How to make your website painful for users

Excuse the click-baitey title, and obviously I'm not actually trying to encourage malicious webmaster practices. This journal entry is mainly just testing if this blogging feature works on my site. Testing, testing, 1 2 3.

1. adblock-blockers

Business Insider presents you with two pop-ups. One asking you to disable your adblocker or pay up, the other asking you to send notifications for new articles. The original website is bright, very, very bright. Like Wattpad. I inverted the colours and desaturated the image, so it's easier on the eyes. You have been warned if you go to the URL displayed.

Unless you don't use an adblocker, you've probably come across this, especially on news sites. Don't get me wrong, I understand the world revolves around money and everyone got to make some. Websites cost money to run, news organizations cost money to run, everything costs money. Even running costs money. But it would be nice to have a little warning before wasting bandwidth on a page locker after clicking on a news result telling you to enable ads on their site. There's a reason why people started using adblockers to begin with and it wasn't necessarily just based on the fact that Internet ads tend to try to hijack your browsing experience and rape your eyes and ears (more on this later) with their product. Ads are known to link directly to scams and malware. Whenever I have hovered over ads, I also notice that the URL they link to doesn't really tell you where you're going to end up. It usually looks like something like this: clickads.weqhnqwfijqwithqiuwtq or whatever. Once you click on it, Godspeed.

When I was younger and bought my first computer, I clicked on an ad telling me my computer was infected with a virus (obviously a fake, but I didn't know any better at the time). Thankfully I had some trial of an antivirus pre-installed on my computer, which caught the Trojan before it could any damage. After that moment, I never trusted ads again. I learned the easy way, but others are not so lucky.

The ad I clicked on was via a legitimate website, although it was so many years ago that I cannot recall exactly which site — only that it was a news website. Whenever I have browsed the Internet without an adblocker, such as on a borrowed device, I am frequently redirected or forced to navigate a minefield of misleading clicks. It feels almost like a game. Touch screens make this even more anxiety-inducing.

The other problem with ads is even if they are safe and legitimate, they make websites choppy, especially on lower-end devices, eat up bandwidth, and increase page loading times. All in all, ads make the user experience measurably worse. The only way I would disable adblock as if "mal-vertising" and "lag-vertising" became a thing of the past, which I don't see happening any time soon. Otherwise I take my bandwidth and page impressions elsewhere. If I can't read about the recent happenings on one news site, I'll read it on some other site that doesn't suck.

Even though running this site costs me money, I couldn't bring myself to put ads on it. The last thing I want is a slow-loading, malware-infested, slug-fest browsing experience on my own domain. Heck, I don't even like the fact I have to display those annoying "this site uses cookies blah blah" pop-up for EU citizens. Damn those things are annoying.

2. Newsletter and app pop-ups

It seems like every major website is asking you to sign-up for newsletters and download their own specialized data-mining app to browse their site.​ If you browse Reddit on mobile for example, it loves constantly reminding you to download its app, no matter how many times you dismiss the message. As far as newsletter pop-ups are concerned, they seem to be on the decline. It seemed like before every time I visited a new news site or blog, switch to a different window, and then come back, long and behold a pop-up blocking the page's content would be asking me whether I wanted to sign-up for spam. Now I mostly see newsletter-begging down on the side or at the bottom of the page, of course promising you can always "unsubscribe" (inevitable you will if you like your inbox clean).

3. Right-click disablers

Wattpad is notorious for this. Try to read any of my writings on Wattpad and you'll find you won't be able to right-click on the text. So if you come across a word you want to search up or just want to copy/paste a part of the text, nope.​ Apparently this is to help prevent copyright violations, but I sincerely doubt its effectiveness. I publish my stories first on Wattpad and sometimes I'll instinctively try and copy and paste a page onto Tumblr afterwards only to be reminded I can't do that easily. If I could disable that feature for Wattpad readers, I would, but fortunately you can just view my stories on Tumblr without dealing with such an annoyance. If you know of any Wattpad or Tumblr alternatives that would provide an easier reading experience, be sure to let me know.

4. White backgrounds

Unless it's to give off an aura of purity or some other branding reason, why the hell do most websites have to have a blinding white background? Well I'm no expert in this, but apparently it is easier to read black text on a white background, and it's just easier to create sites with white backgrounds. That being said, it hurts like hell to browse bright sites at night, or for long periods of time.

Mind you my site doesn't offer the best contrast either. The background here is pitch black and the text pitch white. It would be indeed easier on the eyes if there was less contrast. At least in my experience tones of grey are best, with maybe an accent of a deep, but light blue or a rich reddish-crimson (more red than pink).

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As demonstrated above: somewhere between A and B is best. C is just pure torture. It just hurts looking at it!

5. Auto-playing videos

By far the worst of the worst: auto-fucking-playing videos. News sites love doing this. Wikia loves doing this. Satan loves doing this. What's great is when they play sound too and are loud as hell. It's okay if you click on a video on YouTube and it auto-plays because that's what the user wants. When you click on a video, you want to watch it. When you click on a news article, you want to read it.

​Gotta love when the auto-playing vid sticks to the screen like a turd... Following you as you scroll down and read the article... Just horrid.

Well that's the end of this click-baitey test journal entry. Let me know if anything about my site annoys you. And damn that white square above is giving me a migraine just looking at it.