Every Fucking Website. That's the name of a satirical page hosted on GitHub Pages that just hit 586 points and 346 comments on Hacker News. Created in 2020 by developer lxe, it's a single-page parody of everything wrong with modern web design — and the fact that it's still getting upvoted in 2026 tells you everything about how little has changed.
What the Page Does
The premise is brutally simple. You land on a page that immediately throws every dark pattern at you simultaneously:
- A COVID-19 alert banner (dated, but the pattern persists)
- A cookie consent dialog with no "reject all" button
- A newsletter signup popup
- A "Stop it!" button that doesn't actually stop anything
- A footer with six identical columns of placeholder links
- Product logos that lead nowhere
It's the web equivalent of those comedy sketches where every cliché happens at once. Except it's not exaggeration — it's documentation.
Why It Still Resonates
The Hacker News discussion is full of developers sharing their own experiences with web bloat:
"I counted 14 tracking scripts on a recipe blog this week. The recipe was for boiling eggs."
The core complaint hasn't changed since 2020:
Cookie banners are still hostile. Despite GDPR being law since 2018 and CCPA since 2020, most implementations still make "reject all" harder than "accept all." The EU's own Digital Services Act was supposed to address this, but enforcement has been glacial.
Newsletter popups haven't died. Even with the rise of Substack and the supposed death of email marketing, every SaaS landing page still ambushes you within 5 seconds of arrival.
Dark patterns have evolved. What was blatant in 2020 is now subtle — pre-checked boxes, countdown timers that reset, "one-time offers" that appear every visit.
The Technical Side: How We Got Here
The average web page in 2026 ships over 2MB of JavaScript. For context, the original Doom game was 2.39MB. We're sending an entire game's worth of code to display a blog post.
The bloat comes from:
- Analytics scripts (Google Analytics, Hotjar, FullStory, PostHog)
- A/B testing frameworks (Optimizely, GrowthBook)
- Chat widgets (Intercom, Drift, Zendesk)
- Consent management platforms (OneTrust, Cookiebot)
- Advertising frameworks (Google Ad Manager, Amazon TAM)
- Social sharing buttons nobody clicks
- Font loading strategies that block rendering
Each individual script seems reasonable to the team that added it. The result is a collective action problem where every team adds "just one more thing."
What Would Actually Fix This
The Hacker News thread surfaces several proposals:
Technical solutions:
- Browser-level blocking of intrusive patterns (Safari's approach)
- Web standards for native consent APIs (so banners aren't needed)
- HTTP headers for preference signaling (
Sec-GPCalready exists but is underused)
Regulatory solutions:
- Fining companies for hostile cookie UIs (the EU has started, barely)
- Banning pre-checked consent boxes entirely
- Requiring "reject all" to be as prominent as "accept all"
Cultural solutions:
- Developer pushback against adding "just one more script"
- Companies valuing page speed as a business metric, not just Core Web Vitals checkbox
- Frameworks that make it harder to ship bloat by default
The Irony of Writing About This
There's a delicious irony in writing about web bloat on a platform that itself loads JavaScript. But dev.to is relatively lean — it's a Rails monolith that renders server-side and ships minimal client JS. The page you're reading right now loads faster than most news articles.
The Real Takeaway
The reason "Every Fucking Website" still hits the front page of Hacker News in 2026 is that every developer has experienced this. We build the web. We know it's broken. We add to the bloat anyway because someone on the growth team has a KPI to hit.
The page isn't just comedy. It's an indictment. And the fact that six years later we're still upvoting it means we haven't learned.
Maybe it's time we did.
The original page is at lxe.github.io/everywebsite. It's worth 30 seconds of your time — you'll laugh, then cry, then check how many scripts your own site loads.
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