I hate

If it’s for watching the Tour, I’d get a monthly Eurosport/GCN+ sub

Places charging the same price for a fucking cauliflower or whatever burger as a meat burger. Fuck. Off.

Dips. Hummus and guacamole especially. Probably taramasalata too. Not had that for years.

Essentially just an overpriced way of making dry bread damp.

Dry bread.

Dry bread without dip

Dry bread and dry dip.

Websites (I'm looking at you here Wikipedia) that can't detect if you're on mobile or PC and just serve up whatever version the link is that you clicked on.

The Google amp shit that fucks up everything.

I bet you've never donated to Wikipedia so you get what you deserve :P

Websites that try and detect if you're on mobile or PC and serve up whatever version they want, irrespective of the link that you clicked on...

Was just about to post that.

I often, almost weekly, think about coming here to just write “websites”. I hate them. I am never ever on a fast computer, and anything less is just not equipped to make them usable. I hate the cookies bullshit, even more so when it slowly animates before I can click it. I hate when Barclays doesn’t put the fucking code boxes where I can click on them and I have to repeatedly scroll down to find them. I hate when I click on a shopping item, press back, and it takes me back to the top. I hate mailto links because I also hate the mail app. I hate having to turn screen lock off on my phone so I can turn my phone landscape to use your stupid website. I hate trying to read your white-on-black text. I hate opening a thread and watching the whole thing disappear under a sea of slowly-loading images. I hate going to click a link only for it to shift down making me click the wrong thing. I hate that this is all so shit in 2023 with how much I pay for everything.

Mandatory cookies permission requests are the worst thing to happen to the internet ever

Except maybe the disappearance of the seethru helicopter game

Mandatory cookies permission requests are the worst thing to happen to the internet ever

Not Eternal September?

Had to Google, I was not yet 1 year old in September 1993

In my experience they get that wrong much less than the number of times I've clicked on a mobile link on desktop.

I often, almost weekly, think about coming here to just write “websites”. I hate them. I am never ever on a fast computer, and anything less is just not equipped to make them usable. I hate the cookies bullshit, even more so when it slowly animates before I can click it. I hate when Barclays doesn’t put the fucking code boxes where I can click on them and I have to repeatedly scroll down to find them. I hate when I click on a shopping item, press back, and it takes me back to the top. I hate mailto links because I also hate the mail app. I hate having to turn screen lock off on my phone so I can turn my phone landscape to use your stupid website. I hate trying to read your white-on-black text. I hate opening a thread and watching the whole thing disappear under a sea of slowly-loading images. I hate going to click a link only for it to shift down making me click the wrong thing. I hate that this is all so shit in 2023 with how much I pay for everything.

All of this. We went through a period of time when websites stopped looking like they did on Windows 95 and everything became nicely aligned with images that loaded quickly and in place. We seem to have done a complete u-turn in the last few years and the majority of websites are a bag of misaligned shit, with nothing lining up and looking like it's just been plonked randomly somewhere on the page, text loading in one font and then changing at the last minute, doesn't quite fit on one page etc etc. The oldest, nerdiest, hand-coded HTML sites load absolutely perfectly, and instantly, on any device. Why the fuck does a basic, modern site showing me nothing more than text and a couple of images take so fucking long to load on a modern 56 jiggabit fibre connection and then look such a mess?

Bring back tables and frames. Damn.

I hate trying to read your white-on-black text.

I agree apart from this bit and much prefer dark backgrounds on everything, including on here.

I like it aesthetically but it does my head in, I can manage one screensworth

In the same vein:

Websites that second guess what you are writing, and correct it to the wrong thing as you are writing it.

Or websites that suggest that you have searched for the wrong thing, and "correct" it to the new thing, and then have the fucking temerity to tell you that there are no results returned for the thing that you weren't fucking looking for.

Webforums. They reduce discussion to the lowest common denominators and reward trolling over intelligent conversation.

In the early days of the public Internet, most ISPs provided Usenet (usually not connected to public Usenet) for discussion forums. They pointed their mostly Windows-using customers to Outlook Express, which wasn't a wonderful client for anything but did support Usenet. And so there was genuintely threaded discussion. Actual branching threads mean there's much less thread derail because people not interested in the tangent don't read that branch and just follow the main conversation; it's easy, if you find you've followed a branch that's lost value, to backtrack and go down a more constructive path. Even though Usenet is where flame wars and spam originated, they were less of a problem for the same reason.

Sadly, pretty soon they all provided web interfaces to the forums as well. Despite there long having been Usenet web interfaces that support actual branching threads, that's not what they used. And as both Usenet and Outlook Express became less generally used, flat "threads" - where you have to page through all the shit to pick out the constructive bits - became dominant.

Sometimes the market just goes down the wrong damned rabbit hole and never comes out. Webforums are one of those. Fuck webforums.

websites that suggest that you have searched for the wrong thing, and "correct" it to the new thing

LFGSS

tl;dr

so usenet just ripped off reddit?

Those requests are GDPR constantly flipping the bird to assholes like Elon Musk and Paul Graham.

You likely haven't heard of Paul Graham. Unlike Musk, he's been right about computer tech on more than one occasion. But like Musk he's a rich, libertarian asshole who doesn't have to care about surveillance capitalism because it doesn't affect him. Surveillance capitalism isn't relevant to the lives of the very rich. Their lives aren't susceptible to it. They also like to think they're more powerful than any government - and mostly they're right.

GDPR was a shot across the bows of those assholes and then some. It's constant sand in their underpants. It offends their narcissistic prejudices and also inconveniences them and their companies financially. I really don't mind those occasions when I need a couple of extra clicks to see some content, because I know how much it annoys them.

Don't be like Paul and Elon.