Chrisoft

This might become a series. Let’s see …

WARNING: this is an “old mfer yelling at clouds” kind of post. If you don’t take this kind of posts well, please, be kind to yourself and close this page immediately, and optionally, set fire to your computer.

The premise of this post is simple. I’m just going to list a few common things that irritates me the most on the modern web (and promising you that you’ll never see any of them on this website) and why[1]. Let’s get started.

But before that … one caveat: The list applies only to websites that once existed in a more traditional form, e.g. news sites, forums, personal homepages, etc. Web applications are fully exempt from this list.[2]

infinite scrolling

The first time I noticed the existence of infinite scrolling, it was on some social media website that I’m no longer active on. And I instantly dreaded it.

Being the somewhat cynical person that I am, I’m quite convinced that this mechanism is designed by social media companies to get people addicted to their platform. There’s basically no other way to explain why it even became a thing.

Set aside the psychological manipulation, many implementations of infinite scrolling are plagued by performance issues caused by either not unloading old content, or initiating the automatic request way too late, or a combination of them. It also messes with scroll aide extensions.

The bare minimum to make this infinite scrolling idea remotely redeemable, in my opinion, is to trigger the loading only after an explicit, obviously intentional user interaction that is not merely scrolling close to the end of the page. Or better still, just implement good old pagination, which, when implemented properly, would also allow the viewer to skip to the page they want to see instantly, a feature that most implementations of infinite scrolling lack.

wasted screen estate

If the content on your website is artificially limited to take up only less than half of the available length in either dimension, you should probably reconsider your life choices.

(Unless your content only use that much space, that is.)

fake content blocks as loading indicators

This one annoys the hell out of me, because the only purpose it appears to serve is to slow down the loading of the actual content, which is already slow as f if you are browsing the modern web on an older computer.

Yes the kind that shows empty cards that have an occasional animated glare flashing through is the most annoying.

One occasion where this is potentially excusable is to stop elements from being shifted around when the page fully loads.[3] However:

• many implementations are done so poorly that these placeholders fail to do what they’re supposed to: elements still shift around as things get loaded in.
• if you don’t make your website so goddamn heavy, it wouldn’t take such a long time to load would it? Saying this especially to those websites that used to have a much lighter incarnation but are now simply insufferably huge.
• if you must use these as placeholders, they don’t have to be animated in a way that takes more resources to render than the actual content they are supposed to hold, do they?

The Brits in fact have a pretty good word for this kind of design. It’s called “wankery”.

overriding common browser shortcuts

No, I don’t want to see your poorly implemented custom search box when I press ctrl+f. And I don’t want to be forced to press it twice to use the native search either. So quit doing it.

Obviously if your custom search actually functions properly, or if the overridden shortcut serves little purpose on your page, this is probably excusable.

[4]

autoplay on non-media-centric pages

Autoplay audio has been such an annoying problem that most browsers these days are outright banning autoplay with sound. But autoplay of silent videos is just equally as annoying. It might be silently (duh) diverting the viewer’s attention without them even noticing it.

Unsurprisingly the biggest use of this is by big corpo websites to show you ads. It’s almost like that they know exactly what they are doing: being the only thing that moves on the screen, the reader’s attention would be surely all drawn to it, giving them the ad impression they crave.

any attempted adblock detection

First of all, I’m sorry that you have to use one of the worst ways to monetize your website. My condolences. Second, you know it will absolutely be bypassed, right?

registration wall

Well, I guess this is understandable (but in no way excusable) for big corpo websites that have an unholy thirst for their visitor’s personal info and selling it to data brokers later on, LinkedIn comes to mind as the worst offender.

But what baffles me more is that this practice has also been incredibly common in smaller forums. Some have even more ridiculous requirements on account age or some kind of active engagement to perform the most basic tasks. And no it’s not an anti-bot measure, because what is being restricted is almost always access to some information that new visitors might actually want, and the engagement requirement makes it obvious that the owner is absolutely craving the engagement. What good does it do to have two more registered users on your scrappy little forum who will never return?

Fortunately this nonsense seems to be in decline especially on newer websites, at least partially thanks to the Internet being dead or dying.

dishonorable mentions

These will not be given ratings, but are still disgusting in my opinion.

persistent, substantial animated elements for no reason

Well, I’m talking about your “cool mesh of vertices floating around with highlight following mouse” kind of thing. I’ve seen that kind of background on a surprisingly wide range of websites: from personal websites to websites of startup companies. It comes in many different flavors.

That stuff might be cool for the first 5 seconds, then it becomes nothing but distraction and a waste of resources.

Yes, your cute Live2D-esque animated waifu also counts. At least let the user to turn it off for goodness’ sake.

using fixed-width font for big wall of texts

This would have been a self-own of epic proportions had the post been published a day earlier. Because this entire website was using Computer Modern Unicode Typewriter Text as its primary font …

Well, the website isn’t your text editor, is it? So why would you do that? Torture your readers’ eyes?

disagree with the list? too bad.

This should go without saying, but this list is EXTREMELY SUBJECTIVE. If you disagree with the list, feel free to do any of the following:

• Write a detailed rebuttal of the points you disagree with, and send it as an e-mail to my compliant inbox, which I’ll surely read thoroughly, or better still, pipe it right into /dev/null.
• Make your own list.
• Or set fire to your computer, again.

Anyway, I’m getting outta here. 2026-04-15 13:25:35