Discussion
Death to Scroll Fade!
hyperhello: It’s kind of like when someone wants you to read something, so they hold the thing to read for you and read it out loud, while moving their finger at the words they’re currently reading. I know how to read!!!
sgbeal: The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the web, yet i'm seeing it for the very first time on that post. (And, indeed, it's annoying. My eyes can't read when there's animation going on nearby.)The goldfish animation along the bottom is epic and i will have to mine that bit for reuse somewhere :).
llm_nerd: It definitely isn't prevalent, and usually is for "feature" pieces (like an expose on the Washington Post back when they were a real newspaper), along with product pages.Apple uses it for their various pages, and it is legitimately annoying-https://www.apple.com/iphone/Tesla is a fan as well-https://www.tesla.com/modelsOccasionally sites use lazy loaded images, and do a "fade in" effect when they're actually loaded. Nothing wrong with that particular use.
wgjordan: Anthropic uses it across all their websites, here's a typical example where the effect is obvious as you scroll down: https://claude.com/solutions/agentsI could be wrong, but my simple guess is that it's become widespread in LLM-generated websites partly because of Anthropic's own style guides getting adopted through Claude-bundled skills and such.
ryandrake: > This post purposefully ignores the reduced motion preference to give everyone the same truly terrible experience. I am sorry. Please use your browser’s reader mode."Reader Mode" shouldn't even be a special mode. It should just be the default browsing experience, and users who want all this styling crap should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something.
apples_oranges: what a good idea to have this automatically come up when the page opens, and perhaps give user a few seconds to press escape to get rid of it, if needed
jonas21: You haven't noticed it before because when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect that can be used to draw your attention to particular elements on the page.This site is intentionally doing it very poorly to make a point. Really, the takeaway should be don't do things poorly. But that's kind of obvious.
Sohcahtoa82: > The poster seems to be implying that this effect is prevalent across the webBecause it is.For sites with dynamic content (social media, news, etc.), it doesn't happen.But commercial sites trying to convince you to use their product, they're incredibly common. It's not always a fade in exactly like this site does it. Sometimes it's content sliding in from the side.It's incredibly pervasive on SaaS marketing pages.
yards: I raise you one. Death to the parallax scroll. In fact, death to all scroll animations.
apsurd: https://webflow.com/ is what i blame for the fade-in on scroll module.15 years ago it did look very polished, boutique, professional. Now that it's a module everyone can do, everyone literally does it for every module.Also there's tailwind that likely has a module for all the modules in webflow.
ryandrake: Scrolling should just move a fixed size view up and down a fixed sized page. Why on earth must everyone complicate it so much?
knorker: > when it's done wellIt's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful.Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain.And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to half it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time.The web is already slow. No need to deliberately spend effort to make it even slower.
JohnFen: > when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effectI've seen it quite a lot, but apparently I've never seen it done well. It's a very annoying effect that chases me away from the site using it.
ayhanfuat: It is partly to blame, yes. This is from Claude’s official frontend skill:“Motion: Use animations for effects and micro-interactions. Prioritize CSS-only solutions for HTML. Use Motion library for React when available. Focus on high-impact moments: one well-orchestrated page load with staggered reveals (animation-delay) creates more delight than scattered micro-interactions. Use scroll-triggering and hover states that surprise.”
psychoslave: You are absolutely right!
sociopathai: interesting
marssaxman: Not doing it at all would be better still. It's really annoying.
levmiseri: I'm guilty of this as well. https://kraa.io/about has some fade-in animation for the intro text – driven by wanting the initial impression to be focused/minimal and 'unravel' as you go. I take it that most HN folks would vastly prefer to NOT have this?
sublinear: I think it looks fine except it's missing a more obvious hint that there's more to see when I scroll. The one that's there is just textual and very delayed.
xnx: It's amazing how web graphic designers don't realize 99% of all added motion/animation is just as annoying and unnecessary as <blink> and <marquee>.
cogman10: Really, almost any animation or hijacking of scrolling should be abolished. It's one of the most disgusting things to encounter on a webpage.I don't want your product to spin while I scroll down. I don't want animations or boxes to start appearing or disappearing. I don't want helpful tooltips, popups, or "I hope you enjoyed this" notifications to appear as I scroll.What I want when I scroll is for the page to move, either up or down, in a completely consistent manner. I want to be able to reasonably predict what I'll see as I go up or down.Apple loves this shit. Fortunately they aren't AS BAD as they once were, but you'll still encounter it on their product pages.https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/
alprado50: Agree. I understand why people like those animations and sometimes even i want to implement these in my website with GSAP, but then i remember that these animations make my content harder to read.
wincy: Hah, the point has certainly been made. Absolute Barf-o-Rama.I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, which hasn’t really improved as an adult, and this page immediately made me feel like I’m going to throw up. Had to switch to reader mode after the first image. I was always the kid who couldn’t read in the car, and was always groggy on long road trips because of Dramamine (side note, Meclizine has significantly improved my life, as it has largely the same effect without drowsiness). As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me. Elevators are tiny torture chambers, especially when stopping on multiple floors. And it’s cumulative, the sensation becomes worse the more I’m exposed to it over the course of a day (I have a mental “theme park budget” in my head of how many rides I can comfortably do!). VR can’t have any motion that isn’t firmly anchored to a sense of place (space ship/driving sims are okay though!)I’m glad awareness is being raised about this, but I’m curious what websites are using this now? Is it just personal blogs and the like right now? I definitely would have noticed this cropping up on websites I frequent.
peab: the effect in this example fine though, and not obnoxious like OPs? I don't get it
stefanfisk: Agree 100%!I’m a fast scroller and skimmer. Info scroll down and the text is not there I’ll just assume that the site is shot and close it. Ain’t nobody got 200ms to wait for a god damn fade in when there’s an infinite amount of sites out there to discover.
jevndev: My least favorite by far is the “multi section” webpage design. Where the page is split into multiple whole-screen sections and scrolling the mouse wheel alternates between either moving between sections or playing the animations of that section. Yes please make my scroll wheel only sometimes actually scroll the page and other times rotate a graphic for way too long thanks
RobotToaster: Parts also seem to ignore prefers-reduced-motion.
charcircuit: This website has a slow and laggy implementation which unfairly shows off the effect.
realityfactchex: I thought this was going to be about iOS and how now (as of iOS 26) there is a "fade out" at the top of every web page (around the notch/top-edge area).When scrolling/reading a web page, it literally changes the section of the text that fades to gray.So, "everything scroll fades".I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Quite irritating, IMHO.This article's critique seems valid, too (more generically about "scroll fade" in interfaces, e.g. web pages, which seems to mostly be about items appearing gradually via motion). Personally, I see less of that these days, compared to making every page in an OS fade out where unnecessary.
freedomben: > As an adult I’m fine as long as I’m in the front seat, public transit is terrible for me.Me too! The worst part about this is anytime there's more than two adults in the vehicle, the "front seat" has all sorts of social expectations and courtesies. I once mentioned that I get motion sick when not in the front seat, and I could tell that nobody believed me and thought it was an uncool way to try and guilt people into letting me monopolize the favored chair. After that I don't bother, but do try to avoid shared cars because in those I'll be quietly sitting in a torture chamber while others around me don't understand.Also, good God those drivers whould constantly gas-brake-gas-gas-brake-gas-brake-brake-gas. I get it when all the sudden traffic rapidly and unexpectedly slows down, but so many people seem to always be pressing at least one pedal, never coasting. It's torture
netrap: Death to Scroll Bar size change!!!
confounder: Amen. So cathartic to see someone publish the post I've been wanting to write for a while, and with a much better title.Also: I've noticed a new abuse recently of sites implementing scroll momentum on desktop — has anyone else seen this? I couldn't believe it, but there it was.
ramon156: I was redesigning a website of mine and Claude suggested to add this as an animation. My theory is that, if claude is confident in a suggestion, a lot of other people have done the same.Maybe it's too subtle to notice.Edit: on odeva.nl
chrismorgan: The scroll fade on that site is comparatively inoffensive (comparatively), because you messed with scrolling itself, which is one of the worst things you can do, taking over and ruining inertia. You’re literally going out of your way to make things worse. The ONLY time scrolljacking of any kind is acceptable is for things like maps where there is no “normal”.
eru: Or for a game, where it's part of the interface.
chrismorgan: Got an example of what you mean? Because if you mean the only thing I can think of, I very strongly disagree.
ivanjermakov: Death to scroll event override in general. Messes up my vimium smooth scrolling.
MoonWalk: "should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something."Bwahahaha, +1! This reminds me of calling Windows XP's default motif "Fisher-Price" mode. Which, sadly, looks professional and efficient compared to Windows (and, increasingly, the Mac) today.
medbar: Not sure if I second this or not. I did want to scroll, but I don't know how much of that was influenced from the context or the extreme minimalism making me want to look for more - I'm interested in how I would have reacted to the site not knowing it had scroll fade. I could see an argument with the "Don't Make Me Think" principle.
arcfour: I don't have a strong opinion either way on the effect, but I do have to say that I always find it amusing how fatalistic HN can sometimes be over the most minor cosmetic inconveniences, couching them as "wasting (large amounts of) humanity's time" and "disrespecting people" as if we're talking about something far more serious than little animations on a webpage.I mean, you might not like it, and that's fair and understandable, but is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
wtallis: Hijacking native scroll behavior to badly reimplement anything remotely like scrolling is wrong even in a gaming context. But if you're implementing Half Life 2 in a browser, where the user no longer has a normal cursor, then hijacking scrolling to implement the weapon switcher is fine.
Night_Thastus: Something else scroll-related I personally hate:Sticky 'headers' that appear when you scroll down, and disappear when you scroll up. I hate them so much. It hurts my brain to see the stupid thing appear and disappear constantly if I scroll around a page.The worst part is you can't even zap them out of the way with something like uBlock, because then there's no header even when you're at the top of the page. >:(
adventured: Screen real-estate for legitimate content is often at a premium and then they go and steal some of that land with sticky headers and or footers. I occasionally run across mobile sites that use both at the same time, while throwing in ads here and there, it's an atrocious experience.
liendolucas: I can only add another aberration that it just started to happen on my browsers without even updating or doing anything at all: I get the master volume raised, I mean not the YouTube volume, but the volume that is reported in my OS.I truly don't know how this is possible or how should I turn it off completely. There are some settings in Firefox but the ones I have tried do not work.This is one of the worst things I have seen in many years, along with all the other aberrations that are already spread on the net.
