I don’t believe any of it for a moment but being cursed with curiosity I sometimes find myself looking stuff up on the internet* which leads me to these sorts of websites and I’ve noticed that they almost all have a similar layout and structure. Namely links and pictures everywhere in no apparent coherent fashion. Basically the exact opposite of a simple, clean and straightforward layout.
Is there any particular reason for this?
Click on these at your own risk, I highly suspect they’re dodgy in more ways than one, but they do show what I mean (I’ve broken the links, just in case)
Old-school HTML, probably using templates or an early “builder” like HoTMetaL. Plus a tendency towards garish color combinations like bright red and neon green. And not a lot of skill at the task. Of course you have to have a distinctive background image repeated across the page. And while I didn’t peek at the code, I’d guess they’re all table-based, which was the hot way to organize images and blocks of info ca. 2003.
End results all look the same the way everything looks the same in every elder crafts store on Earth.
You don’t find many first-rate minds behind sites (or newsletters, or YT channels, or the like) like this. Many are/were older and kind of fumbling around in this web stuff. So you’re looking at very amateurish use of amateur/EZ tools, preferably free or laying around, all of which drives the result to a common result and look and feel. Then, of course, they all start copying and helping and borrowing from each other, so you have very similar tropes (like the overpowering BG image and cubical format) the same way all medical sites are spacious white with tasteful hints of blue and green.
If you’re asking about the mindset behind CTs and CT sites… this thread could run for years.
Nah. The mindset is they want to feel special, they suspect anything they don’t understand (which, obviously, is damn near everything), and, sadly, they’ve an unhealthy dose of anti-Semitism. All the CTers I’ve had the misfortune to encounter always tie in their latest CT with some flavor of hatred of Jews along with the CTers’ regular ol’ hatred of the government.
A unifying “theme” in conspiracy theory-oriented websites is the Endless Page, which scrolls on forever in stream of consciousness mode.
Part of the reason for this is ignorance of principles of good website design and/or laziness. It also seems to be in tune with the mental illness which (to greater or lesser degree) drives the conspiracy theory buff. They’ve just got to put all this meandering spew out there at once without links to new pages. It’s too important to interrupt for even one second, which might allow the Giant Illuminati Pharma Lizards to gain the upper hand in the battle for hearts and minds.
The current phad in webbery is endless pages, one horizontal stripe of content at a time, going on and on and on and on, often with about 50 words per stripe. It’s driven by SEO voodoo-ery, Bootstrap-is-divinery, and OhHeyLookWhatTheyDiddery.
Hates it, I do.
Just ran into one of these for a corporate-level product, whose many pages of many stripes boiled down to “Call our rep and let him/her tell you how great this product is.” Finally ordered a single license out of desperation and found that the product itself is 2005-level crudity in interface and operation. Make that 2005-look wrapped over 1990s functionality. Arrrrgh.
Art produced by people with schizophrenia seems to be somewhat consistently garish and busy. Examples here (link goes to Google Images). It would not surprise me if the people producing these websites are at least a few steps along that spectrum.
I should also have mentioned that the crackpot Endless Page now is leavened by Endless Video Links, which together with the wall o’text would require you to spend about twenty hours just to get through the homepage, assuming you haven’t been blinded by flashing text over a black background.
There’s a difference between amateurish sites run by the semi-insane and those run by the mentally ill with something to sell, which generally (but not always) are better designed and less cluttered. Even the loon who runs the “Millions Of Health Freedom Fighters” site has done a major redesign, finally figuring out that an endlessly scrolling homepage composed of numerous tightly spaced columns (which made it resemble a Civil War-era version of the New York Times) was really hard to read, not to mention fouling up search engine optimization (the original site was a “winner” on Web Pages That Suck).
One thing I found hilarious in exploring the individual channels on Roku is that there are many clones of a few basic types:
[ol]
[li]Someone, usually older, who doesn’t have the computer chops to manage a YT channel or webpage with self-streaming video…[/li][li]…set up a Roku channel about…[/li][ul]
[li]UFOs[/li][li]Bible readings and/or interpretations[/li][li]Patriotism, Damn It![/li][LIST]
[li]…probably based on 2nd Amendment rants.[/li][/ul]
[/ol]
[li]…quickly records about five very basic and obvious videos and…[/li][li]…never reappears.[/li][/LIST]
Now, this pattern isn’t too unusual on the web, and wasn’t unusual back in the days of newsletters, but it follows the strange, garish, almost childish look and feel being discussed for CT websites, but on an even more primitive level. It gets sad after a while that so many people with Strong Opinions, Damn It! run out of anything to say in about the length of a good op-ed, and end without having said anything new or original or even interesting. Even most YT channels have slightly higher… values. This is truly the bottom feeder of the genre.
A high percentage of the cat images seem to come from the work of 19th-early 20th century artist and illustrator Louis Wain.
Wain was a well-known artist who among other things illustrated children’s books and magazine articles. His earlier works showed conventional to cutesy images of cats, some dressed up and acting like humans. Later as his apparent schizophrenia progressed, his cats started looking progressively weirder and more alarming, and became more and more abstract in a manner supposedly common to schizophrenic art.
While looking up Wain references (I remember seeing citations of his art’s “progression” into mental illness) I was interested to see that some modern interpretations challenge the idea of this “progression”, noting that many of his works were undated and that he is said to have occasionally produced conventional cat images during his hospitalizations. The variation could be due to his having had remissions from schizophrenic episodes.
