I think an important subtlety here is that clients/‘normies’ look at different websites to us, so the taste in websites that they cultivate is different to ours.

I stress over this with my own website-for-work. If I make the developer’s version of my site, who am I talking to? Other devs. If I make the version that appeals to agencies and casual users, there’s a constant voice in my head trying to drag me back to something simpler, lighter, judging me for that threejs hero section. As with all things, I guess it’s a matter of finding the right balance. Web development sure is in a very strange place and transitioning hard right now - off topic but I’m seeing more and more people looking for work and fewer and fewer job postings, especially for freelancers like myself. But maybe I’m not advertising AI bot integrations hard enough.

Bring back lightbox!

My partner works at a nonprofit and they paid some consultant for a chat bot. The next month they were surprised they got a $2000 bill for the API use and at first wondered if the bot was really popular. The analytics reveled that very few conversations were happening.

The consultants apparently had the bot load and fed it an immediate prompt which greeted the user. This was happening on every page load. Bad consultants, bad bot.

“It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind”

This sums up everything driving the tech sector right now. From execs at big tech to nobodies on X.

EDIT; if I think about the nature of it. The visibility fight is the decreasing attention with increasing channels and noise. Visibility tactics go to the extreme. And the fear of looking behind comes from the previous tech cycles and the thoughts around what if you had missed those? And maybe those with the most fear are the ones that did.

The obvious solution is to implement a mock chatbot that answers from a set of pregenerated wrong answers. Noone will know the difference.

> No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content

Your clients seem to have got what they wanted, or at least someone who has learned to write like one.

> Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy.

> [...]

> I've started asking clients a simple question when they bring it up. Not to be difficult, just to understand.

> [...]

> It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind.

> [...]

> No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content, clear and immediate.

It’s been long enough that this might even have plausibly come from a human with LLM writing overrepresented in their brain rather than an LLM. But either way there’s this record-scratch feeling that I experience on each one of these, and (fittingly) it just completely knocks me out of the groove, requiring deliberate effort to resume reading.

These chatbot and google login are my most hated feature of current web.

Obviously it just a script embedded in the page, so it has not actual place in the design. So the effect, especially on mobile, is this dance of starting to read a page, have it obscured by annoying popups, and trying (and failing) to close the popup with the hidden 12x12 pixels x button.

Just like the entire ads market, it’s all forgery to drive up clicks so owners can say to the clients that there is interaction.

Don’t get me started on the recent YouTube ads on iPad that place a banner that sits on top of the video, hiding subtitles, and closing it is behind a menu that requires you to be a brain surgeon specialist in order to interact with, instead of clicking the ad itself. I currently have 15 tabs in safari for ads that I inadvertently clicked.