The Bullshit Web

First, the author gives us a preface from David Graeber detailing what he means by “bullshit”:

Huge swathes of people...spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it...These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.

Then gives a good example of the kind of bullshit going on in the web: CNN claiming to have the highest number of “video starts” in their category. This is a stat that we all know doesn’t represent anything real but I’m sure goes over well in a marketing meeting:

I don’t know exactly how many of those millions of video starts were stopped instantly by either the visitor frantically pressing every button in the player until it goes away or just closing the tab in desperation, but I suspect it’s approximately every single one of them.

Or what about those “please sign up for our newsletter” emails?

[newsletter signup forms are everywhere.] Get a nominal coupon in exchange for being sent an email you won’t read every day until forever.

As a developer, you probably think “these things only exist because of marketers”. Then the author hits on a few things closer to home, which I think in certain cases are valid points:

there are a bunch of elements that have become something of a standard with modern website design that, while not offensively intrusive, are often unnecessary. I appreciate great typography, but web fonts still load pretty slowly and cause the text to reflow midway through reading the first paragraph

The article is a good look at what the web is becoming and how some of the things we think are so great, if we step back for one second, we might realize aren’t so great after all.