I'm guessing that it is just showing other people browsing the same site - which might be fun if it happens once in a while.

But having this on the HN frontpage, there are tons of visitors right now and this is indeed annoying.

It’s like the page design thinks the author’s content is less important than information about random visitors browsing the page. If your web design doesn’t consider the article to be worth reading, I’m not going to read it.

I feel the same about a lot of news sites that overlay the content with pop ups and ads and whatever. If the article isn’t even important to you, what am I doing here? I want my money back.

With ads and popups that want my email address, I can at least understand why someone would do it. There is a benefit to the site owner.

With this nonsense "someone in Timbuktu just connected" nobody benefits. It's just 100% annoying and dumb.

Firefox focus made it not so bad. One tab only.

I had to check out the site to see why everyone was complaining. I was thinking it can't be that bad.

It is that bad. I did not read the page.

Usually I don’t mind some whimsical features on a personal site, but this one is obnoxious and completely kills my desire to actually read the post (the subject of which had me intrigued).

Yes. I switched to reader mode but wish that agressive popup wouldn’t be there as it served no purpose

Holding out for "Suddenly I Understand UX" =)

I suspect this blog does not usually get much traffic.

Suddenly, you understand websites.

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Firefox reader view helps with that.