And this is why I do much of my browsing in lynx...
How I Experience Web Today
181–190 of 326 posts
Re: How I Experience Web Today
#182This is less-bad than the real thing. [EDIT] I think I figured out the main difference: this lets me imagine that more than 10% of the "content" isn't also SEO garbage, and has actual value. [EDIT AGAIN] What it really needs is a giant sticky header that hides when scrolling down but pops up the second you scroll up at all , obscuring all the stuff you were scrolling up to see.
Those headers are a biscuit(<-euphemism).
Re: How I Experience Web Today
#183Very bitter and to the point. I regularly wonder, do the people who want features like these installed — feedback form, "support chat" windows of various degrees of fakeness, subscription offer popups jumping in your face, and other absolutely baffling obstacles — really use their own web sites? Have they ever had to?
A website is a tool, a means to an end. The purpose of chat popups or feedback forms is to further a business goal, not to increase the website's usability.
I had a support chat on my business website for a long time; the "business goal" I wanted to further was to make it very easy for people to talk to me, ask questions, etc. I helped out a lot of people with very short turnaround times.
I removed it mostly because it takes a lot of effort to maintain a good level of responsiveness on these kind of things unless you have a dedicated support team.
Some of these support chat popups are a bit too in-your-face, but it sure beats hunting down some email address somewhere.
Re: How I Experience Web Today
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Deep linking to apps is a solved area. Reddit completely drops the ball on this, and has for years. Their engineering is a complete shambles. The only reason they survive is their market share, not for any reason of 'good experience'
I'm almost tempted to apply for a job at Reddit to see why their engineering is such omnishambles. It's impressive in a way. The only good thing I have to say about it is that they're committed to keeping old.reddit.com alive indefinitely.
Because the team that built old.reddit.com has long since left? And now this is the only artifact they have from an era of decent engineering?
Re: How I Experience Web Today
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Decent programmers know how to deeplink into apps, it's completely possible.
That includes the vendor of my third-party Reddit app (Now for Reddit). If I tap a Reddit link from a page of search results, the link opens in the app. It's shocking that the devs of the official app don't even bother to do even this bare minimum.
Reddit is by far and away the most mismanaged site with hundreds of millions of users. I wonder what the internal politics are like. The leaks have consistently been pretty bad.
Re: How I Experience Web Today
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
- Social Share buttons served by a third party script loaded with trackers. Bonus points if they include the usually pathetic number of likes and retweets.
There are two of those (or at least, representations), for Twitter and Facebook. Could use another few dozen, just for luck. (A few years ago I started collecting screenshots of link litter. I think the max was about a dozen links, though most sites seem to keep it to 3--5.)
There are old plugins (that are still on a lot of sites) with buttons for Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Digg(!) and other dead networks.
Re: How I Experience Web Today
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing on the internet is free and has never been. If it appears free that's because somebody pays for it with time, money, hardware, or lost opportunities.
Okay, but that's true of everything. The spirit of the question is, why is the web especially egregious?
Probably, because several factors have conflated and reinforce each other:
1) Historically, everything on the web used to be "free" and this is still an implicit assumption for internet users.
2) Payments are not part of the HTTP protocol; micropayments never materialized
3) The web is too good for advertisers - targeting, reach, scalability are unmatched compared to off-line advertisement. This supports p.1 above and hinders p.2.
It's a vicious circle.
Re: How I Experience Web Today
#188So true, so sad. These days, when even a few hurdles of crap present themselves, I often just leave. I don’t care what the site has to say or sell me. Whenever I come across a site that just displays content immediately, it fills me with joy. Usually it’s some obscure personal or academic site, but for a moment I feel like I’ve found a gem in the desert and I browse happily for a while…then I promptly add to a list o…
> I long for a curated list of such sites. I don't know if this is good news but I started doing this a while back and found so many sites that it was futile to keep them in one list. These days I tend to keep them in contextual notes or databases. Also many of them fail to pass one or two annoyance tests, but I find that they're worth it anyway. For example they are not mobile friendly in some minor way, like the to…
My god, the web has become so garbage that we're going back to web directories...
Re: How I Experience Web Today
#189So true, so sad. These days, when even a few hurdles of crap present themselves, I often just leave. I don’t care what the site has to say or sell me. Whenever I come across a site that just displays content immediately, it fills me with joy. Usually it’s some obscure personal or academic site, but for a moment I feel like I’ve found a gem in the desert and I browse happily for a while…then I promptly add to a list o…
I'm still amazed that https://gail.com/ is still just a pleasant personal website that reminds me of the early days of the web...
The HTML is delightfully retro,
Q: Interested in selling gail.com?
A: Sorry, no.Re: How I Experience Web Today
#190Very bitter and to the point. I regularly wonder, do the people who want features like these installed — feedback form, "support chat" windows of various degrees of fakeness, subscription offer popups jumping in your face, and other absolutely baffling obstacles — really use their own web sites? Have they ever had to?
Hmm, when I was working on one of these customer facing websites the support popup was quite literally directly connected to me (very small company) until we integrated it with the real support system (still just me and one or two other people).