[avaer]

I've worked on several projects where people looked at the site, which was simple and straight to the point, and people would straight up tell me they didn't take it seriously because it didn't have these performative UI things on it.

It's like when a Youtuber's audience complains about how they're constantly asking you to subscribe. The reason it happens is because the statistics say it works.

[theturtletalks]

It really comes down to first impression. Your website design is your company’s first impression. If the design is clean, people will believe the product is clean and robust as well. Similar to how people think things that cost more and probably high quality and better overall.

As for this website, the best component is the ASCII animation in the hero and you can’t even copy that component. In fact, that nice ASCII hero is what gave me a good first impression to go thru all the components.

[zevyoura]

It's there: https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/ascii-h...

[theturtletalks]

Ah it’s in the hero section, kind of scanned that section but had lost interest by that point

[vasco]

So the thing that made you go through all the components didn't even hold your attention enough to make your argument true

[theturtletalks]

I was on mobile and a lot of the pages are overflowing. After going thru half, it got a bit annoying. I actually keep a directory of all these tailwind/shadcn registry websites and this one drew me in more than others.

[freehorse]

My first impression when entering websites with such "hero animations" is noticing my gpu usage spiking and my power consumption increasing by 20W because somebody thought it was cool to have some pointless but "cool" canvas/WebGL/CSS (or whatever it is) animation.

[StilesCrisis]

What's the point of having the GPU if you never use it, right?

[freehorse]

I want to use my compute resources for stuff that are actually useful/relavant. I have no problem if somebody makes some animation that actually conveys something relevant for the topic of the website/product/article etc, eg some animated plot to showcase some data, esp when that can convey more than a classical visualisation. To be fair, I also dislike hero images in general, as they are distracting/useless, consuming bandwidth resources and screen space (esp in mobile). But "hero animations" take this a step further.

[sidewndr46]

I worked at a startup that had an unusually fancy landing page. I noticed that it was sluggish on my laptop. Someone pointed out there phone tended to heat up when showing it off to customers. We poked into what the contractor had done. They apparently used some bezier curves to animate stuff in a nice way. Each time the animation moved it computed the entire bezier curve to some superfine detail then picked a point in it and put the elements on the page.

[hdjrudni]

Also on the HN homepage: https://cognition.ai/blog/frontier-code Not quite ASCII but pretty close!

[aaronharding]

explain why Craigslist, temu, etc. are all popular then? :p

[theturtletalks]

Sometimes utility can be so good, users don’t care about design. I was also thinking of it as a business coming to a SaaS website. B2C is filled with so many dark patterns, first impression probably plays less of a role.

[HWR_14]

Craigslist became popular when that was the clean look for a website, and then never bothered updating. Network effects in action.

Temu offers people the ability to save money. If your product is "X, but cheaper" you can have a worse UI than X.

[beezlewax]

Amazon is a hideous looking website too and always has been. Ebay is similar too in that aspect and plenty of others.

[Urahandystar]

They were established when hideous websites were common changing would cause uproar and possibly alienate a large group of users. Look at Googles web page just a text box on a blank page, no way you are launching with that UI in 2026.

[_the_inflator]

See? It is about goals.

There is a reason why landing pages don't use distraction.

As a platform lead and product lead with millions of customers, be assured that you are not your customer. Never ever think of you as the focus of your website if you want to have success in business.

If you want to sell or marked and money as well as the slightest bit of seriousness is involved, you have to follow industry standards and never your own taste which is highly misleading.

Boring first is a good statement and principle to follow. Always track and A/B. There is a reason why all landing pages look the same kinda, and at least follow a certain structure.

Any deviation from it won't help you, even though you personally enjoy your personal website. You would be surprised what other visitors think about your website, how they perceive it, use it, and I mean literally everything: browser size, smartphone model, screen size, scrolling, click behavior, colors - everything.

I am so glad the psychology of online sales has matured. It is in everybody's interest to work in a trustworthy environment and using the right approach signals a company acknowledges and appreciate its customers.

I learned it the hard way, but got the lesson. I am totally different. I find many landing pages fishy, while they are the most successful there are, and like exploring on my own as well as fantastic animations.

On the other hand, I value the text only principles of everything serious from archivex and Pubmed. I am a developer fist, who loves animations sind decades. But this is bad for business. ;)

[wavemode]

I don't think the commentary being made here is that startup websites should not be flashy. Just that, maybe they don't all need to look exactly the same as each other.

[dayjah]

I think homogeneity is an unavoidable end game for the internet (unfortunately).

At work we’ve been discussing whether to migrate off our home grown component library to Material UI. I shudder at the thought, personally. However, a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product.

Like many of us I was born into a deeply customizable Internet, all of my websites were green or red on black. They were a glorious amalgam of fixed width fonts and <blink> tags. With occasional wingdings characters for fun and games and complex <table>/<tr>/<td> tags for really epic layouts. They were l33t, honestly ^_^

But, as time goes on and more and more people use this thing, converging on the one-true-UX feels like a net good thing assuming the fundamentals are right. To some degree the LLM-ization of the Internet is essentially the end game of squashing the personality out of the Internet which bootstrap started.

We’re on the cusp of spoken word being the core UX of computers with a fall back to reading the LLM transcript, neither of which benefits from <blink>

[hntiz]

> a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product

Not that I disagree with you, but I'll also offer a tradeoff.

When people expect to pick up your app intuitively, it can also just mean them using the app absent-mindedly, which can mean them skipping the manual and jumping straight to trying to tie up the support lines. Whereas if your ui asks for a user's full focus up front, yes there are downsides to that but they're also more engaged.

[NewsaHackO]

I guess the issue is that when someone can't use a product immediately, they have an urge to abandon it altogether, not learn how to use it.

[preg_match]

It depends highly on the application. If the application domain is inherently complex and or used in business contexts, then they will have to learn how to use it regardless. Intuitiveness only works for somewhat cookie-cutter applications. Consider Excel: Excel is not intuitive to people who have not used excel. We can make it easier to use, but regardless the user will have to learn the fundamentals of a spreadsheet (and even how the data is stored in memory!) in order to successfully use excel. The reason I say users even have to understand how data is stored in memory is because of types. Dates are not strings, for example.

[enos_feedler]

Homogeneity doesnt need to be the endgame just a pitstop along the way. We should have a universal tool for creating unique things. If everything is unique the cognitive load is high we get lazy and output all converges on shallow stuff that is the same. If the tools are homogenous we learn something once and spend energy on making the diffetences

[maxweylandt]

Related: institutional isomorphism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism_(sociology)

[kid_cubi]

We're migrating our Material UI components to homemade components, since MUI doesn't cater to our needs anymore.

[jsdalton]

It seems to me the parent commenter is saying the opposite: looking exactly like each other _is_ the point. It's a form of social signaling, to indicate that a project "belongs" to the in group of high-flying successful AI hype projects.

Note I'm not arguing that this is a good strategy. But given that so many people follow it I imagine it's not as bad as it appears on the surface.

[muvlon]

It's a bit of in-group signaling but I think, importantly, also date signaling. A 2026 hype website looks different from a 2020 hype website looks different from a 2010 hype website. Having a generic 2026 hype website look tells visitors that you're either new or update your website's design to follow current trends.

They do the same with cars, where it's even more important and even more explicit. The design language has to change every couple years so that you can tell when somebody is driving a car older than 5 or so years. For example, currently we're doing blobs but with a few sharp features and muted colors. Before that it was more colorful and more metallic paint. Before that, in the 00s, it was pure blobs. Before that it was all sharp edges etc. Now sharp edges are beginning to make a comeback.

That's why I don't think we'll ever have the "one true design language". Fads and trends will continue, repeating themselves to a degree but also changing in new ways.

[everforward]

I think they sort of do, it’s a form of signaling.

It’s the same game we play verbally with slang. Slang word gets made up, people use it so others know they’re in the group that uses the slang, usage spreads until it’s no longer a group indicator. You see it all the time as an age grouping. You can almost guess someone’s age by the slang they use for “good” (cool, lit, bussin, etc).

This is the same. Startups invent a new UI style to separate themselves from the incumbents, incumbents eventually copy the style, cycle repeats.

[noisy_boy]

My colleague vibe coded a website that looks exactly like this one. Everyone on the meeting loved it - they thought it was cool. These were IT people.

[ceejayoz]

The IT people know no one's really buying just off the flashy website alone - because they don't! - and that it'll get management to okay it.

[brightball]

I use a Substack site for the conference that I run. The popup and subscribe buttons everywhere used to annoy me...but they work. Went from 0 to almost 1,000 subscribers on an otherwise low traffic site and it's by far the best way to reach people.

https://carolina.codes

[SpyCoder77]

Another way to get a lot of traffic is getting the top reply to the top comment on the top hacker news post. Speaking of which... https://github.com/SpyC0der77

[nwatson]

I was in the Winston-Salem Flywheel coworking for eight years, good place. I hope the Greenvile site is as good.

[brightball]

Beautiful facility. They renovated the old Pepsi bottling plant.

https://www.flywheelgreenvillesc.com/

[sgsvnk]

There are 2 kinds of people- people who understand tech and people who use tech, in the ratio 1:9 (or even lower?). For the 90%+ people who like using fancy tech and feel smart/intelligent, the bling on your landing page is necessary.

[epolanski]

Same for clickbait thumbnails, people hate them, and yet don't really click on non clickbaity ones.

[thewebguyd]

In the marketing world this is called revealed preference. This stuff is A/B tested to death. Anyone trying to sell something is best served by watching people's behavior instead of listening to what they say, as the two are often different if not polar opposites.

[4chandaily]

The perspective marketing world seems toxic. From the perspective of the "consumer", it sure does feel like we are being "ignored", "tricked", or "bamboozled" when our stated preferences are ignored in favor of "revealed preference".

It isn't that we have a "preference" for these things, it is far more likely that a user just doesn't have their guard up 100% of the time, and these psychological manipulations are designed to cut through that.

Sure, these strategies probably net clicks, but they aren't from people who "chose" your product, they are clicks from people who were manipulated into clicking.

I suppose whether you think that is okay depends on your industry and ethics.

[thewebguyd]

Yeah, it is highly toxic. I'd assume that in most cases those "revealed preferences" are specifically engineered, not organic. It's taking advantage of biological reflexes and calling it a true preference.

[Lalabadie]

It's behavioral marketing, vs status/aspirational marketing.

A stated preference isn't necessarily current or situational (I will choose to run instead of watching another 45 minutes of Youtube videos).

A situational preference is often inertia, and behavioral marketing will directly hinder the meta cognitive processes that usually give us the agency to override our default mode choices (John has been on YouTube for the last 20 minutes, what next suggestion is not likely to keep him there?)

[gryn]

Better for you(the seller) vs better for me (the buyer)

Two agents with two different utility functions fighting each other, it's an adversarial relationship/game.

The fight is for your limited attention span.

Clickbaity titles or least informative ones, 20min of rambling for what could've been a 2min video or article, spreading the meat of the info in the later half of the video for better retention instead of the beginning, highly misleading previews at the beggining, etc ... are good for the content producer but not so much for the content viewer that has to sift through it only to reliaze that didn't care about that particular thing.

Not limited to videos, but also things to buy the meat of the technical/practical description of the product get worse and worse each year and the other proxy signals for them too.

Seems like marketing is a lot like military conflict drown the enemy in lot of noise to drop the SNR.

what's that you want to buy a 4k video projector and set a filter for it? here it is for cheaper. Oh, you wanted the actual dots on the wall resolution to be 4k instead of max supported input signal, oops.

You're used to higher price meaning better quality? guess we'll flood that price point with shitier quality progressively until we find your limit

[marcosdumay]

I guess in the social sciences world this is called institutional erosion...

Youtube is a perfectly "unbiased" "democratic" repository, where crazy people shouting conspiracies and prize-winning documentaries have the same thumbnail and half-line of text for you to discover if they are any good.

[all2]

I really wish there was a way to filter out the soy-O-face thumbnails entirely. I do not like them. I do not want to see them.

[unlogic]

Check "DeArrow" chrome extension.

[wnevets]

Its like when people say they hate politicians all the while they've been voting for the same Senator for the past 30 years.

[XorNot]

Youtubes monetization guidelines also require it.