Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/22/the-worst-of-modern-websites.html
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Too true. I find more and more these days that I miss the old 1990s Internet. When people created good content out of love, not profit. And SEO wasn’t yet a thing.
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Sites that tell you that they use cookies. Every. Single. Visit.
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On a slow connection (I know, right? is that even a thing?) the new web is a maddening chaos of jumpy text and re-formatting page lay-outs. It is enough to drive a sane man mad, though how I would know that is up for debate. In the future they will trace the insanity of our age to these things.
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I feel like this is missing the climax, where after wading through the bullshit it turns out to be one of those utterly useless and content-free sites where it’s layers of images scrolling vertically at different speeds, separated only by one and two sentence blurbs paraphrasing the company’s marketing slogans.
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They should also add attempting to click a useful footer link only for infinite scrolling to whisk it away from you.
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I knew I experienced a new low in the modern web when visiting someone’s wiki for some information only to be treated to no less than 5 concurrent video ads with overlapping sound.
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Right?
You use cookies? What a coincidence! I reject all cookies on 95% of the sites I visit! What a small world.
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Nope, still haven’t…
…was I supposed to?
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See, what those annoying websites need is more cartoon foley sounds. Slide whistles! Musical saw and theremin!
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And most annoying of all, to me at least, is when they detect I’m leaving their site, often just from the trajectory of my mouse alone, and show a pop-up to join their email list. Has anyone in the history of the internet thought that joining the email list of someone who is desperately harassing them was a good idea?
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At least there’s no obnoxious Flash intro and rotating animated GIFs, amirite?
I am also grateful that autoplaying videos with sound seem to be ebbing presently, but I’m sure they’ll be back. But we seem to be done with ads that make sounds when you mouseover them. And pop-under windows, and the ol’ blink-and-marquee, and busting out of frames… ah, memories.
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…and content that worked.
Just put the video on a video platform. I’m tired of links to Twitter where there’s a video that never plays.
I don’t use Twitter, don’t want Twitter, and so I’m in the minority that Twitter users with video do not want as their audience, I guess.
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They forgot to add the passive aggressive lines that are sometimes used to opt out of joining mailing lists in the pop up. Such as: 1. Yes, I wish to subscribe. 2. No, I’m not interested in getting discounts on my purchases.
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If only they had a way of storing the fact you knew this. Like they could possibly store a bit of data in your browser so the next time you went there you didn’t have to read that shit again.
Alas, no such tech exists.
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I utterly agree with this sentiment, and would put the date about a decade later: It seems to my rapidly decaying recall that in the early-ish 2000s we found a sweet spot of tools that were useful enough that you didn’t have to be some kind of polymath to create a site that wasn’t eye-bleedingly awful with a largely-non-monetized web and good search tools to create a web full of findable good content for good-content’s sake.
That time was - for me - certainly a pulling back of the curtain of the vast expanse of knowledge that had previously only been theoretically available, and was now actually accessible.
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Man, that brings back memories. I miss GeoCities!
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Great video, seeing all these pop-ups in one place makes me think it’s all a conspiracy to just get people to use apps instead of browsing the web.
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