Modern Web Woes - I'm mad at the internet

[Megaroad 2012]

Fan sites didn't get totally dumb until Wikia, now you have autoplaying video and capeshit ads on wikias for things like missing persons cases and genealogy. I swear there used to be more independent sites that had wiki style editing but not actual integration into Wikia's cancerous system too.

Yeah, I remember some wikias weren't 100% cancer only a few short years ago. I think there's a few still out in the ether that I encounter by accident. Dustloop comes to mind.

But man do I dread if I really need to look in a fandom page for some reference to something. At least they've since moved their clickbait articles to the bottom of pages so I don't have to see someone took time to write yet another "my life is empty without fandom" type article.

 

[Stasi]

I don't like this "endless scrolling" BS. When reaching the bottom of a page, more stuff is generated, and the scroll bar gets shorter. It just keeps going and going, filling the RAM, making stuff harder to find.

Who came up with that and for what purpose?

(or to quote AVGN: "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!")

On the flip side I also hate when sites artificially split something over multiple pages to maximise clicks. There is absolutely no reason why an article with not even a page worth of text needs to be split across 4 pages. Fortunately this seems to be done by only the most shit tier bottom of the barrel websites and I only encounter it by accident while trying to Google something.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I don't like this recent trend of websites messing around with the copying of text.

Like if one copies text, other text can be inserted.

And it sucks when one clearly pressed the keys to copy, yet nothing was copied.

On the flip side I also hate when sites artificially split something over multiple pages to maximise clicks.

Too much of the internet is run by people who want to maximize profits by "improving your experience".

 

[The Lawgiver]

Out of fucking nowhere Netflix won't let me watch anything if I try watching it on my own computer isntead of a TV or mobile device. It's not a login issue, it's some shit where it brings up a popup saying "MICROSOFT SILVERLIGHT IS REQUIRED TO WATCH THIS CONTENT DOWNLOAD IT NOW". Thing is the computer I'm using right now isn't a windows computer and looking into this shit microsoft silverlight is no longer going to be supported or some shit like that. This is apperently a netflix error that's existed for years but i of course only get it NOW when silverlights support is being cut due to some weird security exploit shit or something I haven't felt the need to look too deeply into right now.

 

[Finder]

Not sure where to say this, but the Wayback machine is just depressing at this point. It fills me with the worst kind of nostalgia and dread.

I really believe the best era of the internet is in the past and looking at it on the Wayback machine just reinforces my belief. The state of the modern internet is tragic, nothing less, but it was always doomed to happen.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

>want brief info on getting rid of mildew and how it grows
>get search results on mold instead

argh...

 

[hhaergenreyt]

Every single twitter link on mobile results in a popup modal that fills the entire screen, commanding me to sign in. It doesn't even let me navigate elsewhere within a thread or to someone's profile or anything. All intra-twitter links are broken. It's impossible to browse twitter on mobile without being signed in now.

And that suits me just fine, actually. It made me realize just how little of value there is there, and broke me out of my doomscrolling habit.

---

Another annoyance: imgur is garbage now. Someone links to

https://imgur.com/something.png

, you expect that to actually lead to just

something.png

and nothing else, right? NOPE! Instead you have to watch multiple megabytes of unrelated social networking crap load slowly (even with ublock on), and then the very last thing that loads is the image you came there for in the first place.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

On the flip side I also hate when sites artificially split something over multiple pages to maximise clicks. There is absolutely no reason why an article with not even a page worth of text needs to be split across 4 pages. Fortunately this seems to be done by only the most shit tier bottom of the barrel websites and I only encounter it by accident while trying to Google something.

The worst of both worlds is when you are looking for something very specific and use the search-function in the browser. Let's say that I got redirected to that page by google so I KNOW that there's a link to what I'm looking for and I know that I can find it by searching for something unique like "Khanom" - because that's part of the headline. Won't work on shitty clickbait sites that split everything up with their retarded JS shit so they can serve more ads, it won't work with infinity scrollers either if it has moved past the front page.

The infinity scrollers at least lets me hold down space or page down to preload a bunch of crap to search through... Unless it's a scroller with a "more" button at the bottom. It becomes extra infuriating if you think you're open a link in a new tab but no, they have a thing against that so it opens in the same tab and when you back out you have to repeat the process above and hold down page down for yet another three minutes.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Old yet annoying thing of the 'net is when clicking on a link and the site is all "really leave page?"...

 

[Kosher Dill]

Old yet annoying thing of the 'net is when clicking on a link and the site is all "really leave page?"...

In Firefox you can actually disable this with the dom.disable_beforeunload setting in about: config.

 

[Dread First]

Yeah, I remember some wikias weren't 100% cancer only a few short years ago. I think there's a few still out in the ether that I encounter by accident. Dustloop comes to mind.

But man do I dread if I really need to look in a fandom page for some reference to something. At least they've since moved their clickbait articles to the bottom of pages so I don't have to see someone took time to write yet another "my life is empty without fandom" type article.

That's why I'm so happy that there's a trend of certain online communities breaking away from Wikia altogether. Off the top of my head, Jagex helped the RuneScape Wiki team migrate off of Fandom/Wikia and to a self-hosted alternative. Same thing happened to Yugipedia as well.

 

[Ahriman]

https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/83127739

Man I miss sites looking like this. If anything, one of these days I might just set up my own Neocities page.

Didn't know about this one, should come in handy.

Chad's Guide to Starting Your Own Website – LandChad.net

landchad.net

A few more reference sites:

1MB Club

An exclusive membership for web pages weighing less than 1 megabyte.

1mb.club

Webring

webring.xxiivv.com

Neocities

Neocities is the new Geocities. Create your own free home page, and do whatever you want with it.

neocities.org

 

[awoo]

https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/83127739

View attachment 2493089

View attachment 2493091

View attachment 2493092

Man I miss sites looking like this. If anything, one of these days I might just set up my own Neocities page.

Didn't know about this one, should come in handy.

Chad's Guide to Starting Your Own Website – LandChad.net

landchad.net

View attachment 2493118

A few more reference sites:

1MB Club

An exclusive membership for web pages weighing less than 1 megabyte.

1mb.club

Webring

webring.xxiivv.com

Neocities

Neocities is the new Geocities. Create your own free home page, and do whatever you want with it.

neocities.org

I can't say I really miss this aesthetic. DeviantArt used to look like the last one.

Not sure if it's been mentioned yet but this very forum is pretty bad when it comes to load times and putting stress on the browser. MyBB and phpBB work a lot faster.

That's why I'm so happy that there's a trend of certain online communities breaking away from Wikia altogether. Off the top of my head, Jagex helped the RuneScape Wiki team migrate off of Fandom/Wikia and to a self-hosted alternative. Same thing happened to Yugipedia as well.

Wikia is a perversion of MediaWiki which loads quite fast and what Wikipedia runs on (whatever your criticisms, the pages load very quickly)

 

[Ahriman]

Not sure if it's been mentioned yet but this very forum is pretty bad when it comes to load times and putting stress on the browser. MyBB and phpBB work a lot faster.

I think it's been brought up many times. Just for comparison, I browse on and off the Level1Techs forums, and it's blazing fast -- it helps that Wendell knows his shit, but still.

Level1Techs Forums

A place to discuss technology, science and design

forum.level1techs.com

Jersh pls fix your shit.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I think it's been brought up many times. Just for comparison, I browse on and off the Level1Techs forums, and it's blazing fast -- it helps that Wendell knows his shit, but still.

https://forum.level1techs.com/

Discourse is awful as forum software though. Barely functional. Xenforo does a lot more so I would expect it to be slower just on that alone.
Plus, I don't think anything is ever going to run fast when it's limited to only hardware that Null personally owns, in his own personal rackspace somewhere in former Yugoslavia. It's not like he can just spin up a trillion more AWS instances like normie sites can.

 

[TheRatcatcher]

I can feel this way sometimes about Nexus Mods on some occasions. I like to find some mods to try out, but there's a lot of superfluous low grade shit that I feel like people only spent 30 minutes cobbling together or just dry and cut coomer shit.

 

[Pee Cola]

Every single hateful thing about current year websites, all in one convenient place.

 

[Bad Take Crucifier]

https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/83127739

View attachment 2493089

View attachment 2493091

View attachment 2493092

Man I miss sites looking like this. If anything, one of these days I might just set up my own Neocities page.

Didn't know about this one, should come in handy.

Chad's Guide to Starting Your Own Website – LandChad.net

landchad.net

View attachment 2493118

A few more reference sites:

1MB Club

An exclusive membership for web pages weighing less than 1 megabyte.

1mb.club

Webring

webring.xxiivv.com

Neocities

Neocities is the new Geocities. Create your own free home page, and do whatever you want with it.

neocities.org

These are beautiful.
I hate the minimalist JavaScript web.

 

[RSLUG30]

These are beautiful.
I hate the minimalist JavaScript web.

the problem is less so with javascript and more in how professionalism is being encouraged over actual creativity, the growing centralisation of the web into a few big name social media platforms, and template sites being heavily promoted to the few that want to actually have their own website. e.g. squarespace's "professional" designs are about as cookie cutter as you can get, and that's by design so that any normie can modify it slightly and navigate it easily.

if you want that kind of web back, then you need to make your own website and encourage others to do so even if you don't have anything to offer, a little portfolio and contact form site with a style that matches you is better than a 2 paragraph, shared style twitter bio. neocities is a good starting point from what i've heard and allows for you to eventually upgrade to a proper webserver if the need arises.

 

[Bad Take Crucifier]

if you want that kind of web back, then you need to make your own website and encourage others to do so even if you don't have anything to offer, a little portfolio and contact form site with a style that matches you is better than a 2 paragraph, shared style twitter bio. neocities is a good starting point from what i've heard and allows for you to eventually upgrade to a proper webserver if the need arises.

>Try Neocities
I've seen Geocities when it was still live. Sadly I've only gotten former Geocities users to try Neo.

I remember thousands of sites dying because everyone abandoned them for social media, in real-time. I wish it were so easy to go back, I truly do. But I've seen the Internet change a lot.

It's hard enough today to get new Internet people to understand what a decentralized Internet even is, much less to get people to learn to code.

People still have personal sites, sure. But the sad fact is that today, the majority of web users are mentally limited to social media, because they only have ever used cellphones or basic laptops, and have zero knowledge of the most basic markup language. Most people will never do what you're describing because they're not really computer people, they only comprehend Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix. The death of MySpace and the rise of Twitter was a death knell of the old era.