Windows

Nine Things I Hate About The Internet

Posted by on Aug 12, 2008 | 8 Comments

Gnomie Austin Polanco writes:

  1. Watching Videos
    Waiting for online videos to buffer is really annoying — especially if you’re trying to keep up with a live stream.

  2. Registration
    Signing up for a Web mail account or YouTube or just about any site nowadays often requires filling out long registration forms. Why do they need my address, postal code, and phone number? When it’s something that requires a certain amount of security — like PayPal or an online banking site — I can understand the need for this information. Otherwise, no.

  3. Ads
    I know many Web sites need ads to pay for their servers and all, but some Web sites overdo it. Do they really need ads in the words we read for information? Do we really need 22+ ads to open at the same time?

  4. Misspelled Web Sites
    Sometimes when I want to go to a Web site I accidentally type something like youyube.com instead of youtube.com. That usually takes me to some weird splog site with links and billions of ads.

  5. Bot Avoidance
    CAPTCHA (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” according to Wikipedia) images, primarily implemented on Web sites to foil spambots, should never be nearly impossible to decipher by human eyes. It seems the Web designer could easily use MS Paint’s text tool and type characters in a random order for the desired result.

  6. Sites With Only Links
    Sites with hundreds of links and no actual content must somehow be profitable to their creators, but I’m tired of seeing them whenever I’m searching for something legitimate.

  7. Live Help On Web Sites
    My experiences using live chat to resolve support questions have seldom been good. The person on the other end often may as well be a bot — give me old-fashioned phone support any day!

  8. Flash Sites
    Sites done completely in Flash seem to take years to load. Of course it depends on your connection speed, but don’t the designers of such sites take into consideration that the majority of people don’t have lightning speed Internet access?

  9. Torrents
    The simultaneous uploading/downloading of BitTorrents makes my Internet connection slow to a crawl. I guess I prefer to upload and download separately.

There you have it: nine things I hate about the Internet.

  • http://digital-dharma.net Bill Webb

    1. Oh, well.
    2. Registration gives demographic data that helps target ads.,
    3. I agree about linked ads in text — and a certain site we all love is one of the offenders. Annoying as hell, and this is the only one I go to regularly. If I were a newcomer to it, I’d probably never come back.
    4. Guessing what sites will be misspelled and buying those domains is a big bucks business. Remember, .05% success on clicks is a big deal when it comes to ads.
    5. Optical recognition programs can read simple CAPTCHA images. I like the ones that require you to add a couple of numbers and post the sum, but that may be a bit advanced for sum peeps.
    6. See #4.
    7. Chat help allows the use of templated information, as well as handling more than one complaint at once. You get what you pay for.
    8. See #1.
    9. I use uTorrent and have no trouble tailoring my upload and download preferences. Might be time to look at another client if yours lacks the capability.

    These aren’t retorts, just commentary based on my own experience.

  • Ringo Fyre

    Get a faster connection (I know how it is not being able to get ADSL but there are some cost effective alt. – ISDN, cable and satellite)
    Get a real web-browser (preferably with popup blocking) – I suggest starting with Firefox (with Adblock Plus and Noscript) or Opera (both free). If you want to support a site which relies on ads turn them on for that site or alternatively donate to the owner – it’ll give them a pleasant surprise and sure beats the slow trickle of ad revenue!
    Use the preferences in your torrent client to only allow a certain number of connections or amount of bandwidth for uploads. Also try finding if your client has an inbuilt timer, set it to bedtime and by wakeup all your downloads will be finished! If your client doesn’t have a timer try using a freeware app launcher (most usually have a timer built in).

  • E2001

    10. Blogs
    Specifically, the censorship mechanisms which exist to protect the blog owner from redistributing information which he/she may not agree with. For example, a typical response to this blog might be: “I would like to congratulate you and your respondents on your sincere political correctness in addressing such an irrelevant topic such as this. It is my only regret that due to pressures from popular opinion sources, this response will not be seen.”

  • http://woolf2k.spaces.live.com woolf2k

    absolutely nothing… it’s great!

  • http://www.ilteractive.blogspot.com ilter

    “Gnomie Austin Polanco writes, and the Gnome expects a big debate followed by a collapse”

  • Jisp

    Hard to believe you had enough time on your hands to write such a lame little moan!! Anything that annoyed me that much, in 9 different ways, I would simply stop doing.
    Solution – have a look at all the cables around the back of your hardware and disconnect the one from the modem. Don’t thank me, just do it and spare us useless rants.

  • Dan Bromberg

    With all the benefits of the web I guess there’ll always be a few who need to whine; maybe they need to hear tales from the old days when spending an afternoon at the library turned up little or no useful information.

  • steve henry

    number 9==a lot of internet providers deliberatly screw up bit torrent users. Road Runner is one of them. unfortunatly I know from experience. and i wasn’t downloading video–it was a linux distro