[hamish-b]

I like seeing what users are currently viewing the same page, but man the constant jostling of users coming and going made it hard to read the post.

[seanlinehan]

I have this little bookmarklet in my bookmarks bar that I use constantly. It removes all fixed or sticky elements on the page and re-enabled y-overflow if it was disabled:

javascript: (function () {document.querySelectorAll("body *").forEach(function(node){["fixed","sticky"].includes(getComputedStyle(node).position)&&node.parentNode.removeChild(node)});var htmlNode=document.querySelector("html");htmlNode.style.overflow="visible",htmlNode.style["overflow-x"]="visible",htmlNode.style["overflow-y"]="visible";var bodyNode=document.querySelector("body");bodyNode.style.overflow="visible",bodyNode.style["overflow-x"]="visible",bodyNode.style["overflow-y"]="visible";var nodes=document.querySelectorAll('.tp-modal-open');for(i in nodes) {nodes[i].classList.remove('tp-modal-open');}}())

[JimDabell]

They have been called “dickbars” before [0].

> Kill-sticky, a bookmarklet to remove sticky elements and restore scrolling (174 comments)

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32998091

[0] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/06/27/mcdiarmid-stick...

[consumer451]

Same here. Right-click the page and choose Inspect (or Inspect Element). Click the Console tab, paste this code, and press Enter:

    document.getElementById("presence")?.remove();

If you want to know why this is happening in your brain, it's likely a prey/predator identification thing. I would like to think that being so distracted by this just means I have excellent survival instincts :)

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0703913104

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salience_%28neuroscience%29

[theendisney]

Can just right click remove node.

[addandsubtract]

uBlock Origin also lets you "zap" elements away. No console fiddling required.

[HexDecOctBin]

Reminded me so much of a game called Chess Royale that I used to play, the avatars and the flags (screenshot [1]). It was really good too; and then Ubisoft being Ubisoft, they killed it even though the game had bots and could have been made single-player.

[1]: https://game-guide.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Might-and-M...

[krackers]

isn't this the page that used to have cursors everywhere in the background? I think the distracting design is some intentional running joke at this point

[nine_k]

Try "dark mode" foe further trolling.

[YesBox]

I tried uBlock's element zapper and ended up playing a furious game whac-a-mole :D

[paulmooreparks]

Same here. I don't have the time or patience to hack the page like the siblings comments suggest. There are more articles on the web than I will ever be able to consume in my lifetime, so I just close the tab and move on when the UX is aggressively bad.

[airstrike]

It's hilarious but I literally can't click on their gh or patreon links because of it

[rf15]

natural selection at work

[JimDabell]

I found Safari’s “hide distracting items” feature was necessary to finish the article.

[jahsome]

Inatant tab close for me. So obnoxious.

The idea is kinda cute, but the implementation is aggressive.

[cnnlives]

Maybe if the background color on all pages was a heatmap of the current top line of the page, so that you could see where people were reading and how many were reading, it would be better?

Also, what if it played slow and brooding music when fewer people were reading and epic action adventure music when many people were reading it?

How about if the page mined bitcoin and the first person to enter a page made a percentage higher percentage of the next person’s bitcoin and less of the next one, like a multi-level marketing mining strategy?

[mathiaspoint]

That heatmap idea sounds really neat actually.

[promiseofbeans]

It's pretty fun seeing what countries people are from. If you hover, it tells your their city as well!

[akst]

I ended up using safari remove distracting content, which seemed to work nicely.

[Kapura]

i literally opened the developer console to delete that element from the page. no surprise somebody who has no idea how to make a readable website is getting bullied by a chatbot.

[spacemadness]

Certainly not built to help those with ADHD in mind.

[lagniappe]

Its the bottom 20px or so, with a lot of content above it. Move the window down slightly.

[_carbyau_]

The article literally starts with:

"Any person who has used a computer in the past ten years knows that doing meaningless tasks ..."

I guess this is demonstrating another variant of that. Admittedly, not one I'd seen before so +1 for novelty even if -20 for distraction.

[throwaway290]

that webmaster should ask himself, if it is so easy implement does it mean you SHOULD implement it? I just immediately closed the page.

[pwdisswordfishz]

I wonder if it's GDPR-compliant.

[wiseowise]

Why wouldn’t it? It’s anonymous and he probably doesn’t store the data.