Hacker News

by Ryan Harman

Show HN: Performative-UI – a react component library of design tropes (vorpus.github.io)

360 points by lizhang 3 hours ago

hope you enjoy

jdw64 2 minutes ago

The funny thing is, the techniques shown here are the ones that were once considered something only advanced front-end developers or publishers could do. Seeing that a former symbol of skill has now become a subject of satire makes me think that what we call 'high-level' ultimately comes from what others can't do. I personally never even thought about how to implement ASCII art animation.

prplfsh 6 minutes ago

I love how this is both hilarious and extremely well made. Great job!

And I'm gonna be honest, I kind of want to use a few of these components for real (the ASCII art is fantastic).

reactordev 5 minutes ago

[delayed]

avaer 2 hours ago

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.

wavemode an hour ago

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.

dayjah an hour ago

I think homogeneity is an unavoidable end game for the internet (unfortunately).

At work we’ve been discussing whether to migrate off our home grown component library to Material UI. I shudder at the thought, personally. However, a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product.

Like many of us I was born into a deeply customizable Internet, all of my websites were green or red on black. They were a glorious amalgam of fixed width fonts and <blink> tags. With occasional wingdings characters for fun and games and complex <table>/<tr>/<td> tags for really epic layouts. They were l33t, honestly ^_^

But, as time goes on and more and more people use this thing, converging on the one-true-UX feels like a net good thing assuming the fundamentals are right. To some degree the LLM-ization of the Internet is essentially the end game of squashing the personality out of the Internet which bootstrap started.

We’re on the cusp of spoken word being the core UX of computers with a fall back to reading the LLM transcript, neither of which benefits from <blink>

hntiz 3 minutes ago

maxweylandt 31 minutes ago

kid_cubi 22 minutes ago

jsdalton an hour ago

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.

theturtletalks an hour ago

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.

zevyoura an hour ago

It's there: https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/ascii-h...

theturtletalks an hour ago

aaronharding 44 minutes ago

explain why Craigslist, temu, etc. are all popular then? :p

theturtletalks 41 minutes ago

epolanski 2 hours ago

Same for clickbait thumbnails, people hate them, and yet don't really click on non clickbaity ones.

wnevets 2 minutes ago

Its like when people say they hate politicians all the while they've been voting for the same Senator for the past 30 years.

thewebguyd 2 hours ago

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.

4chandaily an hour ago

padolsey 2 hours ago

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.

thomascgalvin 32 minutes ago

https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

halapro a minute ago

Ew. I mean 500 bytes of CSS would make this so much better.

andy_ppp 13 minutes ago

My god, it's perfect.

davedx 36 minutes ago

Virtue-signalling or just the daddy?

https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

psadauskas 2 hours ago

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.

otter-in-a-suit 5 minutes ago

I had this conversation the other day. I'm a native German speaker originally, which is why I hand out commas like it's candy and capitalize things unnecessarily. Sometimes I notice these things and leave them in when I write something, since at least it gives you a good indication that a human wrote it... for now.

nozzlegear an hour ago

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.

oneneptune 13 minutes ago

frantathefranta 2 hours ago

Claude's "write me a product description like a cool human would" is just using lower-case where it shouldn't be though.

quotemstr 22 minutes ago

The problem is that omitting capitalization, commas, and so on signals, in addition to "not AI in default settings", but also "I'm part of the San Francisco AI in-crowd and Altman is my spirit animal".

Waterluvian 2 hours ago

Netscape knows best.

ghurtado an hour ago

Give me Navigator or give me death

sph 2 hours ago

Ah yes, the jeevacation special

arm32 2 hours ago

Craziest m'island

MrBuddyCasino 2 hours ago

Array language proponents also like to do this. In their case I‘ll allow it, it matches the substance.

cmrdporcupine 2 hours ago

lowercasing everything -- just means

you're literate smart... poetic; because

you read e.e.cummings

and william carlos

williams

...

fin.

arm32 2 hours ago

Instructions unclear, am will.i.am

tfitz237 3 hours ago

These all look very professional for (basically) a parody library

sv123 an hour ago

Definitely bookmarking for future ideas and inspiration, don't care if I'm shamed for it.

csomar 2 hours ago

What are the odds some companies end up using it for a real product?

eranation 2 hours ago

100%

scottyah 19 minutes ago

Honestly I can just swap these bad boys in and ship in less than a couple hours if it'd be funny enough. I don't think they're bad designs at all, and I don't think every aspect of my business needs to be unique and obsessed over.

IMO this is like judging landscaping companies for all using similar looking shovels.

Boxxed 2 hours ago

...which might just show how predictable and similar all janky startup pages are.

NuclearPM 2 hours ago

Janky?

aogaili an hour ago

It's still better than the sh*t developers produced three years ago.

Some people just like to feel superior by shaming others' work. You can easily tweak the visual output if you want to, but it's good enough for most use cases and better than what developers used to produce.

So, it's progress.

chrisra an hour ago

Agreed. I enjoy looking at and using a lot of these components.

wuliwong an hour ago

I get the whole trope thing and maybe I'm just an old man but I still am kinda impressed when Claude sh*ts out this type of UI 100 times faster than I ever could. It might also be that I never could have made UI even of this quality before AI. (˶ˆᗜˆ˵)

kfarr an hour ago

Some of these are actually nice and appropriate to use in certain contexts. Also this issue is hilarious: https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/issues/2

butz 8 minutes ago

Dickover is suspiciously missing. How will I ask visitors to subscribe to my newsletter?

Terretta an hour ago

“TokenStream – Server-sent events (SSE) were added to the HTML5 spec in 2008 but never used until 2025.”

I remember chunked transfer encoding shipped in 1997. It's been possible since then to readily and easily stream bytes of text or chunks of html the way everyone sees LLMs do today.

I used this to write a web based telnet client in 1997, and later a text moo / chat for the web. In both cases used a frameset so your line to send was at bottom of screen, the incoming lines were server-sent as things happened server side, and scrolled the client as new lines came in.

There were other things you could abuse before that, but less reliable.

But yeah, talk about things nobody used....

jrflo 3 hours ago

That ascii lava lamp effect is low key really cool

tyleo 2 hours ago

Yeah probably my favorite of the bunch too. I bet there’s a fun project to do to make a customizer for that.

carlos-menezes 3 hours ago

Lags the hell out of my browser (Safari) window though.

lizhang 2 hours ago

sorry in advance if this post causes more sites to use that effect

grassfedgeek an hour ago

Adding github link for those who want to use it (I do): https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI

lizhang an hour ago

wait my readme isnt performative enough yet, let me add a chart showing the star history

consumer451 24 minutes ago

lol. Genuinely curious, what is your reaction to so much "actually, this is great and useful" feedback?

lizhang 6 minutes ago

jdw64 7 minutes ago

Coooooooooool!!!!

jtbayly 2 hours ago

I could see actually using this…

kachoio 44 minutes ago

pretty decent, may even use some of the components eventually. star given

kardianos 2 hours ago

Savage and accurate. 100%.

Brajeshwar 2 hours ago

Many a true word is spoken in jest.

eranation 2 hours ago

My Claude feels personally attacked.

iishanto 4 minutes ago

Starred this, my next project is going to be classified as slop anyway.

yosef123 2 hours ago

This needs an additional subscriptions service tier, that's even more performative and even more AI

erdaltoprak 3 hours ago

It's very fun and way too polished, thanks!

staminade 2 hours ago

Very funny. Although ironic that this whole library was built with AI.

sbarre 2 hours ago

Ironic, or appropriate?

ghurtado an hour ago

Ironically appropriate

lizhang an hour ago

no more stars please, we are at a funny number

heldrida 2 hours ago

Spot on "AI Native".

smhanov 2 hours ago

It needs a purple gradient mode.

cmrdporcupine 2 hours ago

NGL I'm going to steal/borrow/leach all sorts of these for my product.

When in Rome!

wg0 2 hours ago

Man... That's satire on a whole another level. What a technical and deep sense of humor.

MisterKent 3 hours ago

Now I can produce slop without AI.

sph 2 hours ago

Why would you do that, when you can make shit nobody needs 10x faster with AI

hyperhello an hour ago

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.

hubraumhugo 41 minutes ago

I recently scored all Show HN submissions against AI design patterns: https://ai-design-checker.fly.dev/show

About half of the submissions show 2 or more AI design patterns.

My conclusion from that experiment:

> Is this bad? Not really, just uninspired. After all, validating a business idea was never about fancy design, and before the AI era, everything looked like Bootstrap.

There is a difference between trying to craft your own design and just shipping with whatever defaults the LLMs output. And the same has been the case pre-LLM when using CSS/HTML templates.

I guess people will get back to crafting beautiful designs to stand out from the slop. On the other hand, I’m not sure how much design will still matter once AI agents are the primary users of the web.

[0] https://www.adriankrebs.ch/blog/design-slop/

igurss 3 hours ago

Nice UI quality

ajpaulson 2 hours ago

Lmao!!! Awesome

imafish 3 hours ago

I heard you like AI slop...

utopiah 2 hours ago

Neat, opened an issue there for a finicky bit of code that'd help me quite a bit. /s

rirze an hour ago

I love it https://github.com/vorpus/performativeUI/issues/2#issuecomme...

marknutter 2 hours ago

Yawn. This is just bootstrap all over again. So what if people who don't have design skills can now create pleasant looking websites?

ghurtado an hour ago

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.