alt Hacker NewsEvery Fucking Website (2020)
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I started an e-commerce brand on a Shopify site. I swore to myself I would never put up one of those stupid things that pops up "Someone bought X product an hour ago!" messages in the corner of the screen.
I ended up trying it. Boosted conversion rate meaningfully. Worth the price I pay in mild self-loathing.
Chesterton's popup, I guess.
Loaded way too fast and is way too responsive.
Also when I checked NoScript, it's only loading js from lxe.github.io
I expect there to be at minimum 8 domains, but often 12-18.
I'm filing a bug report...
Steps to reproduce: Open terminal emulator and type;
$ w3m https://lxe.github.io/everywebsite/
I can read the same content as I can read in Firefox.
What I expected to happen: See content similar to the following;
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Some graybeard advice - Any time you need to use a website that doesn't require active cognitive interaction - click the button in your browser that enables Reader View to get the content and strip out everything else. It's not perfect, but it makes the web more usable (especially on mobile, my goodness it's gotten bad).
Firefox also has an extension called "Auto Reader View" in which you can set sites to automatically change to that mode.
The cookie thing, I assume it's EU-only, is an example of the EU policy making process being fundamentally broken in some way. If you create a flawed policy and don't fix it many years after it's very visibly obvious that it's a bad policy, something is really wrong.
Needs a Google login popup, required for any site that there is no reason at all to have an account with.
Reminds me of https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
Needs to autoplay a video which when dismissed just moves to another window and continues playing. With sound.
It needs a feature that disables the whole page and prevents you from using it if it detects you are using Forefox.
So many websites do popups and it feels so anti-user. Maybe I get unusually annoyed, but I do not need a Gemini popup ad in Google Docs. Just let me do what I came to the website to do!
it's funny sometimes there will be an archived espn.com (like this https://proxy.espn.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/030418) and it's hard to argue the web was not better like this, i.e. readable
That "In case you're not aware, there's COVID-19 happening" banner isn't nearly tall nor yellow enough. Given a 6-inch-tall screen, the proper layout would be:
+-----------------+
|2" of vestigial |
|COVID messaging |
+-----------------+
|1.5" of actual |
| content |
+-----------------+
|2.5 of EU |
| cookie banner |
+-----------------+
+---------------------+
|2" of COVID messaging|
+---------------------+
|1" of undismissable |
| "our app is gone; |
| use the mobile site |
| that you're on now" |
+---------------------+
|0.5" of content |
+---------------------+
|2.5" of EU cookie |
| banner, despite |
| being a US-only corp|
+---------------------+As feedback, you made that popup way too clean and easy to close. That’s not how it works in reality. You need to make the background transparent and the X so small it’s technically impossible to hit. Also think about adding an ad and a timer and move the popup slightly after N ms so that the user always hits the ad.
Beautiful engineering, it is modern art. I missed the very slow skeletons in between and the particle webgl stuff
inaccurate, i don't have to go three screens deep into a modal to choose only necessary cookies
It's a bit 2025. Needs a scroll hijack background animation and cursor effects to be up to date for 2026
The interstitial popup needs to be delayed until about 750ms after the first scroll action for that extra insult.
Yeah. I've written about this a few times, with some suggestions for how to make it marginally less miserable to visit a website:
"Take back your web browser screen space with Kill Sticky" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
"Quick Tips For Making The Internet Suck Less" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/08/01/tips-for-making-th...
"Web browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/12/31/web-browsers-have-...
No endless scroll? What the hell am I supposed do I do with my mouse wheel?? Useless!
How will the poor analytics companies pay their poor salaries? And how will people be able to know to advertise to me about a pair of shorts I looked up last month??
A while back I realized that it was just the browser keeping me on screen when I didn't want to be. I switched to the purely native Safari app on my phone, from a highly customized ad blocking browser, with lots of content filtering. My screen time dropped from like 2 hours a day to like 10 minutes.
How hard could it be to write a greasemonkey script that will send the current html/Javascript from hell to a LLM with a prompt that will ask you which of the detected annoying elements you want to remove, and then will create and install another GM script that is removing those elements from this site, and also invent finglonger as a side effect. A man can dream, though. A man can dream.
Yea , thank u , I really despite those websites of current web, much JS, colors, much images and animations with mouse, and million fonts , rounded buttons and everything is rounded and "modern" and slow and bloated why cant have we simple websites, small coherent nice color palette to just read and know the needed info ? hackernews is extremely good example suckless: https://suckless.org/sucks/web/ is another brilliant example
I like it. Reminds me of this: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
I may be skeptical, so take this with a grain of salt. The transformation happened when someone decided to stop being UI designer, to become UX designer. That wasn't enough, so they came up with XD - experience design. At every step of the way, they introduced more lofty goals for the design to justify the increased importance of themselves.
I made a game about this. You can play it if you want to feel annoyed.
In 2026 instead of "Here's some stuff we wrote that you won't read." it's "Here's some slop we couldn't be bothered to write but why don't you read it."
Even my back button was hijacked for a second. Nice attention to detail!
You forgot the sign-up "CTA" button bold and wide, with a microscopic "Sign-in" button somewhere in the footer.
Answer: ads as the main business model running the web since 25 years ago and us accepting the convenience of 'free'.
It turns out everything has a price, and in more recent times we started noticing that our time, attention and intelligence not being insulted also has value.
Somehow the clicking around reminded me of Windows RG. Go check this old relic if you have never seen it: https://www.jamesweb.co.uk/windowsrg . Turn the volume up!
We've got the stupid chat bubble at the bottom.
We didn't want it, it's like a megabyte of JavaScript. It's some third party service corporate forced on us.
I have to imagine a lot of websites are in the same boat, where they're just add crap they don't want to add by higher ups.
Yea but do you guys remember when we actually needed pop up blockers to avoid having a site spawn like 10 new windows behind the current one, and tabs didn’t really exist yet, and the popups had adult content and sometimes they autoplayed sound/video? Like, internet explorer 6 era? Sometimes I miss those days
(2019) *
* according to the copyright notice, although, going by the mention of Covid, it could also be 2020?
needs more unexpected layout shifts ;)
Is the beef with the design or the pop ups, chatbot, banner, etc?
If it's the design, not everyone is a web designer so the bootstrap theme is great to get up off the ground.
If it's the other stuff then, yeah, totally.
If it works, keep it. If it doesn't work, remove it.
I made this 6 years ago but it still applies today.
The worst patterns:
1) scroll hijacking (this should be a felony) 2) stupid cookie popups/banners 3) useless hero images (clients love them, users hate them)
Maybe also it could randomly jump to different vertical scroll positions while you are reading an article?
Every paragraph (maybe sentence) needs to fade in as I attempt to scroll. If I can read the first paragraph easily when the page loads (ignoring the pop-ups) then the website is too well designed.
If the traffic to the site drops dramatically because of the “features”, we would have seen the features removed already.
Missing some spammy "article" links with AI generated images.
Cookie banners are a great example of regulation gone wrong.
Me having to make a legal agreement with every website is absurd and totally predictable.
Yeah, I hand-rolled my site. Not even Google analytics. I have absolutely no idea if anyone even visits my site.
Oh well.
Damn, yeah this is exactly how I make my websites look.
There are more creative ones. Check out https://shellbox.dev
Needs more jank from a bajillion ads loading. :D Kidding aside, this is hilarious and made my morning
Should load much slower.
Also, where is the unrelated autoplaying video that will unmute if you actually click it, that follows your scrolling and only becomes smaller when you dismiss it? Plus, it should probably have text that cuts off letting you know you can have access for just $10/month.
Plus, isn't this website undissmissably "better in the app" after a few minutes of attempting to use it on a phone? Where's that at?
edit: Oh shoot! I forgot, too. This modal needs to also ensure there is absolutely no way to scroll. If you could scroll you might be able to accidentally get to the address bar of your browser to fix the URL to xcancel or even close the page, which isn't using the app as you are intended to do.
Also, it doesn't attempt to hijack the back button to give me stuff I clearly wanted to see before I leave the page.
A lot of work left to do here before it's a "real" website. Although, it has about as much substance as the average website so far, so good work on that.