The Internet Is Unusable

Image: Badly edited by author

I think we've reached the point where the Internet—once a tool that offered us the entire world of information at our fingertips—is now completely unusable.

The root cause is adverting, and it's gotten so bad it's being called the 'adpocalypse.'

Almost every website I go on now is bursting at the digital seams with adverts. There are banners along the top, bottom, and down each side of the page, often animated to maximize distraction. Websites use parallax scrolling so they can add an entire layer of adverts that sits below what you're reading, popping in and out as you scroll. We get the random pop-up one's that interrupt you and then make you wait a designated amount of seconds before you can click away or try to prompt you to add your email address for a shitty PDF download of some bullshit productivity hacks. We get blasted with ads begging us to click, telling us we're "missing out" or that we "won't see this deal ever again," a practice known as Confirmshaming. There are the infuriating ones that open the App Store in a separate window. The other day, I reached a whole new level of ad rage — I encountered a full-screen video ad that started playing automatically and offered me no way of escaping. There was literally no option to exit it or go back to what I was reading. It seemed like the tipping point. All I could do was lose my temper, consider destroying my laptop, and close the website tab.

And that's the way most Internet pages are now – an awful, soul-destroying and value-less experience. Years back, when I was browsing the web, I loved clicking on websites and just seeing how they looked: cool branding, interesting layouts, and unique UX design. It seemed sites were created with intention; they tried to deliver whatever information or service they offered through the best experience possible. Now? Most websites are designed to maximize advertising space. Advertising bucks bankroll most of Big Tech, and as such, everything has been optimized to juice those dollars. The practice has bled into every other connect facet of the Internet experience: search engines, apps, email services, and social media. Everything is stuffed full of ads — which, in most cases, are shitty anyways — and worse, the experience of using the Internet has been tailored to ensure we see these adverts as much as possible.

It's advert engagement metrics over user experience.

They told us that subscriptions were the answer. Until they decided to try throwing adverts into them as well — looking at you, streaming services — and like a bunch of chumps, we ate that shit up. Now it's the norm. These days, we pay to see advertising. It won't be long before this practice leaks into media, news and just about every other facet of the Internet. And really, subscriptions aren't the answer because only a fraction of the Internet-using population can afford to subscribe to every website they want to use, and so many, like me, find most of their Internet experience is constantly interrupted by paywalls. Another pop-up ad that slowly erodes my will to live. Another half-answer is ad blockers — thank you for your noble work — or browsers that hide ads. But both are fighting an uphill battle; they have smaller war chests than their enemies, and big players like YouTube, Meta and Google will fight nasty to get that advertising revenue.

The real answer would be to fix the Internet experience. To regulate how many ads there are, how often they appear, how easy it is to close them, put laws in place to stop them tracking us from page to page, to control how much of page is advertising versus content, for search engines to penalize sites that only exist to suck in ad revenues.

But we know that all of that is unlikely.

How we use the Internet has changed. We don't browse for an hour or two anymore; we live on the damn thing, and that has made every pixel on every screen valuable beyond belief, causing advertising to become more intrusive and at an increasing scale. The shift to digital also means almost every company is an advertising company whether they admit it or not. For example, despite being a car-hailing app, Uber makes over $1 billion a year in advertising revenue. It's become a fundamental part of most companies' bank sheets, and once they become dependant on that income, there's no going back.

I've written before that I kind of hate the Internet now. I yearn for the way it was even 10 years ago, back when it was still a utility that served to be useful and entertaining. These days, it's just a funnel to get us, the online herd, plugged into the machine so we can be blasted with an advertising assault on the eyes.

In pursuit of marketing dollars, increasing stock prices and filling shareholder wallets, it's been broken beyond repair.