I’d like to see just how horrible someone can make a site. Facebook is a good contender.
fcc.gov. Those goddamn “Sign into the Federal Fucked Up Document System with your FFUDS PIN now” things that just don’t actually work. The layers of garbage between you and renewing an amateur radio certificate is truly Idiocratic.
I just did my GMRS a few months ago. That site is a dumpster fire.
This sounds very similar to the Kentucky online portal for teacher certification. It looks like it was made in 1996, and it functions slightly less well than it looks like it should.
Reddit.
Fragile Mods. Shitty trolls. Dishonest engagements. Little to no good discussion. Opinions are seen as attacks. Power-tripping users and mods alike. Karma whores.
And now, more bots than ever!
Just less users, making the bots more visible. You’ve had repost bots all through, we just assumed it was actual people trying to score cheap karma.
Comcast. I dare you to try to cancel or change your cable and internet package.
I finally got my appleTV subscription cancelled, and that took three fucking tries. No, I don’t have an iPhone or an appleTV unit, so I’m now free.
Publisher’s Clearing House.
So this company has ads on local free tv stations in the US about how you could win $5000 a week for life, but when you go to the website it’s like 97% ads and maybe 2% contests, and some contests are straight up unenterable if you have an adblocker. Then before you can officially enter, you have to go through 3 pages of ‘as seen on tv’ crap that it tries to sell you before you can finish entering. Also it lags like a motherfucker with or without an adblocker, cause there’s so many ads taking up that much bandwith, cause heaven forbid a webpage ad be a static image. And of course you have to have an account, so your spam folder and paper mailbox fill up with the worst things possible.
Ogrish.
Doesn’t exist any more, but definitely traumatized me as a child.
If you haven’t heard of it, it was basically a video hosting site focusing on extreme violence and gore.
Tons of clips of people being killed or horrifically maimed in war, car accidents, industrial accidents, ‘extreme’ magic shows gone wrong, brutal gang attacks, straight up snuff videos…
Some videos off the top of my head I won’t ever be able to erase from my memory:
The beheading of Daniel Pearl.
Low resolution video of 9/11, but you could make out people jumping from the towers… and splattering all over the ground. The camera man tracked people the entire distance they fell.
Some insane magic show gone wrong where a man chain sawed his wife in half … she hadn’t managed to fold herself into the right position inside the magic box… her screams and twitching legs were not an act.
A video taken in Fallujah (I think?) of an Iraqi hopped up on an absurd amount of drugs, taken from a US soldier who had just dismounted with most of his squad from a humvee.
Him and others advance down the middle of a street towards the soldiers, all holding AKs. A volley of fire from the dismounted soildiers either took out all the group, leaving them with chunks blown off, writhing in agony, or scattering…
Except this one guy. He’s clearly seriously wounded, but is still advancing basically blind firing his AK.
The US soldiers are in shock that he’s still walking.
Now for a burst from a 50 cal.
Huge parts of this guy’s body are visibly blown off of him, but he still advances.
A second, more sustained 50 cal burst basically liquifies him where he stood.
That and rotten.com have been responsible for a lot of my insomnia, and probably a good chunk of my misanthropy.
You can’t unsee things, folks. Don’t give in to the temptation. It’s not worth it.
2 guys 1 hammer is no joke
Ehhh I was on stile, ogrish, rottten very young, then /b/ when it first came out, then WPD, eyeblech, NSFW__, etc and I’m doing great. Some folks handle things differently… I’ve seen worse stuff than any of those sites and while it was horrible stuff, I’m aite
The thing is, none of that stuff bothered me much at the time because I was young (early 20’s) and naive about the long term impact that kind of thing can have on a person. It was voyeuristic thrill seeking and I got my thrills and had no regrets for a long time.
It was later in life as I matured and began to appreciate the complexity and wonder of the world, and my sense of empathy truly blossomed, that the things I saw and heard back then started to weigh on me. And that’s where my “you can’t unsee things” comment serves as a warning.
Yes, everyone is different and will be affected differently by viewing such things. But I think most people are going to suffer trauma from seeing that stuff. I don’t think being negatively affected by it makes someone better, worse, more or less empathetic, etc, than someone who is ‘immune’ to it. People have different strengths. The problem is, it’s hard to tell which way your brain is going to go with that info ahead of time, and your reaction to those memories can change greatly with the passage of time. That’s why I say it’s not worth it. This late in life I don’t need the images of mangled motorcyclists, violent suicides, videos showing scattered burning remains of airshow accident victims, or the untold horrors of wars I never fought in, all seared into my brain. The hilariously ironic part is that I have aphantasia, so while I can’t visualize these things, I can still REMEMBER them and be bothered by them when my mind wanders that way. And aphantasia does nothing about remembering the screams of the people who just lost loved ones in horrible ways.
That stuff didn’t ruin my life. But I’d be better off not having sought it out or seeing so much of it. People should think hard before they decide to put that stuff in their head. It’s hard to get out, sometimes impossible.
I used to climb on the roof of my house as a kid and shimmy along the narrow in the middle of the night, just for kicks.
I look back on myself decades later and shudder. I am dead in many parallel worlds.
That’s completely fair! I’m almost 40 though and I guess I’m just… I didn’t have the same experience. Maybe later on in life? But I don’t think so. I’m not immune to it (or anything), I’m a lot more careful in lite after seeing so many ways to die. But when I think of the things I’ve seen, I’m not bothered.
I also came out fine even if I saw those horrible videos. But it’s a bit sad that it’s so hard to find those kind of websites nowadays. Social media just censors everything.
I miss the good old wild west of the internet.
Saaaaame
Sometimes I think back to the shit we saw, and I’m a little amazed so many of us came out so well.
And then elections happen, and well…
rotten.com actually was a protest website that was supposed to be the last bastion of online freedom of speech.
it was a fucking eyesore for Gore and mistress Tipper.
Remember–when they go low and refuse to let you go high, fucking bury them.
Time Cube (now archived). I feel bit bad saying it, but omg the layout. It was bad even by 90s standards.
Edit: the creator died in 2015.
Thanks for the flashback
Have some brain bleach: a hamster dance clone.
You are a good person. Thank you.
Spotify. Only website/service that makes their service intentionally worst and people still pay for it
When I was a lot younger and dumber I used to hang out on 4chan. Still can’t unsee shoveldog
I’ll bite.
4chan both is and is many different places at once.
It’s a huge retro gaming community, a rather tame cosplay community, a fantastic literature community, the largest individual DOOM community on the entire internet, a played entirely straight paranormal board that will take you seriously in many instances, and one of the best music forums on the internet, not to mention many of our first introductions to arch and Gentoo came from /g/, and that fancy neofetch you all like so much(quit using it).
SURROUNDED BY pedophiles, nazis, lolcows, narcissists and trolls.
That’s correct. Then 2016 happened and infected the whole website.
literally any restaurant website. I disabled Facebook from my entire network (pihole).
I can no longer order food on a website because Facebook is deadzoned.
Also, about half of big box brick and mortar online stores stopped working as well.
Try using Instagram without an account and no app, basically impossible.
The only way I’ve worked out how to even save Instagram images locally is using the page information (ctrl+i) Media tab in Firefox and sort through it to find it there. Terrible for an image hosting website.
It’s not an image hosting site, it’s a social media site whose goal is to keep you coming back for more. The easier it is for you to save their content locally, the less likely you are to spend as much time on their site.
And the fact that people flock there despite that is a way I feel more and more distant from humanity…
If you’re running Windows, though, you can use the Snipping Tool to grab the part of the screen you want to save, which may or may not have an image in it.
I prefer the PrintScr key on my keyboard, personally.
Doesn’t that call the same snipping tool? Anyway, saving from source may preserve quality a bit better
I don’t think so. I’ve been using PrintScr longer than the snipping tool has existed.
I’m not sure what “saving from source” would be for a screenshot. What do you mean there?
It’s doable if you open everything in new tabs. Still not a good experience though.
Good to know in a pinch! Luckily I never had to spend time there.
It’s hard to pick out one as THE worst, but generally, if I have to use the site for some external reason, the experience is awful.
Health insurance, doctor’s offices, etc are generally pretty bad. Oddly, tax sites aren’t as rough.
Also oddly, vacation related websites are awful.
Usually webapps.
Ugh, still to this day, persistant file storage is either “the cloud” or file APIs that altho secure, don’t allow for saving overtop of existing files. really annoying.
8chan
Literally 4chan, but worse.
How do you even land there?
I only know 4chan through comments, I wouldn’t even bother looking for another site like that lol.
4chan wasn’t even the first, it was an English version of a japanese site (futaba channel) which was an image board version of a forum (2channel).
Back in the late aughts, there were a ton of *chan sites. Some even more unsavory than 4chan.
Eons ago I made a shocksite-“game” that where you basically could trick people into visiting, and you got a point for each visit. The site was basically a collage of the usual such as goatse, tubgirl, et.al. I guess that was the worst, and putting no effort into the design didn’t help either.
Anyways, years went by, and I didn’t have time or interest in maintaining it anymore, so I let the domain name Expire. I chuckled a bit a while back when I realized that the domain had been bought by a jewelry brand, and the used it as a webshop. If only they knew the history… they obviously haven’t checked out the internet archive for that domain.
An absolute classic
Goatse raises an objection.
Reminds me of freshman year in college… people would sneak into each others rooms and put it up on each other’s computers, trying to see if they could set a record for most spins.
You spin me right round baby right round.
Lord I remember my friends throwing this shit on school computers…
You spin a wheel and they ship you free meat. I couldn’t disagree with you more. I recommend anyone try it out. I don’t know why it exists, but my freezer is stocked.
Flo Rida ruined meatspin for me.
