Small Frustrating Bits of Internet Culture

So, since Thursday has yet to post this time around, we shall skip to me and I will hand out the next topic. This time around I’d like to discuss things that frustrate me online. No, not the usual trolls and what-nots but other sorts of pet peeves, little things that frustrate me.

One that recently came across me once again is the zombie apocalypse fad. Everyone seems to love discussing it and what they would do if it was to happen. I’ve always found zombies to be boring and movies featuring them generally do not interest me. It just seems like internet really loves zombies and jokes about them but I fail to find the “in case of zombie apocalypse” humorous or even remotely interesting. But It keeps popping up everywhere. On Tumblr there are those “the object on your left is now your weapon upon facing zombie apocalypse. Will you survive?” things and other chain letters similar to that circling around, on Facebook there are zombie apocalypse groups, almost every online store focusing on t-shirts has something related to zombies and when I asked for help on coming up with a topic to blog about…guess what was the first suggestion? “Zombie apocalypse preparation”. I think I’ve yet to see a genuinely funny zombie apocalypse related thing.

Next is a certain brand of chat speak. I mean, chat speak itself is simply infuriating, it’s a major pet peeve of me. I cannot take anyone who writes 4 instead of for or u instead of you seriously. Write like that to me and I will instantly treat you as a 12-16-year-old in my mind (unless it was just for a comedic effect or something), whether I really want to or not. But the thing that I’m really here to complain about is: You’re, your - they’re, their, there confusion. People keep mixing these up. I thought it was just some fairly new form of chat speak but it turns out a large amount of people seem to be genuinely confused about which one to use and when. I’m not talking about those who do not speak English as a native language either, I’m talking about grown Americans and Brits who still get confused due to maybe poor quality of education or inability to pay attention at school. It doesn’t help that there is a major lazy chat speak factor here online. People write your instead of you’re just to do less typing. This only feeds the confusion and misuse further as those who are unsure copy others. To me it’s also frustrating because often when people mix up those words they all too often turn their sentences into barely understandable jumbles. It’s just a major pet peeve of mine by now.

Sites that look like 90’s puked on them and then died, leaving its battered remains rotting on it. By this I mean sites with ghastly bright and saturated colours with flashy animated graphics (at worst a site with some animated sparkly/star background with repeat pattern - myspace profiles are the worst offenders with this one), low quality clip art, sparkly effects, copious amounts of bright coloured text with Comic Sans font. It’s 2011, by now people have surely seen what one can do with graphics and site layouts. Graphics programs are more efficient, and there are cheap professionals and semi-professionals crawling everywhere online. There is no excuse for the amount of horrible some sites keep spewing.

Also, sites with music that starts to automatically play: NO! Just no! Many professionals looking at these sites immediately turn away if there’s such nonsense going on - many art directors turn away from portfolios that have some ghastly music playing automatically. Generally this stuff just disrupts casual browsing. Often it scares the crap out of people if they sit in silence, open a site, look at it in peace, and BAM some loud tune starts playing out as it finally finishes loading! Plus some might already be listening to something as they browse so they don’t really need an interruption. Auto-play music is just not a good choice. It might pass if the site is related to audio but even then automatic play is not really the best option most of the time.

While I could surely go on and on about my pet peeves if given enough time to think them up (I bet in an hour I'll be able to think up things a million times as frustrating as any of the things I did list here...), I think four is sufficient for this blog. xD So, have fun remembering frustrating things and venting about them, fellow nerdfighters!