> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I think parent is within bounds to complain here.
This is a pretty horrendous font that is an accessibility issue not just a “tangential annoyance”— this is also a uniquely nauseating multi color font with flicker effects that is both interesting in its own right and hardly common.
My grandma always had the morning paper delivered. When I stayed with her during the summer I’d start in the top left corner of the first page and read all the way to the bottom right corner of the last and everything in between. What a 10 year old kid got out of the grain report? I’m not sure. But I was amped up on her homemade cinnamon rolls and multiple glasses of orange juice. It was wonderful. These days I’m more selective about what information I take in!
I remember reading the newspaper in the break room and at lunch. About 2013 or so. That's all their was. Well, for me, because I was a late smartphone adopter.
I kind of lump in "internet" (late 90s) with "internet in everyone's pockets at all times". But there was a fairly large gap there. Especially when you consider the limits of 3 and even 4g.
Do you subscribe now? I’ve toyed with the idea — I think I’d be more aware of local news / serendipitous things I normally wouldn’t seek out.
I’ve been considering subscribing to some high quality signal / low to no ad type written publications. Asterisk, IEEE spectrum, NOEMA. Make getting mail fun again.
This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me." Addiction is a harmful dependency you pursue to achieve some desired outcome. The harmful dependency is the endless browsing, scrolling, and searching you engage in to obtain it, all the time wasted doing it and doing it in a way that consumes a significant amount of time that could be spent acquiring that same information in a more productive manner.
I'm not sure there's always a more efficient way to find that same information. If you already have a question, sure, you can look for an answer. Sometimes you stumble across a post about something you hadn't even thought to look into, though. I think that's part of what he's talking about when he mentions finding things that changed his life.
Moreover, the "content" isn't always information. It can be informative and it can be news you need to know about. But it's often garbage, disinformation and the information analogue of empty calories in food.
I think people may disagree with you on what constitutes a tangential annoyance. Is there any point at which the format is, in fact, a legitimate annoyance?
If you zoom in its actually 3 fonts. It looks line one of those Lain fan sites.
I actually like the font even though my eyes hate it. Its a short read so no biggie. Maybe remove the transparency for a sharper look and make the spacing of the 3 fonts slightly closer to each other.
I doubt you are addicted to information. I highly suspect like many users of digital technology who are able to consume near infinite streams of said, that you are like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface or that some underlying truth will be revealed through identifying patterns in the information.
I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.
The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.
As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)
When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.
I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.
People are complaining at that font should take another look.
I think there's something maybe special going on there.
Probably unintentional ... but I swear reading 'word at a time' the words are in a way clearer, like your mind is able to abstract them out of the background.
Wild!
And yes, information is 'the thing' but it depends on how it's presented obviously.
I think I'm similar. But why didn't people talk about newspaper addiction back then? Sometimes I wonder—even before smartphones, people spent that time reading books, looking up information, and reading newspapers. That kind of addiction was seen as "positive." But in reality, it was probably disrupting daily life too, in its own way.
When I see things like this, it sometimes occurs to me that the people who create "addiction" are the ones in power. Come to think of it, it makes me wonder why there was never any such thing as newspaper addiction.
But when I think about it, communities like HN don't exactly have only the taste I want either, do they?
That's always the case, really. There are people whose daily lives fall apart because they read too many books, but that usually isn't categorized as a form of addiction. So sometimes I wonder how addiction is actually defined.
For how addiction is defined, google ICD-11, it's: Impaired control over the behavior, the behavior taking increasing priority over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation despite negative consequences, plus distress or functional impairment.. (I'm an alcoholic, 5 years sober)
I don't think I've seen a less accessible *font* in my life, including all the dark grey on black and yellow on white ones. Those are hard to read, but this one makes my eyes hurt, they actually started to hurt after I tried reading it despite discomfort. How come? Reading random text for 10 seconds can cause people physical pain? I wear glasses for near-sightedness and slight astigmatism, I wonder if it's related, and if people with 20/20 vision experience it differently.
I know this because the first thing I did when I got to the page was hit F12 to bring up the debugging tools and turn these styles off so I could read it. :)
I thought it was me, I literally think there are things that should no longer be acceptable and this font is one of them. It serves no purpose and I would like to ask medical professionals if it is potentially harmful.
Edit: While fuzzy or blurry text itself is highly unlikely to trigger an epileptic seizure it is a major cause of optical strain, headaches, and reading barriers across various accessibility needs. Given the amount of screen time we all incur in our daily lives, I do not see why this should be a "thing".
My site shows black with yellow background and white text boxes. Highly visible. Maybe you're referring to dead comments? There are options to hide those.
I have 20/20 vision and this presentation hurt my eyes. I'm glad my browser has "reader mode" to normalize things like this. I'm not trying to yuck someone else's yum. I simply appreciate the technical ability to read someone else's post in a way that doesn't cause discomfort.
Maybe try to avoid making a statement using a font which literally hurts my eyes, and possibly the eyes of many others. That's messed up.
Also information addiction should be a human "feature" I suppose, shouldn't it?
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge and so forth.
The font is actually cool but it belongs in games like Alien Isolation (and possibly others) it's just not good for blogging methinks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(reader mode works perfectly well on this site afaict)
I kind of lump in "internet" (late 90s) with "internet in everyone's pockets at all times". But there was a fairly large gap there. Especially when you consider the limits of 3 and even 4g.
I’ve been considering subscribing to some high quality signal / low to no ad type written publications. Asterisk, IEEE spectrum, NOEMA. Make getting mail fun again.
That's the addiction, not the information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_system
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I actually like the font even though my eyes hate it. Its a short read so no biggie. Maybe remove the transparency for a sharper look and make the spacing of the 3 fonts slightly closer to each other.
I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.
The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.
As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)
When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.
I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.
This is me on eBay :)
I think there's something maybe special going on there.
Probably unintentional ... but I swear reading 'word at a time' the words are in a way clearer, like your mind is able to abstract them out of the background.
Wild!
And yes, information is 'the thing' but it depends on how it's presented obviously.
When I see things like this, it sometimes occurs to me that the people who create "addiction" are the ones in power. Come to think of it, it makes me wonder why there was never any such thing as newspaper addiction.
It isn't personalized, so many sections aren't of much interest.
That's always the case, really. There are people whose daily lives fall apart because they read too many books, but that usually isn't categorized as a form of addiction. So sometimes I wonder how addiction is actually defined.
and: https://archive.org/details/americannervousn00bearuoft/page/... - one note on this, Beard blamed nervous exhaustion on steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and uh... the mental activity of women... This excerpt for a tl;dr: https://english.web.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/english/doc...
For how addiction is defined, google ICD-11, it's: Impaired control over the behavior, the behavior taking increasing priority over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation despite negative consequences, plus distress or functional impairment.. (I'm an alcoholic, 5 years sober)
I noticed this about myself about 25 years ago... before the internet really took off on the dopamine rollercoatser it is now.
Edit: While fuzzy or blurry text itself is highly unlikely to trigger an epileptic seizure it is a major cause of optical strain, headaches, and reading barriers across various accessibility needs. Given the amount of screen time we all incur in our daily lives, I do not see why this should be a "thing".
Controversy shouldn't give me cataracts either.
It looks gorgeous as an art piece, but it's impossible to read.
Form over function to the extreme.