Unfortunately, stopped reading at one moment, because though the idea might be interesting, the packaging was unbearable. The obnoxious real time visitors counter seriously screws with my screen reader. I don't care how many people are reading this every 3 seconds updated not only with numbers, but with randomly chosen emois in my speech stream.
If you have a website, please, don't subject your visitors to something like that.
I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience. I've hidden the counter for screen readers. Please try again when you're ready.
I liked the counters on the old 90s/2000s web but it was best at the bottom of the page cause it was easy to ignore. I can't ever see me wanting a moving box telling me other people are reading the same article as me but if I did it would blend in better.
Email is more than a technology its a community. There have been plenty of technical attempts at replacing it but they have failed to un-seat email because they focus only on the technology aspect which as you have found is largely a solved problem although... getting the details right might be hard. You need buy in from the community which is not just users but also businesses and organizations that use email which is everyone from CEOs to church leaders. It's not enough to fix email you have to get buy in from the community to make a meaningful change and I don't see anything here that would do that. This isn't really a criticism, just an insight I offer. I work in this field and we're trying to get out of it cause managing email sucks. I would love something new to take its place but the community has heard so many promises that never came to fruition, when that happens you either need a better promise(harder than it seems) or you need credibility which may be very difficult in the current climate. Not an unsolvable problem, those don't exist but sometimes the lever you need to solve the problem is further than you can reach alone and this is one of those times.
Anecdotally, I don't use a screen reader and also couldn't care less on the visitors on the site. I doubt anyone but you is interested in this, and probably this number is slightly lower just because of that popup
The combination of "I have an idea for changing one of the fundamental experiences of modern life" and "my website is obnoxious and hostile" didn't really work for me.
The entire website is accessible; I dedicated ample time to it. This was a minor oversight, but I wouldn't call it hostility.
Mistakes happen.
Thanks for the change.