Front page of the Orange Site
For the third time, one of my posts has ended up on the front page of Hacker news.
The article in question was a rant on the prevalence of Tailwind Templates in slop apps and vaporware. You can read the article at Tailwind and slop apps.
Anyway let's look at the results of hitting Hacker New's front page.
Comments
Well my brief reading of the comments tells me that most people did not read the article. Instead it seemed that they assumed I was railing on Tailwind as a framework and suggesting that any site using Tailwind looked rubbish. This obviously was not what the article in question was about.
While a lot of the comments did seem to understand that I was pointing out that the use of Tailwind templates signalled vaporware, and thus were not a good look for your product. Many thought that I was suggesting that they should write all their CSS from scratch and be ultra creative with the UI, rather than writing the "generate a stylish landing page" prompt. These commenters, in my opinion, did not read, or at least failed to understand the article.
Sadly I felt that my sentiment in the article was proven by these commenters. They couldn't be bothered reading the article, and they couldn't be bothered spending time on their "product". Many justified this by saying they preffered "predictable" and "boring" UIs. I'm not sure how that is relevant. But it made me sad to think that the coporate "white goods" mindset had infected the minds of programmers. People who can literally create any digital experience, world, interface, they like. Are not bothering. They even are self justified in their rejection of the ability to create. And that is sad. In a world of endless possibilities, the creators ask a machine to churn out boilerplate products.
Anyway, I got slightly philosophical there. In essense I reject the sentiment that developers, or whatever they want to be called, are justified in reaching for cookie-cutter off the shelf material to sell their product. If you do this, your product will just be a drop in the ocean of slop. It's not Tailwind's fault, it's the fault of lazy developers.
Traffic Spike?
Yes, but nothing exceptional. It peaked at just over 4k hits on the first day and dropped off to just below 500 on the second. My €3 UpCloud server running AlmaLinux was under no stress whatsoever.
The site is now back down to a trickle of hits per day.