The Anti-Jobs with a million young.

[reddragdiva]

On the way to the Wikipedia party a coupla weeks ago, Magnus and I worked out how to MAKE A MILLION DOLLARS ON THE INTERNET. GeoCities offered people something they couldn't easily get anywhere else: a really easy way to make the most eyegougingly awful web pages in existence. MySpace offered the same. So what we'll do is make a website that lets people make truly horrible websites for themselves, using modern technology. SVG graphics! OpenGL! 3-D! You'll need the latest NVidia card just to look at the site! We'll also make it use lots of JavaScript, to give all four cores of your PC a proper workout! I can't see how this idea could possibly fail.

This led me to wonder what drives the human urge to comprehensive aesthetic failure. When the Macintosh first came out in 1984, what did people do? Produce documents with every single font. When I was editing a student newspaper in 1995, we were removing fonts from the Macs to keep people from using the really horrible ones. (And this was without Internet on those machines.) And, of course, Word art.

Facebook has myriad problems, but encouraging its users to make its other users gouge their eyes out before they've even read the text is not one of them.

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE DO THIS? Are there studies or anything?

There's good reason graphic designers are paid money.

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

'We'll also make it use lots of JavaScript, to give all four cores of your PC a proper workout! '

You mean MediaWiki?

Do you know any hardcore WP editors who are Google Chrome users? Thought not. Leave the tabs running (especially watchlist) and watch while Google's "We leak like a sieve, but we cleanup with a hammer whenever you close a tab" garbage collection falls in a heap after a few hours' use.

[reddragdiva]

I expect there are actually lots and lots. If Wikipedia knocks over Chrome reproducibly, file a bug or let wikitech-l know. Even if it's a Chrome bug it would I suspect count as reportable - knocking stuff over is considered not good.

Magnus actually uses Chrome, which is why WYSIFTW works wonderfully in it.

[reddragdiva]

The numbers: 11% Chrome.

[the_axel]

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE DO THIS?

Some people like to try new things. The things don't have to be new to the world, just new to them.

Do you remember when magazines first started having access to cheap colour printing?
Same thing. I remember some music & comics magazine of the late 80's that loved to do two colour pages in tiger stripes or paisley or whatever with the text in a third colour.

Great articles, when I could read them.

Hell, the 80's - see what happens when clothes in eye gouging colours and patterns are sold?

[reddragdiva]

You're right, actually. WiReD and even Smash Hits demonstrated the necessity of keeping graphic designers on a short fucking leash too.

[pndc]

Of course, now that TiReD has cut back on the unreadable typography, you can see just how shit the "articles" are.

[fluffymormegil]

Music magazines still do that stupid shit.

[hairyears]

What makes people do this?

There are two well-documented answers :

1. Because I can;
2. Being a teenager.

Alas that the Marquee tag is no longer supported: what fun I might've had in embellishing my answer... Try this instead: www.goer.org/htmlhorror/htmlhorror1.html

[jauncourt]

Well, there's tumblr, and wix.com, already. Both of those make horrible web site design astonishingly easy, though passbly clean sites can be built on tumblr if you put your mind to it.

I'm sure there are more.

[loosechanj]

My computer has SIX cores now. Smug.

[pndc]

Yeah, but if it's AMD, it's only worth about 2.5 cores of a real CPU.

[loosechanj]

Yeah, a real expensive CPU.

[pndc]

I'm looking at Scan's web pages for Core 2 Quad and Phenom II Hex CPUs, and not seeing any significant difference in price. Phenom II Quad is a little bit cheaper.

AMD CPUs are fine, but I've found the chipsets on AMD boards to be pretty rubbish. I'd rather have a slow stable system than a fast one that keeps crashing.