All my clients wanted a carousel, now it’s an AI chatbot

我所有的客户以前都想要轮播图，现在他们想要 AI 聊天机器人

All my clients wanted a carousel, now it’s an AI chatbot! 2026-03-14 12:55 我所有的客户以前都想要轮播图，现在他们想要 AI 聊天机器人！2026-03-14 12:55

It always starts the same way. The client pulls out their phone mid-meeting, navigates to a competitor’s website, and holds the screen up like evidence. “You see? They have one of those.” A little bubble. Bottom right corner. Blinking… 一切总是以同样的方式开始。客户在会议中途掏出手机，导航到竞争对手的网站，然后像展示证据一样举起屏幕。“你看？他们有那个东西。”一个小气泡。在右下角。闪烁着……

For years, that gesture was about carousels. Every homepage had to have one, big, slow, full of stock photos that nobody asked for. I built dozens of them. They spun. They faded. They slid. Visitors ignored them completely, scrolled past in half a second, and went looking for the phone number. 多年来，这个动作指的都是轮播图。每个主页都必须有一个，又大又慢，塞满了没人想看的库存照片。我做了几十个这样的东西。它们旋转、淡入淡出、滑动。访客完全无视它们，半秒钟就滑过去了，直接去寻找电话号码。

Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy. Cookie consent banners came next. Every site needed one, even the ones with no cookies whatsoever. Then Google Tag Manager, even for clients who never once opened an analytics report. I asked one of them, eighteen months after launch, if he’d ever looked at the traffic stats. He hadn’t. He didn’t even remember the login. 后来，这种趋势像所有趋势一样悄然消亡了。并不是因为有人认定轮播图不好，只是因为出现了更新的东西可以效仿。接下来是 Cookie 同意横幅。每个网站都需要一个，即使是那些根本没有使用 Cookie 的网站。然后是 Google 标签管理器，即使是对那些从未打开过分析报告的客户也是如此。在网站上线十八个月后，我问其中一位客户是否查看过流量统计数据。他没有。他甚至不记得登录信息了。

Now it’s the chatbot. I’ve started asking clients a simple question when they bring it up. Not to be difficult, just to understand. “Do you actually use chatbots when you visit other websites?” There’s usually a pause. Then a laugh. No, not really. They close them immediately. They find them annoying. Half the time they answer something completely unrelated to the question. Once, a client told me about a competitor’s chatbot that confidently gave out wrong opening hours for months. He thought it was hilarious. And yet: “but we should have one, right?” 现在轮到聊天机器人了。当客户提起它时，我开始问他们一个简单的问题。不是为了刁难，只是为了理解。“当你访问其他网站时，你真的会使用聊天机器人吗？”通常会有片刻的停顿，然后是一阵笑声。不，其实不会。他们会立即关闭它们。他们觉得这些东西很烦人。有一半时间，它们回答的内容与问题完全无关。有一次，一位客户告诉我，竞争对手的聊天机器人几个月来一直自信地提供错误的营业时间。他觉得这很滑稽。然而他还是说：“但我们也应该有一个，对吧？”

That’s the moment I find both fascinating and exhausting. It’s not about utility. It’s not even really about the chatbot. It’s about visibility, the fear of looking behind. A website without a chatbot in 2026 risks feeling unfinished, like something’s missing. Even if what’s missing is a half-broken widget that most visitors dismiss in three seconds. The chatbot has become a social signal, not a tool. A way of saying: we’re keeping up. 那一刻，我既觉得迷人又感到疲惫。这与实用性无关，甚至与聊天机器人本身也无关。这关乎可见性，关乎对落后的恐惧。在 2026 年，一个没有聊天机器人的网站会让人感觉没做完，好像缺了点什么。即使缺少的只是一个大多数访客在三秒钟内就会关掉的半残组件。聊天机器人已经成为一种社交信号，而不是工具。它是在说：我们紧跟潮流。

I’ve tried the opposite approach. When a client mentions the chatbot, I’ll sometimes open a few smolweb sites, fast, minimal, readable, calm. No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content, clear and immediate. Their eyes change. “Oh, that loads fast.” “That’s easy to read.” “I like that.” And they mean it. Genuinely. Then I ask if they’d want something like that. “Well… but it looks a bit simple, doesn’t it?” 我尝试过相反的方法。当客户提到聊天机器人时，我有时会打开几个“小网”（smolweb）站点——快速、极简、易读、平静。没有弹窗，没有闪烁的角落。只有清晰、直接的内容。他们的眼神变了。“哦，加载得真快。”“这很容易阅读。”“我喜欢这个。”他们是真心的，发自内心地喜欢。然后我问他们是否想要那样的网站。“嗯……但这看起来有点简单，不是吗？”

Simple is the word that keeps coming up. And I’ve learned that when a client says simple, they don’t mean easy to use. They mean not impressive enough. They mean what will people think. A lean, fast website doesn’t look like it cost anything. It doesn’t signal effort. It doesn’t say: we take this seriously. The real irony is that building something genuinely simple, something that loads instantly and says exactly what it needs to say and nothing more, is often harder than bolting on a chatbot. But that’s invisible work. Nobody sees the restraint. “简单”这个词总是不断出现。我了解到，当客户说“简单”时，他们指的并不是“易于使用”。他们指的是“不够令人印象深刻”。他们担心的是“别人会怎么想”。一个精简、快速的网站看起来好像没花什么钱。它无法体现投入的努力。它无法传达“我们很重视这件事”的信息。真正的讽刺在于，构建一个真正简单的东西——那种加载即开、只说重点且不多废话的东西——往往比强行装上一个聊天机器人要难得多。但那是隐形的工作，没人能看到这种克制。

I don’t have a solution to offer here. I’m not going to end this with a tidy list of tips for convincing clients to embrace the smolweb. That’s not how it works, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. The pressure isn’t really coming from clients anyway. It’s coming from the web itself, from a decade of bloated pages, dark patterns, and feature arms races that quietly redefined what a “real” website looks like. Clients are just reading the room. The room is wrong, but they’re not imagining it. 我这里没有解决方案。我不会用一份整洁的建议清单来结束这篇文章，去教你怎么说服客户拥抱“小网”。事情不是那样运作的，假装可以做到那本身就是一种不诚实。无论如何，压力其实并非来自客户。它来自互联网本身，来自过去十年里臃肿的页面、黑暗模式以及功能军备竞赛，这些悄然重新定义了什么是“真正的”网站。客户只是在察言观色。虽然这个环境本身是错的，但他们并没有产生幻觉。

The shift might come from users, not decision-makers. It might come when enough people notice that the fast, calm site was easier to use. That they actually found what they came for. That they didn’t have to close three things before reading a single line. Maybe we plant the seed and wait. In the meantime, the chatbot is live. It sits in the corner of my client’s homepage, blinking patiently. It doesn’t know the opening hours. It doesn’t know the prices. It doesn’t really know anything. But it’s there. Just like everyone else’s. 这种转变可能来自用户，而不是决策者。它可能发生在足够多的人意识到“快速、平静的网站更好用”的时候。当他们发现自己真的找到了想要的东西，而不需要在阅读一行字之前先关掉三个弹窗时。也许我们只能播下种子，然后等待。与此同时，聊天机器人已经上线了。它坐在我客户主页的角落里，耐心地闪烁着。它不知道营业时间，不知道价格，它其实什么都不知道。但它就在那里。就像其他所有人的网站一样。

You encounter the same behaviour? Share it with me on the Fediverse 你也遇到过同样的情况吗？在 Fediverse 上与我分享吧。