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Death to Scroll Fade

dbushell.com

41–50 of 232 posts

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#41

I'm guilty of this as well. https://kraa.io/about has some fade-in animation for the intro text – driven by wanting the initial impression to be focused/minimal and 'unravel' as you go. I take it that most HN folks would vastly prefer to NOT have this?

I think it looks fine except it's missing a more obvious hint that there's more to see when I scroll. The one that's there is just textual and very delayed.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#42
post #13
post #3

The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web, yet i'm seeing it for the very first time on that post. (And, indeed, it's annoying. My eyes can't read when there's animation going on nearby.) The goldfish animation along the bottom is epic and i will have to mine that bit for reuse somewhere :).

You probably haven't noticed it before because when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect that can be used to draw your attention to particular elements on the page. This site is intentionally doing it very poorly to make a point. Really, the takeaway should be don't do things poorly. But that's kind of obvious.

Not doing it at all would be better still. It's really annoying.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#43

I'm guilty of this as well. https://kraa.io/about has some fade-in animation for the intro text – driven by wanting the initial impression to be focused/minimal and 'unravel' as you go. I take it that most HN folks would vastly prefer to NOT have this?

[deleted]

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#44
post #10

I raise you one. Death to the parallax scroll. In fact, death to all scroll animations.

Scrolling should just move a fixed size view up and down a fixed sized page. Why on earth must everyone complicate it so much?

I don't understand why browsers ever let designers fuck up the scrolling mechanism in the first place. Why is that even possible?

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#45
post #13
post #3

The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web, yet i'm seeing it for the very first time on that post. (And, indeed, it's annoying. My eyes can't read when there's animation going on nearby.) The goldfish animation along the bottom is epic and i will have to mine that bit for reuse somewhere :).

You probably haven't noticed it before because when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect that can be used to draw your attention to particular elements on the page. This site is intentionally doing it very poorly to make a point. Really, the takeaway should be don't do things poorly. But that's kind of obvious.

Fade in in scroll will always be slower than the reading speed of a significant percentage of population.

This becomes worse for people who just skim content, re-read the text, or want to quickly scroll to a specific place in text

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#46
post #40

It's amazing how web graphic designers don't realize 99% of all added motion/animation is just as annoying and unnecessary as and .

Oh they know, but it's requested because clients want a fancy website, and just having fucking text on the fucking screen explaining what you fucking sell is boooooring.

And also completely functional and accessible but where's the fun in that?

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#47

I'm guilty of this as well. https://kraa.io/about has some fade-in animation for the intro text – driven by wanting the initial impression to be focused/minimal and 'unravel' as you go. I take it that most HN folks would vastly prefer to NOT have this?

I’ll say as someone who suffers from severe motion sickness and the OP site makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, that your site does the fade in fast enough that it doesn’t give me any discomfort. Seems fine to me. Maybe I should consider being a consultant for vestibular motion sickness accessibility, haha. I’d get paid to answer “on a scale of 1-10, how pukey does this app make you feel?”

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#48
post #38

Hah, the point has certainly been made. Absolute Barf-o-Rama. I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, which hasn’t really improved as an adult, and this page immediately made me feel like I’m going to throw up. Had to switch to reader mode after the first image. I was always the kid who couldn’t read in the car, and was always groggy on long road trips because of Dramamine (side note, Meclizine has significantly…

I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness

I don't, and yet I am also feeling nauseated after reading that page! What a truly awful experience.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#49
post #3

The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web, yet i'm seeing it for the very first time on that post. (And, indeed, it's annoying. My eyes can't read when there's animation going on nearby.) The goldfish animation along the bottom is epic and i will have to mine that bit for reuse somewhere :).

Anthropic uses it across all their websites, here's a typical example where the effect is obvious as you scroll down: https://claude.com/solutions/agents I could be wrong, but my simple guess is that it's become widespread in LLM-generated websites partly because of Anthropic's own style guides getting adopted through Claude-bundled skills and such.

That's a bit different since those are separate chunks of content rather than running prose (and they're mainly meaningless marketing fluff anyway). I don't find it all that annoying compared to the original article.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#50
I thought this was going to be about iOS and how now (as of iOS 26) there is a "fade out" at the top of every web page (around the notch/top-edge area).

When scrolling/reading a web page, it literally changes that section of the text so that it fades to gray.

So, "everything scroll fades".

I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Quite irritating, IMHO.

EDITED TO ADD ELABORATION: The issue with iOS "scroll fade" text color in Safari near the top notch is that this makes that top-edge-text "dynamic" (changing) and thus "draws attention" to it visually, thus competing for eyeball attention when I am probably actually reading somewhere further down on the page. Also, I would still like to be able to glance up to the topmost visible text if wanted, without having to adjust to its different and less visible colors. Apple designers should know all this. Further, I'd say the page text color should probably by default respect what the web page designer configured it as, and not have the OS change that text color (unless the user gets fancy and requests an override with dark mode or whatever settings).

This article's critique seems valid, too (more generically about "scroll fade" in interfaces, e.g. web pages, which seems to mostly be about items appearing gradually via motion). Personally, I see less of that these days, compared to making every page in an OS fade out where unnecessary.

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