> [...]

> I've started asking clients a simple question when they bring it up. Not to be difficult, just to understand.

> [...]

> It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind.

> [...]

> No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content, clear and immediate.

It’s been long enough that this might even have plausibly come from a human with LLM writing overrepresented in their brain rather than an LLM. But either way there’s this record-scratch feeling that I experience on each one of these, and (fittingly) it just completely knocks me out of the groove, requiring deliberate effort to resume reading.

And, I mean, none of these is even bad in isolation, but it sure feels like we’re due either a backlash where these patterns become underused even when appropriate, or them becoming so common they lose their power (is syntax subject to semantic bleaching?). Or perhaps both. Socioliguists are going to have a blast.

The consultants apparently had the bot load and fed it an immediate prompt which greeted the user. This was happening on every page load. Bad consultants, bad bot.

This sums up everything driving the tech sector right now. From execs at big tech to nobodies on X.

EDIT; if I think about the nature of it. The visibility fight is the decreasing attention with increasing channels and noise. Visibility tactics go to the extreme. And the fear of looking behind comes from the previous tech cycles and the thoughts around what if you had missed those? And maybe those with the most fear are the ones that did.

Obviously it just a script embedded in the page, so it has not actual place in the design. So the effect, especially on mobile, is this dance of starting to read a page, have it obscured by annoying popups, and trying (and failing) to close the popup with the hidden 12x12 pixels x button.

Just like the entire ads market, it’s all forgery to drive up clicks so owners can say to the clients that there is interaction.

Don’t get me started on the recent YouTube ads on iPad that place a banner that sits on top of the video, hiding subtitles, and closing it is behind a menu that requires you to be a brain surgeon specialist in order to interact with, instead of clicking the ad itself. I currently have 15 tabs in safari for ads that I inadvertently clicked.

Your clients seem to have got what they wanted, or at least someone who has learned to write like one.

Back in the day, websites could just put up an animated "under construction" gif.

I was skeptical but it gets a 68 NPS from users, even if we do get the occasional "why are you investing in AI I hate it" coming through the feedback channel.

As ever, the issue is "what problem are you solving". If it's that you want more people to put their hand up and talk to you/order something, chatbots seem like a bad solution. If it's that you have a ton of complex docs that people have to read in order to implement and use your product, it's not the solution but it's probably part of a solution.

Fedex has now a voice bot when you call and it is kind of good and fast. I mean faster than navigating their website. It picks up directly after some boilerplate. It can understand me.

With website chatbots we could have similar leaps if they are done well and have access to CRM/ERP etc. to actually help you.