The post is a joke site called "Every Fucking Website" that piles on fake cookie banners, chat widgets, overlays, and other UI junk to parody the average corporate website. Even though it was made in 2020, most people thought it now understates the problem. The complaints were strikingly concrete. Full-page "use the app" takeovers, autoplay video, delayed popups that steal keyboard focus, and content that shifts just as you click are no longer edge cases. They are the normal texture of using the web, especially on mobile, news sites, recipe sites, banks, and social platforms.
What people kept landing on is that the web got worse because hostile design is profitable. One ecommerce operator admitted that fake-looking social-proof popups raised conversion enough to justify using them despite hating them. That fit the broader mood. Annoying patterns survive because they move metrics, not because teams accidentally forgot how to build simple pages. A lot of the ugliness is also organizational. Several developers said they ship chat bubbles, app nags, and tracking junk because management, marketing, legal, or vendors force them in.
The cookie-banner argument dominated the more substantive part of the discussion. The strong consensus was that the banners are not required for ordinary functional cookies. They exist because sites want tracking, ad tech, and analytics that are not strictly necessary, then choose the most obnoxious compliance path. That said, a credible minority pushed back that this still counts as a regulatory failure. If a law predictably produces universal banner fatigue while letting tracking continue, the incentive design is bad even if the intent was right. People also pointed out that browser-level privacy protections like blocking
third-party cookies often did more to improve daily experience than legal consent flows did.
A more technical thread focused on layout instability as one of the most damaging failures because it turns basic actions into misclicks. People described banks, search results, Gmail ads, and AI answer boxes inserting content late and moving the target under the cursor. The useful framing here was that this is not just aesthetic bloat. It breaks input correctness. Several comments argued browsers should enforce some notion of click stability or ignore clicks on freshly moved elements, because websites have shown they will exploit motion and timing when money is on the line.
The overall takeaway from the conversation was bleak but clear. The bad web is not mainly a design fashion problem. It is a system of incentives around ads, tracking, app installs, engagement, and internal
KPI chasing. That is why a six-year-old parody still feels realistic, and why the simplest fixes people shared were defensive ones like
Reader View, alternate frontends, browser extensions, and stricter mobile browser settings rather than trusting sites to improve on their own.
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