Thanks. Honestly, given all of the random comments in bubbles and other UX I never even saw it. I realize it's obvious once you've seen it, but everything else was so distracting I genuinely didn't. And I was literally trying to just "tune everything out" and read, not assuming there was an option to disable it that I should look for.

Also, "quiet mode" doesn't suggest any clear link to the cursors. I get what you're saying with it, but I'm more likely to assume it's got something to do with the site playing sound effects I don't hear because I've got my device on silent mode.