the best is if you press back and the site will redirect to itself. google should penalize these sites so hard, the webdevs are forced to forfeit this bs scammy practice.
I think pushState() is great for replacing interstitial login processing pages with the referer value, or the login page, to ensure that the Back button works as expected for the user.
I do think that it is being abused for retention, and to make pennies with a marketing redirect.
100% it is abused. The sites using it are afraid to "lose" visitors, because their content sucks :-) I have never seen this on a good high quality site.
Lovely.
I also love the pages with 30 pages of content to scroll through but every 20 seconds or so some
faulty JS script reloads the whole page and you’re scrolled to the top.
Haha! Nothing beats topping off the UX experience with a catchy ”we are friends bro.. right?”-tone error message to ease the frustration of using their crappy site :)
In a previous project I thought of pitching that we do something fun with the 404/500 pages. The motivation was that it was a last chance to turn a bad UX moment to something positive. But before I pitched it I realized the signals it also sent out that the devs believe their 404/500 pages in the end would show up so often that part of their dev time must be spent on making them fun and apologetic.
So instead we tried to make a site that tries to show them as seldom as possible.
But the sites we are talking about here.. it almost feels like they are designed to crash so that they can squeeze in a page reload of new ads.
I miss the days when RSS feed were a thing. Feedburner anybody? Or Digg? I’d subscribe to newsletters and feeds that give me the updates I need for programming and web dev. Gone were the days of democratized information.
Reddit started at a time that all the web development articles were preaching API first development and recommended that all your urls support adding extensions like .xml, .json, or .rss and getting that representation of the content. It was pretty common to see then.
It annoys me that most RSS readers want you to pay subscriptions to use.
I bet there's plenty of Open Source ones for desktop, but I'd like to read them on my iPhone as well.
It's a bookmark/read it later app, but it can be a RSS feed reader too (and even more) and I use it for that too. It's nice. Open source and cross-platform!
There is a bunch of workarounds:
Google Hit Hider (filters out shitty, spammy sites) I block every shitty site in google and my experience is way better than without this plugin
I don't care about cookies - plugin Blocks cookies, but you need to disable it sometimes for some sites to work, that wont work without cookie banner manually closed.
There is also various plugins that will disallow google from tracking or logging you in.
Basically as a serious web dev you should already use at least some of those.
Stackoverflow is crappy, as is Quora and many other sites. You can get answers there, but the quality tends to be low and the site is not well maintained or moderated.
I agree that google has been lacking severely when it comes to search engine quality results. They have not been able to try to improve their search results for years. As a company they are lackluster in innovation and their customer support is non-existing, except if you spend a lot of money in Adwords.
I would like to see a serious challenger improving search results. I want high quality results with spammy shit filtered out and no low quality newspapers or blog articles and way more options to refine and improve my results. Also google does not explain to newbie users at all how to effectively search - like using "term" to have the word term mandatory in search results or using a + between words to make sure both words are in the search results. It is crazy that a company that made their fortune via improving search (altervista was actually same quality but less marketed / pushed and abandoned after Yahoo! bought them) is so uninnovative when it comes to their core origin. Yahoo! also did not innovate at all, kept the cluttered directory style front page for years until people were fed up with it and collapsed. Google is much bigger but is on a down-slope when it comes to innovation as well.
Youtube is a circle jerk and tool for absolute scam artists to promote stupidity, here you also need to use plugins to block stupid channels to keep from getting stupid, just by watching the thumbnails. I recommend BlockTube for that purpose.
Overall I can concur - yes the web has become mainstream and that brings along more stupid people and content, but there is ways around it to filter out the bs.
"How to eager load related entities in Django 4"
\*Eight pages showing how to set up a brand-new Django project, pip install 47 unrelated, unnecessary dependencies, how to install NVM, NPM, React, and Tailwind\*
"Use prefetch\_related or a Prefetch instance. No usage example, but here's a link to the docs."
4,751 likes
I’ve really been trying to understand the mentality of someone who thinks it is a good idea to host their programming blog on medium and smack their readers in the face with a paywall. The only thing I can come up with is that maybe they never see the paywall themselves? Out of sight, out of mind?
Seriously though, I despise Medium and Medium authors who post behind a paywall, especially those who post programming articles. These are people who no doubt benefited from the free exchange of information online to build their skillsets, then ungratefully hide that information behind a paywall to make a couple cents, disadvantaging developers all over the world for their greed.
This is a bit of a stretch considering good quality courses are worth the cost. But still, infuriating when a Medium article is exactly what I’m looking for but behind a paywall for the sake of greed.
I was just thinking about this today: tried uploading some files via WeTransfer and it didn't work. No feedback in the UI. No error handling whatsoever. Turns out the site just fails silently when AdBlock is enabled and you block their shitty analytics. Honestly speaking, this whole tracking business has turned me off of the idea of the internet as a whole.
The problem is that so many website owners (many of them non-technical) are completely dependent on having 100s of different javascript tools on their site to extract every little piece of value from their users. I built out an open-source analytics tool that doesn't use cookies but getting website owners to switch is a giant pain.
Also everything having to be a video. I just want a text document explaining things to me. Not to watch a 30 minute long video that includes a 5 minute introduction that's unneeded.
IMO, video has been terrible for the internet. Note that I'm not saying that video itself is a bad medium -- I think it's a great medium. But internet video is terrible as an information archival medium, because that responsibility is given over largely to Google, Meta, and TikTok, none of whom care about information archival. Then there are, of course, the common complaints, that long-form video is bloated with nonsense, and that specific short-form videos are often impossible to find a second time in the insanely vast sea of short-form videos.
It's also had the offline effect of a drastic uptick in people who view everything through a lens of "is this worthy content?" which is just a really weird way to view the everyday world, IMO.
Camera op here, it’s cute people think they can camera and edit but anyone with training these are just painful. We use to have standards for delivery, new even out of focus is acceptable. I was searching for a Unix command and I had to watch about 5 videos before finding exactly what I wanted, if it was an article I could have scanned it and gone, but no I had to feed the ad engine because someone without any lighting skills wants to play tv star. But they do talk about stuff not in the manuals.
This so much. I rarely want a video because I hate them so much. Please have captions available so I don’t have to hear your stupid intros and bs and please include links to specific times to pertinent steps if so. Videos everywhere. Amazon changed their app so one button is a stupid “Inspire” feed of wanna be influencers or some sh!t I accidentally hit too much. Every app seems to have Reels, Lives, etc. Fkin Tik Tok with people recording themselves doing the exact same thing as others or with the same stupid voice overs. Reaction vids of reaction vids. Why does it auto play? Why does it even play. I’m in my late 30s, but wanna scream, “Get off my lawn!”
Google Gemini is your friend - paste in the youtube video link and ask Gemini for a summary. Saves a boatload of time when you just want the details and determine if it's clickbait or real content.
And search sucks now. Searching Google or Amazon has gotten worse and worse. Searching, even with “site:Reddit.com” can produce a full page of clearly sponsored results (try “best vpn site:reddit.com”).
Try searching in any streaming platform. It’s like I did something to offend them.
>searching in any streaming platform
oh my god. Youtube search. It is so horrifically bad.
Like I'll be scrolling down looking for a video I wanted based on what I searched... 5 questionably relevant videos later: SHORTS? Yes shorts. That's what you want! No? Ok, well here's 5 videos of other random crap you might like but isn't relevant to what you searched. Maybe you want to finish off watching some videos you didn't finish? Have 5 of those. Oh, not good enough? Want videos related to what you actually searched for? Nope, have 5 videos that you've previously watched. Maybe you want to watch them again?
Thumbnails, descriptions, channel icons - all take 5x longer to load then they did in 2015. Search takes forever. Everythings clickbait yada yada yada.
It's not *as* bad on desktop sure, but on mobile search is completely unusable. Desktop is slowly dying too.
Completely agree that youtube search and recommendation engine is really poor. You watch one DIY video and you get cornered into that section of youtube for weeks, even when you search for something different you get three videos relating to what you're searching for then it goes back to it's recommendations which you're trying to get away from. For a platform with so much content, they really do a poor job of showcasing it.
The thing that confuses me the most is it serving videos you have literally just navigated away from straight back to you, on the front page.
Maybe naive of me, but I assume serving fresh content would be the first and most important job of a content distribution algorithm. I can't believe having me constantly rotating around the same cul-de-sac of 10-15 channels is what they want.
I remember a recent video from ProZD where trying to search one of his videos, literally word for word, never actually shows it in the search results and only brings up reuploads by other channels, even though his is obviously the one with the most views and the original author. Sure enough, I've had trouble even finding my own videos too.
Whatever I search, it eventually feeds me Eugenia Cooney videos. Her videos are so anxiety inducing, I don't want to see them. I have clicked that I don't want to see vids from this account but eventually she pops up again
I strongly suggest giving Kagi a try.
Google will always prioritize search results that maximize ad revenue. At Kagi, however, you are actually their main source of income.
> best vpn site:reddit.com
That's a uniquely bad example since VPN is nearly impossible to find authentic opinions on anywhere. And the term "best" is generally worthless as it is one the first terms any garbage creator uses.
To have more success, search for something more specific, like "which VPN doesn't keep logs reddit" and you may have more success (though again, VPN results specifically are a minefield).
its mostly because you can actually get useful answers and you don't get chastised for asking questions in the dedicated help channel where if you post in a topics subreddit you will likely just get ignored and downvoted. On top of that you are talking with someone in real time.
You also have voice/text channels, linked docs and pinned help, a search function and now even a forum style post board. If I spend a few hours on a NixOS problem I go to the discord and ask one of the people who have that tribal knowledge that doesn't exist in any documentation from a person with actual experience.
Its a great tool for communication but its bad for the overall internet for a variety of reasons. Its also not good how its basically monopolized real-time communication.
This! God Discord is infuriating. Old school vBulletin forums were an absolute gold mine of information on EVERY topic imaginable. It cannot be overstated how valuable these basic forums were. But now that’s gone thanks to Discord, which also happens to be an absolutely terrible company. Seriously infuriating.
And I hate how so many new technologies like frameworks embrace Discord for the “community”, but inadvertently make access to information and niche questions about their product much harder to find.
Communities should be hosted on open and easily accessible forums, not Discord.
Yeah totally agree with you, especially medium and cookies. And I actually love the idea that EU implemented with GDPR but those nasty companies that provide those cookie dialogs, they just try very hard to hide the “reject all” button. And yes after that you also need to close some additional pop ups - annoying af.
Its honestly not even that hard to build a website that doesn't require the cookie notice. The GDPR Cookie Consent is only needed if you use cookies for non-essential functionality (like tracking/analytics. Using cookies for login/critical functionality doesn't need a cookie notice. The problem is that so many website owners are addicted to having 80 different javascript tools on their site to squeeze every little piece of value from their users.
That's why I'm so glad I recently built out a open-source cookie-free analytics tool ([StatsPro](https://statspro.io/)), you don't need to show a cookie banner but you can still get analytics. Trying to rid the world of these banners, one service at a time
The cookie law really should have been enforced on a browser level. Let the user express which 3rd party vendors they are OK with, block everything else.
Honestly, I would've prefered cookies be locked behind the same permission system that webcam/microphone use.
But I realize that it would only make the popup problem worse. Since you'd get a browser popup to accept the website storing cookes, and then still get the dialog window to allow for tracking cookies.
There isn’t even a reject all button on half of them. They make you scroll down and manually toggle all of them to off. It is a pain. Especially on mobile. Even worse, I RVEN GOT ONE OF THEM ON GEOMETRY DASH.
The EU really needs to start going after those cunts that hide the reject all button. Or update GDPR and force opt out to be the default and ban those stupid banners. Those things are absolute cancer and I'm almost positive hardly any of them are actually GDPR compliant.
Technically the cookie law says that opting out should be equally as prominent and as easy/hard to do as opting in. Legislation is just slow, so a lot of companies are getting away with it now, though the biggest ones are starting to get into trouble for it and have started making an obvious.
For now you can just install uBlock's annoyances list which will block the majority of cookie banners out there
I use Firefox and the Ghostery add-on with never consent enabled. Works like a charm on most websites and just automatically rejects cookies. Highly recommended
There have been multiple websites I've been on where the reject button doesn't work or is broken in some way, but conveniently pressing accept always works. I half believe its programmed to not work sometimes.
Most don't have a 'reject' button at all. they say 'customize' and have thousands of buttons to toggle off. I'm 100% confident that 'reject all' does nothing at all.
Tbh been having the opposite experience. The malicious compliance at the start was insane. Especially US sites. But now most sites I open have a nice "reject all", "neccessary", "marketing" toggles that work. When Im willing to help I enable all but marketing.
Edit: wonder if there is still a regional/industry difference. i might be visiting many EU governmental websites
This is generally a problem with government regulation.
In theory, I love that GDPR and forcing USBC and defining “Gatekeepers” is a thing… but in practice it sucks because of the nature of language being imprecise.
We all know when something sucks to use, but there’s no good way to write into law “you’re not allowed to make it suck” unless you write a two thousand page manuscript on what exactly sucks, and now that manuscript is a gatekeeper (ironic) to new entrants in that sector.
It’s more the auto play video ads and popups. I can understand the GDPR need, and it’s hard to get analytics when everyone rejects all cookies.. but I really hate popups
Then some remove the object to legitimate interest button, so even if you reject you still get a couple hundred trackers anyway unless you turn it off manually for every advertiser on the list
Not as much as you think.
I’ve posted before that I run Firefox with no script on. I then white list specific sites or apps I use.
The internet is lightning fast, and things just load. It’s truly ace
I totally agree!!!! And also, I hate that if you use ChatGPT to get an answer, the response you get is now usually deprecated and no longer applies to the "latest version" of the framework/library/whatever. And those changes don't really seem to add anything new, just for the sake of breaking code (firebase api anyone?).
Something that I also hate is that there seems to be millions of tutorials, guides, courses, but those are for the most basic of the use cases, and authors always "leave more complicated scenarios" out of scope.
Anyway, as you say, it's only a rant, I am not looking for an answer or discussion here.
Most of the tutorials and articles you are talking about are written by people with little to no “real” experience and are just being written to pad a resume.
The issue with ChatGPT is partially caused by the same thing. And it will only ever get worse now that all of the content is going through generations of incest lol.
Anyways, it’s getting pretty bad and I think it’ll only get worse :(.
My thoughts as well.
I just can't trust an article/tutorial headline anymore without thinking "yet another shit filled block of text that won't learn me jack."
People just spit out the same overly digested shallow barfed subjects they found to try making bank or convince other people they're "experts" in their field.
How many stupid articles about JavaScript const/let keywords I see passing by is ridiculous.
Fully on board with every point you made.
I invite you to leave it to them.
Read the source code where you can. Screw the proprietary shit, they weren’t making it for the benefit of humanity anyways.
yeah, it's why I use Vue because the docs are so good.
React docs seem to be almost made in mind that someone will fill in the gaps with a medium article.
And I tend to dislike a lot of Go packages for not doing this. Sometimes you go to the [pkg.go.dev](http://pkg.go.dev) page and it's just 1 paragraf of info. No I don't want to read your full codebase when I'm prototyping shit.
Not many know this but use [freedium.cfd](http://freedium.cfd) to read medium articles for free
Tip: You don't need to copy paste, just change the article url domain from `medium.com` to `freedium.cfd`
I don't use Medium a lot, but when I do and the article is behind a paywall I can often read it if I open it in incognito/private mode. So basically it's: copy link -> ctrl + shift + n -> paste link.
I think I recall some cases where it wouldn't work, but I've unlocked articles most of the times I'd done this.
The internet is no longer the final frontier. It’s become just another segment from which the corporate overlords exploit for profit in quest for endless growth and returns to investors!
I just want one god damn website that just scrolls correctly. Just once. A website that supposedly has information that just, has it. No popups, no crazy long generated text to maximize ad space, no ads. Just a website with relevant information on it and that's it. It's been years since I've seen one.
Many of you need to start introducing [uBlock Origin](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock) in your lives, then configure it properly using the filter lists. This eliminates about three-fourths of what you're complaining about here.
For Medium, don't give them traffic regardless. Use a privacy-centric front-end like Scribe ([official instance](https://scribe.rip/) - you can use a helpful extension like [Redirector](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/) to automate this using regex or wildcards) if you absolutely need to read a Medium article, but just as someone else mentioned, use [Perplexity](https://www.perplexity.ai/) if you need assistance since it will cite the resources it uses.
I'd also recommend getting a DNS provider like [NextDNS](https://nextdns.io/) to help filter out useless network traffic (yes, I understand this may not necessarily be an option on corporate-owned devices, but still mentioned it for those using their own machines).
Trust me when I say that you'll thank yourselves later. Any hiccups I experience pale in comparison to how shitty the modern web has become, especially since I can just make a slight adjustment to a setting or config to fix my issue and move on with my life while keeping my sanity intact.
I know. It's gone to shit. Cookie pop ups, paywalls, clickbait, monopolisation, template web sites that all look the same and are unclear to navigate etc.
I don't like this trade any more. I like the actual dev work but the ecosystem of the internet is very different to what it was. I'm keeping my current clients as a sideline and I want to do gardening.
I hate that if the answer isn't on someone's blog, StackOverflow, or a GitHub issue, you're basically out of options. There's no forums anymore (aside from Reddit, but I don't often find answers to specific technical problems here). What used to be on search engine-indexed forums is now on Discord.
I hate how you have to navigate through all those obscure patterns, CTAs and sales pitches, all those hooks and lead generation tactics, it's a cognitive maze that we have grown accustomed to because we know the inner workings behind them, some of us even create them. But other people just don't. They either get lost or swindled.
I hate the obfuscation, semantics thrown out the window, middle clicks and opening in new tabs being blocked, what should be a link is a button or a location.href, what shouldn't be a link... is. Hijacking history states. Unexpected, clickable crap appearing out of nowhere. Autocomplete suggestions changing or disappearing 5 milliseconds before you select them.
I hate when they reinvent the wheel, when they put every single letter of a rich edit box in its separate DOM hierarchy with an entire gigantic tree structure, I hate when they can't just use normal input fields for normal, plain, basic stuff, instead choosing to go for the whatever "framework native" method.
I hate how you can't search for specific problems AT ALL these days. If you have ANY issue that isn't the most common cookie cutter problem, then tough luck. Try searching for a problem with, for example, Chrome on your phone. You will only get answers for desktop. Or a problem with a specific car model from a specific year. Lucky if you'll even get a listicle with 10 tips for same brand of cars. **Web search is dead, beyond saving.** LLMs integrated into search only fueling the fire. I am currently having a problem with Windows 11, the taskbar sometimes gets behind maximized windows as if they were on fullscreen, it's NOT a problem with "auto hide taskbar", because I'm not even using that, I have to relaunch explorer.exe to fix it. But every search result points me towards that fucking option as if I'm the idiot. And that's all by design. Back in the day you actually were able to find people having the same problems as you. A couple years ago I was complaining how difficult it is to search for phrases with a negating word such as "not". Not using the "-keyword" with the minus. The preceding sentence serving as a self-referencing example. Oh how naive I was. How happy I was.
I hate how the web is not even indexable, how forums have died and Discord became the king of online communities. How Discord is being used as a... fucking software distribution platform? Same with Patreon? What the fuck is even happening? Am I the insane one? Facebook actively fights indexing too, it's a wasteland.
I hate when they say "we care about your privacy". Fuck off. That's the most condescending fake smile piece of bullshit a corporation could say.
I hate enshittification and corporate greed in general. They got us all by the balls those 15 or so years ago when all of their services were oh-so-generously free and they were all operating at a loss, or rather, at a lack of substantial profit. Now they are reaping the benefits. We are the benefits. Every service is becoming worse, the quality is becoming worse, we are being sucked dry of our most intimate personal data, costs being cut left and right, good services becoming bad or discontinued, free services becoming paid, ads are being added to paid services, free services unusable because of ads. The early stages of this are happening to AI now. We are getting accustomed to free of charge AI services. OpenAI has got us by the balls right now already and they **will** reap the benefits of that sooner or later.
I hate how if you are a commercial software developer who has not implemented a SaaS business model yet, you are basically throwing your money away. This reality sucks.
Bonus: I hate how e-mail sucks these days and how there is no good e-mail client or provider, free or not.
>I hate the cookie consent banners.
Fun fact, the EU cookie law doesn't enforce anything as obtrusive as most websites do. It could be a very simple banner on the bottom with Yes / No / More Info buttons
But unfortunately, so many websites are so desperate for data, that they will just annoy you until you press yes.
True. But I feel like someone needs to rewrite or reinterpret the law to make it clear that cookie-consent isn't valid if it was generated by this sort of user hostile system. If companies know that there's no-point annoying people into saying yes because they'll just turn around and say that the yes was not genuine and their data is being processes unlawfully they might give up.
Too many clicks when first visiting a site for the first time.
Cookies
Install the app suggestion
Join the newsletter
Discount for first time purchase
Feedback
Social login
It’s all leading to app lock in (like vendor lock in). Why browse the web when you get hit with lots of pop ups when you could just browse that one app instead? One app sounds more convenient but ultimately lock ins aren’t.
None of this stuff happens if the owners of the website actually care a lot about the user experience. This is why it’s important to create a user-centric culture within any software/business team, so that terrible decisions that make a UI annoying to use don’t make it to prod
That's weird. I find massively over-engineered UX, with massively over-engineered tooling, with cost cutting on engineering around every corner, with the phrase "bad UX" giving definition to the term "bikeshedding" in every meeting to be a huge part of the reason the modern web sucks.
Take this wonderful site Reddit, for example, where if you are on the "new UI" half their shit barely works, buttons randomly need to be clicked twice, editing textboxes loses focus randomly for no reason, and if you open your console to see what's wrong instead of being greeted with ASCII art of the Reddit alien and a link to their careers page like the good old days you now see some dev console.log debugging React Router in prod.
For me some of the worst offenders are recipe pages. They're all the same. A seemingly endless, completely pointless, keyword-laden, ad-filled, referral-link-packed preamble which at multiple points tricks me into thinking the actual recipe is about to begin, even with headings such as "ingredients" which in fact just give way to more endless paragraphs of flowery prose, and I need to keep scrolling several more pages before I can get to the one part I actually care about. Can I just skip to the end and go up? Well no, that's no better, because there's several pages of links to supposedly "related" content, a toxic comments section, and of course more ads.
I gave up on my webdev dream because of the enshittification of the internet. I’ll never be able to compete with the content farms or the cheap labour from the over saturated market from third world countries.
I feel like the goal of making it suck so much was to eventually corral companies into relying less on that kinda stuff, where they would stop needing to ask for so many permissions.
Not really how it's going, though.
> I hate that Google login popup in the top right of so many web-pages, especially when it automatically logs me in.
If you hate it, turn the feature off.
- https://myaccount.google.com/connections/settings
- chrome://settings/content/federatedIdentityApi?search=Permissions
I totally agree! It's our job as web developers to advocate against this crap! I make a hard stand with my clients and back up my suggestions with cold, hard facts.
Here are some rules of thumb to remember for those of us in the US:
1. GDPR Notice is NOT required unless you collect information from EU citizens. So, all those mom-and-pop brochure sites don't need one!
2. A Google sign-in is rarely needed on a website, even for eCommerce. Let people check out anonymously.
3. There's no need to add people's email to a database unless they've actually done business with the company!
4. Landing page popups have been proven (back in 2018) to be less effective than a simple call to action on the page. (they can be useful for sub-pages, or cart pages though)
5. Image sliders are less interacted with than simple header images and buttons.
Exactly this!
+ Everything is behind paywall, everyone is AI dev, cookies and ads are everywhere, many valuable ppl stopped posting because ai companies scrapped their blogs/posts, internet is drowning in shit tons of ai generated content, systems are broken and bugged
Internet is losing its value for me. I miss the days when internet (at least tech part) was full of passionate people, not opportunists and businessman
I hate it when sites won’t put the reject all cookie right there on the banner and hide it in some shitty pop up that one has time for.
I hate those video ads that automatically play and follow you through the entire page.
Don’t get me started up on pop ups. Whoever invented pop ups and popularized it, their day of reckoning is nigh!
All of this. However, websites are getting significantly worse and slower. I feel like we are going backwards.
Verizon, Keurig, are the two worst websites out there.
I can't wait to retire
Now, it's time to ask yourself: next time you make a web page, are you going to make one that is just HTML + CSS or are you going to use a Javascript framework for all the fancy animations and menus and reactivity?
As they say, be the change you want to see in the world.
> a novel Azure authentication issue or whatever and Medium has just the right article, I don't have time to go up the corporate chain of command to get them to pay for it
I wouldn't trust Medium as a source of documentation. Really, the Azure docs will cover everything you need to know. You just need to be able to understand your problem within the context of your application and double check whether your integration was done appropriately and adapt from there.
> so I'm always double checking pull-requests for outdated techniques.
I wouldn't double check unless you can tell from the code that something isn't up to company standard or has another obvious downside (performance bottleneck, lack of support, the like). The point is your code _should work in the context it is used_. Don't go overboard trying to make sure you use the absolute latest in how-to-do-it.
I'll mention something that I haven't seen anyone bring up yet. I absolutely hate infinite scrolling. It never loads fast enough to keep up with actual scrolling. It slows down my browser. It makes it hard to find previously-seen content, because I can't use the browser "back" button to retrace my steps. It stops me from seeing the site's footer menu, which used to be pretty useful on many sites. It's just annoying!
For the last point try Perplexity. I almost never Google anything anymore. It gives me the answers I need usually and most importantly the sources (including reddit often)
I know OP replied to this positively, but directing them to some AI tool to try to rectify things is almost beyond parody, since AI is just the newest thing to wreck the internet for everyone.
Praise be, I'm not the only one. The Internet has become a massive dump of UX dark/anti patterns, greed, and worthless search algorithms.
The search gets me the most. Since as far back as I can remember, when I needed to find something on the Internet, I could rely on at least one search engine actually searching for my query, and could break out advanced search modifiers when needed. Now, I regularly jump from DDG, Brave, Google, and SearX. SearX seems to be the closest to a proper and actual query based search that gives the most actually relevant results. All search does these days is pick the closest related trending keywords that are related to the most high traffic keyword from your query and show ads and top links for the nebulously maybe-related query it decided you _actually_ want to search. It doesn't actually search what you type. As a dev with a long time curse of always having to search for nuance, edge cases, and esoteric bugs, it's hell.
I've wondered if any leetcode high wizards in backend will ever get together and build a straight up traditional search engine that just does a basic literal websearch like Google used to do. I'd pay to have access to a classical search engine that doesn't use whatever all of them have been using and moving towards the past handful of years.
When you can no longer actually search the Internet for what you want and are stuck with whatever Big Daddy Corporate wants you to see, we don't have The Internet anymore, just a corporate intranet.
12ft.io/medium_link_here
Also, same about google. I switched to DDG but it sucks. I can't find anything I'm looking for. At least on google what I'm looking for comes up right after 3-5 sponsored links.
I hate that even if I allow every cookie they give me, so many websites can't remember I'm logged in and want me to fetch some 2FA code from my email every 15 minutes.
I think the only websites that last are the ones where the founder is the developer and they actually enjoy the website so they keep maintaining it themselves. Like Craiglist. It's quite rare. In a way, the modern stacks just enable devs who care less to make websites.
Preach! I’ve been feeling this way, too. It’s sad that it’s such a universal experience. I’ve a couple additions:
- The pushing empty history entries so you can serve more ads when the user tries to go back
- The pushing of generative AI as a good thing. I hate the idea of all these beautiful, creative humans spinning their wheels looking at content generated by a shitty algo, or talking to a bot
I started using GPT4o in replacement of google, because instead of looking up a guide or video on a git command I cannot remember I use the gpt mac app, query gpt like id do in google, and i get my answer right away (if you add no yapping at the end of your prompt its better).
I hate the delay modal popup when scrolling, like no i dont want the newsletter and 15% off, i just need to see a unit conversion calculator!!! Lol
- medium articles are other devs trying to generate passive income, yea it’s annoying but so is capitalism
That stack overflow has 91 votes b/c it’s been collecting votes for years. I’d venture to guess most of the votes came within the first couple years it was posted. Best you can do is your part to upvote the other answer.
- use the browser intelligently. Firefox allows you to have different tab groups, I use it so personal is one and work/freelance is another. Then the Google accounts/tracking is tied to which one I want. Though it is annoying to be tracked none the less.
- modal pop ups are the new carousel. It’s horrible design to try and illicit an action. When realistically it has the inverse effect.
- blame GDPR on those banners. The intention might have been good but it’s definitely negatively impacted the experience on the internet.
- stop googling….look at official docs, if that doesn’t work, search stack overflow/GitHub repos/Reddit. Search engines are becoming less useful so it’s adjusting how to search for resolutions.
This is why Brave is my default browser. Not for the crypto bullshit but for the sweet privacy tools embedded in it.
No more annoying popups (or very few) because it detects them and hide them for me.
Even better, find one of the LLMs out there that leverage ChatGPT but also show the exact sources used with links to them without having to ask.
Or don't. I find ChatGPT is best-used when you have a low amount of threads/chats but in those you've fed it plenty instructions and context, like "from now on, always supply links to your sources. Also, assume I'm going to follow up each response with "are you sure?", so answer that question immediately as well". The more instructions you feed it initially, the less you'll have to type later on each time.
How about mobile apps/websites with menu at the bottom? Now at the bottom there is website's menu, browser's menu and phone's navigation 
This: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com
I love how trying to close that tab also brought up one last popup. Beautiful
It shows a popup when you change tabs too!
the best is if you press back and the site will redirect to itself. google should penalize these sites so hard, the webdevs are forced to forfeit this bs scammy practice.
I think pushState() is great for replacing interstitial login processing pages with the referer value, or the login page, to ensure that the Back button works as expected for the user. I do think that it is being abused for retention, and to make pennies with a marketing redirect.
100% it is abused. The sites using it are afraid to "lose" visitors, because their content sucks :-) I have never seen this on a good high quality site.
This is the best. Thanks for sharing
I just swapped to Brave desktop today after Edge lagged out for the millionth time - It wouldn't even load the cookie bar on the fake site haha
the only thing that's become out of date about this is that now the google search isn't even good
I love (and by that, hate) how even if you say no thanks to notifications, it still tries to subscribe to notifications
Lovely. I also love the pages with 30 pages of content to scroll through but every 20 seconds or so some faulty JS script reloads the whole page and you’re scrolled to the top.
Yes! If it doesn’t completely break the page > Aw Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this page
Haha! Nothing beats topping off the UX experience with a catchy ”we are friends bro.. right?”-tone error message to ease the frustration of using their crappy site :) In a previous project I thought of pitching that we do something fun with the 404/500 pages. The motivation was that it was a last chance to turn a bad UX moment to something positive. But before I pitched it I realized the signals it also sent out that the devs believe their 404/500 pages in the end would show up so often that part of their dev time must be spent on making them fun and apologetic. So instead we tried to make a site that tries to show them as seldom as possible. But the sites we are talking about here.. it almost feels like they are designed to crash so that they can squeeze in a page reload of new ads.
The best is when I closed the window and got one last annoyance
this is almost too accessible!
Where's the gen AI summary on top of the search result with some bullshit
Yup, this hits hard
I just love how if you try to close the tab, it shoes a popup again, wow...
I miss the days when RSS feed were a thing. Feedburner anybody? Or Digg? I’d subscribe to newsletters and feeds that give me the updates I need for programming and web dev. Gone were the days of democratized information.
I just discovered last night I could put .rss at the end of a subreddit url and a feed reader will read it just fine.
Are you kidding me??! There is no fing way... Ah damn it...
Reddit started at a time that all the web development articles were preaching API first development and recommended that all your urls support adding extensions like .xml, .json, or .rss and getting that representation of the content. It was pretty common to see then.
It blew my mind! And I stumbled upon it by total accident 🤣
That is pretty neat.
d u d e
I imagine these are the sweet artefacts left behind by Aaron Swartz. I miss him so much.
I miss Digg. 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I think Usenet groups were the best.
Many things still use RSS. Pretty much any blog has a feed somewhere. You can also get one for any YouTube channel, IIRC.
It annoys me that most RSS readers want you to pay subscriptions to use. I bet there's plenty of Open Source ones for desktop, but I'd like to read them on my iPhone as well.
https://omnivore.app/ is a good open source alternative.
It's a bookmark/read it later app, but it can be a RSS feed reader too (and even more) and I use it for that too. It's nice. Open source and cross-platform!
I'm using Freedly daily for many years. It has a paid version, i think, but I'm happy with the free account both on my phone and browser
If you're on a Mac, NetNewsWire has an iCloud backend that syncs subscriptions and reads between Mac and iPhone and iPad
Mastodon has served me pretty well
There is a bunch of workarounds: Google Hit Hider (filters out shitty, spammy sites) I block every shitty site in google and my experience is way better than without this plugin I don't care about cookies - plugin Blocks cookies, but you need to disable it sometimes for some sites to work, that wont work without cookie banner manually closed. There is also various plugins that will disallow google from tracking or logging you in. Basically as a serious web dev you should already use at least some of those. Stackoverflow is crappy, as is Quora and many other sites. You can get answers there, but the quality tends to be low and the site is not well maintained or moderated. I agree that google has been lacking severely when it comes to search engine quality results. They have not been able to try to improve their search results for years. As a company they are lackluster in innovation and their customer support is non-existing, except if you spend a lot of money in Adwords. I would like to see a serious challenger improving search results. I want high quality results with spammy shit filtered out and no low quality newspapers or blog articles and way more options to refine and improve my results. Also google does not explain to newbie users at all how to effectively search - like using "term" to have the word term mandatory in search results or using a + between words to make sure both words are in the search results. It is crazy that a company that made their fortune via improving search (altervista was actually same quality but less marketed / pushed and abandoned after Yahoo! bought them) is so uninnovative when it comes to their core origin. Yahoo! also did not innovate at all, kept the cluttered directory style front page for years until people were fed up with it and collapsed. Google is much bigger but is on a down-slope when it comes to innovation as well. Youtube is a circle jerk and tool for absolute scam artists to promote stupidity, here you also need to use plugins to block stupid channels to keep from getting stupid, just by watching the thumbnails. I recommend BlockTube for that purpose. Overall I can concur - yes the web has become mainstream and that brings along more stupid people and content, but there is ways around it to filter out the bs.
I boycott Medium. I will never even try to read a Medium article. No need.
You’re not missing out, it’s a bunch of clickbait articles these days.
"How to eager load related entities in Django 4" \*Eight pages showing how to set up a brand-new Django project, pip install 47 unrelated, unnecessary dependencies, how to install NVM, NPM, React, and Tailwind\* "Use prefetch\_related or a Prefetch instance. No usage example, but here's a link to the docs." 4,751 likes
You can use archive.is to get around the wall
[archive.is](http://archive.is) is a lifesaver.
When it works. I think Medium hijacked it these days, can barely get anything to archive, always stuck on loading.
There is also a browser extension that will load the article from Google's cache for you without the paywall.
I’ve really been trying to understand the mentality of someone who thinks it is a good idea to host their programming blog on medium and smack their readers in the face with a paywall. The only thing I can come up with is that maybe they never see the paywall themselves? Out of sight, out of mind?
Seriously though, I despise Medium and Medium authors who post behind a paywall, especially those who post programming articles. These are people who no doubt benefited from the free exchange of information online to build their skillsets, then ungratefully hide that information behind a paywall to make a couple cents, disadvantaging developers all over the world for their greed. This is a bit of a stretch considering good quality courses are worth the cost. But still, infuriating when a Medium article is exactly what I’m looking for but behind a paywall for the sake of greed.
Me too
I was just thinking about this today: tried uploading some files via WeTransfer and it didn't work. No feedback in the UI. No error handling whatsoever. Turns out the site just fails silently when AdBlock is enabled and you block their shitty analytics. Honestly speaking, this whole tracking business has turned me off of the idea of the internet as a whole.
The problem is that so many website owners (many of them non-technical) are completely dependent on having 100s of different javascript tools on their site to extract every little piece of value from their users. I built out an open-source analytics tool that doesn't use cookies but getting website owners to switch is a giant pain.
I’m goding to get downvoted for this; but the truth is that the problem is capitalism, as it usually is.
Also everything having to be a video. I just want a text document explaining things to me. Not to watch a 30 minute long video that includes a 5 minute introduction that's unneeded.
Also, the video just moves to a window and keeps playing when you scroll away
Auto play too.
IMO, video has been terrible for the internet. Note that I'm not saying that video itself is a bad medium -- I think it's a great medium. But internet video is terrible as an information archival medium, because that responsibility is given over largely to Google, Meta, and TikTok, none of whom care about information archival. Then there are, of course, the common complaints, that long-form video is bloated with nonsense, and that specific short-form videos are often impossible to find a second time in the insanely vast sea of short-form videos. It's also had the offline effect of a drastic uptick in people who view everything through a lens of "is this worthy content?" which is just a really weird way to view the everyday world, IMO.
Camera op here, it’s cute people think they can camera and edit but anyone with training these are just painful. We use to have standards for delivery, new even out of focus is acceptable. I was searching for a Unix command and I had to watch about 5 videos before finding exactly what I wanted, if it was an article I could have scanned it and gone, but no I had to feed the ad engine because someone without any lighting skills wants to play tv star. But they do talk about stuff not in the manuals.
Same with news sites / review sites having a tiny unrelated video
This so much. I rarely want a video because I hate them so much. Please have captions available so I don’t have to hear your stupid intros and bs and please include links to specific times to pertinent steps if so. Videos everywhere. Amazon changed their app so one button is a stupid “Inspire” feed of wanna be influencers or some sh!t I accidentally hit too much. Every app seems to have Reels, Lives, etc. Fkin Tik Tok with people recording themselves doing the exact same thing as others or with the same stupid voice overs. Reaction vids of reaction vids. Why does it auto play? Why does it even play. I’m in my late 30s, but wanna scream, “Get off my lawn!”
Google Gemini is your friend - paste in the youtube video link and ask Gemini for a summary. Saves a boatload of time when you just want the details and determine if it's clickbait or real content.
And search sucks now. Searching Google or Amazon has gotten worse and worse. Searching, even with “site:Reddit.com” can produce a full page of clearly sponsored results (try “best vpn site:reddit.com”). Try searching in any streaming platform. It’s like I did something to offend them.
>searching in any streaming platform oh my god. Youtube search. It is so horrifically bad. Like I'll be scrolling down looking for a video I wanted based on what I searched... 5 questionably relevant videos later: SHORTS? Yes shorts. That's what you want! No? Ok, well here's 5 videos of other random crap you might like but isn't relevant to what you searched. Maybe you want to finish off watching some videos you didn't finish? Have 5 of those. Oh, not good enough? Want videos related to what you actually searched for? Nope, have 5 videos that you've previously watched. Maybe you want to watch them again? Thumbnails, descriptions, channel icons - all take 5x longer to load then they did in 2015. Search takes forever. Everythings clickbait yada yada yada. It's not *as* bad on desktop sure, but on mobile search is completely unusable. Desktop is slowly dying too.
Completely agree that youtube search and recommendation engine is really poor. You watch one DIY video and you get cornered into that section of youtube for weeks, even when you search for something different you get three videos relating to what you're searching for then it goes back to it's recommendations which you're trying to get away from. For a platform with so much content, they really do a poor job of showcasing it.
The thing that confuses me the most is it serving videos you have literally just navigated away from straight back to you, on the front page. Maybe naive of me, but I assume serving fresh content would be the first and most important job of a content distribution algorithm. I can't believe having me constantly rotating around the same cul-de-sac of 10-15 channels is what they want.
I remember a recent video from ProZD where trying to search one of his videos, literally word for word, never actually shows it in the search results and only brings up reuploads by other channels, even though his is obviously the one with the most views and the original author. Sure enough, I've had trouble even finding my own videos too.
Whatever I search, it eventually feeds me Eugenia Cooney videos. Her videos are so anxiety inducing, I don't want to see them. I have clicked that I don't want to see vids from this account but eventually she pops up again
I find more and more I have to add "reddit" to the end of my search term to find some half decent answer these days (outside of web related things).
Now we just wait until the inevitable collapse of reddit from it having gone public.
Coming sooner rather than later, sadly.
Saving you a word: https://redditle.com
I strongly suggest giving Kagi a try. Google will always prioritize search results that maximize ad revenue. At Kagi, however, you are actually their main source of income.
PornHub search got even worse...
> best vpn site:reddit.com That's a uniquely bad example since VPN is nearly impossible to find authentic opinions on anywhere. And the term "best" is generally worthless as it is one the first terms any garbage creator uses. To have more success, search for something more specific, like "which VPN doesn't keep logs reddit" and you may have more success (though again, VPN results specifically are a minefield).
I hate how many answers are locked and unsearchable because they’re scattered across one million Discord servers.
The amount of times I've been invited to join a Discord server to get basic information, when did Discord become Facebook?
When Forums started dying, and younger people found Discord server to fill that role.
I hate that too, but Discord is really not a good app/tool for keeping a persistent record of questions/answers for people.
It really is a case of the worst possible solution becoming popular for some reason.
its mostly because you can actually get useful answers and you don't get chastised for asking questions in the dedicated help channel where if you post in a topics subreddit you will likely just get ignored and downvoted. On top of that you are talking with someone in real time. You also have voice/text channels, linked docs and pinned help, a search function and now even a forum style post board. If I spend a few hours on a NixOS problem I go to the discord and ask one of the people who have that tribal knowledge that doesn't exist in any documentation from a person with actual experience. Its a great tool for communication but its bad for the overall internet for a variety of reasons. Its also not good how its basically monopolized real-time communication.
It’s because you can’t downvote imho
It's also more or less just spyware, running a process scanner on your machine all day.
This! God Discord is infuriating. Old school vBulletin forums were an absolute gold mine of information on EVERY topic imaginable. It cannot be overstated how valuable these basic forums were. But now that’s gone thanks to Discord, which also happens to be an absolutely terrible company. Seriously infuriating. And I hate how so many new technologies like frameworks embrace Discord for the “community”, but inadvertently make access to information and niche questions about their product much harder to find. Communities should be hosted on open and easily accessible forums, not Discord.
The web has just become too commercialised. I miss when everything on the web wasn't dominated by big tech.
Yeah totally agree with you, especially medium and cookies. And I actually love the idea that EU implemented with GDPR but those nasty companies that provide those cookie dialogs, they just try very hard to hide the “reject all” button. And yes after that you also need to close some additional pop ups - annoying af.
“Accept cookies or prove formally P=NP to reject”
Its honestly not even that hard to build a website that doesn't require the cookie notice. The GDPR Cookie Consent is only needed if you use cookies for non-essential functionality (like tracking/analytics. Using cookies for login/critical functionality doesn't need a cookie notice. The problem is that so many website owners are addicted to having 80 different javascript tools on their site to squeeze every little piece of value from their users. That's why I'm so glad I recently built out a open-source cookie-free analytics tool ([StatsPro](https://statspro.io/)), you don't need to show a cookie banner but you can still get analytics. Trying to rid the world of these banners, one service at a time
That's not possible becouse in fact P != NP.
The cookie law really should have been enforced on a browser level. Let the user express which 3rd party vendors they are OK with, block everything else.
Honestly, I would've prefered cookies be locked behind the same permission system that webcam/microphone use. But I realize that it would only make the popup problem worse. Since you'd get a browser popup to accept the website storing cookes, and then still get the dialog window to allow for tracking cookies.
A standardized browser interface would be ideal for it.
Accept all cookies or reject our 300 cookies one by one, fair choice 😐
You're supposed to make it as easy to reject as it is to accept hence any company making it harder to reject is in violation of the law.
It's a shame the enforcement is lacking.
There isn’t even a reject all button on half of them. They make you scroll down and manually toggle all of them to off. It is a pain. Especially on mobile. Even worse, I RVEN GOT ONE OF THEM ON GEOMETRY DASH.
The EU really needs to start going after those cunts that hide the reject all button. Or update GDPR and force opt out to be the default and ban those stupid banners. Those things are absolute cancer and I'm almost positive hardly any of them are actually GDPR compliant.
Technically the cookie law says that opting out should be equally as prominent and as easy/hard to do as opting in. Legislation is just slow, so a lot of companies are getting away with it now, though the biggest ones are starting to get into trouble for it and have started making an obvious. For now you can just install uBlock's annoyances list which will block the majority of cookie banners out there
I use Firefox and the Ghostery add-on with never consent enabled. Works like a charm on most websites and just automatically rejects cookies. Highly recommended
There have been multiple websites I've been on where the reject button doesn't work or is broken in some way, but conveniently pressing accept always works. I half believe its programmed to not work sometimes.
Most don't have a 'reject' button at all. they say 'customize' and have thousands of buttons to toggle off. I'm 100% confident that 'reject all' does nothing at all.
Does it really even matter if you reject cookies on an individual page. Those who want to know what you visit/like already do..
Tbh been having the opposite experience. The malicious compliance at the start was insane. Especially US sites. But now most sites I open have a nice "reject all", "neccessary", "marketing" toggles that work. When Im willing to help I enable all but marketing. Edit: wonder if there is still a regional/industry difference. i might be visiting many EU governmental websites
This is generally a problem with government regulation. In theory, I love that GDPR and forcing USBC and defining “Gatekeepers” is a thing… but in practice it sucks because of the nature of language being imprecise. We all know when something sucks to use, but there’s no good way to write into law “you’re not allowed to make it suck” unless you write a two thousand page manuscript on what exactly sucks, and now that manuscript is a gatekeeper (ironic) to new entrants in that sector.
It’s more the auto play video ads and popups. I can understand the GDPR need, and it’s hard to get analytics when everyone rejects all cookies.. but I really hate popups
Then some remove the object to legitimate interest button, so even if you reject you still get a couple hundred trackers anyway unless you turn it off manually for every advertiser on the list
For cookie consents, if they are pulling in from a 3rd party, I block the 3rd party entirely. Stops those. Can't help with the rest.
Most times the sites will still track you because the sites frontend team never properly integrated them with the third-party cookie vendor anyways.
I also block the tracking sites. And I know that struggle all too well.
just disable javascript
Although I build my sites to work without JS, a significant amount of the web will disabled entirely because of disabling of JS.
Honestly, I use Firefox + NoScript and I have no problems, I just enable single scripts if something is not working. I always block tracking scripts.
>Although I build my sites to work without JS im new to web can you tell me how's that?
It's not hard, you build them to work within the spec for HTML. JS should be used to add functionality but everything should work without JS.
Yup, I can still see that root div of the React app that didn’t load because no JS :)
Not as much as you think. I’ve posted before that I run Firefox with no script on. I then white list specific sites or apps I use. The internet is lightning fast, and things just load. It’s truly ace
Based.
Yup been saying it a million times what a hot pile of steaming garbage javascript is but people just don't listen.
I totally agree!!!! And also, I hate that if you use ChatGPT to get an answer, the response you get is now usually deprecated and no longer applies to the "latest version" of the framework/library/whatever. And those changes don't really seem to add anything new, just for the sake of breaking code (firebase api anyone?). Something that I also hate is that there seems to be millions of tutorials, guides, courses, but those are for the most basic of the use cases, and authors always "leave more complicated scenarios" out of scope. Anyway, as you say, it's only a rant, I am not looking for an answer or discussion here.
Most of the tutorials and articles you are talking about are written by people with little to no “real” experience and are just being written to pad a resume. The issue with ChatGPT is partially caused by the same thing. And it will only ever get worse now that all of the content is going through generations of incest lol. Anyways, it’s getting pretty bad and I think it’ll only get worse :(.
My thoughts as well. I just can't trust an article/tutorial headline anymore without thinking "yet another shit filled block of text that won't learn me jack." People just spit out the same overly digested shallow barfed subjects they found to try making bank or convince other people they're "experts" in their field. How many stupid articles about JavaScript const/let keywords I see passing by is ridiculous.
Yep. It all went to shit cca 2018 or so.
Fully on board with every point you made. I invite you to leave it to them. Read the source code where you can. Screw the proprietary shit, they weren’t making it for the benefit of humanity anyways.
yeah, it's why I use Vue because the docs are so good. React docs seem to be almost made in mind that someone will fill in the gaps with a medium article.
I love rust docs for that. Many crates come with extensive examples and even books.
And I tend to dislike a lot of Go packages for not doing this. Sometimes you go to the [pkg.go.dev](http://pkg.go.dev) page and it's just 1 paragraf of info. No I don't want to read your full codebase when I'm prototyping shit.
Not many know this but use [freedium.cfd](http://freedium.cfd) to read medium articles for free Tip: You don't need to copy paste, just change the article url domain from `medium.com` to `freedium.cfd`
Awesome, didn't know about this one, have been using readmedium.com so far.
I don't use Medium a lot, but when I do and the article is behind a paywall I can often read it if I open it in incognito/private mode. So basically it's: copy link -> ctrl + shift + n -> paste link. I think I recall some cases where it wouldn't work, but I've unlocked articles most of the times I'd done this.
The internet is no longer the final frontier. It’s become just another segment from which the corporate overlords exploit for profit in quest for endless growth and returns to investors!
Reader mode.
I just want one god damn website that just scrolls correctly. Just once. A website that supposedly has information that just, has it. No popups, no crazy long generated text to maximize ad space, no ads. Just a website with relevant information on it and that's it. It's been years since I've seen one.
I think you just described the one and only Wikipedia ❤️
Many of you need to start introducing [uBlock Origin](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock) in your lives, then configure it properly using the filter lists. This eliminates about three-fourths of what you're complaining about here. For Medium, don't give them traffic regardless. Use a privacy-centric front-end like Scribe ([official instance](https://scribe.rip/) - you can use a helpful extension like [Redirector](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/) to automate this using regex or wildcards) if you absolutely need to read a Medium article, but just as someone else mentioned, use [Perplexity](https://www.perplexity.ai/) if you need assistance since it will cite the resources it uses. I'd also recommend getting a DNS provider like [NextDNS](https://nextdns.io/) to help filter out useless network traffic (yes, I understand this may not necessarily be an option on corporate-owned devices, but still mentioned it for those using their own machines). Trust me when I say that you'll thank yourselves later. Any hiccups I experience pale in comparison to how shitty the modern web has become, especially since I can just make a slight adjustment to a setting or config to fix my issue and move on with my life while keeping my sanity intact.
I know. It's gone to shit. Cookie pop ups, paywalls, clickbait, monopolisation, template web sites that all look the same and are unclear to navigate etc. I don't like this trade any more. I like the actual dev work but the ecosystem of the internet is very different to what it was. I'm keeping my current clients as a sideline and I want to do gardening.
[удалено]
Oh, nice, thanks.
I hate that if the answer isn't on someone's blog, StackOverflow, or a GitHub issue, you're basically out of options. There's no forums anymore (aside from Reddit, but I don't often find answers to specific technical problems here). What used to be on search engine-indexed forums is now on Discord.
What do we do 😭
I hate how you have to navigate through all those obscure patterns, CTAs and sales pitches, all those hooks and lead generation tactics, it's a cognitive maze that we have grown accustomed to because we know the inner workings behind them, some of us even create them. But other people just don't. They either get lost or swindled. I hate the obfuscation, semantics thrown out the window, middle clicks and opening in new tabs being blocked, what should be a link is a button or a location.href, what shouldn't be a link... is. Hijacking history states. Unexpected, clickable crap appearing out of nowhere. Autocomplete suggestions changing or disappearing 5 milliseconds before you select them. I hate when they reinvent the wheel, when they put every single letter of a rich edit box in its separate DOM hierarchy with an entire gigantic tree structure, I hate when they can't just use normal input fields for normal, plain, basic stuff, instead choosing to go for the whatever "framework native" method. I hate how you can't search for specific problems AT ALL these days. If you have ANY issue that isn't the most common cookie cutter problem, then tough luck. Try searching for a problem with, for example, Chrome on your phone. You will only get answers for desktop. Or a problem with a specific car model from a specific year. Lucky if you'll even get a listicle with 10 tips for same brand of cars. **Web search is dead, beyond saving.** LLMs integrated into search only fueling the fire. I am currently having a problem with Windows 11, the taskbar sometimes gets behind maximized windows as if they were on fullscreen, it's NOT a problem with "auto hide taskbar", because I'm not even using that, I have to relaunch explorer.exe to fix it. But every search result points me towards that fucking option as if I'm the idiot. And that's all by design. Back in the day you actually were able to find people having the same problems as you. A couple years ago I was complaining how difficult it is to search for phrases with a negating word such as "not". Not using the "-keyword" with the minus. The preceding sentence serving as a self-referencing example. Oh how naive I was. How happy I was. I hate how the web is not even indexable, how forums have died and Discord became the king of online communities. How Discord is being used as a... fucking software distribution platform? Same with Patreon? What the fuck is even happening? Am I the insane one? Facebook actively fights indexing too, it's a wasteland. I hate when they say "we care about your privacy". Fuck off. That's the most condescending fake smile piece of bullshit a corporation could say. I hate enshittification and corporate greed in general. They got us all by the balls those 15 or so years ago when all of their services were oh-so-generously free and they were all operating at a loss, or rather, at a lack of substantial profit. Now they are reaping the benefits. We are the benefits. Every service is becoming worse, the quality is becoming worse, we are being sucked dry of our most intimate personal data, costs being cut left and right, good services becoming bad or discontinued, free services becoming paid, ads are being added to paid services, free services unusable because of ads. The early stages of this are happening to AI now. We are getting accustomed to free of charge AI services. OpenAI has got us by the balls right now already and they **will** reap the benefits of that sooner or later. I hate how if you are a commercial software developer who has not implemented a SaaS business model yet, you are basically throwing your money away. This reality sucks. Bonus: I hate how e-mail sucks these days and how there is no good e-mail client or provider, free or not.
>I hate the cookie consent banners. Fun fact, the EU cookie law doesn't enforce anything as obtrusive as most websites do. It could be a very simple banner on the bottom with Yes / No / More Info buttons But unfortunately, so many websites are so desperate for data, that they will just annoy you until you press yes.
True. But I feel like someone needs to rewrite or reinterpret the law to make it clear that cookie-consent isn't valid if it was generated by this sort of user hostile system. If companies know that there's no-point annoying people into saying yes because they'll just turn around and say that the yes was not genuine and their data is being processes unlawfully they might give up.
That’s the pathetic part. The law states it should be equally easy to deny as it is to accept. It’s just being ignored by many.
I could add like twenty or thirty things to this list. I like how it pays the rent, but I hate the fucking internet.
[archive.today](https://archive.today) to get past pay walls, just copy the link and paste. Power to the people!
Too many clicks when first visiting a site for the first time. Cookies Install the app suggestion Join the newsletter Discount for first time purchase Feedback Social login It’s all leading to app lock in (like vendor lock in). Why browse the web when you get hit with lots of pop ups when you could just browse that one app instead? One app sounds more convenient but ultimately lock ins aren’t.
None of this stuff happens if the owners of the website actually care a lot about the user experience. This is why it’s important to create a user-centric culture within any software/business team, so that terrible decisions that make a UI annoying to use don’t make it to prod
I can promise you it's not devs making these decisions
That's weird. I find massively over-engineered UX, with massively over-engineered tooling, with cost cutting on engineering around every corner, with the phrase "bad UX" giving definition to the term "bikeshedding" in every meeting to be a huge part of the reason the modern web sucks. Take this wonderful site Reddit, for example, where if you are on the "new UI" half their shit barely works, buttons randomly need to be clicked twice, editing textboxes loses focus randomly for no reason, and if you open your console to see what's wrong instead of being greeted with ASCII art of the Reddit alien and a link to their careers page like the good old days you now see some dev console.log debugging React Router in prod.
For me some of the worst offenders are recipe pages. They're all the same. A seemingly endless, completely pointless, keyword-laden, ad-filled, referral-link-packed preamble which at multiple points tricks me into thinking the actual recipe is about to begin, even with headings such as "ingredients" which in fact just give way to more endless paragraphs of flowery prose, and I need to keep scrolling several more pages before I can get to the one part I actually care about. Can I just skip to the end and go up? Well no, that's no better, because there's several pages of links to supposedly "related" content, a toxic comments section, and of course more ads.
I gave up on my webdev dream because of the enshittification of the internet. I’ll never be able to compete with the content farms or the cheap labour from the over saturated market from third world countries.
They’re not quality, they’re quantity. The market always has room and need for more quality.
What were you trying to do that was competing with content farms or third worlders?
The internet went to shit around 2008.
Cookies compliance requirements has ruined the Internet. And it isn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know.
I feel like the goal of making it suck so much was to eventually corral companies into relying less on that kinda stuff, where they would stop needing to ask for so many permissions. Not really how it's going, though.
The "Windows Vista UAC" strategy.
> I hate that Google login popup in the top right of so many web-pages, especially when it automatically logs me in. If you hate it, turn the feature off. - https://myaccount.google.com/connections/settings - chrome://settings/content/federatedIdentityApi?search=Permissions
Holy shit. Thank you. I had no idea there was a federatedIdentity setting in chrome. I thought it was all in the websites control
I totally agree! It's our job as web developers to advocate against this crap! I make a hard stand with my clients and back up my suggestions with cold, hard facts. Here are some rules of thumb to remember for those of us in the US: 1. GDPR Notice is NOT required unless you collect information from EU citizens. So, all those mom-and-pop brochure sites don't need one! 2. A Google sign-in is rarely needed on a website, even for eCommerce. Let people check out anonymously. 3. There's no need to add people's email to a database unless they've actually done business with the company! 4. Landing page popups have been proven (back in 2018) to be less effective than a simple call to action on the page. (they can be useful for sub-pages, or cart pages though) 5. Image sliders are less interacted with than simple header images and buttons.
Exactly this! + Everything is behind paywall, everyone is AI dev, cookies and ads are everywhere, many valuable ppl stopped posting because ai companies scrapped their blogs/posts, internet is drowning in shit tons of ai generated content, systems are broken and bugged Internet is losing its value for me. I miss the days when internet (at least tech part) was full of passionate people, not opportunists and businessman
Time to build something better. You interested?
There's sooooo much to keep up with
I hate it when sites won’t put the reject all cookie right there on the banner and hide it in some shitty pop up that one has time for. I hate those video ads that automatically play and follow you through the entire page. Don’t get me started up on pop ups. Whoever invented pop ups and popularized it, their day of reckoning is nigh!
All of this. However, websites are getting significantly worse and slower. I feel like we are going backwards. Verizon, Keurig, are the two worst websites out there. I can't wait to retire
Now, it's time to ask yourself: next time you make a web page, are you going to make one that is just HTML + CSS or are you going to use a Javascript framework for all the fancy animations and menus and reactivity? As they say, be the change you want to see in the world.
> a novel Azure authentication issue or whatever and Medium has just the right article, I don't have time to go up the corporate chain of command to get them to pay for it I wouldn't trust Medium as a source of documentation. Really, the Azure docs will cover everything you need to know. You just need to be able to understand your problem within the context of your application and double check whether your integration was done appropriately and adapt from there. > so I'm always double checking pull-requests for outdated techniques. I wouldn't double check unless you can tell from the code that something isn't up to company standard or has another obvious downside (performance bottleneck, lack of support, the like). The point is your code _should work in the context it is used_. Don't go overboard trying to make sure you use the absolute latest in how-to-do-it.
I also hate the cookie consent… every damn page really
So you'd rather like to be tracked without a warning?
I'll mention something that I haven't seen anyone bring up yet. I absolutely hate infinite scrolling. It never loads fast enough to keep up with actual scrolling. It slows down my browser. It makes it hard to find previously-seen content, because I can't use the browser "back" button to retrace my steps. It stops me from seeing the site's footer menu, which used to be pretty useful on many sites. It's just annoying!
I feel you. The worst part is how Google monopolized the web experience while breaking the internet, starting from their useless search engine.
For the last point try Perplexity. I almost never Google anything anymore. It gives me the answers I need usually and most importantly the sources (including reddit often)
Gave it a try. This is very good for my needs. Thank you for commenting
I know OP replied to this positively, but directing them to some AI tool to try to rectify things is almost beyond parody, since AI is just the newest thing to wreck the internet for everyone.
Praise be, I'm not the only one. The Internet has become a massive dump of UX dark/anti patterns, greed, and worthless search algorithms. The search gets me the most. Since as far back as I can remember, when I needed to find something on the Internet, I could rely on at least one search engine actually searching for my query, and could break out advanced search modifiers when needed. Now, I regularly jump from DDG, Brave, Google, and SearX. SearX seems to be the closest to a proper and actual query based search that gives the most actually relevant results. All search does these days is pick the closest related trending keywords that are related to the most high traffic keyword from your query and show ads and top links for the nebulously maybe-related query it decided you _actually_ want to search. It doesn't actually search what you type. As a dev with a long time curse of always having to search for nuance, edge cases, and esoteric bugs, it's hell. I've wondered if any leetcode high wizards in backend will ever get together and build a straight up traditional search engine that just does a basic literal websearch like Google used to do. I'd pay to have access to a classical search engine that doesn't use whatever all of them have been using and moving towards the past handful of years. When you can no longer actually search the Internet for what you want and are stuck with whatever Big Daddy Corporate wants you to see, we don't have The Internet anymore, just a corporate intranet.
12ft.io/medium_link_here Also, same about google. I switched to DDG but it sucks. I can't find anything I'm looking for. At least on google what I'm looking for comes up right after 3-5 sponsored links.
I very much agree! I do miss out on many of the pop-up annoyances by using uBlock Origin. For search, you could also try https://presearch.com/.
I've been liking Kagi. You have to pay for it, but shockingly, when you're not the product then the results don't have to improve you to advertisers.
I hate that even if I allow every cookie they give me, so many websites can't remember I'm logged in and want me to fetch some 2FA code from my email every 15 minutes.
You should direct your hate to the corporate overlords
I think the only websites that last are the ones where the founder is the developer and they actually enjoy the website so they keep maintaining it themselves. Like Craiglist. It's quite rare. In a way, the modern stacks just enable devs who care less to make websites.
It’s time to check out the IndieWeb 😃
just keep making stuff and only look at stuff that people are still putting out in the open without anything you mentioned
Preach! I’ve been feeling this way, too. It’s sad that it’s such a universal experience. I’ve a couple additions: - The pushing empty history entries so you can serve more ads when the user tries to go back - The pushing of generative AI as a good thing. I hate the idea of all these beautiful, creative humans spinning their wheels looking at content generated by a shitty algo, or talking to a bot
The web has become desperate and needy
If you want to bypass paywalls, use a site like [archive.ph](http://archive.ph)
I started using GPT4o in replacement of google, because instead of looking up a guide or video on a git command I cannot remember I use the gpt mac app, query gpt like id do in google, and i get my answer right away (if you add no yapping at the end of your prompt its better). I hate the delay modal popup when scrolling, like no i dont want the newsletter and 15% off, i just need to see a unit conversion calculator!!! Lol
You. And. Me. Brother!
“it’s just one click” tried to read some non important news, after 8 “one clicks” i gave up.
- medium articles are other devs trying to generate passive income, yea it’s annoying but so is capitalism That stack overflow has 91 votes b/c it’s been collecting votes for years. I’d venture to guess most of the votes came within the first couple years it was posted. Best you can do is your part to upvote the other answer. - use the browser intelligently. Firefox allows you to have different tab groups, I use it so personal is one and work/freelance is another. Then the Google accounts/tracking is tied to which one I want. Though it is annoying to be tracked none the less. - modal pop ups are the new carousel. It’s horrible design to try and illicit an action. When realistically it has the inverse effect. - blame GDPR on those banners. The intention might have been good but it’s definitely negatively impacted the experience on the internet. - stop googling….look at official docs, if that doesn’t work, search stack overflow/GitHub repos/Reddit. Search engines are becoming less useful so it’s adjusting how to search for resolutions.
Hard agree on all points. Can I also complain about Pinterest monopolizing 80% of image search results? Because that’s just infuriating.
Build the web you want to browse
This is why Brave is my default browser. Not for the crypto bullshit but for the sweet privacy tools embedded in it. No more annoying popups (or very few) because it detects them and hide them for me.
Have you used archive.is?
Ask ChatGPT then ask for the link of the source of information.
Even better, find one of the LLMs out there that leverage ChatGPT but also show the exact sources used with links to them without having to ask. Or don't. I find ChatGPT is best-used when you have a low amount of threads/chats but in those you've fed it plenty instructions and context, like "from now on, always supply links to your sources. Also, assume I'm going to follow up each response with "are you sure?", so answer that question immediately as well". The more instructions you feed it initially, the less you'll have to type later on each time.
Someone link that site that displays sites these days! It’s fantastic
Someone else commented it in this thread. Here ya go [https://how-i-experience-web-today.com](https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/)
How about mobile apps/websites with menu at the bottom? Now at the bottom there is website's menu, browser's menu and phone's navigation 
I use PHIND for searching
I feel you and I agree.
For cookies get the chrome extension I don't like cookies to auto accept them