it's time for me to say it: all modern software and commercial websites suck.

i'll admit it - i was inspired to type this up over a moment of frustration. what exactly sent my shit up the wall isn't really of concern, rather it's that it was one too many, as it seems modern software/web development is but a pile of end-user frustrations and irritating UX decisions.

far be us from the days of simplistic but sensical design. everything must constantly be shifted about, presumably to give a team of otherwise unoccupied unpaid interns something to do. things must constantly be given a fourteenth, nay, fifteenth coat of gloss to cover up the actual goddamn functionality of the tool we are trying to use.

in the name of user friendliness, things have been made more complicated than ever - those scary settings are simply obsfucated or worse removed entirely. simple features are now considered a godsend, and if they're taken away, people practically cheer when they're brought back, like it's a goddamn accomplishment.

here's an example, discord has been around for four goddamn years - the thing soooo much better than skype, right? yet for what purpose am i unable to do something as simple as open a server or DM in another window - a feature i could do in AOL, MSN, and Yahoo Messenger? this feature, this BASIC feature that mIRC could do, has somehow been prioritized under a games store nobody asked for.

we are regressing in the name of progression - modern software sucks ass. the new twitter redesign sucks ass and no amount of getting around it by switching your user agent (something which might i add they can themselves solve at any point by duck typing) makes it less of a pain for things like artists who now have to, alongside working around twitters horrible image compression, work out how to get its fucking algorithm to crop their art correctly. WHY IS AN ALGORITHM CROPPING ART IN THE FIRST PLACE? is it so neccessary, and if so, why is it SO hard to put in a manual option to crop it ourselves?

all social media sites have sucked any sort of individuality out of their UX, what was once a place to express your creativity now barely has colour options, and decides at all times how to display any of the very few assets they allow you to have on your page. direct control of any kind, even things as simple as markdown or BBcode so that users may format their text, somehow terrify the people who run these shitheaps. something like the days of myspace - user pages being coded in HTML - is now unimaginable. one of the last bastions of a mainstream site allowing this sort of creativity, reddit, finally got around to shitcanning CSS in preference of an extremely limited social-media-esque system of selection boxes.

software cannot simply do what we tell it anymore, it must tell us what we want - and its designers have decided that the software cannot be wrong. i find it telling that on places like here on neocities, we ironically look to the past to find a more enjoyable future - one free of being told what colours we may use, what sounds we may play, what resolutions our images must be, etc. the absolute dogshit ugliest user created websites back in the geocities/freewebs/angelfire/etc days still are a million times more creative than anything spewed forth from social media.

every time software i uses shoves an auto-update down my throat (especially web browsers) i prepare myself for the worst - my "favourite" being the time firefox broke all its addons. but usually, it's not something unintentional like that, but rather an intentional change that makes the software more cumbersome to use on purpose, for a reason i have never been able to ascertain. i find myself more and more yearning for days that are long past, where technology might not have been as "good" - but it sure was a hell of a lot more enjoyable to use.

but hey, maybe people like me are a relic of a dead age. i get a lot of people telling me it's "not so bad" (as if that's what we should be striving for.) much like somebody who still listens to their music on vinyl records, perhaps my tastes have simply become out of date for a modern age infested populated by smartphones. basically, i'm abe simpson yelling at a cloud.

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