15 Websites That Are Essentially Useless

Do you want the power to stream music over the Internet whenever you want for only $10.00 a month? Oh, no, you don't, because you already get it for free. The Internet continues to change the way we consume media, from TV to movies to music, and as times change business plans that once seemed reasonable become ridiculous. Once services like Spotify and Rdio came along and figured out how to provide the same service for free, Rhapsody was left out in the cold. It is strange to see the site still accepting new registrants now that there are numerous competitors with better services. Maybe the "people who haven't heard of Spotify" market is lucrative, but we doubt it.

Though the site adds more and more Yelp-like aspects as time goes on, we all remember that Foursquare's initial appeal was all about "checking in." As if you and your friends weren't excluding people quite enough as it was, you could now let everyone know what they aren't invited to in real time. Really, what's the point of brunching if you can't remind people that they aren't there? In the "celebri-me" culture of social media, Foursquare may well have been the low point. Though we mock Foursquare, it definitely provided us with some of our favorite social media moments. There was nothing quite like watching one of your cool, tech-savvy friends accidentally become the Mayor of a local Dunkin' Donuts or White Castle after checkin in one too many times.

Here is yet another example of how not everything can be crowdsourced. The idea behind TheTopTenz makes sense. Let the people vote on what they think are the best and worst in a given category. This approach works fine on targeted blogs. Whether it is a poetry blog or a forum for ventriloquists, lists can be crowdsourced effectively from knowledgeable communities. TheTopTenz's problem is that when the entire Internet gets a vote, the most popular item will likely rank highly on any list. Case in point, McDonalds is both the "best" and "worst" fast food restaurant according to the site. Though technology has come far in recent years, It is still evident when a website tries to curate content without actually paying people to create it, and TheTopTenz is just one of many sites attempting this trick.

Nowhere can you see the decline of local journalism as well as on your hometown paper's website. We are used to getting our news from mammoth sites that trade on their slick UI and multimedia presentations. Next to the average national site, these layouts are hard to look at. While the print version of our paper looked professional yet quaint, local news websites tend to look somehow plain and sloppy at the same time. Though it's nice to keep up with local news, the layout of these sites renders them the third choice after the print edition and nightly news for dose of local goings on. Frankly, with the hyperlocal scope of bloggers and the glut of content provided by national sites, rare is the story best covered by a local paper. It is a shame that we lose more and more local newspapers every year, but for many of them, web presence is not the answer for how to stay relevant.

You guys remember AskJeeves, right? We make fun of it a lot, so hopefully that's helped to jog your memory. So, the website has dropped the butler and changed their identity. These days Ask.com offers a Q&A service that is about as frustrating as Yahoo Answers alongside the inferior search engine you've always ignored. It is impressive how many bad answers Ask.com gives you at once. The site first offers you a half page of ads, then gives you their one or two canned answers, followed by similarly bad answers from sites like chacha.com and wiki.answers.com. Below all that, you get some Google results repackaged, followed by more ads. It truly is a triumph: nowhere else can you get such bad answers delivered in such a confusing way. Bravo!

It wasn't so long ago that hard copies of TV Guide were in every house you went into. Now that guides are built into every cable package, and many of us have turned to the streaming and DVR, what does TV Guide have left? If their website is any indication, not much. TV Guide offers a strange mix of TV news and weird attempts at social media engagement with features like "social power rankings" and "trending tonight." Lacking the gossip of TMZ, the analysis of A.V. Club, and the clarity offered in TV Guide's print edition, the only thing this site provides is a cautionary tale for the transition from print to digital.

The only effective use of Favstar we've seen so far is when Twitter comedians retweet Favstar notifications that their tweets have been favorites sixty-nine times. Favstar has two uses: to show you your tweets that have been favorite the most, which almost no one cares about, and to show you how many favorites your tweets have received, which absolutlely no one cares about. Even if you are obsessed with Twitter, favorites aren't the best measure of your Twitter reach. If someone loves your tweet, they retweet it so they can get some credit from their friends for finding it. Favoriting a tweet is the Internet equivalent of the girl you're sleeping with but don't want to show your friends. Also, did we mention that to get full utility out of Favstar, you have sign up for a paid subscription? Worth it!

Search companies continue to combine forces in a marketplace dominated by Google, and, to a lesser extent, Bing. At this point, Google's technology powers Ask and AOL's search engine while Microsoft powers both their Bing and Yahoo. This doesn't stop brave (or foolish) entrepreneurs from trying to get a slice of the search engine pie. According to DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg, competing with Google is nearly impossible because they already "copied the whole Internet ... and data mined it." Since Google is the only search engine with the infrastructure behind it, competing search engines have to rely on gimmicks to lure in customers. Blekko, for example, pioneered the idea of slashtags, which allow you to modify a search term with a second term. Though there may be specific utilities where that makes sense, they can't make up for the infrastructure gap Google has created.

Here at Complex Tech, we are staunchly pro-video game, but even we could never wrap our minds around this one. Video games are supposed to provide an experience that is exhilarating exactly because it is beyond our reach. We can get down with those who want to pretend to be a wizard, warrior, or football player. Hell, we can understand someone who wants to moonlight as a farmer. But, a game that simply allows you to live a normal life digitally has never struck us as anything but sad. Pretty much everything you do in Second Life is available to you in the real world. Why not go on real dates, attend real concerts, or actually go surfing? We recently found out that you can actually play roleplaying games within Second Life which is the absolute saddest thing we've heard in our entire lives.

For how great a service Twitter is, that's how bad their add-ons tend to be. One of our least favorite features on Twitter is the "#Discover" tab. We're not sure who asked for a smaller Twitter feed made up of random tweets from our feed, but the Russian Nesting Doll style implications are enough to blow your mind. Will we soon see a feed made from that feed, and then yet another feed created from that feed? If you dig deep enough do you get to the one tweet that is perfectly suited to your personality? If you dind't tweet that tweet, what does that say about you? These are the existential questions that dawn on you while you are trying to figure out why the hell the Discover tab exists.

Ahh, About.com, everyone's least favorite search engine result. About.com offers everything you hate about Wikipedia without any of the things you love. While Wikipedia is comprehensive, About.com offers broad, useless articles like "Characteristics of the New England Colonies" alongside bland blog content with titles like "Just in Time for Back to School." As the website offers no sources to back up their seemingly randomly selected articles, you can't even use the site for the most rudimentary research. Not comprehensive enough to approach being a useful research tool, far from entertaining enough to stand alongside even mediocre clickbait sites, About.com exists to lure traffic from middle school students who want to find a shortcut for their school report and don't yet know better.

For some reason, your internet service provider curates a crappy home page with a silly mix of news, gossip, and human interest stories for you to ignore. Though we're pretty sure that their traffic correlates completely with which of their customers forget to change their homepage to Google, these sites continue to exist. Lacking the curation and perspective of your favorite blogs while having none of the rigor of a respectable news outlet, these websites are just a bland tapestry of content feasting on accidentally clicks. Whether it's "Hot Jobs Through 2020" or "Kate Middleton Dazzles on Red Carpet," these provide all the information you couldn't care less about with the least appealing presentation possible.

Yahoo Answers sounds like a wonderful idea at first glance. The only problem is that it relies on the kindness of strangers, which anyone familiar with the Internet knows is a grave mistake. People ask questions ranging from the reasonable to the absurd, and generally speaking, they are either answered by pathetic know-it-alls who don't really know what they're talking about or jerks looking for a quick laugh. How does Yahoo Answers discern quality answers from terrible responses? Once again, the community polices this, which usually results in the most hilarious and ridiculous answers landing in the "best answer" category. Thankfully, Yahoo has thrown in cheesy avatars and a no-frills layout, lest Answers provide anything but one of the most unpleasant experiences the web has to offer.