stuff to get rid of the rest of annoying stuff.
- Use the custom frontends others have written. There is a small movement of people annoyed at dark patterns who write better frontends. You can use an extension like libredirect to use a better frontend if one exists: https://libredirect.github.io. For a while it looked like there was going to be a semi-organized "simple web" effort, but it feels pretty anarchic now.
Personally I'm cheating a bit, because I use a custom browser, so when I encounter something that annoys me, I make some small tweak and recompile. But I think you can get like 99% of the benefit of what I'm doing with Firefox extensions (Google doesn't want people to be able to block ads, because that's kind of their whole business, and has castrated adblockers with their Manifest v3 extension proposal for Chrome).
Also, uBlock Origin is better than AdblockPlus & others, because at some point AdblockPlus sold out and you should switch.
So, call to action:
- Switch to Firefox. Make yourself acquainted with its reader mode.
- Install the Ublock Origin and libredirect extensions
- Install Stylus, and learn to tweak css for the websites that you most visit
* Web pages that use mounds of javascript to duplicate functionality that already exists in html, like forms.
* Bonus points if the form tries to prettyprint or otherwise 'help' me type in them.
* Double bonus points if your links are not actually links, but onclick javascript redirectors.
* Pages that override browser keyboard shortcuts. E.g. Github thinks it's funny to make ctrl-k go to their search-github box instead of my browser's searchbar.
* In fact, pages that override *any* browser UI behavior. Right now, substack is doing something wonky such that hovering on the article text doesn't show a selection cursor.
* Triple bonus points if said overrides appear to exist *specifically* to break browser behavior, e.g. by making C+P difficult.
* CSS popups. There's a reason all browers have popup blocking now, and it's not because a second window was involved.
* *Massive* decorative elements, such that I can only see a tiny fraction of the actual page content at a time.
* Obfuscated element classes/ids that make it hard to identify and nuke offenders.
* Anything that breaks Reader Mode or RSS/Atom feeds, making it hard to view content outside your shitshow of a site.
Maybe you can adblock your way out of *some* of these things. For example, in uBlock Origin you can use CSS selectors that match on a *substring* of a class of a visual element instead of the whole class (which nowadays contains randomly-generated parts to make it harder to block).
In particular, Substack has this annoying popup on text selection (people who select text while reading it have probably noticed it already). Normally, the only CSS class that I can block is .pencraft, but that ends up destroying the main page of the blog (almost everything there has .pencraft attached). But if I block substack.com##.pencraft[class*="selection_popover"], it only covers those .pencraft elements that also have selection_popover in their class name, which for now seems to only include the annoying selection popup thingy.
If some of your annoyances have partially randomly generated class names but also have predictable parts in them, this could work for you too.
I must be in the middle: the flashing banner ads *really* bother me, but I barely notice a little flickering “draft saved.” I was a little surprised to find out that was what you were talking about.
For calibration, my answer on the survey is “they annoy me quite a bit.”
Fund my (hypothetical) web company/companies and I'll 'just' re-implement all of the important/useful software and hire Edward Tufte to design all of the UIs!
(Semi-seriously – I have an absurd number of personal/side projects that are basically this. I even use a few of them!)
I'm another survey respondent who said "flashing things on websites annoy me intensely", because never in a million years would I have thought the question was describing autosave status indicators.
I will throw my hat in the ring as someone who is really bothered by the more obvious elements, but barely notices the Gmail-style ones. If this post is a memetic hazard and I can no longer ignore them, I’m going to be very mildly annoyed!
100% agree and I think the entire internet has gone downhill. So many sites refuse to load now with adblockers on, and the whole internet has gotten worse. Any random news site will have 3 flashing banners and pop-ups every few seconds or if I move my mouse off screen. I thought we figured this out with web 1.0 in the late 1990s that it is terribly bad user experiences to have loads of flashing things or moving elements of any kind on your website.
I'm in the camp of...run away and close the tab immediately if it is annoying with constantly changing banner ads, video pop ups in the corner at all and usually with ads, etc. The scroll down ones are super super annoying as well with the huge 1/3 of the page banner you have to fight with actively, scrolling up and down before it minimises into a smaller banner.
My conclusion is...I guess you don't want visitors on your website. If I need to click through 3 pop ups in different parts of the screen, fight scroll with the top banner to see the content, and then it all flashes at me constantly...they clearly hate their users and don't want any visitors to their website. I'll immediately close it and never go back, my blacklist of sites grows everyday.
To me the big cost of this 'draft saved' is that it is a distraction. It breaks your train of thought and concentration. When you're deep in a flow state and some small text in your visual field keeps flicking back and forth, it is a distraction.
This isn't as directly annoying as the flashing banner ads, but it does make it harder to draft messages. I know many authors and creative types talk about using focused writing apps with no distractions, no notifications, etc. Why? because Word, gmail, blogging sites, etc. are all unusable.
Most modern web design seems intended -- consciously or otherwise -- to establish control of the user's client and thereby their attention. Instead of providing content for the user to view as they choose, sites build the "viewer" into the page, with a mix of javascript and CSS. At that point, the browser is no longer your client. The purported website itself is the client for a bespoke, single-vendor API backing it -- an API inevitably incompatible with any other site, to maximize the costs of third-party client-writers.
The result is that you can't easily view content from many providers in the client of your choice; it's "use their client" or "write your own" (in the form of CSS hacks or whatever). And, business pressures being what they are, that's fine by most of the providers. Their content doesn't actually matter. Their content is bait. The actual purpose of such sites is to feed users' attention into a chipper shredder, then use the output to fertilize a cash garden.
As legitimate content producers continue to migrate to ever-more-consolidated single-vendor platforms, things get progressively worse. When youtube or facebook enshittify their platform, that enshittification is inherited by all the relatively-innocent producers that rely on them for hosting. Which is how ACX ends up with subscription popups that neither Scott nor his readers wanted or will ever want. But what can one do about that? The entity responsible for the bullshit is not the entity writing the content! I can't boycott Substack without boycotting Scott! I can hack the site CSS to remove the bullshit...but I have to do that separately for every site on the Internet.
I don't think there's a fix for this. Any set of browser features that allows a website to provide its own interface will be abused to control the user's use of that interface. And all monolithic platforms (youtube, facebook, substack, et al) will try to make it hard for either users *or* authors to respond to enshittification with a middle finger.
(note how many services provide a desktop client, but forbid third-party clients. This is not for security, no matter what they say. It's because they want their users to be a captive audience.)
There might be some hope on the author side of things. In principle, instead of an author posting their content directly to platform X using X's tools, they could generate an authoritative RSS/Atom feed (with whatever tools they choose); and then (separately) host a site consuming that feed on their platform of choice. Said site would act as the official, default UI -- the equivalent of astralcodexten.substack.com -- but disgruntled users could directly consume the authoritative feed if desired. Being a dependency of the official site, such a feed would be relatively reliable. And if, later, the platform host enshittifies its UI in ways the *author* doesn't like, they could migrate elsewhere with minimal transition cost.
Note that this would be the reverse of the typical structure where the site is the authoritative source of content and the feeds a secondary, often-neglected feature.
The details of that suggestion aren't important; the important part is the separation of UI from content. There has to be a site-independent way of querying the content without the chrome. Otherwise, both authors and users are at the mercy of the platform's developers. We've seen what they do with that power, and it's produced an Internet that is increasingly Out To Get You. Every year, my arsenal of browser armor grows. It's a necessary thing, to keep the web tolerable.
But it shouldn't be.
(how does one do links in substack comments? I wrote about this on LW a few years ago, not sure how to link it)
This happens because of typical-mind-fallacy on the part of PMs. There is a substantial group of people who aren't bothered by little spinners and indicators. They're like the speedometer on your car's dashboard...just fades into the background when you're not using it.
Then there are a bunch of people who can't stand them. If your product leadership doesn't contain those people it goes wrong. They'll never even notice it. And it won't actually impact metrics that much in the medium term, just slowly erode the joy a segment of people feel in using your product over years until they can't wait to use something else. Oops!
Scott, you should really start using uBlock Origin.
Funny, whenever people talk about an adblocker, they NEVER mean Adblock, except those people who don't know better.
That would be like if there was a very bad brand of refrigerators called Fridge™, and whenever somebody said something like, "at home, we have a fridge", and people with a Fridge™ would think: "hey, I have one of those" and never find out there was this new type of fridge that worked waaaay better and was not secretly spying on you.
I think the real lesson of this post is how people can answer "yes" to a question where the survey maker's concept of that question is different from most users, leading to an analysis built on false assumptions.
No one else has addressed the Halachic website specifically, so as your most Orthodox Jewish reader, here you go:
The Halachic website you found is specifically for Sefaradi Jews. The "two Rabbis" it is flickering between are Rav Ovadia Yosef as a younger person, and Rav Ovadia Yosef as an older person. He is quite the personality cult person. Modern-day Mizrachi (Middle Eastern, subsection of Sefaradi) Jews have a tendency to really go in for the flashing lights, in general. My husband and I were just speculating on why this is. We think it's partly due to the fact that they are relatively poor, and therefore tend to like gaudy decorations more.
Here are some nice pictures and videos of small Sefaradi synagogues in Israel:
In short, it is very likely that the Sefaradi readers of this site actually do see the flickering images as a sign of how nice the website is - they have similar things in their Synagogue!
Next time you want to look up an obscure Halachic text, check out www.halachipedia.com/
Or the best source is Pninei Halacha: https://ph.yhb.org.il/en/. This is widely accepted as the hottest new thing in Halachic literature.
Both of these are oriented towards giving a more organized, bigger picture view of Halacha, including both Ashkenazi and Sefaradi sources.
Flashing elements need to be make or break things for a given activity and even then they should be show stoppers, not matters of course. No alarm that goes on forever is an alarm anymore, and it's one of those Norman-door annoyances for me, a guy who talks about Norman doors. Flashing must convey information, like an old timey lighthouse (the light rotating has a known period that tells you where you are if you know what you are looking at! They are being replaced with electronically controlled lights that simply flash at preset rates, but spinning around is an alternative way of creating a digital signal that works in all directions.)
This, and also sites that change the text selection behavior. Substack is the latest offender, adding a pop-up "Restack quote" whenever I select anything. Look, if I wanted to "restack" this, I'd copy the quote I wanted and click the button at the bottom of the post.
Just let me do my neurotic constantly-selecting-and-deselecting-the-paragraph-I'm-reading thing in peace.
Just to be clear, I said that I was significantly annoyed by flashing elements, but I would never have considered any of these to be flashing elements. I was thinking ye ould <blink> tags.
Regarding "draft saved": I don't mind it when I am working on an email where the main bottleneck is typing. But when I spend time coming up with which words to write, it is annoying. (And I think this generalises to other sites.)
I think a more interesting extension of this post would be about attention-manipulating design in general - including in physical spaces.
Examples (note that I suffer from these things more than average, so this might not be universally hated):
- TV in restaurants (as opposed to sport bars). I always try to sit such that it isn't in my field or vision.
- static adds that suddenly switch to something else (both on websites and in physical spaces). Make it much harder to do longer chains or thought (such as when trying to ro research while waiting for a plane).
- supermarkets playing adds from speakers while you are in the store. (Some czech stores have their own "radio" which is just play adds for their products and silly songs.)
- excessive "information messages" on public transport. For example, British railways' "See something that doesn't belong? See it, say it, sorted!" indeed makes me hate them with passion and caused me to always travel with noise-cancelling headphones.
Random thought:
- These things generally sound like something that should be illegal, but aren't yet. Is it because we don't view attention as a resource? Or that many people don't value it? Or that we haven't acknowledged that attention can be manipulated or taken from us?
- It is interesting that we now have rules against electronic spam, but less so about physical spam and attention spam in physical spaces.
- I sometimes use a "replacement by human" test: For example, would we find it socially acceptable for a British Railway employee to walk up to me every 3 minutes and go "Do you see something that doesn't belong? ..."? No, definitely not. That suggest that the automated recording is over the line also.
As a proud member of the 16% that avoids using websites if they're too visually distracting, I sometimes use TamperMonkey to remove visually distracting indicators. For example, presentations in google slides have an especially annoying "saving..." icon that I remove with: https://gist.github.com/rbalicki2/4ef8429d9577e965d12513695346df7a
The biggest problem on websites is pop-ups. The worst offender being the cookie message, which manages to be both completely useless and extremely irritating at the same time. But I find all pop-ups of any kind annoying.
Was trying to figure out why "draft saved" doesn't bother me when most flashing/changing elements in websites do. Then I remembered that I hardly ever look at the screen when I'm typing. Learning to touch type is probably about the same amount of effort as switching email clients?
I also get annoyed by ads, though not quite to this extent. That said, as long as flashing elements are rendered in your browser (rather than in a dedicated app like Gmail on Android), you as the end user have ultimate control over them, including the power to remove them.
For instance, my adblocker of choice is uBlock, and its element zapper and element picker modes can be used to remove arbitrary elements on websites. However, sometimes it's not obvious exactly what to remove, or how to adjust the filter to be sufficiently general. In that case, if you don't want to put in the time to learn and experiment with uBlock's filter syntax etc., that seems like a good use case to hire someone on a website like Fiverr to create the filters for you.
Or: I don't like the YouTube home feed, so I have an addon which removes it (called Block YouTube Feed").
Or: I don't like sponsor segments in Youtube videos, so I have an addon which skips them (called "SponsorBlock for Youtube").
The spectrum of flashing element annoyingness is immense. When I took the survey I probably picked one of the two middle options, because I was imagining the constantly-moving video ads you get on some websites, or even worse, the popups that move around the screen. Stuff like the "draft saved" notifications in Gmail gets dropped several layers of visual processing before it hits my consciousness and I couldn't care less about it.
Ublock Origin doesn't have the flashing text problem, and it's generally recommended over AdBlock Plus these days, after some controversy about AdBlock letting some ads through.
Perhaps the people who program all these sites to flash hate their jobs and don't want to do them, and also know that there's no disincentive for them to spite their employers by making the web pages awful.
I imagine that most people who answered your survey were not at all imagining a single text element changing to indicate status, and were instead imagining annoying flashing banner ads, like you mentioned at the start of the post.
Along the same lines as the "just use protonmail" gmail support comments, I will throw in a recommendation for uBlock Origin over Adblock Plus. Mostly due to the "acceptable ads" fiasco, but your screenshot of the ABP interface also looks covered in, well, ads, to upgrade and share on social media and install it on all your devices. The UBO interface is mostly buttons to block things in various ways.
(Copying over all your custom filters should be straightforward)
I think on the survey, people may consider flashing elements to be things like banner ads or newsletter sign ups, so that may skew numbers. At least, I wouldn't consider the Saving Draft stuff to be what the question was asking about.
On a side note, consider using uBlock Origin instead, it has no flashing and doesn't have the controversies that Adblock does.
Edit: Ha, looks like everyone has the same thought.
If you're interested in some of what is known about causal effects of ads on websites, I cover a lot of material in my banner-ad page: https://gwern.net/ad
For the most part, I never even notice this kind of stuff. I had no idea about the flashing Google drafts message, even though I use GMail for both work and personal use. On the other hand, the alternating rabbi photos would probably annoy me.
>And speaking of AdBlock, its interface looks like this:
What you want is uBlock Origin. And also possibly NoScript.
One note: you're using AdBlock Plus instead of uBlock Origin and should stop that. ABP in 2016 started allowing certain ads and is more resource intensive while having fewer features. uBO is also open source.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/business/media/adblock-plus-created-to-protect-users-from-ads-opens-the-door.html
I don't know if design is getting worse, but I've noticed an increase in my "wow, you are doing something so annoying I literally don't want to use your site" reactions these days.
It's gotten to the point where I'll open the dev console and delete/hide the offending element rather than put up with it.
What I would love is an Android web browser that doesn't let video autoplay so that all of my data isn't wasted on bullshit. Is there one?
I usually attempt to use the mobile version of the site if I can. It's usually cleaner.
Cannot stand flashing anything. I leave. Period. Extreme "green" in your chart.
Pretty sure I said the flashing mildly annoyed me, but I was very much thinking of the Jewish Rabbis. The Draft Saved indicator is so small, and practically the same color as the background, that it doesn't bother me. And I had to open Adblock to see it was doing that, I tune that part of the board out entirely. (Granted, that means whatever it's supposed to be doing, it isn't doing it.)
Thinking about it, I think videogames with loading screens still benefit from changing the text on them; if nothing else it tells you the thing hasn't frozen. So there are situational exceptions.
Those things drive me nuts. If there is something moving on the page, I can't read the text. Luckily, most browsers support reader mode which really helps. I also keep a post-it note handy to block things.
For technical control freaks, I've been told the answer is Stop the Madness, but I haven't tried it yet.
Flashing ads exist to maximize revenue in basically the way you'd expect. If you get paid per impression and an impression needs 5 seconds then you can get 12 ads in a minute. They also increase attention paid to the ads (which is generally quite low for banner display ads). While you find it annoying the adnets want to make money more than they want to please you. Though I expect they'll decrease as we're increasingly training users to expect to pay for content and as ad rates go down.
Flashing interface elements exist because people expect feedback on their actions. Action and reaction. If you don't give them a reaction then they think nothing happened. There's no permanent way to display it because it has to show up in response to the action. Meaning it has to change in some way on the action and then un-change to wait for new actions. If you have a different solution to this I'd be interested in hearing it. Making it an option takes some extra work but should be doable if there's enough demand people will actually switch over it.
Also, remember the median internet user is not extremely online and generally needs some degree of assistance/guidance. Accessibility and ease of use is almost considered synonymous with good design.
I really love that sometimes this blog just covers really specific personal complaints. Very humanizing. Zero irony btw, I also hate flashing elements.
This post made me realize how often I will look at the wall while typing if it's remotely long and I'm typing quickly. It's probably related.
That said, I am another person who wouldn't consider "draft saved" to be a flashing element on the survey, so I don't have it as bad as Scott.
I'm surprised this article doesn't seem to consider the massive selection bias inherent in the ACX survey, and assumes that 16% of survey respondents equates to 16% of all internet users. That seems like complete nonsense to me; people who like to read 10,000 word book reports are not remotely representative of the average person. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the average person likes those sorts of flashing text elements, and including them gets them more users.
(That doesn't explain why there isn't an option to turn it off though.)
Nothing worse than Facebook's messaging popups which flash to indicate that the other party is typing. It's the visual equivalent of phone music interrupted by "Your call is important to us..."
I'm working on an antidote:
https;//conntects.net
It's not finished yet, but I can safely guarantee that it won't flicker, because I hate writing JavaScript. I'm writing a social networking site in which every url is a genuine page. No infinite scrolling. No gigantic JavaScript framework upload. Instead of a single-page JavaScript app pulling in data, actual server served pages include just enough JavaScript to do whatever dropdown menus, etc. are needed on the page.
If you want to see what's new, you need to refresh the home page.
Social media is frying our brains.
But connecting with geographically dispersed friends is useful...
I don't mind a changing element as long as it is doing something useful. Reporting that my current draft has been saved is useful information.
I recall keeping the lights of my modem within view back in my BBS days. The pattern could tell me if I was connected yet, or still connecting, or if a file transfer was full or half duplex or just stuck. I normally hate flashing elements, but that had enough utility that I would bear it.
Both images showcase Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the preeminent authority in Sephardic Jewish law. One image captures his younger years, while the other depicts him in older age.
Web banner flickers,
In Gmail, a draft takes root,
Different, yet alike.
Gmail drafts flash only when there is a subject. While drafting an email, leave the subject blank. If you really need it, say to recognize a draft among a list of drafts in progress, start the email body with the subject. Once the draft is done, enter the subject, and send it off.
With respect, some feedback: low-effort personal gripe posts like this[1] lower the signal-to-noise ratio of ACX, and make it less pleasant to browse. I would like to see fewer of them.
[1] Subjectively, I would put the "block you on Twitter" post in the same category, even though it did include include some genuine insight about the incentives of journalists versus regular people.
I would add the nav bar that appears and disappears based on how you scroll to the list of offenders. Not only does it pop on and grab your attention, but if you scroll down one click too far and have to scroll up one line, it pops on, covering the exact line you were trying to read. I have custom CSS loaded for sites I frequent (including SubStack) to remove that useless element.
I chose my avatar image in the hopes that it would be seen as an obvious bug that they would be allowed.
Clearly that approach has failed.
I've read only a few sentences. And I have to ask, can you ask commenters not to have blinking or changing icons... The round thing next to your name.
You have a popup to subscribe which enrages me you hypocrite.
Anyone out there with amblyopia or strabismus?
I have Scott's level of difficulties with websites or applications that have differently-formated information menus on the same screen at the same time.
For example, if you've ever tried to maintain a website in Wordpress: the "Posts" screen at login will have pop-ups from your plugins that appear in a white box and in a certain formatting (I think it's different for each plug-in), then you've got different kinds of posts in a hyperlink-style menu on a horizontal strip across the screen, then just below that you've got drop-down menus (in a new formating style), then below that, looking like it's a column that lines up with the drop-down menus (but not connected) is a list of your posts. Meanwhile on the left side of the screen you've got a "dashboard" with a verticle list on the left side of screen. Click on any option on the dashboard and another verticle list pops out with slightly smaller fonts and spacing.
All of this is murder on people who have difficulty making small short regular eye-movements. I hate it so much. And so much of our tech is structured like this.
Yeah, this is annoying. I'm unable to watch as I type into a brower address bar—every key stroke updates the options in an annoying drop down menu that can't be disabled. I'll typically either close my eyes or look at the wall to my left.
Empirically I'll pay at least an extra $20 not to use Frontier's website (ie, I once got a United flight that cost $20 more than Frontier, just to avoid Frontier's website), which gets to the point of so-bad-it's-funny in terms of web design. I mean, they really do everything to maximize website awfulness, not just the popups and flashing things, but that was a very stark financial illustration of what web design is worth to me.
Of course, Frontier's bad web design is meant to wring money out of people drop by drop, and I assume it's succeeding there to such a high degree that it doesn't matter how many people avoid them just for the web problems.
Just today I was annoyed, after going to the local news station's website (as I often do) to read the weather bulletin, examine the 7-day forecast, and enjoy the future radar feature, to have that morning's TV weather spot come up as a video it was difficult to close as the "x" disappeared into the radar background. I have demonstrated my fealty to the station. Why are you ruining my experience of your content? Why should the TV spot override the material presented by the same person who made the TV spot?
But that was as nothing compared to trying to cancel a streaming service and "add-on" that I had unwisely decided to take a free trial flyer on. About twenty minutes into the free trial, the thought of watching anything on Hulu/Starz became depressing and I moved to cancel. To do this you "toggle" between a check mark and a plus sign and an x, which come and go, appear and disappear. Doh, there it goes back again! Got it! No, fool, you missed it again! Oh, better luck next time!
Anyone out there with strabismus or amblyopia and have this kind of difficulty just from using software that has a lot of menus, ribbons, and pop-ups? And also hate lots of colors and low contrast?
Hate: Microsoft Word, Wordpress
Love: DrudgeReport, F.Lux darkroom mode.
So-So: Excel (yah grids!)
A tool I like for these kind of things is Tampermonkey - it's an extension that lets you run arbitrary bits of code on specific webpages to modify their behavior. Obviously this is most useful if you're a programmer who can write their own scripts, but there do exist some decent repositories of scripts out there, like https://greasyfork.org . (Or if you know a web developer these things are generally quick to write)
Granted, for just blocking stuff the adblock 'block specific elements' tools probably work well enough in a lot of cases, but tampermonkey scripts are a lot more flexible. (IIRC some people use this sort of script to put back the like buttons on this site...)
Also try Javascript Manager. It works by blocking javascript for sites like your Jewish law web site but would probably break interactive sites like gmail.
https://js-manager.freebusinessapps.net/
Thank you for posting this. Even thought this annoyed me, I was not even aware.
I assumed these annoyance as a fact of life—as opposed to something that I can avoid (e.g. by migrating from services) and change (I design user interfaces, so I will take this into account).
Sometimes we forget that we have agency in this world, but you need to be aware first. In other words, mindfulness predates change.
“As long as you keep typing, the ‘Saving Draft’ button flashes in the upper left corner every few seconds.”
I find it bizarre anyone could care about this. I like reassurance my draft is getting saved! I’ve lost it on at least one occasion. There are people who are bothered by this? Really!?!
I think the reason I’m not bothered by “draft saved” type UI elements is that they’re responding to my interaction with the page. Like, it doesn’t bother anybody that when you type a “A”, a little “A” flicks into visibility on the screen. That’s something you did. Well, the “draft saved” thing is the same, just on a slight time delay. It’s reporting that it finished the task your keystroke assigned it. I don’t know, it doesn’t bother me.
Also, somebody should mention that web companies often thoroughly A/B test features like this, and won’t deploy one to the whole user base before they’ve collected exhaustive metrics describing the effect it has on user engagement. They are also well aware of how many people are switching to ProtonMail after a new UI feature comes out. For a feature like the “draft saved” thing, which doesn’t make them any money except via making the user experience better, you can bet it adds more value overall than it subtracts.
I had never noticed the "Draft saved" thing on gmail before. I am unbothered but understand your frustration with it.
One strategy I piloted that I thought I would share: you can just give your email the subject "Draft saved" until you're done, and then change it to what you actually want. There's still a millisecond where it goes to "Draft saving..." but this would get rid of most of the flashy/blinky thing.
I have a low tech suggestion for you Scott. "Draft saved" is on the upper left on both the Substack and gmail drafting page. Get a small piece of very opaque paper and fold it sharply in half, & drape it with the fold on top so that it covers only the part of your screen with the fucking "draft saved" blinkers. I'm not bothered by blinkers, but I cannot stand seeing my face on the screen when I'm video conferencing. It's not that I'm critical of my appearance -- well I *am,* but that's not the problem in this case -- it's that watching myself smile and open and close my mouth as I talk makes everything seem sort of derealized and fake, like I'm an actor. So I keep little folded pieces of paper near the laptop to cover my onscreen mug!
If you are bothered by having whatever else is in the upper left of the screen covered by the paper, use a transparent piece of plastic, and the stick a little piece of opaque paper just to cover the crucial spot.
Not sure if this came up yet, but the photos of the Rabbis are actually of the same Rabbi--Rav Ovadia Yosef. Just photos of him at different ages. No idea why the website creator decided to have it flip between the two, but honestly more curious about why you were on a halacha website.
Huh. I thought I hated flashing elements, but by that I mean -flashing- elements, ones that change all the time. I never even noticed the "Draft saved" thing in Gmail, not that I write messages in Gmail very often. I don't mind that. What I mind is ones that are constantly changing, or jiggling around, which is done specifically to attract attention.
I guess this comes from different levels of sensory filtration. Me and seemingly most people aren't bothered by the draft saved, which is designed to be unobtrusive. Scott has mentioned in other posts that he lives in quiet part of town and hates parties and seems to have a bunch of sensory sensitivities.
I'm normally super annoyed by "saving..." indicators, roamresearch has what I think is a good compromise; It's just a circle that's orange when there are unsaved changes, green when save is complete. I don't notice it changing unless I look at it.
If I agreed with you any more on this topic, we would spontaneously enter into a Vulcan mind-meld.
As much as I approve of this message, it's not going to accomplish anything if you insist on framing it as "everyone." You are the only person I've ever encountered who feels as strongly and consistently about this as I do. I'm shocked that the survey figure for "would stop using" was 16%; I suspect that a large fraction of that 16% were thinking of more extreme cases, and would be able to ignore e.g. the Gmail/MS Word save messages, but we might just be an extremely unrepresentative sample on this particular point.
If you don't have a strong philosophical objection, presenting it as an accessibility issue is a more effective strategic approach. I'm almost certain that the inability to tune out moving/changing stimuli is strongly correlated with autism and/or ADHD. You could probably test that hypothesis fairly easily with your survey data.
At least part of the answer here is the bad tech incentives - tech companies tend to inventivise doing things regardless of whether it's a good idea. Flashing elements allow more complications, and "added draft saved notifier to Gmail app, driving a 5% improvement in gerrymandered metrics" looks much better on your perf review than "kept Gmail boring but functional after realizing it was more usable that way", or even "added option to disable the draft saved notification feature that my coworker just added and wrote a whole doc about how much it improves his gerrymandered metrics".
Mailing list pop-ups on your site alienates and enrages users
I don't have that problem in gmail because, like Christopher McCann, I use the HTML version of the site. Appending ?ui=html to a gmail URL will get you there, after you click past a warning saying "please don't do this".
As long as we're on the subject of UI, could I just say that the color coding of your pie chart is non-intuitive?
The halacha website feels the need to constantly scroll through pictures of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (who they've also adorably made their little favicon!) because otherwise their readers might be tempted to not vote for his political party, Shas.
Here is one of the many campaign ads prominently featuring the ghost of Ovadia Yosef campaigning on his party's behalf (I want a Youtube playlist, honestly):
https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2022/10/WhatsApp-Video-2022-10-27-at-6.30.28-PM.mp4?_=1
Does the Talmud have any guidance about whether to add flashing elements to websites?
Obligatory Firefox proselytism : Firefox has a "read mode" integrated that removes the interface of the website when you try to read an article. It's very useful and can also be used to bypass paywalls (for example on the nyt, go to an article, unable lecture mode and reload the page, tadaa)
Bad pizza graph color scheme, otherwise good post. The number in green should be "slightly annoyed", the one in orange "will give up on the site". I know, I know, it's there in the legend, but come on!
Very true!
AdBlock Plus started selling the ability to show you ads anyway, and a variety of other missteps. These days I do not recommend it to anyone; uBlock Origin is both 'pure' and works much better than ABP ever did.
>I used to think I must be the only person who worried about this; maybe it was a weird OCD thing. But I asked about it on the ACX survey . . .
I'm not sure that survey question is fair and balanced. Three out of four options state that you are annoyed by flashing elements. Only only option is (barely) positive. Then you add the three options to show that the vast majority is annoyed. That is not a good methodology. A better question would include has many positive options (don't notice at and don't care) as negative once. A 'no opinion' option would have been good as well.
Speaking for my self, once I concentrate on typing I do not register the other elements. Either I don't see it at all, or it doesn't perturb me one bit. I'd still keep the OCD option open.
Over here in the EU the law requires consent for cookies, so a lot of websites show a pop up from the bottom after load. Often this has two buttons - all cookies, or minimum required cookies. There’s also some text about why they want you to click all. Some have a third option to modify cookies. Often when trying to dismiss the pop up and hit accept all, I hit that, which brings up a full screen cookie management page.
Here was my experience yesterday. I am linked to a url (from the daily express I think). Accept cookies popup comes up, I accidentally click the modify cookies. Spend a second on that to get rid of it. Back to webpage. A popdown asks me if I want to download the app at the same time as a floating page on the bottom right shows some video of something. This is both intrusive and eats up screen estate. I try and get rid of the video but they are designed to have the tiniest x button possible. Inevitably I go to the video page. I go back to the article. The app pop down and floating video are still there, this time a different ad.
I start to read the article, which is slow to load anyway as it needs to load a dozen or so of those ads that now come both within and at the bottom of the articles, often taking up more screen estate than the article, often flickering or running previews.
The progressive loading of these ads slows the scroll which is itself annoying but within a few seconds of scrolling another floating window appears asking me to sign up for the newspaper.
Reader: I didn’t sign up for the newspaper and I did not read the article.
But! The express probably don’t care. They are making money from a few PPV ads, and I clicked on the video which is probably revenue to them. I also engaged with the cookies. From a metric point of view I’m a satisfied and engaged, and revenue producing, customer. They probably don’t even measure “scroll to bottom”.
Unrelated point, but you should seriously consider using ublock origin, AdBlock is itself a closed sourced advertising and data collection platform, it will strike deal with companies to display ads and will not block agressively enough.
Ublock gives a better experience (fewer ads) and open source.
I don't mind the "Draft saved" thing, because I get a little weird about obsessively saving files to make sure nothing is lost, but the other shit enrages me. It has reached the point where I do a good 85% of my web browsing on the computer where I have adblockers turned on. I used to look at the Internet on my phone. I don't do that much anymore.
Did anyone mention prefers-reduced-motion yet? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion
There's a really interesting question to be dug into, about what the product incentives are within big tech companies, especially where the user is not making the primary purchase decision. One of the things I've noticed is that Google seems to be generally trending towards consistently worse UI, and I suspect that there's just no pressure to make things better for users, because the bureaucracy isn't really built for that. I've been wondering if that problem is related more to scale (big enough company means the internal incentives tend to be all bureaucratic) or if there's an additional cultural force of some sort (desire for designers to make things look aesthetically pleasing to their own eyes, desire for engineers to make changes that are functional) that exacerbates it.
so true!!!
Thank you for writing about this! I don't understand why everyone else isn't grabbing their pitchforks over today's heinous web design practices. Maybe it's because we don't know where the product managers and web designers live. I'm in the camp that will stop using a site that has items like: flashing anything, ads that follow you down the screen as you scroll, or "exit intent popups", the most pathetically desperate and annoying mechanism ever invented. Just because something is possible to implement doesn't mean it's a good idea!
I think I'm more sensitive to lights than most, so that may explain it.
On a related topic, do we have to have "hover everything", so that A) you have to move your mouse over the screen to find out what UI elements are available, and B) no matter where you try to place your cursor out of the way, some "on hover" element pops up to block your view? My big question is: DO THESE PEOPLE EVEN TRY OUT THEIR OWN WEBSITES? Who is actually demanding these features? Put this crap on your website and I'll remember you. Not only will I avoid buying your products, I'll seek to badmouth you every chance I get.
> They haven’t. I can no longer write things on Gmail - I have to compose on Notepad and then copy-paste to the Gmail window - because they’ve made it look like this:
As a heads up: you can also switch to hit "switch to HTML view" in the bottom right corner of the screen when gmail loads up in your browser to stop this from happening. Since you're using Notepad anyway, it's not feature-reduced.
I think we should also talk about the new message notifications. For example on Twitter chat groups, or Discord. If it's not blinking, at least there is a blue dot and maybe a number calling for your attention.
Google probably don't want you to use their email interface. It makes no money for them. You can buy a gmail address but it is expected that most power users will use it with Outlook or a similar email app.
I stopped using gmail long time ago because it became too cluttered and annoying for a power user. It probably works for majority who sends only an occasional email and that leads people to use all other google services (showing adds etc.).
Flashing ads are an irritation, more so when they feature disagreeable or offputting images. Incessant recent ads for an ear wax removal product comes to mind (unfortunately), although mercifully that now seems to have gone away.
I also see loads of ads for life insurance and funeral services, featuring wrinklies who look as old as Methusaleh and have clearly spent their declining years and possibly their entire lives working or basking in the sun. I shouldn't complain, as I'm no spring chicken myself, and ageism is a Bad Thing, but do we really need constant reminders that our days are numbered?
But the web UI feature that drives me completely potty, and compared to which flashing ads pale into insignificance, is dynamic page extensions that throw the display completely out of vertical alignment each time when the slider bar is used.
It seems that nobody in the history of the world has yet figured out a way to extend a page while leaving unmoved the content already displayed. I'm not talking about a slight jog, which would be bad enough in itself, but a massive flurry of movement after which one's place is completely lost.
Another minor irritation is a horizontal bar that slides down from nowhere and covers content when one pans the page down with the slider bar, so one has to overshoot and slide the bar back up slightly to tuck the bar away again. It must have seemed such a smart idea to whoever invented it, but it would have been better if they had kept their idea to themself!
I'd be shocked if any changes to the interface on such a central product as Gmail didn't go through A/B testing. If it passed, it means the net effect on engagement couldn't be substantial. Maybe they had bad metrics, or the effect is unobservable (e.g. annoyance/hate, not leaving the platform, though maybe they also had users rate the experience). Or maybe the weak positive effect for most users beat the negative effects for the small subset.
Save your sanity and use reader mode in FireFox - I'm sure there are extensions for other browsers, safari too has it natively integrated IIRC.
It gives you large font (customizable), simple UI, no complex flashing elements and distracting stuff as *well* as Dark Mode. All with a click of a button :)
One reason why I use Firefox (Chromium-based browsers also offer this) is to use the extension uBlock Origin, which lets you select an element of a page and block it. It used to work in Safari too, but Apple has denigrated extensions and offers just a few weak apps for ad blocking that barely work at all. It can be found at:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#ublock-origin
and manual installation instructions are there too, just scroll down. It can also be installed through the official add-on stores. The element blocking part is especially useful for me since I am using a 13" MBA, and a few banners across the bottom and top of a page mean I get to see just a few inches of a page, like looking through a letterbox. The Globe & Mail site is dreadful for this, and is quite usable once I have permanently removed the banners.removed
This is only one element of the fad of intrusive and bloated design that began with pop-up windows and has snowballed ever since.
Funny enough, it seems like the very existence of front-end and UI/UX designers as an occupation in the web space immediately made these problems much worse than they were. Between the use of enormous unnecessary design frameworks, CSS animations and integrated javascript, etc., the experience of using most sites is so much slower and worse than flat HTML used to be.
The default position seems to be that everybody has broadband so it doesn’t matter if you need to load megabytes and megabytes of scripts and frameworks and stylesheets every time you click something, and because it’s new and sexy tech it’s okay to animate everything and move elements based on cursor or window or viewport position. Of course they never count on latency, or errors in their own code, or conflicts between different elements they’ve injected, so reading a page with a few paragraphs of information you actually want becomes a trial, requiring you to install four or five different types of ad- and nuisance-extinguishing plug-in just to render pages more or less readable.
My latest favorite atrocity is Wikipedia (not that it can be trusted anymore) has enforced pop-up link previews on every wiki link that appear when you hover but don’t disappear when you move your cursor away. It’s an actual ‘screw you for attempting to read the page you’re on’ feature.
Ivan Ilych would have had something to say here....
Something that may help with some sites is to configure your device to [prefer reduced motion](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion). This allows web designers to use a `@media (prefers-reduced-motion)` block to not show the animations you've indicated a preference to not be shown.
This is a fairly modern feature that designers have to go out of their way to use, but it does work in some places.
I'm convinced that UI designers etc. invariably suffer from a fatal flaw - they are not the intended user of the product they are designing. Thus we have flashing N.B. that are unhelpful, LMS that give instructors tendonitis given every task takes multiple clicks/swipes on different location of the screen (I'm looking at you Blackboard), etc. .... I could go on forever and a day about this.
First off - Text headers changing to communicate functionality are not what that survey question addresses.
Secondly - Disabling that isn't a choice, it's a tradeoff. Is the percentage of people irritated by it larger or smaller than the portion that will worry that there is no "save draft" button? I suspect that feature was added based upon feedback along the way, so what we are seeing is (at least to some degree) the result of a complex balancing act. One that does not combine well with "you can't please all of the people, and you can't put everything into an options menu".
I just read the hilarious, fascinating and baffling Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles and the only sour note was all the huge constantly running gif inserts interspersed with the text: https://www.sbnation.com/2014/8/18/5998715/the-tim-tebow-cfl-chronicles
“I have long really held the opinion that the amount of noise which any one can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity, and therefore may be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
https://genius.com/Arthur-schopenhauer-on-noise-annotated
This may be tangential, but speaks to the choices made by software designers needing "something to do". When I taught college math, the portal platform was built on D2L, and customized by the school's programming team. Their operation appeared to consist of meetings that always concluded with "ok, add another screen", with all hands raised.
The (corporate) Pearson software was even worse, with anything useful hidden in a labyrinth of links. I ended up coding my own website, and just adding problems and docs to it.
probably worth considering that the median ACX reader is likely to be rather more autistic than baseline and hence more sensitive to stimuli, skewing the results
This has been going on since Netscape Navigator implemented a blink element for some reason.
See also: Pretty much every restaurant website ever. I do not want animated text, I do not want fancy skeuomorphisms, and I certainly do not what a soundtrack.
When I answered the survey to say flashing elements annoy me I did not mean blinking elements of text, I meant flashing.
For me the unifying principle seems to be that I don't like GUI elements to move.
So ... MY primary sadness is when a page is coming up and keep re-rendering as images arrive (because the HTML which could have specified width and height did not ...). This make using the page very tough until it has 'settled down.' And I can't be sure when it has settled down.
BEST is when there are *control* elements such as buttons moving around. Microsoft's Outlook client for Windows (non-web!) does this as part of the send-an-email process -- the "send" button moves while I am trying to press it!
I am annoyed, but much less so, by an image that changes (such as at the Jewish Law site). I'd prefer not, but this isn't a deal breaker.
Same with status text changing (though I'd prefer an icon in a fixed location to change or something like that).
Scott, is your problem with 'flashing' or with ANY dynamic change to the page you are using/viewing?
+1 to the "Substack annoyingly added a new pop-up interstitial, only for non-subscribers" complaint.
The HP website is worse: a page like https://support.hp.com/us-en/printer-setup/hp-deskjet-2700e-all-in-one-series/2100187844/model/2100709835 will, after about 60 seconds, cover the left half of the screen with a "Tell us what you think!" window that does not have a close button. Which, if you step away from the computer to perform step 1, makes it impossible to read the rest of the directions.
(also, the HP website seems to break saved URLs frequently; hopefully that link stays working for at least a few weeks)
I believe that website is showing you two pictures of the same person, just at different ages? Or, like, definitely two visibly closely related individuals.
Genuine flashing elements would/do bother me but I don't agree that gmail and Substack "draft saved" stuff counts. Possibly this is because I'm constantly paranoid that my draft is -not- being saved and enjoy the visual placebo of it always being there in the corner but I'm also mostly confident my brain filters out stuff like the little product text on the AdBlock window.
I actually started out agreeing with the piece but then was surprised that you included the saving draft icon on Substack in the same category as seizure causing rabbi flashes. Inferences from your poll might therefore be invalid. I hate flashing but don’t place it in that category. Other people have pointed this out, but I want to keep harping on it because really that feature is one of the things that makes Substack amazing and I hope no one listens to this post.
I'm surprised there's no mention of ads that re-load themselves and cause the text you're reading to jump around and re-flow. And often these ads aren't even visible on the page, so it's totally pointless aggravation. Its the equivalent of some yanking a magazine out of your hands while youre reading. It's shockingly rude, and shocking how common this is. Lately I just ragequit.
I find them so irritating I use a whole stack of adblockers, flashblockers and image-blockers to browse the internet. Even still images distract from the text, so in order to see any kind of image in my browser, I have to do a slightly annoying two-step temporary authorization to make the image load. This works pretty well and makes the internet experience overall far less irritating, infuriating, and overstimulating. Text-only for the most part.
I have a friend whose school-age daughter has photosensitive epilepsy, and she says to check her daughter's websites for flashing elements before she can let her daughter visit them. If they're for a school assignment and have flashing elements, she has to print out screenshots for her daughter.
The flashing elements are a migraine trigger. The internet would be un-usable for me without image/video blockers.
How do you deal with the blinking cursor in notepad? Is that not a flashing element? I was thinking like flashing banner adds, not tiny things like "draft saved". I mean like popup ads that cover text and play commercials for video games. I would have voted not bothered if asked about all but the first example in this post.
I suspect that in some cases people say they wouldn't use a website with things like this, but in practice it's just the opposite. The company I work for has one of the most annoying popups I have ever experienced. If your mouse ever comes close to switching tabs, a big window pops up saying "Wait before you go please give us your email address!" I despise it, and as soon as I was able I pulled the metrics to show that it was a pointless annoyance.
And then I found out that it is incredibly good at getting people to give us their email address. Probably the single most effective method we use for adding people to our newsletter. My spirit was crushed.
Operating systems have accessibility setting to reduce motion, which is available to the websites and if they respect it, they should disable/reduce animations.
I have a different set of issues, somewhat overlapping, that also annoy me.
Some partial solutions:
- Write custom CSS for websites. Adblock works by deleting an element. But you can also style it so that it is smaller, or is hidden. You can then inject it with an extension like stylus.
- Using some "reader mode" type of extension, which deletes extraneous non-text elements. Would have worked for your jewish site.
- Writting some custom javascript and injecting it into the website when loading it. E.g., Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter has some annoying elements, so I redirect it to the archive.is version, apply a readability plugin and then inject some stuff to get rid of the rest of annoying stuff.
- Writting a custom frontend. For example, I find the Effective Altruism Forum and the RoyalRoad pages annoying, so I've parsed them and written my own, at https://forum.nunosempere.com/ and https://royalread.nunosempere.com/ respectively.
- Use the custom frontends others have written. There is a small movement of people annoyed at dark patterns who write better frontends. You can use an extension like libredirect to use a better frontend if one exists: https://libredirect.github.io. For a while it looked like there was going to be a semi-organized "simple web" effort, but it feels pretty anarchic now.
Personally I'm cheating a bit, because I use a custom browser, so when I encounter something that annoys me, I make some small tweak and recompile. But I think you can get like 99% of the benefit of what I'm doing with Firefox extensions (Google doesn't want people to be able to block ads, because that's kind of their whole business, and has castrated adblockers with their Manifest v3 extension proposal for Chrome).
Also, uBlock Origin is better than AdblockPlus & others, because at some point AdblockPlus sold out and you should switch.
So, call to action:
- Switch to Firefox. Make yourself acquainted with its reader mode.
- Install the Ublock Origin and libredirect extensions
- Install Stylus, and learn to tweak css for the websites that you most visit
From the major psychotic hatreds department:
* Sticky navbars
* Web pages that use mounds of javascript to duplicate functionality that already exists in html, like forms.
* Bonus points if the form tries to prettyprint or otherwise 'help' me type in them.
* Double bonus points if your links are not actually links, but onclick javascript redirectors.
* Pages that override browser keyboard shortcuts. E.g. Github thinks it's funny to make ctrl-k go to their search-github box instead of my browser's searchbar.
* In fact, pages that override *any* browser UI behavior. Right now, substack is doing something wonky such that hovering on the article text doesn't show a selection cursor.
* Triple bonus points if said overrides appear to exist *specifically* to break browser behavior, e.g. by making C+P difficult.
* CSS popups. There's a reason all browers have popup blocking now, and it's not because a second window was involved.
* *Massive* decorative elements, such that I can only see a tiny fraction of the actual page content at a time.
* Obfuscated element classes/ids that make it hard to identify and nuke offenders.
* Anything that breaks Reader Mode or RSS/Atom feeds, making it hard to view content outside your shitshow of a site.
Maybe you can adblock your way out of *some* of these things. For example, in uBlock Origin you can use CSS selectors that match on a *substring* of a class of a visual element instead of the whole class (which nowadays contains randomly-generated parts to make it harder to block).
In particular, Substack has this annoying popup on text selection (people who select text while reading it have probably noticed it already). Normally, the only CSS class that I can block is .pencraft, but that ends up destroying the main page of the blog (almost everything there has .pencraft attached). But if I block substack.com##.pencraft[class*="selection_popover"], it only covers those .pencraft elements that also have selection_popover in their class name, which for now seems to only include the annoying selection popup thingy.
If some of your annoyances have partially randomly generated class names but also have predictable parts in them, this could work for you too.
Scott, I think what you want to do here is switch over to the Apple ecosystem as much as possible.
I must be in the middle: the flashing banner ads *really* bother me, but I barely notice a little flickering “draft saved.” I was a little surprised to find out that was what you were talking about.
For calibration, my answer on the survey is “they annoy me quite a bit.”
For Gmail, the Basic HTML version of Gmail doesn't have the annoying "draft saved" animation:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui
Fund my (hypothetical) web company/companies and I'll 'just' re-implement all of the important/useful software and hire Edward Tufte to design all of the UIs!
(Semi-seriously – I have an absurd number of personal/side projects that are basically this. I even use a few of them!)
I note that "Click to Remove Element" (a chrome browser plug-in, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/click-to-remove-element/jcgpghgjhhahcefnfpbncdmhhddedhnk) will remove the blinking rabbis.
For the Gmail thing, take part of the adhesive bit of a post-it and stick it over that part of your screen is an option
I'm another survey respondent who said "flashing things on websites annoy me intensely", because never in a million years would I have thought the question was describing autosave status indicators.
I will throw my hat in the ring as someone who is really bothered by the more obvious elements, but barely notices the Gmail-style ones. If this post is a memetic hazard and I can no longer ignore them, I’m going to be very mildly annoyed!
Though it can’t bother me too much. It took [this post](https://www.themotte.org/post/488/smallscale-question-sunday-for-may-14/99214?context=8#context) for me to finally make the trivial changes needed to make fandom sites usable. Before that I just…suffered?
100% agree and I think the entire internet has gone downhill. So many sites refuse to load now with adblockers on, and the whole internet has gotten worse. Any random news site will have 3 flashing banners and pop-ups every few seconds or if I move my mouse off screen. I thought we figured this out with web 1.0 in the late 1990s that it is terribly bad user experiences to have loads of flashing things or moving elements of any kind on your website.
I'm in the camp of...run away and close the tab immediately if it is annoying with constantly changing banner ads, video pop ups in the corner at all and usually with ads, etc. The scroll down ones are super super annoying as well with the huge 1/3 of the page banner you have to fight with actively, scrolling up and down before it minimises into a smaller banner.
My conclusion is...I guess you don't want visitors on your website. If I need to click through 3 pop ups in different parts of the screen, fight scroll with the top banner to see the content, and then it all flashes at me constantly...they clearly hate their users and don't want any visitors to their website. I'll immediately close it and never go back, my blacklist of sites grows everyday.
To me the big cost of this 'draft saved' is that it is a distraction. It breaks your train of thought and concentration. When you're deep in a flow state and some small text in your visual field keeps flicking back and forth, it is a distraction.
This isn't as directly annoying as the flashing banner ads, but it does make it harder to draft messages. I know many authors and creative types talk about using focused writing apps with no distractions, no notifications, etc. Why? because Word, gmail, blogging sites, etc. are all unusable.
Most modern web design seems intended -- consciously or otherwise -- to establish control of the user's client and thereby their attention. Instead of providing content for the user to view as they choose, sites build the "viewer" into the page, with a mix of javascript and CSS. At that point, the browser is no longer your client. The purported website itself is the client for a bespoke, single-vendor API backing it -- an API inevitably incompatible with any other site, to maximize the costs of third-party client-writers.
The result is that you can't easily view content from many providers in the client of your choice; it's "use their client" or "write your own" (in the form of CSS hacks or whatever). And, business pressures being what they are, that's fine by most of the providers. Their content doesn't actually matter. Their content is bait. The actual purpose of such sites is to feed users' attention into a chipper shredder, then use the output to fertilize a cash garden.
As legitimate content producers continue to migrate to ever-more-consolidated single-vendor platforms, things get progressively worse. When youtube or facebook enshittify their platform, that enshittification is inherited by all the relatively-innocent producers that rely on them for hosting. Which is how ACX ends up with subscription popups that neither Scott nor his readers wanted or will ever want. But what can one do about that? The entity responsible for the bullshit is not the entity writing the content! I can't boycott Substack without boycotting Scott! I can hack the site CSS to remove the bullshit...but I have to do that separately for every site on the Internet.
I don't think there's a fix for this. Any set of browser features that allows a website to provide its own interface will be abused to control the user's use of that interface. And all monolithic platforms (youtube, facebook, substack, et al) will try to make it hard for either users *or* authors to respond to enshittification with a middle finger.
(note how many services provide a desktop client, but forbid third-party clients. This is not for security, no matter what they say. It's because they want their users to be a captive audience.)
There might be some hope on the author side of things. In principle, instead of an author posting their content directly to platform X using X's tools, they could generate an authoritative RSS/Atom feed (with whatever tools they choose); and then (separately) host a site consuming that feed on their platform of choice. Said site would act as the official, default UI -- the equivalent of astralcodexten.substack.com -- but disgruntled users could directly consume the authoritative feed if desired. Being a dependency of the official site, such a feed would be relatively reliable. And if, later, the platform host enshittifies its UI in ways the *author* doesn't like, they could migrate elsewhere with minimal transition cost.
Note that this would be the reverse of the typical structure where the site is the authoritative source of content and the feeds a secondary, often-neglected feature.
The details of that suggestion aren't important; the important part is the separation of UI from content. There has to be a site-independent way of querying the content without the chrome. Otherwise, both authors and users are at the mercy of the platform's developers. We've seen what they do with that power, and it's produced an Internet that is increasingly Out To Get You. Every year, my arsenal of browser armor grows. It's a necessary thing, to keep the web tolerable.
But it shouldn't be.
(how does one do links in substack comments? I wrote about this on LW a few years ago, not sure how to link it)
This happens because of typical-mind-fallacy on the part of PMs. There is a substantial group of people who aren't bothered by little spinners and indicators. They're like the speedometer on your car's dashboard...just fades into the background when you're not using it.
Then there are a bunch of people who can't stand them. If your product leadership doesn't contain those people it goes wrong. They'll never even notice it. And it won't actually impact metrics that much in the medium term, just slowly erode the joy a segment of people feel in using your product over years until they can't wait to use something else. Oops!
Scott, you should really start using uBlock Origin.
Funny, whenever people talk about an adblocker, they NEVER mean Adblock, except those people who don't know better.
That would be like if there was a very bad brand of refrigerators called Fridge™, and whenever somebody said something like, "at home, we have a fridge", and people with a Fridge™ would think: "hey, I have one of those" and never find out there was this new type of fridge that worked waaaay better and was not secretly spying on you.
I think the real lesson of this post is how people can answer "yes" to a question where the survey maker's concept of that question is different from most users, leading to an analysis built on false assumptions.
No one else has addressed the Halachic website specifically, so as your most Orthodox Jewish reader, here you go:
The Halachic website you found is specifically for Sefaradi Jews. The "two Rabbis" it is flickering between are Rav Ovadia Yosef as a younger person, and Rav Ovadia Yosef as an older person. He is quite the personality cult person. Modern-day Mizrachi (Middle Eastern, subsection of Sefaradi) Jews have a tendency to really go in for the flashing lights, in general. My husband and I were just speculating on why this is. We think it's partly due to the fact that they are relatively poor, and therefore tend to like gaudy decorations more.
Here are some nice pictures and videos of small Sefaradi synagogues in Israel:
https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2015/08/ohel-moshe-synagogue-8957.jpg - nice neon!
https://youtu.be/E5SAY5izAXM - check out all the purple lighting
In short, it is very likely that the Sefaradi readers of this site actually do see the flickering images as a sign of how nice the website is - they have similar things in their Synagogue!
Next time you want to look up an obscure Halachic text, check out www.halachipedia.com/
Or the best source is Pninei Halacha: https://ph.yhb.org.il/en/. This is widely accepted as the hottest new thing in Halachic literature.
Both of these are oriented towards giving a more organized, bigger picture view of Halacha, including both Ashkenazi and Sefaradi sources.
Flashing elements need to be make or break things for a given activity and even then they should be show stoppers, not matters of course. No alarm that goes on forever is an alarm anymore, and it's one of those Norman-door annoyances for me, a guy who talks about Norman doors. Flashing must convey information, like an old timey lighthouse (the light rotating has a known period that tells you where you are if you know what you are looking at! They are being replaced with electronically controlled lights that simply flash at preset rates, but spinning around is an alternative way of creating a digital signal that works in all directions.)
This, and also sites that change the text selection behavior. Substack is the latest offender, adding a pop-up "Restack quote" whenever I select anything. Look, if I wanted to "restack" this, I'd copy the quote I wanted and click the button at the bottom of the post.
Just let me do my neurotic constantly-selecting-and-deselecting-the-paragraph-I'm-reading thing in peace.
I find substack's editor completely unusable for actual writing for many reasons.
Just write your piece in plain text, using an editor you like (notepad?), copy it into substack, and then tidy it up there.
Just to be clear, I said that I was significantly annoyed by flashing elements, but I would never have considered any of these to be flashing elements. I was thinking ye ould <blink> tags.
Regarding "draft saved": I don't mind it when I am working on an email where the main bottleneck is typing. But when I spend time coming up with which words to write, it is annoying. (And I think this generalises to other sites.)
I think a more interesting extension of this post would be about attention-manipulating design in general - including in physical spaces.
Examples (note that I suffer from these things more than average, so this might not be universally hated):
- TV in restaurants (as opposed to sport bars). I always try to sit such that it isn't in my field or vision.
- static adds that suddenly switch to something else (both on websites and in physical spaces). Make it much harder to do longer chains or thought (such as when trying to ro research while waiting for a plane).
- supermarkets playing adds from speakers while you are in the store. (Some czech stores have their own "radio" which is just play adds for their products and silly songs.)
- excessive "information messages" on public transport. For example, British railways' "See something that doesn't belong? See it, say it, sorted!" indeed makes me hate them with passion and caused me to always travel with noise-cancelling headphones.
Random thought:
- These things generally sound like something that should be illegal, but aren't yet. Is it because we don't view attention as a resource? Or that many people don't value it? Or that we haven't acknowledged that attention can be manipulated or taken from us?
- It is interesting that we now have rules against electronic spam, but less so about physical spam and attention spam in physical spaces.
- I sometimes use a "replacement by human" test: For example, would we find it socially acceptable for a British Railway employee to walk up to me every 3 minutes and go "Do you see something that doesn't belong? ..."? No, definitely not. That suggest that the automated recording is over the line also.
As a proud member of the 16% that avoids using websites if they're too visually distracting, I sometimes use TamperMonkey to remove visually distracting indicators. For example, presentations in google slides have an especially annoying "saving..." icon that I remove with: https://gist.github.com/rbalicki2/4ef8429d9577e965d12513695346df7a
The biggest problem on websites is pop-ups. The worst offender being the cookie message, which manages to be both completely useless and extremely irritating at the same time. But I find all pop-ups of any kind annoying.
Was trying to figure out why "draft saved" doesn't bother me when most flashing/changing elements in websites do. Then I remembered that I hardly ever look at the screen when I'm typing. Learning to touch type is probably about the same amount of effort as switching email clients?
I don't think I'd consider any of those to be flashing elements. Maybe the rabbis, nothing else. I probably said 'very annoying'.
I hate ads, and pop-ups, and bling pong.
I also get annoyed by ads, though not quite to this extent. That said, as long as flashing elements are rendered in your browser (rather than in a dedicated app like Gmail on Android), you as the end user have ultimate control over them, including the power to remove them.
For instance, my adblocker of choice is uBlock, and its element zapper and element picker modes can be used to remove arbitrary elements on websites. However, sometimes it's not obvious exactly what to remove, or how to adjust the filter to be sufficiently general. In that case, if you don't want to put in the time to learn and experiment with uBlock's filter syntax etc., that seems like a good use case to hire someone on a website like Fiverr to create the filters for you.
Or: I don't like the YouTube home feed, so I have an addon which removes it (called Block YouTube Feed").
Or: I don't like sponsor segments in Youtube videos, so I have an addon which skips them (called "SponsorBlock for Youtube").
Etc.