What's the most frustrating experience you've had with a website? (Sign-up, form, downloads, etc.)

literally any site/service which advertises itself as "free" and then AT THE VERY LAST STEP it asks for your credit card info. i gtfo out of there the moment I see it

Trying to recover a password on Spotify - "We have no record of that email address."

So I try to create a new account with that email - "This email address already exists in our system."

Yeah that's happened to me too; as far as I can tell it's just Spotify silently banning your account. Must've signed up for one too many free trials.
- Not at all. It was just an account I hadn't used for a while and had forgotten the password to. I was trying to sign up for premium so I could listen to albums on the Android app.

"We use cookies. Pay us or allow us to sell your data." I guess I'll find that info somewhere else then :)

So many:

Unsubscribe links that are magically broken.
Newsletter popups when you're trying to view content.
Websites that are paywalled coming up in search engines.
Broken shopping cart payment systems.
The fact that it's an assault on your senses to browse without an adblocker.
"Sign in to view content" for articles, posts, etc.
Banking sites that time out after a minute.
likewise, shopping cart sessions that expire before you're done shopping.
AI generated articles that don't even sound like they're referring to the right topic.
Recipe websites that have a 15 page story for each recipe without a way to skip to the actual recipe.
"Endless scrolling" that prevents you from accessing links at the bottom of the page.
Business websites that don't list an address.
"Password must be short enough to guess."
"How did we do? " emails.
Automatic newsletter sign-up.
Desktop websites that act as if you're on a phone (i.e swipe through grocery filters instead of scrolling through them).
Unreadable, archaic, and/or low-contrast fonts.
"This content is not available in your country."

I could list dozens more. 😮‍💨

Honestly, AI websites that do sound like they're talking about the right topic are worse. You'll get halfway through the steps and realize it's bullshit and wasted your fucking time
Recipe websites that have a 15 page story for each recipe without a way to skip to the actual recipe.
This is a quirk of copyright law. You can’t copyright a recipe unless it’s attached to a story. Because recipes aren’t considered creative works, for some reason. So you’re not copyrighting the recipe; You’re copyrighting the story, which was a creative writing exercise. Basically, without a story attached to it, the recipe is free for anyone to steal and resell in a cookbook or paid site.
- There's probably some SEO "hack" involved, too.
  Either way, as a user, it's infuriating.

Canon.com refused to show me the final price before clicking pay now

There's the old saying: "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it."
So they're either incompetent, are hoping you are, or they're playing to this logic and only want rich customers.
These options are not mutually exclusive either.

Any website that insists on emailing you a login link rather than just using a password. Then they treat it like a positive and say “no more passwords!” Fuck you.

Microsoft likes defaulting to email-based login, and I always click on the option to enter my password instead, but after doing that it sends me an email with a verification code anyways. Seriously???

Requires 2FA for login, but doesn’t support time-based authenticator codes / setting up an authenticator app

Code is successfully emailed / sent via SMS

“Code is invalid. Please try again.”

Also, any system where the code is requested but never arrives.

"we respect your privacy, as such our whole website is unavailable in your region because the GDPR made our data gathering policies illegal and we'd rather cut you off than have to comply with the law."

"I see this as an absolute win"
We respect your privacy and only share your data with 508 resellers.

Just this past Friday I had a pile of boxes I had to scan barcodes on. Two barcodes per box.

The issue was the form did nothing when you pressed enter, and required tab to get from the first field to the second (a 2nd tab would start a new row, so it was at least equipped for multiple entries).

Most barcode scanners, if you're unfamiliar, insert a linefeed character (ASCII 0x0A) after each successful scan.

It took me an unbearably long time to read through the 250 page user guide / programming manual for our barcode scanner to figure out how to change this to tab (0x09). It required no fewer than SIX barcodes to be scanned; enter programming mode / modify suffix / 0 / 9 / validate / save, which were spread across three pages of the manual (fortunately it had links, because also >100 pages apart).

It was worth it in the end, but it would have taken 5 minutes for them to code it to allow enter to switch between fields. This workflow is the only thing this site does, it's unreasonable to expect people wouldn't be using a barcode scanner.

Not a website, but a 30+MB app that could easily have been replaced with a <10k website...

To pay for your parking, you have to enter the parking lot number, your cars' tags, and CC data. So far, so good.

But they also require an email address and a phone number. They want to confirm that email address, and they check whether the number is a valid UK telephone number. And no, you simply cannot enter an international prefix. Which meant that I as a tourist could not pay for the parking lot at the hotel.

I used to put my photos on DeviantArt, I had an account for ~20 years on that site, and it got slower and worse over time, finally I just had enough and deleted my account and built a simple HTML menu and exported galleries from DigiKam and put on a personal webhost, it is far, far, far faster than any big social media image sharing platform, and it looks retro and cool.
I have also got myself a Pixelfed account:
https://metapixl.com/Stoy
It loads faster than dA did and is easy to use.

Job offer that require registering and read from resume falsly so i have to fix everything the job experience and education etc

Soo many job application form.... Make account, upload CV, correct mistakes, add all information again because it's just too frustrating to correct everything, find the job that you want to apply for. Fuck you Honeywell, the most toxic company that I ever worked for.

USA visa application is hellish.

Login is convoluted, and breaks password managers.

It has a global time out somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes.

On timeout, it lets you work, until you try and go to the next page, then just forgets you exist rather than saving.

You can't save pages that aren't completely filled in.

Some pages can take 20 minutes to fill in (it gets detailed, and you dare not mess it up).

Oh, and it breaks pasting into some boxes, so no prewriting it in another document.

There is an extension "Don't Fuck With Paste" for FF (maybe chrome too) that, as the name implies, stops pages from messing with the ability to paste. Could be useful.
- Oh, it also only worked in native Chrome. It went weird in Firefox, and apparently also played up with chromium.
Try doing anything with US customs. On the one hand, woe and Armageddon to those who do not enter absolutely correct data, on the other hand, you cannot enter anything but A-Z, 0-9, and a handful of basic punctuation. And, of course, addresses have American formatting and fields.
One would have thought that a bureaucracy dealing with customs might have heard about foreign countries...
- I suspect both websites are maintained by the same team (assuming they are maintained). For one of the (supposedly) most technically adroit countries in the world, their ICT is truly crap.

A webshop, where I wanted to buy tools. Choose things, put into cart, then go to check-out. The "check-out" was a page that they wanted you to print out and fax to them. Nope, nope, nope. :-)

"how can we run a shell company with a customer-facing experience for cover?"
"I have just the thing"

So apart from the websites that are purely based around being obnoxious so you'll subscribe to their premium plan I'd say GitHub has been the least intuitive place to navigate for me.

The new Twitter has an 'x' in the top right corner that does not close the page. Asshole design.

I have actually tried to get rid of a Twitter embed by clicking on the "X"

Oracles website when trying to download a specific version of Sun Java because it's the only version of Java the shitty management app works with.

eBay. Selling at 6 figure levels and they still have no support for sellers, treat you like crap, obfuscate what you're actually paying in all combined fees. Mine never got below 39% including all fees combined, shipping, tax, transaction, and platform with a perfect account. For the actual work they do, they are not worth half of that. If they were not a monopoly, a competitive market would be half from all involved. Taxing used goods is criminal. Logistics is a scam of ridiculous bureaucracy, and online transaction processing is more like a skimming operation with a government piracy charter, while actual eBay is mostly automated.

Korean websites. I won't even list all the frustrations here, omg there's so many. It's like a shitty 90s yahoo webpage with so much gatekeeping, engagement bait, arbitrary moderation, minimal community engagement, no customization or curation, impossible authentication demands, so on and so on.

and it's like the fucking standard, everywhere! in a country with maybe the best internet in the world!

oh yea and it doesn't work except with IE!! forced edge use! its like a Ferrari in wooden wheels. fuuuck i hate korean webdesign culture

school website that required adobe flash for menu, silverlight for some other feature and activex for homework

Wow, Silverlight - now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

Twitter, after it became X. Due to the downsizing and automation of everything I can't even delete my account because the hell(p) pages send me in a three page loop.

I was trying to sign up for an Apple account to use Apple music, and I kept running into errors on Linux. I ended up using a windows computer and got through the initial process successfully. BUT THEN to log in on desktop, it turns out signing up for an Apple account through Apple music requires less information than signing up through the accounts page, so I had to go back to fill out more information.

After a while of that, I got stuck at an instructional page where the button to continue had no JavaScript attatched to it. It seems to be an issue that's been present for years on windows devices, and Apple has seemingly done nothing to fix it.

I ended up just borrowing my Dad's account.

Tech support web site that had incomplete or inaccurate information

Downloading VMware Workstation from Broadcom. They made it free but they definitely didn't make getting it easy. What's worse, in-app updates have been broken since Broadcom takeover, meaning you need to navigate their shitty website every time you want to update.

Probably Civitai bcus

so goddam (slow|bloated) , uses tonnes of (CPU|GPU)
barely working search function apparently so bad peops had to make 3rd party websites just to search civitai bcus performance so bad
login-gated downloads , they don't let you use passwords , login email only
Can't even view model info if marked sensitive , so forced to login for that tꝏ

I can't get my Medi-Cal insurance back because the official government site to apply simply does not fucking work.

A popular EHR cloud service that we use has a developer portal where operations such as logging in or entering two-factor codes would take upwards of 2 minutes to process.

When I asked our rep about it they went "eh it's normal".

This same company designed a XML SOAP API where if you request too much data, it just returns a HTTP 200 with no content. No error message or formatted SOAP reply, just completely nonsensical response.

I hate this company but there's literally very few choices in this space.

DHL. Fucking DHL. Not sure if it fits your question but I got triggered badly here.

They removed all forms of contact except WhatsApp and their shitty z broken chat bot. If there is ever a use case for LLM than this is it. But they use s system that can either sell you stamps or breaks.

Oh but you can call them. Do you can talk to there chat bot. Once you've broken it enough for it to grant an audience with a human being the connection drops.

I very rarely get worked up by broken systems but someone else chose to use this shit shoe and I'm now imprisoned in their web of bullshit.

This is why I hate DHL:
Why do they need soooo many different shipping systems, and why do I as the recipient need to care?
I have been in the situation where I was trying to track a package, but because I was in the wrong portal or selected the wrong DHL service, it claimed that it had no idea about the package.
How hard can it be to have one unified tracking number?
Something like:
DHL
<SERVICE_CODE>
<ID>

Try to sign in for Amazon Kindle unlimited

I think Id have to say youtube. That shitty site just keeps getting shittier and just when you think they cant fuck things up more than they have they set new standards of shitty shitfullness.

There was once a day long ago when the next video in que was remotely relevant to your query or previously played video. Now you could be watching a documentary and two videos later they are shoveling some completely irrelevant shit at you.

Then they started vpn blocking. 95℅ of the time I cant even play a video. Or it plays for a minute then errors out with "something went wrong".

For years yt-dlp saved my ass when I needed a video. Now works about 10% of the time.

Curate your watch history!
My YT feed is basically 80% I like, if I watch a video outside of my normal interests, I'll get rid of it from my watch history.
My feed is very focused on infrastructure, computers, weird history videos and stuff like that.
- I don't sign in. Haven't had an account for the better part of 10 years.
- While they were younger the kids only had access to YouTube on the main TV. You can't underestimate the need to review and prune the watch history to keep it on track.
  Interestingly I've noticed the recommendations tend to change depending on the time of day with more stuff appearing that grabs the whole families interest in the evenings when we are likely watching together or with one of the adults in charge of the remote.
Have you tried yout.com? Take the URL of any vid, and just delete the 'ube' from it. It only allows a few DLs per day but it works.

Verizon's customer portal. Clunky, badly designed interface and what should be simple tasks end in dead pages, non-responsive widgets, and interminable loading screens. Just awful.

LinkedIn and its identity verification.

I didn’t want to do it so I wanted to delete my account. They don’t have a form outside your profile page, which was inaccessible because it needed an identity verification.