Interesting, as I had the complete opposite reaction. I found it distracting and had to scroll it off the screen to be able to focus on the content of the article.
Putting blinking things in the periphery of vision is a very well known pattern when you explicitly want to draw people's attention. If this were email notifications, blink away. But it's actively drawing the reader away from the core purpose of the site--reading the damn article--without adding anything of value.
"Oh, other people are coming here? Social validation! I'm reading the right things! Now what was I reading?" Complete malarky.
You might want to work on improving your ability to focus. If you're that easily distracted, then you might need to work on mindfulness. It isn't like it's banging a gong every time the number changes.
I think that if somebody is talking about UI design, there shouldn't be an annoying, randomly highlighting yellow object taking my attention. It is really bad UI design. Who benefits from this information? Nobody else but the writer of the article.
I tried to read the article for 15 seconds but the highlight just made me close the whole thing.
Actually, there is. Contrary to what ninja rockstar hipster Wangular.js devs like to believe, not everyone runs an i7 on a gigabit fiber line. Little useless counters like that (who the hell cares how many people have viewed a page anyway? I sure as hell don't, and can surely survive without being bombarded with attention whoring) tend to add up. And even for those who do run an i7 and a gigabit fiber connection, it's invariably in response to little bullshit widgets like these clogging up CPU cores and network connections.
Sure, go ahead, downvote my comment while dismissing it with snide remarks. You're just contributing to the reasons why people disable Javascript or relegate it to on-demand / click-to-play functionality.
