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Comment by IndigoIncognito | Hacker News Reader

I always thought that HN occasionally bugged out

It's incredible how for many people this had no meaning, while for me it was immediately clear. Semiotics is a complex art, and perhaps this signal was a bit too subtle for many.

It was clear to me, but only because the first time I saw it, the top post was "XYZ has died."

I've understood the meaning pretty quickly too, and I think it's a very nice gesture. If there isn't such a post (on the first 2-3 pages max) however, as has happened a few times, it's just a mystery death ribbon.

Posts where the title starts with "<name>, <occupation>" gives me a sense of unease each time I see one.

A few years ago, I saw a social media prank of posting a photo of an author - say, George RR Martin - with the caption "Renowned American fantasy George RR Martin at age 74, at his home in New Mexico yesterday. Martin's best known series, A Song of Ice and Fire was adapted into the television series A Game of Thrones."

but I guess it's also cultural... a black band for mourning it's a very eurocentric thing. I am not sure if it would make sense in other contexts. (but i really don't know)

In India, China and Japan the color associated with death is white, so it's pretty eurocentric indeed.

It could be confusing for some as it's selectively applied. There are only 15 names on the shown list but there are likely 2-3x that many which spent the better part of the day on the front page over the past 7 years.

I never would have guessed a black menu bar / banner on a website would be triggered by someone dying. Not saying it’s a bad thing in any way - I just wouldn’t have any reason to relate the two things without reason.

It was immediately clear to me.

It's just annoying to me. It looks like the website is broken. I'll be trying to add it to uBlock or something. If it had text then maybe I'd keep it. As it stands it's not actually communicating anything meaningful. Poor UX.

> As it stands it's not actually communicating anything meaningful.

A ribbon [1] or armband [2] is a really common and subtle way of symbolising mourning, I'm quite surprised people aren't more aware of this practise.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_ribbon

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_armband

I meant no disrespect to the sentiment. I don't think a black border at the top of a webpage is clear enough communication. Perhaps if there were some additional graphic indication of what it is? As it stands it's a black bar that makes the page look broken. If someone had a ribbon or band on their person or an image of one I would likely have grasped the significance after a moment's thought.

> As it stands it's not actually communicating anything meaningful

It's a nice gesture to people who likely had some impact on lots of our lives

For sure. I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't have some form of communication toward that end, either. What I mean is that the black border appears as if there is something wrong with the webpage. That is not clear. I am not saying that the idea of what it is trying to communicate is bad or wrong in any way. I meant that it is unclear as presently implemented.

I also tried uBlocking it, but I ended up removing the whole webpage so I left it alone

Agree. Tried to uBlock it too.

I think a HTML comment explaining why would have stopped me.

Me too. Or that they're A/B testing or a new layout or something.

It actually was asked to dang to create the black bar this time [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011421

Whether dang would have done that without that comment is unknown.

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