6 ms·
The web looks like shit
- lutusp 10y agoSomeone should create an index of sites that aren't s * * t. Then we can watch as the listed sites resist the temptation to sell out, once they actually have visitors resulting from their special status as non-s * * t. Google, are you listening? I know it's not in your interest to promote sites that don't beat you over the head with advertising, but maybe not flogging is the new flogging. I would have suggested my own site as a candidate -- no ads, lots of free software and articles, no pop-ups -- but I decided that was too craven and self-serving. Find it yourself.
- mcguire 10y agoIs this an example?
- mtw 10y agoFunny. Animations on hover links. A big ad "Play Dirty" near the top. A big "Sign up for newsletter" box that will get me spammed. Then even more huge ads below to get me to click. Stop. The web is not broken. It's growing every year. There are lots of sites that gives you an ad-free experience if you pay. Like in real life, don't bother going to places that you don't like.
- kasikp 10y agoThis was, ironically, actually pretty hard to read...
- justaman 10y agoIts hard to imagine how people read anything on the internet without an adblocker.
- criswell 10y agoWhy was it hard to read for you? I'm having no trouble. I'm wondering if a lot of the CSS is more tailored towards macOS/Chrome? Also, the site being responsive makes `Command +`ing work beautifully (if the issue is font-size, but it's 18px which is larger than most sites I come across).
- jedanbik 10y agoI read the article on Chrome with uBlock Origin, and enjoyed commentary about ad blockers and anti-patterns between massive ads for Method dish soap the same size as the preceding paragraphs.
- RugnirViking 10y agoI also read the article on chrome with uBlock Origin and found no such thing? How strange.
- OutsmartDan 10y agoBest part is the hamburger menu on desktop. Real cool
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mikerice 10y agoThis is rich coming from theoutline
- jasonkostempski 10y agoThe only reason I read even a few lines of this was to see if the layout was supposed to ironical. It wasn't. I don't know what was going on with my scrollbar but they managed to jack it up better than any site I've ever been to.
- boubiyeah 10y agoThis is "infinite scrolling" where content come and go as you scroll for better performances. On a good implementation, the scrollbar characteristics can be made to look fine and stable though.
- sidegrid 10y agoIs ironical a word?
- teh_klev 10y agoApparently so: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5015/ironic-vs-ironical http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5015/ironic-vs-ir...
- sjwright 10y agoIt's a string of letters that convey a meaning, so yes, it's a word. It also has the blessing of being listed in most dictionaries. Both forms, ironic and ironical are valid and in casual settings tend to be used interchangeably. In a more formal sense, one would say a work that uses irony can be describe as ironical, whereas the events themselves are ironic.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lucideer 10y agoIt is. "ironic" was a French loanword, but when it was shoehorned into English, forms like "ironically" made the redundant addition of "-al" natural for some. Both have been in common use for many centuries. I'm still far more used to the terser "ironic" myself though. "ironical" seems alien and strange to me.
- Neliquat 10y agoJesus woodchopping christ, this is parody right? Did the author not see where his article would be posted? Is this some Tim and Eric level artistic dissonance? Or are we still that blind to our own shortcomings? Being shown you are wrong is the great liberator. You get new options, and get to learn something. Lets hope.
- majewsky 10y agoI took it as parody. But the huge "Read next" thingie at the bottom that linked to an actual article made me think again. I'm not sure anymore.
- nottorp 10y agoThe site linked to looks like shit. Don't know about the whole web.
- StavrosK 10y agoOh man, this article is so good. I didn't actually read most of it, but that ad really had me going. "Is this an actual ad? It says 'advertisement', but is it part of the content, like an ad found in one of the articles it talks about? Is it an actual ad? They can't be that clueless. Is it parody? I can't tell at all."
- 19eightyfour 10y agoI'll just reply under your comment rather than making a new top level post. Oh god this article is so true.
- dhruvmittal 10y agoFor all that the outline is an insane looking site with 3/4 screen ads, it is also true that it doesn't do any of the shenanigans (redirection, slowing down the page to load ads, etc.) that the author calls out in the article.
- radarsat1 10y agoArticle looks great in Firefox's Reader View ;)
- johnchristopher 10y agoAh, yes ! That's the site that do the thing with the scrollbar and the next article autoloading and url changing on the fly. F* you.
- joshuatopolsky 10y agoThe article isn't about aesthetic choices. If you don't like the way The Outline looks, that's your opinion, but we made it that way ON PURPOSE. The article is about forced compromises because of bad B2B decisions made a long time ago about what user value is. It's useful to be able to separate those things out. You can appreciate the article and still be mad at our site because it doesn't look like what you expect.
- KON_Air 10y agoWell, I find it hard to appreciate an article I can't read.
- thedevil 10y ago> but we made it that way ON PURPOSE Aside from everything else, why would you make animated squiggly lines on purpose? It's extremely irritating because it causes motion in my peripheral vision. I can't see how it adds value.
- joshuatopolsky 10y agoWe think they look cool? Also it's strange but some people LOVE them and some people HATE them.
- golergka 10y agoHm. I wonder, which one of those categories of people would change their decision to read or leave the article because of that. Yes, I think it's those who love the squiggly line would (hypothetically) continue to read the site just because of cool design, and not the other way around.
- adangert 10y agoYou guys should do some real A/B testing rather than rely on your own opinions.
- 10y ago
- rayiner 10y agoAs someone who grew up on the web circa 1998, I find the modern web to be shit. The old web flew on my 300 MHz PII with 256 Kbps DSL. The new web crawls on a quad core i7 with 300 Mbps fiber. But Sturgeon's law being what it is, we're probably stuck with a shitty web. But I wonder if browser makers can do anything to ease the pain a bit. For example, a page will reflow a few times while it loads, making it hard to start reading immediately. I'll often be mousing to the thing I want to click on next only to see everything move. Could browsers coalesce these reflows so that only completed pages are presented to the user?
- grenoire 10y agoWaiting for completed pages simply takes way too long. Seems like there isn't a way to automatically 'skeleton-ize' the page either. So; it is the sites' responsibility to prevent reflows.
- SamBam 10y agoThe simplest thing would be for sites to add fixed-sized containers for the ads and other heavy, asynchronous media, so that the space is already allocated before the ad loads. They could even put something nice in the background. However, I'm fairly certain that they do it on purpose to increase the click-throughs to ads. Sites like Salon on my phone are the worst. No matter how much time has passed since it looks like everything has finished loading, the moment I go to click on a link an ad pops up under my thumb.
- Touche 10y agoI don't disagree that the old web was aesthetically nicer, but nothing flew on 14.4 or 28k modems. I remember when 56k came out and everyone was like "WOW!".
- guiscreenshots 10y agoOP wasn't talking about 14.4 - 56k. They said: "256 Kbps DSL"
- jefffih 10y agoyall so mad lol
- Touche 10y agoI agree with this article but this happens for a reason; it works. Those full page ads that you hate? Some % of people actually click on them. Now, with proper competition this could be fixed. Sites using full-page ads would lose out to a competitor without them. But since no one can find a way to monetize a website without making it shit, shit is what we get.
- rhizome 10y agoThose full page ads that you hate? Some % of people actually click on them. Only because the close button is obscured.
- dfar1 10y agoWas there just a massive ad with rollovers on an article complaining about massive ads?
- delegate 10y agoIronically (or not), the article is exactly on the kind of website which it describes as 'shit'. But I agree with it. The web is no longer a place to 'share information'. It is a place where 'content' is 'monetized' - or whatever the language they use nowadays. Back in the day you'd have the web-site text with a little space left for 'banners', now it's vice-versa - the content is advertising and the useful information is used to lure in 'traffic'. All the big 'media' sites, Facebook and Google included are actually advertising companies and this is the result. Sure, they also produce 'useful' stuff, but that's because they're well-funded places were smart people go to do their smart things. I personally wouldn't mind if all the ad-supported content went away tomorrow. If a web-site tells me to disable my ad-blocker, I just close the tab. "But we should somehow support... ". No we shouldn't. There's too much crap out there, more than enough to consume in several lifetimes - noise, which disorients and confuses us. We should do the opposite - fight the ads, boycott ad-sites (that includes most 'news' websites, which are useless and toxic time wasters) and support sites which are valuable - donate, pay for subscriptions, etc. Even with no funding, valuable content will still be posted by people who are passionate and have something to say about a subject. All the rest is, as tfa says - "shit".
- vfaronov 10y agoI’m not sure what the author thinks “the web” is. For me, sites like Mic, Teen Vogue, CNN constitute a minor part of “the web”. Their being equated with “the web” seems like a much more serious problem than their visual design could ever be. In light of that, it’s interesting to note how the article frames the problem: > Stopping the publication of bad articles is probably too much to ask, but must so many websites look awful?
- devmunchies 10y agoThe site looks like a designer "concept" site. Kind of like concept cars or high-end fashion. But the difference is that those concept cars are never really created because its impractical. The site was definitely done by a good designer who knows what good design is, but its a tad over-the-top for everyday use. It looks good though.
- anorborg 10y agoSeriously? Pot meet kettle?
- 0x445442 10y agoI can't find the reference but I remember reading an article in Wired circa 2000 during the dotcom boom. It was about a couple of guys who owned a diamond business in Canada and were lured to Los Angeles to start an online diamond business, ice.com or something. The gist of the article was these guys only lasted 12-18 months and went back to Canada and their original business because they were fed up with the internet and the online business. The one detail of the article I remember was a quote from one of the owners... "The internet is basically a giant direct marketing platform" How to monetize information and what information should be monetized seem like very tough things to determine. From a consumers perspective, I hate adds on websites and employ the various bits of software to block them but I'm not opposed to paying for information. At the moment I don't pay any online subscription fees other than video. I've considered paying for wsj.com but the price point is too high in my opinion. From a strictly UI perspective I agree with the article's sentiment; most of the web is a UI fluster cuck.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sunnyP 10y agohmmm. I find LINGsCARS easier to read than the site linked.
- leppr 10y agoNothing new in this article, but since we're there, here's how I minimize this problem: * On the desktop, clicking on Firefox's readability button has become almost second-nature to me when I end up on news sites (speaking of which, what do you guys on Chrome use?). * For longer articles, I'll often whip up my Kobo and read the articles synced from Pocket. * On mobile, I also use Pocket (used to enjoy the readability feature on my old iPhone too). And finally, most of the annoying popups and other conversion-whoring anti-user features are neutralized with an extension such as uMatrix, but using it requires quite a bit of daily maintenance overhead so I don't bother anymore.
- bassman9000 10y ago> Using the internet shouldn’t be this hard. Pg Up/Down don't work (unless you select some text). ok