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30 minutes with a stranger

pudding.cool

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Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#151
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say that somehow I knew I had to scroll the first time I entered. But I went back after reading your comment and I have no idea how did I find out the first time, there is no indication that there is content bellow.

Same for me. It was immediately obvious I should scroll, but I don't know why.

I was viewing on desktop and the blank space all around made it immediately feel like an article that required a scroll to view the content below the fold.

Seeing the timestamps change as I scrolled and seeing a progress "bar" update within the speech balloons during the dialogs made it more obvious I just had to scroll to see the content change.

I do think the progress bar color is low contrast enough that some might not see it and not realize they have to scroll to cause the dialog to update, though.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#152

It's the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it's much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression. You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There's also the interesting…

[dead]

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#153
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not disagree with you entirely, but I feel this almost borders on self-delusion. The sole purpose of ads is to (probabilistically) shift the targets spending behavior in favor of the one buying the ads, nothing more, nothing less. While ads can have utility from the victims point of view (contain relevant information), this is entirely incidental. If you want product updates or information, getting that from ded…

Show HN is advertising.

Sure; but people are not typically getting paid to post Show HNs, and that content is not shown to victims unsolicitedly, so I don't have any problem with it either.

If you are a "fellow techy, working on serving ads", it is a pretty safe assumption that producing "Show HNs" is neither the main purpose of your job nor very representative.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#154
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it. A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now. Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did…

I do not disagree with you entirely, but I feel this almost borders on self-delusion. The sole purpose of ads is to (probabilistically) shift the targets spending behavior in favor of the one buying the ads, nothing more, nothing less. While ads can have utility from the victims point of view (contain relevant information), this is entirely incidental. If you want product updates or information, getting that from ded…

When I read ads in the old, old National geographic magazines at my grandparents what startles me is the entire paragraphs of text laying out the case for their product. I miss that even if it was BS.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> loneliness is a perceptual phenomenon that represents a paradoxical component; it is not mitigated through proximity to others It might be better described as alienation. Then we can fit it into Hannah Arendt's theory of fascism being caused by alienation. In the modern world, that alienation is accelerated by social media and cost of living for those without assets, who pay the cost of inflation without benefiting…

I do wonder if this is really the same type of alienation that Arendt refers to. I can understand how if you are afraid the neighbor is going to be an informant, you stop interacting. Public discourse breaks down and ideology takes hold. This seems quite different to me than the type of alienation we are talking about in 2025 from online interactions. I am not sure alienation is really the right word in terms of isol…

Who can afford space for a junk drawer in 2025? If junk wants to be my roommate, it better pay the rent.

I'm joking and completely agree with your point about lack of hyper stimulation, but I'm also a bit serious. About ten years ago I started getting rid of things that would entertain me once or twice a year mostly because of the real state they use. Now that I quit all social media I remember why I used to keep all that stuff around.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually met a serial killer who did this, heh Would love to hear the story behind this one.

When I was an intern in a small town, I took a trip to London. On my way back, I caught a cab from the provincial station to my house. The cabbie seemed fun. We were talking about football. Just ordinary banter with a cab driver. Out of the blue, he asks me "hey mate, just for fun, what would you do if you'd murdered someone and had a dead body to dispose of?" I was a bit surprised, but it's not that odd a thing to t…

Still a better conversion than the typical Reform party bollocks I get from the cabbies at the airport.

EDIT: if I had to dispose of a body I’d find a farmer willing to lend-out his pigs with no questions asked.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#157

I'm increasingly convinced that social isolation is the single great social ill of our time. I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected. But so much of the hate simmering away like a pot about to boil over is the result of loneliness. The evidence on this is startingly clear. https://www.sciencedirect.com…

Humans are moored to their social web: having to exist amongst others continually pulls you towards the average feelings/views/activities of the people you are connected to. Change is slow.

When humans become unmoored from this web through loneliness/isolation/alienation, they can freewheel and drift further from that average. This can be liberating! But if you don't re-connect, either with your previous web or a new one, there's nothing stopping you falling off the deep end; nothing to give you a little correction that keeps you "normal". Political extremism of various flavors, or identity crises founded in over-rumination, are what we see - but also innovation and removal of constraints. Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies relates. The social isolation moonshot is to break from convention and be a hero auteur, but the risk of failure is very high. Nullum magnum dementiae sine mixtura ingenium fuit.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#158
post #74

I know it's supposed to be fancy and cool looking but this sort of website design where you have to scroll and then the whole screen animates really bothers me. It actually gives me a headache to try and follow it versus normal scrolling behaviour and text. As soon as I start scrolling down and I can't scroll normally and images and text start flying around I feel a disturbing feeling in my head and lose concentratio…

Sometimes this is indeed merely "fancy" and vacuous, but other times it is a meaningful and more engaging way to present the content. I feel like this is an example of the latter. Even if you're not a fan and would have done it differently, it seems a bit hard to understand what could be so bothersome that you have to close it in 10s...

I often like the use of advanced media. The NYT and Washington Post have done some amazing advanced media that fully exploits the richness possible with the web.

Not so sure about this one, though. Like others, I was more annoyed with the constant scrolling to get tiny niblets of information and didn't even make it through. It makes it feel like work and the mechanisms completely overwhelms the message.

Also weird that it's hogging CPU even when you're sitting on a completely static portion of the page.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#159
post #18

Really great design. This is the unicorn of fancy websites because for once, it actually makes sense to override browser's standard scrolling behavior. The 30-minute timeline on the right provides an obvious context for what you're navigating with the scroll actions, and you wouldn't be able to do that with a regular scrollbar. Usually scrolling overrides happen because the designers' mindset was that the site should…

I don't mind designers overriding when they take meticulous care to craft a better tailored experience. But once I scrolled past the initial content I found the site a UI disaster. Not long after it said "Pick a person to explore", I wanted to tap a particular box to read one of their conversations, and couldn't figure out how to bring any dialog up. I wound up scrolling further down afterward to see if that was how…

I feel the same. I don't particularly mind if a developer overrides the scrollbar, and I would actually argue that in this case it was a good way to present the story and overall I liked it, but you need to do it right. If the sites becomes all clunky, it stutters, and you get text popping up a while after you scrolled, then it's better to focus on the performance and leave aside the animations.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#160
post #122

I know it's supposed to be fancy and cool looking but this sort of website design where you have to scroll and then the whole screen animates really bothers me. It actually gives me a headache to try and follow it versus normal scrolling behaviour and text. As soon as I start scrolling down and I can't scroll normally and images and text start flying around I feel a disturbing feeling in my head and lose concentratio…

Would be nice if we could disable JavaScript and just get access to the text. I also dislike this style, plus it lags on my computer. I scrolled all the way down but all I got was that it is a story of how it's not so bad to talk to strangers.

I don't know if I'm missing the mark here, but:

you can in fact disable JavaScript in your browser. In Firefox, go to `about:config` and set `javascript.enabled` to false.

Warning: lots of sites will break.

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