Oh absolutely. I don't like the content of the piece but I enjoyed how it was conveyed.
The CEO of my company got an email the other day promising "insights" into visitors of our site. They wouldn't go into the details of how they accomplished it without a fuckton of money, but they promised email addresses, gender, name, location, etc. even for users who hadn't entered their information into our contact form. I assume its a similar database where it collects information from a variety of sites and then that data is shared with all clients. I told my CEO to fuck off, to he replied, "but everyone is doing it."
Fuck off. I'm not doing it and I will not work with anyone who does. He looked a bit stunned. Like he had never heard the word no, especially about something like this. Get some morals. Stop being a shady POS.
Anyways. I find most online advertising shady and intolerable. The sponsored content that looks just like the content of the site, is supposedly "better" for the user but I find it be the worst yet.
"Oops. Looks like your browser, Safari, won't support WebGL and therefore sucks. Try something modern like Chrome or Firefox."
- This app
"Oops. Looks like your browser, Chrome, doesn't support 64 bit java and therefore sucks. Try something modern like Safari or Firefox."
- Anything Java
"Oops. Looks like your browser, Firefox, is so laden down with shit that it can't get out of its own goddamn way. Try something streamlined like Chrome or Safari."
- My CPU
"Oops. Looks like your browser, Chrome, is actually a virus that opens three goddamn processes for every tab and sucks down 65% of your CPU. Try something that isn't a big shiny memory leak like Safari or Firefox."
- My Activity Monitor
Anybody else remember when you could, like, run one browser and shit would just sort of work?
...yeah, I miss NCSA Mosaic, too.
Ugh. I know. It's really frustrating from both a user and designer/developer point of view. The problem is browsers are competing with one another so they have to be different by definition.
The absolute worst part of designing and developing for web is trying to make something work well, look good and look consistent across all browsers. The coolest new technology and web features are loved by designers. They make things work without insecure add-ons like Java and Flash. But they can't be seen by everyone and so you have to either say "fuck them" or "I'm going to spend the next two weeks adding fallback and recreating my creation in flash so they can see it." It's a death sentence to the creative process.
It would be like if you poured your heart and soul into a script, learned some new storytelling strategy (is that a thing? I feel like I just entered marketing land), implemented the "storytelling strategy," made minor changes until it works perfectly, went through the period of pride and joy in your creation, and then someone came along and said "20% of movie theaters can't hear the word "the." Please rewrite the entire thing without using that word. Thanks."