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> I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it.

I thought I was the only one with this habit hah!

IMHO this "close modal when clicking outside of it" is a UX pattern you need to be careful with in general, because it's easy to "miss" a click and accidentally close something, even without this habit. It's okay for some things that are truly temporary (i.e. delete confirmation dialogs and the like), but clearly not everything.

But hey, old.reddit.com still works, and is mostly okay.

> I don't click a cursed en.m.wikipedia link by accident

I got this extension to automatically redirect them: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ – also useful for some other things like redirecting Reddit to old.reddit.com, and PostgreSQL documentation links to /current/ rather than /9.4/ and such which still frequently show up in search results.

> I thought I was the only one with this habit hah!

Nope. I think I would gladly institute capital punishment for people who institute pop-ups on highlighted text. "Oooh, you highlighted a passage of text, would you like to tweet it (with a link to source and user tracked)?"

No. I was reading that. ** off.

Outlook.com is particularly as depending on my random clicks I can end up with "new email + quote" or "new Note" or some other thing.

Some things I've managed to murder with adblock rules but really I'd just like my browser to not show the relevant triggers.

GitLab's diff or Code Review has an extremely annoying feature for people who fidget with text, especially when dragging text.

In addition to highlighting and "painting" the text, I often click and drag the highlighted text around. If some text is dragged onto the code view in Firefox, the dropped text seems to be treated like URLs, and opened either in new tabs or in the current tab.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/uploads/666d09080e20ea8...

If gitlab allows uploads by dropping files outside of the textarea, it might be a bug related to that (either in the browser or more likely in gitlab). This is standard for dragging urls or files into the browser from outside when the website isn't a drop target, afaik. You might be able to write a user script to disable it.

Alternatively, if you feel like rebuilding Firefox yourself, it looks like nsBaseDragService.cpp _might_ help you with preventing stuff from being dropped anywhere; I haven't read the whole file, but going by the name, overriding aCanDrop and mCanDrop to false might help. See lines 62, 84, 92. This _might_ allow you to continue dragging stuff around but disable dropping stuff.

[1]: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/nsBaseDr...

I also thought I was the only one. To be fair, my text-painting is half readability enhancement and half fidgeting. I am kind of annoying in pair programming sessions.

I find it really hard to read large sections of text on a screen without the highlighted text play that somehow anchors my view (this is a largely subconscious process I think).

But yeah, my wife will go batshit when trying to read the same thing over my shoulder. "Just stop, I can't read when you do that"

The "New Email + Quote" thing gets me frequently, the quoted text below will just be some random section of text and I have to go back, deselect the text, and start a new email.

I’m 90% sure I’ll be done with Reddit if they ditch old view. It’s honestly that integral for me lol

The old.reddit redirect and RES are really the only reason I've continued to use the site at all.

With a well curated selection of subreddits (and removal of a lot of the "default" ones) it's actually really good. My brain naturally starts going "these links aren't really interesting anymore" after 100-200 links, and I task switch as a result.

Same. I have like 3 default subs subbed and a few really, really niche ones.

If you are on iOS, the Apollo app makes Reddit a joy to use again.

I share your affinity to the older reddit ui but why bother using an addon for redirecting when you can opt out of the redesign in settings instead.

This way I don't need to sign in or remember cookies.

Because a) they randomly toggle your setting back, and don’t respect it at all on mobile, and b) features are slowly breaking on the old UI as well: gallery links not working, the “report” button taking seconds to load and then having a modal that breaks interoperability and hijacks Esc.

> hijacks Esc

I hate squarespace with a passion for this. I'll be loading a forum or other page and hit esc to stop the page from loading. It works--but a few seconds later, it prompts me to log into the CMS/management.

As far as modals go, I actively want modals to respond to esc. I don't want to have to reach for my mouse to close a pop-up. Modal popups are the only thing that should hijack esc.

AND SOMETIMES IT USES history.replace()

WHYYYyy

I "paint" text as well.

Sometimes I need to zoom and paint to improve the contrast of something. Even on HN for downvoted things, sometimes that helps.

This is something I also noticed a lot and find it equally infuriating. I can only guess why things are like this: you and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood. You know what a server is, what HTML is, what a browser history is, how cookies work, etc. But some manager wants to tap into the huge market of technically illiterate people who don't even know what a browser is, for whom a smart phone is nothing less than black magic. The manager tells his devs to just "make it work" for the most challenged user, to abstract away all these nuances of how a browser works. They use test groups to find out how my grandma expects a website to work and they basically make a smart phone converge towards one of those gizmos you saw on Star Trek, and then you get something like the Twitter interface.

> The manager tells his devs to just "make it work" for the most challenged user, to abstract away all these nuances of how a browser works. They use test groups to find out how my grandma expects a website to work and they basically make a smart phone converge towards one of those gizmos you saw on Star Trek, and then you get something like the Twitter interface.

Nooooo they do not do this. If they did, modern UIs wouldn't confuse my elderly parents much worse than old ones did.

Dear all tech companies (but looking at you, Google, since they won't stop buying cheap Android phones): every time you decide to have some full-screen horseshit notification pop up on an action, instead of doing the usual thing (say, a "hey, update this for new stuff!" thing) I get a fucking phone call to help "fix it". Goddamn stop it, the rest of us hate that too (my intent was to open the app to do something, so don't get in my way) but it's usability poison for the olds.

That includes those new tabs in Firefox every time there's an update. It's confusing. Stop it. Oh, and FF, bring back normal-ass menus, because my parents (unfortunately) use Windows. Browsers have proven Apple right all along with forcing the top-of-screen "file, edit, view..." menu, since apparently even major vendors can't be trusted to do the sane thing with those instead of cramming it all in some mysterious kitchen-sink button-opened dropdown.

> something like the Twitter interface.

Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value.

I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.

> Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value.

It doesn't work like that. Stratechery explains why. Aggregators aggregate users and even power users like to talk to/be listened to by a lot of people.

So Twitter and Youtube and the like don't even need to target power users, in general. They need to target the greater population, and once that population is captive, if you want to have any kind of audience as a publisher, you're wrangled to where the users are, you're captive, too.

Apple does the same thing with devs. They primarily target not super sophisticated middle to upper class users with decent disposable incomes. Since they "own" a huge amount of these users, developers have to build applications for them if they want to make money. And then developers are second class citizens on Apple platforms. Apple removes an API overnight? Better get cracking to fix your app ASAP. Apple doesn't support modern CI/CD platforms? Have Amazon stack up consumer desktops in a warehouse to kind of work around that.

> Stratechery explains why.

I have experienced it myself, and anyone else can theorize all they want, but they can't invalidate my experience.

As an example, I can no longer use YouTube for tutorials, because they have no dislike signal visible to me, and as such, I can't judge whether they are worth watching.

I can not stand Reddit's new UI. But even with the old UI, the massive amount of users attract a lot of heavy-handed moderation, which also turn me off. I use it for "entertainment" and not "research" or "speech".

Even though HN has much fewer users, it is among the few platforms where I can use it for real speech, like deep insight.

Many platforms have such a low signal-to-noise ratio that I am wasting my time on them, and don't find them useful for neither entertainment nor speech. I don't care what Stratechery says I like, when clearly I know myself better.

So true, 100% on the tutorial videos. I found myself watching this super basic tutorial video the other day that had a lot of polish and shine but lacked a huge amount of substance. I wondered how such videos would operate if the downvotes were still visible. Yes downvotes played a strong role in signaling tutorial quality.

> I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.

Hopefully this doesn't make me some kind of elitist or something, but I specifically never link to Hacker News or mention it on my social media accounts because I don't want HN to become "watered down" like so many previously high-value content sites/forums have been over the decades. I'll just share the linked article if I want to share something I found here.

Endless scrolling is nothing like a sci-fi gadget. Grandma probably enjoys reading books. She knows what a page is.

Endless scrolling is an explicit rejection of skeuomorphism.

Old UIs were designed exactly in the way you describe. And old people liked them. The traditional desktop experience has never really been dethroned.

> > modals and other horrible UI features

> and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood

Y'all, with your expert knowledge, know there's a dialog element in HTML, right?

> On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it

I'm not one of those people who paints but this has got me so many times. Honestly I'm not even one of the people that hates the redesign (Admittedly because I spend less time there now) but that has dinged me so many times. Why is everything a modal?

The "This page looks better in the app" message on mobile is a well earned diss aimed at their web designers

quora used to ask for login only when you followed a link while already on quora (so opening from google search wouldn't prompt a login). you could just copypaste url and look at the thread. but not anymore, they closed this off since recently. fuck them, community-driven websites shouldn't become fenced off like that because some lizard brain correlated compulsory login with registration count.

+1 on reddit "modal" bs, i don't paint, but simply like to click shit from time to time. it's horrible.

+1 on rage quitting bullshit sites out of disgust.

The old Reddit design was just so much better. As a long time front end dev I know this can be an annoying take. But product teams push out so much redesigning that's just unnecessary and this happened with Reddit. The official app has less functionality and is less intuitive and the new website is a garbage fire of pushing you "related content". I guess I'm glad that kept old.reddit.com at least.

The original seems to have been designed with different goals in mind. I have no doubt that the new ux better optimized their new goals, I just don’t agree that the new goals were as useful to me personally.

You can still work around the Quora BS by appending `?share=1` to the URL

thanks, that's good to know

"Oh and once I tried to use Quora. It asked me to log in before I even knew what kind of a website it is. Now I hate Quora with a passion even though I'm not even sure what kind of a website it is exactly."

Quora used to be good. A place where you can ask any question and if it was interesting enough, interesting people answer. Like a good question about wikipedia, made Jimmy Wales answer directly.

But over time it all became very generic and force login to read anything, made me not visit at all anymore.

completely off topic, but you're not Jan Marsalek[0] by any chance? the Wirecard criminal that is wanted by Interpol? :)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Marsalek

Re twitter and reddit and YouTube: old.reddit.com and nitter.eu and newpipe/invidious respectively.

All these projects show we're patently far from the only ones who get driven up the fucking wall by absolutely brain-dead design being pushed over the user's wishes.

With LibRedirect[1] you automatically get redirected from twitter et al. to these instances.

[1]: https://github.com/libredirect/LibRedirect

> I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use.

My old mentor used to do this too, and I really never understood why. Since then, I have seen others do it too, occasionally. It looked more like a fidget than anything helpful. I once tried it just to see if this was some hidden technique I was missing out on, but I didn't notice anything particularly helpful - it didn't help me keep focused on the text or anything, and it distracted me personally.

I'm very curious what the benefit is, or at least the reason? From an apparent lizard brain :)

I do it when I'm reading something, but my attention isn't fully (or is difficult and requires back and forth with references) on it to mark either the paragraph I'm on or the sentence I just finished reading.

on wide pages it helps my eyes find the next line. It's not really something I do conciously though and I'm barely aware that I am doing it.

Yeah this happens to me on Reddit as well. Twitter used to be like this too where a tweet opened like a "lightbox" but a couple years ago they changed it so that clicking a tweet goes to a page with the individual tweet. Generally in UX I like to avoid this concept of dialog boxes, modals etc but everyone ends up re-learning that after naively implementing things in this "A screen pops up over another screen" manner

Explain "Paints" as this primate can't understand.

Clicking text and moving the cursor for the sole purpose of highlighting that text.

Selecting the text as if you were going to copy it

> On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it.

The whole point of modals is to enable the user to close them by clicking outside of them. So this way if you want to show new users something like an onboarding tutorial, they can just click outside of the modal if they are like "WTF is this??", rather than needing to look for the close button. The fact that many people abuse them doesn't negate the fact that they are, if used correctly, actually a better experience for the user.

That may be the point, but it sure is annoying behavior that I don't particularly want in this use case!

I'll often click and close out of a thread just by trying to get focus back on the window so I can scroll down, and its annoying as all hell.

The way Notion does this is annoying as hell. I am in a data entering view and there is no "submit" button??

It's why they want us back in the office. The executives do the same thing, so they know.

It seems your monkey brain is not very happy.

> Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS?

So you think the standard should be to keep a video playing even if one's scrolled past it? Are you insane?

The only insane thing is to have an algorithm guess whether I want to watch the video or not, instead of just letting me decide with a single damn click.

Autoplaying videos that stop playing after scrolling is one of the worst UX crimes in history of UX. At the same time in 2022 I still cannot prevent "autoplay" of animated gifs that bombard my senses in every feed unless I outright block literally everything other than text.

And the sad thing is that software quality in general is most likely just as bad, only not as visible.

There's a bit more subtlety and tradeoff here.

For example, I doubt most people watching a video on YouTube would like the video to stop playing when they scroll down. If they wanted to pause it, they'd pause it. They also probably don't want the video to transition to the next, whilst they're reading threads.

If you're in an infinite loop stream however, you do probably want it to pause or stop, without intervention, as you've scrolled away and dismissed the video.

However - you may not want that to happen whilst you're still in-thread with the video. If you're looking at comments on the video, you probably still want it to continue. But if you reach the bottom of the thread, you probably don't want to have it pause and have to find the start of the thread to continue playing it, just because you scrolled an inch too far.

That's fair, as always context matters. But I feel it was implied the context of our discussion was infinite scroll pages like twitter (he specifically mentioned that), tiktok, instagram etc.

That's true - which is why I spent the majority of the comment speaking about a situation in an infinite scroll where you do not want the video to automatically pause.

Why decide? Gimme a toggle in the settings to pause or throw it into the corner when I scroll past a video I've pressed play on

Personally I prefer it to pause, but I don't really watch many videos on Twitter

not op, but yes when I actively unmuted it, it should keep playing