Sorry to revive an old thread, but I am constantly and consistently annoyed by the shitty design of the modern web.
I hate how every site, including professional sites, have changed their identity to be "simpler and more fun", even sites for doing administration or power-user tasks. Nothing presents itself as basic and functional anymore, they always have to be "super fun", so they fill themselves with animations and illustrations. Many sites used to show a bunch of information in rows that was easy to read, and modify in bulk, where all the main functions were available in a toolbar or a menu. Now, those simple and straightforward and powerful lists have been replaced with these big clunky buttons labelled "do stuff" and they all load pages that say cute little phrases like "lets go!" and "getting things ready!" with illustrations of cute cats riding bicycles, meanwhile the useful functionality no longer exists. I have seen "item lists" on professional websites that contain 5 items - I'm trying to manage hundreds of items and they are giving me no tools to work with! And it's not like the bigger list items convey more information, there's just a lot of empty, wasted space. But hey, it's more "fun" I guess. This is mostly annoying for power-users needing to do power-user tasks, but It still annoys me when normie sites like >reddit
and twitter do it to. I don't use >reddit
, but I used to, and I remember when they switched over to the "new style". The old >reddit
frontpage (still available at old.reddit.com) is quite functional for what it is. It displays a relatively straightforward list of 25 articles, and a next page button. It could still be more efficient but it's not too bad. Of course that wasn't anywhere near fun enough, it barely "pops" and there's no alegria art, so of course it needed a redesign. So they made new >reddit
, which is.....completely unusable, and it takes me scrolling very far down to see 25 articles which used to all be on one page. Worse, because you now need to scroll endlessly to actually see any content, they compensate for it by using infinite scrolling. Infinite scrolling sucks on all webpages. If you're a web designer and you're thinking of implementing infinite scrolling, don't. All web designers who implement infinite scrolling should be fired and permanently disbarred from the software industry. Just give me pages. At least with pages, all the content is loaded at once and won't move around at random as new stuff loads in, while often with infinite scrolling content will jump around and shift as new stuff is loaded, which is ridiculous as it makes me lose my place when I'm reading something. Worse, often loading a few new posts for some inexplicable reason takes significantly longer than just loading a new page would. If I need to find a post that was from a few days ago, I can't just look at page 4 or 5 and look at post dates in the title to try and narrow down where it might be, my only choice is to scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, until I hopefully find it among an endless sea of crap, meanwhile the page is running slower and slower and using more and more memory.
Infinite Scrolling is the worst invention of the internet. It needs to stop.
