The fake chats all seem to use the exact same image too. Apparently this one woman works for dozens of support sites if you were to believe she was real in the first place.
c/overemployed
Likely because those sites are built by the same provider.
I work for a car dealership and all of the other dealerships of the same brand in our region use the same family of providers, We -used- to have the faces of real employees pop up on the chat thing until they got too busy to handle it
now its the same stock photo of a person who likely doesnt even exist
You obviously also need an account for everything. This requirement is only communicated at checkout.
i always look for the ‘guest’ checkout option. some merchants have it, and i’ll choose them over somewhere like azn if the price is reasonably close.
Yeah but then they pull the old you need to enter everything to get the delivery costs. I understand they need my address to figure out what shipping would cost. But they also require my name, email and phonenumber before showing the shipment costs. So annoying, it makes comparing prices between shops impossible as some shops have higher prices and free shipping, where others have super low prices, but then fuck you on the shipping.
I love using rockauto for buying car parts for this reason. Basically the whole site works like it’s 2002, in a good way. Enter site. Click the items you need, with easily searchable indexes. Get multiple different brands and choices of same part. Go to checkout. Enter email and zip code you used last time. Enter CC info. Done.
That’s the point at which I assign a shop it’s very own email address and give it a bad phone number (not incorrect, unrouteable)
Honestly like 2/3 of this is handled by the right Firefox plugins but that JavaScript Shuffle bullshit drives me INSANE
MY PHONE IS AN HTML ONLY ZONE
Yeah… I tried that for a while. You don’t go very far on modern internet with JS disabled
Use noscript and whitelist urls as needed. Pages that dont need javascript dont get to use it, and for pages that do need it, you can make sure it only runs exactly what it needs to.
it is bad enough on some websites to make me wish I could just use a mail catalog thing
2025 Got to Online Store Type “toilet paper” in search bar. Instead of simply saying, “Sorry, we have no toilet paper” they expect you to scroll through 50,000 variations of “toilet seats”, “toilets”, “toilet brushes”, “paper”, “paper toilets”, “paper brushes” only to finally discover there are no entries for “toilet paper”, etc. and discover for yourself that they have no toilet paper.
In 2005 they would have just taken your data without asking.
Remember YouTube before ads? Seriously profit motive and infinite growth ruins everything. I want to play Luigi’s mansion every time google asks me to switch to an app or sign in when I google something. Like fuck off.
OP just has crap internet. It absolutely does not take noticeable amount of time for JavaScript to download.
I experience the “search box deselected after starting to type” problem on Amazon pretty much every time I use it, even if I have the page up for several minutes before starting to use it. Its like the search box.is specifically designed to fuck with me.
Multiple platforms, multiple browsers, it’s like they dont have anyone actually looking at their UX.
Sad part about this is it’s not comic hyperbole. It’s just literally an average online experience.
Not with a good ad and annoyances blocker. I reformatted my hard drive recently and the few pages I had to visit before installing that really opened my eyes to how bad it is, and how most people just live with it being. Hadn’t experienced much of any of these the past several years, and it has gotten a lot worse since I did. I’ve noticed that most people I know who are not that tech-savvy have stopped going to websites or even trying anything online other than a very small selection of apps, and now that makes total sense.
I came here to say this. Often times the pop ups are so bad that I just leave the site. Its almost never worth it
Sites so slow they actually crush the browser and overheats the phone. Reddit does that, the imgur site is cursed by performance issue and it’s always loading something. Sometimes I think they’re loading malicious code to mine crypto with my computational respurces for how bad it gets.
we have redlib tho
Old reddit too
ugly af
It’s what a phpBB / vBulletin forum would look like.
If you ask me, goated interface. All the information is there, fast to load.
I often decide I don’t actually need what I was about to purchase when I run into this, and I close out the browser tab and move on.
…I guess in some weird way, the poor experience benefits me!
I can hear it now. My kid’s generation is gonna be giving each other shit like "wait, you bought this off a website? Like a millennial?"
Ah, yes. I keep hearing more and more of people buying merchandise through TikTok among some other seemingly app-only interfaces.
I miss “old internet” :(
Two years ago I bought one pair of shoelaces from a website that looked like the old internet. It was fucking great.
Amazon redirecting you to the front page after you decline cookies is just amazingly stupid design.
It’s just literally an average online experience.
I am going to refute that claim as I don’t see monitors falling out of windows everyday.
And I am pretty sure people are doing “online” stuff.
This is the reason why I had a long and bloody fight regarding the homepage of the company I work at. And I won.
Management wanted a new homepage, marketing wanted the homepage to be - and this is a citation - “Emotional!!! And we want ENGAGEMENT!!!” (For context: We are building industrial machinery).
Marketing got an external offer (behind my back) and a mockup of the homepage based on React with animations and an dynamic background which turned every PC we looked at it with into a space heater. And they wanted to spend > 15 k € on it.
I - as something yanks would call a CTO - said no.
Everything turned quiet “Emotional!!!” for a couple of months, but in the end I won with the argument that we are building FUCKING BORING INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY, our costumers seldom change and if so, they are also from some big boring industrial company who already know us because we are in this business since Ugh, the first CEO chiseled the first iteration of our landmark product with a flintstone in 15000 BC.
The rebuild of the homepage resulted in something that is quiet nice looking… but that can also work perfectly fine in fucking DILLO!
Way back in 2001 when Adobe flash was the exciting new thing on the web, I was the network/firewall admin for the data-center hosting the company website. I didn’t get to argue about the site itself, since they had Microsoft in to do that. I did win the argument against the Microsoft engineers wanting to put the site outside the firewall for “performance”. Needless to say my ass was on the line if performance was impacted.
Sure enough, the big launch day arrives, the Superbowl adds run, and the complaints all start coming in about how terribly the site was performing. They beat the hell out of it in the lab, so they knew with absolute certainty that the firewall was to blame. Lots of higher-ups were suddenly aware that I existed, which is never a good thing for a network admin.
I dove into troubleshooting and had my answer in less than ten minutes. The front page was a monstrosity made entirely of flash that displayed nothing until the entire page loaded - graphics and all. That worked well enough on a high speed network but, back in 2001, most people at home were on dialup. A little quick math on the size of the download had it taking over 40 seconds to just see the front page.
The site got a really rapid rewrite, and I was off the hook.
“Works fine in Dillo” is a golden endorsement.
Yeah good call, idek your company, site, or industry, and I don’t need to. As someone who has to deal with the same shit from a customer perspective I can’t hate it enough.
Professional websites should all aspire to be like McMaster-Carr’s, “you know why you are here why should we bug you with bullshit, now what size roll pins did you need?” Literally one of my favorite websites of all time, no muss no fuss.
Too relatable
Also the thing you’re actually looking for will be on the 3rd result page, buried under a dozen vaguely related items that are the site ''recommendation ‘’ even though you typed the exact reference of the thing you were looking for.
Oh, and those filters on the side? Forget it, they’ll remove results you might actually care to view
Honestly that EU cookie legislation does more harm than good.
how??? I mean, really now? How does the GDPR cause harm? I mean, it harms the greedy marketing corporations and data farmings, but that’s good.
Yeah. Although I don’t get why they can’t just not use cookies?
No, this is malicious compliance bullshit. About as clever as a three year old asking if dolly can have a sweetie instead
No, it forces people to actively take a stand about the surveillance and exploitation of your data. Without it those things just happens automatically (they still do of course, but not in the form of cookies at least).
Anyway, get the consent-o-matic extension for your browser, it seriously lessens the annoyance, although companies are beginning to take notice of it and are making attempts at circumventing it.
Missed the part where
Shipping is 6.95 Close tab Sigh, open amazon
Amazon price mysteriously $7 higher
It’s not though. They’re always the cheapest even before shipping.
Depends if it’s sold by Amazon who stuffed 90000 units in their own warehouse or if it’s just sold through amazon by the same vendor. I’ve seen all three prices on the same item all still on amazon.
Oh yeah you definitely can find price variations but I can’t recall ever finding a better price not on Amazon except maybe getting electronic components off eBay. Those were always a gamble if they’d ever arrive or not though.
I got a way better deal on a weird but awesome pillow by not buying it on Amazon and had the same experience overall. They had a real sale vs a flat percent on the Amazon store.
I will pay 6.95 to not order from Amaozn, fuck 'em
I like that I’m financially comfortable enough to pay for shipping and not give Bezos a cent.
Amazon offering free shipping is a large part of why the parcel industry became a hellhole of semi-illegal subcontractors even here in Germany where labour laws exist.
Open browser
Browser demands updates
All extensions update simultaneously. Each opens its own tab to proudly announce bug fixes for bugs you never noticed.
Close ten tabs you didn’t open
Miss one. It autoplays a video ad.
Type in search bar. Autocomplete offers suggestions that are 5 years old, NSFW, or both.
Search for a product. Top results: Ads. Sidebar: Ads. Bottom: Ads. An actual organic result is wedged between an ad and a newsletter signup modal.
Click real-looking result. Redirected to a shady dropshipper site.
Back button doesn’t work. It reloads the same scam page five times. You lose the original tab somewhere in a pile of redirects.
Click Amazon link. It’s a new seller with the business name “USB_Cable_Amazon_Partner_Official.” 13,000 reviews. All 5 stars.
Try to read reviews. Most are for the wrong product. Many are AI-generated gibberish. The rest complain about shipping.
Add to cart. You are not logged in.
Log in.
CAPTCHA challenge: Pick all the traffic lights. Traffic lights are 1 pixel wide. One is technically a lamppost. Verification failed.
2 factor authentication push. By the time you get the authenticator open, the session expired. Start over.
Try to close browser. Are you sure you want to close 37 tabs?”
Yes. It crashes.
Reopens all 37 tabs next launch.
Give up and use your phone
4 popups, fingerprint required, and every link jumps when the page loads because of delayed ad banners.
App store ad appears for the site you’re already on
Clicking “x” opens the ad anyway.
You close the phone browser
Go outside
Get a push notification: “You left items in your cart.”
I once responded to one of those “you have items in your cart” emails that I received like a mere half hour after finishing browsing with a “fuck off”, and a short while later somebody responded and said some things and ended with “same to you too”
I immediately replied and said oh wow a real person replied, don’t take it personally, it was directed at the automatic message.
they started berating me and telling me that I should just unsubscribe if I don’t want the emails (that I never fucking subscribed to in the first place???), and then deleted my account and banned me from the store, it seems. I tried to buy something over half a year later, but it was declined without reason, and support told me it was “flagged for fraud” and didn’t elaborate
Oh fuck them
You missed scroll hijacking because reinventing how things move on the screen is important for some reason?
Because phones. The reason behind fucking up scrolling is phones. Swipe upwards once and get the next pretty animated scrolling to the precise place, wooo!
One trick for the “back button doesn’t work” is to right click it and select the page you want to go back to from that list.
Though I do wish back buttons worked on clicks rather than loads or anything a site can override with javascript. I hate the sites that treat scrolling to the next article as a new page. It trains me to not scroll to the next one, even if it looks interesting, because they fuck with my browser like that (even though I can work around it, fuck them for the attempt).
The other day I found one that I’m pretty sure somehow removed the earlier entries from the back button list.
Like removed them removed them or just filled it up with spam “clicks”?
Second one is annoying and shouldn’t be possible but first one is concerning and really shouldn’t be possible. Makes me wonder if there’s a way to access the links in the back list via js. What browser btw?
First one, and Firefox.
I also hate how some sites block middle mouse clicks or ctrl+click, which opens a new tab. So I’m forced to follow the stupid link then either middle click the back button, or right click back - open in new tab
This should be etched into gold as a perfect description of life in 2025.
I think it’s interesting that in 2005, the internet had a ton of popups and scammy ads that told you “you just won a free iPod!” and everyone knew that was a thing. There was even a gag about it in Scary Movie 3 (2003):
Yet you don’t hear people complain about that as much today. It’s like so much of the internet has been cordoned off into walled gardens that most users don’t see pages out in the open.
I read an interesting article about that: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/ads/
Those popups were so prolific that all browser developers responded by implementing popup blockers.
Which kind of led to the absolute mess of banner ads (and the adblockers created in response) that we still have today. I dare you to deactivate your adblocker on any of the major (commercial) news sites.
I also recall not a single one of those builtin popup blockers working as intended, random popups would show up anyway. Hell, that feature still leads to annoyances when a site actually needs to open a new window (happens with some internal systems being used where I work)
I’m sorry, I can’t read this.
Can someone put it in greentext?
