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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
you're literate smart... poetic; because
you read e.e.cummings
and william carlos
williams
...
fin.
When in Rome!