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How I Experience Web Today

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Re: How I Experience Web Today

#221

Post by don-code »

leavenotracks wrote: post #82

So 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…

It's seemingly becoming harder to have an "experience" on the Web, and I find myself turning away from progressively more sources as a result.

In the 2000s, running with an ad blocker was a near surefire way to speed up loading a page without any functional issues cropping up - the ad blocking tech even then was _good_.

Then came paywalls - pay for this content, or you won't see it. I suppose, then, I won't see the content.

Then came JavaScript frameworks in the 2010s - ads weren't assets anymore, they were actually part of the content. But for the most part, the Web still worked without JavaScript, and many sites (for what reason, I still don't totally understand) would gracefully fall back to presenting "just the content" if JavaScript was disabled. So I traded an ad blocker for NoScript, turning the lot of it off instead. Some sites need a minimal amount of JS to function, which I'll allow (first-party and CDNs like `jsdelivr`). But if you require JS from stripe.com, I suppose I also won't see then content.

But eventually those JavaScript frameworks became bold - displaying partial content, or no content at all, became the fallback. I count the "Continue reading" button among these (and I get why - tracking who actually read the article must be vastly more lucrative than counting pageviews), though some pages are so bold as to display _nothing_ but the "You need to enable JavaScript" text itself.

Most recently, I've noticed a new tactic: setting a CSS "opacity: 0;" on the page, then removing it with JS, even when JS is not required to load the page. Removing the rule with dev tools shows the entire page. I can only assume this is a way to make sure the page doesn't become visible until all of the content is loaded, but again, the content includes the ads, upsells, and otherwise.

Thankfully I've logged into Hacker News and posted this comment without JavaScript enabled. I wonder how long I'll be able to do that.

Re: How I Experience Web Today

#222

Post by abraxas »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #208
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My god, the web has become so garbage that we're going back to web directories...

Maybe we should have never left. It's Google search and their advertising that destroyed the web we all used to enjoy.

This is not the case. At least it wasn't the case in the late nineties and early naughts. The web then was full of banner and popup and pop under ads (punch the monkey, remember?). Google was a breath of fresh air then with a clean site and text only ads. No question they strayed from that early vision but they are still far from the worst offenders.

Re: How I Experience Web Today

#223

Post by inetknght »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #199
asdff wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone needs to just scrape the web for light weight websites then offer a search engine just for these sites. Rid the corruption from the web please.

But would anyone pay for it? Basically a relatively closed and essentially almost manually curated web ring seems like it'd offer a lot of value, but who pays? Maybe it could work if you charge users a super small base fee (let's say $1/month), and charge commercial sites that want to be listed in certain verticals?

> But would anyone pay for it?

Content owners' greed is ruining the web. Build websites without any intention of monetary gain and you'll find a much better experience in the web.

Re: How I Experience Web Today

#224

Post by inetknght »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #205
arp242 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I find that disabling JavaScript often helps. I have it enabled by default, but disable it in uBlock on a per-site basis if some crap pops up. A lot of the times that fixes things. For example for some reason the BBC thinks it's helpful to display a big fat "Register for an account t…

I tried disabling Javascript by default, but there are too many important sites that require it. My browser's "disable javascript" extension can disable on a per-domain basis, but really what I'd like is on a per-URL-pattern basis, so that is disabled but not . Sometimes disabling scripts is not enough, so I also disable CSS. This makes images huge at the top of the page (navigation icons, etc.). So, then I disable i…

I went a few years liking firefox's reader mode. But it's worth noting that reader mode does _not_ disable javascript.

Re: How I Experience Web Today

#225

Post by gunapologist99 »

abraxas wrote: post #222
matheusmoreira wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should have never left. It's Google search and their advertising that destroyed the web we all used to enjoy.

This is not the case. At least it wasn't the case in the late nineties and early naughts. The web then was full of banner and popup and pop under ads (punch the monkey, remember?). Google was a breath of fresh air then with a clean site and text only ads. No question they strayed from that early vision but they are still far from the worst offenders.

Exactly. After they bought Doubleclick and promised they wouldn't merge the two third-party cookies and the associated data, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. No display advertising ever again!

And the web smelled like roses ever since.

Re: How I Experience Web Today

#226

Post by eyelidlessness »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #199
asdff wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone needs to just scrape the web for light weight websites then offer a search engine just for these sites. Rid the corruption from the web please.

But would anyone pay for it? Basically a relatively closed and essentially almost manually curated web ring seems like it'd offer a lot of value, but who pays? Maybe it could work if you charge users a super small base fee (let's say $1/month), and charge commercial sites that want to be listed in certain verticals?

Curated = the next round of “help I’m being censored”.html

Re: How I Experience Web Today

#227

Post by SilasX »

herodotus wrote: post #19

Brilliant! Thank you for doing this! I wish I could send the link to almost every organization whose web sites I have had to endure. If you had offered me a rating pop-up, you would have been the first one I ever use (and gave 5 stars to). Now do one for those horrible CRM messages "Thank you for XXXX. You are very important to us at YYY. Please click here to give us important feedback on your experience." After I bo…

>Thank you for doing this! I wish I could send the link to almost every organization whose web sites I have had to endure.

Yeah I almost wonder how many of the people responsible for the final UX actually experienced it themselves. Not some debug or dev mode, but what the end user actually deals with. Would they tolerate it? Then how does this stuff persist?

Re: How I Experience Web Today

#228

Post by reesporte »

leavenotracks wrote: post #82

So 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…

https://wiby.me/ is a cool search engine for classic internet sites you might like

it's not a curated list, but there is a "surprise me" button

Re: How I Experience Web Today

#229

Post by jb_s »

handrous wrote: post #10

This 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.

In real life, the news article is actually a PR release written entirely by a PR company and fed to some low-level staffer (because actual journalism is expensive and nobody can even tell that this is happening)

Re: How I Experience Web Today

#230

Post by kirse »

rchaud wrote: post #162
cutler wrote: post #61

In the early 2000s there was a site usability movement centred around the work of Jakob Nielsen and http://useit.com . Fortune 500s were paying him huge sums to have extraneous crap removed from their home pages and just for a while sanity and minimalism ruled. Then Web 2.0 arrived.

Web 2.0 included cool stuff like Flash. The real culprit here is Google AdSense. A few sites made a ton of money, and then it became the entire business model for "new media" companies that in turn loaded up search results with SEO-optimized listicle garbage.

I'd argue the real culprit is the "maximize shareholder value" mantra. Nothing is off limits in the Excel-sheet optimization game and room for experimentation or creativity is often axed in favor of minimizing risk and extracting more pennies for the cash pile.

We'll break out of it eventually though. People are tiring of their walled technology gardens.

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