Buying things online in 2005 was certainly better. Ebay was a wild place. You’d get in bidding wars going a dollar at a time. Sometimes you’d walk away with a pretty great deal. Not like now how you’ll go to a garage sale and some dude wants retail for his 4 year golf clubs. That’s in large part due to fb marketplace. It’s straight ruined garage sale finds
Sorry, what exactly about Facebook marketplace? Too low prices, or too high? Or do you just mean the fact that theres no bidding on there? Haven’t been on there in a while so not sure what the correlation is.
Marketplace ruined (affordable) great garage sale finds.
Now some girl will want 300 dollars for her 2 year old vacuume cause that’s what some moron actually paid
Before the internet there were still people who thought their stuff was worth more than it was. I do feel like garage sales in general though have declined so thats a bummer.
I’ll enshrine this post it encapsulates something that I always struggled to put into words.
And, the sites end up eating battery.
Rose tinted glasses. Shopping online in 2005 was absolutely not as simple as 3 clicks.
you missed the part about broken links, pages that wouldnt load because of some random HTML error, oh, and the payment itself either getting rejected or otherwise not working for a long time.
Not to mention the popup ads…
The internet in the 2000s was like a WW1 Trenchline. Noise and graphic content everywhere and one wrong move could cost you life or limb.
I dont exactly remember when it started getting “safer” because I think the same time the internet was getting safer to browse, a lot of Millenial and Zillenial kids were getting smarter and otherwise learning how to not get malware and worms on their PC
I remember arguing with my mum over a banner ad that said “congratulations you’re the 1000th person to visit this page, youve won 1million dollars”
I was really young and I was like mum just put your card in here and get a million dollars its so easy and you always complain about having no money. Its not a scam we just got lucky.
I am lucky neither of my parents had a credit card or any trust for computers.
2025 Got to Online Store Type “toilet paper” in search bar. Instead of simply saying, “Sorry, we have no toilet paper” they expect you to scroll through 50,000 variations of “toilet seats”, “toilets”, “toilet brushes”, “paper”, “paper toilets”, “paper brushes” only to finally discover there are no entries for “toilet paper”, etc. and discover for yourself that they have no toilet paper.
The fake chats all seem to use the exact same image too. Apparently this one woman works for dozens of support sites if you were to believe she was real in the first place.
c/overemployed
Likely because those sites are built by the same provider.
I work for a car dealership and all of the other dealerships of the same brand in our region use the same family of providers, We -used- to have the faces of real employees pop up on the chat thing until they got too busy to handle it
now its the same stock photo of a person who likely doesnt even exist
- 2025
- Go to any website
- uBlock Origin
- No ads and cookie banners
- Some AI chat assistant named Jill on the bottom right corner
I always ask AI Jill if she wants to fuck.
Don’t toss your monitor, you will need to go to the online store in order to get a new one
yeah cause you cant get one at your local best buy anymore, but someone will certainly harrass you into trying to buy a smart TV
Sad part about this is it’s not comic hyperbole. It’s just literally an average online experience.
I came here to say this. Often times the pop ups are so bad that I just leave the site. Its almost never worth it
Sites so slow they actually crush the browser and overheats the phone. Reddit does that, the imgur site is cursed by performance issue and it’s always loading something. Sometimes I think they’re loading malicious code to mine crypto with my computational respurces for how bad it gets.
we have redlib tho
Old reddit too
ugly af
It’s what a phpBB / vBulletin forum would look like.
If you ask me, goated interface. All the information is there, fast to load.
I often decide I don’t actually need what I was about to purchase when I run into this, and I close out the browser tab and move on.
…I guess in some weird way, the poor experience benefits me!
I can hear it now. My kid’s generation is gonna be giving each other shit like "wait, you bought this off a website? Like a millennial?"
Amazon redirecting you to the front page after you decline cookies is just amazingly stupid design.
This is the reason why I had a long and bloody fight regarding the homepage of the company I work at. And I won.
Management wanted a new homepage, marketing wanted the homepage to be - and this is a citation - “Emotional!!! And we want ENGAGEMENT!!!” (For context: We are building industrial machinery).
Marketing got an external offer (behind my back) and a mockup of the homepage based on React with animations and an dynamic background which turned every PC we looked at it with into a space heater. And they wanted to spend > 15 k € on it.
I - as something yanks would call a CTO - said no.
Everything turned quiet “Emotional!!!” for a couple of months, but in the end I won with the argument that we are building FUCKING BORING INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY, our costumers seldom change and if so, they are also from some big boring industrial company who already know us because we are in this business since Ugh, the first CEO chiseled the first iteration of our landmark product with a flintstone in 15000 BC.
The rebuild of the homepage resulted in something that is quiet nice looking… but that can also work perfectly fine in fucking DILLO!
Yeah good call, idek your company, site, or industry, and I don’t need to. As someone who has to deal with the same shit from a customer perspective I can’t hate it enough.
Professional websites should all aspire to be like McMaster-Carr’s, “you know why you are here why should we bug you with bullshit, now what size roll pins did you need?” Literally one of my favorite websites of all time, no muss no fuss.
Way back in 2001 when Adobe flash was the exciting new thing on the web, I was the network/firewall admin for the data-center hosting the company website. I didn’t get to argue about the site itself, since they had Microsoft in to do that. I did win the argument against the Microsoft engineers wanting to put the site outside the firewall for “performance”. Needless to say my ass was on the line if performance was impacted.
Sure enough, the big launch day arrives, the Superbowl adds run, and the complaints all start coming in about how terribly the site was performing. They beat the hell out of it in the lab, so they knew with absolute certainty that the firewall was to blame. Lots of higher-ups were suddenly aware that I existed, which is never a good thing for a network admin.
I dove into troubleshooting and had my answer in less than ten minutes. The front page was a monstrosity made entirely of flash that displayed nothing until the entire page loaded - graphics and all. That worked well enough on a high speed network but, back in 2001, most people at home were on dialup. A little quick math on the size of the download had it taking over 40 seconds to just see the front page.
The site got a really rapid rewrite, and I was off the hook.
“Works fine in Dillo” is a golden endorsement.
We are all Anon now
Theres a webpage someone made thats like a visual example of this but I forgot what it’s called (maybe “I look at a webpage in 20XX” ) Anyone know it ?
Is it this?
The only wrong thing is that the video is “click to play” - it should be autoplaying by default
That is it. thanks!
And everything is SO FUCKING SLOW. I swear my old Celeron 300A at 500mhz running Windows 98 and SUSE Linux was super responsive. Everything you clicked just responded right away, everything felt smooth and snappy. Chatting with people over the internet using ICQ or MSN was basically instant, all the windows opened instantly, typing had zero latency and sending messages was instant.
My current Ryzen 5950X is not only a billion times faster, it also has 16 times the number of cores. I have hundreds of times the RAM as I had HDD capacity on that old system. Yet everything is slower, typing has latency, starting up Teams takes 5 minutes. Doing anything is slow, everything has latency and you need to wait for things to finish loading and rendering unless you want everything to mess up and you’d have to wait even more.
It’s a two-fold curse - first, every single program these days isn’t a stand-alone program, it’s a glorified web browser. Hand-in-hand with that is the fact that, in order for these webpages-disguised-as-programs to behave in the way you normally expect a modern UI to act, it has to have five layers of javascript frameworks, each adding its own pile of cruft to the slagheap that is modern app design. It’s horrendous and I hate it.
“If you have resources, why shouldn’t MY website be using 100% of it?” - web developers since 2017
That’s because in the Celeron 266-300A-350 days we overclockers were as gods! And if you had just moved from a modem connection to a university LAN connection like me, it was peak computer usage.
The way you describe performance then and now makes me wonder if you’re thinking mostly about running SUSE back then and if you’re talking about a Windows (Teams) machine now. I definitely remember things like the right-click menu taking forever to load sometimes on old windows & HDD based systems.
Using Linux on my work & home PCs now after being used to Windows on them first, they have that responsive feel back.
In the 90s, a lot of programmers spent a lot of time carefully optimizing everything, on the theory that every CPU cycle counted. And in the decades since, it’s gotten easier than ever to write software, but the craft of writing great software has stalled compared to the ease of writing mediocre software. “Why shouldn’t we block on a call to a remote service? Computers are so fast these days”
One thing I love about the Linux/FOSS world is that people work on software because they care about it. This leads to them focusing on parts of the system that users often also care about, rather than the parts that Product Management calculated could best grow engagement and revenue per user over the next quarter.
I’m not arguing that all these big frameworks and high level languages are bad, by the way. Making computers and programming accessible is a huge positive. I probably even use some of their inefficient creations that simply would not exist otherwise. And for many small or one-off applications, the time saved in programming is orders of magnitude higher than the time saved waiting on execution.
But when it comes to the most performance sensitive utilities and kernel code in my GNU plus Linux operating system, efficiency gets way more important and I’ll stick with the stuff that was forged and chiseled from raw C over decades by the greybeards.
The flip side of that is entire classes of bugs being removed from modern software.
The differences are primarily languages. A GUI in the 90s was likely programmed with C/C++. Increasingly, it’s now done in languages that have complex runtime environments like dotnet, or what is effectively a browser tab written with browser languages.
Those C/C++ programs almost always had buffer overflows. Which were taken off of the OWASP Top 10 back in 2007, meaning the industry no longer considers it a primary threat. This should be considered a huge success. Related issues, like dynamic memory mismanagement, are also almost gone.
There are ways to take care of buffer overflows without languages in complex managed runtimes, such as what Go and Rust do. You can have the compiler produce ASM that does array bounds checking every time while only being a smidge slower than C/C++. With SSDs all but removing the excuse that disk IO is the limiting factor, this is increasingly the way to go.
The industry had good reasons to use complex runtimes, though some of the reasons are now changing.
Oh, and look at what old games did to optimize things, too. The Minus World glitch in Super Mario Bros–rooted in uninitialized values of a data structure that needed to be a consistent shape–would be unlikely to happen if it were written in Python, and almost certainly wouldn’t happen in Rust. Optimizations tend to make bugs all their own.
While there’s an overhead to safer runtime environments, I wouldn’t put much blame there. I feel like “back in the day” when something was inefficient you noticed it quicker because it had a much larger impact, windows would stop updating, the mouse would get laggy, music would start stuttering. These days you can take up 99% of the CPU time and the system will still chug along without any of those issues showing.
I remember early Twitter had a “famous” performance issue, where the sticky heading bar would slow systems down, because they were re-scanning the entire page DOM on every scroll operation to find and adjust the header, rather than just caching a reference to it. Meanwhile yesterday I read an article about the evolution of the preferences UI in Apple OSs, that showed them off by running each individual version of said OS in VMs embedded within the page. It wasn’t snappy, but it didn’t have the “entire system slows down and stops responding” issues you saw a decade or so ago.
Basically, devs aren’t being punished (by tooling) for being inefficient, so they don’t notice when they are, and newer devs never realise they need to.
Oh my fuck, my work has a website and I hate it. There are multiple fields to fill out on a page, and every time you fill one field, the entire page automatically refreshes. I can’t just tab from field to field and fill things out - I have to fill out a field, wait for the refresh, click in the next field, fill it out, wait for the refresh, click in the next field…. until I’m done.
Next, for some reason everything is a floating window and there is no scroll outside of it. Which means that if I click the page wrong, the floating window moves, and I can’t move it back. I lose all progress because the only way to fix it is to refresh the site.
Then there’s the speed. At the end of the day, when everyone is using this site, it gets extremely slow. You’d think this would be a predictable issue that the company could be proactive about, yet every day, right when we’re itching the most to go home, every one of us experiences the dreaded lag. I hadn’t seen lag this bad since I played Sims 2 on an old computer.
Missed the part where
Shipping is 6.95 Close tab Sigh, open amazon
I will pay 6.95 to not order from Amaozn, fuck 'em
Amazon price mysteriously $7 higher
It’s not though. They’re always the cheapest even before shipping.
Depends if it’s sold by Amazon who stuffed 90000 units in their own warehouse or if it’s just sold through amazon by the same vendor. I’ve seen all three prices on the same item all still on amazon.
Oh yeah you definitely can find price variations but I can’t recall ever finding a better price not on Amazon except maybe getting electronic components off eBay. Those were always a gamble if they’d ever arrive or not though.
I got a way better deal on a weird but awesome pillow by not buying it on Amazon and had the same experience overall. They had a real sale vs a flat percent on the Amazon store.
I like that I’m financially comfortable enough to pay for shipping and not give Bezos a cent.
Amazon offering free shipping is a large part of why the parcel industry became a hellhole of semi-illegal subcontractors even here in Germany where labour laws exist.
Open browser
Browser demands updates
All extensions update simultaneously. Each opens its own tab to proudly announce bug fixes for bugs you never noticed.
Close ten tabs you didn’t open
Miss one. It autoplays a video ad.
Type in search bar. Autocomplete offers suggestions that are 5 years old, NSFW, or both.
Search for a product. Top results: Ads. Sidebar: Ads. Bottom: Ads. An actual organic result is wedged between an ad and a newsletter signup modal.
Click real-looking result. Redirected to a shady dropshipper site.
Back button doesn’t work. It reloads the same scam page five times. You lose the original tab somewhere in a pile of redirects.
Click Amazon link. It’s a new seller with the business name “USB_Cable_Amazon_Partner_Official.” 13,000 reviews. All 5 stars.
Try to read reviews. Most are for the wrong product. Many are AI-generated gibberish. The rest complain about shipping.
Add to cart. You are not logged in.
Log in.
CAPTCHA challenge: Pick all the traffic lights. Traffic lights are 1 pixel wide. One is technically a lamppost. Verification failed.
2 factor authentication push. By the time you get the authenticator open, the session expired. Start over.
Try to close browser. Are you sure you want to close 37 tabs?”
Yes. It crashes.
Reopens all 37 tabs next launch.
Give up and use your phone
4 popups, fingerprint required, and every link jumps when the page loads because of delayed ad banners.
App store ad appears for the site you’re already on
Clicking “x” opens the ad anyway.
You close the phone browser
Go outside
Get a push notification: “You left items in your cart.”
I’m sorry, I can’t read this.
Can someone put it in greentext?
I once responded to one of those “you have items in your cart” emails that I received like a mere half hour after finishing browsing with a “fuck off”, and a short while later somebody responded and said some things and ended with “same to you too”
I immediately replied and said oh wow a real person replied, don’t take it personally, it was directed at the automatic message.
they started berating me and telling me that I should just unsubscribe if I don’t want the emails (that I never fucking subscribed to in the first place???), and then deleted my account and banned me from the store, it seems. I tried to buy something over half a year later, but it was declined without reason, and support told me it was “flagged for fraud” and didn’t elaborate
Oh fuck them
I think it’s interesting that in 2005, the internet had a ton of popups and scammy ads that told you “you just won a free iPod!” and everyone knew that was a thing. There was even a gag about it in Scary Movie 3 (2003):
Yet you don’t hear people complain about that as much today. It’s like so much of the internet has been cordoned off into walled gardens that most users don’t see pages out in the open.
Those popups were so prolific that all browser developers responded by implementing popup blockers.
Which kind of led to the absolute mess of banner ads (and the adblockers created in response) that we still have today. I dare you to deactivate your adblocker on any of the major (commercial) news sites.
I also recall not a single one of those builtin popup blockers working as intended, random popups would show up anyway. Hell, that feature still leads to annoyances when a site actually needs to open a new window (happens with some internal systems being used where I work)
I read an interesting article about that: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/ads/
This should be etched into gold as a perfect description of life in 2025.
You missed scroll hijacking because reinventing how things move on the screen is important for some reason?
Because phones. The reason behind fucking up scrolling is phones. Swipe upwards once and get the next pretty animated scrolling to the precise place, wooo!
One trick for the “back button doesn’t work” is to right click it and select the page you want to go back to from that list.
Though I do wish back buttons worked on clicks rather than loads or anything a site can override with javascript. I hate the sites that treat scrolling to the next article as a new page. It trains me to not scroll to the next one, even if it looks interesting, because they fuck with my browser like that (even though I can work around it, fuck them for the attempt).
I also hate how some sites block middle mouse clicks or ctrl+click, which opens a new tab. So I’m forced to follow the stupid link then either middle click the back button, or right click back - open in new tab
The other day I found one that I’m pretty sure somehow removed the earlier entries from the back button list.
Like removed them removed them or just filled it up with spam “clicks”?
Second one is annoying and shouldn’t be possible but first one is concerning and really shouldn’t be possible. Makes me wonder if there’s a way to access the links in the back list via js. What browser btw?
First one, and Firefox.
should of used a rust based browser
