Pseudo romanticizing of the old web. Yeah, I don't like that we're heading into a corporate super controlled web but as of now, that still vastly better than it used to be before search engines were a thing. I also only look back with a nostalgic eye at the time of gaming magazines because it was fun, but it's so much better to be able to Google stuff now. I don't miss dealing with web design out of order, wild west style.

Old website navigation was often bad and ugly. Everyone had a forum but you never found what you were looking for. And web design unavoidably had to change to allow better mobile access. You could no longer load in font size 6 blue on top of blue as that would (correctly so) annoy people and make them stop visiting your page, when ther was a better site available.

Now social media isn't necessarily bad, we're on one after all, but there are definitely harmful social media who are just made for ragebait, like Twitter and Facebook.

It's a fact though that you need more googlefu now, to find what you're looking for.

Special shout-out has to go to my local newspaper websites The Derby Telegraph and Nottingham Post .

They are a virtually unreadable mess, due to the layers of advertising and other JavaScript interruption.

It was kind of inevitable that it would go this way. The business model that people expect the Internet to work in is directly at odds with how people want to use the Internet. Tech companies have been enjoying a 20 year long honeymoon period where they have effectively infinite money and no regard for sustainable profit.

As usual for these people, they seem to hate people with disabilities or those simply older. You know what Web 1.0 "design" (there’s a reason for the scare-quotes, properly designed sites were of course a thing) was? Utterly inaccessible. I won’t cry a single tear for all these horrible unreadable designs, and I barely even have issues (I mainly get overly distracted and annoyed by movement, I disable GIF animations by default and have "prefers reduced motion" active), but for people with more serious issues, it was/is way worse. Now granted, there’s still horrible inaccessible shit on the web today, but it’s far better than it was and especially far better than what these old-web defenders seem to cry to return.

And the best thing? People tend to get worked up when you say you’d like to consume the content without annoying shit. When it’s about JS, everyone applauds you "Yeah, fuck those JS only sites, we want basic text!" but when you say you want basic text without 50000 moving and blinking things? "Fuck you for wanting a sterile web where everything is boring"

/rant

I disagree with his definition of web3. Some devs are working on decentralizing the web, that's the real web3. IPFS is blockchain-less. My new peer-to-peer search engine is blockchain-less. Yes, blockchain people are trying to put blockchains everywhere, but we musn't let them build their vision web3. And that means, you need to help the blockchain-less vision, you need to find projects to contribute to. Let's make the web uncensorable and anonymous together

we all miss the blink element.

Decentralization existed because anyone could make an equally shitty website without losing much in it. If you really miss that web 1.0 crap, you can go to i2p or freenet.

I think it's time for a new standard to replace HTML and Javascript for the web that formalizes all the most used functions and gives developers way less freedom to make a crappy website.

Alternatively train AI to recognize crappy websites and severely punish them in search.

Or use AI to reformat websites into something user friendly. Considering the coding skills of GPT-4, I don't think that's too far away.

Between GDPR prompts, auto-generated articles, banner ads, normal ads, filler content, related articles, the web has become unusable.

Really it's Google's fault for not cracking down on these practices. And their competitiors for not doing so either.

Search engines in general have become beyond useless. I barely find anything anymore and it's not just the fault of bad web design. Even if the search results followed human friendly design, they don't even contain anything related to my search.

My only hope is that retrieval-augmented LLMs can fix this mess. Basically they read all these crappy websites for you and extract the actually useful information.

I agreed until the "fuck blockchain" comment in the article. How else would you solve the byzantine generals problem in computer science?