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.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
Buying things online in 2005 was certainly better. Ebay was a wild place. You'd get in bidding wars going a dollar at a time. Sometimes you'd walk away with a pretty great deal. Not like now how you'll go to a garage sale and some dude wants retail for his 4 year golf clubs. That's in large part due to fb marketplace. It's straight ruined garage sale finds
Literally enshitification. Often when these companies focus on one aspects and not others, it leads to such results.
Rose tinted glasses. Shopping online in 2005 was absolutely not as simple as 3 clicks.
you missed the part about broken links, pages that wouldnt load because of some random HTML error, oh, and the payment itself either getting rejected or otherwise not working for a long time.
Not to mention the popup ads...
So many popup ads, and no adblockers to prevent them.
The internet in the 2000s was like a WW1 Trenchline. Noise and graphic content everywhere and one wrong move could cost you life or limb.
I dont exactly remember when it started getting "safer" because I think the same time the internet was getting safer to browse, a lot of Millenial and Zillenial kids were getting smarter and otherwise learning how to not get malware and worms on their PC
I remember arguing with my mum over a banner ad that said "congratulations you're the 1000th person to visit this page, youve won 1million dollars"
I was really young and I was like mum just put your card in here and get a million dollars its so easy and you always complain about having no money. Its not a scam we just got lucky.
I am lucky neither of my parents had a credit card or any trust for computers.
I only fell for one of those maybe once or twice before I caught on. No money was lost though. just spam/adware
I did manage to get scammed and have my habbo hotel account stolen though, I was also a stupid kid.
I always ask AI Jill if she wants to fuck.
Well... did she?
Jill has standards
So she said yes!
2025 Got to Online Store Type "toilet paper" in search bar. Instead of simply saying, "Sorry, we have no toilet paper" they expect you to scroll through 50,000 variations of "toilet seats", "toilets", "toilet brushes", "paper", "paper toilets", "paper brushes" only to finally discover there are no entries for "toilet paper", etc. and discover for yourself that they have no toilet paper.
The fake chats all seem to use the exact same image too. Apparently this one woman works for dozens of support sites if you were to believe she was real in the first place.
Likely because those sites are built by the same provider.
I work for a car dealership and all of the other dealerships of the same brand in our region use the same family of providers, We -used- to have the faces of real employees pop up on the chat thing until they got too busy to handle it
now its the same stock photo of a person who likely doesnt even exist
c/overemployed
Sad part about this is it's not comic hyperbole. It's just literally an average online experience.
I came here to say this. Often times the pop ups are so bad that I just leave the site. Its almost never worth it
I'm totally not looking at temu
I often decide I don’t actually need what I was about to purchase when I run into this, and I close out the browser tab and move on.
…I guess in some weird way, the poor experience benefits me!
Sites so slow they actually crush the browser and overheats the phone. Reddit does that, the imgur site is cursed by performance issue and it's always loading something. Sometimes I think they're loading malicious code to mine crypto with my computational respurces for how bad it gets.
Don't toss your monitor, you will need to go to the online store in order to get a new one
yeah cause you cant get one at your local best buy anymore, but someone will certainly harrass you into trying to buy a smart TV
Imagine having to navigate that site to buy a new monitor, without a monitor.
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!
Yeah good call, idek your company, site, or industry, and I don't need to. As someone who has to deal with the same shit from a customer perspective I can't hate it enough.
Professional websites should all aspire to be like McMaster-Carr's, "you know why you are here why should we bug you with bullshit, now what size roll pins did you need?" Literally one of my favorite websites of all time, no muss no fuss.
Way back in 2001 when Adobe flash was the exciting new thing on the web, I was the network/firewall admin for the data-center hosting the company website. I didn't get to argue about the site itself, since they had Microsoft in to do that. I did win the argument against the Microsoft engineers wanting to put the site outside the firewall for "performance". Needless to say my ass was on the line if performance was impacted.
Sure enough, the big launch day arrives, the Superbowl adds run, and the complaints all start coming in about how terribly the site was performing. They beat the hell out of it in the lab, so they knew with absolute certainty that the firewall was to blame. Lots of higher-ups were suddenly aware that I existed, which is never a good thing for a network admin.
I dove into troubleshooting and had my answer in less than ten minutes. The front page was a monstrosity made entirely of flash that displayed nothing until the entire page loaded - graphics and all. That worked well enough on a high speed network but, back in 2001, most people at home were on dialup. A little quick math on the size of the download had it taking over 40 seconds to just see the front page.
The site got a really rapid rewrite, and I was off the hook.
I'll enshrine this post it encapsulates something that I always struggled to put into words.
And, the sites end up eating battery.
it's called "enshittification", atleast that's how i refer to it
And, the sites end up eating battery.
Yeah, but they would have done that in 2005 too, if you were using them on a device with a battery.
Not in the same measure.
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.”