That site was very hard to read on my browser. Every couple of seconds the author's byeline would flicker (too fast for me to see what it changed to) and the text would jump up and down.
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."
I don't mean to pick on you personally—the problem is more that these things tend to get upvoted to the top of the thread, where they choke out on-topic conversation. This happens because the annoyances are real, not because they're unreal. At the same time this comes up so often that we have to try to avoid the repetition.
In this particular case, the way the site semi-periodically twitches is kind of interesting itself. Way more than the common annoyances that you rightly chastise people for complaining about.
1. There are no apparent ads on the site. There are three things uBlock origin blocks, but they don't seem to be things doing anything visible (I'd guess trackers).
Usually it is sites infested with ads and a ton of trackers where you encounter visual glitches this jarring.
2. The interval between glitches varies, and sometimes it is a double glitch instead of a single glitch.
3. If I open the site in both Firefox and Chrome, their glitches are in sync. Same if I open it in more than one Firefox or Chrome window.
This suggests whatever it is doing is based on clock time, not on time since page load which is what I would have expected.
I agree in general. In this particular case, though, it was jarring. Having the screen jump every few seconds without the user interacting at all is a bit extreme.
does anyone know how AMP seems to avoid this (despite the hate here). On AMP sites I rarely get the post paint jumping around insanity.
My own metric - non AMP site + clickbait headline = jank and constant jumps as dynamic stuff happens (be it ads changing or show off or attention grabbers or analytics maybe).
Yes, keep on eye on HN posts, especially mobile browsers often have a very jumpy experience - common issues are various permissions pop-ups for things like cookies, and weird reflow issues as you scroll etc. Would it be helpful if I provided specific examples of crap laden or janky websites?
This is such a common issue HN site guidelines actually have a rule for this:
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. ..."
I've become more and more convinced the AMP haters just have total blinders on to the crap that websites spew - or are browsing with ad blockers or javascript blockers or something.
