Remember “Best viewed with” buttons? How about those ugly “Under construction” banners? Well, now there’s a new craze in bad design: pimp buttons, those little buttons people stick under every single thing they write, begging you to submit it to Digg, Facebook, MySpace, or anywhere else that might inflate their page hits.
Here’s an example from a real web site: 
The effect, to me at least, is rather like a desperate “L@@K!!! PLEASE READ!!! FORWARD THIS!!!” subject line in an e-mail. It begs and pleads for attention, and by doing so serves as a very good indication that it doesn’t deserve any.
In case the pimp buttons aren’t enough to get across the idea that the author is desperate, take a look at the top left:
Eighteen readers? For a site that you’ve been posting to for four months? You can put up a web site where you post pictures of your lunch each day and get more subscribers than that.
I’m all in favor of everyone being on the web. If you have something you feel compelled to say, get out there and say it. But if you can only find 18 people interested in what you have to say then (a) you really don’t need Feedburner, and (b) you really don’t need to be displaying your feed stats for everyone to see.
While we’re on the subject of unnecessary cruft, I think that the Creative Commons license could be removed as well. I’ve a hunch that if anyone was interested in reusing the content, they’d start by reading it.