This website brilliantly demonstrates how today's web is such a mess

There’s a lot to love about the open web, one of the last standards out there that isn’t controlled by one giant company like Apple. But if we’re being honest, websites today are kind of a mess. Pop-ups that ask you to accept cookies, dialogues that ask you to turn on notifications (who ever says yes?), and giant advertisements that cover half your screen are just a few of the small annoyances we have to put up with everyday.

Attention to detail — Apparently one person just couldn’t take it anywhere and needed to an outlet to take out their frustration, so they built a website that features just about every single annoying feature on websites today to demonstrate just how awful it’s gotten.

how-i-experience-web-today.com starts off looking like a Google search page, but once you click on the single link displayed, you’re thrown into a nightmarish website that bombards you with the aforementioned pop-ups and dialogues that websites use to milk you for value.

Funnily enough, below the pop-ups you can see the headline of the site is “An article I want to read,” but then it’s comically challenging to actually get to the article. Every time you overcome one obstacle, another takes its place.

The attention to detail is impressive. If you leave the page and come back to see another pop-up that asks for your email and says, “It seems you leave the tab? Yeah, I know everything. Leave your email so we can better bother you.” And when you finally do get to the article, scrolling down causes the article to jump around because in-line ads keep getting loaded into the story.

SAD TBH — It’s all very funny and clever, but it’s also a pretty spot demonstration of the frustrating user experiences that we have to put up with today. Steve Jobs was unfortunately right in his thinking when he decided the iPhone shouldn’t have Flash, because it one of the technologies that littered the web but caused slowness and just a poor experience. But websites will go up right to the line, doing as many annoying things as they possibly can get away with to make money. And we get a worse internet for it.