People would probably vote more if they had to vote at least 5 times to see the ranks, i.e. say "3 more votes to see ranks" in top center, and then pop up the ranks automatically.
Here I am clicking color after color like a dunce, wondering when I get to see the ranking. After 20-30 or so clicks I finally notice the ultra-tiny-low-contrast "Ranks" text.
I didn’t even know I was voting on anything during my first three clicks. “Choose a color” doesn’t equate to “vote on a color” in my mind. I thought I was “choosing a color” to see its rank (and I didn’t get why it was showing me two on the page). I must be the lowest common denominator in this case.
And then click it (even though it's the one area of the page that doesn't have a cursor:pointer (took me some time too, even after coming back here to check comments)).
Of course, but you could ignore all the obvious ones.
Keeping track of this would also show interesting trends over time. Do web designers favour 'hard' colours or pastels? Do they favour blue or less melatonin-generating colours. Stuff like that.
That won't give you a ranking in practice - you'd get 90% of colours receiving 0 votes so there's no way to distinguish them. I think the output of this game would be more interesting to analyse.
I suspect people are choosing more because of hue and undertones than strictly on RGB colors. It would be more interesting to aggregate the results up into more general conclusions - do people like pastels or earth tones better? How bright of a color is too bright before people stop voting for it? How dark?
I've been into 70's colorscapes recently, so when given the chance I vote for earthy tones, then beyond that I may pick colors I know i like, or based on emotional gut reaction, it depends how hard the gut reaction hits me. I'd be curious to have these stats as well. I'd also be curious to know, how often do I pick the colors I think are my favorite. Purple is my favorite color, but it doesn't appear often in earthy tones and I think I would prefer an earthy or washed out orange or green to a washed out purple.
At certain karma thresholds, different things unlock. There's a list somewhere but I'm not sure if it's up-to-date.[0] It looks like top bar color can be changed once you hit 250 karma.
The observations of the other comments would be strange indeed, if it were. Looking back through old discussions, it turns out I'd misremembered a mix of speculating comments as fact. Most conclusively, the order is now completely different to when the page was discussed last month:
Just a heads up, if you're using any dark mode extension you'll want to disable it for this site. (op, probably worth getting your site added to the global dark mode list)
The contrast with the text that shows the hex code seems to interfere with my judgement. Perhaps leaving out the text, or showing it in smaller text on the bottom could help a tiny bit. But I suspect monitor quality/calibration has a larger effect.
It's a nice toy, but I doubt its practical value as in design you deal with color palettes, not standalone colors. I might be wrong, but my gut feeling is that "the most popular" color wouldn't necessarily end up as a part of the most popular palette, or even in top 5.
> But which one of these motherfuckers is the best color?
> Together, we've voted on 0.27834177017211914% of all colors.
> (Don't worry, we'll get there.)
Good news is, you are completely right and the author agrees. It is a joke. Which brings us to the bad news — but it's a monday which is hard enough so I'll let it slide.
Might work as a joke but several of those colors will be indistinguishable to human eye, yet have completely different crowd-sourced names.
Or - could you ever tell the difference between "Amateur Rockstar Bright Pink" (#ff1aab) and "Pink Soul Of Heart" (#ff1bab) even if your life depended on it?
The fact that 24-bit RGB can represent 16 million colors does not mean our vision is capable of telling such number of colors apart from each other. Creating a coherent and concise naming system for all them could be an interesting (and perhaps quite challenging) technical task, but I don't believe crowd-sourcing those will yield any usable results. Or - how many colors with "poop" in their name do you think is acceptable? https://colornames.org/search/results/?type=partial&query=po...
The problem with anything crowd-sourced is always that without moderation the results are garbage, and moderation is generally expensive or at least requires passionate volunteers. Crowd-sourcing 16 million unique color names is bound to be problematic and very difficult to moderate.
I actually gave this a second thought as a technical problem. The CSS defines 140 color names. It would probably not be infeasible to crowd-source / invent 4,096 base color names spread out exactly evenly across the 3-dimensional RGB space (e.g. "maroon", "deep sky blue", "slate gray" and so on.) If we could then further name 64 "tints" (like "reddish", "dark bluish", "purple hazed"), one could express about 250,000 colors with base color + tint pairs (like "reddish deep sky blue" or "purple hazed maroon"). This should be already sufficient for expressing almost all colors normally needed for UI designs etc.
If even more fidelity was somehow desired, one could then add one more of the 64 tints from the same vocabulary with some qualifier, like 'slightly'. So e.g. "slighly purple hazed dark bluish slate gray". This system could express the full RGB space, and there would be always possibility to find a closeby very similar color with shorter name - e.g. "slight dark bluish reddish deep sky blue" => "reddish deep sky blue" => "deep sky blue".
Look at the bigger picture: given the data is open, if you wanted a solid depiction of what colour best represents "poop" you could average those results.
Do they strictly increase vote on only the hues shown? Having a weighted multiplier of the vote on nearby hues that decreases the further away you go would reach a conclusion quicker.
Voting on all 16 million is a cool concept, but given that this is probably going to be popular for only a day or so, probably not achievable. From your own ranks, only 0.27% of colours have been voted on at all, and most likely the majority of those voted on have a single vote.
Personally I think that's okay. I also think it might make sense for any summary to lump colors together using clustering and averaging the group using a colorspace like Oklab.
There's lots of room for different types of analyses here!
That's a super cool idea! You could have it adapt so that depending on the number of votes the clusters get smaller so it returns the most specific data it can.
I mean random as in the two colours are selected at random.
I think it's not really relevant to select colours in a void. Colours are good for a purpose. This is especially relevant on websites. I love yellow but I would hate it when it's used for text on a white background. Stuff like that.
I certainly agree that context is important when picking a color. I don't think the conclusion is that whatever color is selected the most should be used for everything because it's the most popular. But when presented with two colors the way the site does, there is generally one I prefer over the other. Whether this preference information is actually useful is a whole other question.
Ultimately, wouldn't that just see which is the most popular background color? Pixel-for-pixel the background takes up the largest percentage of screen space on most websites.
Though I would also be interested to see what the most popular background colors are. My money's on white and off-white.
You could, instead of counting pixel-by-pixel, count once per specified color. Eg count #000000 once per css rule it's specified in, once per image it's used in, etc.
I'm more interested in the algorithm behind the pairing. I wonder if it's randomly pairing colours or using something similar to adaptive comparative judgement.
I was going to comment that it's a joke project, so there is no need for usefulness, but then I realized your comment might be a joke comment and I'm lost in confusion now
This is a perfect example of why we need ranked choice voting. I think #BD60E2 is best, but due to its unpopularity I'm forced to vote #BD60E1 if I want my vote to matter.
You'd need some algorithm that works on continuous variables, that is, #44E205 should rank closely to #44E106. Somehow you need to learn a function over rgb sampling only some of the points. Maybe you average over votes for colors that are close to a color in rgb space.
16 million collars aren't that many compared to large-scale internet systems. If you got 160 million+ votes you'd start getting meaningful results without any averaging.
Idk if you're serious or not, but this site actually does ranked voting: you don't get to choose your favorite color out of 17M, but you rank pairs. The problem here is that you can vote a variable number of times. I guess it's possible to come up with different algorithms to determine the winner.
The hex codes cannot be selected/copied out which was disappointing, but perhaps worse is that the hex codes slowly fade away completely!
I only noticed the first time because there was a gorgeous gold/purple combination that I wanted to save, which makes me think there might be another layer of combination that can be saved which is worst/best combinations of colour.
I felt my vote was very influenced by how many times I had already seen that hue. I probably would have voted more often for certain shades of green if I hadn't seen a slight variation of them three times already, for instance.
I'm voting nearly the exact opposite. Hadn't thought of it this "burning" way (on mobile it's smaller, maybe that's why?) but bright colors are fun colors for me.
Mobile vs desktop, OLED votes vs. LCD votes, indoors vs sunlight etc. would also be interesting to compare.
133 comments
[ 121 ms ] story [ 2924 ms ] threadI don't think anyone would be mad.
In my defense I'm outside with a ton of glare...
2. Black
3. Colours (mostly blue)
Still disappointed?
2. Light grey
3. Some other light grey
...
235. dark grey
236. slightly bluish dark grey
237. slightly yellowish dark grey
...
Keeping track of this would also show interesting trends over time. Do web designers favour 'hard' colours or pastels? Do they favour blue or less melatonin-generating colours. Stuff like that.
Obviously, the best color is #BADA55
[0] - https://www.colourlovers.com/colors/most-loved/all-time/meta
Would be nice to see percentages/total users. It might be only used by 5 accounts of the same person.
My top bar color is #ccff99.
(Joking aside it is behind a karma limit for some reason)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853964
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
The observations of the other comments would be strange indeed, if it were. Looking back through old discussions, it turns out I'd misremembered a mix of speculating comments as fact. Most conclusively, the order is now completely different to when the page was discussed last month:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220615213203/https://news.ycom...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31759722)
> But which one of these motherfuckers is the best color?
> Together, we've voted on 0.27834177017211914% of all colors.
> (Don't worry, we'll get there.)
Good news is, you are completely right and the author agrees. It is a joke. Which brings us to the bad news — but it's a monday which is hard enough so I'll let it slide.
Or - could you ever tell the difference between "Amateur Rockstar Bright Pink" (#ff1aab) and "Pink Soul Of Heart" (#ff1bab) even if your life depended on it?
The fact that 24-bit RGB can represent 16 million colors does not mean our vision is capable of telling such number of colors apart from each other. Creating a coherent and concise naming system for all them could be an interesting (and perhaps quite challenging) technical task, but I don't believe crowd-sourcing those will yield any usable results. Or - how many colors with "poop" in their name do you think is acceptable? https://colornames.org/search/results/?type=partial&query=po...
And how about "asdf" (the first four letters on the home row of a QWERTY keyboard - an age-old internet troll version of "foobar")? https://colornames.org/search/results/?type=partial&query=as...
The problem with anything crowd-sourced is always that without moderation the results are garbage, and moderation is generally expensive or at least requires passionate volunteers. Crowd-sourcing 16 million unique color names is bound to be problematic and very difficult to moderate.
I actually gave this a second thought as a technical problem. The CSS defines 140 color names. It would probably not be infeasible to crowd-source / invent 4,096 base color names spread out exactly evenly across the 3-dimensional RGB space (e.g. "maroon", "deep sky blue", "slate gray" and so on.) If we could then further name 64 "tints" (like "reddish", "dark bluish", "purple hazed"), one could express about 250,000 colors with base color + tint pairs (like "reddish deep sky blue" or "purple hazed maroon"). This should be already sufficient for expressing almost all colors normally needed for UI designs etc.
If even more fidelity was somehow desired, one could then add one more of the 64 tints from the same vocabulary with some qualifier, like 'slightly'. So e.g. "slighly purple hazed dark bluish slate gray". This system could express the full RGB space, and there would be always possibility to find a closeby very similar color with shorter name - e.g. "slight dark bluish reddish deep sky blue" => "reddish deep sky blue" => "deep sky blue".
Joking aside I agree with you that it is useless to name 16 million colors but I appreciate the futile effort.
There's lots of room for different types of analyses here!
That would have made a lot more sense than what they're doing. I'd really like to see the outcome of that. Not this random comparison.
While certainly different individuals are going to vote on colors differently, I doubt that the aggregate results would resemble randomness.
I think it's not really relevant to select colours in a void. Colours are good for a purpose. This is especially relevant on websites. I love yellow but I would hate it when it's used for text on a white background. Stuff like that.
it would be fairly easily to implement, although probably quite expensive in either cost or time
Could use sampling and still get reliable estimates?
I'd imagine you get white and black in one or two, but then what?
I bet some pretty interesting graphs could be drawn with the results
Though I would also be interested to see what the most popular background colors are. My money's on white and off-white.
16 million collars aren't that many compared to large-scale internet systems. If you got 160 million+ votes you'd start getting meaningful results without any averaging.
I only noticed the first time because there was a gorgeous gold/purple combination that I wanted to save, which makes me think there might be another layer of combination that can be saved which is worst/best combinations of colour.
Mobile vs desktop, OLED votes vs. LCD votes, indoors vs sunlight etc. would also be interesting to compare.
The “best” colours also seem really bad, I wonder if what they appear next to gives false results. Still, interesting idea!