The funny thing is, the techniques shown here are the ones that were once considered something only advanced front-end developers or publishers could do. Seeing that a former symbol of skill has now become a subject of satire makes me think that what we call 'high-level' ultimately comes from what others can't do. I personally never even thought about how to implement ASCII art animation.
I've worked on several projects where people looked at the site, which was simple and straight to the point, and people would straight up tell me they didn't take it seriously because it didn't have these performative UI things on it.
It's like when a Youtuber's audience complains about how they're constantly asking you to subscribe. The reason it happens is because the statistics say it works.
I don't think the commentary being made here is that startup websites should not be flashy. Just that, maybe they don't all need to look exactly the same as each other.
I think homogeneity is an unavoidable end game for the internet (unfortunately).
At work we’ve been discussing whether to migrate off our home grown component library to Material UI. I shudder at the thought, personally. However, a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product.
Like many of us I was born into a deeply customizable Internet, all of my websites were green or red on black. They were a glorious amalgam of fixed width fonts and <blink> tags. With occasional wingdings characters for fun and games and complex <table>/<tr>/<td> tags for really epic layouts. They were l33t, honestly ^_^
But, as time goes on and more and more people use this thing, converging on the one-true-UX feels like a net good thing assuming the fundamentals are right. To some degree the LLM-ization of the Internet is essentially the end game of squashing the personality out of the Internet which bootstrap started.
We’re on the cusp of spoken word being the core UX of computers with a fall back to reading the LLM transcript, neither of which benefits from <blink>
> a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product
Not that I disagree with you, but I'll also offer a tradeoff.
When people expect to pick up your app intuitively, it can also just mean them using the app absent-mindedly, which can mean them skipping the manual and jumping straight to trying to tie up the support lines. Whereas if your ui asks for a user's full focus up front, yes there are downsides to that but they're also more engaged.
It seems to me the parent commenter is saying the opposite: looking exactly like each other _is_ the point. It's a form of social signaling, to indicate that a project "belongs" to the in group of high-flying successful AI hype projects.
Note I'm not arguing that this is a good strategy. But given that so many people follow it I imagine it's not as bad as it appears on the surface.
It really comes down to first impression. Your website design is your company’s first impression. If the design is clean, people will believe the product is clean and robust as well. Similar to how people think things that cost more and probably high quality and better overall.
As for this website, the best component is the ASCII animation in the hero and you can’t even copy that component. In fact, that nice ASCII hero is what gave me a good first impression to go thru all the components.
Sometimes utility can be so good, users don’t care about design. I was also thinking of it as a business coming to a SaaS website. B2C is filled with so many dark patterns, first impression probably plays less of a role.
In the marketing world this is called revealed preference. This stuff is A/B tested to death. Anyone trying to sell something is best served by watching people's behavior instead of listening to what they say, as the two are often different if not polar opposites.
Better for you(the seller) vs better for me (the buyer)
Two agents with two different utility functions fighting each other, it's an adversarial relationship/game.
The fight is for your limited attention span.
Clickbaity titles or least informative ones, 20min of rambling for what could've been a 2min video or article, spreading the meat of the info in the later half of the video for better retention instead of the beginning, highly misleading previews at the beggining, etc ... are good for the content producer but not so much for the content viewer that has to sift through it only to reliaze that didn't care about that particular thing.
Not limited to videos, but also things to buy the meat of the technical/practical description of the product get worse and worse each year and the other proxy signals for them too.
Seems like marketing is a lot like military conflict drown the enemy in lot of noise to drop the SNR.
what's that you want to buy a 4k video projector and set a filter for it? here it is for cheaper. Oh, you wanted the actual dots on the wall resolution to be 4k instead of max supported input signal, oops.
You're used to higher price meaning better quality? guess we'll flood that price point with shitier quality progressively until we find your limit
The perspective marketing world seems toxic. From the perspective of the "consumer", it sure does feel like we are being "ignored", "tricked", or "bamboozled" when our stated preferences are ignored in favor of "revealed preference".
It isn't that we have a "preference" for these things, it is far more likely that a user just doesn't have their guard up 100% of the time, and these psychological manipulations are designed to cut through that.
Sure, these strategies probably net clicks, but they aren't from people who "chose" your product, they are clicks from people who were manipulated into clicking.
I suppose whether you think that is okay depends on your industry and ethics.
Yeah, it is highly toxic. I'd assume that in most cases those "revealed preferences" are specifically engineered, not organic. It's taking advantage of biological reflexes and calling it a true preference.
It's behavioral marketing, vs status/aspirational marketing.
A stated preference isn't necessarily current or situational (I will choose to run instead of watching another 45 minutes of Youtube videos).
A situational preference is often inertia, and behavioral marketing will directly hinder the meta cognitive processes that usually give us the agency to override our default mode choices (John has been on YouTube for the last 20 minutes, what next suggestion is not likely to keep him there?)
I guess in the social sciences world this is called institutional erosion...
Youtube is a perfectly "unbiased" "democratic" repository, where crazy people shouting conspiracies and prize-winning documentaries have the same thumbnail and half-line of text for you to discover if they are any good.
I was going to say that too. Some of these I definitely am guilty of. I have a few dozen that aren't on the list but it's a breath of fresh air to see it so well organized even though, we all know what it is :D fantastic job to the author(s).
Honestly I can just swap these bad boys in and ship in less than a couple hours if it'd be funny enough. I don't think they're bad designs at all, and I don't think every aspect of my business needs to be unique and obsessed over.
IMO this is like judging landscaping companies for all using similar looking shovels.
The most extreme virtue-signal is to go completely browser-default and have no styling whatsoever. Like lowercasing because your pinky can't be arsed to reach for the shift-key even though you've a billion dollars in series A.
God, that takes me back. MSHTML, the mismatched tags, <font>, table layout, the webmaster that added the Google Analytics snippet before the DOCTYPE tag
I've mostly stopped caring about using using proper capitalization, commas, grammar and spelling in my writing of comments, primarily as a signal that i'm not an llm.
If you turn on HN's "Show Dead" setting, there are tons of LLM-generated comments on stories related to AI. You can see the human(s) behind the LLM trying to fiddle with the style of comment by making them skip proper grammar, capitalization, use or avoid certain phrases, and so on. The biggest tell for LLM content, though, is just the content as a whole: it sounds fake and ungenuine, like it passed through a committee of hostage negotiators to remove the speaker's own attachment/expectations.
They can configure it to use all lowercase letters, skip em-dashes, make grammar mistakes, stop saying "it's not X, it's Y", or whatever, yet the content itself just has a fake quality to it that makes it stand out, which is why those comments still get flagged IMO.
I had this conversation the other day. I'm a native German speaker originally, which is why I hand out commas like it's candy and capitalize things unnecessarily. Sometimes I notice these things and leave them in when I write something, since at least it gives you a good indication that a human wrote it... for now.
The problem is that omitting capitalization, commas, and so on signals, in addition to "not AI in default settings", but also "I'm part of the San Francisco AI in-crowd and Altman is my spirit animal".
I get the whole trope thing and maybe I'm just an old man but I still am kinda impressed when Claude sh*ts out this type of UI 100 times faster than I ever could. It might also be that I never could have made UI even of this quality before AI. (˶ˆᗜˆ˵)
It's still better than the sh*t developers produced three years ago.
Some people just like to feel superior by shaming others' work. You can easily tweak the visual output if you want to, but it's good enough for most use cases and better than what developers used to produce.
“TokenStream – Server-sent events (SSE) were added to the HTML5 spec in 2008 but never used until 2025.”
I remember chunked transfer encoding shipped in 1997. It's been possible since then to readily and easily stream bytes of text or chunks of html the way everyone sees LLMs do today.
I used this to write a web based telnet client in 1997, and later a text moo / chat for the web. In both cases used a frameset so your line to send was at bottom of screen, the incoming lines were server-sent as things happened server side, and scrolled the client as new lines came in.
There were other things you could abuse before that, but less reliable.
The author should have AI set up a simple deployment to EC2 and Azure and make an endless series of semantically meaningless AI companies with web sites and submit them everywhere. The web sites should also do this themselves.
The thing about humor is that you don't have to tell people when you don't get a joke, you can just quietly continue to live your life while you wait for your next chance to be temporarily happy.
The funny thing is, the techniques shown here are the ones that were once considered something only advanced front-end developers or publishers could do. Seeing that a former symbol of skill has now become a subject of satire makes me think that what we call 'high-level' ultimately comes from what others can't do. I personally never even thought about how to implement ASCII art animation.
It's less about "can't do" and more about creativity :)
Well, yes.
I've worked on several projects where people looked at the site, which was simple and straight to the point, and people would straight up tell me they didn't take it seriously because it didn't have these performative UI things on it.
It's like when a Youtuber's audience complains about how they're constantly asking you to subscribe. The reason it happens is because the statistics say it works.
I don't think the commentary being made here is that startup websites should not be flashy. Just that, maybe they don't all need to look exactly the same as each other.
I think homogeneity is an unavoidable end game for the internet (unfortunately).
At work we’ve been discussing whether to migrate off our home grown component library to Material UI. I shudder at the thought, personally. However, a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product.
Like many of us I was born into a deeply customizable Internet, all of my websites were green or red on black. They were a glorious amalgam of fixed width fonts and <blink> tags. With occasional wingdings characters for fun and games and complex <table>/<tr>/<td> tags for really epic layouts. They were l33t, honestly ^_^
But, as time goes on and more and more people use this thing, converging on the one-true-UX feels like a net good thing assuming the fundamentals are right. To some degree the LLM-ization of the Internet is essentially the end game of squashing the personality out of the Internet which bootstrap started.
We’re on the cusp of spoken word being the core UX of computers with a fall back to reading the LLM transcript, neither of which benefits from <blink>
> a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product
Not that I disagree with you, but I'll also offer a tradeoff.
When people expect to pick up your app intuitively, it can also just mean them using the app absent-mindedly, which can mean them skipping the manual and jumping straight to trying to tie up the support lines. Whereas if your ui asks for a user's full focus up front, yes there are downsides to that but they're also more engaged.
I guess the issue is that when someone can't use a product immediately, they have an urge to abandon it altogether, not learn how to use it.
Related: institutional isomorphism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism_(sociology)
We're migrating our Material UI components to homemade components, since MUI doesn't cater to our needs anymore.
It seems to me the parent commenter is saying the opposite: looking exactly like each other _is_ the point. It's a form of social signaling, to indicate that a project "belongs" to the in group of high-flying successful AI hype projects.
Note I'm not arguing that this is a good strategy. But given that so many people follow it I imagine it's not as bad as it appears on the surface.
It really comes down to first impression. Your website design is your company’s first impression. If the design is clean, people will believe the product is clean and robust as well. Similar to how people think things that cost more and probably high quality and better overall.
As for this website, the best component is the ASCII animation in the hero and you can’t even copy that component. In fact, that nice ASCII hero is what gave me a good first impression to go thru all the components.
It's there: https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/ascii-h...
Ah it’s in the hero section, kind of scanned that section but had lost interest by that point
explain why Craigslist, temu, etc. are all popular then? :p
Sometimes utility can be so good, users don’t care about design. I was also thinking of it as a business coming to a SaaS website. B2C is filled with so many dark patterns, first impression probably plays less of a role.
Same for clickbait thumbnails, people hate them, and yet don't really click on non clickbaity ones.
In the marketing world this is called revealed preference. This stuff is A/B tested to death. Anyone trying to sell something is best served by watching people's behavior instead of listening to what they say, as the two are often different if not polar opposites.
Better for you(the seller) vs better for me (the buyer)
Two agents with two different utility functions fighting each other, it's an adversarial relationship/game.
The fight is for your limited attention span.
Clickbaity titles or least informative ones, 20min of rambling for what could've been a 2min video or article, spreading the meat of the info in the later half of the video for better retention instead of the beginning, highly misleading previews at the beggining, etc ... are good for the content producer but not so much for the content viewer that has to sift through it only to reliaze that didn't care about that particular thing.
Not limited to videos, but also things to buy the meat of the technical/practical description of the product get worse and worse each year and the other proxy signals for them too.
Seems like marketing is a lot like military conflict drown the enemy in lot of noise to drop the SNR.
what's that you want to buy a 4k video projector and set a filter for it? here it is for cheaper. Oh, you wanted the actual dots on the wall resolution to be 4k instead of max supported input signal, oops.
You're used to higher price meaning better quality? guess we'll flood that price point with shitier quality progressively until we find your limit
The perspective marketing world seems toxic. From the perspective of the "consumer", it sure does feel like we are being "ignored", "tricked", or "bamboozled" when our stated preferences are ignored in favor of "revealed preference".
It isn't that we have a "preference" for these things, it is far more likely that a user just doesn't have their guard up 100% of the time, and these psychological manipulations are designed to cut through that.
Sure, these strategies probably net clicks, but they aren't from people who "chose" your product, they are clicks from people who were manipulated into clicking.
I suppose whether you think that is okay depends on your industry and ethics.
Yeah, it is highly toxic. I'd assume that in most cases those "revealed preferences" are specifically engineered, not organic. It's taking advantage of biological reflexes and calling it a true preference.
It's behavioral marketing, vs status/aspirational marketing.
A stated preference isn't necessarily current or situational (I will choose to run instead of watching another 45 minutes of Youtube videos).
A situational preference is often inertia, and behavioral marketing will directly hinder the meta cognitive processes that usually give us the agency to override our default mode choices (John has been on YouTube for the last 20 minutes, what next suggestion is not likely to keep him there?)
I guess in the social sciences world this is called institutional erosion...
Youtube is a perfectly "unbiased" "democratic" repository, where crazy people shouting conspiracies and prize-winning documentaries have the same thumbnail and half-line of text for you to discover if they are any good.
Its like when people say they hate politicians all the while they've been voting for the same Senator for the past 30 years.
I love how this is both hilarious and extremely well made. Great job!
And I'm gonna be honest, I kind of want to use a few of these components for real (the ASCII art is fantastic).
I was going to say that too. Some of these I definitely am guilty of. I have a few dozen that aren't on the list but it's a breath of fresh air to see it so well organized even though, we all know what it is :D fantastic job to the author(s).
please share your few dozen components
Why? They are silly gimmicks. You can easily prompt this.
Claude: “In react, make a full screen component that renders pixel squares that fade in and accumulate over a page component, taken as a target prop.”
Stupid crap like that. What’s cool is for those fullscreen tutorials or app walkthroughs, this works REALLY well to highlight the box on screen.
When Agentic browsers become the norm, surely we will go back to the days of super plain HTML pages?
Oh wow, it uses normal css, how delightful! https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/blob/main/src/style...
These all look very professional for (basically) a parody library
Definitely bookmarking for future ideas and inspiration, don't care if I'm shamed for it.
IMO that means "professional" will look very different in a few years.
Just because they're showing contempt for the process doesn't mean the process isn't refined
Joking about something tends to require an interconnected understanding of it
What are the odds some companies end up using it for a real product?
100%
Honestly I can just swap these bad boys in and ship in less than a couple hours if it'd be funny enough. I don't think they're bad designs at all, and I don't think every aspect of my business needs to be unique and obsessed over.
IMO this is like judging landscaping companies for all using similar looking shovels.
...which might just show how predictable and similar all janky startup pages are.
Janky?
The most extreme virtue-signal is to go completely browser-default and have no styling whatsoever. Like lowercasing because your pinky can't be arsed to reach for the shift-key even though you've a billion dollars in series A.
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
My god, it's perfect.
Ew. I mean 500 bytes of CSS would make this so much better.
I've mostly stopped caring about using using proper capitalization, commas, grammar and spelling in my writing of comments, primarily as a signal that i'm not an llm.
If you turn on HN's "Show Dead" setting, there are tons of LLM-generated comments on stories related to AI. You can see the human(s) behind the LLM trying to fiddle with the style of comment by making them skip proper grammar, capitalization, use or avoid certain phrases, and so on. The biggest tell for LLM content, though, is just the content as a whole: it sounds fake and ungenuine, like it passed through a committee of hostage negotiators to remove the speaker's own attachment/expectations.
They can configure it to use all lowercase letters, skip em-dashes, make grammar mistakes, stop saying "it's not X, it's Y", or whatever, yet the content itself just has a fake quality to it that makes it stand out, which is why those comments still get flagged IMO.
The uncanny valley of text. It looks and sounds like a human, but lacks the "soul" / humanity that our intuition somehow perceives.
It's really strange... I see some text with obvious tropes and sometimes I read something and there's no obvious AI trope... but it's just not human?
I had this conversation the other day. I'm a native German speaker originally, which is why I hand out commas like it's candy and capitalize things unnecessarily. Sometimes I notice these things and leave them in when I write something, since at least it gives you a good indication that a human wrote it... for now.
Claude's "write me a product description like a cool human would" is just using lower-case where it shouldn't be though.
The problem is that omitting capitalization, commas, and so on signals, in addition to "not AI in default settings", but also "I'm part of the San Francisco AI in-crowd and Altman is my spirit animal".
Virtue-signalling or just the daddy?
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
Netscape knows best.
Give me Navigator or give me death
Ah yes, the jeevacation special
Craziest m'island
Array language proponents also like to do this. In their case I‘ll allow it, it matches the substance.
lowercasing everything -- just means
you're literate smart... poetic; because
you read e.e.cummings
and william carlos
williams
...
fin.
Instructions unclear, am will.i.am
I get the whole trope thing and maybe I'm just an old man but I still am kinda impressed when Claude sh*ts out this type of UI 100 times faster than I ever could. It might also be that I never could have made UI even of this quality before AI. (˶ˆᗜˆ˵)
It's still better than the sh*t developers produced three years ago.
Some people just like to feel superior by shaming others' work. You can easily tweak the visual output if you want to, but it's good enough for most use cases and better than what developers used to produce.
So, it's progress.
Agreed. I enjoy looking at and using a lot of these components.
That ascii lava lamp effect is low key really cool
Yeah probably my favorite of the bunch too. I bet there’s a fun project to do to make a customizer for that.
Lags the hell out of my browser (Safari) window though.
sorry in advance if this post causes more sites to use that effect
Some of these are actually nice and appropriate to use in certain contexts. Also this issue is hilarious: https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/issues/2
Dickover is suspiciously missing. How will I ask visitors to subscribe to my newsletter?
“TokenStream – Server-sent events (SSE) were added to the HTML5 spec in 2008 but never used until 2025.”
I remember chunked transfer encoding shipped in 1997. It's been possible since then to readily and easily stream bytes of text or chunks of html the way everyone sees LLMs do today.
I used this to write a web based telnet client in 1997, and later a text moo / chat for the web. In both cases used a frameset so your line to send was at bottom of screen, the incoming lines were server-sent as things happened server side, and scrolled the client as new lines came in.
There were other things you could abuse before that, but less reliable.
But yeah, talk about things nobody used....
COMET was so far ahead of its time. Sierra Online used it for their webchat in 1995 and it was absolutely the best webchat out there for years
Adding github link for those who want to use it (I do): https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI
wait my readme isnt performative enough yet, let me add a chart showing the star history
lol. Genuinely curious, what is your reaction to so much "actually, this is great and useful" feedback?
this gives me great motivation to take on even more story points next sprint!
That is absolutely delightful
I could see actually using this…
Savage and accurate. 100%.
Many a true word is spoken in jest.
My Claude feels personally attacked.
pretty decent, may even use some of the components eventually. star given
This needs an additional subscriptions service tier, that's even more performative and even more AI
It's very fun and way too polished, thanks!
Coooooooooool!!!!
Slick and self aware. Looks good
Very funny. Although ironic that this whole library was built with AI.
Ironic, or appropriate?
Ironically appropriate
Spot on "AI Native".
no more stars please, we are at a funny number
It needs a purple gradient mode.
NGL I'm going to steal/borrow/leach all sorts of these for my product.
When in Rome!
Starred this, my next project is going to be classified as slop anyway.
Man... That's satire on a whole another level. What a technical and deep sense of humor.
Now I can produce slop without AI.
Why would you do that, when you can make shit nobody needs 10x faster with AI
The author should have AI set up a simple deployment to EC2 and Azure and make an endless series of semantically meaningless AI companies with web sites and submit them everywhere. The web sites should also do this themselves.
Nice UI quality
Lmao!!! Awesome
I heard you like AI slop...
Neat, opened an issue there for a finicky bit of code that'd help me quite a bit. /s
I love it https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/issues/2#issuecomme...
Yawn. This is just bootstrap all over again. So what if people who don't have design skills can now create pleasant looking websites?
The thing about humor is that you don't have to tell people when you don't get a joke, you can just quietly continue to live your life while you wait for your next chance to be temporarily happy.