6 Stupid Features Professional Websites Still Use

And end up with 15,000 things to look at. And that's fine; I'm totally cool with looking at 15,000 things. But I'd like to do that sort of efficiently, and not like this:

Looking at these products in chunks of 15 or 24 at a time, with a click and lengthy pageload after each page? That's how cavemen shopped online back in 2006. I pick on Home Depot here, but essentially every online shopping site has the same issue. I don't claim to understand the sorcery behind websites that allow infinite scrolling (see Twitter, Instagram, Cracked), but this feels like a problem we solved several years ago.

For the longest time, I never used Twitter, because Twitter is an ugly garbage site if you don't have an account. The Twitter homepage is incredibly unfriendly to someone who isn't logged in, with absolutely no hint of the content the site has to offer. And for the longest time, even if you directly went to the profile page of some celebrity or person you knew, you'd see nothing but hot nonsense, a half (or third or quarter) of a confusing, reverse chronology conversation. The conversations have sort of been filtered out now, but the reverse chronology remains, and in general it's still not a great look at what Twitter offers.

Pinterest is even worse. I can't claim to have many friends that use it, but on occasion someone has sent me a link to look at some of their "pins." Is that right? Did I use that term right? I wouldn't fucking know, because even if someone explicitly invites you to look at their goddamned pins, you can't unless you sign up for a goddamned Pinterest account.

"WHAT IF I DON'T WANT TO SIGN UP? WHAT THE FUCK AM I GOING TO DO WITH
MY POORLY DESIGNED HOUSEBOAT THEN, DICKOS?"

Sure, there are technical reasons why websites prefer slideshows. Depending on the implementation, slideshows can increase ad impressions, which is distasteful, but maybe a necessary part of the shitty web economy. And, on a purely technical level, slideshows don't consume bandwidth sending dozens of images to someone who gets bored after the third image. (That's, I think, the reason Cracked uses them in a few places.) But the slideshows that are nothing more than text articles broken up into 13 pages? That's nonsense.

WebMD, sir, I am hung to the tits right now and do not have the patience for careful clicking.

But then why, oh why are there still loading screens on the Internet? These spinning widgets and loading bars are an anachronism, a bizarre holdover from a more primitive age. Amusingly, they show up most often on those Flash and multimedia-heavy sites of people and companies that are advertising their creative or design services. Like illustrating that you have no idea what people look for on websites is an advertisement of your design savvy.

Digital Vision/Getty Images
"I'll tell the users what they want, and they'll be thankful for it."

More high-profile are all those travel websites. These make heavy use of loading screens, and, sure, there might be technical reasons for that. These sites do supposedly have to poll external databases to get the hottest, tautest deals to you. I remain a little skeptical about that -- there are backend techniques to minimize that -- and many of these loading pages feel unnecessarily drawn out, with their "Hang On, We're Searching For The Perfect Vacation For You" messages, like they're using the loading screen less as a technical necessity and more as an excuse for branding.

I have no idea what this means.

And, last but not least, maybe the highest-profile site in the world uses a loading screen. That's right. Motherfucking Gmail.

Yeah, it's fast; I'll give them that. But it'd better stay that way. We're watching you, Google.

But something's changed in recent years. The bastards have come back. Although they rarely spawn additional windows now, modern websites can create what are called modal windows, pop-ups within the same window that obscure the website beneath them. You'd think these would be used for ads, and I imagine in many cases they are. But far more common are pop-ups for things like newsletters or prompts to create an account or download the site's app or whatever. These just seem so misguided to me, begging for attention while at the same time concealing the one thing that makes the site worthy of attention. What kind of solvent-huffing id- ...

Actually, hang on. I love pop-ups. I love pop-ups and newsletters and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Let's all sign up for some newsletters today.

There are like 12 different places you have to go to set your privacy settings.

What the fucking fuck is this fuck?

It's not just the settings. To set your privacy settings properly, you have to use something called a Timeline Review (which is the same or different from an Activity Log; I'm not sure) where you have to go through your entire goddamned Facebook history one line item at a time.

Why is this so fucking difficult?

What the hell is this bullshit?

Fuck.

Who's responsible for this?

Is it this fucking guy?

Is that it? Is that why Facebook is such a bizarre mishmash of garbage? Because it's programmed by a dinosaur pulling on three fucking levers?

Oh shit, it is, isn't it?

This is the guy who knows all of our secrets.

Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist and knows some of your secrets too. His first novel, Severance, is incredible and available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Apex Books. Join him on Facebook or Twitter.

Be sure to follow us on Facebook and YouTube, where you can catch all our video content, such as If The Internet Was A High School and other videos you won't see on the site!

For more from Bucholz, check out 5 Tips For Talking To Your Parents About The Internet and 7 Horrific Internet Ads We'll Soon See.