MTV Got Heavy

I used to check MTV.com for the American charts—TRL, MTV2, whatever was actually climbing that week. The site was cluttered even back then, but it worked. You could find what you came for.

Then they redesigned it into oblivion.

Flash everywhere. Auto-playing ads you couldn’t kill. Buttons that hung forever. Pages that either didn’t load or didn’t exist. The whole thing was this bloated, broken monument to corporate incompetence. MTV had spent so much energy trying to be flashy—literally, in the worst possible way—that they’d made the site useless.

I understand the logic that led there. Bigger, louder, more visual noise means more engagement, right? But broadband doesn’t fix bad design. The Polish MTV site is just as heavy. There are web designers who get it, though—the ones who understand that removing things can be smarter than adding them. You can make something lean and fast that people actually want to use.

MTV used to be worth visiting. Now it’s just weight and Flash for its own sake. I stopped going back.