[tootie]

This is the difference between building a website as an experiment for an untested audience and running a modern business. The simple reason most websites are optimized for mobile is because most users are on mobile. And the reason there are ads and email acquisition forms is because they are worth something to businesses. Text-only, ad-free, non-responsive text content isn't worth much.

[Aerroon]

But they all suck on mobile!

Using the internet on a phone is a terrible experience. Websites take forever to load, they randomly resize things, they add pointless headers and footers to the limited space, they move the focus around at random etc.

You know how websites sometimes have that button that scrolls you back to the top near the bottom right? Those buttons tell me that the people making the website never use phones themselves. The amount of times I've found that button helpful vs the amount of times that I've hit it by accident while scrolling is so small that the entire thing feels like a cruel joke. Mobile websites are full of these kinds of UI patterns.

HN is actually one of the few nice to use websites on a phone because it doesn't try to do all of these things. On reddit you're better off using the old desktop view than any of the mobile views. Same for websites like YouTube.

Google doesn't even have parity in functionality between the mobile and desktop websites. On desktop you can filter results between arbitrary time stamps. On mobile you can only pick between "past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past month or past 12 months".

There are a million small things like that that are wrong with mobile websites. They ruin the experience.

[tootie]

Sure, anyone can screwup, I'm just saying "mobile first" is valid business strategy. A lot of the annoying things like ads and whatever are just never not going to be annoying. It's kinda their raison d'etre. Things like date filtering on google results probably get so little usage there's no incentive to make them fully available. Very few apps are built to optimize utility, they're built to optimize revenue.

[darepublic]

Try Firefox with ublock on mobile

[r113500]

I'm curious about this type of response. it sort of implies that I don't know why things have changed the way they did. the causality is implicitly in the original also. we have a lot of mobile first websites, because most people use phones to access internet. and all the bad things happen on the internet have reasons behind them like that, because it's an emergent dynamic process. emails are to be collected, for they are a valuable tool in sales pipeline. things buzz and blink because it's easy to hack human attention system, which is also why casinos do it. but that's kind of, like, not what the comment is about.