Satisfying rant about how broken everything on the web is

[Permalink]

1 Like

But muh software has opinions! If you don’t like muh opinions, get different softwares!

Well, to quote the article, fucking fuckity fuck fuck, I guess. The irony that my post will get deleted for language is bittersweet, like tears on Turkish Delight.

5 Likes

The web has totally gotten worse. It’s not like it’s now a matured industry with a massive focus on UX and usability.

Might as well be “Guy shouts at clouds”.

The irony of course being that the only reason he’s frustrated to begin with is that he’s grown use to online experiences being so smooth, and so exceptions become irritating.

As someone that spends 8 hours a day making people like this less frothy I’m just glad he kept it to his personal blog - shame someone thought it worth sharing, stares at @beschizza.

3 Likes

It was an okay rant. Need more confusing charts and graphs. Also, I didn’t see any xkcd, oatmeal, or onion references. Two demerits for that.

However.

SO. MUCH. THIS.

11 Likes

As soon as you say “When I did … back in the 90s” perhaps you should think twice about continuing your train of thought.

Some of the things he mentioned are valid complaints, some of his problems are actually there for security reasons and others are just part of a hissy fit.

2 Likes

Oh totally, they’re mostly valid complaints, but addressing them as ‘this is everything that’s wrong with the internet today’ is just absurd - especially as most of them are complaints about apps or his odd use-cases, not ‘the internet’. And the web certainly isn’t getting slower - if he wants data I can provide it on request :stuck_out_tongue:

Equally, “I don’t keep any cookies…”. So you turn off a fundamental device used for pretty much any website that needs to maintain consistency between page loads and you’re surprised that you have issues? Good god man.

1 Like

Google is mainly to blame for websites that postload image content as well. Those sites are trying to score better in google’s ranking by being faster to finish the dom load. They do that by loading the images after the dom is displayed. The ones who do this right at least know what the sizes of the images will be so the format of the page doesn’t change. The ones that do it wrong will make the page shift and warp as the images come in, making it difficult to hit a link.

Also, using two-factor authentication where the second factor is protected by the same two-factor auth (google voice in this case) is dumb. That’s entirely on him.

Also, “I don’t keep any cookies or browse history” Have fun logging into every site, every time. No wonder you’re complaining about 2-factor auth (which is awesome and should be the standard everywhere) if you’re unwilling to keep a cookie on your machine that says “trust this machine.”

2/10 for usefulness. 8/10 for old man is confused by technology. :smile:

6 Likes

A lot of these complaints seem to come down to “I never leave anything logged in (for security reasons, presumably?) but then having to use security features to get into my account is a pain in the ass”. The way I look at it - my computer requires a password to get into it. If somebody manages to bypass that password, I’m already severely compromised, so having to login to fucking Skype every god damned time I want to use it is a waste of my time.

Some valid complaints, sure, but things like the baby pictures complaints? Why not just download them from your phone in the first place? Or send them to your mom from the phone itself? Why go through the hassle of the auto-backup to Google Photos, then trying to get them back from Google Photos to your computer, when you can just plug the phone into your computer and have it auto-download every photo on there? My Google Photos backup is exactly that - an emergency backup, in case the normal methods of saving my photos go tits up.

3 Likes

Take a look at the computers that got us to the Moon.
Then compare with the computers we need to send an email.
The software is definitely getting slower.

And the AJAX bullshit, all the AJAX bullshit!!!
(Another example of a good servant becoming bad master…)

3 Likes

My mum can use Yahoo mail. I don’t think she could fly a space ship.

I’ve read the BBS long enough to know that you are a very smart person @shaddack - in fact I’d probably entrust you to build a spaceship - but I’d like to think you’d be the first to appreciate that you don’t (in any way whatsoever) represent the usability needs of the average internet user.

But ajax… yea I can appreciate that. It’s an amazing technology that some crucial experiences would fail without - but it can also be really poorly implemented, or used in places where it really shouldn’t be. This BBS implements it quite well, mind.

3 Likes

Agamemnon tends to agree, but I like ajax design patterns when used well.

Always point to a non redirected resource (do the god damn redirection behind your load balancers in your web tier, ffs)

Build your Dom correctly, and set your element sizes (yes, you can still use fluid layouts, I promise. But things won’t jump around)

While overly complex and heavy middleware like struts sucks, the idea of nearly mandatory input validation doesn’t. Validate, trim, and fixup inputs at every. Stage.

1 Like

How about the infuriating quirk where Boingboing loves to completely reload the main page every time I return to it with the back button. Pfft, caching, who needs that.

Or the weird ass dynamic loading/unloading of comments on long discussions?

Or how sometimes clicking on a story takes you straight to the discussion. Or sometimes it takes you to the full version of the story. Or maybe it’ll take you to the site the story came from! Or how about the story summaries being clickable links even if there’s no visual hint that this is the case.

Can we go back to 2008?

https://web.archive.org/web/20080818062108/http://www.boingboing.net/

7 Likes

I don’t always use meta refresh on Ajax pages, but when I do its always content=“3”.

1 Like

Oh, and from the OP:

Dude, you’re the one that set that password. WTF are you complaining about?

2 Likes

Probably for the sake of ads. Could be wrong though, and I’d be interested to hear why it does it - can’t be arsed to investigate myself just now (I’m supposed to be working, sssh).

That’s actually pretty smart - if not a bit finicky (especially on iOS, ESPECIALLY if you’re trying to comment on iOS). The idea is that if you link to a comment, or click through to the thread, you don’t have to ask the database to fetch hundreds of comments and then get your browser to render them all. The idea is that it just saves you from having to click ‘next/previous’ all the time. And on a good connection on a desktop computer it does work pretty seamlessly.

Can’t say I’ve ever seen this one - wouldn’t the title just be using the_permalink() - given that it’s a wordpress site, @deanputney ?

As someone that’s worked with the web for over a decade, NO.

2 Likes

Totes, it is only like 13 characters. Real passphrases start at 30.

BTW, correct horse battery staple is literally like 0.5% of all pass phrases. THANKS RANDALL!! :stuck_out_tongue:

5 Likes

Here’s how that thing works:

  1. If the post is a long one, and only an excerpt appears on the homepage, clicking it goes to the full post where you can read the rest.

  2. If the post is so short that it appears in full on the homepage, clicking it goes to the discussion instead, because you don’t need to read it twice.

1 Like

More specifically, most of the complains seem to be about Google, which really has seemed to shit the bed in relation to good interface design lately.

5 Likes

Ah, I stand corrected @xzzy - it seems you are correct here.

@beschizza I don’t think that’s very good usability tbh - but maybe this was done for good reason. Do enough of your users even click through to comments for that to be a desired result of clicking on the title? I’d personally just remove the link and make it more obvious that it’s standalone content, in those cases.

Edit: I’d misunderstood - the dynamic link is the labelled button link, not the title.