Ask HN: Why has everything become so annoying? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why has everything become so annoying?

15 points5350-uiop-113013 comments

> try to open a link

how about some cloudflare mf!

> open an interesting article

half the page is greyed out, pay up mf!!

> try to change a password

password not secure enough mf!!

> try to watch youtube

you must disable adblock mf!!

> search for a video on youtube

no, you will watch what we tell you mf!!

> search for something on google

here is some blogspam written by chatGPT with 20 chapters mf!!!

> try to update twitter account

here are 10 arkose captcha puzzles to solve consecutively, each requiring abstract thinking and 20/20 eagle vision mf!!

> try to login to work email

enter the 2fa okta pass mf!!

> open an app on my phone

you have been signed out because of suspicious activity. give us your phone number to verify mf!!

> open slack

we just rejigged the UI, now a bunch of useless crap pops up and stays up every time you mouseover something mf!!!

> try to edit some code

your node is outdated, neeed to update mf!!

bash isn't supported anymore got to use zsh now mf!!

got to sign in to git first mf!!

got to pull the latest branch mf!!

got to merge all the changes first mf!!

got to login to corporate vpn before u can push mf!!

> turn on game console to relax

need to install this mandatory 50gb update first mf!!!

things that used to be 1 step. now are 2, 3, 4+ steps.

everything requires more effort for same results. everything is more and more annoying.

Quit accepting the intermediaries that "add to your experiences"

Skip youtube, rip dvds. Skip Twitter, talk to actual friends. Give up the phone that you never actually owned to begin with.

What bugs me on a daily basis is how unusable/finicky certain webpages are (due to ads, prompts to login/subscribe, or the sheer link density). If my cursor is even slightly in the wrong place, I end up clicking on a different link. Or because my cursor accidentally hovered in the wrong place, it opened a dynamic menu which blocked me.

Or something even newer is the emphasis on "recommendations" being included in your searches (youtube, quora, etc).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31g0YE61PLQ

Not an accident at all. All clicks are click fraud.

Wonder why so many web pages are jacking and have all the elements jiggling around? Google controls Chrome so it must have come down as an order from the top.

Not sure what the root cause it, but it does seem like all advances in computer hardware and internet bandwidth get immediately nullified by garbage software. My computer should do things instantly, why doesn’t it?

Remember when we won the war on pop-ups? I do. Seems like web developers can’t add enough of them now. Open a webpage and wait five seconds for the inevitable cookie banner and email newsletter pop-up. It’s very annoying. Super-fast internet plan, running wires through my house, expensive network hardware, all wasted because I still have to wait when I open a web page.

We’re squandering amazing resources by building software this way.

For someone who mostly grew up in Europe during the 70's and 80's, the promises of technology certainly have turned into some kind of reverse fulfilment.

It is frustrating to see how the world increasingly becomes worse in parallel to technology's increasing advances not fulfilling its promise. Simply because the majority of human beings taking advantage of it have their mind still firmly and exclusively rooted within their primitive reptilian brain areas.

I am sorry for the younger generation who didn't grown up in a time before computers and the (now broken) internet, and who won't even be able to understand what old folks like me are referring to, simply because they lack the lived exposure of former times and realities. All those youngsters are inheriting a world increasingly worsening at a scale not possible before.

Death will be an escape and a relieve from this slow descent into the abyss of the current real time dystopia.

The walled gardens have grown into walled cities with some concentric walls and all kinds of "Checkpoint Charlies" to restrict movement in & out of the free world, or even nearby neighborhoods.

Unless of course all your documents are completely in order and you agree to update them everywhere you go with a detailed record of all your travels, as verified by real-time electronic surveillance.

Don't even think about "No Man's Land".

"And then there's the negative side . . ."

I think at least some of the blame falls on companies seeking to delivery features as quickly as possible, rather than taking the time to really think about the problem and solutions and solve them in the right way, that can stand the test of time, rather than getting thrown out every 2-3 years and remade with whatever the latest nonsense is.

- economics - anticrime - the past is still with us, it’s just unevenly distributed - dude I remember cvs and subversion, pushing and pulling was something we had to do all the time

Yes yes. Pushing and pulling all the day. Modern day sisiphus.

Here you go -- a real answer to your questions.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-anti-economy

What a strange rant. I wonder if this has anything to do with the world, or more to do with your own reaction to it

You mean you get increasingly annoyed with a lot of things. So do I.

I blame lawyers, criminals, and dumb people.

Bourbon or weed might help, at least makes it seem funnier.

I'll add a tiny solutions:

If you do the audio captcha, you usually nail it the first time and it lets you in right away.

Check archive.ph for the articles.

On Brave, you can add dns block lists. One of the lists available through the GUI is for blocking scripts in news sites.

Instead of google, sometimes I use Yandex since it has more raw shitty results. Which, ironically, can be more useful than the AI-written textual diarrhoea on ever SEO-addicted site.

I use Brave + Ghostery + Privacy Badger and don't get that popup for YouTube.

That said, I miss the internet of the early 2000s.

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