It seems like the web is getting harder to use.
Or maybe I'm just getting older.
I am not adapting well to the future at all.
I think you're forgetting some things:
There's the 'flat design' bullshit that people think 'is artistic':
Worst of all? This shit is starting to infect traditional desktop computing too.
https://dri1.img.digitalrivercontent.net/Storefront/Company/msintl/images/English/en-INTL-Windows-10-Home-KW9-00265/en-INTL-L-Windows-10-Home-KW9-00265-RM2-mnco.jpg
Are those buttons on that dialog box or just text decoration? Who fucking knows?! The only help you get is the layout of the window.
Now look at Windows NT 4.0:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4e/Windows_NT_4.0.png
You know that "About Windows" thing is a dialog box. It has a shaded "OK" button in the right bottom corner. Shit's 10/10 UI design.
Besides. You can actually see that the buttons to close/minimize/maximize a window are actually buttons, in contrast with Windows 10 where they're decorated like they themselves are window decoration.
Windows NT 4.0 literally indicates what is and isn't a button better than Windows 10!
Hang on, guys. I think I'm gonna install Windows NT on my system.
Welcome to the aneurysm that is the Google design guidelines.
>Surfaces and edges of the material provide visual cues that are grounded in reality. The use of familiar tactile attributes helps users quickly understand affordances. Yet the flexibility of the material creates new affordances that supercede those in the physical world, without breaking the rules of physics.
What a breath of fresh air. They want the designs to seem as realistic as interactions we have in the real world.
Let's try it out:
That's right. According to google (and reality, apparently), pressing a button is actually the opposite. You're really pulling the button toward yourself!
>https://material-design.storage.googleapis.com/publish/material_v_4/material_ext_publish/0Bx4BSt6jniD7WlduMk1kbTRzQWc/components_buttons_main15.png
That does actually make sense for some buttons though. You know, the ones work the funny catches.
The biggest palpable decline in the past half-decade has been the fall of the search engine and SEO wars. The Internet has become difficult to navigate and less usable largely because it's impossible to find something you're not looking for by name anymore.
The web is barely even fit to be named as such any more, it's more like a bicycle wheel, where you can be on the rim, but all paths--the spokes--lead to the centre: Google and Facebook.
This isn't even getting into the actual bullshit on the computers, where apparently the actual ACT of using a computer should be an experience and a delight in itself. And its affecting Linux Desktop Environments as well.
I'm so mad about this I might become a Luddite by choice.
>>2
We made the developers in charge of development, and the designers in charge of design. So we have developers making software into a rolling beta because it's fun (and assures long-term employment to fix the bugs their games created), and the designers treat it all as one big art project. Look at how much system resources are used to generate all that nothing they have in their designs. And all this just causes problem on the new F/UHD screens because their pretty pictures don't scale well, and for some reason fucking boxes can't seem to scale well. If we had stuck with bitmap graphics and fonts (at least for the UI) we'd just need to double up the pixels and call it a day.
And don't even get me started on some of the CSS coloring people use for their standards in HTML. I saw a site the other day that had their bold font set to be normal weight and underlined, and their link font to be bold, but without an underline.
True, but a lot of this has to do with nobody stepping up to make usable shit.
>>8
That's horrifying. It's even worse that some of this could be rectified in browsers, especially stuff like pressing tab to show links not outlining the selection, but the default options to do so are difficult to find or use; I also belive that the newer versions of HTML itself is implemented incorrectly: I've seen short sentences within div tags break into two lines when there was plenty of space to expand out to it's full length -- on the newline there could be as little as 3 characters when there was more than 75% of the screen width left for use.
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The web is also getting bloated, with frameworks or whatever that is that loads a ton of javascript into my browser and fill my memory. not only that, advertising has destroyed any good faith in visiting a website, a webstie full of ads will track the user, feed the tracking information to advertisers without user's consent, not to mention the aforementioned RAM flooding.
Earn $1,000,000 together.
http://goo.gl/YLysV3
Whose idea was it to make https so popular? My browser will often get an https "secure connection failed" for no real reason other than that the website forced https instead of http. One time it even gave me an https error when directing me to a firefox help forum thread about https errors. Also when trying to access free wifi that have those "accept our terms of use" redirect pages at places like a library or cafe, it will give me an "Unsecure" error for any website that uses https, forcing anyone who wants to log in to memorize a specific http site. What a mess.
>>15
The web as an all-encompassing method of digital presentation was a massive mistake as we pay for it every single day. What exactly was wrong with using different protocols for different types of file and server. It's not like anyone using a browser would notice the change from HTTP to Gopher to FTP in terms of their actual interaction with the computer itself (in that it's all in the same program and obeys that program's laws).
Sometimes I even think HTML has been a joke that's gone on too long and we should all go back to text files.
>>17
Maybe a txt:// protocal that's only interpreted as plain text or a mtxt:// as plain text + bold, underline, italics, hyperlink and monospace differentiators would be a welcome protocal.
>Maybe a txt:// protocal that's only interpreted as plain text
That exists: it's called Gopher.
>mtxt:// as plain text + bold, underline, italics, hyperlink and monospace differentiators
That exists: it's called HTML 1.0
I hate how so many news sites nowadays use such huge fonts and pictures, plus add floating banners taking up 20-30% of the vertical space, so that even on a 1080p monitor it's like you're browsing in 640x480 mode. People design for mobile and then adapt the same god-awful UX to the desktop instead of the other way around.
>so that even on a 1080p monitor it's like you're browsing in 640x480 mode.
Same with how slow a lot of computing is these days in terms of UI and other things. Makes you wonder what it would be like if we didn't waste it all on useless trash and bloated code. Might as well have just stayed on DOS if we were going to have such annoying experiences.
Javascript is heretical
Bring back Xanadu.
it's like cable TV now
Fuck endless scrolling! Fuck it.
just some basic html and css skills can create a great webpage with only a few tags. but no serious website would ever do that.
>>25
dude
you do not have a fucking idead of how much i hate this shit
really
i hate too much
In the early 2000s, dozens of academic math websites were made featuring Java applets with interactive geometry.
Now, nearly none are left and Java applets are long deprecated. There's still some similar sites and demonstrations but few are ever as comprehensive as those old sites (and considering the current state of the web, a pain to find). Also, Java applets and Flash somehow lagged considerably less than modern webshit attempts at the same.
It used to be that I could go online and spend hours discovering countless cool sites on whatever topics I could imagine. Now it's all buried in bot-ran blogs all copying from each other. Or is it that people no longer make cool websites? Most cool webpages I run into now are hosted on github, most cool articles on some large platform. Most people I know don't use the web outside of youtube, wikipedia, and social media apps. The web just isn't as fun these days.
>Now it's all buried in bot-ran blogs all copying from each other.
You need to use a lot of +"query" -"query" modifiers to find the buried stuff.
>Or is it that people no longer make cool websites?
Depends on what you consider cool. I find that more interesting sites are usually spread by word of mouth. Here's a couple link directories to check out:
https://peelopaalu.neocities.org/
https://kaisernet.org/links.htm
https://sundee.neocities.org/links/
Some alternate search engines that mainly cover buried sites:
https://wiby.me/
https://search.marginalia.nu/
>The web just isn't as fun these days.
I think it's more the general mood of the users that's the problem. There are fun sites out there, but demoralized and/or nasty users diminish the overall mood.
>You need to use a lot of +"query" -"query" modifiers to find the buried stuff.
I find that Google has this habit of returning no results at all, or barely anything, for searches that make extensive use of +"query" -"query" modifiers even where a modifier-less version of that same search returns results that should match the modifiers. Or, on rarer occasions, of outright ignoring quotation marks or other operators for certain searches and shitting out a page of SEO AI-spam regardless.
>Here's a couple link directories to check out:
I am well aware of those link directories, and a number of others. Peelopaalu plenty of nice links in it.
The problem with these small "word of mouth" link directories is that they're usually a list of "nostalgic" webpages, old personal sites, and a bunch of the site owner's personal interests. They're not comprehensive and they're rarely useful for finding anything specific. I kind of wish there was a modern version of the old Yahoo link directory. Or for search engines to stop sucking again.
People linking to each other is a nice development though. With how most sites are now, you'd think everyone forgot the web is for hypertext.
>Some alternate search engines that mainly cover buried sites:
I haven't had much luck with wiby, but marginalia is occasionally interesting. There's a few other newer ones I've seen floating around that might be promising.
>There are fun sites out there, but demoralized and/or nasty users diminish the overall mood.
The "general mood" you refer to does not effect me, I barely use community or social sites. Textboards and IRC more than meet my needs for any online interaction.
What bothers me far more is the difficulty of finding useful or informative websites (new ones, not ancient pages cursed with link rot), fun interactive sites, web toys and "web art," non-dogshit blogs, and so on. It used to be that countless hobbyists, artists, tech nerds, academics, writers, mentally ill weirdos, etc. had personal webpages with worthwhile material on them. Now they're mostly on social media. Those who still have personal sites barely update them and just link to their Twitter accounts. Even corporate websites used to be good looking, had "kid's areas" for flash games, etc.
The web was fun because it was easy to find pages where people had created fun things. Material that now is mostly concentrated in a few painfully (and intentionally) unsearchable platforms. And the present day renaissance of lain-themed neocities webpages run by teenage transsexual furries roleplaying as if it's the 90s does not make up for that loss.
>>34
Regarding the search modifiers, I've also noticed they're not always working nowadays. In some cases you can use a different engine that is based on another to make it work, for example using goo instead of bing.
The novelty factor of the web has long since diminished so of course it's going to be harder to find sites like that. Interacting with your site visitors encouraged personal sites, but the lack of visitors, the poor conduct of the average user and the spambot armies of today make it less attractive. They do still exist, but the greater signal to noise ratio and poorly configured search engine algorithms make it harder to come across them.
Speaking of the link directories, why hasn't anyone made a wiki style link directory that anyone can contribute to? Perhaps it already exists but a quick search gave me nothing worthwhile.
i see no problem, op.
i can still browse this site on my iPhone 17 XXR Pro Max Ultra
Something I deeply hate about modern web are the tables or objects that don't load instantly and move everything on the site every other second.
Do you want to click this little link? Too bad, it moved to load our ad.
Oh, you think you got it this time? Fuck you! It moved again to load an empty box begging you to subscribe/turn off ad blocker!
You thought you were done? Have a funny pop-up show up exactly where you want to click! Now you have to input your email address DIPSHIT!!!
The new authentication standards and machine learning legislation companies are pushing for could be really bad
>Speaking of the link directories, why hasn't anyone made a wiki style link directory that anyone can contribute to? Perhaps it already exists but a quick search gave me nothing worthwhile.
I've been thinking about something like this. Kinda want to make a wiki + imageboard for "weird website exploration". You know, like for cataloging indieweb projects + "weird" shit like ARGs, etc.
Think there'd be enough community for something like that, or is that too niche?
>>35
I know this won't be helpful, but DMOZ existed, which may have been similar to what you are describing (I've never actually used it before went offline.)
>>41
I'd think that there is definitely a community for that!
If not, at least 10 other people and myself will visit your website, although I genuinely encourage the creation of something like that.
On a side note, here's a link dump thread some of you may find interesting.
http://secretareaofvipquality.org/read.cgi/saovq/1444128918
>>41
feel free to use https://wiki.gikopoi.com
>>35,41
Well, I think at a certain scale, that kind of project inevitably becomes a search engine, because nobody can be asked to keep up-do-date with it all, and small, static sites are very ephemeral.
To that point, there's marginalia.nu, and there's also that premium Kagi search engine that I think focuses on human-made content for a ridiculous fee.
I think Gnome has found a good compromise in between the trendy superflat style and the far more practical skeuomorphism of 2000's ux. You can certainly tell what all the icons are supposed to represent. I think the two things inhibiting people from using more skeumorphic design is the fact that it's not in style and that it's more technically challenging than superflat design and therefore requires more resources. But, yeah, the original iOS icon pack was perfect; we had no idea how good we had it.
>>33
Notably, the peelopaalu guy as of 20/JULY/2024 has quit maintaining the link list because "The Internet these days is just fucking wack and I do not care about it. Nothing specific has triggered this, I just spend very little of my personal time having fun online like I did 10, 15, or 20 years ago. It's just not the same for me anymore, and it's time to move on."
Fitting.
