Is the Internet Going Down the Tubes? The internet can be one of the most annoying things ever invented. Sure, it is also a great thing, but unfortunately there are a lot of people and advertisers making it over into something no one could like. The purpose of this tampering, I call it that for lack of a better word, is to force us to see advertisements. The more advertisements we bring up on a page the more money they make. There is nothing wrong with advertisements it they are not shoved down our throats as they are now being. Let me give you a case in point. By now, everybody must have notice the scam where you are led by a headline to click on a link. Let me make something up to illustrate. Let’s say the headline says “Noah’s Ark Has Been Found.” You click on the link and you are brought to a page with one paragraph on it which says something like Noah was a prophet, blah, blah, blah and there is a link on the bottom which says” NEXT”. That page has several advertisements on it. You click next and you get a second page with another paragraph giving you the history of the wood in the ark with more advertisements on it and the dreaded “NEXT” link. This can go on until many of us no longer care about where the ark was found and give up. I have seen these things go on for as many as 48 pages and some might even go on for more. The usual number of pages is somewhere around 24. Is it fair to the viewing public to be deceived like this? Some might say well once you are brought to the page with the “NEXT” link on it, you don’t have to go any further. I say to these people the same could be said about those annoying robo calls, one can just hang up, but this doesn’t change the fact you have had time taken away from you and in some instances, you might have been doing something which was important to you and stopped to answer the phone. Many people get these calls at supper time. There should be no scams in communications which are either legal or illegal. Another annoying thing is when you are trying to read an article and it is littered with popups. They cover the parts of the article while you are trying to read it. It is especially annoying if you are interested in the article and might need the information for school or work. Popups can be helpful if used correctly or be a horror if not. There are a lot of annoyances such as endless columns of text on a page and the text is close together making keeping you place tiresome. You try using magnify to make the page bigger, but then you can no longer fit the entire page on the screen and have to continuously use the scroll bar to get to the sides of the pages. How about the sites which launch an advert which covers half of the article you are trying to read? You diligently try to only read a few lines which appear under the ad but you can’t help and get frustrated. Sometimes these types of ads disappear after being on the screen for up to 30 seconds and sometimes they stay there. Then there are the sites on the internet which lure you with a come-on link and when you get to the site you find they want information from you before they will let you read the article you went there to read. Sometimes they might ask you to subscribe. One thing which has been driving me crazy as of late are the videos which come on when you get to a page and when you turn them off the audio continues. I don’t know who thought that up, but that really turns me off when a site does that. I have seen this with some of the news articles on Yahoo News lately. Many people who are responsible for news articles and such do not seem to have any clue about making their sites more user friendly. I have a hunch, if a survey was taken they might find out their hits are going down not up because people are getting tired of being used this way. I only say this because I know how I feel about these things. Another annoying thing I find is a website which is designed poorly and you cannot find certain things necessary for the purpose you went there for. Let me tell you what I am talking about. What happened to me the other day is a perfect example. I decided to buy something from a company’s website. It asked me for the usual information but told me I had to create an account first. I figured why not so I picked a user name and a password. First of all, there were no instructions for what letters and numbers could be used for this task and how long the ID and password had to be. I typed in my choices and as with many sites you have to type the password in twice and both times things had to match of course. I kept getting a message they didn’t match even after I absolutely made sure they did. I was never able to establish an account because of this and gave up. You would think if they had a problem with their page, they would fix it immediately instead of wasting our time and losing money on their end. Lastly, there is something which we all hit upon once in a while and that is a website which takes forever to load. We might think it is the fault of our computers, but we notice no other sites have this problem. As the site slowly and painfully starts to load we may get disgusted and try and close the browser but we can’t. This is a big problem for some people who do not know how to use the Microsoft Task Manager which would allow you to close the browser. Even for us who do, it is still a pain in the neck. The internet and the sites on it are becoming more profit oriented than ever and less people friendly in some cases. I hate to think what might happen now that Net Neutrality has been killed. Will this mean many of our choices of what we read and where we go will be taken away from us? I hope not. My hope is companies and people will wise up and make sites friendlier.
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