I’d like to see just how horrible someone can make a site. Facebook is a good contender.
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.
Pintrest is the worst website ever built and has caused immense damage to the free sharing of information.
Together with Quora. Search engine pollution.
There was about ten minutes there when Quora was Yahoo! Answers for people who passed the Apgar test.
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.
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.
How are we measuring?
- Global harmful impact: it’s hard to beat Facebook
- Disgusting: long ago, I got a spam advertising a dedicated CSAM site. I looked to see it it was really what it said, and sent it to NCMEC when I saw that is was
- Actively malign: 8chan is up there, as are old fashioned hate groups.
I kinda meant horrible design, but I guess these categories are good measurements too
4chan. When I saw a German shepherd get hit in the face with a shovel full force, I decided the site wasn’t for me.
Ya no. That’s when I quit too. That place’s
hollowgot no humanity left.It was like 20 years ago when I saw it. It never really had any humanity.
Unfortunately people always go on the “shock site” boards like /b/ and /pol/ instead of checking out the more niche ones like /po/ (papercraft and origami) and /tg/ (traditional games) which are much more like regular hobbyist forums/image boards. I can see why one awful experience would sour the whole thing though and some of the people who post there are sad excuses for human beings.
Edit: Just as an example this is the oldest thread on 4chan at the moment. It was created in 2016 and is still active. It catalogues OP’s struggle to make an origami clock.
the idea of someone unironically using 4chan to chat about origami is so funny to me
Yeah but, counterpoint, can you name any other active online origami communities?
Reddit.
Fragile Mods. Shitty trolls. Dishonest engagements. Little to no good discussion. Opinions are seen as attacks. Power-tripping users and mods alike. Karma whores.
And now, more bots than ever!
Just less users, making the bots more visible. You’ve had repost bots all through, we just assumed it was actual people trying to score cheap karma.
Can’t stand the staleness. Apart from the frigging bots and automods, it feels like a bunch of boring, shallow, sated establishment guys that like “pretending that one could be hip with a mortgage payment,” as Bela Koe-Krompecher once put it.
An absolute classic
You spin me right round baby right round.
Lord I remember my friends throwing this shit on school computers…
Goatse raises an objection.
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.
Flo Rida ruined meatspin for me.
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.
Ogrish.
Doesn’t exist any more, but definitely traumatized me as a child.
If you haven’t heard of it, it was basically a video hosting site focusing on extreme violence and gore.
Tons of clips of people being killed or horrifically maimed in war, car accidents, industrial accidents, ‘extreme’ magic shows gone wrong, brutal gang attacks, straight up snuff videos…
Some videos off the top of my head I won’t ever be able to erase from my memory:
The beheading of Daniel Pearl.
Low resolution video of 9/11, but you could make out people jumping from the towers… and splattering all over the ground. The camera man tracked people the entire distance they fell.
Some insane magic show gone wrong where a man chain sawed his wife in half … she hadn’t managed to fold herself into the right position inside the magic box… her screams and twitching legs were not an act.
A video taken in Fallujah (I think?) of an Iraqi hopped up on an absurd amount of drugs, taken from a US soldier who had just dismounted with most of his squad from a humvee.
Him and others advance down the middle of a street towards the soldiers, all holding AKs. A volley of fire from the dismounted soildiers either took out all the group, leaving them with chunks blown off, writhing in agony, or scattering…
Except this one guy. He’s clearly seriously wounded, but is still advancing basically blind firing his AK.
The US soldiers are in shock that he’s still walking.
Now for a burst from a 50 cal.
Huge parts of this guy’s body are visibly blown off of him, but he still advances.
A second, more sustained 50 cal burst basically liquifies him where he stood.
That and rotten.com have been responsible for a lot of my insomnia, and probably a good chunk of my misanthropy.
You can’t unsee things, folks. Don’t give in to the temptation. It’s not worth it.
rotten.com actually was a protest website that was supposed to be the last bastion of online freedom of speech.
it was a fucking eyesore for Gore and mistress Tipper.
Remember–when they go low and refuse to let you go high, fucking bury them.
Ehhh I was on stile, ogrish, rottten very young, then /b/ when it first came out, then WPD, eyeblech, NSFW__, etc and I’m doing great. Some folks handle things differently… I’ve seen worse stuff than any of those sites and while it was horrible stuff, I’m aite
Sometimes I think back to the shit we saw, and I’m a little amazed so many of us came out so well.
And then elections happen, and well…
The thing is, none of that stuff bothered me much at the time because I was young (early 20’s) and naive about the long term impact that kind of thing can have on a person. It was voyeuristic thrill seeking and I got my thrills and had no regrets for a long time.
It was later in life as I matured and began to appreciate the complexity and wonder of the world, and my sense of empathy truly blossomed, that the things I saw and heard back then started to weigh on me. And that’s where my “you can’t unsee things” comment serves as a warning.
Yes, everyone is different and will be affected differently by viewing such things. But I think most people are going to suffer trauma from seeing that stuff. I don’t think being negatively affected by it makes someone better, worse, more or less empathetic, etc, than someone who is ‘immune’ to it. People have different strengths. The problem is, it’s hard to tell which way your brain is going to go with that info ahead of time, and your reaction to those memories can change greatly with the passage of time. That’s why I say it’s not worth it. This late in life I don’t need the images of mangled motorcyclists, violent suicides, videos showing scattered burning remains of airshow accident victims, or the untold horrors of wars I never fought in, all seared into my brain. The hilariously ironic part is that I have aphantasia, so while I can’t visualize these things, I can still REMEMBER them and be bothered by them when my mind wanders that way. And aphantasia does nothing about remembering the screams of the people who just lost loved ones in horrible ways.
That stuff didn’t ruin my life. But I’d be better off not having sought it out or seeing so much of it. People should think hard before they decide to put that stuff in their head. It’s hard to get out, sometimes impossible.
I used to climb on the roof of my house as a kid and shimmy along the narrow in the middle of the night, just for kicks.
I look back on myself decades later and shudder. I am dead in many parallel worlds.
That’s completely fair! I’m almost 40 though and I guess I’m just… I didn’t have the same experience. Maybe later on in life? But I don’t think so. I’m not immune to it (or anything), I’m a lot more careful in lite after seeing so many ways to die. But when I think of the things I’ve seen, I’m not bothered.
I also came out fine even if I saw those horrible videos. But it’s a bit sad that it’s so hard to find those kind of websites nowadays. Social media just censors everything.
I miss the good old wild west of the internet.
Saaaaame
8chan
Literally 4chan, but worse.
How do you even land there?
I only know 4chan through comments, I wouldn’t even bother looking for another site like that lol.
4chan wasn’t even the first, it was an English version of a japanese site (futaba channel) which was an image board version of a forum (2channel).
Back in the late aughts, there were a ton of *chan sites. Some even more unsavory than 4chan.
This one is gold
Blue, actually. Very, very, very blue.
You can, by going to the coupon page of this Web Site, print out coupons for trail rides and receive great discounts.
The color blue is not for rent, they’re giving that shit away.
I like the random red button on the left with no description. Had to click
The site says it’s closing August of 2020…
I… Why that sounds dangerous?
literally any restaurant website. I disabled Facebook from my entire network (pihole).
I can no longer order food on a website because Facebook is deadzoned.
Also, about half of big box brick and mortar online stores stopped working as well.
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.
