I use the Internet. A lot. Although it is a great tool, there are some things which annoys the heck out of me.

• Telkom. OK, I think this applies to all South African Internet users. Slow internet, overseas pages that won’t load, connection going down randomly, high prices, etc etc drives me crazy.
• Autoplaying videos. I hate it when I open up a website (not something like YouTube) with an embedded video which starts playing automatically, especially if I have to scroll down to see it. With high bandwidth costs and the above mentioned slow internet, this makes it worse.
• Flash Ads. I understand the importance of ads on websites, as many sites won’t be able to operate without them. However, I dispise flash ads which makes noises when I move the mouse over them, or which expands out of the ad’s container, or anything like that. Plus it chews up even more valuable bandwidth.
• Poorly written websites. It is incredible that so many companies seems to neglect their websites. Good (bad?) examples of these types of sites are Telkom’s online billing site, ananzi.co.za (the 90′s called, they want their animated GIF’s back) and computicket.za (this site seems horribly outdated). The situation is improving, but way too slowly i my opinion.
• Get rich quick schemes. Come on people, how stupid do you think I am?!? The only way to make money is either being extremely lucky or working hard. There’s no way I can make millions every month by submitting ads to Google, or capturing data, or something like that. Of course, in order to start “working” in this industry one has to buy an “information pack”, usually costing anything from $5 to $500. It’s actually really sad that some people are so desperate to make money that they fall for these scams.
• Having to sign up to use sites. I wish everyone would just start using OpenID or something. I hate filling in my details every time, and having to remember yet another username and password.

These are my major gripes with an otherwise awesome experience. What’s yours?