My Experience on Your Website

It all starts with me clicking a link in a search engine. It advertises the world! The solution, in my grasp at last! Alas, my answer is cut off in the in-page summary so I must deign to.. actually visit, leaving the warm and familiar embrace of my search buddy and stepping into the dark unknown.

And thus, the page begins to load.

Then the page… continues to load, with only a white screen visible (my website would be ready by now already, I think to myself).

The page continues to load some more, with the header popping into visibility. I'm on a 300 megabit connection. Most websites are done by now. I amuse myself by thinking "I suppose some websites have a minimum version of WIFI they support" in a morbid way, as it's more interesting than watching the screen-paints dry.

Placeholders load. They form irregularly staggered false lines of text. My brain jumps and my eyes refocus, thinking the "experience" is over, but truly this hell is just beginning. I become aware that I've been lied to. My brain pavlovs further towards not wanting to visit your site, because being lied to feels bad. Also, needing placeholders for a regular website is an astounding admittance of how garbage your stuff is. I do my best to amuse myself with that fact as I continue to wait.

Ads load. They always load first. This time it's three hovering video ads, one after another, one from twitch.tv that is livestreaming in 1080p because it autodetected my screen size despite being packed into a 200x70 box. It's some dude (male) in a japanese-style catgirl dress playing CSGO. I have never watched anyone play CSGO. I might for the first time–watch it for the stupid catgirl jig–but probably not. I didn't just drift onto your webpage with nothing to do no matter how much squirrel-brain is involved.

One of the ads starts playing audio. It's impossible to tell which. I mute my pc, then the tab for good measure.

My fans whirr up like I'm starting a AAA game made in 2012. I lament the loss in battery life, and shift it off my lap and onto a table.

Some of the text appears. Not all of it, and it rapidly shifts no less than four times as the title appears, changes fonts, and two ads pop in: one banner, and one additional video ad in EYE BLARING ORANGE AND GREEN in place of the link I was going to click. I've wised up, and have switched to another window to wait so it doesn't get me.

It has been eight seconds. The page is still not fully loaded, although I can find tidbits of the text I was looking for in-between the endless marching of flashing, super-contrast mid-content ads.

I tend to discover your site is composed entirely of copypasted AI-generated filler and leave at this point, but today I'm desperate and it does not deter me.

An AI chatbot bubble pops up in the bottom left, before smoothly flowing out into some "please interact with me!" begging, complete with fake email notification icons. I assume it also plays a sound, since most of them do, but I've already muted everything in an act of self-defense.

Feeling vaguely sympathetic to the creepy guy down the street that everyone whispers about–where solicitors seem to show up, enter, and never leave, and who always has a shovel with a coating of fresh dirt and a pretty garden of vegetables in the back yard–I close the fake sub-window that's blocking what I want to read.

I don't get to read it anyway. Another ad has loaded above the fold, and pushed my current paragraph down off screen. I can only fit one paragraph on-screen at a time because of the sheer size of the massive block top menu (that you're never supposed to fix to the screen (that has been fixed to the top of the screen)) and the series of marching banner ads across the bottom.

I start to scroll to return to where I was, but am interrupted by a full-screen modal ad. It's not blocking scroll events, so I don't notice that I scroll too far while hunting for the X. Luckily, I have been trained by years in the bowels of this fiery planet and I don't miss the requisite single pixel target.

It takes two full seconds to react to my input and close, screaming something about gingivitus and masculinity before it goes away.

In the corner of my eye, I spot the battery gauge drop from 96% to 92% in a single tick, despite still being plugged in. This is because all four cores are saturated to the max with abuse of WebWorkers and ServiceWorkers, and because Intel lied on (creatively reinterpreted) their power usage metrics.

Now that the modal is gone, I discover I have scrolled too far. The page is loading the next article, and is now unresponsive. I watch with resigned disappointment and a little bit of judicious fear as it deletes the paragraphs I was reading (never to be seen again) and replaces them with a new article–and a new set of ads.

In the middle of my roommates scream of rage (the download rate for this page has taken down our shitty ComcastTM wireless connection and they've just died) and the constant turbulence of analytics scripts maxing out my link to try and track how far I am from the IP geolocation to sell me a new toaster (it's not going to work, the 25mb WASM package was miscompiled and it's trying to upload to the wrong IP), a counter ticks up somewhere, and a demon wearing the face of a forty-year-old man gets a promotion for ensuring ever-more souls suffer on an hourly basis.

Another overdressed demon wearing a human face, this one appearing even older, shuffles his tie. I cannot tell if he's cosplaying satan or not as he tells his eager subordinate "excellent job."

Placeholders appear for the second page load, and I watch with morbid fascination.

The page load fails, because they didn't pay their developer and she didn't have time to fix the six and a half thousand "Critical bugs" before she quit (they're all critical bugs, even the ones that only appear on the Xbox browser (nobody uses that (she was told to "ship it" and "make it work" (She sued them for unpaid overtime and is still litigating (the judge is upset))))).

React deletes the entire page and leaves me with a singe <div> stating "an error has occurred." It doesn't even finish the arcane incantation with "please refresh" or "try restarting." Clearly the work of the devil.

I close the tab. My laptop stops smoking, and the battery gauge stabilizes at 78% before starting to slowly climb once more. The fans whirr to a halt a half-minute later, the tidal wave of silence hitting me like a ton of bricks I didn't notice was there.

I give the laptop a moment before using the touchpad, to avoid burning my fingers (there was not sufficient thermal headroom (Intel lied (The manufacturer didn't test it (another demon was promoted for both these decisions)))).

I press the back button.

Nothing happens.

I long press the back button. There are 256 separate entries for your site scrolling off the bottom of my screen, interspersed with ad.doubleclick.net entries from a malicious script spamming the history api to hide the dodgy russian malware servers it was accessing to figure out it's next DDOS target to point my poor, trusting system at.

I close the tab, and re-open my search engine.

It takes a moment to load too, with placeholders, totalling 4 seconds. An absolute travesty that yet seems like heaven in comparison.

I then click on your competitors website.