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The internet is unusable

In pursuit of marketing dollars, increasing stock prices and filling shareholder wallets, it’s been broken beyond repair.

Stephen Moore
UX Collective
5 min readJan 30, 2025

A visual showing various advert popups on an internet web page
Image: Created by author

We’ve reached the point where the Internet — once a tool that offered us the entire world of information at our fingertips — is now completely unusable.

The root cause is adverting, and it’s gotten so bad it’s being called the ‘adpocalypse.’

Almost every website I go on now is bursting at the digital seams with adverts. It’s bad enough on desktop; on mobile it’s a nightmare. There are banners along the top, bottom, and down each side of the page, often animated to maximize distraction. Websites use parallax scrolling so they can add an entire layer of adverts that sits below what you’re reading, popping in and out as you scroll.

An image showing a number of pop up adverts on a popular news website
A typical Internet experience / Image: The Daily Mail

We get the random pop-up one’s that interrupt you and then make you wait a designated amount of seconds before you can click away or try to prompt you to add your email address for a shitty PDF download of some bullshit productivity hacks. We get blasted with ads begging us to click, telling us we’re “missing out” or that we “won’t…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Stephen Moore

Writer, editor, part-time furniture maker. Subscribe to Trend Mill for critical takes on our dystopian metaverse hellscape future - https://www.trend-mill.com

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