The web is broken

The web is broken.

The web I grew up with does not exist any more.

It has been replaced by big businesses who have created walled gardens of content, buried in apps, shrouded in javascript, crowded by cookies. Homogenised, liked, retweeted, subscribed, and influenced.

Gone are the days of surfing the web where you would stumble from one Geocities website to another Anglefire page. Each person hand crafting their own expression of themselves. We would find a wealth of information; knowledge from the depths of someone’s hobby, a page dedicated to pylons, dancing hamsters, or a song about badgers.

Creating a site back then required a little knowledge, but not that hard. I watched as the unlikeliest of people tentatively marked up their headings, paragraphs, and images. “Right-click view source” allowed anyone to see how a site had been built and copy, learning by example and then learning by doing.

Rudimentary WYSIWYG editors broadened access to self-publishing, while web-rings directed people to the next interesting (or not so interesting) site on the ‘net.

It was a brave new world where chasing the algorithm meant playing with a few meta tags and publishing interesting content.

This world has gone, ruined by the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and TikTok. Walled gardens have formed, AI generated content drowns out the human. The product is now ourselves, not our content. Finding anything useful is now hidden by mountains of monotonous copy created by large language models.

The web is broken.