Buying things online in 2005 was certainly better. Ebay was a wild place. You'd get in bidding wars going a dollar at a time. Sometimes you'd walk away with a pretty great deal. Not like now how you'll go to a garage sale and some dude wants retail for his 4 year golf clubs. That's in large part due to fb marketplace. It's straight ruined garage sale finds

Literally enshitification. Often when these companies focus on one aspects and not others, it leads to such results.

Rose tinted glasses. Shopping online in 2005 was absolutely not as simple as 3 clicks.

you missed the part about broken links, pages that wouldnt load because of some random HTML error, oh, and the payment itself either getting rejected or otherwise not working for a long time.

• 2025
• Go to any website
• uBlock Origin
• No ads and cookie banners
• Some AI chat assistant named Jill on the bottom right corner

2025 Got to Online Store Type "toilet paper" in search bar. Instead of simply saying, "Sorry, we have no toilet paper" they expect you to scroll through 50,000 variations of "toilet seats", "toilets", "toilet brushes", "paper", "paper toilets", "paper brushes" only to finally discover there are no entries for "toilet paper", etc. and discover for yourself that they have no toilet paper.

The fake chats all seem to use the exact same image too. Apparently this one woman works for dozens of support sites if you were to believe she was real in the first place.

Sad part about this is it's not comic hyperbole. It's just literally an average online experience.

Don't toss your monitor, you will need to go to the online store in order to get a new one

Imagine having to navigate that site to buy a new monitor, without a monitor.

This is the reason why I had a long and bloody fight regarding the homepage of the company I work at. And I won.

Management wanted a new homepage, marketing wanted the homepage to be - and this is a citation - "Emotional!!! And we want ENGAGEMENT!!!" (For context: We are building industrial machinery).

Marketing got an external offer (behind my back) and a mockup of the homepage based on React with animations and an dynamic background which turned every PC we looked at it with into a space heater. And they wanted to spend > 15 k € on it.

I - as something yanks would call a CTO - said no.

Everything turned quiet "Emotional!!!" for a couple of months, but in the end I won with the argument that we are building FUCKING BORING INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY, our costumers seldom change and if so, they are also from some big boring industrial company who already know us because we are in this business since Ugh, the first CEO chiseled the first iteration of our landmark product with a flintstone in 15000 BC.

The rebuild of the homepage resulted in something that is quiet nice looking... but that can also work perfectly fine in fucking DILLO!

I'll enshrine this post it encapsulates something that I always struggled to put into words.

And, the sites end up eating battery.

And everything is SO FUCKING SLOW. I swear my old Celeron 300A at 500mhz running Windows 98 and SUSE Linux was super responsive. Everything you clicked just responded right away, everything felt smooth and snappy. Chatting with people over the internet using ICQ or MSN was basically instant, all the windows opened instantly, typing had zero latency and sending messages was instant.

My current Ryzen 5950X is not only a billion times faster, it also has 16 times the number of cores. I have hundreds of times the RAM as I had HDD capacity on that old system. Yet everything is slower, typing has latency, starting up Teams takes 5 minutes. Doing anything is slow, everything has latency and you need to wait for things to finish loading and rendering unless you want everything to mess up and you'd have to wait even more.