
The modern web is becoming unusable - csomar
https://omarabid.com/the-modern-web
======
danShumway
Somewhat related series of PSAs:

Nitter is an Open Source alternative front end for Twitter that requires zero
Javascript to run, and it's _really_ good, and is way nicer than Twitter's own
UI, and yall should use it. I see Twitter threads hosted on HN all the time,
and I kind of wish more of the posters would link to Nitter's public-facing
instance instead of Twitter. I think its interface is just objectively better
than Twitter's for browsing.

Invidious is an Open Source alternative to Youtube that is also really good
and requires zero Javascript, but unfortunately it suffers from a lot of
performance problems and videos will occasionally refuse to load -- Youtube is
I think more hostile about throttling/blocking that kind of stuff, and
proxying videos is probably harder than proxying tweets. You can donate to
Invidious though, which might help them afford more powerful hardware.

In regards to Medium -- if you disable Javascript those popups will all
vanish, and for the most part all you'll be missing out on is comments and
occasionally a lazy-loaded image. It's amazing how much of the web
(particularly news) works fine without Javascript, and getting rid of it gets
rid of a lot of these annoying popups and requests. Use uMatrix, it makes it
really easy to turn Javascript off by default and whitelist as necessary. And
every person who disables Javascript is one more tiny audience metric to make
it ever-so-slightly harder for news sites to ignore progressive enhancement.

~~~
dotancohen

      > It's amazing how much of the web (particularly news) works
      > fine without Javascript,
    

It's amazing that any content would require Javascript. Web applications I
understand, but content (particularly news) should have no need for scripting.

~~~
mehrdadn
Infinite scrolling needs Javascript, and it's pretty useful for some sites
that have feeds.

~~~
smcameron
Fuck no it isn't. Infinite scrolling has no valid use case.

~~~
RHSeeger
I use Reddit Enhancement Suite, and one of the features it adds is autoloading
the next page when I get to the bottom of the current one. It's really nice.

------
itqwertz
The majority of content on Medium is low-quality, varying from personal blog
post opinions stated as fact to yet another career-boosting tutorial on
beginner React fundamentals. I advise most people to keep the content for
their own blogs and let that site fall under the weight of hosting their crap
content.

Twitter and Facebook are known cesspools that suck away your time and add very
little value. I don’t know anyone same that uses Twitter regularly. Facebook
seems to be used most by those who understand their business model least.

Guard your time and be careful with what you feed your time.

BTW this also applies to modern journalism sites like the New York Times and
the Washington Post. Use archive.is and let them rot from years of neglectful
journalism.

~~~
andrewnc
I have found Twitter to be very valuable to follow machine learning
researchers and find out about up and coming research.

~~~
unforeseen9991
I've also found Twitter to be very valuable in my own profession.

I've found it to be a toxic hellhole of shit for everything else.

------
makecheck
I can understand sites not wanting to give things away forever. I _cannot_
understand what is served by interrupting new visitors almost immediately,
before they can practically do _anything_ with your site. All that does is
remind me how little I really “need” your services.

~~~
mirimir
The Firefox add-on "DOM Delete" often works wonders.

~~~
LeftHandPath
I usually just press F12 and delete it with the DOM tree inspector.

Is "DOM Delete" automated?

~~~
benhurmarcel
I guess that's the one:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dom-
delete/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dom-delete/)

------
pzmarzly
> There is a solution: To buy a disposable phone number and use it to complete
> the verification. But this was the breaking point. At this point, I no
> longer bother.

This may not be enough. A case in point: two months ago my grandma decided to
make herself a Facebook account to chat with her IRL friends. She had one made
in 2014, but she only logged in to it few times. It was made using a fresh
email, and never breached. So she logged in to that account on her phone,
using the newest Facebook app on a brand new phone, provided real name, birth
date and photo, and linked a real phone number, never used before. She got
permanently banned within a week, by just chatting on Messenger and sending
friend requests on Facebook. I suspect some of her IRL friends reported the
friend request they received. Or maybe some AI decided she types too fast for
an elderly woman, or uses too few emoji. We will never know.

The ban appeal form requires you to send photos of government-issued ID, and
she decided it's not worth the risk.

~~~
ubercow13
It’s especially bad because you can use Facebook to log in to countless other
sites, which you will also lose access to. I even had to upload my photograph
to Facebook once to ‘verify’ myself, and my photo was rejected with no reason
given.

------
zzo38computer
Yes, it is true. The modern web really is becoming an unusable, user-hostile
wasteland, and also is very slow, very complicated, very messy, etc. The web
developer tools help a bit, at least, but not quite. But better configuration
for web browser should also be better. (Of course, there are also some good
web pages too, but they are making a lot of bad ones too.)

But (as another comment says) documents should not be apps; they are should be
separate. (Although there is the case where sometimes you want to embed apps
in documents, such as to make an interactive demonstration of some algorithm,
or to include inline currency conversion, to validate or autocalculate a form,
or whatever. But the document needs to be readable even if the code doesn't
run, and the code probably shouldn't run by default. Also, I think such
embedded apps should perhaps be separate frames even if enabled, and do not
need to do as much stuff as is now exposed to JavaScript interfaces.)

The modern web is also overused. Often, there are better file formats (e.g.
plain text), protocols (e.g. IRC, NNTP, Gopher), etc, that can do as well, or
better. Or even existing features of HTML and so on, which you can use but
they use worse ones instead.

~~~
joe_the_user
I can at least understand Facebook (that I'm on), the NYTimes (that I'm not
on), or the twenty other big sites being paywalls, even if I hate it.

But random newspaper from random little place telling to subscribe to their
meager content after three articles? What do they really think? I mean, even
if I subscribed to my own local news paper in my own little burge, am I really
going to be going to the trouble of logging on and so-forth?

All the paywalls seem more like excuses publisher make for their failings than
anything they could reasonably expect to make money from. It's a lot like
scholarly sites charging $25/article. My guess 0% percent of visitor pay this.
It's not a price people, it's a price to justify other bullshit.

~~~
sailfast
The funny thing is that the local burgh paper needs that subscription or it
will not be there in a couple of years. They need it a lot more than NYtimes,
perhaps who has a bigger global base.

My answer to this is yes, absolutely, I will log in and pay for good local
news coverage, and I do every day.

If you don’t live there but the story explodes for some reason, why not try to
get some new subscribers? Asking for money is not a big deal in my opinion.
Asking for it by compromising your UX or user privacy, however (“only paid
subscribers can view in incognito”) is terrible.

~~~
ddxxdd
Why isn't there some sort of coalition between local news sites that allows
e.g. a paid subscription to oregonlive.com to allow you access to
m[ichigan]live.com, nj.com, and other "local" news across the country?

Sinclair Media already owns half the local news broadcasters around the
country; why isn't such a setup already done?

~~~
bradleyankrom
Gannett has done that to an extent. You’ll see the same layout and styling
across a lot of local sites as well as usatoday dot com.

------
mtm7
I know the “safe” decision in a boardroom is to suggest whatever makes the
numbers go up, but this post is right. People push it too far and damage their
products in the process.

Examples: I no longer click on Quora in search results. I’ve stopped using
Reddit on mobile. I used to love Imgur, but now I hesitate because they force
you to run 1MB+ of React and download 553 resources for a subpar experience of
viewing a single image [0].

I understand that these are businesses and the lights must be kept on, but
certainly there are better ways to do this. Maybe a more humane strategy
wouldn’t be as profitable in the short term, but it would certainly be better
for building a sustainable business that actually lasts.

[0]:
[https://twitter.com/csswizardry/status/1185604806901207045](https://twitter.com/csswizardry/status/1185604806901207045)

~~~
boring_twenties
> I’ve stopped using Reddit on mobile.

"Slide" is a free (as in freedom) reddit client for Android. Needless to say
it's much better than either the mobile website or official app.

------
outime
One particular annoyance (present in this post) is the FB pages.

Many business only have online presence in FB and nowadays I think you can’t
even check reviews or e.g. the lunch menu (perhaps depends on the A/B test
part you fall in).

I left FB many years ago and no way I’m creating a dummy account for the same
reason shown in the post (requires a phone).

So I just give up and can’t blame the business owner since the person probably
went for the straight forward free choice and didn’t have to learn anything
new but FB, I truly hate it nowadays.

~~~
csydas
Is this really still true? I have not been in the US for a few years, but at
least in many of the European and Asian countries I've been in, this just is
not a thing. I have noticed that in places like Korea and Japan, local
aggregator sites are still popular/crawled by Google as the results for
search/maps, but even my colleagues, Tokyo natives, use the same aggregator
sites when I'm visiting and we're looking for a place to eat.

Facebook feels pervasive, sure, but from my POV it's still contained to North
America, and the influence elsewhere is waning.

~~~
tyzerdak
I think he mean that for small business facebook is stadart nowadays.

A lot of small shop owners in east europe have only facebook page with
location and hours and some updates.

And I can't blame them but there's fact that every platform becomes shit after
gaining popularity or goes down if not. And people without technical skills
are feeding facebook with this situation.

Would be nice for domain sellers to give free single page generator with basic
info and free hosting for this html page attached to domain.

------
jacquesm
The big divide is between apps and pages. Pages are just documents and should
not contain _any_ code. Apps are fine to contain code. The problem is that we
now have pages that believe they are code and apps that have to be styled
using the mechanisms for pages. This duality is here to stay for at least a
while to come, and maybe for a long time.

But it would have been good security wise and privacy wise if this divide were
made more explicit.

~~~
zokier
What I have been wishing for a while is having well-defined purely document-
oriented subset of HTML5 standardized. In practice it probably would mean
different levels or profiles defined. It could help with many usecases beyond
just web, email coming to mind as an example

~~~
atq2119
The real challenge here is that document and application tend to get mixed up
on the web.

Looking at even a good old-fashioned blog, there are really three nested
things on your screen: the blog post document, the blog post-viewing
application, and the browser.

Why a blog post-viewing application? In theory you could skip it and just have
a plain reader view, but in practice you do want to have navigation and
comments, and that's what the application part is for.

Many modern systems surface that split in the form of an API: the API is what
gives you access to the underlying document.

The challenge would be making that solid accessible to the user. For example,
could a browser natively have two address bars? One for the document, and one
for the application that is used to access the document?

------
mattrp
This article is a great headline that doesn’t even begin to scratch the
surface of what’s wrong. I’d say the internet has become an Amazon-style
marketplace of fake do-do. Anything you search for results in nothing but
endless fake domains with fake reviews designed to pitch you more ads and
track you even more. Finding an actual original legitimate source of anything
is essentially impossible at this point.

~~~
randomsearch
This is massively hyperbolic. The internet is full of great resources from
authoritative sources.

~~~
whiddershins
I do find it incredibly hard to find anything resembling a trustworthy source
of info on a bunch of topics.

Travel? Full of nonsense Diet? Don’t even try Exercise? Maybe Health/Medical?
No Anything I might purchase? Depending on the category, everything is an
advert by someone who has barely done anything with the product.

~~~
randomsearch
Travel - depends what you want, but Lonely Planet has plenty of info that's
reasonable. Travel safety - foreign office.

Health - NHS, NIH, American Dietetics Association... tons of public service
bodies are out there.

------
nottorp
The author is probably in the US, if you're in the EU you get a bonus:

The cookie popups that cover half or all the page, are usually dark patterned
so it's very easy to opt in but hard to impossible to opt out and worse, come
back every few days if you didn't opt in.

I simply can't follow some of the stuff that gets posted on HN because I'm not
about to spend a day going through, for example, Yahoo->Oath->Verizon's popup
about agreeing to tracking...

~~~
pricci
> The cookie popups [...] come back every few days if you didn't opt in.

Isn't that the expected behaviour?

~~~
nottorp
Why would it be, I've already opted out once.

I bet if i opted in the popups would never come back :)

~~~
itronitron
presumably they don't store a cookie indicating your opt-out choice because
you chose to opt-out, that is a small price I am willing to pay as a reminder
that I don't really need to read the article on their damn website anyway.
There are multiple tech 'news' websites that are often posted on HN that I
haven't read articles from in over a year. I find personal tech blogs to be
much less invasive and more interesting anyway which is the silver lining to
the current trend of news websites being so unusable.

------
momentoftop
I don't have a Twitter account, so I browse it by going to mobile.twitter.com,
which allows me to view tweets and replies. I assume this is an oversight by
Twitter, and it will be locked down at some time, but it serves me for now.

Similarly, I only ever browse reddit by going to old.reddit.com. I don't
expect that to be supported for much longer either.

~~~
saagarjha
The normal Twitter website works too.

~~~
arebop
When I try to read comments on normal Twitter, it prompts me to login.

~~~
floatboth
Click the tweet itself, not the "conversation" icon button. That button is not
"view replies", it's more like "write a reply".

------
smkellat
I maintain a separate website for my sole proprietorship that is fairly tiny
made with MkDocs. I have a blog running on ikiwiki. The sole proprietorship’s
Facebook page mostly points you back to one of those two sites. There is a
tiny amount of JavaScript on the MkDocs site but it is manageable.

Living in rural Ohio with flaky cable broadband means uBlock stays almost
permanently on. I’m sure high engagement ads are nice things. Waiting a couple
minutes for them to load makes for a poor user experience out here on the
fringe of the qualitative digital divide.

------
userbinator
_I mean it’s only $2 /month. Less than what you’d pay for a cup of coffee. Or
$340/year; here hoping you are very bad at math._

I suspect the 340 is deliberately designed to combine with the psychology of
"bulk prices are always lower"; when shopping, I've seen plenty of examples
where the larger quantity and more expensive item is shown boldly as "on sale"
with a prominent reduction from a "non-sale price" when its per-unit price is
still _higher_ than the smaller quantity one.

~~~
saagarjha
I'd guess the "$2/month" price has a catch.

~~~
lazyjones
Yes, it's $34.99 after 3 months. Currently, they've changed the introductory
offer to $9.99/month (instead of 2).

~~~
Filligree
Well, that's hilariously out of touch. I'd need to really _need_ their
articles to pay that much.

------
CuriousReader13
Here is how I deal with the problem:

1\. Customize a decent browser eg Firefox to my own safety standard (disable
cookies, Autoplay, etc.)

2\. Treat every website like an application. If a site is usable under my
settings, fine.

3\. If a site needs an additional capability, e.g a login credential or
cookies, only provide them for that site if it’s compelling enough, otherwise
blame the site and move on.

After customizing for a few dozens of sites, and not being able to use
countless others, the modern web becomes a lot more manageable for me.

~~~
tempodox
I do similar things and it kinda works for people like us. But, firstly, what
about the rest of the world that's less knowledgable or technically inclined;
and secondly, the fact that we (figuratively) have to put on armor and carry
an arsenal of weapons before we can think of using the web still leaves a bad
taste in my mouth.

------
thesquib
I dislike the popups asking if I want notifications, I never allow them. Stop
that now please!

~~~
blotter_paper
I don't know what browser you use, but I'm not familiar with any that both
allow notification requests and don't allow you to turn them off somewhere in
settings.

~~~
Cenk
I’ve noticed sites putting up a fake notification modal first, and then
triggering the real browser pop up only if you click yes. I believe this is so
they can ask you again on your next visit if you say no, which you can’t do if
you deny the browser pop up.

~~~
saagarjha
You can thank OneSignal (YC '11) for that.

------
Animats
This used to be called Pulling a Myspace. Usage down? Add more ads. Repeat.
Eventually, all ads and tiny usage.

------
jacobsenscott
When your only metric for success is growth, you have no choice.

~~~
mjevans
Long term success is achieved by not behaving as a parasite.

~~~
ajna91
Why was draw_down's comment killed? A quick glance at his profile indicates he
is a 4 year old account with more than a 1500 karma, yet every recent comment
by him is flagged/killed [1]. Yes, some of them appear trollish, but not all
of them.

Does someone here have a grudge against him?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=draw_down](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=draw_down)

~~~
comex
Comments which were killed due to flags are distinguishable: they say
[flagged]. His comments are just [dead], meaning either they were caught by
the spam filter or draw_down was shadowbanned; presumably the latter in this
case. HN’s policies around shadowbanning continue to mystify me.

~~~
saagarjha
In this case it doesn't seem all that mystifying why they are shadowbanned:
they have a history of inflammatory, low-quality comments.

------
colinsul
I liked this NYT series for a perspective on this:

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/14/magazine/inte...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/14/magazine/internet-
future-dream.html)

~~~
zmix
And _this_ is why we need Javascript in certain webpages! :-) Great!

~~~
anoncake
For a "log in to continue reading" popup? No thanks.

------
Cougher
A couple of other mentions:

Looking for restaurants as I'm traveling is a difficult process. I used to
land on Yelp and its imitators, thinking that I was getting a solid list of
what was available, only to find that there is so much more that isn't listed.
And the reviewers are generally awful.

People search sites. Years ago, I was able to track down quite a few people
from my long-distant past for free. Then those sites were bought by companies
like Intellius, which is about as helpful as classmates.com.

~~~
nieve
Early on Classmates.com had as pretty much their sole value proposition that
they'd actually input insane numbers of class rosters and set up pages for the
schools as gathering points. The social network side of things was actually
more successful than I would have thought for a long time, but Facebook has
pretty much eaten their lunch on that side so they're back to needing to be a
good contact method. They're not.

Worse, they're getting creepier. They'd already collapsed into a nearly pure
scam by 2010 or so, but apparently they're doing some very creepy stuff with
their data sources now. I had to work with them trying to connect another site
(ick) and never had an account that had both have my real name and high school
(in fact my school was only in test data), but at some point in the last few
years they connected the two and are trying to convince me that people are
looking for me under a name they'd never know. I guess the inevitable
devolution of something selling getting back in contact is selling the idea of
contact without the reality.

------
egfx
How come no mention of Pinterest in the mess hall? Talk about a website whose
experience took this turn.

------
jturpin
It's gotten to the point where when I read an article, I will move my mouse
around to try and trigger the "Subscribe to our Newsletter" popup, so I can
close it instead of accidentally triggering it as I read the article.

~~~
tmm84
This behavior drives me nuts. I'll be like 3 minutes into reading and, bam, a
modal popup blocks out what I was reading and I have to click it away. The
ones that really make me angry are when I move towards the back button and
show a popup (nope, I'm not gonna spend another millisecond here after that).

Or even worse, the ads that come in from the top and push everything down the
page then leave a minute later.

------
lazyjones
It’s the browser vendors’ fault - they not only failed to provide us with
options for disabling/circumventing this abuse, they are complicit with the ad
industry and actively support their interests rather than their users’.
They’ve also made browsers so complex that it’s impossible for small
developers to provide a more useful alternative. This is where I am hoping we
will reach the breaking point soon, so we can replace the whole mess with
something simple and user-friendly.

~~~
zmix
It's just going to repeat history, then.

While I agree, that we need a Community's browser (one, that fully supports
XML, ideally bringing back the original Seamonkey/Firefox way to do things),
rather than a Corporation's browser, I doubt it could be made more simple.
Today's technologies are here for a reason. It's always what you use your
kitchen knife for. Change will not happen. But what we can do, is to keep
"our" web alive and active, and communicate and socialise outside of the big
corps wet dreams.

Just create your part of the web the way you want it to be, and as long as we
keep up, we will not vanish. We need to understand, that we must support non-
profits, like Archive.org, with our money, though.

------
pasttense01
We are on a site which is not. And there are lots of other sites which are
not. And Ublock Origin makes much of the rest of the web quite usuable.

~~~
buboard
Thats not a sustainable model though

------
defnotashton2
Its pretty concerning that lines between desktop and web are blurring and the
oses are platforming. Some additional things I feel are pretty hostile.

* Paypal - defaulting fee based payment options rather than "free ones" or allowing user to set a default.

* Google maps - Searching for "jiffy lube" will show you the business entry and its reviews. If you search for "oil change" it will show you a jiffy lube "ad" that looks the same as the entry but if the reviews are bad they are hidden. In this particular case the location had several thousand bad reviews.

* Google maps - restaurants "menu" button takes me to a page of a bunch of customer uploaded images.

* Amazon app - why isn't "returns" a main menu item for amazon mobile app.

* Uber eats/grub hub/favor - app carts hide fee increases to account for minimum spends meaning you are loosing out on another item for the same amount, and make it harder than it should be to remove items from cart.

* Nordevpn desktop app - hides the logout button in right click -> preferences.

* Apple/Google stores - make it difficult to view recurring subscriptions, and to request a refund.

* Chrome - over the last year I've had to go into settings and tell chrome to not allow sites to offer me notifications so many times. I don't understand why I have to keep resetting it with sync and similar.

* google images - pretty worthless thanks to pintrest, and that I cant download images cause bs corp ip laws.

* Image sharing - still getting more difficult in 2019.

* App notifications - more and more apps push unimportant notifications or spam for engagement while lacking granular controls. I find myself disabling more and more notifications outright only to miss a notification that I actually care about.

Remember that we are techies, "hyper" aware of these decisions and their
implications. What about nana? We are loosing digital agency.

------
z3t4
Web users are so used to signing up to stuff that they will do it almost
automatically.

~~~
conductr
Is that true? Maybe I’m an outlier but I just bounce.

------
jakeogh
When the general web user finally revolts against sites handing them arb
programs to execute, the people that rely on them running their code _ahum_
googfb _caugh_ will have a "next gen" HTML that just happens to also be turing
complete.

The only solution is to refuse to execute their code, and in the cases where
we actually want to, grind the GET response through a halting engine a-la BPF.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20806638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20806638)

------
oneepic
What world is the author living in? Probably just the world of a web
developer. Most people use the modern web all the time, it sucks, but sucks !=
unusable. Very clickbait headline.

~~~
bloaf
I realized, while making a Christmas list this year that I don't know how to
shop for things on the internet anymore. I am not a web developer, but I have
grown up as the internet did and I've seen more of it than most people.

Amazon: Its tolerable if you know exactly what reputable-brand item you want,
but if you don't you immediately find yourself in an unusable cesspool. Fake
reviews. Chinese knockoffs. Low quality promoted items. I searched for
"clamps" in the "tools and home improvement" category and there in my Amazon
search results were trashy supermarket novels.

Amazon alternatives (e.g. Jet?): The selection is so poor that they are not
usable for general shopping unless you are willing to settle for whatever one
item is available.

Google/Bing/etc: Haha no. Sure you can find 1 bazillion retailers for any item
you can think of, but they feel solidly sorted by "amount of money they pay
google." Google shopping is more-or-less useless, and regular google search
results don't allow you to compare products. Also, since it is not hard to
find decent web developers, it is next-to-impossible to judge the
reputation/quality of the bazillion retailers by their website polish.

Ebay/craigslist: Oh god no. Paypal hates me for some reason (it never accepts
my perfectly ordinary credit cards) so payment can be literally unusable. All
these sites feel like you're just selecting from a long list of scams. The
amount of BS you have to manually filter out is completely ridiculous, and you
are clearly competing with people who scrape these sites for items to flip for
a profit.

Facebook: Unusable by anyone who actually cares about their privacy.

Chinese importers (ali/dx): shipping times of multiple weeks is unusable for
many things. At least you know that you _will_ be getting cheap Chinese
products, so you can plan accordingly.

~~~
lazyjones
I have a similar impression of the current Amazon experience, but what works
for me is shopping at small-ish stores using Amazon Pay. Hassle-free, no
registration needed and I get proper service if required.

------
nanoscopic
ITA: OMG! I'm required at many huge sites to register for the site to view
content! Some of them aren't even free, I have to pay!

If you don't like those sites, don't use them. Sites as described do not
constitute the "entire web". There are plenty of great still free still usable
websites. There is an entire internet of them.

Believing that the whole web is just the monopolistic giants is the problem
here.

------
tjpnz
Even simple stuff like the back button is now hopelessly broken on a lot of
the news sites I frequent. The correct behaviour is to bring me back to where
ever on the page I had scrolled to but that's no longer possible if you need
to click a link to view the whole article. Even without that dark pattern it
can still take 10+ seconds with all of the JS bloatware infesting the "modern"
web.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I've started noticing in-page search breaking more and more, for the same kind
of reason. Sometimes you'll see more search results reported than are visible
and/or can be navigated to.

~~~
tjpnz
It certainly feels as though the core idea of sites having pages is dying or
dead.

------
oneeyedpigeon
I know it's unoriginal to attack the 'hypocrisy' of such an article, but I
found it frustrating that the page includes a 'kudos' control which a) could
just be a click but, for some reason, is a 'hover for a very short number of
seconds' action which cannot subsequently be undone b) works with the mouse
only.

------
fulldecent2
What we have today is: email addresses are valuable and people give them out.

The problem is that Gmail has failed to introduce one-time-use or per-
recipient email addresses. That would immediately solve the problem of coerced
email collection.

~~~
boring_twenties
I use a subdomain for this. *@subdomain is forwarded to me. Anytime I need to
give anyone an email address, it's a unique one (usually their name or a
derivation thereof). Anytime I tire of email from a given source, I configure
my postfix to reject the message with something like "550 Go fuck yourselves."

It's the little things in life.

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oxymoran
>”LinkedIn that keeps sending dozens of emails despite unsubscribing multiple
times; and somehow evades the Spam filter“

MLB is also guilty of this. Tantamount to cyber stalking

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frenchman99
This website doesn't work properly without Javascript enabled. Talk about
modern web being a pain.

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wnevets
the modern web reminds me of the days leading up to the .com bubble burst.
Adverts being crammed every where, spying on users and other user hostile
tactics to an attempt to make a dollar.

~~~
buboard
Talk about inequality. Faang absorb the bulk of online profits, leaving most
websites destitute

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tripzilch
Facebook and Twitter aren't "The web", though.

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jasonvorhe
Engagement-focussed platforms and publications are of course trying to sign up
as many people as possible using dark patterns and other annoyances to make
people subscribe to their services to be spared from all the bullshit. I'm not
surprised: They actually provide useful services for free and the bigger the
audience the higher their revenue from advertising. Over the next few years
content on the Internet will go the same route as music and video: It's free
if you endure the ads and there's one subscription for a majority of the
publications with each getting their share.

However, what the author describes isn't "the web". The web is about 2 billion
web pages with just a couple of percent of them being actively maintained. I'd
be willing to get that just a tiny minority of these pages are actually
serving the annoyances this post highlights.

We've seen the abuse of new technologies come and go, people just don't think
about what they're building, they simply use what's available: Blinking text,
text with drop shadows, Comic Sans, pages full of GIFs, pages built with
tables, iframes, pop-ups, link-hijacking ads, Flash-ads, embedded Java code -
the web was never the clean and organized place make it out to be. Never. It's
a romanticised notion that just doesn't die. It's the same rethoric as when
people claim that life was easier at some point in the past.

It's all about finding common ground on what's necessary and what isn't and it
usually starts with a couple of independent publishers trying out something
new and the big players following their lead. HTML5 video killed Flash and
Silverlight with WebGL/Javascript & modern CSS features being the last nails
in their coffins.

The web isn't just a couple of hundred big players and we will probably
survive annoying push notification requests, overly complex Javascript and EU-
mandated cookie opt-in hints.

We will have to live with me stuff being abused for a while until browser
vendors device that it's gotten annoying enough to do something about it.

I wouldn't be too surprised if we find that all browser vendors decide that
they'll disable cookie support in their browsers with a clear prompt to allow
1st party cookies globally only to then do some local machine learning magic
to click all custom cookie acceptance dialogues without user interaction or
something similar. Of course we'll then have to endure our browsers asking for
permission to access Bluetooth devices in our vicinity or to run
advertisements disguised as tiny WebAssembly programs. But even that will sort
itself out as some point.

The web has always been user hostile and that won't change. The level of
hostility however, will.

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tyzerdak
It's true. So why you use some third party for your blog?

Imo nowadays every platform goes to shit so static site generator is a must
for every blog owner that it technical guy.

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otabdeveloper2
> becoming

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hootbootscoot
amen

