As a special “soapbox” piece, we’ve collected a series of per-website complaints that annoy users of these sites at no end. Not that this list will accomplish much unless a webmaster of one of the discussed sites visits this page (and we can all laugh at that idea), but I’m sure other users can sympathize with these educated (and humorous) website complaints listed below, in no particular order, grouped by site.

Sites:
Facebook
Digg
MySpace
Slashdot
Twitter
URL Shorteners
The Coffee Desk (that’s us)

Facebook

Every time I log into Facebook, both my notifications and my “Home page” are cluttered to death with app spam. I thought the notifications were just for friend-related stuff, but it seems I was wrong: apps use notifications to spam constantly. Deleting the apps makes no difference, either: my friends’ app activity is ALSO logged onto my home page, along with invites to use said apps.

As if the app spam on my home page wasn’t enough, the very layout of the home page bugs me: this is the thrice revised revision of the Facebook site layout, and with each update they add more pointless and confusing features in an attempt to emulate Twitter or something (we even gave this a name: web darwinism). I have a Twitter, and I have a Facebook. They are two separate sites. Please stop the copycat B.S.

Also, the lack of privacy on Facebook is disturbing: every time I take some quiz my girlfriend wants me to take (else hell hath no fury), I basically sign my life away regarding sharing my personal information with the quiz’s unseen developer. Have you ever read the full disclaimer you’re agreeing to? Name, birthday, address, bio, answers – it’s all available to these faceless application writers for distribution to advertisers, as many of them have been doing recently.

And finally, fix the stupid chat interface. By fix it, I don’t mean “cram more useless, non-working features into it” – I mean FIX IT. If it doesn’t work in BOTH Internet Explorer and Firefox, it shouldn’t even be on the web. Period.

Digg

The stupidity of Digg users confused between Digg and 4chan aside, Digg has its own set of annoyances. First up, fix the “duplicate story” algorithm – half the drivel I see when it tells me there’s a “possible duplicate” is in no way, shape, or form related to the story I’m trying to post. “Chek out dis fat cat (sic)” and “The Analyzation of Google Analytics” are not by a long shot related, no matter how much you’re trying to convince me they are.

I’m going to also whine about this in other URL shortening services, but Digg is by far the worst when it comes to passing link love to a story’s originating site. By this, I mean the story headline no longer leads to the story’s post on the relevent site anymore: it leads to… you guessed it! Digg.com/[shortened-URL], with the external page “framed” via HTML (an obsolete trick from the 90′s). This gives the external site no linking benefit; only the swarm of Digg users, the size of which is determined by how low the required IQ is of the corresponding story.

Speaking of people whose web access should be taken away, Digg is one of those sites with a much-needed “stupidity filter”. I don’t expect this algorithm to be very efficient after seeing the “possible duplicates” algorithm in action, but it should (at its simplest) be something along these lines: if the user’s post/comment contains one of the following strings, then discard it: “dis”, “yo”, “lulz”, “n*****”, “boxxy”, “dank”, “ur”, “pwnd” (the list goes on).

And finally, open up the resulting link from the “Digg button” in a new window (tab in modern browsers). I hate losing my place just to vote for a story, and forget to right-click because I’m usually using a Mac and because every other button-writer actually had sense enough to open a new window for submission.

MySpace

I treat MySpace like the DMV: I try to avoid it at all costs, but sometimes I have to go there and suffer to get to what I’m looking for. Example: a favorite standup comedian too broke to have a website. And everytime I step into this pit of hell, I pick up another complaint.

First off, the “unresponsive script” dialog in either Flash or Firefox was invented as a result of (and is mainly used on) Myspace profiles. When a single web page takes 30 minutes to load on a 12Mbps downstream connection, causes Firefox/Flash to actually notice the unresponsiveness (for once), and causes my swap partition to go into overtime on a modern machine with no other programs running, something isn’t right. Put a cap on how much HTML/CSS/hotlinking/embedding can go on in a profile, would you?

GIFs GIFs GIFs OMG OMG OMG!!! I have never seen so much animated gif usage/abuse in all my life. Every corner of the profile page is trying to get my attention, and it drives me insane! To the unadjusted (and, inherently normal and focused) eye, the page would cause a seizure if stared at for more than a minute. But these kids actually do this for FUN! Then again, huffing glue is also a favorite afterschool hobby for most of these Myspace users, but can you at least tone down on the animations? There is such a thing called “overdoing it” – look into it.

Slashdot

Ah, the nerd center of the universe. Some stories are right on the ball, others (notable by KDawson and Scuttlemonkey) are absolute crap and FUD. Post something (such as a Viagra ad) under the username BoyIHateMicrosoft and voila! instant user spike!

And be sure to use terms such as “sheeple” and “M$” in your comments, for a karma boost. Also, reposting an insightful comment further down the page as a reply to a topmost comment will result in the mods seeing your comment first, and voting you up.

The best thing to do with this karma, is to become a subscriber for free. What’s subscribing? It’s when you pay to read Slashdot for extra perks, such as ad removal, viewing a story before it goes live and getting a star by your name. Oh wait, thank to the Firehose and the karma-induced ability to disable ads, the only advantage of paying Sourceforge, Inc. to read Slashdot is the little asterisk by your name. Go figure.

And the trolling problem. They can add link-target previews (the URL’s target site in brackets next to a link, e.g. [nimp.org] or [goatse.cx]), but they can’t filter out certain terms only used by trolls, such as blatent racial slurs and the like. They even have an ASCII art filter, but can’t drop a comment because of a certain string found within it. Very logical. Let’s also change the headline links to target goatse.cx to see how many users don’t read the status bar of their web browser.

Twitter

Who the hell are half these people following me? I don’t know them, and chances are they don’t know me. Why are they interested in the unknown? Because they aren’t. They just want you to follow them back so they can compete with Oprah for follower numbers, that’s all.

Why does the font jump up 10 pixels every now and again from the web interface? I didn’t learn about this in that Ruby on Rails class I took…

And stop tweeting about every little human thing you do. If you feel that you have to announce to the Internet the fact that you’re taking a huge, burning crap, then you need to find another hobby. It’s just stupid. Tweets like “lalalala” are doing nothing more than “clogging the tubes”.

URL shorteners

Oh boy, here we go: URL shorteners are a result of Twitter (mainly), and one of the topics of our Web Darwinism article. And they almost all suck, here’s why:

Tell us where they go. If I get rickrolled one more time, I’m going to go live on an island somewhere by myself and live off coconut trees. It’s so stupid. And all because of URL shorteners – a nice, friendly way to see where you’re going before you get there is a needed feature, and so far only Tinyurl.com does this by appending a ‘-’ at the end of the URL.

Please stop framing. This isn’t 1993. You aren’t sniffing user agents with JavaScript, or trying to make sure that the browser supports frames since the only server-side scripting languages available are an early Perl and C. So why put the stupid ow.ly toolbar at the top of the page? It is so pointless. And it robs the target page of link love, as if there aren’t enough nofollow attributes on the web as it is. Geez.

And if the target is goatse, nimp.org, or some other malware-infested hellish waste of space on the ‘net, then please warn users at the least, e.g. “Alert, the target site is a known malware/phishing entity. Press here to continue, although it is recommended that you don’t”. Most idiots would click through it anyways, but that just brings to mind a famous Bash quote:

I’m not saying we should just kill all of the idiots in the world, but maybe if we just remove the warning labels from stuff, the problem will just take care of itself.

…And that almost sums up my philosophy entirely.

The Coffee Desk

Since I’m going to whine about the other sites listed on here, why not add our own site to the list – we don’t claim to be perfect, you know.

First off, it would be nice if the top of the page loaded first, instead of being the last thing on the page to load. You can’t even tell what site you’re on until you wait out the 3 minutes for the header.png to come in, which contains our site logo and name. It’s like being Slashdotted 24/7, with only 1/5 the required Slashdot linking. And turning to ImageShack for image hosting didn’t help, either, because the header is larger than hell.

Get a grip, Anthony: if they aren’t going to subscribe to the RSS feed, its not the end of the world. You don’t need to plaster the RSS links all over the site, even using that pointless plugin that scares away Googlers (“Hi, Google user! Subscribe to our RSS feed! NOW, DAMN YOU! DO IT!” etc.)

The Coffee/caffeine nerd trip is so 1994. Why don’t I open up my own site called “the fat pasty pizza-eating Windows NT 4.0 administrators” to get similar readership, because the similarity and modern approach to rope in tech specialists is the same for both sites. Let’s also go back to writing everything in COBOL, shall we? Let me put on a pot of coffee…

All the Vintage Computer Series does is bring dialup-using geezers to the site. They rob the web server of open connections, and our keepalive is set high, so just knock it off already.

Nobody reads the FAQ except GoogleBot. If it disappears tomorrow, nobody will give a flying fuck. Half the questions aren’t even frequently asked by readers – they’re just their to make people stare at the wooden background longer.

Conclusion, or something resembling one

Whew, that feels so much better. Any humor embedded within the article is merely accidental, believe it or not. But the complaints are bona-fide: they are the woes of many a web users, and continue to be a pain in the ass despite the age of some of the complaints listed here. That said, enjoy the Internet you users helped create.

If only there were a law to revoke Internet access based on usage patterns…