Yes, with over four billion web pages, the Internet is quite a resource for information, entertainment, etc. Still, everything has its drawbacks. Here are some of the things about the Internet which I find to be something less than spectacular.
• Incredibly dead links !!! Yes there are dead links but there are some that are worthy of “Guinees Book” recognition. Has this ever happened to you? For example, you want to know how to adjust your automobile’s carburetor, so you do a search for that information. You click on the first search engine link (it has to be THE best right?) and you are led to a message board with someone asking a question “How do I adjust my automobile’s carburetor?” Dated March 5, 1997 !!! And in all that time no one has posted any answer and that lonely question is the ONLY information there. ARRRGGHHHH !!!
• Deceptive links. Okay, you are still in need of carburetor adjustment, so you click on a promising link that says “all you need to know about adjusting carburetors”. However, when you get there, you find it will tell you all you need to know if you spend $19.95 for someone’s book. I don’t mind advertising and sponsored links but I do mind something like this ending up in a search engine section that should lead to a free website. GRRRRRRRR !!!
Okay, there must be other folks out there with some complaints.
Let’s hear them.
It stopped getting faster. In 1993, I was using a 1200 baud modem, which means that simple icons took minutes to load - forget about pictures or sounds. As time went by, I upgraded to a 28.8 modem, then a 33.6, then a 56K, then DSL, and finally cable internet. In four years, I had gone from waiting for minutes for icons to download to trading full albums of mp3’s in minutes.
But then it stopped. With that sort of exponential speed increase, you’d think that we’d be swapping full movies or entire series of TV shows in 2 minutes, and webpages would have moved away from text-based to embedded 3D interfaces and videos.
When I was a teenager, I used to plot for hours on a way to get a hold of an ancient Playboy with about 7 pages of partial nudie shots in total. When I first got on the WWW in early 1994, it was just starting to pick up. There was an actual printed catalog of all the popular web sites! I spent hours with Netscape 1.0 trying to find any porn that I could (remember there were no good search engines back then). I could find maybe one half-decent picture an hour if I tried really hard.
Compare that to today, I have been blasted by so images that I don’t even flinch anymore (and that’s just from SPAM in my e-mail inbox). What used to be a source of sacred pleasure is now no more than simple white noise bouncing off my eyes. Thanks internet for screwing it up for me.
freejooky
Oh yeah that brings back memories. I remember using a Commode 64 with a 300 baud modem !!! You could see the screen fill in line by line and the only places I could access were bulletin boards. One telephone connection gave you ONE bulletin board - that was it.
Incidentally, I used to have a cable connection but AT&T were jerks (I went for four days with no working Internet connection and I was on hold with their “support” team a lot.) It affected a wide area (not just me). Even before my connection got restored (3 days) I told them to shove it and I got DSL. And how did AT&T face up to all that? Nothing, and in less than a year they just sold their entire cable division. (Did I say they were jerks?)
I’ll admit that cable connections are faster but DSL seems easier to work with in terms of hooking up more than 1 computer, setting up a new computer. I have heard that the lightning speed of a cable Internet connection can become degraded when more people in your area become subscribers. Does that mean we can expect slower Internet speeds? :rolleyes:
Company websites that are all screwed up & lack certain useful pages or critical information such as pricing. Like Microsoft’s site for instance. I go to the page for Visual C++ 6.0, click on the pricng link, and it takes me to Visual C++ 2003. I’m not interested in 2003. I’m interested in 6.0. :mad:
Then again, that’s just another example of deceptive links I guess.
It would be nice if there were two internets… one just for commercial stuff and one for enthusiasts. That way, if you’re searching for information on a hobby of yours and you just want to see some personal pages from other people interested in the same thing, you aren’t bombarded with 80,000 false results that lead to crappy .coms trying to sell you something that isn’t even related to what you want.
Spyware, adware and other kinds of shitware seems to be a new annoyance. I also hate 404 pages that lead to advertising. “We can’t find your site… but that’s okay because we’ve got all this other crap here!” I’ll take “This page cannot be displayed” anyday.
I also wish newsgroups were still popular and not continually assaulted by waves of spam. Yahoo Groups are just as bad nowadays, even though they’ve put new anti-spam measures in.
Spam itself must die as well. And stupid viruses. No self respecting computer enthusiast would write some piece of crap code that’s going to destroy someone else’s machine.
I also wish sites would stop shutting down due to consumption of bandwidth! It seems like so many good pages that I used to love died because the hosting companies tried plain old extortion based on how much bandwidth the sites were using. Bandwidth is one of those things that seems to get exponentially more expensive if you want more. And it prevents good sites (like this one!) from being able to make full use of their features (avatars, images, etc).
In no particular order:
[ul]
[li]Clueless “me too” morons on informational message boards. You know the type: Someone posts a message like, “Does anyone have any info on fitting left nostril inhalers?” and instead of shutting the hell up and waiting for an answer, the next hundred posts are from idiots:[/li] RE: Left Nostril Inhalers “I need info too!!!11111”
[indent] RE: Left Nostril Inhalers “Send me teh info also i need it”
[indent] RE: RE: Left Nostril Inhalers “Me too”
[indent] RE: RE: RE: Left Nostril Inhalers “me 2 LOL”[/indent][/indent][/indent]
RE: Left Nostril Inhalers “I am looking for this info too” …
[li]Search results that are little more than adlink pages with your search keyword plugged in. Most of the time these are easy to spot but sometimes they aren’t as obvious; you click on the result link and land on a page with bot-produced links that tries to hijack your homepage, install a toolbar, and give you a Free! Comet Cursor! Click to Install![/li][li]Popup and popunder ads are bad enough, but I REALLY hate those popups that scroll around your screen.[/li][/ul]
-Websites loaded with graphics and animations and flash and more stuff that takes ages to load on a modem. Especially commercial or university websites. High speed internet isn’t universal people, and I don’t want to spend a half hour waiting for your front page to load just so I can click on a link and wait another half hour for a page to load. It’ll probably be the wrong link too.
-On that note, websites with confusing links. Sometimes it’s just impossible to tell what link will get you the information you want. Seems to be worse on the websites mentioned above.
#1 with asterisks, nothing else in its class for frustration: email spam. I can’t think of anything that pisses me off even remotely as much, although I put a lot of energy into maintaining a decent handle on it.
People who put their WinAmp playlists on the internet. Why, oh why, oh why would anyone do this?
I collect rare tracks and B-sides, most notably Tears For Fears and Radiohead. As there is no comprehensive list of everything these bands have ever done (and don’t bother linking me to one; odds are I’ve seen it and they’re all inaccurate in one way or another), I am constantly searching for tidbits of information on different versions and track times. Nine times out of ten, when I stumble upon a search result for some obscure version of Everybody Wants To Rule The World (say, EWTRTW Radio Edit), it’ll be somebody who posted their f***ing WinAmp playlist that has EWTRTW and Get Low (Radio Edit). You’d be amazed how often something like this happens. 90% of the time is a conservative estimate.
I wouldn’t mind so much if there were any reason whatsoever to post this sort of list to your webpage, but come on: does anybody have any use whatsoever for knowing what you were listening to on March 19th, 2003? Stop polluting search engines and make life easier for the people who are looking for actual information on music.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve clicked on a link, only to be bombarded with 15 pop up ads that I have to click off before I can read what I wanted to read.
I hope that the designers of that little gem get a raging case of prickly heat in their crotch area, and all the pharmacies and grocery stores in a 100 mile radius are out of calamine lotion and oatmeal.
I’ve been spending the last week trying to get rid of it, and will wind up having to wipe my system…again.
No, thanks, I wouldn’t like to lower my mortgage rate.
No, thanks, I don’t need to work from home.
No, thanks, I don’t believe I was the millionth visitor to your site, nor that I won a prize for doing so.
No, thanks, strange as this may seem, I am not interested in increasing the size of my penis.
No, thanks, really, but I’m not interested in meeting single women.
No, thanks, but I’m not going to click on your banner ad. Or your popup ad. Or your static ad with the cute animation. GAH! BLINK TAGS! Where’s the Back button? Oy.
No I don’t need to meet Christian singles.
No I don’t need Christian debt relief. (Wha? Since when does debt have religion? It may *drive * you there, granted.)
(Upon preview I should specify that I meant *debt * may drive you to religion, although I know the *reverse * to have been true on occasion).
And Chimpy:
Much as I’d like that, I meant the blink tags, bright pink background with bright green text, TOO MANY FREAKIN FRAMES I CAN’T LINK TO THE RIGHT PAGE, and stoopid little animations that follow your mouse around type of web-page creators.
Why do some websites have that “introductory” page of nothing that you must click to enter their site? Shouldn’t all websites skip this idiotic step?
And here’s something I should have listed in my original posting:
Pages or entire sites that are … UNDER CONSTRUCTION.
These are just as annoying as those dead links and deceptive links. How come search engines never include these 2 vital words in search results?
If your page or site isn’t ready, why bother telling anyone that?
