I’d like to see just how horrible someone can make a site. Facebook is a good contender.
I think the time I was like 7 and was looking at hamster photos on Google to print and cut out. Scrolling along I couldn’t find any that looked exactly like my hamster named Cinnamon after a black streak along his back.
Getting to the 3rd or 4th “load more” buttons on Google and it started showing me stuff that wasn’t hamsters I got desperate. I saw there were a few images that had text along the top and bottom, “for more cute hamster photos go to xhamster.com”.So naturally, I went there.
Turns out xhamster.com was not a site where hamsters share selfies and is, instead, pornography.
Adobe.
Once, you sign in, good luck finding anything you need.
fcc.gov. Those goddamn “Sign into the Federal Fucked Up Document System with your FFUDS PIN now” things that just don’t actually work. The layers of garbage between you and renewing an amateur radio certificate is truly Idiocratic.
This sounds very similar to the Kentucky online portal for teacher certification. It looks like it was made in 1996, and it functions slightly less well than it looks like it should.
I just did my GMRS a few months ago. That site is a dumpster fire.
Time Cube (now archived). I feel bit bad saying it, but omg the layout. It was bad even by 90s standards.
Edit: the creator died in 2015.
Edit2: CW, anti-queer rhetoric, but I find it very hard to take it seriously in the midst of waves hands vaguely at the rest of the website
Comcast. I dare you to try to cancel or change your cable and internet package.
I finally got my appleTV subscription cancelled, and that took three fucking tries. No, I don’t have an iPhone or an appleTV unit, so I’m now free.
Publisher’s Clearing House.
So this company has ads on local free tv stations in the US about how you could win $5000 a week for life, but when you go to the website it’s like 97% ads and maybe 2% contests, and some contests are straight up unenterable if you have an adblocker. Then before you can officially enter, you have to go through 3 pages of ‘as seen on tv’ crap that it tries to sell you before you can finish entering. Also it lags like a motherfucker with or without an adblocker, cause there’s so many ads taking up that much bandwith, cause heaven forbid a webpage ad be a static image. And of course you have to have an account, so your spam folder and paper mailbox fill up with the worst things possible.
literally any restaurant website. I disabled Facebook from my entire network (pihole).
I can no longer order food on a website because Facebook is deadzoned.
Also, about half of big box brick and mortar online stores stopped working as well.
Spotify. Only website/service that makes their service intentionally worst and people still pay for it
It’s hard to pick out one as THE worst, but generally, if I have to use the site for some external reason, the experience is awful.
Health insurance, doctor’s offices, etc are generally pretty bad. Oddly, tax sites aren’t as rough.
Also oddly, vacation related websites are awful.
Usually webapps.
Ugh, still to this day, persistant file storage is either “the cloud” or file APIs that altho secure, don’t allow for saving overtop of existing files. really annoying.
Seemingly every recipe website. They tell a long, unrelated story, cover the page with ads, popups, slideouts, timer triggered ads, videos, etc.
It’s almost impossible to see the recipe under all the crap.
These were some of the first sites to be enshittified. The more you scroll that more ad revenue they got. So they hid the actual recipes and steps under a back story longer than the dune books that forced you to scroll and hit ad after ad.
A lot of these have a link near the top to go straight to the recipe, which helps me avoid much of the dreck.
Pintrest is the worst website ever built and has caused immense damage to the free sharing of information.
me: oh hey I was looking for–
Pinterest: Sign in or I will come to your house and break your thumbs
me: well fuck you too then
Together with Quora. Search engine pollution.
There was about ten minutes there when Quora was Yahoo! Answers for people who passed the Apgar test.
I legitimately don’t know why Google hasn’t filtered it out of image search results. It’s harmful to Google’s platform.
It’s the top rated blocked website on Kagi.
I don’t know why Google doesn’t take a hint.
This is a baseless but very reasonable theory - because Pinterest pays them a fuck ton of money.
It was actually pretty cool when I started and real people used it.
Honestly don’t get why they’re still around and what they do.
Used to be an easy way to collect and share photos or something from a website with friends. It was especially useful with things like making a collection of fashion that you liked and then discussing similar fashions with friends. It actually at one point would recognize some pieces of clothing and then create links to buy it. Actually a useful advertising kind of thing IMHO. But it became bloated and full of tracking nonsense rather than helping people share things and so it lost its usefulness. It seems it’s mostly populated by bots now to drive SEO.
4chan. When I saw a German shepherd get hit in the face with a shovel full force, I decided the site wasn’t for me.
Unfortunately people always go on the “shock site” boards like /b/ and /pol/ instead of checking out the more niche ones like /po/ (papercraft and origami) and /tg/ (traditional games) which are much more like regular hobbyist forums/image boards. I can see why one awful experience would sour the whole thing though and some of the people who post there are sad excuses for human beings.
Edit: Just as an example this is the oldest thread on 4chan at the moment. It was created in 2016 and is still active. It catalogues OP’s struggle to make an origami clock.
the idea of someone unironically using 4chan to chat about origami is so funny to me
Yeah but, counterpoint, can you name any other active online origami communities?
Ya no. That’s when I quit too. That place’s
hollowgot no humanity left.It was like 20 years ago when I saw it. It never really had any humanity.
Reddit.
Fragile Mods. Shitty trolls. Dishonest engagements. Little to no good discussion. Opinions are seen as attacks. Power-tripping users and mods alike. Karma removed.
Can’t stand the staleness. Apart from the frigging bots and automods, it feels like a bunch of boring, shallow, sated establishment guys that like “pretending that one could be hip with a mortgage payment,” as Bela Koe-Krompecher once put it.
And now, more bots than ever!
Just less users, making the bots more visible. You’ve had repost bots all through, we just assumed it was actual people trying to score cheap karma.
