News organizations across the board have gotten into this bizarre arms race with "interactive" multimedia... and I genuinely have no idea why they think readers want it! The Verge in particular always has dozens of comments complaining about how distracting and unreadable some of their UI choices are.

I suspect part of the answer is similar to Facebook's "pivot to video" - some unscrupulous company has gaslit news executives into thinking that "interactive content" is the future of journalism, and are selling frameworks / consulting services / etc. (Though part of the problem with The Verge is Nilay Patel himself. Nilay seems like a good egg, but he has been obstinate and arrogant about The Verge's UI changes. Can't argue with taste...)

Rule #1 of web development: Don't mess with scroll.

Seriously. I probably in the HN minority in that I don't mind when vertical scroll results in animations that break up the text (e.g. Apple product pages or fancy NYT articles)...

...but when the animations turn into horizontal scrolling while I'm moving my fingers vertically on my trackpad, I hate it. It breaks my brain and makes me angry at the designer.

The scrolling makes me feel uneasy; in my head the columns are all offset by the scroll amount and I'm reading some weird zig-zag layout.

especially because on a Mac scrolling horizontally coincides with the back/fwd gestures. I never even realised this until this article...

Ah, there was more to the article? I gave up after a few photo's..

Thanks. Came here to comment exactly this. Not very UX interested but are there more people who are annoyed by this horizontal scrolling image galleries? Same with the movie streaming websites... For me it seems to be counter intuitive to go horizontally while navigating vertically.