Comment by wtallis

> It's just a way to draw attention to text without solely relying on typeface modifiers.

Adding animations to bring attention to the thing that the user's attention is already focused on is not useful.

> The real designs bring attention to what users are scrolling past as it flies by on the screen. That temporary urgency is why it's an animation.

Did you mean to say "the good designs"? Because there are most certainly many real designs in the wild that badly abuse scroll fading to delay the appearance of all content below the fold.

> It's usually on the h-tags only, not every single line. That communicates the page structure too.

Making only the headings fade on is definitely something I see less often than the more blunt approach of having everything (or almost everything) fade in. And the message it sends to the user is that the text of the headings is not worth reading, otherwise the designer would let those words show up first.

> It's clever and attractive when done right. It's not a new idea, and nobody was complaining about it until now.

It's mildly annoying at best, and has been widely hated and criticized for as long as people have been doing it badly.