I’d like to see just how horrible someone can make a site. Facebook is a good contender.
Stileproject and rotten.com were absolute horror shows. Stileproject just seems to be porn now, but I saw a photo once in like 2005 or so of a guy standing on his head with his legs apart with a full size fire extinguisher jammed deeply into his ass.
Tame by extreme internet shock content standards
Well it was quite a sight back then when porn wasn’t quite so niche.
There was also a guy on Tumblr who seemed to have turned his entire colon inside out.
Ooooo you must be between the ages of 35 and 43 if you’ve been to old-school* stileproject! What a throwback!
I’m 50. We do know about the internet!
I was CLOSE!
In terms of social, political, and geopolitical harm, no platform beats Facebook. At least in X there are community notes. In Facebook, none of that.
With Facebook and x.com you pretty much understand the risks going in.
But with stack overflow there’s so much naivete required to create an account and begin asking questions. The good stuff is laid out right in front of you: people asking similar questions and getting thoughtful responses to deeply technical questions. It feels rewarding to get your first answer approved.
But then after months of “trying” you hit the wall. A sudden deluge of hostility and toxicity. Bipolar moderation staff suddenly deciding your content has no value and dumping you on a curb at night with a shitty smug comment, to the applause of bloodthirsty hoards of bootlicking trolls.
Nothing could have prepared you for this. It’s hell. All of your work for nothing, any chance of justice or restitution gone. Every promise broken.
It’s insidiously evil and I hope every member of their staff (unpaid moderators included) goes bankrupt and loses their home to foreclosure.
Yeah, I’m really happy for GPT for this alone. It minimised my exposure to SO.
Eons ago I made a shocksite-“game” where you basically could trick people into visiting, and you got a point for each unique visit. The site was basically a collage of the usual, such as goatse, tubgirl, et.al. I guess that was the worst, and putting no effort into the design didn’t help either. Once the /b/-tards on 4chan found out about it, traffic really skyrocketed.
Anyways, years went by, and I didn’t have time or interest in maintaining it anymore, so I let the domain name Expire. I chuckled a bit a while back when I realized that the domain had been bought by a jewelry brand, and they used it as a webshop. If only they knew the history… they obviously haven’t checked out the internet archive for that domain.
Pintrest is the worst website ever built and has caused immense damage to the free sharing of information.
I legitimately don’t know why Google hasn’t filtered it out of image search results. It’s harmful to Google’s platform.
It’s the top rated blocked website on Kagi.
I don’t know why Google doesn’t take a hint.
This is a baseless but very reasonable theory - because Pinterest pays them a fuck ton of money.
me: oh hey I was looking for–
Pinterest: Sign in or I will come to your house and break your thumbs
me: well fuck you too then
It was actually pretty cool when I started and real people used it.
Honestly don’t get why they’re still around and what they do.
Used to be an easy way to collect and share photos or something from a website with friends. It was especially useful with things like making a collection of fashion that you liked and then discussing similar fashions with friends. It actually at one point would recognize some pieces of clothing and then create links to buy it. Actually a useful advertising kind of thing IMHO. But it became bloated and full of tracking nonsense rather than helping people share things and so it lost its usefulness. It seems it’s mostly populated by bots now to drive SEO.
Together with Quora. Search engine pollution.
There was about ten minutes there when Quora was Yahoo! Answers for people who passed the Apgar test.
Seemingly every recipe website. They tell a long, unrelated story, cover the page with ads, popups, slideouts, timer triggered ads, videos, etc.
It’s almost impossible to see the recipe under all the crap.
These were some of the first sites to be enshittified. The more you scroll that more ad revenue they got. So they hid the actual recipes and steps under a back story longer than the dune books that forced you to scroll and hit ad after ad.
A lot of these have a link near the top to go straight to the recipe, which helps me avoid much of the dreck.
I think the time I was like 7 and was looking at hamster photos on Google to print and cut out. Scrolling along I couldn’t find any that looked exactly like my hamster named Cinnamon after a black streak along his back.
Getting to the 3rd or 4th “load more” buttons on Google and it started showing me stuff that wasn’t hamsters I got desperate. I saw there were a few images that had text along the top and bottom, “for more cute hamster photos go to xhamster.com”.So naturally, I went there.
Turns out xhamster.com was not a site where hamsters share selfies and is, instead, pornography.
I once had to use the NY State government website for info. Finally found the page. Open page up and see a blue background with dark blue font. Un fucking readable.
DHL.
Website designed by hateful people who seem to make it as hard as possible to pay duty fees on parcels.
Adobe.
Once, you sign in, good luck finding anything you need.
An absolute classic
Reminds me of freshman year in college… people would sneak into each others rooms and put it up on each other’s computers, trying to see if they could set a record for most spins.
Goatse raises an objection.
Flo Rida ruined meatspin for me.
You spin me right round baby right round.
Lord I remember my friends throwing this shit on school computers…
You spin a wheel and they ship you free meat. I couldn’t disagree with you more. I recommend anyone try it out. I don’t know why it exists, but my freezer is stocked.
Usually webapps.
Ugh, still to this day, persistant file storage is either “the cloud” or file APIs that altho secure, don’t allow for saving overtop of existing files. really annoying.
Anything owned by billionaires.
You can, by going to the coupon page of this Web Site, print out coupons for trail rides and receive great discounts.
I like the random red button on the left with no description. Had to click
The site says it’s closing August of 2020…
This one is gold
Blue, actually. Very, very, very blue.
The color blue is not for rent, they’re giving that shit away.
I… Why that sounds dangerous?