this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Greentext

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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

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Anon does some online shopping (lemmy.world)
submitted 16 hours ago by Gorilladrums@lemmy.world to c/greentext@sh.itjust.works
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[–] Sciaphobia@sh.itjust.works 166 points 16 hours ago (6 children)

Open browser

Browser demands updates

All extensions update simultaneously. Each opens its own tab to proudly announce bug fixes for bugs you never noticed.

Close ten tabs you didn’t open

Miss one. It autoplays a video ad.

Type in search bar. Autocomplete offers suggestions that are 5 years old, NSFW, or both.

Search for a product. Top results: Ads. Sidebar: Ads. Bottom: Ads. An actual organic result is wedged between an ad and a newsletter signup modal.

Click real-looking result. Redirected to a shady dropshipper site.

Back button doesn't work. It reloads the same scam page five times. You lose the original tab somewhere in a pile of redirects.

Click Amazon link. It’s a new seller with the business name “USB_Cable_Amazon_Partner_Official.” 13,000 reviews. All 5 stars.

Try to read reviews. Most are for the wrong product. Many are AI-generated gibberish. The rest complain about shipping.

Add to cart. You are not logged in.

Log in.

CAPTCHA challenge: Pick all the traffic lights. Traffic lights are 1 pixel wide. One is technically a lamppost. Verification failed.

2 factor authentication push. By the time you get the authenticator open, the session expired. Start over.

Try to close browser. Are you sure you want to close 37 tabs?”

Yes. It crashes.

Reopens all 37 tabs next launch.

Give up and use your phone

4 popups, fingerprint required, and every link jumps when the page loads because of delayed ad banners.

App store ad appears for the site you’re already on

Clicking "x" opens the ad anyway.

You close the phone browser

Go outside

Get a push notification: “You left items in your cart.”

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 54 points 15 hours ago

This should be etched into gold as a perfect description of life in 2025.

[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 30 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

I think it's interesting that in 2005, the internet had a ton of popups and scammy ads that told you "you just won a free iPod!" and everyone knew that was a thing. There was even a gag about it in Scary Movie 3 (2003):

collapsed inline media

Yet you don't hear people complain about that as much today. It's like so much of the internet has been cordoned off into walled gardens that most users don't see pages out in the open.

[–] Sergio@slrpnk.net 10 points 9 hours ago

I read an interesting article about that: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/ads/

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 28 points 15 hours ago

You missed scroll hijacking because reinventing how things move on the screen is important for some reason?

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 13 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

One trick for the "back button doesn't work" is to right click it and select the page you want to go back to from that list.

Though I do wish back buttons worked on clicks rather than loads or anything a site can override with javascript. I hate the sites that treat scrolling to the next article as a new page. It trains me to not scroll to the next one, even if it looks interesting, because they fuck with my browser like that (even though I can work around it, fuck them for the attempt).

[–] grue@lemmy.world 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

The other day I found one that I'm pretty sure somehow removed the earlier entries from the back button list.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 6 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Like removed them removed them or just filled it up with spam "clicks"?

Second one is annoying and shouldn't be possible but first one is concerning and really shouldn't be possible. Makes me wonder if there's a way to access the links in the back list via js. What browser btw?

[–] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago

First one, and Firefox.

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[–] A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world 72 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Honestly like 2/3 of this is handled by the right Firefox plugins but that JavaScript Shuffle bullshit drives me INSANE

MY PHONE IS AN HTML ONLY ZONE

[–] decipher_jeanne@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah.... I tried that for a while. You don't go very far on modern internet with JS disabled

[–] emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 10 hours ago

Use noscript and whitelist urls as needed. Pages that dont need javascript dont get to use it, and for pages that do need it, you can make sure it only runs exactly what it needs to.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 69 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

And don't even get me started on payment.

[–] ChilledPeppers@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 15 hours ago

Based Brazil has pix: select payment method, scan qr code with your bank app, pay.

[–] Thorry84@feddit.nl 59 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

And everything is SO FUCKING SLOW. I swear my old Celeron 300A at 500mhz running Windows 98 and SUSE Linux was super responsive. Everything you clicked just responded right away, everything felt smooth and snappy. Chatting with people over the internet using ICQ or MSN was basically instant, all the windows opened instantly, typing had zero latency and sending messages was instant.

My current Ryzen 5950X is not only a billion times faster, it also has 16 times the number of cores. I have hundreds of times the RAM as I had HDD capacity on that old system. Yet everything is slower, typing has latency, starting up Teams takes 5 minutes. Doing anything is slow, everything has latency and you need to wait for things to finish loading and rendering unless you want everything to mess up and you'd have to wait even more.

[–] nickhammes@lemmy.world 35 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

In the 90s, a lot of programmers spent a lot of time carefully optimizing everything, on the theory that every CPU cycle counted. And in the decades since, it's gotten easier than ever to write software, but the craft of writing great software has stalled compared to the ease of writing mediocre software. "Why shouldn't we block on a call to a remote service? Computers are so fast these days"

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 10 hours ago

The flip side of that is entire classes of bugs being removed from modern software.

The differences are primarily languages. A GUI in the 90s was likely programmed with C/C++. Increasingly, it's now done in languages that have complex runtime environments like dotnet, or what is effectively a browser tab written with browser languages.

Those C/C++ programs almost always had buffer overflows. Which were taken off of the OWASP Top 10 back in 2007, meaning the industry no longer considers it a primary threat. This should be considered a huge success. Related issues, like dynamic memory mismanagement, are also almost gone.

There are ways to take care of buffer overflows without languages in complex managed runtimes, such as what Go and Rust do. You can have the compiler produce ASM that does array bounds checking every time while only being a smidge slower than C/C++. With SSDs all but removing the excuse that disk IO is the limiting factor, this is increasingly the way to go.

The industry had good reasons to use complex runtimes, though some of the reasons are now changing.

Oh, and look at what old games did to optimize things, too. The Minus World glitch in Super Mario Bros--rooted in uninitialized values of a data structure that needed to be a consistent shape--would be unlikely to happen if it were written in Python, and almost certainly wouldn't happen in Rust. Optimizations tend to make bugs all their own.

[–] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 11 points 10 hours ago

Oh my fuck, my work has a website and I hate it. There are multiple fields to fill out on a page, and every time you fill one field, the entire page automatically refreshes. I can’t just tab from field to field and fill things out - I have to fill out a field, wait for the refresh, click in the next field, fill it out, wait for the refresh, click in the next field…. until I’m done.

Next, for some reason everything is a floating window and there is no scroll outside of it. Which means that if I click the page wrong, the floating window moves, and I can’t move it back. I lose all progress because the only way to fix it is to refresh the site.

Then there’s the speed. At the end of the day, when everyone is using this site, it gets extremely slow. You’d think this would be a predictable issue that the company could be proactive about, yet every day, right when we’re itching the most to go home, every one of us experiences the dreaded lag. I hadn’t seen lag this bad since I played Sims 2 on an old computer.

[–] Quik@infosec.pub 57 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

You obviously also need an account for everything. This requirement is only communicated at checkout.

[–] relativestranger@feddit.nl 28 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

i always look for the 'guest' checkout option. some merchants have it, and i'll choose them over somewhere like azn if the price is reasonably close.

[–] Thorry84@feddit.nl 4 points 12 hours ago

Yeah but then they pull the old you need to enter everything to get the delivery costs. I understand they need my address to figure out what shipping would cost. But they also require my name, email and phonenumber before showing the shipment costs. So annoying, it makes comparing prices between shops impossible as some shops have higher prices and free shipping, where others have super low prices, but then fuck you on the shipping.

[–] green_copper@kbin.earth 52 points 14 hours ago

The second last point is the most enraging to me. Either show me a loading overlay or don't move the items a single pixel!

[–] Beryl@jlai.lu 29 points 16 hours ago

Also the thing you're actually looking for will be on the 3rd result page, buried under a dozen vaguely related items that are the site ''recommendation '' even though you typed the exact reference of the thing you were looking for.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 26 points 13 hours ago

This is 100% accurate.

[–] happydoors@lemmy.world 23 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Yeah, idk. 2005 internet sucked in a lot of ways too. Nostalgia doing a lot of work here

[–] capuccino@lemmy.world 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I can't see me doing shopping online in 2005

[–] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 3 points 12 hours ago

I did. Amazon started selling third-party stuff in 2000 (and wasn't evil yet).

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[–] Gowron_Howard@lemmy.world 20 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

UX my ass. These “improvements” only hinder the user.

[–] currycourier@lemmy.world 16 points 15 hours ago

I suppose they never specified it was supposed to be a good user experience?

[–] Samskara@sh.itjust.works 14 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

The X stands for eXploitation.

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 10 points 15 hours ago

Our target audience is people with cognitive disabilities who still have access to a credit card.

[–] sunglocto@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (3 children)

Use Librewolf + Ublock origin with cookie popups filter turned on and medium mode on when needed.

[–] VerilyFemme@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 13 hours ago

Yeah, Librewolf is kinda the best web browser. I still need to use Firefox for some things that just have to be invasive, like I think my bank needs the browser to be a little less locked down, but man I love just browsing the web and only seeing what I want to see.

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[–] jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 11 points 16 hours ago

it is bad enough on some websites to make me wish I could just use a mail catalog thing

[–] gibmiser@lemmy.world 10 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

It used to be that the ads, viruses and tracking were on the web pages, but now we are so blessed that they are built into our browsers and operating systems! Talk about optimization!

[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 5 points 12 hours ago

Don't worry, they are still in the web pages too

[–] SunshineJogger@feddit.org 9 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Still true 3 years later

[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 4 points 10 hours ago

Truer

[–] BubblyRomeo@kbin.earth 8 points 16 hours ago

Too relatable

[–] the_wiz@feddit.org 7 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

This is the reason why I had a long and bloody fight regarding the homepage of the company I work at. And I won.

Management wanted a new homepage, marketing wanted the homepage to be - and this is a citation - "Emotional!!! And we want ENGAGEMENT!!!" (For context: We are building industrial machinery).

Marketing got an external offer (behind my back) and a mockup of the homepage based on React with animations and an dynamic background which turned every PC we looked at it with into a space heater. And they wanted to spend > 15 k € on it.

I - as something yanks would call a CTO - said no.

Everything turned quiet "Emotional!!!" for a couple of months, but in the end I won with the argument that we are building FUCKING BORING INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY, our costumers seldom change and if so, they are also from some big boring industrial company who already know us because we are in this business since Ugh, the first CEO chiseled the first iteration of our landmark product with a flintstone in 15000 BC.

The rebuild of the homepage resulted in something that is quiet nice looking... but that can also work perfectly fine in fucking DILLO!

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[–] morphballganon@lemmy.world 6 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Was the cookies popup really 3 years ago already?

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 3 points 4 hours ago

They've been around for over half a decade.

[–] apftwb@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

OK. Someone please drop a comment to this post telling me how to make all the "sign in to Google" and "Allow Essential Cookie" popups to go away. uBlock filter list?

[–] reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Consent-O-Matic should make the cookie popups less of a problem at least.

[–] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 5 points 14 hours ago

Oh man that sounds so great

Click link
Already installed

🗿Feels chad man.

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[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 4 points 39 minutes ago

Sad part about this is it's not comic hyperbole. It's just literally an average online experience.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago

Hitting myself with the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind machine

Websites in 2005 never had annoying popups and obnoxious JavaScript and a thousand bad design decisions that made using them terrible.

Everything was so easy back then and you could always trust your anonymous Internet retail vendor to do exactly what you paid them for.

[–] Cruxifux@feddit.nl 3 points 14 hours ago

Remember YouTube before ads? Seriously profit motive and infinite growth ruins everything. I want to play Luigi’s mansion every time google asks me to switch to an app or sign in when I google something. Like fuck off.

[–] MeaanBeaan@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago

In 2005 they would have just taken your data without asking.

[–] Jackcooper@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

Missed the part where

Shipping is 6.95 Close tab Sigh, open amazon

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