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.
Agreed. Example: I loved using recipe sites, especially ones that archived food magazines I enjoyed. Now I'm back to print cookbooks! You can't read the recipes with pop up ads covering them, videos playing. No thanks!
Sadly my favorite food magazines are gone now too. Glad I didn't get rid of my cookbooks!
I feel exactly the same about recipe sites!! I don’t even last 3 seconds on there.. I actually started an ad-free recipe blog last year out of principle but have since closed it down
I, too, find myself reaching for my cookbooks because online is so distracting with pop ups. While I was out of the house this weekend, my husband took to baking an apple pie -- He told me he sat down with our The Joy of Cooking, and took the time to read all about different types of dough, tips, etc. and baked the most delicious pie he has ever made. Definitely a different experience than he would have had if he simply searched apple pie and clicked on a website for the recipe.
Recipe sites are a perfect example of how bad it's gotten – completely unusable, filled with adverts and the author's full life story so they can stuff it with keywords and rank in Google. But, in doing so, it fails to do what it's meant to... give us a damn recipe!
The (not so) funny thing is, if you're old like me, you remember the late 90s when the web was ruined the first time by popup ads. Back then, in pre-browser tab and pre-CSS days, the issue was full instances of the browser window that would start opening, each containing more ads, and then when you tried to close those, more browsers would open. This was known as "popup hell" and was only finally tamed when newer browsers implemented pop-up blockers and Javascript was standardized and containerized and tamed.
Now it seems we're right back there, but it's harder to stop because the new ads and overlays are just HTML elements within a web page, and those can't always be easily distinguished from core site elements. This time the solution must be social, not technical, I think.
The real tragedy is that corporate social media has become such a nightmare that we desperately need to get back to a time when individuals had their own websites and blogs where they controlled and owned their own content. Interesting web page designs died when mobile became the norm: there just isn't room on a phone screen to do cool things, and most sites are responsive so they work on phone and desktop.
Now a generation of people have been trained to hate the web because of all that popup ad-centric nonsense, and many only ever interact online through FB or Instagram or other social media. Bad actors really have ruined everything about the online experience, top to bottom.
Agreed. One of my favorite running websites, Marathon Handbook, is almost unusable now because of ads. I literally get a pop up that says it’s using too much memory.
Scrolling on the website is a mess as well. It’s all laggy and constantly skips to the bottom of pages now. It’s a little better when I use it with reader mode in safari but it’s still a mess. It’s upsetting how so many websites have become this way because I like going on my favorite blogs and reading my favorite newsletters.
I saw another comment about recipe websites and those are even worse. I immediately export recipes using paprika now and read them there.
"I literally get a pop up that says it’s using too much memory" – can't think of a way to summarise it better, and the distinct lack of care for user and user experience.
An irony is the shitty browsing experience will push more people to use AI programs to get info.
Consumers/users deserve some criticism here too. We have learned to stuff ourselves with unlimited content and subsidised services . Imagine a world where we pay for discrete bits of content - I’m not sold the blockchain micropayment narrative is useful but there is a middle ground somewhere and we’ll only move toward it if users become more discerning. I’ll let others decide how cynical to be on the likelihood of that.
I thought about writing that – that the worse it gets, the more people will turn to ChatGPT etc – but they are also shit (and will soon enough contain ads). It's maybe just that everything is shit, and we'll need to wait till the whole thing collapses to make something better.
I really want to be positive and hopeful we can do better.
My long term view is the web bifurcates into utter shit worse than today, filled with ads/malware/tracking/gen AI slop/bots/etc & the other side is a based on secure, discrete and authentic data. I haven’t figured what will break the camels back tho
Design can be used to inflict deception and annoyance, or to make the web usable. Unfortunately, it's more the former these days, as you rightly pointed out.
Seriously: I had flashbacks, because this is where print was 25 years ago. Everyone getting nostalgic for the Golden Age of Magazines in the late 1990s forgets (or was too young to remember) when a magazine, weekly newspaper, or daily newspaper was absolutely HUGE…and most of that weight and volume came from two-thirds to three-quarters of the page count being ads, mostly for brands that were less worried about whether anybody actually saw the damn thing and more about the tax writeoff for multipage full-color bulldada. (Again, everyone forgets, but I track the end of the Golden Age of Alternative Print to the ban on tobacco ads: I had several editors admit that for all of the complaints from readers about incessant cigarette ads, those ads were the only things keeping a lot of regional weeklies and monthlies going.) Considering the ongoing conversations about who the hell is actually making money off online ads, it’s going to get really ugly when they pull their money out of Web advertising and focus on their latest scam.
Yup, great example! Once ad revenue is a company's lifeblood, they're hooked and there's no going back. And so begins the downward spiral of more ads, more money, more ads, more money – and this is always detrimental to the user experience
It’s not as much ads that bother me but the quantity of ads that ruin a websites performance that bothers me. Some articles I can’t even scroll through because of all the ads
I hear you. There’s even the print parallel: “Continued on Page X” notices where the continuation would be about two column inches at the bottom of a page, or ad inserts with their own separate page count that were put in off-center so that a reader trying to read the cover story would instead flail around in the insert. EVERYTHING seems to be going back to the beginning of 2000, not in a craving for a simpler time, but because “this worked on everybody BACK THEN…”
Everything is either an advertisement itself or is bombarded by ads. Even subscription services are pushing advertisements. We are witnessing the slow burn death. It's just a matter of how long it will take for the candle to go out.
Hi Stephen, I agree. This is why I can't spend too much time on my phone browsing the internet. I need a larger screen to hope to be able to read content among all the ads. And all those extra steps and verification for everything (looking at you substack)... The enshittification of all products in late stage capitalism reached the internet. I remember the early internet, the creativity, the magic. Now everything looks the same, and AI rob us of the hunt for great site (assuming it gives us correct answer). This is why I quit Google search and Chrome. Duck Duck Go and Firefox provide a better experience.
PS. just a thought. I left this tab inactive for a few minutes, and there was a full page ad asking me to subscribe to your newsletter. It is kind of ironic, don't you think?
The only way to win is to not play the game. But that’s good news: in the end, as we all go offline in disgust, we end up winning our very lives back. We will look back in amazement and shame over what we put into the hands of ourselves amd our children.
hi stephen. i agree with the sentiment here. but what's the alternate for creators to make money? if no ads and affiliate marketing? people don't want paywalled content too
It's been bad for a while, but it seems to have gotten worse lately. YouTube is especially bad, and its algorithms seem to be broken. In the last month or so, it's been showing me, a vegan, videos about the carnivore diet, sprinkled with endless ads for cheese. I tried blocking those ads, and YouTube claimed I wouldn't see any more from that company while I was signed in. Guess what happened. Yep, I got a freaking cheese ad in every single video I watched from that point on.
I don't know what kind of marketing strategy YouTube has going, but making viewers leave the platform altogether because they can't take one more unblockable ad for cheese (or cars or banks or whatever else someone has paid YouTube to bombard us with) doesn't seem like it would be very effective.
I still have trouble understanding how any real money is made -- although apparently it is! I mean, how many of us actually click on the adverts? And how many of us actually buy anything from the adverts? (If I'm watching a streaming movie, for example, as the adverts come up, I keep my eyes laser-focused on the "SKIP" button and the countdown; when the countdown hits 0, I immediately click on SKIP. ) Amazon, for example, makes money by advertisers paying to place adverts. I understand that. But how do the advertisers make money to pay for the ads?
Hi Terence, I'm older than you, was part of the early testing of Net and capitalising on it as originally designed, as an engine of innovation. You've said it mate, this thing has been turned into a total piece of sh#t by big money, I hate it like you.
One should actually check what Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee now thinks about the WWW, since he designed it with his team at CERN for such noble purposes. Am pretty sure the Sir, he'll concur that this once state of the art is now as sick and dangerous as a rabies infected dog!
Agreed. I recommend you read Edward Zitron's fantastic new essay on this and much more:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
Yeah, been a long time reader.
this, yes.
Was gonna suggest the same!
Marketers kill everything. Long live marketers.
Bill Hicks was onto something.
Agreed. Example: I loved using recipe sites, especially ones that archived food magazines I enjoyed. Now I'm back to print cookbooks! You can't read the recipes with pop up ads covering them, videos playing. No thanks!
Sadly my favorite food magazines are gone now too. Glad I didn't get rid of my cookbooks!
I feel exactly the same about recipe sites!! I don’t even last 3 seconds on there.. I actually started an ad-free recipe blog last year out of principle but have since closed it down
I, too, find myself reaching for my cookbooks because online is so distracting with pop ups. While I was out of the house this weekend, my husband took to baking an apple pie -- He told me he sat down with our The Joy of Cooking, and took the time to read all about different types of dough, tips, etc. and baked the most delicious pie he has ever made. Definitely a different experience than he would have had if he simply searched apple pie and clicked on a website for the recipe.
Recipe sites are a perfect example of how bad it's gotten – completely unusable, filled with adverts and the author's full life story so they can stuff it with keywords and rank in Google. But, in doing so, it fails to do what it's meant to... give us a damn recipe!
The (not so) funny thing is, if you're old like me, you remember the late 90s when the web was ruined the first time by popup ads. Back then, in pre-browser tab and pre-CSS days, the issue was full instances of the browser window that would start opening, each containing more ads, and then when you tried to close those, more browsers would open. This was known as "popup hell" and was only finally tamed when newer browsers implemented pop-up blockers and Javascript was standardized and containerized and tamed.
Now it seems we're right back there, but it's harder to stop because the new ads and overlays are just HTML elements within a web page, and those can't always be easily distinguished from core site elements. This time the solution must be social, not technical, I think.
The real tragedy is that corporate social media has become such a nightmare that we desperately need to get back to a time when individuals had their own websites and blogs where they controlled and owned their own content. Interesting web page designs died when mobile became the norm: there just isn't room on a phone screen to do cool things, and most sites are responsive so they work on phone and desktop.
Now a generation of people have been trained to hate the web because of all that popup ad-centric nonsense, and many only ever interact online through FB or Instagram or other social media. Bad actors really have ruined everything about the online experience, top to bottom.
"Bad actors really have ruined everything about the online experience, top to bottom."
A perfect summary.
Why did you have to go ruin my day by reminding me of the pop-up hell.
Agreed. One of my favorite running websites, Marathon Handbook, is almost unusable now because of ads. I literally get a pop up that says it’s using too much memory.
Scrolling on the website is a mess as well. It’s all laggy and constantly skips to the bottom of pages now. It’s a little better when I use it with reader mode in safari but it’s still a mess. It’s upsetting how so many websites have become this way because I like going on my favorite blogs and reading my favorite newsletters.
I saw another comment about recipe websites and those are even worse. I immediately export recipes using paprika now and read them there.
"I literally get a pop up that says it’s using too much memory" – can't think of a way to summarise it better, and the distinct lack of care for user and user experience.
An irony is the shitty browsing experience will push more people to use AI programs to get info.
Consumers/users deserve some criticism here too. We have learned to stuff ourselves with unlimited content and subsidised services . Imagine a world where we pay for discrete bits of content - I’m not sold the blockchain micropayment narrative is useful but there is a middle ground somewhere and we’ll only move toward it if users become more discerning. I’ll let others decide how cynical to be on the likelihood of that.
I thought about writing that – that the worse it gets, the more people will turn to ChatGPT etc – but they are also shit (and will soon enough contain ads). It's maybe just that everything is shit, and we'll need to wait till the whole thing collapses to make something better.
I really want to be positive and hopeful we can do better.
My long term view is the web bifurcates into utter shit worse than today, filled with ads/malware/tracking/gen AI slop/bots/etc & the other side is a based on secure, discrete and authentic data. I haven’t figured what will break the camels back tho
Design can be used to inflict deception and annoyance, or to make the web usable. Unfortunately, it's more the former these days, as you rightly pointed out.
https://www.deceptive.design/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/sludge-decisions/
Seriously: I had flashbacks, because this is where print was 25 years ago. Everyone getting nostalgic for the Golden Age of Magazines in the late 1990s forgets (or was too young to remember) when a magazine, weekly newspaper, or daily newspaper was absolutely HUGE…and most of that weight and volume came from two-thirds to three-quarters of the page count being ads, mostly for brands that were less worried about whether anybody actually saw the damn thing and more about the tax writeoff for multipage full-color bulldada. (Again, everyone forgets, but I track the end of the Golden Age of Alternative Print to the ban on tobacco ads: I had several editors admit that for all of the complaints from readers about incessant cigarette ads, those ads were the only things keeping a lot of regional weeklies and monthlies going.) Considering the ongoing conversations about who the hell is actually making money off online ads, it’s going to get really ugly when they pull their money out of Web advertising and focus on their latest scam.
Yup, great example! Once ad revenue is a company's lifeblood, they're hooked and there's no going back. And so begins the downward spiral of more ads, more money, more ads, more money – and this is always detrimental to the user experience
It’s not as much ads that bother me but the quantity of ads that ruin a websites performance that bothers me. Some articles I can’t even scroll through because of all the ads
I hear you. There’s even the print parallel: “Continued on Page X” notices where the continuation would be about two column inches at the bottom of a page, or ad inserts with their own separate page count that were put in off-center so that a reader trying to read the cover story would instead flail around in the insert. EVERYTHING seems to be going back to the beginning of 2000, not in a craving for a simpler time, but because “this worked on everybody BACK THEN…”
Everything is either an advertisement itself or is bombarded by ads. Even subscription services are pushing advertisements. We are witnessing the slow burn death. It's just a matter of how long it will take for the candle to go out.
Hi Stephen, I agree. This is why I can't spend too much time on my phone browsing the internet. I need a larger screen to hope to be able to read content among all the ads. And all those extra steps and verification for everything (looking at you substack)... The enshittification of all products in late stage capitalism reached the internet. I remember the early internet, the creativity, the magic. Now everything looks the same, and AI rob us of the hunt for great site (assuming it gives us correct answer). This is why I quit Google search and Chrome. Duck Duck Go and Firefox provide a better experience.
PS. just a thought. I left this tab inactive for a few minutes, and there was a full page ad asking me to subscribe to your newsletter. It is kind of ironic, don't you think?
The only way to win is to not play the game. But that’s good news: in the end, as we all go offline in disgust, we end up winning our very lives back. We will look back in amazement and shame over what we put into the hands of ourselves amd our children.
hi stephen. i agree with the sentiment here. but what's the alternate for creators to make money? if no ads and affiliate marketing? people don't want paywalled content too
It's been bad for a while, but it seems to have gotten worse lately. YouTube is especially bad, and its algorithms seem to be broken. In the last month or so, it's been showing me, a vegan, videos about the carnivore diet, sprinkled with endless ads for cheese. I tried blocking those ads, and YouTube claimed I wouldn't see any more from that company while I was signed in. Guess what happened. Yep, I got a freaking cheese ad in every single video I watched from that point on.
I don't know what kind of marketing strategy YouTube has going, but making viewers leave the platform altogether because they can't take one more unblockable ad for cheese (or cars or banks or whatever else someone has paid YouTube to bombard us with) doesn't seem like it would be very effective.
Been thinking similarly- the basis for my work on the Paranet. https://open.substack.com/pub/swoodie/p/the-case-for-a-new-internet?r=3k8ei&utm_medium=ios
I still have trouble understanding how any real money is made -- although apparently it is! I mean, how many of us actually click on the adverts? And how many of us actually buy anything from the adverts? (If I'm watching a streaming movie, for example, as the adverts come up, I keep my eyes laser-focused on the "SKIP" button and the countdown; when the countdown hits 0, I immediately click on SKIP. ) Amazon, for example, makes money by advertisers paying to place adverts. I understand that. But how do the advertisers make money to pay for the ads?
Hi Terence, I'm older than you, was part of the early testing of Net and capitalising on it as originally designed, as an engine of innovation. You've said it mate, this thing has been turned into a total piece of sh#t by big money, I hate it like you.
One should actually check what Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee now thinks about the WWW, since he designed it with his team at CERN for such noble purposes. Am pretty sure the Sir, he'll concur that this once state of the art is now as sick and dangerous as a rabies infected dog!