Top Five reasons for the Web to drive you crazy

As those who know, and granted the vast majority of my audience will not, those such as I from the north of England have limited anger thresholds. It only takes the tiniest of things for us to boil over the surface and to start throwing things around the office in a fit of rage. Equally, almost as soon as it’s happened it’s over and done with and acting as if it never happened.

I have had five of these episodes in the last few days, and I’m blaming you, myself, my friends, my colleagues, my family and anyone who has used the web at any point in their lives, ever. We are all as bad as each other, and all equally guilty of the following.

1. The attention grabbing video headline.

The more I search YouTube for the occasional mood pick-me-up, the more infuriated I get with the typical video names and headlines. I more often than not search for something to make me laugh, yet am encountered with non-descriptive headlines which say “Family Guy - funny!!” or “Jon Stewart - hilarious!”.

Really?! Because I truly thought that Family Guy was a biblical cartoon series and The Daily Show was a documentary. I had no idea that these would be funny (sarcasm). Normally if you find something on YouTube with an adjective describing the hilarity of a video, you’ll probably find it not to be; similar to the sociological reference, if you find a country with “Democratic” in the name; you’ll find more often than not a dictatorship style government.

2. Sponsored downloads which don’t exist.

Students miss many lectures in an academic to watch a missed episode of television on the night before. I do the same. But when it comes to downloading these episodes the day after, sometimes encoding or uploading takes more time than others as these downloads are provided by others.

So when you do your searching and a list of torrent sites come up and you start your clicking mission, a lot of the time you will find no available downloads but these sponsored, high-speed downloads available which catch your eye. It’s a big lie.

There’s some clever coding or something behind the scenes which churns up Google with all of these links, but when you go to download, it’ll either cost you money, malware or a dodgy download which does no good to your computer (and your essay in progress).

3. “Become a Fan” groups on Facebook

There are pages on Facebook which now require you to “Become a Fan” to see a hidden something, either a message or a video, a picture or something relatively banal when the content around it hypes it up to thenth degree.

As joining these groups spread through status updates on your news feed, these quickly become viral as the intrigue and mystery takes hostage the mind and the need to find out overpowers us. Even still, they’re annoying and they make you and your Facebook friends look like idiots.

4. Flash

I can see why Flash has lasted as long as it has with no real competitor for all these years, and Silverlight is better but not as dynamic nor as widely used. I’m praying that HTML5 will offer some recompense to the slow, hard drive and memory churning, bulky junk that Flash has. It’s the reason why my browser memory usage jumps sky high whenever I visit anything outside my initial homepage, and through Flash advertisements, this churns up even more memory.

Adverts I can live with as they keep the vast majority of the web free, but go back to using GIF’s wherever you can, please.

5. Website updates which screw you over for days on end

You know what I mean, especially Twitter and Facebook which update every so often but nothing drastically, just a few behind the scenes changes which screws up the formatting, the links, applications and chat windows, and generally the comfort of being set in your ways and not liking change.