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Comment by rschachte | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder what specifically marked the turning point for web usability. Too many dark UX patterns, popups, ads and extremely heavy frameworks for extremely simple sites.

I feel that we got to a point where the community put out a couple recipes for deploying websites and everyone just jumped on it irrespective of the problem, mimicked the same patterns (email newsletter popups, ads, google analytics, 30 million external assets, etc) and called it a day.

While I think your opinion is a bit extreme, I agree that there are so many things that we don’t need, but companies are hiring and new devs are copying the recipes.

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The web is SO much more usable now than at anytime earlier.

For example, browsers used to actually allow pop-up windows (as in it would open a new desktop window (not a tab), sometimes off-screen). And then when you closed it the browser would let it spawn more pages.

There was a common pattern of spamming popup windows with a "close" button the same place a "run" button was when you downloaded an executable in Windows 95.

And then after closing 10 windows with the button in the same place they'd hit you with an executable download.

This was common.

I agree and I remember those days. However, I think there is a distinction between browser improvements vs web usability.

I’m moreso talking about _how_ people design sites for the web and how poor design choices lead to poor usability. I think the proliferation of tools that require not too much in-depth knowledge (react), heavy CSS frameworks and large client side JS libs have ruined a lot of the web surfing I used to enjoy

> I always wonder what specifically marked the turning point for web usability. Too many dark UX patterns, popups, ads and extremely heavy frameworks for extremely simple sites.

It's funny that you include popups in that, because actual popups are almost nonexistent today, whereas they were ubiquitous in the early 2000s web.

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