I’ve finally had it with these guys. I subscribe to some of their magazines, and they’re fine. But they’re online emails they ask you to subscribe to are the fucking epitome of unhelpful design and sheer stupidity. Every now and then they headline an article that I think might be interesting, like this one:
The Birth of a Bike
Some of the most useful bicycles in the world are built in the United States—by New York’s Worksman Cycles. Here’s a behind-the-scenes tour.
Okay, so I click on it and am taken here, where they have one friggin picture on each page. They do this shit with all their magazines, even when it’s an article that mainly text. Please, dear reader, read one or two little paragraphs and then click to load another fucking page—and s…l…o…w…l…y—all so we can artificially bump up our links or some other such shit. Note to idiots: scrolling down works fucking great!
Well, I’ve had it. So, fuck you and and your asshole web group. I’ve unsubscribed. At least I now have a perfect example to talk to clients to about when discussing “how not to treat your readers”.
Yeah - I was thinking about that last night when I stumbled across some blog proclaiming “32 of the best and most amazing [something or other]”. One per page. Really?
I seem to remember being quite interested by the theme, but there’s no way I’m clicking through 32 individual pages. I just moved on.
I understand. Mouse clicking has become the new hard labor of the 21st century. Reminds me of The Jetsons when George was exhausted from having to push the button TWICE one day at work.
I quit shopping at one online store because it would only load 8 items per page. No choice. Now, if you have a very slow dialup connection, that sort of makes sense. But gimme a choice to view all, or at least view 100 at a time, especially if the categories are so broad that there’s several hundred items per category. Because you know what? There’s other companies that sell basically the same stuff. I shop online for the sake of convenience. If my experience is not convenient at one store, I’ll go to another. I’m not loyal to most online shops.
It’s not the mouse clicking that’s the issue, here. It’s the 1-2 minute load time per page. I have no problem clicking 30 times to view 30 pictures. I do that with the pictures stored locally on my machine, anyway, in slide-show view. It’s the fact that I would have to take half an hour or more to look at those pictures, where I would otherwise finish them in 5 minutes, solely because of page loading time between pictures, that makes websites like that unusable.
Yep. There are plenty of sites that give you a bunch of pictures to click through, but having a reader go through 10 or 15 pages to read a short article or view a few pictures is asinine. Finally, I unsubscribed and never have to be tempted again by something that looks interesting and then get slapped by their stupidity.
Sure is, but I hate it all the same. I make a little money from ads on my own site, but never at the expense of content or by abusing the goodwill of my visitors, although I know I could make more money if I did - I politely declined another offer just this week from someone who wanted to hide ‘subtle’ (i.e. misleading) links in my page content.
The New York times is pretty bad about page-splitting (and Cracked is worse), but at least they have a good number of words on each page, too. I don’t put up with that shit just for a slideshow, but I do for Cracked because I love it.
I’m kinda hoping this will result in a sort of natural selection process, but if it does, it will probably only deal with one form of it in turn, and a new one will arise to annoy us.
Somewhat before the rise of content-less blog-based click farms, people were doing the same thing with online video - in particular, on Metacafe, which at the time had a very attractive ‘Producer Rewards’ deal - the producer forum was chock-full of people asking essentially “How can I induce lots of people to watch my video, which is either utter shite, or not even my own work?”.
They should really have been asking “How can I make videos that people want to watch?” - but it seems people always want to try to do things the easy way (in practice, it’s the hard way, because you still have to invest a massive effort to manufacture the phenomenon that would just happen naturally if you deserved it).
The only person who made a fortune out of the Metacafe Producer Rewards scheme was Kipkay - because he makes instructional videos that people find interesting - however, the whirlwind of shit videos that other producers unleashed on the site made the whole thing a less viable business and eventually, the scheme was no longer sustainable.
That’s why the shittier parts of the web (low-rent places like HuffPo and the like) have started churning out this type of article in the first place. The whole “X things associated with some random theme” genre was invented as a flimsy justification for turning one weak concept into X ad impressions rather than just one or two.
Not just that, but even the decent content on some sites is so swamped by social media paraphernalia (Facebook “Like” buttons, “Tweet” buttons, reaction categories, tags, alerts, etc., etc., ad nauseum) that you can hardly see the content.
I’m an educated left-liberal type, smack in the center of HuffPo’s demographic, but i never bother to visit the site because it’s so fucking cluttered with shit.
Stop running contradictory articles month after month. I stopped reading the magazine Men’s Health because of all of the contradiction month to month. In January they’ll give you a HIIT workout poster and talk about how it’s the greatest lifting method ever, then in the March issue they’ll tear down HIIT as an abomination to the workout world that should be abolished. I read the magazine for years (from 17-25) before I really caught on, but I can’t even look at the magazine without feeling a bit of disgust now.
Heh. Many years ago I subscribed to Glamour, and they ran a puff piece about pet care. They had a do-and-don’t list that included “don’t feed your dog too many sweet treats!” accompanied by a photo illustration of an Old English Sheepdog wearing a party hat and neckerchief, sitting in front of a big bowl full of ice cream.
A couple of months later, another puff piece about things you can do with your pet. “Celebrate his birthday!” Same dog. Same party hat. Same ice cream.
