Is general browsing now just a messy pile of ****?

Cloudfare honestly seems to make every site that uses it much worse.

It's like when anti piracy measures only punished paying customers, anti DDOS and whatever else seems to only make it worse for normal users.
 
Another annoyance now is how many fake review sites have popped up. I'm not talking fake reviews like on amazon but when you search for a product review, click on the site and then just have a wall of generic text that could be a review of anything due to it being so vague and a load of referral links.

At least in the past people used to actually write about the product before asking you to click on referral links :p
 
Puzzled said:
Another annoyance now is how many fake review sites have popped up. I'm not talking fake reviews like on amazon but when you search for a product review, click on the site and then just have a wall of generic text that could be a review of anything due to it being so vague and a load of referral links.

At least in the past people used to actually write about the product before asking you to click on referral links :p
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Yeah, that irritates me as well. In some cases, they've just copy-pasted press releases from the manufacturer and labelled that as a "review". It's difficult to find real reviews of a product using a search engine.

On a similar note, if I search for answers or lore in games I quite often end up on websites that have a page for that game that has no content at all. Just a heading mentioning the game so that search engines will include it in results for searches on that game. Presumably lots of advertising as well, but my security software blocks all that.
 
Another gripe about the net are those modal overlays. They're the nowaday equivalent of pop-up ads and ad-blockers don't block most of them.

E.g.

- welcome to this web site
- please complete this survey (before I even started reading the godamn page!)
- subscribe to our newsletter
- we think you might like...
- 20% off for American users (when you're obviously UK)
- are you sure you want to leave this site?
- a random video that moves to the bottom-right of the screen as you scroll down

There doesn't seem to be a one size fits all approach to blocking these, unlike the early 2000s browsers when they were able to block pop-up ads across the web.
 
To be fair whilst you have quite a ranty thread title I'm inclined to agree to some extent, I genuinely do feel like browsing is worse than it was say 5 years ago:
  • GDPR et al means never ending spam of cookie requests, I don't mind the ones where you can easily select "Reject all" but some aren't that simpe
  • Loads of clickbait, now clickbait has been around for years, but it used to be less common and more obvious
  • Searching for the answer to question like how to fix a particular tech issue often leads to numerous inconclusive threads, often filled with answers that you know won't solve the issue. "Q: Help my computer won't POST. A: Try booting Windows in safe mode"
  • Agreed about this annoying moving videos, and just generally slow loading pages that cause objects to move as it loads
  • Local newspaper websites seem particularly bad nowadays, my old home town has a moderately prestigious local paper dating back centuries but their website nowadays is an absolute travesty. Clickbait, loads of inaccuracy, chock-full of adverts, silly quizes, pop-ups etc etc. It's that bad that I actively avoid it. Just embarrassing really,
 
HangTime said:
Searching for the answer to question like how to fix a particular tech issue often leads to numerous inconclusive threads, often filled with answers that you know won't solve the issue. "Q: Help my computer won't POST. A: Try booting Windows in safe mode"
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This one is super annoying - people seem to pile in with responses based on key words in the request for help rather than reading the details and so you get 20 posts, even if well meaning, of things the original poster has already discounted as being useful before someone actually posts something helpful :(
 
HangTime said:
  • Local newspaper websites seem particularly bad nowadays, my old home town has a moderately prestigious local paper dating back centuries but their website nowadays is an absolute travesty. Clickbait, loads of inaccuracy, chock-full of adverts, silly quizes, pop-ups etc etc. It's that bad that I actively avoid it. Just embarrassing really,
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They appear to all use the same template, right down to pop ups, videos and so on all appearing at exactly the same points during scrolling.

Speaking of which I was making a reservation on Booking.com yesterday - that was a painful experience! As normal with this sort of thing I was viewing information such as my flight itinerary in another tab whilst making the reservation, and every time I did this I would get a message, or a page description change, or a pop up effectively begging me /threatening me not to leave my booking midway through. Really unpleasant to work with.

Ryanair similar - they've always been bad, but now you don't even get presented with a checkout page ; after a (long and laborious) checkout flow incorporating multiple pages with what appears to be a deliberately inconsistent UI, at the end you don't actually get a PAY NOW page, just a big advert for car hire and other such addons.
You have to specifically click the basket icon on the top right to be presented with a payment screen, I just sat there looking at the page for ages thinking a page component hadn't loaded successfully before I noticed it up in the corner. I've entered names, details, everything; what else would I possibly want to be doing other than paying to complete the transaction?
 
Its always annoying when you are searching for a solution to a problem, google finds a possible match, you read the preview and think "Yep that exactly what my problem is" and then when you actually read the post you realise at the end that its your post from a couple of years ago.
 
cheesyboy said:
There's no doubt we've passed the pinnacle of the internet.

It's a ******* mess now. Just a generally awful experience, and notably worse than a decade+ ago.

That's objective truth, not rose tinted. There was fun to be had circa 2000, but the peak was probably late 2000s.
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You know what, not only do I agree with you on this specific subject, but I actually think you can expand that to society in general.
 
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