The web looks like shit | Hacker News Reader

The web looks like shit

theoutline.com

65 pointsjgrahamc91 comments

As someone who grew up on the web circa 1998, I find the modern web to be shit. The old web flew on my 300 MHz PII with 256 Kbps DSL. The new web crawls on a quad core i7 with 300 Mbps fiber.

But Sturgeon's law being what it is, we're probably stuck with a shitty web. But I wonder if browser makers can do anything to ease the pain a bit. For example, a page will reflow a few times while it loads, making it hard to start reading immediately. I'll often be mousing to the thing I want to click on next only to see everything move. Could browsers coalesce these reflows so that only completed pages are presented to the user?

Waiting for completed pages simply takes way too long. Seems like there isn't a way to automatically 'skeleton-ize' the page either. So; it is the sites' responsibility to prevent reflows.

The simplest thing would be for sites to add fixed-sized containers for the ads and other heavy, asynchronous media, so that the space is already allocated before the ad loads. They could even put something nice in the background.

However, I'm fairly certain that they do it on purpose to increase the click-throughs to ads. Sites like Salon on my phone are the worst. No matter how much time has passed since it looks like everything has finished loading, the moment I go to click on a link an ad pops up under my thumb.

I don't disagree that the old web was aesthetically nicer, but nothing flew on 14.4 or 28k modems. I remember when 56k came out and everyone was like "WOW!".

OP wasn't talking about 14.4 - 56k. They said: "256 Kbps DSL"

Sorry, I missed that somehow. I don't recall DSL being around in 1998 (but I'm sure my memory is just wrong). I got on the web around 1994 and it felt like many years before we had DSL or cable internet.

Anyways, I do agree that the 90s web was nicer in many ways. One thing I miss greatly is that people actually hand-crafted websites back then. Sure, they used frames and had construction gifs... but they were hand-crafted. If you searched for "star wars" you got a couple dozen sites that were all different looking (but had similar content). Today this is virtually unheard of. Go try to find a star wars fan website that doesn't use Wikia or some other similar tool.

May be Google can start lowering rank of shitty pages. Oh but those shitty pages have Google ads so they'll lose revenue and their stock would tank.

Also why would a news website care if you have a shitty experience. Their A/B tests are saying customers are more likely to click on ads and sign up if they use the dark patterns.

Their end goal is to make more money. That's what they are optimizing for. If you don't like it, don't go to the website. That's the only signal they give a shit about.

Very few people had speeds in that range — most pages were developed with the assumption that they'd be used by someone on dial-up (and probably 28.8k). It'd be like saying you don't understand why people are complaining now about a slow site when you're using over a 1Gbps fiber connection.

https://github.com/WICG/ScrollAnchoring/blob/master/explaine...

As someone who started creating web apps in 1995, I think that view is mostly based on memories of subjective perception: pages were smaller, yes, but people expected the web to be slow in the dial-up era and were less likely to remember a site which loaded in 5 seconds as “slow” when everything was like that; now that some pages are Google.com fast the expectation is much less forgiving.

That's not to say that there haven't been problems with ads, gratuitously bloated JavaScript, etc. but it's easy to forget that back in the 90s there were a ton of pages which only worked well on then-fast (T1+) connections or relied on Java or Shockwave (not Flash, the Macromedia plugin before Adobe acquired them) and took a solid 30 seconds of swapping just to start up.

The one thing we've definitely seen a big regression on were pages which cannot be used if any part of a huge amount of JavaScript fails, and I'm really glad that mobile devices have been reminding the entire industry why progressive enhancement is still critically important.

> I wonder if browser makers can do anything to ease the pain a bit. For example, a page will reflow a few times while it loads, making it hard to start reading immediately. I'll often be mousing to the thing I want to click on next only to see everything move. Could browsers coalesce these reflows so that only completed pages are presented to the user?

Speaking as someone who's worked on browser engines for years now, this is a hard problem. The semantics of the Web demands immediate, synchronous reflows: after performing DOM mutations, any script running on the page can ask for the location of any element on the page, and it requires an up-to-date answer. These APIs are used a lot: almost any news site, for example, is going to use them during initial page load (e.g. for ad placement). So we have to reflow during initial page load.

You might then ask: Why not perform the reflow "in the background" so that the DOM APIs doesn't break, but present a static version of the page as it was initially to the user? The problem with that is that clicking on links (or even mousing over them) is a DOM event that script can be involved in. Besides the fact that you'd basically have to have two simultaneous versions of the DOM around, you'd (for example) break scripts that expect the X/Y coordinates of a mouse-down event on a button to occur inside the boundaries of the button.

Browsers have been coalescing reflows as much as possible within the constraints of the Web, and have for at least a decade. But the semantics of the Web limit what can be done.

Ironically (or not), the article is exactly on the kind of website which it describes as 'shit'.

But I agree with it. The web is no longer a place to 'share information'. It is a place where 'content' is 'monetized' - or whatever the language they use nowadays.

Back in the day you'd have the web-site text with a little space left for 'banners', now it's vice-versa - the content is advertising and the useful information is used to lure in 'traffic'.

All the big 'media' sites, Facebook and Google included are actually advertising companies and this is the result.

Sure, they also produce 'useful' stuff, but that's because they're well-funded places were smart people go to do their smart things.

I personally wouldn't mind if all the ad-supported content went away tomorrow. If a web-site tells me to disable my ad-blocker, I just close the tab.

"But we should somehow support... ". No we shouldn't. There's too much crap out there, more than enough to consume in several lifetimes - noise, which disorients and confuses us.

We should do the opposite - fight the ads, boycott ad-sites (that includes most 'news' websites, which are useless and toxic time wasters) and support sites which are valuable - donate, pay for subscriptions, etc.

Even with no funding, valuable content will still be posted by people who are passionate and have something to say about a subject. All the rest is, as tfa says - "shit".

Jesus woodchopping christ, this is parody right?

Did the author not see where his article would be posted? Is this some Tim and Eric level artistic dissonance? Or are we still that blind to our own shortcomings?

Being shown you are wrong is the great liberator. You get new options, and get to learn something. Lets hope.

I took it as parody. But the huge "Read next" thingie at the bottom that linked to an actual article made me think again. I'm not sure anymore.

The article isn't about aesthetic choices. If you don't like the way The Outline looks, that's your opinion, but we made it that way ON PURPOSE. The article is about forced compromises because of bad B2B decisions made a long time ago about what user value is.

It's useful to be able to separate those things out. You can appreciate the article and still be mad at our site because it doesn't look like what you expect.

That is an important distinction. But your page still won't fit on a floppy and is splattered with distracting animated gifs throughout the article and two giant full screen ads and a prompt to give over my email address at the bottom. It's a more thoughtful assault.

Did you actually just say it wouldn't fit on a floppy disk?

You are committed to this character. Kudos, I guess.

Yes. Chrome web tools say the page takes 1.7 Mb to load (disabled cache and ad block for a clear measurement).

Some people want to know what you're saying with minimal extras added in, saying it should fit on a floppy is a way of pointing to this notion.

Alluding to someone being ridiculous because 'floppy disk' isn't very generous to the other person, which is to say you seemed to be missing the point: your site could be more simple and weigh less making it better in the eyes of many on this site.

Yes. As in, 1.44 megabytes. For a four-paragraph article.

> a prompt to give over my email address at the bottom

That's the point. It's at the bottom, within the normal flow of the document. Not a fucking lightbox popup thing with confirmshaming!

> two giant full screen ads

I saw one methodhome.com ad, with a cool custom CSS animation on hover, again normally appearing within the article. How is it full screen?

I mean, in a way it is. You're advocating for readability, yet use a color that many find directly hurts it. You use arbitrary icons and moving imagery, images that are impossible to scale up (and read). It's no surprise that people are wondering if you're ironic...

Well, I find it hard to appreciate an article I can't read.

> but we made it that way ON PURPOSE

Aside from everything else, why would you make animated squiggly lines on purpose? It's extremely irritating because it causes motion in my peripheral vision. I can't see how it adds value.

We think they look cool? Also it's strange but some people LOVE them and some people HATE them.

Hm. I wonder, which one of those categories of people would change their decision to read or leave the article because of that.

Yes, I think it's those who love the squiggly line would (hypothetically) continue to read the site just because of cool design, and not the other way around.

You guys should do some real A/B testing rather than rely on your own opinions.

A/B testing is exactly what has turned the web into a horrible soup of click bait.

Good design needs strong opinions.

Thats if you make decisions based on revenue, conversions, etc and not based on criteria that is most beneficial to the user. You need a little of both for a sustainable business.

I really liked what RSS readers did. Also the HN app pulls out the text from the article and shows it in a consistent style. We'll spaced black on white sans-serif text. No ads, no bullshit, just text and images. Same clean design for every post.

I would really love browsers to have a read mode, like incognito mode. If website owners want to make their site not work with standard html, then search engines should rank them lower.

I really don't care about wiggling text underlines. It hurts my eyes. I want accessible clean design optimized for readability and speed.

"I would really love browsers to have a read mode, like incognito mode."

Firefox does. It's fabulous.

Bad design does, too.

Depends what you want. A/B testing tends to lead to bland mediocrity. At the end of the day there is definitely something to be said a strong design statement that somebody is willing stand up for, even if it is a noble failure, when compared to the design by committee non-entity that A/B testing often leads to.

Lol, if that is the case, it seems strange to make such a polarizing decision about the horizontal rules. You will definitely turn away more readers that find them annoying than you will gain readers who are like "the article content is meh.... but those animated squigglies tho!"

Wrong.

When you publish an article entitled "the web looks like shit" on a page that looks like shit, and people quite reasonably call you on that, you want to own it, because then you look subtle and smart and clever.

Whining about how people are pointing out your page looks like shit just makes you look whiny. And the page still looks like shit.

Dude I literally own it. We love the way our site looks. We made it this way with a lot of thought and care. It's not for everyone, however.

I came here looking for these comments, knowing the crowd.

Didn't expect to find you here though.

So just want to add - The Outline is one of the freshest aesthetics I've seen in a long time. I get it and I love it. Nice job.

I mean I get that it's your baby and you and whoever else worked on it are super into the style. I'm super not, but why do you care? You've got your statement to make. "That's just, like, your opinion, man, it's not for everybody" still comes off whiny, though.

That said, good call not breaking reader mode, so the less avant garde among us don't have to choose between bouncing and getting a headache. Super-saturated background for unsaturated text? Seriously? I mean, the luminance contrast is good and all, but Jesus. How is this not literally painful for you guys to look at on Apple displays? Even on a Dell it stings.

What people are saying is that the web does look like shit, and your website is part of the problem.

Unfortunately for you, the web _is_ for everyone. It's for everyone on HN, it's for people with disabilities, it's for people who have a 32" desktop screen that don't need your shitty hamburger menu and giant font size, it's for people with color blindness, it's for people who want to read the content, not marvel at your silly squiggly lines.

Saying that "my design is not for everyone" in such a dismissive manner is deliberately showing the middle finger to everyone who is outside of your group and people are calling you out on that.

Your submission is objectively ironic, regardless of what YOU think.

Yeah, but this looks like shit on purpose. The article's complaining about pages that look like shit by accident. Totally different, don't you know.

I clicked on the actual site. Took 5 seconds to load and a bunch of things wiggling on the page. Navigation was like snapchat style with full page ads. Lots or chrome reducing actual readable area. Contrast for text isn't that great for readability.

Definitely classifies as "looks like shit" in my book.

Also, just throwing it out here, 6e80b054e26bd9dad7934a0bb10699451e59f833.

> When you publish an article entitled "the web looks like shit" on a page that looks like shit...

Frankly, that's a very subjective conclusion. While I think that those article pages are still too large and slow to load on poor connections, aesthetically The Outline looks and feels pleasing, original and well designed. In my opinion.

While your opinion is just as valid I have a problem with the absolute way in which you express it.

Well, that's a shame.

What PURPOSE would that be?

If you don't like the way The Outline looks, that's your opinion, but we made it that way ON PURPOSE.

It's not just how it looks (utterly horrid on desktop, IMO), but its ostensible (anti-)usability too...

[FWIW, it freaking crashed my old iPad (not just Safari, but the whole OS), and lost all my tabs. But who cares about users right?]

I don't disagree with the point of the article. There are sites I don't visit simply because digesting the information presented on those sites takes too long due to poor design choices.

Having said that, the "aesthetic choices" that The Outline makes negatively affect the usability of the site, just like all of the other sites I intentionally don't visit.

I'm in agreement with the other posts here: I couldn't tell if the article's presentation was supposed to be a parody or not. Based on your comment it seems like the article (and presentation) were intended to be taken seriously. If that is truly the case, then the "aesthetic choices" used greatly decrease the readability and usability of the article. If you're looking for specifics:

* Narrow central column of text that leaves large, empty left and right gutters on desktop browsers; * Excessively large default font size and leading yields 1-2 sentences per screen page; * Giant paragraph breaks littered with examples referenced from the article that take away from article space; * Poor choices of color (readability) and useless animations.

All of the aforementioned "aesthetic choices" decrease usability and comprehension because they take away from the reader's ability to read the article. So while you may think these are simple "aesthetic choices", they are all "usability choices" as well.

An example of better choices that don't distract from reading the article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/04/ec...

Note that the example I provided still has huge gutters and the font size is still too large for my liking, but I understand the compromise that was made to make one site usable for both mobile and desktop. Otherwise, the use of black-on-white, sane leading, and sane paragraph spacing means I can quickly scan and comprehend the article because there are no distractions from doing so. I can quickly read and comprehend articles on the Economist. My reading and comprehension of articles on The Outline is slower due to the aforementioned usability issues. Since my time is limited, that means I'll prefer articles from The Economist first and defer (or ignore) articles from The Outline.

In what way would you improve "narrow"-ness of the text column and centered alignment? Are you suggesting the line length should be longer, or that there should be stuff in the gutters? How would that be an improvement?

The article points out plenty of hypocrisy in other sites. Pointing out the hypocrisy of The Outline is both reasonable and expected when it looks like someone vomited a jelly sandwich onto my screen.

Oh man, this article is so good. I didn't actually read most of it, but that ad really had me going. "Is this an actual ad? It says 'advertisement', but is it part of the content, like an ad found in one of the articles it talks about? Is it an actual ad? They can't be that clueless. Is it parody? I can't tell at all."

I'll just reply under your comment rather than making a new top level post.

Oh god this article is so true.

The only reason I read even a few lines of this was to see if the layout was supposed to ironical. It wasn't. I don't know what was going on with my scrollbar but they managed to jack it up better than any site I've ever been to.

Is ironical a word?

It's a string of letters that convey a meaning, so yes, it's a word. It also has the blessing of being listed in most dictionaries.

Both forms, ironic and ironical are valid and in casual settings tend to be used interchangeably. In a more formal sense, one would say a work that uses irony can be describe as ironical, whereas the events themselves are ironic.

It is. "ironic" was a French loanword, but when it was shoehorned into English, forms like "ironically" made the redundant addition of "-al" natural for some. Both have been in common use for many centuries.

I'm still far more used to the terser "ironic" myself though. "ironical" seems alien and strange to me.

I thought ironical was the word that describes what one is doing when one makes an ironic statement?

That is to say when someone says something ironic, they are not themselves ironic, rather they are being ironical.

Apparently so:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5015/ironic-vs-ir...

It's the ironic way to use the word. Using a word to sound smart but using it incorrectly and mispronouncing it, is ironic. I think.

Agreed. Light grey text on a royal purple background isn't great, but it could be worse; it could be burnt orange on that same purple. Wait, it has that too.

And 3/4 screen ads. And animated images. And scrolljacking And autoplaying videos (something they argued against themselves). What a disaster.

I keep oscillating between "this is literally the most tone-deaf thing I've ever seen on the web" and "this is an utterly unprecedented new sublimity of metapresentation".

Not to mention the forced tiny horizontal width of the actual content. I have a 27" monitor and the text was constrained to a ~4" strip down the center of the page.

Indeed, the web looks like shit.

Wait, it's not ironic? I thought it was like Web Pages That Suck. Where the layout was bad because you 'don't expect to read about bad websites on a well designed one' or something.

Huh, guess this is a serious effort.

This is "infinite scrolling" where content come and go as you scroll for better performances. On a good implementation, the scrollbar characteristics can be made to look fine and stable though.

It's not intentionally ironic. Whatever is going on in design right now is a bit perplexing. I have personally found Eli Schiff's insight useful in parsing it. He explains it in terms of designers' self-hatred, lol.

Here was his comment when The Outline launched -- https://twitter.com/eli_schiff/status/805775141825290241

I've actually been told that the graphic design of The Outline is supposed to be the cool feature that gets people coming back to the site. Which is weird, as it's... awful.

For all that the outline is an insane looking site with 3/4 screen ads, it is also true that it doesn't do any of the shenanigans (redirection, slowing down the page to load ads, etc.) that the author calls out in the article.

Ah, yes ! That's the site that do the thing with the scrollbar and the next article autoloading and url changing on the fly. F* you.

Nothing new in this article, but since we're there, here's how I minimize this problem:

* On the desktop, clicking on Firefox's readability button has become almost second-nature to me when I end up on news sites (speaking of which, what do you guys on Chrome use?).

* For longer articles, I'll often whip up my Kobo and read the articles synced from Pocket.

* On mobile, I also use Pocket (used to enjoy the readability feature on my old iPhone too).

And finally, most of the annoying popups and other conversion-whoring anti-user features are neutralized with an extension such as uMatrix, but using it requires quite a bit of daily maintenance overhead so I don't bother anymore.

This was, ironically, actually pretty hard to read...

Its hard to imagine how people read anything on the internet without an adblocker.

Why was it hard to read for you? I'm having no trouble. I'm wondering if a lot of the CSS is more tailored towards macOS/Chrome? Also, the site being responsive makes `Command +`ing work beautifully (if the issue is font-size, but it's 18px which is larger than most sites I come across).

I read the article on Chrome with uBlock Origin, and enjoyed commentary about ad blockers and anti-patterns between massive ads for Method dish soap the same size as the preceding paragraphs.

I also read the article on chrome with uBlock Origin and found no such thing? How strange.

Someone should create an index of sites that aren't s * * t. Then we can watch as the listed sites resist the temptation to sell out, once they actually have visitors resulting from their special status as non-s * * t.

Google, are you listening? I know it's not in your interest to promote sites that don't beat you over the head with advertising, but maybe not flogging is the new flogging.

I would have suggested my own site as a candidate -- no ads, lots of free software and articles, no pop-ups -- but I decided that was too craven and self-serving. Find it yourself.

I can't find the reference but I remember reading an article in Wired circa 2000 during the dotcom boom. It was about a couple of guys who owned a diamond business in Canada and were lured to Los Angeles to start an online diamond business, ice.com or something.

The gist of the article was these guys only lasted 12-18 months and went back to Canada and their original business because they were fed up with the internet and the online business.

The one detail of the article I remember was a quote from one of the owners... "The internet is basically a giant direct marketing platform"

How to monetize information and what information should be monetized seem like very tough things to determine. From a consumers perspective, I hate adds on websites and employ the various bits of software to block them but I'm not opposed to paying for information. At the moment I don't pay any online subscription fees other than video. I've considered paying for wsj.com but the price point is too high in my opinion.

From a strictly UI perspective I agree with the article's sentiment; most of the web is a UI fluster cuck.

Funny. Animations on hover links. A big ad "Play Dirty" near the top. A big "Sign up for newsletter" box that will get me spammed. Then even more huge ads below to get me to click.

Stop. The web is not broken. It's growing every year. There are lots of sites that gives you an ad-free experience if you pay. Like in real life, don't bother going to places that you don't like.

I agree with this article but this happens for a reason; it works. Those full page ads that you hate? Some % of people actually click on them.

Now, with proper competition this could be fixed. Sites using full-page ads would lose out to a competitor without them. But since no one can find a way to monetize a website without making it shit, shit is what we get.

Those full page ads that you hate? Some % of people actually click on them.

Only because the close button is obscured.

This is rich coming from theoutline

Article looks great in Firefox's Reader View ;)

I’m not sure what the author thinks “the web” is. For me, sites like Mic, Teen Vogue, CNN constitute a minor part of “the web”. Their being equated with “the web” seems like a much more serious problem than their visual design could ever be. In light of that, it’s interesting to note how the article frames the problem:

> Stopping the publication of bad articles is probably too much to ask, but must so many websites look awful?

The site looks like a designer "concept" site. Kind of like concept cars or high-end fashion. But the difference is that those concept cars are never really created because its impractical.

The site was definitely done by a good designer who knows what good design is, but its a tad over-the-top for everyday use. It looks good though.

Best part is the hamburger menu on desktop. Real cool

The site linked to looks like shit. Don't know about the whole web.

Seriously? Pot meet kettle?

Was there just a massive ad with rollovers on an article complaining about massive ads?

> Using the internet shouldn’t be this hard.

Pg Up/Down don't work (unless you select some text).

Is this an example?

yall so mad lol

hmmm. I find LINGsCARS easier to read than the site linked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com