Everything Stupid about the Internet

2022-01-01

Format

Everything Stupid about the Internet

Domain: internet.sucks

Small paragraphs about each

Add rating scale for how stupid you have to be to fall for this:

BD - Brain Dead. [brief description:......] BR - Boneheaded Rube [brief description:......] AP - Average Punter DR - Digital Revocation. You shouldn’t be allowed to have a computer Add rating scale for how irritating this is:

1 2 3 4

1990s

The good: We were years away from having unwashed swarms of humanity descending on the Internet to “make money from blogging”.

• Dancing baby
• Dancing scantily clad
• You are 1 millionth customer
• ""
• Links that turned purple
• Having to share a computer and panic when you saw purple links that showed they'd been clicked

2000s

The Good: The web is still relatively new, so the options to irritate you are still limited. Streaming video can be encapsulated by this iconic image [Real Player buffering]. Your phone can’t connect to the Internet unless you’re a Blackberry-wielding bigwig, and even if you are, the mobile internet looks like this [insert image of WAP site].

The bad:

every computer can run Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash, and designers know how much of a sucker you are for loud, disruptive web experiences.

Plus, we are in the Wild West era of programmatic advertising CMSs (Wordpress, Joomla) have arrived and we are the starting point of the web beginning to look like an identikit heap of ugly page templates, useless “category” tags and a web experience that feels like it was generated by a machine.

• Prevent right click on page, show !message about content being copyrighted
• Loud emoticon pack ads
• Limewire/Ares/Kazaa/Frostwire - fake MP3s
• Free iPod ads
• Free anti-malware ads
• “Hot girls in your area want to meet you”, fake chat windows
• Dickheads in message boards sending you those LMGTFY links
• “One weird trick”, “Doctors hate him”, “Mortgage rates in {%locale%} are falling!
• pre-Panda algorthim, random sites filled with copied content, or senseless machine-generated sentences. Look up apartment design websites
• Multi-page slideshows
• Work from home ads

2010s

The Good:

The Bad: Zero-click searches. Net worth Forbes articles being takas gospel..linkrd tincreasung stupiduty of abg population.oen ‘Viral videos’ are now anything you can claim to have ‘broken the internet’. At least in the mid-2000s viral vids “felt” viral, like Star Wars kid, “Charlie bit my finger”, “Chocolate rain”

Youtube vids:

Prank fails

Are you a teenager or adult who economic prospects rely entirely on being a dancing monkey for an audience of 12 year olds? You may be eligible for an exciting career as a Youtuber! [insert Jez dancing image]

Drift customer service “messenger” style popups

Want to Receive notifications????? Pushcrew

Autoplaying videos

Social Share Buttons - because adcorps think you’re too much of a moron to copy and paste, so they’ve helpfully added this JS monstrosity to their website, which, totally by coincidence, drops invisible tracking pixels so they know what other sites you visit

Those goddamn recipe websites

• Mobile Games: [clash of clans] [angry birds] [candy crush]
• Starting tweeets with “BREAKING:” for something that isn’t breaking to anybody ever
• Zergnet/Outbrain/Taboola
• Spotify’s annoying ads
• Paywalls everywhere, even on Medium.com
• Snarky Twitter bios
• Medium.com
• Infinite Scrolling
• Recommendation algorithms (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix)
• SEO optimized titles (Ultimate guide for fat loss for absolute beginners 2019”)
• Listicles
• Headphone needs app to connect
• Youtube comments
• Reaction Videos
• Pocket Articles (see below)
• Self-promotion, digital nomads, the grind, influencer (Self-improvement article as lead-gen for shitty ebook), shitty articles on Entrepreneur, Forbes and Medium
• Look up decline of forbes.com
• I studied morning habits of millionaires. Here’s what I learned. This is absolutely sign up for my udemy course about how to be a millionaire!
• “Do this ONE thing to be successful in 2019”
• Chatbots aka “Conversational Commerce” (Slack, FB, etc)
• Full page modals that launch the second you open the site
• Google showing machine-generated search results
• Pinterest sign in to view more (no, I just need to find a pic, not click on a Pinterest thumbnail that’s 200px wide, only to take me to a login screen. This companyis worth $19bn btw
• “Millenial-friendly language” (emojis, “we just can’t”, “rockstar”, “this is everything”); use themuse.com career training example
• Recaptcha computer vision training; hope that pirated ebook download was worth it!
• Trying to modify your FB News Sidebar, Twitter Promoted ads or Pocket recommendations,
• Amazon Netflix autocomplete for shows they dont have

Why yes I do want to get notifications in my browser

It's always the most cancerous websites throwing these in your face, too.

Download our App! (Wayfair)

Your mobile website works fine. Stop trying to get me to download your app. It's not going to happen! There are no cool features that are 'app-only'. Except for you, I guess. I bet you'd love it if I handed you my location data, and notification permissions so you could spam me at all hours of the day to tell me some restaurant I don't give a shit about is offering 5% off for a limited time.

Podcast-deluged hellscape

- Podcasts - if you ever wanted to listen to your friend and his/her guest rambling inarticulately about a topic you don’t care about, you’re in luck! Recording equipment is cheap and begging for listeners is no longer gauche

YouTube Home Page (when you haven't signed in)

Just horrifying

Clickbait and Exaggerated Faces on Video Thumbnails

No one in the history of internet content provision has ever been this excited to tell you about the benefits of Bitcoin. The mouth-agape thumbnail is crucial to achieving this.

Full Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MyUnMONR0FUd5vdLQZlqot7y5UE8hrhTSPKMP_rEIU0/edit