Welcome to my tiny rebellion. This small faction is a web movement to spread which opposes Internet Enshittification, political tyranny, and mainstream web interfaces that suck. At Rebels Against Terrible Interface, we despise annoying post-golden Internet design practices like autoplaying videos and rounded corners being everywhere.
But further than that, we want to change more than just the negative forward evolution of corporate web design. In RATI's mission, we use the word "interface" quite loosely. For our purposes a terrible interface also includes spyware, bloatware, misused AI, restrictive operating systems, and the ever-dreadful approach of age verification law. Us rebels want to make everything about The Internet more free and better, and after that our goal is to move on to saving the world. Before we can do that, we must stop continued enshittification and crush the EU Kids Act.
AI is a little different for this project. We do hate datacenters and the trashing of humanity's value of art, and the environmental consequences of just getting a single answer from a chatbot these days is shocking, but Rebels Against Terrible Interface does not have a be-all-end-all absolute opposition to every possible aspect of AI in the mid 2020's and later. I think many of the policies people implement on their home turf about AI are so far to one side, they alienate thousands of people who hate AI but don't want to condemn it that much. Yes, the situation we're in sucks. But there are exceptions to its use being terrible. For one thing, there are specialized and constrained things that professional organizations can do with AI if we want to ban it from being used publicly. Things like recovering almost completely lost ancient texts that got fossilized. Though I recall it was a group of students that did that one.
Obviously if we could use AI without creating datacenters all over the place and burning down areas of the planet and putting garbage in space, that would change things even if it didn't solve the issue of stolen art. If we could solve that and solve the stolen art issue, we would still be in trouble. And it caused the newest iteration of spam to be invented this decade. But I am probably going to watch an AI video if it's not outright spam and not terrible. If a modern AI power-use and water contamination is like a huge bomb going off, the video that came out of the prompt is a bit like a memorial to that disaster. In years to come, it will make sense to keep lots of samples of what AI made to keep a history of all this shit. I do respect the choice to move away from AI on the part of "creators" who used to use it but won't anymore, and I respect the move of leaving the old AI videos they used to make accessible where they were. Lots of good stuff can be said about people who go from using AI to saying about AI "fuck this, no more of that." That being said, if you are about to use an advanced chatbot for something or create an image or video with an advanced generative AI, I seriously ask for you to reconsider, and see if there's some other way you can do it. I for one would love it if we could somehow get more ethical "Pick a Door" backrooms content.
I don't use AI, and nothing on this webpage was AI either. I also despise the idea of people telling me I can use generative AI in my programming because it's a stupid idea and I love programming. Whoever came up with the words "Vibe Coding" and decided "Oh of course, this should be used as a title to describe the lamest piece of shit to come out of programming this decade!" had no idea how badly they conceived it.
Here are just a few of the many things on mainstream websites that RATI is sick of:
- Unnecessarily slow websites.
- Removing attractive tiled sprites from website background visuals in order to replace them with monotonous small numbers of colours and gradients.
- Making useful hyperlinks that you easily could middle-click to enter a new tab not work with middle-click anymore.
- Auto-playing videos. That means with or without sound, and includes a specified video page you deliberately clicked on if there's something else you could want to do on that page first. I'll watch you when I'm ready.
- Rounded corners being put by the website designers everywhere. That includes on buttons, search fields, and especially images and the content of fucking videos.
- Videos that behave unpredictably when you click on them, including turning the sound on if it was playing without sound and you just wanted to pause it.
- Videos starting out by default at maximum volume. What the fuck are you doing?
- Foamy graphical buttons that lead to extra options menus yet don't appear immediately even though you know fully well they're there and that they're just taking ages to load.
- Changing websites not for the reason that they actually had problems that need to be solved but rather that it's being changed for the sake of changing.
- Websites following global website design trends with no regard for whether it makes sense.
- Removing page/number URL tricks, even if non-infinite scrolling is enabled, stopping the user from deciding what page of their feed they want to start reading from. URL-editing is a thing.
- Tracking tags at the end of URLs when you click a link, and for that matter all user Internet surveillance fullstop.
- AI features on websites that you explicitly did not go to in order to use AI products. Gemini under YouTube videos and Google searches is absolutely stupid. The old days of NeuralBlender when you showed up because you wanted a silly prompt image was not.
- Search engines and local site searches removing features, take away the power to say the suggestion is wrong and you do actually want exactly what you typed, and just not working.
- Blocking people from right-clicking an image to go to the menu and click "view image" so you can fully look at it and download it from a one-image nothing-else page.
- Defaulting any sort of subscription feed or creator page to "sort by popular" even though people clearly care about backwards and forwards exact chronological order a lot more.
- Making video thumbnail images change into animated previews of the video when you hover over them with the mouse, with no way to turn that off or no way to get the original static image.
- Asking if the user wants to accept invasive cookies or stop using the site completely, at which point the website should just fuck off.
- Gross animated ads that mess with sensory issues far more than they should.
- Selling user personal data.
- Following the user around with a stupid graphic or video that they clearly are trying to escape from or else why would they have clicked "Back"?
- Mandatory infinite scrolling.
- Saying "Login" as a verb when the verb form is OBVIOUSLY "Log In". Grammar matters.
- Deliberately confusing buttons and menus. I know they exist.
- Making something you click on to use which is pretty important only visible with some unclear icon with no text guidance to explain what it does beforehand.
- Gross animated scrolling elements that shift and writhe unnaturally.
- Unnecessary garbage for long stretches in articles that wastes my time.
- Not letting you see actual details of something's post date, usually by saying "3 years ago"/"11 years ago" etc and not even bothering to give the hour or month.
God they just love to fuck The Internet up.
How to Help
The first step currently is to spread the word and share our name. At the time of this writing, RATI was just one person. But we can make this movement bigger. This is similar to the Clippy movement, but here there is no requirement to change your avatar. To help, simply tell people about us and put this code in your website:
This will put a logo on your webpage of choice with a link back to here. Our logo is a rat's fist. Rodents are clever and hardy creatures that can withstand incredibly difficult conditions. They also have sheer numbers power.
Keep in mind that sharing this icon on your website will not immediately make you an inner member of the Rebels Against Terrible Interface organization with quick power of voting in how it's run. However, your contribution to spreading the word will be appreciated and you will become some sort of member.
This may look like a webring but it's not. All of this links back to one place and I'm not keeping a link list of people in storage for the sake of managing a ring of profile sharing. Though if you want to put clickable arrows to lead places next to your copied graphic on your site, you can.