No one born after 2000 knows what a truly awful website looks like.
By @noelmaybe · Nostalgia
i'm in a group chat with some younger coworkers and they were complaining about a client's website being 'unusable.' i pulled up some old geocities and myspace pages to show them what real suffering was and they looked at me like i had three heads.
The full story
the website they were complaining about was just like... kinda ugly. the font was a little weird and the color scheme was boring. meanwhile i grew up on websites with flaming text gifs, auto-playing midi music, and a cursor that was a sparkly fairy wand. we're talking about guestbooks you had to sign, webrings you had to click through, and everything being under construction forever. you'd spend ten minutes on dial-up just to load a page with a tiled background of someone's cat that made the text impossible to read. that was the internet. it was a nightmare and it was beautiful. they think a slow-loading ad is the peak of bad web design. they have no idea. they've been coddled by clean CSS and user-friendly interfaces. they will never know the trauma of trying to find the 'skip intro' button on a Flash animation page. i feel like it was a formative experience that built character, you know? they just don't get it.
How people voted
- Bad Move — 24% (9 votes)
- Needs Context — 41% (15 votes)
- Reasonable — 35% (13 votes)
Readers are split: “Needs Context” leads with 41% — 37 votes and 5 comments so far.
What people are saying
@thatguymike — Were you actually trying to prove a point or just make them feel dumb?
@hollyish — If a website is hard to use, it's a bad website, doesn't matter what year it is.
@violettbh — Wow, a history lesson that no one asked for.
@yaraish — lmao
@whoops — the sparkly fairy wand cursor was peak internet and i miss it
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