this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Greentext

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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

Be warned:

If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.

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Anon does some online shopping (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago by Gorilladrums@lemmy.world to c/greentext@sh.itjust.works
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[–] Sciaphobia@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Open browser

Browser demands updates

All extensions update simultaneously. Each opens its own tab to proudly announce bug fixes for bugs you never noticed.

Close ten tabs you didn’t open

Miss one. It autoplays a video ad.

Type in search bar. Autocomplete offers suggestions that are 5 years old, NSFW, or both.

Search for a product. Top results: Ads. Sidebar: Ads. Bottom: Ads. An actual organic result is wedged between an ad and a newsletter signup modal.

Click real-looking result. Redirected to a shady dropshipper site.

Back button doesn't work. It reloads the same scam page five times. You lose the original tab somewhere in a pile of redirects.

Click Amazon link. It’s a new seller with the business name “USB_Cable_Amazon_Partner_Official.” 13,000 reviews. All 5 stars.

Try to read reviews. Most are for the wrong product. Many are AI-generated gibberish. The rest complain about shipping.

Add to cart. You are not logged in.

Log in.

CAPTCHA challenge: Pick all the traffic lights. Traffic lights are 1 pixel wide. One is technically a lamppost. Verification failed.

2 factor authentication push. By the time you get the authenticator open, the session expired. Start over.

Try to close browser. Are you sure you want to close 37 tabs?”

Yes. It crashes.

Reopens all 37 tabs next launch.

Give up and use your phone

4 popups, fingerprint required, and every link jumps when the page loads because of delayed ad banners.

App store ad appears for the site you’re already on

Clicking "x" opens the ad anyway.

You close the phone browser

Go outside

Get a push notification: “You left items in your cart.”

[–] mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I once responded to one of those "you have items in your cart" emails that I received like a mere half hour after finishing browsing with a "fuck off", and a short while later somebody responded and said some things and ended with "same to you too"

I immediately replied and said oh wow a real person replied, don't take it personally, it was directed at the automatic message.

they started berating me and telling me that I should just unsubscribe if I don't want the emails (that I never fucking subscribed to in the first place???), and then deleted my account and banned me from the store, it seems. I tried to buy something over half a year later, but it was declined without reason, and support told me it was "flagged for fraud" and didn't elaborate

[–] reptar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Oh fuck them

[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I think it's interesting that in 2005, the internet had a ton of popups and scammy ads that told you "you just won a free iPod!" and everyone knew that was a thing. There was even a gag about it in Scary Movie 3 (2003):

Yet you don't hear people complain about that as much today. It's like so much of the internet has been cordoned off into walled gardens that most users don't see pages out in the open.

[–] bob_lemon@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago

Those popups were so prolific that all browser developers responded by implementing popup blockers.

Which kind of led to the absolute mess of banner ads (and the adblockers created in response) that we still have today. I dare you to deactivate your adblocker on any of the major (commercial) news sites.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You missed scroll hijacking because reinventing how things move on the screen is important for some reason?

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

Because phones. The reason behind fucking up scrolling is phones. Swipe upwards once and get the next pretty animated scrolling to the precise place, wooo!

[–] Thorry84@feddit.nl 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

And everything is SO FUCKING SLOW. I swear my old Celeron 300A at 500mhz running Windows 98 and SUSE Linux was super responsive. Everything you clicked just responded right away, everything felt smooth and snappy. Chatting with people over the internet using ICQ or MSN was basically instant, all the windows opened instantly, typing had zero latency and sending messages was instant.

My current Ryzen 5950X is not only a billion times faster, it also has 16 times the number of cores. I have hundreds of times the RAM as I had HDD capacity on that old system. Yet everything is slower, typing has latency, starting up Teams takes 5 minutes. Doing anything is slow, everything has latency and you need to wait for things to finish loading and rendering unless you want everything to mess up and you'd have to wait even more.

[–] nickhammes@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

In the 90s, a lot of programmers spent a lot of time carefully optimizing everything, on the theory that every CPU cycle counted. And in the decades since, it's gotten easier than ever to write software, but the craft of writing great software has stalled compared to the ease of writing mediocre software. "Why shouldn't we block on a call to a remote service? Computers are so fast these days"