When I look at disciplines other than my own, I can recognize the skill and elegance that goes into it, even though I don't have those skills myself.

But when I look at the output of web development, and I see smooth scrolling, scrolljacking, excessive whitespace, artificial latency before UI popups ... I just don't get it. How can an entire field, as a default practice, intentionally make things bad?

▲

detourdog 4 days ago | parent [-]

Web development merged with the advertising industry right after tripod starting showing ads.

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/ads/

▲

cgriswald 3 days ago | parent [-]

There has to be more to it. Even services I pay for (the rare ones that don’t also spam my experience with ads) pull from a grab bag of bizarre user hostile quirks.

	▲	detourdog 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think it's that the mentality has invaded the medium of the web. Capturing users/audience is a way to demonstrate "value". Services we pay for want to show wall street how loyal their customer are. Each auto company want's to have an app store rather than having users just directly connecting and using their phones as the car's infotainment system. It's all misguided.