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Death to Scroll Fade

dbushell.com

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Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#61

Post by freedomben »

wincy wrote: 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…

> As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me.

Me too! The worst part about this is anytime there's more than two adults in the vehicle, the "front seat" has all sorts of social expectations and courtesies. I once mentioned that I get motion sick when not in the front seat, and I could tell that nobody believed me and thought it was an uncool way to try and guilt people into letting me monopolize the favored chair. After that I don't bother, but do try to avoid shared cars because in those I'll be quietly sitting in a torture chamber while others around me don't understand.

Also, good God those drivers whould constantly gas-brake-gas-gas-brake-gas-brake-brake-gas. I get it when all the sudden traffic rapidly and unexpectedly slows down, but so many people seem to always be pressing at least one pedal, never coasting. It's torture

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#64

Post by jonas21 »

troupo wrote: post #45
jonas21 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It can speed up the loading of the above-the-fold content because the images on the rest of the page can be loaded as the user scrolls closer to them.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#65

Post by ge96 »

sgbeal wrote: 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 :).

> The goldfish

It goes where you click in the water area

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#66

Post by MoonWalk »

realityfactchex wrote: post #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 co…

Even better iOS example of not just "scroll fade" but regressive and incompetent UI design: the moving of Music's playback controls from the empty area at the top of the window into the content-browser area... where the controls are "transparent" and overlap the text and thumbnail images there. And all that stuff in the content-browser pane? Yep, it scroll-fades.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#67

Post by knorker »

jonas21 wrote: post #64
troupo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It can speed up the loading of the above-the-fold content because the images on the rest of the page can be loaded as the user scrolls closer to them.

So you agree that for text, it should NEVER be used. And you are only arguing for lazy loading of images?

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#68

Post by SoftTalker »

ayhanfuat wrote: post #23
wgjordan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is partly to blame, yes. This is from Claude’s official frontend skill: “Motion: Use animations for effects and micro-interactions. Prioritize CSS-only solutions for HTML. Use Motion library for React when available. Focus on high-impact moments: one well-orchestrated page load with staggered reveals (animation-delay) creates more delight than scattered micro-interactions. Use scroll-triggering and hover states th…

Who thinks like this? The last thing I want on a website is surprise. I want to do what I came there to do, the same way it worked last time, and then get on with my day.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#69

Post by arcfour »

knorker wrote: post #25
jonas21 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> when it's done well It's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful. Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain. And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to have it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human work…

I don't have a strong opinion either way on the effect, but I do have to say that I always find it amusing how fatalistic HN can sometimes be over the most minor cosmetic inconveniences, couching them as "wasting (large amounts of) humanity's time" and "disrespecting people" as if we're talking about something far more serious than little animations on a webpage.

I mean, you might not like it, and that's fair and understandable, but is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.

Re: Death to Scroll Fade

#70

Post by medbar »

sublinear wrote: post #41
levmiseri wrote: post #33

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.

Not sure if I second this or not. I did want to scroll, but I don't know how much of that was influenced from the context or the extreme minimalism making me want to look for more - I'm interested in how I would have reacted to the site not knowing it had scroll fade. I could see an argument with the "Don't Make Me Think" principle.
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