[dathinab]

(sarcasm)

It's revenge against anyone with certain kinds of visual impairments and/or concentration issues because the ex-spouse of the author which turned out to be a terrible person had such.

(sarcasm try 2)

It's revenge against anyone using JS on the net with the author trying to subtle hint that JS is bad.

(realistic)

It's probably on of:

- the website is a static view of some collaborative tool which has that functionality build in by default

- some form of well intended but not well working functionality add to the site as it was some form of school/study project, in that case I'm worried about the author suffering unexpected very much higher cost due to it ending up on HN ...

[tonsky]

Hi, author here. In case you really want to know: no, it’s custom-made and works exactly as intended. There are two main reasons:

1. Fun. Modern internet is boring, most blog posts are just black text on white background. Hard to remember where you read what. And you can’t really have fun without breaking some expectations.

2. Sense of community. Internet is a lonely place, and I don’t necessarily like that. I like the feeling of “right now, someone else reading the same thing as I do”. It’s human presence transferred over the network.

I understand not everybody might like it. Some people just like when things are “normal” and everything is the same. Others might not like feeling of human presence. For those, I’m not hiding my content, reader mode is one click away, I make sure it works very well.

As for “unexpectedly ended up on HN”, it’s not at all unexpected. Practically every one of my general topic articles ends up here. It’s so predictable I rely on HN to be my comment section.

[pests]

I like your content but I do think you need to rethink #1. Fun is usless if no one wants to show up because they are annoyed.

[acqq]

Count me too to the group of "I was so distracted that I stopped reading."

Then the second thought was: I should again start to block js by default as much as I can.

[gpvos]

2. I only understood that it was actual other people's mouse cursors when I read that here. So it didn't really engender a sense of community, although after some time I did think you are very good at modelling actual human mouse movements. Now that I know it, it's pretty neat though.

[daveslash]

Same. I didn't realize it was other people until I came here. Then... I went back to the page and had fun trying to follow other people's cursors.

[wonger_]

The author has several other writeups:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The cursors will only be a problem during front page HN traffic. And the opt-out for people who care is reader mode / disable js / static mirror. Not sure if there's any better way to appease the fun-havers and the plain content preferrers at the same time. Maybe a "hide cursors" button on screen? I, for one, had a delightful moment poking other cursors.