What I genuinely hate about this trend is that these sites look (or rather, have looked) very pleasant and one may argue even professional.
The colors are soothing, the fonts are nice, the layout logical, it has all the necessary parts, but after you learn that this means "zero effort was put into this", it just starts looking off-putting and any project having a site like this will immediately hit one with a visceral 'ick'.
It sucks that an entire tiny, but not insignificant "genre" of website design is now irradiated, because the word machine has very particular taste.
I'm kind of feeling the same way towards em dashes. There were such a useful grammatical tool — specially for people that have thoughts inside troughs (sort of, I suck a grammar).
But know I'm reading something and there's this particular ugh when I come across an em dash :-(
I do think that all of this no-effort copy/paste slop might put a premium on actual effort and caring. Now websites that don't look like braindead slop seem to have a special shine!
I used to have a macOS text replacement shortcut so that whenever I typed -- it was replaced with an actual em-dash, all so I could have fancy typography in my emails and Slack messages. But these days, I use a double hyphen because it stands out as more human. (Or to indicate my affection for typewriters.)
But when I leave comments online—on Lobsters, for instance—it feels more correct to type — to get the real deal.
Oh god same! I used to use the single - but changed it to -- at some point, but that gets auto-exported as an actual em-dash by org mode in particular. I've never taken to typing out the em-dash itself, but it's a little unfortunate that whatever cadence I usually type in has gotten at least partially binned as "AI slop"
these sites look (or rather, have looked) very pleasant and one may argue even professional
I disagree. I'd say that might be true at first glance, but the longer you look the more odd things you start to see.
Why is this important text 10px and barely readable? Why does everything have animations? What's up with the contrast? Why is there a random status dot here? Why did nobody consider using the accessibility media queries? Why does the DOM only consist of divs? etc.
I think the lack of common sense in these AI websites is what makes them so off-putting. The actual pleasant and professional websites do not have these problems from my experience.
That's the sad bit imo, I think in the past if someone put in enough effort to make a site with a similar degree of color-cohesion and professionalism, then they also probably spend enough time to not include the cruft/clutter you're referring to. The outer veneer is now much less likely to indicate anything about the quality or polish of the site itself
Why is this important text 10px and barely readable?
I don't have a good excuse for this.
Why does everything have animations?
People associate fancy sites with more "modern" / user-friendly products. The website of, say, OpenBSD is excellent and will work 50 years from now, but it would make an ignorant person think it's some fossil from the start of the internet.
What's up with the contrast?
This one I genuinely don't think is that bad. Almost all the text has good contrast, the one that sucks is probably meant to imitate footer text.
Why is there a random status dot here?
In a genuine product, I think having a quick "all good on our end / it's on fire" gauge featured prominently could potentially work. Obviously this being a parody, it makes no sense.
Why did nobody consider using the accessibility media queries? Why does the DOM only consist of divs?
I definitely don't condone it, but let's be real, most users couldn't care less what the HTML looks like. They care that it's fancy and maybe that it's responsive.
I genuinely think the smoking gun here is simply that every single claudesite looks the same with such minor differences, that it cannot hide the fact.
Let's be generous and assume that they [LLM-generated websites] are aesthetically better than whatever came before [in the context of lay people making websites]. The problem is that now everyone is making them and the LLM tells are becoming obvious. So we're in a world where (a) we (think we) can tell apart a beautiful LLM [website] and a beautiful human [website] and (b) making the beautiful LLM [website] is a prompt away. If everyone could summon Van Gogh to paint them some variation of Starry Night --- and they then hung them up in their living rooms --- something would be lost by the time you see the fiftieth Starryish Night.
But that just means we have to start making websites that are "out of distribution." I won't pretend like this hasn't happened before (I've heard allusions to people getting a similar "ick" from bootstrap), but if LLM companies get any motivation to RL on the remaining human bastion of websites, then we might start a losing cat-and-mouse game. The silver lining is that we might now gain a greater appreciation for even the crappiest of genuinely human design.
The “ — Slop Edition” part of the title has been dropped in the submission, but seems rather important. (I have accordingly suggested an edit to reinstate it, and tag vibecoding.)
I am so. tired. of the hate that curl | sh gets, and how it always gets directed towards calling people stupid instead of building something better. the reason they’re popular is that we’ve yet to build and adopt a safer and equally convenient alternative that works.
That heading is awful. Seeing the “instrument serif” mention, I looked at what it looks like in Chromium since I don’t allow pages to choose their own fonts in Firefox (it makes the web so much better) and keep Chromium as a standby for such occasions.
The use of letter-spacing throughout the page upsets me to begin with (body { letter-spacing: … } is never acceptable) but then the heading is set in a font that is already condensed, and uses heavy negative spacing to tighten it so that the letters are smushed into one another? And despite the font only coming in weight 400, it’s set in weight 600 which will be synthesised and look atrocious?
Please tell me this is exaggerated. Please. For my sanity.
nemin | 3 hours ago
What I genuinely hate about this trend is that these sites look (or rather, have looked) very pleasant and one may argue even professional.
The colors are soothing, the fonts are nice, the layout logical, it has all the necessary parts, but after you learn that this means "zero effort was put into this", it just starts looking off-putting and any project having a site like this will immediately hit one with a visceral 'ick'.
It sucks that an entire tiny, but not insignificant "genre" of website design is now irradiated, because the word machine has very particular taste.
benj | 3 hours ago
I'm kind of feeling the same way towards em dashes. There were such a useful grammatical tool — specially for people that have thoughts inside troughs (sort of, I suck a grammar).
But know I'm reading something and there's this particular ugh when I come across an em dash :-(
I do think that all of this no-effort copy/paste slop might put a premium on actual effort and caring. Now websites that don't look like braindead slop seem to have a special shine!
bitshift | an hour ago
I used to have a macOS text replacement shortcut so that whenever I typed
--it was replaced with an actual em-dash, all so I could have fancy typography in my emails and Slack messages. But these days, I use a double hyphen because it stands out as more human. (Or to indicate my affection for typewriters.)But when I leave comments online—on Lobsters, for instance—it feels more correct to type
—to get the real deal.I dunno! Language is weird.
pgn | an hour ago
Oh god same! I used to use the single - but changed it to -- at some point, but that gets auto-exported as an actual em-dash by org mode in particular. I've never taken to typing out the em-dash itself, but it's a little unfortunate that whatever cadence I usually type in has gotten at least partially binned as "AI slop"
bramh | 2 hours ago
I disagree. I'd say that might be true at first glance, but the longer you look the more odd things you start to see.
Why is this important text 10px and barely readable? Why does everything have animations? What's up with the contrast? Why is there a random status dot here? Why did nobody consider using the accessibility media queries? Why does the DOM only consist of divs? etc.
I think the lack of common sense in these AI websites is what makes them so off-putting. The actual pleasant and professional websites do not have these problems from my experience.
pgn | an hour ago
That's the sad bit imo, I think in the past if someone put in enough effort to make a site with a similar degree of color-cohesion and professionalism, then they also probably spend enough time to not include the cruft/clutter you're referring to. The outer veneer is now much less likely to indicate anything about the quality or polish of the site itself
nemin | 58 minutes ago
To play the devil's advocate:
I don't have a good excuse for this.
People associate fancy sites with more "modern" / user-friendly products. The website of, say, OpenBSD is excellent and will work 50 years from now, but it would make an ignorant person think it's some fossil from the start of the internet.
This one I genuinely don't think is that bad. Almost all the text has good contrast, the one that sucks is probably meant to imitate footer text.
In a genuine product, I think having a quick "all good on our end / it's on fire" gauge featured prominently could potentially work. Obviously this being a parody, it makes no sense.
I definitely don't condone it, but let's be real, most users couldn't care less what the HTML looks like. They care that it's fancy and maybe that it's responsive.
I genuinely think the smoking gun here is simply that every single claudesite looks the same with such minor differences, that it cannot hide the fact.
cole-k | an hour ago
I've remarked upon this before (https://lobste.rs/s/zljfgp/on_ai#c_y2atvt)
But that just means we have to start making websites that are "out of distribution." I won't pretend like this hasn't happened before (I've heard allusions to people getting a similar "ick" from bootstrap), but if LLM companies get any motivation to RL on the remaining human bastion of websites, then we might start a losing cat-and-mouse game. The silver lining is that we might now gain a greater appreciation for even the crappiest of genuinely human design.
leela | an hour ago
That's where I'm at now. Give me something ugly but in a human way over polished slop any day.
chrismorgan | 2 hours ago
The “ — Slop Edition” part of the title has been dropped in the submission, but seems rather important. (I have accordingly suggested an edit to reinstate it, and tag vibecoding.)
panekj | 2 hours ago
I'm curious where this "live status" element comes from and do people actually understand it as something meaningful.
hoistbypetard | 3 hours ago
I'm mildly ashamed to admit that "logo that looks like an asshole" made me snicker. I'm much less ashamed to admit that it made me think of one of my favorite books.
pgn | an hour ago
Stumbled upon this while scrolling through your link:
https://tehccringe.com/news/kurt-vonneguts-descendants-sue-anthropic-claudes-logo-is-our-grandpas-butthole
lilac | an hour ago
I am so. tired. of the hate that curl | sh gets, and how it always gets directed towards calling people stupid instead of building something better. the reason they’re popular is that we’ve yet to build and adopt a safer and equally convenient alternative that works.
chrismorgan | 2 hours ago
That heading is awful. Seeing the “instrument serif” mention, I looked at what it looks like in Chromium since I don’t allow pages to choose their own fonts in Firefox (it makes the web so much better) and keep Chromium as a standby for such occasions.
The use of letter-spacing throughout the page upsets me to begin with (
body { letter-spacing: … }is never acceptable) but then the heading is set in a font that is already condensed, and uses heavy negative spacing to tighten it so that the letters are smushed into one another? And despite the font only coming in weight 400, it’s set in weight 600 which will be synthesised and look atrocious?Please tell me this is exaggerated. Please. For my sanity.
fuzzy | 2 hours ago
Is the
.claude/in a.gitignorefile at https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core/blob/master/.gitignore#L41 an indication that Claude has been used?(The developer is "currently building Tangled".)
hoistbypetard | 2 hours ago
It's a weak indicator, IMO. About as strong as the
.DS_Storeis of them being a mac user.erock | 2 hours ago
https://tangled.org/oppi.li/every-fucking-website/commit/e652c907259b1a206ce9e3f0af89ad4acebfe173
It could also just be trying to mimic a typical slop css file
icy | 2 hours ago
That's not the repository of the submission in question.