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Internet Annoyances

Considering that I am almost constantly online since since 1996, I am overall very pleased with the development of the internet to a universal platform to acquire information, to work on common projects, to exchange opinions, to do some shopping and banking and to have fun. Some trends, however, have become increasingly annoying, for me as a webmaster of a big site as well as a "normal" user.

Disclaimer While I'm doing my best to stick to the facts in this commentary, please note that some of my observations may be flawed and that my findings may be very personal. I haven't included many links to back my views, because I don't feel like updating them all the time. Sorry.

Spam Sure. Who doesn't hate it? But most of all I am astonished that the overall spam volume is still rising after so many years, although there is close to no return from it. Currently the vast majority of all e-mail messages has to be considered spam. If it hasn't already been filtered out automatically, every human being who is not a complete moron can recognize spam in milliseconds. This used to be different a couple of years ago when I actually read some of the then infrequent spam mails, especially the amusing ones pretending to come from former African dictators.

I reckon that if someone sends out 1 million spam messages today, only some 100,000 will get noticed at all for a split second. Out of these 100,000 human spam recipients, maybe 100 will read more than a few words. Of these 100, only 10 will click a link to penis enlargement because, if there is any information provided, it is quickly recognizable as fraudulent. Statistically, I believe that at most 1 of these 10 people will buy anything. And this is only possible under the assumption that the site sells anything at all and is not just another redirect - many spam-advertised sites appear to be dead ends!

So even if it is possible to earn a few cents per 1 million spam messages simply because someone pays for the page clicks, there can never be sufficient return to justify the (admittedly small) effort. Common sense tells me that whole system should be increasingly unlikely to work, even if it were legal. And if sending a single e-mail cost only 0.1 cent, the spam business should have collapsed long ago. So why is it still thriving? Unless the spammers themselves are complete idiots (which is what most spam messages look like), spam must be a miraculous way to find the needle in the haystack, the one out of one million who is still gullible enough.

On a side note, regarding the customary "I need your bank account to transfer my money" fraud (the Nigeria scam), I read about an investigation that came to the startling result that intellectual people are much more likely to fall for it than users with average education!

Phishing Of all fraudulent internet manipulations phishing is the probably most insidious one. Because you can never be careful enough. I sometimes spend a few minutes until I can rule out the authenticity of a message from a bank, from PayPal or from eBay. The spoofed messages very often look quite genuine.

Here is what I do when I suspect that I have received a phishing mail (in about this order):

JavaScript links and mutilated windows Why is it necessary to have images or even sub-pages open new windows (with or without a redundant "close this window" button)? I've talked to a few site designers, and I was told more than once that the average user would likely always stay in the same window and always click on links, never on the "back" button. What a crap! Because for the assumed dull user there would be nothing more confusing than a maze of windows, especially if it's not clear how they are being controlled (like when you click on another image link, and you don't know whether the image opens another pop-up or refreshes the current one).

With the advent of Firefox that offers to open links in a new tab and to organize, lock and even restore tabs I was hoping that the bad programming habits of some web designers to open overlapping non-maximized windows would be overridden. But especially the irritating ad pop-ups have found ways to defy Firefox. The battle will enter its next round, as I am getting some nifty add-ins for the browser...

Captchas I hate them. It took them just one or two years to become one of the worst online plagues. You want to comment on a blog or write into a guestbook, you want to log in somewhere or download something. You are in a good temper, but suddenly a page comes up with a cryptical image of disfigured numbers and letters. It always takes some guessing, but in spite of everything I fail to pass captchas half of the time. Am I stupid? No, that honor belongs to the people who conceived the captchas. They don't work because letters are not recognizable at all, because numbers and letters look alike, because it is case-sensitive but capital and small letters look alike, because the correct order is not clear or even because I have to solve an additional puzzle by only typing a certain selection of the (barely) visible characters. 

As a website owner I know too well how nasty spambots can be. But enhancing the captchas making them always more cryptical riddles doesn't help. It only annoys the hell out of the human visitors. The much better option is to ask a simple question that a human being can easily answer. Since I switched to such a procedure, the average spam entries per day in my own guestbook decreased from over 3 per day to zero.

Website miniaturization The screen resolutions and monitor dimensions are always growing. The last time I worked on a 640*480 pixel monitor was in 1996. But many recent websites, and particularly those of big companies, have a fixed width of 800 or even 640 pixels, and are using the smallest possible font size that is barely readable. Moreover, on many news sites that squeeze the text into a narrow window between the navigation bar and the ads, you get only a small portion of an article at a time and you have to press "next" several times to go on reading. While I can increase the font size for better accessibility (which inevitably ruins the layout especially if the columns are narrow), there is no real way how I can tell the website to occupy a larger portion of my big screen (which is big for a reason after all). Some sites should really list a magnification glass among their viewing requirements.

I think that, rather than paying attention to ancient monitors, the web designers simply don't know better but to nail down absolute dimensions for everything, especially since everything can be formatted so easily with CSS. I am fond of CSS as a great way to customize everything, but it encourages web designers to abandon the art of adaptive layouts.

Overcrowded and ad-polluted portal websites The portals of fully or partially online-based companies such as e-mail providers, other internet services, media companies or TV stations are being visited by millions of people every day. While this should be a reason for them to come up with a particularly decent, fast-loading and easy-to-use web design, their portals are very often quite the contrary. There is usually no consistent site design, and sometimes no visible concept at all. Half of a page's real estate is often reserved for off-site ads. Many websites even give away their page background to ads, which then appears in colors such as pink or yellow! Much of the rest is spent for even more unrequested videos and Flash animations that waste valuable bandwidth and CPU power. The overall volume of a single page, including all media, is often far beyond 1 megabyte, making a visit without DSL impossible. While pop-ups are fortunately not so common any longer and can mostly be suppressed, ads hovering above and/or moving across the page have become commonplace, and it is a pain of the ass to click them away. There are no real menus, and important functions such as search, login, help, FAQ or contact are obscured in a way as if they don't want to be found. Sometimes direct navigation to content pages is not possible, but only via an intermediate page (with more ads, of course). Most portals look like porn sites these days, only without tits.

The rationale for the degradation of websites of online companies is obvious, however. The sites were initially set up as a service to their customers. But it is just too tempting to squeeze more profit out of a site by filling it with ads and by offering paid services that have nothing to do with the original purpose of the website or even with the company itself. When I go to the site of a TV station, I would expect to find extensive information about their programs. But it is a huge disappointment every time I look for such content. I am apparently asking too much, and I am rather expected to play browser games or download ring tones. And pertaining to the ads, it is peculiar how the companies (at least if they are not direct competitors) mutually pollute their websites!

The pleasant exception among the web-based companies shouldn't remain unmentioned: Google - a commercial site that does not only have a very simple and fast interface but also decent ways to integrate ads into the search results (well, Google's all-dominating AdSense service for other sites is another story). The same praise goes to eBay, although to lesser degree because it is not quite as clean any more.

Mindless bookmarking and blog posts I am gradually putting up with the new features of the Web 2.0, many of which are very casual compared to what I see as the profundity of traditional websites. I am old-fashioned and I miss the days when website visitors actually recognized what was new and exciting and when they used to read and reflect on what someone was writing. Case in point: In early 2008 the EAS counter went up because of several blog and online bookmarking posts. The subject: "Starship Interiors", a page that had already been in existence at EAS for several years. First off, I am glad that people still seem to care about my site, and now is as good a time as any, even if an old page is in the focus. But the latter is also a part of the problem of Web 2.0. Once it has entered the blogosphere, the old news gets reposted effortlessly, and it becomes something "new" (at least for a day until it has been shifted down to the 14th archive page).

And while I think that most people who saw the link did have a closer look at my content, many of those who felt compelled to comment did not mind the actual topic. It seems that they took for granted that that I created those cross-section views of the ship interiors myself, although the real source is credited beneath every single thumbnail. Also, several people complained "So many images, but none from the Enterprise-D?" They didn't even bother going one page level up to look for the TNG page. It appears they don't care any longer how a website works - a real website with a navigation structure, not one with highly interactive and highly interlinked but overall randomly selected half-baked stuff. Finally, the "miserable geek in his mother's basement" comment seems to be compulsory in any Trek-related blog or online bookmarking post.

Fake sites and rip-offs I frankly concede that the performance of Google (and of other search engines likewise) has improved a lot in the past few years despite the ever rising data volume to be handled by their servers. It has always become harder to cheat and to get fraudulent content listed. However, there are still too many fake sites that slip the net and receive average to good ranking from Google. The typical fake is an automatically generated page with a short and distinct static URL (insinuating rich content) and a common Google search term as its title. But looking closer, the "content" consists of nothing but a list of old search results and some ads that may or may not be remotely related to the page title. Something like this is utterly useless and frustrating each time a user is looking for real information. I even stumbled across pages where I could "Learn everything about Ex-Astris-Scientia.org" or even "Find the Lowest Prices for Ex-Astris-Scientia.org".

Google usually deletes auto-generated pages from the index when they are discovered or reported. Many of them are parts of a link farm set up to rank another page higher and are therefore banned from Google. On the other hand, Google even offers to build such sites with their AdSense for Domains program! In other words, Google helps to cheat unsuspecting visitors, helps to undermine its own index. It is a pretext that "parked domains" will eventually be filled with content. If a parked domain is really meant to serve a certain company, the least they must do is announce the upcoming launch of the website instead of filling it with pointless ads that will deter visitors forever. For the same reason, a half-way respectable company would never register a domain that has been contaminated with ads in its recent history and may even be much more expensive than a fresh one. Ad-polluted parked domains (many of which have been taken away from defaulting webmasters and its reputation ruined to embarrass them) are dead domains, and still Google actively supports them.

Another annoyance are ripped sites, especially those which duplicate Wikipedia. While it may be a good idea to have more than one universal encyclopedia just to read a second opinion or to see a different approach, there seem to be many wiki-based encyclopedias that exactly copy a portion of Wikipedia and are never updated. I can understand well if something like news is exchanged among different sites, but not encyclopedic content. I am not sure about the legal ramifications (Wikipedia may allow to copy their articles), however, it is a total waste.

Babylonian sites For ten years I have been accustomed to speaking English whenever I am online, unless I am moving through a purely German realm like with eBay, other online shopping, my bank account etc. However, recently all sorts of sites force me to speak German even when I don't want to. They are "intelligent" and analyze my IP, offering me a customized German version. Likewise, at work I frequently have to switch to French, because our company's network hub is located in France.

Google is among the sites that insist on me speaking German or French - when I type "www.google.com" I wind up at "www.google.de", or "www.google.fr", respectively. This wouldn't bother me very much, if the search results were not customized as well, with German/French language results always coming first. But not only the ordering of the results is different. Google has separate databases on their different language-specific sub-sites. I may not even find some English-speaking results with the German or French Google. The only way to switch to the English default version is to click a small link at the bottom of the page, which then takes me to "google.com". Well, I can stay logged in, so Google will respect my language preference, but I don't really want them to know everything that I search for. The best way is to access Google through the built-in Firefox search engine, which always takes me to google.com.

It's similar with several other sites. When I go to what I think is the English version, they say "Willkommen" to me nonetheless. I appreciate that as long as the German version is correct. But when I visit a blog of some American guy, and it shows the content in English, but the standard links, navigation and even his bio in German although his German skills are most likely limited to "Guten Abend", it becomes bizarre. Especially since "Schulbildung: Gymnasium" insinuates that he attended a Gymnasium, a type of school that isn't comparable to anything that exists in the US.

I am only glad that they don't attempt to automatically translate essential content with Google Translate to create total confusion... But this will be only a matter of time.

On a funny note, eBay auto-translates some of the item description from foreign eBay sites as a "translation service without warranty". This includes translations of ebay.at items, from Austrian to German as it seems!

Modern paternalism In a similar fashion as automatically switching to the language that I am believed to speak, several websites claim to be more intelligent than I am. They anticipate what I am allegedly looking for. The first example has not yet become a commonly accepted technique, and I hope it will never happen. On some websites hosting blogs or articles it happens that words inside a paragraph are being underlined. But what appears to be a wiki-like keyword-sensitive linking to a definition or further information turns out to be a particularly insidious way to incorporate ads. Phew!

An even worse example of websites that know better what I want than I do myself is the automatic correction of alleged misspellings in search results, including hits for search terms that have nothing to do with what I am looking for. Example: In order to stay informed about where EAS is being cited, I can do a simple web search, combining "astris" with various keywords. Google, however, gives me many search results with the term "Astrid" instead of "astris", obviously assuming that I am looking for a girl named Astrid but too stupid to spell her name correctly. I don't know what the criteria are, because "astris" is not even an extremely rare word that might justify being "corrected". Typing other unusual search terms (even things that have to be typos by all means) Google does its job the way I would expect and only suggests "Did you mean...?" when it suspects a misspelling, which is a lot more transparent and less patronizing. There is absolutely no need for auto-correction.

Finally, why is it that many websites refer me to "most popular topics"? This may be of some interest on news sites, but it has become a common practice everywhere. At EAS, I'm trying to direct people to the best features in my humble opinion, especially when I think they deserve more attention than they usually receive. But EAS is not really made for people with "average interests" anyway. ;-)

Speaking of "most popular", even eBay has jumped on the bandwagon, now listing the most frequently requested articles first as the default setting for the search. Fortunately it is possible to switch back to the personal setting. Nevertheless I find it very disappointing for sellers of less popular items that this way they are getting even less exposure at eBay.

Wikipedia - hive of conceit? I like Wikipedia very much. It is one of the few sites that I visit almost every day, and a site where I could spend hours, always discovering something new. I consult Wikipedia very often for my research. I have learned a lot on subjects that I barely knew anything about before Wikipedia. I appreciate very much that people dedicate much of their spare time to extend the site, to keep it accurate and up-to-date. But I find it worrying that at least in one of the fields where I am an expert Wikipedia turns out to be selective and somewhat arrogant.

It may not be just Star Trek's problem, but it sucks that well-written articles about major Trek websites like TrekBBS were deleted from Wikipedia and even Memory Alpha has been tagged for deletion for some time. All because of lacking "notability" under the questionable terms of Wikipedia that would include a local school magazine and perhaps a garage business but not a website with tens of thousands of worldwide users every day. On the other hand, the Star Fleet Universe, a gaming subculture (albeit a relatively popular one), was conceded a whole article series. I'm not even complaining that an article about my own website, Ex Astris Scientia, was first rewritten to one about the Starfleet Academy motto of the same name and eventually removed altogether. But the deletion policy should remain consistent, which is not the case as long as many other unofficial science fiction sites outside Star Trek still have their place at Wikipedia.

Something that also bothers me is that several links from Wikipedia articles to EAS were deleted although they were perfectly fitting in the context. The cited reasons in these cases: "A personal website is not notable / is original research" and "link spam". On the other hand, Wikipedia loves to cite the ramblings about Star Trek by online critics or, even better, newspaper columnists without any ties to or knowledge of the fandom. Wikipedia certainly gets the basic facts about Star Trek right, but overall it is not a good resource in this field anyway. That honor definitely belongs to Memory Alpha.

There is another, albeit minor source of sorrow, pertaining Wikipedia. The site has enforced the addition of <rel="nofollow"> to any outbound link, potentially as a questionable SEO technique. That way Wikipedia does not leak any Google PageRank, while it gains PageRank from any incoming links (such as from EAS) that are usually not protected. The consequence is that Wikipedia pages climb up the list at Google. Many Wikipedia articles have much higher PageRanks than the index pages of whole major websites dedicated to the very same topic, and they may appear first in Google's search results, although they are just sub-pages. There are many factors that contribute to Google rankings, but Wikipedia's link policy certainly helps to stay on the top. Maybe I should be glad that there is no article on EAS at Wikipedia any longer.

Twitter litter I am not a big fan of the so-called Web 2.0 because I was quite content with the conventional internet as a platform for companies, institutions and individuals to present their products, services, research or opinions. I certainly appreciate the new possibilities of online shopping and banking, of Wikipedia and photo/video sharing. There are even a couple of blogs I like, although it is my firm opinion that hand-made sites are superior. But I never saw a need for something like social networking, link sharing and micro-blogging, because it appears to me as a poor surrogate for traditional websites and discussion forums and ultimately as a poor imitation of life itself.

It's not that I wouldn't have given the Web 2.0 a chance. I am creating RSS feeds with EAS site updates on a regular basis since 2007. As I am running a hand-made HTML-based website, I have to write the source code of the feed in a text editor, as if I didn't have enough work preparing several updates per week. While the feeds of blogs and other Web 2.0 sites are created automatically, no one ever bothered to provide a software or script that could enable people like me to convert HTML to feeds or back on the fly. Still, every website with a certain reputation is expected to have a feed. I take the effort of creating a feed because I know that some regular visitors like to have all news sources they like in a feed reader, even if these are only some 300 out of 6000 daily visitors.

In mid-2009 I tested Twitter because some other notable Trek sites are on Twitter too. I didn't expect much, but what I found there was easily the most underwhelming internet innovation of all times.

The most obvious flaw of Twitter is the posting limit of 140 characters. What can I say with just 140 characters? Sorry, that is not sufficient for me. Not by a long shot. Sure, the posting limit allows the tweet to be sent as an SMS to my mobile phone. But it is the year 2009, and mobile internet is becoming affordable. And why would I need to get an SMS from Twitter anyway? Nothing broadcast via Twitter could possibly be so important that I would need to be informed via SMS on my way home. Home to my ultrafast DSL connection where I have the whole world on my fingertips, a world that I don't need and I don't want to be dumbed down to 140 character posts.

To most people it may be a minor nuisance, but the necessity to shorten links in a tweet is another thing that puts me off. I think it is important to know in advance where a link will lead me: to a news site, to a personal website, to yet another social network? Or to shameless spam (which happens very often), to a porn site, to Nazi propaganda, to malware? Provided that the redirect works at all, clicking the obfuscated link can become a very unpleasant surprise.

The thing about Twitter that annoys me most as an ordinary user is the totally missing coherence of the tweets. Twitter may be the easiest way to spread the word about serious issues like the protests in Iran, but even this may vanish in the white noise of the mindless chatter. In conventional message boards there are topics, and off-topic posts are generally scorned for good reasons. In Twitter everything is off-topic by default. I can still see who replied to whom, but in most cases it is a bottomless pit once I try to find the original tweet, and often I can't even tell what the hell these two or more people are talking about. I was following the tweets of two Trek actors for some time, but I could not make any sense of most of what they were writing, and on which matters they replied to other users. Twitter is a totally chaotic chatter that defies any attempts to order your own trains of thought, much less to create something of substance or to really get to know other people.

Following the example of other big Trek websites, I tried to post at least my site updates on Twitter. I thought that could be done automatically, because I already had the hand-made RSS feed as some sort of admission ticket to the Web 2.0. But all my attempts to get a tool called Twitterfeed working were in vain, because I would need an additional newly standardized date field in my RSS feed. And here we have another high hurdle for people who work with HTML, who are effectively barred from the Web 2.0.

So I have declared my Twitter test phase a failure. I'm sorry if my low opinion on Twitter offends the people who are obviously having fun there. It is not my intention to put them down. Twitter may be a good platform for casual discussions that wouldn't be possible elsewhere, but just not for me. Its basic principle of 140 characters per post is in strong contrast to my idea of electronic communication, and if I have to take considerable efforts just to re-re-post my own site updates, I can easily do without Twitter.

 


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Last modified: 24.08.09 
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