We Turned the Sound Effects Off by Default

Published 2026-06-20 · Tags: product, opinion

Every new visitor flinched at the first click sound. So sounds are opt-in now, there's a proper boot screen, and the white flash on load is gone.

The site makes little noises. A tick when you flip a toggle, a two-note chime when a verification passes, a soft pop when a new bet lands in the feed. We like them. We spent real time on them, down to the zipper glissando on the Slot Cruncher sliders.

As of this week they're off unless you turn them on.

The reason is simple and a bit humbling. We watched a few people use the site for the first time. Every single one of them flinched at the first sound and went looking for the mute button. Not because the sounds are bad, but because nobody expects a website to make a sound, and when one does, the first reaction is "what did I just click".

There's also the autoplay problem. Browsers block audio until you've interacted with the page, so the first sound often fired late, in the middle of something unrelated, which made it feel random rather than responsive.

So: off by default. The speaker icon in the top bar turns them on, and the choice sticks. If you had them on before, you still have them on; we only changed the default for people who never touched the setting.

While we were in there, we also added a proper boot screen. The site used to flash white for a frame or two on a cold load before the dark theme kicked in. It now paints dark from the very first frame, shows the SC mark and wordmark while the app loads, and fades out when it's ready. It's about a second. If you're on a fast connection you'll barely see it, which is the goal.

One more small one: there's a "Join our Telegram" chip in the footer area now. Most of the useful feedback we get comes from there, and it was buried two clicks deep.

That's it. If you miss the sounds, they're one click away. If you never knew they existed, you now know why.