Internet, there’s so much we love about you, we just don’t know where to begin. With every good thing, there comes the bad. From time to time those bad things have to be pruned so that the good things can grow and thrive. Some things that the Internet has given us started out as good, wonderful, glorious things, but like an annoying sitcom neighbor, they quickly wear out their welcome. Here we are with 15 Things The Internet Could Do Without. We’re taking them away from you, Internet. It’s for your own good.
15. About.com
Yes, About.com, we’re going to single you out, call you by name and shame your children and grandchildren. Why? Because About.com, you serve absolutely no purpose. None. Your only reason for being seems to be to scrape content from Wikipedia and other websites verbatim in order to hijack Google search results so that when we think we’ve found a real article. It takes us a long time realize that we’ve been booby-trapped, and we’re not stuck on your stupid site with stupid navigation torn directly from Yahoo circa 1994. We’re pretty sure that if About.com were to disappear off the face of the Internet, no one would bat an eye. 
14. “Theme of the Week” Photo Blogs
Yes, blogs like “People of Wal-Mart,” “This is Why You’re Fat” and “Cake Wrecks” are hilarious. They are a laugh a minute. They’re also getting old quick. Every week there’s a new one. “Hipsters of Target,” “Cats on Turntables” or “Old People Falling Down Stairs,” we’ll laugh at them, but really, after a while, it’s hard not to feel like you’re part of someone’s get rich quick scheme. Step 1: Start a themed photo Tumblr blog. Step 2: Get people to submit photos to you. Step 3: After the site gets a huge ball-load of traffic in a month, write a book with the photos people have submitted to you. Step 4: Sell the book back to your site visitors. Step 5: Profit! 
13. Endless live-action web series
It’s fantastic that high quality digital video cameras have gotten so cheap and video editing has gotten so easy that anybody can put together their own short films and comedy skits, but that’s also the problem. These days, anyone and their idiot college roommate or any thirty-something graphic designer with nothing better to do can put together a seemingly professional quality video based on some lame inside joke or pop culture reference. “OMG you remember that part in Metroid? Let’s do a video of two guys in an apartment arguing about it!” … “Has anyone done a spoof of Octomom? Who cares, let’s do another one! Yeah, that would be rad!” No. It’s not. Please stop until you come up with something that’s actually funny. College Humor and Funny or Die are a couple of good examples of how to do it correctly. 
12. Top 10 / 15 / 20 / 50 / 100 Lists
Yes, including this one. Yes, we’re part of the problem, not the solution. Not the point. Stay focused here. Why do top 10 lists keep popping up, a thousand a time on Digg? Because top 10 lists generate traffic, they’re fun and quick to read, they’re fun to write and they’re fun to argue about. But, how many more groups of 10 items can humans possibly assemble? Aren’t we running flat out of things to make lists out of? It’s not likely, but top 10 lists really have hit the critical point in the past year or so. Cracked.com, we love you like a bastard stepbrother, and your lists keep us in stitches, but wow… there’s just so damn many of them. 
11. Zombies
As much as it hurts, it has to be said. Enough with the damn zombies. Zombie movies, zombie websites, zombie flash mobs, zombie Flash games, zombie flash drives, zombie emoticons, zombie this and zombie that. Zombies are awesome, that’s not up for debate. And yes, zombies are meaningful metaphors of man’s struggle with mortality as well as standing for modern society’s increasing isolation into smaller and smaller niche groups against the whole. We get it, but sometimes you can get too much of a good thing. It’s like if one day you woke up and someone served you ice cream for breakfast. You’d be all like “Hell yeah, ice cream for breakfast!” But then, day after day after agonizing day, month after month, year after year, you got nothing but ice cream for breakfast. Eventually you’d smash your tiny fists into each bowl of ice cream screaming NO MORE! It’s like that with zombies. 
10. MySpace
MySpace, you had your day. You had your time. Years ago, when Facebook was by invite only for college students, you were the only real outlet for the average Joe or Jane to show off drunken party photos, reunite with old friends and cyberstalk ex-girlfriends. But now, with Facebook as the social website du jour and other sites like Virb picking up the slack, MySpace is just sort of an ugly, slowly-loading, mp3 embedded cancer on the web. There it sits, taking up valuable Internet space that could be used for more valuable things like porn and videos of cats playing piano, like your 100 year old grandmother just waiting to be put out of its misery. Every time we accidentally come across someone’s MySpace page, we can’t help but feel a deep, deep sadness like someone should just gas it and get it over with. 
9. Twitter fascination
It’s pretty apparent that Twitter isn’t going anywhere. Fine. Whatever. We’re good with that. Where else are we going to find out what dumb thing Britney Spears said today or what some random guy’s favorite kind of sushi is? We wish we could get over the the fascination with Twitter? Maybe it’s because it’s pretty new to the Oprah crowd or maybe it’s because of Ashton Kuchner. Maybe it’s because Twitter finally got to the point where it doesn’t crash under its own weight every 10 minutes, but the never-ending fascination with Twitter in the news and across the web has to stop. We don’t need to hear about every B-list celebrity that has hit the million followers mark. We don’t need to hear about every Twitter mashup web app that comes along. We don’t need to hear about it every time a celebrity “accidentally” has naked pictures of themselves posted to Twitter. It’s just a website, and a pretty pointless one at that. 
8. LOLcats
We’re pretty sure that over time, the Internet will get over its heroin-like addiction to LOLcats. We just have to be patient. When LOLcats first emerged from their dank and sweaty 4chan lair, we admit, we were hooked on the first hit. About a year or two and some billion cat photos later, we have to wonder if there isn’t more that the Internet has to offer. LOLdogs? Snails? 
7. Internet instant-win codes
It used to be that you could walk into a gas station, grab a 20 oz. bottle of Coke or Pepsi with the promise of winning cash, and all you had to do was twist off the cap and right there, printed under the cap was your verdict– YOU WIN or TRY AGAIN LOSER. Simple. But the Internet comes along and suddenly companies realize that they can siphon just a little bit more of your life away if instead of giving you the instant gratification, they can force you to enter some randomly generated code into their website. So instead of just twisting off the cap and sighing that once again life has shat on you, you now have to keep the cap, go home, pop open a browser, navigate to their crappy mini-site where your eyeballs are permanently seared with their logo and their slogan, go through a whole bunch of crap where you enter your email address, your name and give a small sample of your blood and THEN enter code RXY74TV0 (Or, is that RXY74TVO), only then to find out that you’re a loser and a sucker. Enjoy that daily spam mail. 
6. “Super Mario Bros.” nostalgia
Ten thousand years from now, future alien-human hybrid archaeologists will dig up the remains of the early 12st century under dozens of feet of mud and garbage. They’ll find ways to extract life from our rusted, rotting hard drives, network cables and Dell PCs for clues to how these primitive societies lived and they’ll come to the conclusion that we all worshiped a diminutive overweight dinosaur-riding Italian plumber named Mario. How else would they be able to explain millions of videos of people playing the original “Super Mario Bros.” theme song on everything from carrots to ukuleles to pop bottles? How else would they be able to explain the plethora of crafts on Etsy.com for Super Mario hats, mittens and drink coasters? What other rational conclusion could they come to after watching eight thousand hours of 8-bit Mario tributes, spoofs and parodies? We all love Mario. Since he first appeared to battle the evil Donkey Kong through every minute iteration that Nintendo throws at us, he’s a lovable character, so congrats to Nintendo on that. But do we really need to hear another version of the theme, another Mario art exhibit, another Mario whatever. Get over it. Move on to some other bit of nostalgia that you can beat into the ground. We suggest Battletoads.
5. YouTube celebrities
Sorry for sounding like a bunch of old goats here, but since when did being an annoyance on YouTube constitute some sort of real world celebrity status? Celebrity used to mean something– like flying around the world in a biplane, or winning a war, or at least being the mildly hot daughter of some rich guy… not making a hundred videos of yourself spazzing out in a high chipmunk voice. Get a real job… show up on “American Idol” like everyone else. 
4. Expanding rollover banner ads
Everybody’s gotta pay the bills, and banner ads often do the trick. We could talk about the evil of banner ads, but that’s just not the truth. Banner ads get it done here and almost every other website that isn’t funded solely out of the goodness of some billionaire’s heart. They’re there, they’re not going away. That’s just how it is. But lately there’s been an awful lot of companies that have been trying to make banner ads that get in your face, like we didn’t notice they were there. We see them, maybe we just don’t want to click on them. But having ads that roll out over top of the crap we were trying to read will just make us pissed off at your product. Bottom line. Does your movie look like it’s something that’s watchable? Maybe. Do we want to see a full-page loud-as-hell trailer slide out over what we’re trying to read? No. Go to hell. 
3. Wikipedia-enabled pseudo-experts
Wikipedia is perhaps one of the greatest inventions ever. It finally killed the print encyclopedia. If you’re searching for something like “earthworms,” it usually comes to the top of a Google search result so that you can just find out about earthworms without sifting through a lot of b.s. It’s great when you need somewhere to completely rip off a term paper, complete with citations. On the other hand, it’s turned us all into a society of pseudo-experts. Someone says something about Chester Arthur having once been the Dean of the Port of New York and someone else sidles up, like they’re a freaking Chester Arthur expert to rebut “No, Chester Arthur was the Collector of the Port of New York. EVERYBODY knows that, dumbass.” Fantastic… you can Wikipedia Chester Arthur and now you’re going to lord your typing skills over everybody else in an attempt to feel superior. Congratulations, you win at the Internet. 
2. Teenagers
This number two item was going to just be called “Assholes,” but then we realized that most people that are assholes on the Internet are teenagers, or older people who think that they’re teenagers. It’s a scientific fact that while people are teenagers that they’re assholes. That’s just their job. It’s apparently why God put them on this Earth. And then God invented the Internet to let every teenager with a halfway decent network connection flood everyone’s life with idiotic, inane commentary and general douchebaggery. You’re watching a funny video on YouTube, reading an interesting scientific article and there they are– amassing like Huns at the gates, leaving comments purposely filled to every square inch with racism, sexism and homophobia with no other purpose than just to be jerks. Can you imagine what a wonderful, wonderful world it would be if teenagers were just not allowed on the Internet at all until they were 18? Not only would there be fewer jerkoff trolls, every single web page would be nothing but boobies and swearing. Boobies, swearing and free liquor. But no… since the Internet is a place where anyone of any age can go, gotta keep it clean. Teenagers should be restricted to AOL until they’re 18 and then they can graduate to the “real” Internet that’s every bit as filthy and gaudy as it should be. 
1. Spammers
You knew this was number one. You had to know. Spammers are like the gangrene-infested bacterial plague on all of the Internet. No matter where you go, you can’t escape them. They’re in your email, offering you the promise of millions if you only give your banking information to someone in Nigeria. They show up in the comment section of websites, trying to sneak in links to sites offering ch34p C1al1s and V14gr4. They’re in World of Warcraft, using dead bodies to spell out the name of some virtual gold-selling website that’s just going to steal your account info and sell your 80 dwarf paladin for a couple hundred bucks. They’re in your Google, redirecting search results to spam blogs that seem to have what you’re looking for, only to really just assault your computer with viruses and pop-ups.
Look, here are some things we love about the Internet like the “Internet People” video and the webcomic “The Internet Love Story.”
This post was written by Orin Shepherd, who must get off the Internet asap.
