A joyless Yahoo!

So much of what I do on the web has become irritating. For instance my e-mail account. I think it used to have ads just on the left-hand panel. Then an animated strip of annoying ads appeared on the right-hand panel. Then a strip appeared across the top--what looks like the first e-mail in my inbin but is another ad.

To add insult to injury, the scroll bar dividing my e-mail from the flashy ad has gotten very thin, increasing the chance I will click on the ad. Do advertisers really think they are going to win me over by forcing me onto their unwanted real estate? I know that I can pay $5 per month to be ad-free on Yahoo. It's just hard to stomach seeing what was once a clean interface being junked up with advertising. It's like that old farm down the street that has been replaced by a bank, yogurt shop, vitamin store, dry cleaners, and pizza place. Visual pollution.

I don't like to read newspapers online because they tend to go for these dynamic flashy ads, which I find super irritating. Plus, the cacophony of ads makes the page load super slow. Who thinks this is a good idea?

And Google, formerly the gold standard in elegant, simple design, has now gone to the dark side. Google maps generates a tall column of boxes down the left side (obscuring my map!!) with all kinds of options that, I presume, generate cash for the poor children of Silicon Valley. I can't figure out how to get all these boxes to go away. No, I don't want to find a restaurant. I just want to know how to get from A to B, thank you.

Sigh.
7/16