New Directions In Bloat

Next month I'll be giving a talk at Smashing Conf in Barcelona on "New Directions in Web Bloat". This talk will be a follow-up to one I gave last year on the Website Obesity Crisis.

I need your help! Please send me examples of the flabbiest, most ridiculous, puffed-up, overbuilt sites you've come across in 2016, particularly if they use new advertising formats, or demonstrate a fresh kind of design pathology.

I'm especially interested in examples of the following:

• New advertising formats you've noticed in the past few months

• Particularly egregious examples of sites that use megabytes of cruft to display a tiny amount of text. (Note: everybody emailed me the one-word NYT article already.)

• Interesting examples of ad-blocker detection, or even better, ad-blocker-detection-blocker-detection.

• Magnificently gratuitous use of video.

• Examples of the Inner Platform Effect, particularly with multiple levels of nesting.

• Bloated articles about bloat.

For maximum ha, I prefer well-known sites to obscure examples. But I'm not picky. If it makes you weep quiet tears of rage, I want to hear about it! Let me know also if you mind being credited by name in my talk.

Thank you!

—maciej on September 15, 2016