The 30 Worst Things to Happen to the Internet

If want to watch your video or listen to your music, we will press play.

2 Girls 1 Cup didn't originate on the Internet. It was simply the trailer for a pornographic movie. But when that trailer hit the Net in 2007, it became a sensation with people posting videos of other people's reactions to the disgusting clip of two girls defecating, eating excrement, and vomiting. The video was so nasty, porn legend Ron Jeremy couldn't sit through the entire one-minute trailer.

Rotten's tagline says it all: "Pure evil since 1996." That's exactly what this site delivers. Want to see photos of dogs being eaten by maggots or people having their limbs dismembered by a meat grinder? How about photos of dead families? No? Then you have no reason to visit this website. Ever.

If we were to make a list of 30 great things to happen to the Internet, the creation of Napster would surely make the list. As one of the first programs that allowed people to easily download music, it changed the entire game. Unfortunately, like a candle in the wind, Napster only lasted for two years before it was sued to death by the RIAA. But, like Ra's al Ghul said, you can't kill an idea. Napster lives on in all the file storage sites and let people upload albums and songs.

Once the most hated kind of person on the Internet, the Troll has turned into cultural mainstay and a tactic to gain recognition and build a name for one's self on the Net. Want people to listen to you? Pick a topic and troll away.

We don't know why these crudely drawn memes became so popular but we'd wish they'd go the way of Tila Tequila.

Comment sections on websites are supposed to be places were readers are able to communicate with other readers and people on the website. In an idyllic world, they would be troves of intellectual banter. Instead, most are just the opposite. Most are nothing more than cesspools of hate (real hate, not Internet hate) and close-mindedness. It doesn't matter the publication, either. Sure, World Star's comments are wild ignorant (and hilarious), even the NYT has a comments on stories that will make you double check what website you were reading.

So you've thought of the perfect project and slaved away thinking of the perfect name; one that you're damn near sure no one could have thought of before you because it contains a K where there should be a C or some shit. But lo and behold, you go to the website and it's taken! But not by someone who stole your idea, but by a douchebag who copped the domain and is waiting for a guy like you to make him or her a generous offer.

Is there anything more annoying that reading a tweet or Facebook page where everything is wRiTtEn LiKe ThIs? Actually, yes, there is: when people swap out all the vowels in their names for Vs and Xs.

Duh.

We hate bots as much as the next person, but we equally hate the idea that every website we go to doesn't believe that we are human. There's very little less annoying that trying to leave a comment or download a file and having to enter in some cryptic code that's so obscured you're forced to guess at what a majority of the characters are. It's wonder we get them to work at all.

While Google set out to help people discover and access all the world's information, doe people sought to manipulate that system by tinkering with the way the search engine reads and ranks their pages. What this causes, in turn, are search results that don't always reward the correct websites. Case in point: If your site writes an original story and a site with better SEO optimization aggregates it, that site will get seen more love from Google. Doesn't seem fair, does it?

If you take Klout scores seriously, you're probably one of the people who go on Twitter and try to rally your followers to help you gain more followers. If you needed any proof that Klout, a service started in 2009 that measures people's influence by their social media accounts, was flawed, then check out this stat: President Obama has a lower score than Lady Gaga.

Before you get up-in-arms about us putting VLOGs on this list, hear us out. First, there's a difference between a VLOG and a video podcast. The latter is informative, usually well-produced, and talks about things other than what the host just purchased or ate for brunch. The former involves people who couldn't hold people's attention with regular blogs who decided they would fair better if in front of a camera. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

What was supposed to be a new online chat service that allowed people to speak to randomly chosen users either via text, voice, or video, turned into a dong fest. RJMetrics discovered that one out of every eight feeds on Chatroulette involved R-Rated content, a majority of them from men flashing their goods for an unsuspecting user.

If there's one thing a guy doesn't need while watching porn is the ability to accidentally tell the world that his is watching porn. SMH.

If you can't afford a pair of Air Jordan Breds, that's unfortunate. There are lot of other sneakers you can most certainly afford. That doesn't mean you hop online a buy a pair of kicks with the Jumpman logo looking instead like the Karate Kid. Not only do these sites cost brands and companies millions and billions of dollars, they make unsuspecting consumers look like complete idiots.

Ah, the struggle rapper. Now, we're sure rappers and other musicians have always bee desperate to get on, but in the Internet and social media age, never has it been, to quote Katt Williams, so hilariously sad. There are numerous ways to spot a struggle rapper. Alvin Blanco of Hip Hop Wired has it down to a science. It usually involves an unknown rapper recording verses on a looped part f a popular instrument that came out less than a week earlier, then hopping on Twitter or Facebook (even email) and spamming every and all writers, editors, A&Rs, bloggers, and other industry heads. It's a straight-up epidemic.

When a song becomes popular two things happen: It gets played ad nauseam on the radio and one hundred people take to YouTube to record cover versions. Now, most of these cover versions are horrible; especially the ones that attempt to put an acoustic spin on rap songs. But one group, Karmin, managed to turn their affinity to horrible covers into record deal with Epic. To be fair, Karmin's head and shoulders better than Rebecca Black who made a name for herself after her mom paid $4,000 to have a song and video made, then posted the video for the grating single "Friday" on YouTube.

It's calmed down over the past years, but there was a time when you couldn't visit a website without a number of windows taking over your screen like the chicken pox. Want a surefire way to make sure people never visit your site again? Bombard them with ads for shit they wouldn't purchase even if they woke up with A-Rod money.

As we've said before, a lot of people pine for the days when Facebook was a " lawless community of college kids posting images of keg stands and friends with dong pics crudely drawn onto their cheeks after they passed out." Back then you didn't have to worry about your mother, father, aunt, uncle, or grandmother seeing all the dumb shit you were doing while you were away at college. But then Facebook realized the only way to turn into a billion-dollar property was to get everybody and opened its doors to the masses. It was then that Facebook died for a large number of people who didn't want to post photos of their kids. Pour some liquor out.

As crazy as Justin Bieber fans are, even we couldn't believe the #CuttingForBieber hashtag. Allegedly started as a protest against photos of the young star smoking weed, the hashtag featured photos of "Bielebers" with arm cuts. The whole thing-hashtag and photos-was later believed to be a hoax started by 4Chan. Hoax or not, the real issue, as the New York Times stated was the damage it may have done to the adolescent population, 15% which has suffered from self-injury.

Look, we understand companies have to figure out a way to stay in the black, but switching game in the ninth inning and making people jump through hoops to pay to read articles is not the business. Most people will just wait until someone aggregates your story.

Remember when YouTube was the wild, un-monetized west where you could find any and every piece of unlicensed video IP and watch it uninterrupted? So do we. Which is why now it's the bane of our existence to click on our favorite underground rap tune from the mid-nineties and be forced to sit through a pre-roll that we know O.C. is not seeing a piece of. It's enough to make you swear off YouTube forever. And go to ComplexTV. Just kidding. Not really.

You know all those people who bemoan the current state of the Internet? The people who believe things should go back to some unknown golden era when no one was making money by creating content on the web . What they're really mad at are content farms: Sites that produce content solely for the gaming of search engine algorithms. These sites generally employ no staff employees and pay freelancers a pittance to produce articles in subjects in which they aren't well-verse. It's one step removed from having computers writer articles.

We can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but sometime in the early to mid 2000s, brands began looking to bloggers as the people pushing culture forward. And to be fair, some do. After all, COMPLEX partners with a lot of them—those that, through careful curation inform people on what's next and what's not. But it's gotten out of hand as of late, with people with nothing more than a Tumblr page, and selfies acting like they're doing the public a service. To which we say, FOH.

Yes, 4Chan has done some good since its launch in 2003, but behind the cat memes, the imageboard has a long, dark history including the hosting of child pornography, and various attacks on sites like YouTube and the emails of government officials. The site even made Apple's stock price dip in 2008 after creating a fake story about Steve Jobs having a heart attack. Cold blodded.

Started in 2005 as an aggregator of videos depicting the worst the world had to offer mixed with new rap videos, World Star Hip Hop has emerged as a repository of rachetness. Want to see a grown women get tazed in front of her kids after antagonizing a store security guard? Or a group of kids fight McDonald's employees? Or a girl with dreams of being a video vixen lackadaisically shake her ass in her mom's living room? This is the place to go. What any of this has to do with "hip hop" we haven't yet figured out.