I lost my love for the web (2022)

I’m losing my love for the web because it’s boring, not because of how it’s built. I am also guilty of this and contribute to the problem at my day job, but taking a limitless method of creation and churning out business apps and marketing sites until they inundate everything we do is a shame.

May get into a different kind of programming, web dev just feels uninspired to me right now. Note: this is my world on the web right now, I’m sure others disagree and have another opinion. Loving something is subjective.

What's great about Jquery is that it doesnt change. Nor does PHP . The worlds most popular sites still run on both.

Many years ago i found a jquery plugin for drawing a signature on a tablet. It still works. This would have never happened with any mobile app framework or any of the 'post-post-post-modern' html frameworks.

I love the web more than any time. It's 2024 and it's the only truly open platform, where you can plug in your thing and just leave it there. Every other platform is in a competition about who will be the biggest a-hole

> Somewhere, someone decided that you must build your websites a certain way, or you're doing it wrong™ and some people have gone as far as to actually wish harm on people for the tools they decided to use to build their websites.

When was this ever not true? I remember people who wrote HTML by hand deriding those who used WYSIWYG editors 25 years ago, though perhaps not wishing them harm.

More hated than those editors were proprietary plugins like Flash, Java, Microsoft's not quite compatible version of Java, ActiveX, and the like. Some sites were unusable without a very specific configuration of client software, almost certainly requiring Windows. They were usually painfully bandwidth-intensive as well in an era when the average connection was about 0.05 Mbps.

There are lots of things to worry about the state of the web (and the wider internet) but this is not it.

I do dislike websites that require JS unnecessarily, but I just do not read them. Most people do not even know what framework you use. It comes down to "a few people are nasty about what I do". That is unavoidable if you do anything public.

I still love the web. But in the 90s and 2000s, it was something that really interesting people were focused on as a platform for writing, design and creativity. These interesting people tended to gather communities of interesting people around them. Now it feels like something more akin to ham radio. Still interesting, still a good hobby, but the zeitgeist has moved on.

What would revitalize the web (and the arts in general) is a huge shift in focus in society to prioritize leisure and happiness over profit. Leisure time has largely evaporated in many developed countries, and the impact on the arts and the whole economy around the arts has been devastating. I’d love to see the whole country have a chance to get bored for a month, hmm when have we tried that recently, maybe it would be good to try again without anything terrible going on at the same time.

"What changed? How we build.

Somewhere, someone decided that you must build your websites a certain way, or you're doing it wrong™ and some people have gone as far as to actually wish harm on people for the tools they decided to use to build their websites."

His love for the web is dead, because some online people have weird opinions?

Well, I call that a weird opinion. Who cares. There are always weird and creepy people. And the cancer of the web today is rather ads and tracking in my own humble and weird opinion and not what tools you use. If you used the most awesome tools to integrate ads and tracking of 200+ company then I hate that and not the tool. And if you used jquerry with an other outdated inefficient libary to build an interesting experiment, then I might still love the result. Because the result matters to people visiting the site more then the build process.

I thought the article was going to go in a totally different direction and advocate for a return to simpler tools and the importance of content over tool obsession. I mean, who actually cares if you use React for your blog? If the content is good enough and you’re not fixated on proselytizing the framework, does it even really matter to anyone?

I've been dipping back into native/systems programming lately and it's honestly no better over there.

I starting writing code in C again, because I really enjoy the simplicity. I wanted to use some nice-isms in C++ (function overloading, some encapsulation with struct) so I wrote C code, but leveraged the C++ compiler with a few features enabled by C++.

1) C++ programmers hate my code because I don't use the stl, containers, etc.

2) C++ programmers hate my code because I don't use referencing counting, "safe" pointers. Instead I raw dog it and wrote my own memory arenas (I alloc memory once at program start and free at the end).

3) C programmers hate my code because it leverages some C++-isms when it's convenient.

4) Rust programmers hide in fear and regard everything I do as unsafe, dangerous and borders on undefined behavior (they are like helicopter moms).

Cookie warnings killed my love of the web.

Adtech killed the web. The cookies, frameworks, and the rest of the cruft are there because of adtech.

This year I regained my love for the web. Not related to technology about how the Internet is built.

My journey starts with writing my own RSS client, which required me to learn more about HTTP protocol. I had to find interesting RSS sources. So I did. I found some sources. When did you actively searched for a science blog? Science channel?

Then I transformed my program into web scraping machine. I captured domains from the web. Each domain can reference a other domain. Through references I captured new domains. Some are boring, some are not, but I live more outside of google bubble now. Since I use bookmarking in my software I can go back to interesting places. From time to time I check what new entered my program. Sometime websites from Singapore, sometimes a China state propaganda machine, sometimes some new 'reverse engineering' page blog, sometimes a blog that has been dead for several years, but contains funny articles.

Sometimes I test my database of links to check if it contains something new with 'hack', or 'reverse engineering'. My search as answer provides domain names, so I do not have to go through content farms.

I started checking Google results vs Yandex vs kagi, and other search engines. I used my curiosity to find many more search engines, like https://zarebin.ir, or https://search.seznam.cz, or marginalia search.

I search for anything related to old stuff. Therefore I try to find old fan pages about "diablo 2", or "quake", or "tomb raider" to see if anything exists anymore. Some things exists, but they hide at 6th page of results, and I have been there many times in recent months.

I opened my mind about search. I test myself to invent new search terms to find new stuff.

I know there is a lot negativity, about "build tools", or the approach, that does not stop me from searching new things.

Domain repository: https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

When you have a great product, you can get away with mediocre or even bad internet presence. Take Starbucks, visa, Mastercard, Walmart etc who have at best average presence on the internet but their physical products are making them a lot of money because they are simply that good. Improvement to their online presence will only improve their product growth and sales.

The fluff you see on the internet is for bad products. The products themselves are generally nothing special and hence the whole marketing, analytics, social media presence is whats required creating this wave of websites and social media presence that is nothing but people trying to sell you stuff you don't need.

Take doctors for example. Good doctors can get a few bad reviews online but people will still go to them because the good reviews generally are a lot more than bad ones. Most great doctors don't even have a good online presence. On the other hand average or bad doctors tend to spend an awful lot of time improving their online presence to get new patients all the time because old ones tend to not stick around thanks to average patient care.

The web is what you make of it just like everything else. People looking for quick cash have existed for decades. With the web, it's become easier for them thats all. You can chose not to fall into this trap.

I think it's fair if people complain, the web has been getting bigger and bigger and websites start to weigh a ton. It's a shame if you can't read someone's blog because you have JS disabled and if you dare to enable it you have to download 200MB worth of data. Weird that the author misses the old web and doesn't want to stick to the old, html+css ways

The author loved the web because "EVERYONE could build on the internet". The problem isn't that how we build has changed, it's that everyone is on the internet and some percentage are opinionated assholes and people dealing poorly with their mental illnesses.

The author lost their love of the web because working in public has a lot of downsides.

The web needs a genuine "Web 3", a new era of decentralized creativity that will be brimming with possibility and attracting developers passion as it did in the past.

It does not look like such a rejuvenating phase is coming anytime soon. The centralized app era has cornered the web and its economics and will for sure perpetuate itself at least for the short/mid term future.

Still, to the degree people can afford it, its worth experimenting with fundamental web technologies and patterns (e.g., ideas like htmx, activitypub, linked data etc.) that might get us back to an interesting path.

While climbing out of the gravity well of centralization requires enormous energy, there is plenty of potential energy lying latent in the structure of the web... What we need is a spark.

I lost my love for the web for two reasons.

1) It's largely lost its sense of fun.

2) With all the tracking, analytics, commerce, calls-to-action, "funnels", etc., so many websites set themselves up as adversaries to their audience that it's mostly stopped being worth bothering with.

Nobody really cares about your tech choices except some /g/ turbo nerds, sounds like the author spent time in some toxic communities and projects this on the whole of the industry.

This happens?

I write my own SSG in Python using Jinja2. I use normalize.css but other than that everything is from-scratch. I've never had anyone throw anything at me for not doing things a weird way.

It's like the opposite of the "I hate almost all software" [1] rant.

[1] https://tinyclouds.org/rant

I do like this "small web" trend that has benn going on

What's with all these tantrum-y hyperbolic blog posts... "my love for the web has died"

So what / good for you / that's nice

I would say having a webpage on a platform counts towards having a web presence. Every FB, Insta, X, etc. page is a little “website”.

I think the author is conflating technology with people. To me, this is a natural effect of getting everyone online.

In the beginning the web was 'nice', because only a certain kind of people had access and interest in publishing content. Geeks, programmers, scientists, students, etc. The place felt more 'elitist' because it was. We worshiped those who fell asleep coding in a basement, fueling on left over pizza and coffee, so that they could give that software away to us all for free as 'open source'.

Those were the people building the early internet and then there was the rest of the people who were not yet online - on TV, on the streets, government, etc.

But the people building the internet were building it for the people not yet online. As soon as hardware got cheap enough for everyone to afford it and software got 'simple' enough for everyone to use it, the masses flowed, bringing with them all the 'bad stuff' from the offline world times 100. They also brought some 'good stuff' too, like better visual designs, fonts, icons, images and videos, online payments.. but we're focusing on the bad now, so let's ignore the good for now.

Trolls, criminals, swindlers, script kiddies, everyone was welcome and so the flood dissolved and even reshaped the original 'elite' and now every kid wants to start a startup and become a billionaire.

But whenever I think that 'the old Internet was better', I keep reminding myself that, hey, 'the old Internet' is still here and it's alive and kicking, nobody forces me to go to the sites I don't like (well, in fact, I'm often forced to interact with terrible UX of utility companies or airlines). There's a lot of noise, sure, but it's not that hard to access the 'good internet' if you really want to.

Maybe there's something else at play, maybe the dopamine hits less after all these years, maybe we're getting older and are just nostalgic about something we used to enjoy a lot more when we were younger.

Torrent trackers are the closest I’ve found to an old-web style community. That and hn

As someone else said, author probably spent time in some toxic communities.

As long as they aren't my employer nor the things I am building are for them, IDGAF about what people think of my choices when building software.

The thing is, there is a massive difference between creating things for fun and creating things professionally. Programming used to be WAY more fun when I was teenager, but that does not have anything to do with the technologies or the web landscape.

Right there with you. The fun is gone. It is all about $$$ now.

The internet is dead, long live the internet.

You just realized that people on the internet are toxic?

The author prefers being an amateur to being a professional. Professionalism is often arbitrarily and highly standardised and somewhat boring. You find the same phenomenon in sports, for example. It's also a typical trajectory of any industry.

Which is fine, it's just not particularly related to the web.