The unbearable sameness of the modern web
blog.rachelbinx.comIf you think the web is boring now it's because you stopped surfing the web, not because people stopped making exciting and innovative websites. That isn't meant as a criticism; people's priorities change and we do different stuff. I still find the web wildly exciting after 30 years of using it because I still seek out interesting things on it...
Tell me this looks like every other website: https://www.anumberfromtheghost.com/asleep-in-trees
The web is boring now because everyone interesting is banned by bland mediocrities. If you don't follow the current thing to the letter every major social media platform - bar twitter for the last two months - would remove you from circulation pretty much instantly. The only people who agree with everything that is popular right now are the ones incapable of thinking. Ergo a chat bot trained on old forum data seems more genuine than anyone left on Reddit.
Yeah I miss the old days where on most sites you really needed to be a hard-core troll or do/say something illegal to get banned and removed. Now on for example Reddit if you say anything that's not acceptable in the current zeitgeist it's instant (shadow)banning.
It all became so corporate and milquetoast - all that matters are ads and so that they don't appear near "controversial" content to not to loose revenue.
It's much worse than that. The people doing the banning on reddit aren't doing it because they are paid or told to, they are doing it because they think stopping wrongthink is a public service and will feel right doing it every time.
HN isn't much better with flagging of posts. The highwater mark of this was PG's heresy post being kept off the front page for 6 hours before dang made the post unflaggable. I would have loved to see the Monday meeting where he had to explain why that was needed.
I've seen that for many of those people it's not a matter of being right or wrong but a moral battle of good vs. evil. Heretics are to be purged, not discussed with.
Being honest I think religion is kinda hard-wired into the human brain and if it isn't the mystique kind like with Jesus or Allah then it (d)evolves into this kind of agno-atheistic fanaticism where some flavor of the year "problem" appears that these people obsess with. And this is coming from a long time atheist btw.
On top of that, only the reiteration of the same trite puns or catchphrases gets upvotes, the rest drowns.
/r/homelab was interesting, now it's just pictures of people's setups
/r/garmin was interesting, now it's screenshots of people's VO2max stats
etc...
Repeat ad nauseam. Everything is bragging or showing off for fake internet points.
The nick mullen rant about the yeti cup subreddit is good for a laugh.
I don't know what is driving it but I think those posters really feel they're part of a community. The give gold, repeat the same tired jokes, and feel better. It's insane to me.
I'm going to let you in on a secret: it isn't a real community. It is Yeti astroturfing. ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶
"every major social network" is a very recent sub continent on the internet and didnt replace most of it.
I find reddit super exciting as well, it's THE place to talk quickly with random english speakers and I wish that existed when I was a french kids pinging randos on ICQ...
Old forums aren't much better unfortunately. Going back to the places where I hung out in the 00s the inmates are running the asylum now.
The problem now is finding interesting content, in the recent past it was enough to fire some few keywords on a search engine. Even leas advanced search engines found those sites. Google beat them adding some kind of authority but at the end the authority is gamed. Well content sites giving a s*t to SEO remain under layers and layer of dust.
I think pinning all of this on Google is unfair. They're part of it, but Reddit/Twitter/Facebook is every bit as complicit. Honestly, I think most of what's changed is our collective web-usage habits.
In my experience researching ways of building different and better discovery tools, the ice-berg of stuff that you'll virtually never find on Google/Facebook/Reddit/Twitter runs extremely deep, and is often much more interesting.
The platform-oriented web is like a giant shopping mall with some magazines and newspapers sold in-between. News websites are mostly reviewing the "products" sold in the shops. YouTube celebrities are demonstrating their shopping abilities. Sites like Reddit/Twitter are fostering customer discussions whose aim is to determine the "best product".
Completely agree. I mentioned Google specifically because it in their official mission [1] and this is where they started.
> The problem now is finding interesting content, in the recent past it was enough to fire some few keywords on a search engine.
But it's still enough to subscribe to some newsletters or reddit or listapart of the decade, etc. It's really not far away.
Now the problem is turbulence.org. Man, that hurts.
I mean, no, that's hardly a website. It's as much a website as example.com/demoscene.exe. Nobody ever stopped making art and video games, it's just that they don't run in the browser.
If you call it a website, then Unity is a web authoring tool.
It actually is a pretty decent website. If you look at the main page [1] instead, it's a gallery to navigate to the subpages. Conceptually not too different than browsing a traditional 2d webpage.
As a virtual 3D space it is much more of a web "site" than a collection of "pages" is a "site".
Umm, it reminds me of all the websites when VRML was a hip fad in the 90s (but obviously higher resolution/better).
But still, this misses the authors point - that mainstream websites have become homogenous. Obviously its not about literally every last website, but bemoaning what is currently trendy.
Umm, it reminds me of all the websites when VRML was a hip fad in the 90s (but obviously higher resolution/better).
I made a few experimental VRML websites in the late 90s (on a lovely SGI Irix..) and I can see why you'd say that, but it's only superficially similar in the 3D-in-a-browser sense. VRML experiences were usually terrible and never pretty.
It's the same idea updated with extra cycles.
It is pretty, and there are some nice aesthetic touches. But the overall look is still very blocky and VRML-ish.
I guess at some point we'll get photorealistic rendering - most likely in AR glasses rather than in the browser - and there will be a lot more experimentation for a while, some of it driven by AI.
But even this is in a tiny niche far, far outside the web mainstream, and if it hadn't been linked here hardly anyone would find it.
I remember the exact moment in the mid-90s when I realised the suits were moving in and the web was going to be transformed from a weird, colourful, mad eccentric thing into a generic mall.
From a corporate POV it has far exceeded my worst nightmares. Sites like this are a very small pushback, but they're not going to make a dent in the overall crapification and hustle-driven corporatisation of our biggest and most interesting planetary cultural resource.
I did some VRML at uni. We thought it was the future :)
Having said that, I think what you're saying is some very superficial pattern-matching. I found it a fantastic experience, and I'm not a particularly arty person.
It's boring because we consume content mostly through platforms that incentivise a certain mode and format of content creation. There is also the bias on recency and the fear of missing out "important" contemporary events and news. The interesting content is still there, but our perception and short attention spans mostly ignore it.
That is lovely. I need to come back when I've got more time and better headphones.
But I don't want my news headlines presented like this. I'm kinda ok with the standardization of the regularly-visited sections of the web - in fact I think it's just UX principles in action.
That website is fantastic. Cutting edge expression, difficult, well realised. I wish that were what modern art is.
What a great experience!
Don't know about the whole fuddy duddy discussion goin on here but let me just say that website is trippy as balls. And I enjoyed it immensely. Thank you very much for posting it, seriously inspired me.
The fellow who made it recommends: https://threejs-journey.com
I know what I am doing this weekend. Cheers.
It's like complaining why books has roughly all the same shape when paper allows so many formats and creativity. It's clear, it's because uniformity can optimize costs and people is more interested in content and not on the container.
Yeah I'm guilty of having a boring website, but it allows for easy readability without my having to spend weeks trying to balance out artiness and accessibility.
came here to say this. everyone blames google and social media which is true but the other major part of it is form vs function. Most of the time the arty sites prioritise the former over the latter and they become annoying to use for anything more than a few minutes
It would be nice if that standardization of UIs at least brought along some benefits for users with screenreaders and the like. But I find that the more we use frameworks, the more we end up complicating the structure of the page for alternative methods of viewing
You would expect fully custom UIs made by non-professionals to be the most complicated to parse, but even simple single-page apps with their react-component dynamically updating sections, pop overs, modals and switching screens are rarely accessible at all
Funny how using native browser controls is more accessible than re-implementing the controls.
It also got... isolated. I was going to leave a comment, but couldn't, as there was no where to leave it.
Bring back failed attempts to be the next CSS Picasso, but also bring back a social web. Offloading comments to social networks hinders discovery of networks.
I understand your sentiments about comments but as someone who have been on the receiving end there are two fights that I don't want to deal with;
1. SPAM. They will find a way to do it. Not even automated, employed cheap labor just spamming blog comments.
2. The extreme hatred and scorn from people who spew venom from behind their anonymous screen names.
Not just me as a person but my family had been threatened (on my blog comments). Not worth the effort, I have done away with the thousands of comments my blog had collected since 2001. A lot of them were nostalgic, sweet, and many a friends, colleagues, co-founders, and girlfriends were the result of comments on my blog but now -- NOT worth my time.
Fully agree. A company I work with used to receive about 1 SPAM message per hour. They kind of outcrowded any actual customer request in the INBOX. And to me, most of them looked like they were hand-written by people with English as a 2nd language. We tried a lot of CAPTCH providers and similar things, but that didn't help. It wasn't automated robot SPAM.
What did move the needle, in the end, was blocking all IPs from India. A bit heavy-handed, maybe, but it was a small company with only local customers anyway.
Then why blog? Comments are what distinguish a blog from an online magazine.
The early web had so much more diversity than the current web, and with far fewer walled gardens.
Try browsing the modern web in an incognito window and see how far you get before you are asked to login and then forced to login to read more. The big social networks force you to not only login to read stuff, they also strongly push you towards the mobile app because there's so much more data they can harvest from your phone.
Oh, and the ads. In the late 90s we had to contend with popup ads and animated gif banners but the modern web without an ad blocker is much worse. I'm not against ads, but why do 95% of them have to be so scummy?
I don't think everything needs to have a public comment section. The owner's email address is readily found on the site if you want to send feedback.
Most front end devs I manage don't like pre built components and want to roll their own. They might quibble over the behavior or style and feel the itch to change it.
This is also a terrible waste of resources to rebuild the wheel over and over. A few components, sure, when there is a compelling case for custom. But you do the business a disservice by consuming so much time on items just because you want to.
I also find it incredibly demoralizing trying to advance a project and the bug log is full of bugs about basic component behavior you would just get out of the box with a pre built set.
The most likely alternative to boring, functional, and WORKING, is BROKEN and dysfunctional. Please don't break navigation. Have predictable menu behavior. Etc... There are other ways to be creative.
Or heaven forbid, browser-native controls. So many building blocks in a SPA are required because you are not using the browser's native functionality. Instead everything is re-implemented worse.
It's interesting: the modern web packages up web design so that every facebook, Wikipedia or Instragram feed looks the same. The design is done for you.
The geocities approach was that everyone creates their own site design with an editor, which was actually pretty good and effective. There were many website where you could create your own website, such as maxpages and xpages.
They would let you create pages on your site and link to other pages. There was a lot of funky pages out there.
Maybe people decided they don't want to do design anymore?
I love the message and the sentiment. It's why I value and enjoy coming across personal websites with effort. The biggest thing I've noticed is that while the adoption and ease of use the various social media websites/platforms, frameworks, boilerplates have brought on there was general decline in computer skills for the general population.
I remember being in school and have computer class where one part of the class was dedicated to setting up a website and learning the ins and outs. I still recall as I left the schooling system the class and activities still survived albeit adapted. Time has passed and things do change but I still see the modern web exactly as it has been if anything discoverability has been the biggest factor of exposure to more uniqueness in the web.
I love the message of this article. Honestly, little weird blog sites are the best and usually a great read too.
I might be going against the narrative, but I enjoy the same-y web.
I like having the same design philosophy and navigation on wildly different websites. I like knowing exactly where to find information at a glance because things have been put in roughly the same way across multiple information sources. I don't like to scour through the asinine design decisions of some guy with a handcrafted HTML website that "represents his personality".
Sure, if you browse the web for the "human aspect" or for entertainment, having quirky website sure is fun and interesting. But the moment you need the web to actually search for stuff in the most efficient way possible the façade of the early web quickly shows its true colors.
There's quite a difference between having a standard layout, and having a standard aesthetic design, though.
I certainly agree that there are many usability patterns that should be implemented in every website. That doesn't mean that every website has to look the same in terms of padding, color design, and content, though.
Yes, there's still nothing like Zombo.com
Leave the mouse and scroll events alone
The irony when the homepage of said site has broken markdown links everywhere...
one reason I love tailwind. literally design swapping classes until it looks decent.
one reason I love CSS. literally design swapping properties until it looks decent.
Hey, where did my div go?!
Straight into the soup
Float positioning was too responsive.
fair enough, not a comment with substance, but point was anything that doesn't lock you into components is a good thing. plain css is great. off the shelf ui components are boring.
Heaven forbid we have websites with semi standard form factors and layouts so you can actually use them without having to click around randomly for 10 minutes or hope the fancy design doesn’t break your browser.
I have zero desire to bring back the exciting mess of flash websites, vrml, etc etc. it’s bad enough that everything is endless scrolling now.