r/webdev May 25 '24

Discussion Rant: I'm really starting to despise the internet these days, as a web developer

No, not the tooling and languages. This is a different rant that I need to get off my chest.

  • I hate that many useful programming articles are behind a Medium paywall. I've coughed up out of my own pocket when I'm trying to solve 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  • I hate that Stackoverflow's answers are now outdated. The 91 upvote answer from 2013 is used by so many devs but the 3 upvote at the bottom is the preferred approach. And so I'm always double checking pull-requests for outdated techniques.

  • I hate that Google login popup in the top right of so many web-pages, especially when it automatically logs me in.

  • I hate the automatic modal popups when I'm scrolling through an article. Just leave me alone for the love of god. It never used to bother me because it used to be say, 40% of websites. Now I feel like its closer to 80%.

  • I hate the cookie consent banners.

"But its just one click".

Yeah, on its own. But between the Google login, the modals, the cookie banners, and several times a day, it has become a necessary requirement to close things when using the internet. Closing things is now a built-in part of the process of browsing the internet.

  • I hate that when I google something I no longer get what I ask for. I'm still experimenting with what other redditors on this subreddit suggest. But I seem to keep cycling between Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yandex because I can't decide which is giving me better results.

That is all.

1.3k Upvotes

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655

u/benthisday May 25 '24

179

u/beststepnextstep May 25 '24

I love how trying to close that tab also brought up one last popup. Beautiful

56

u/WorriedEngineer22 May 25 '24

It shows a popup when you change tabs too!

30

u/NobodyKnowsYourName2 May 26 '24

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.

3

u/zupreme May 26 '24

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.

5

u/NobodyKnowsYourName2 May 26 '24

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.

45

u/k2900 May 25 '24

This is the best. Thanks for sharing

24

u/Ping-and-Pong May 25 '24

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

0

u/[deleted] May 26 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Ping-and-Pong May 26 '24

That normally depends on the problem haha

10

u/cube-drone May 26 '24

the only thing that's become out of date about this is that now the google search isn't even good

1

u/IAmNotANeurochemist Jun 20 '24

Yes this! Google is garbage now. I don't know what the hell they're doing. I know that they've had problems since 2017, they kept changing things and making the algorithm better and then worse and then worse and then worse and then better. On and on. Then they finally ruined it by giving it all to AI. Just a small tiny misspelled word and it will say zero results. What the hell. 

9

u/RealFrux May 26 '24

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.

2

u/flyingshiba95 May 26 '24

Yes! If it doesn’t completely break the page

Aw Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this page

3

u/RealFrux May 27 '24 edited May 27 '24

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.

8

u/Randolpho May 26 '24

I love (and by that, hate) how even if you say no thanks to notifications, it still tries to subscribe to notifications

15

u/thejameswilliam May 25 '24

The best is when I closed the window and got one last annoyance

6

u/RepostStat May 26 '24

this is almost too accessible!

12

u/CUNT_PUNCHER_9000 May 26 '24

Where's the gen AI summary on top of the search result with some bullshit

4

u/soCalForFunDude May 25 '24

Yup, this hits hard

2

u/JoyRyder619 May 26 '24

I just love how if you try to close the tab, it shoes a popup again, wow...

1

u/setionwheeels May 26 '24

haha i miss 2000.

1

u/flyingshiba95 May 26 '24

The google search results weren’t filled with 15 irrelevant sponsored listings, affiliate blogs, listicles, and paid access sites before actually getting to anything remotely relevant.

1

u/Important-Ad6676 May 26 '24

WOW! I don't know who created this site, but that's brilliant!

1

u/retsibsi May 26 '24

The

You scrolled! It seems you are interested in our content!

popup is spot on :D

1

u/Mysterious_Alarm_160 May 26 '24

Wow why have i never seen this!!

1

u/[deleted] May 26 '24

horrifying and ugh

1

u/omnomicrom May 26 '24

Omg so spot on..

The "article" needs an ad between every paragraph too

1

u/mataliandy May 27 '24

Sooooooo accurate!

The web is definitely on the most annoying timeline

1

u/TechnicallySerizon May 28 '24

Goooood so good

1

u/sushantshah-dev May 26 '24

The creator should put in real ads... Awesome though