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How the web became unreadable
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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Technology
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We wanted it all to be free. It was free. I remember the early days of the internet, the webforums, the IRC, it was mostly sites run by enthusiasts. A few companies showing their products to would-be customers. It was awesome and it was all free.
And then it got popular, it got mainstream. Running servers got expensive and the webmasters were looking for funding. And we resisted paywalls. The internet is free, that's how it's supposed to work!
They turned to advertising. That's fair, a few banners, no big deal, we can live with that. It worked for television! And for a while that was OK.
Where did it all go sideways? Well, it was much too much effort to negotiate advertisement deals between websites and advertisers one website at a time, so the advertisement networks were born. Sign up for funding, embed a small script and you're done. Advertisers can book ad space with the network and their banner appears on thousands of websites. Then they figured out they can monitor individual user's interests, and show them more "relevant" ads, and make more money for more effective ad campaigns.
And now we have no privacy online. Which caused regulators like the EU to step in and try to limit user data harvesting. With mixed results as we all know. For one it doesn't seem to get enforced enough so a lot of companies just get away with. But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.
And now we're swamped with ads, and sponsored content written by AI, because capitalism's gonna capitalism and squeeze as much profit as they can, until an equilibrium is reached between maximum revenue and user tolerance for BS. Look up "enshittification"
I wonder how the web would look like if we had not resisted paid content back then. There were attempts to do things differently. flattr was one thing for a while. Patreon, ko-fi and others are awesome for small creators. Gives them independence and freedom to do their thing and not depend on big platforms or corporations. The fediverse and open source are awesome.
There's still a lot of great stuff out there for those of us who know where to look. But large parts of the internet are atrocious.
No it didn't. Running a server today is dirt cheap compared to the bad old days. So is registering a domain. Getting a TLS certificate doesn't cost anything at all.
However, there are a lot more people here now. It used to be you could feasibly run a moderately popular website off a single server and it'd be fine. Now, with billions of people on the Internet, you need an army of servers distributed around the world if your site gets even remotely popular.
That's a feature, not a bug. Consent banners were manufactured as a way to turn public opinion against GDPR and generate political pressure to repeal it. “Look at how those Europeans ruined the web!” GDPR was supposed to pressure these unscrupulous advertisers into giving up their spooky tracking, but they did this instead. And it's working—most people blame GDPR for ruining the web, not the sleazeballs who actually ruined it.
Sure, servers are cheaper now. Domains are cheap now. TLS certs are free now. But that happened after the advertising business model became dominant.
For a while, server power was barely keeping up with the rise in demand, and you couldn't just add another cloud server or bump up the RAM allocation on the one you have, you had to physically install new hardware. That took a larger chunk of money than adding $5 to your hosting plan, and time to set up the hardware.
By the time the tech stack got significantly cheaper (between faster hardware and virtualization, not to mention Let's Encrypt), advertising was already entrenched and starting to coalesce around a handful of big networks.
honestly heartbreaking in a lot of ways to see the current turn of events and how the web is today.
but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would've been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could've worked? but its really hard to say.
i don't even have a problem with ads on sites to an extent, as long as they aren't overly obnoxious and don't spy on you and track your every move. that shouldn't be too much to ask, right? but alas, i guess it is in 2023. 🤷♀️
just such a sad state of things. the web is currently unusable without a content blocker or protection of some kind, which is insane to think about. this all really only scratches the surface too of the modern web's issues. in general a lot of the individuality and freedom of the internet is just... gone. all completely corporate and shall now, so much seo spam and clickbait and other garbage, just for the most clicks or revenue possible. there's little quality left for sure.
feels like we lost the internet in a lot of ways. i wonder what the solution is, if there even is one. i guess we just can't give up fighting.
@Skimmer5728 I think what we're doing right here in the fediverse is a good solution. We're just building a parallel infrastructure to their dumb web3.0 garbage. Those who want a better Internet can come over here and those who want to stick with garbage can stick with it.
well said, i agree, the fediverse is definitely a good approach.
i think the only concern will be getting more people to move here and adopt it, it'll be harder to convince and appeal to more mainstream people. but i guess that'll be easier and easier as the web goes to shit and gets worse and worse over time than it already is, lol.
Fediverse is really still in its infancy. Its only just shifted from those with a lot of technical knowledge to those with a fluency of it.
It's when the average person can create an account and start engaging that it will reach critical mass.
It's not a bad thing that its taking a while to get there so that certain cultures, terms of engagement and stable/viable instances (each with their funding streams) can be established. If there were a sudden mass exodus from centralised systems to the fediverse, it would just mean a massive loss of the signal to noise ratio rather than a slow, measure integration of each wave of new users.
Eternal September. There's no integrating the masses to a 'better' network. I think to some extent you're going to get what the big names have now because it's the people, not just the sites.
And the fediverse sign up is exactly as hard as an email sign up already. Idk how you make it easier.
The "web3.0" is also an attempt to escape the nightmare that "web2.0" has become, just centered on Blockchains and the technologies they allow. Technically, the web3.0 is not at odds with the fediverse, it might even be that some day both might end up working together.
For example, one of the alternatives to Reddit that's being worked on, is a Blockchain + IPFS solution that already has some features like user migration between instances. It's a bit hard to expect to onboard the average user to a full crypto experience, but things like Lemmy could be the "base service", while someone looking for something more could look into integrations with other solutions.
The comment was getting long and I didn't want to get into socioeconomic side effects, mobile, or other factors.
It's not all bleak. The internet is still built on a foundation of free and open technology. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), TCP/IP and DNS …
The best thing we can do is teach those things. Keep them accessible to as many people as possible and make sure they don't become forgotten arcane voodoo knowledge. Anyone can set up a website and share it with others. We don't have to depend on big social networks.
The biggest challenge is how do you get people to be curious about this stuff? Back in the day, we had to learn, we had to look under the hood, because half the time stuff just didn't work and we needed to figure out how to fix it. But today everything is hidden behind a shiny UI and most things just work. There's no need to look under the hood (if you even still can, and it's not some encrypted blob or compiled binary webASM nonsense).
Not as simple as it used to be. Thanks to the abuse from ad, social media, and other tracking networks, now you need to comply with the cookie laws, personal information laws, data retention laws... and so on. It's no longer as simple as setting up a website and just sharing it; just having an uncontrolled log, or lacking one, can land you in trouble. Allow random users add content (like comments) to the site, and you can get drowned before even realizing what's happening.
You're posting in the solution right now :)
Lemmy does give me a strong nostalgic feeling of old school forums. I think the Fediverse is going to give enthusiasts what they've been missing. I just hope it lasts and continues to grow.
That's what pisses me off about Bluesky. Mastodon already exists, and is not for profit. We don't need another "decentralized" platform that intentionally doesn't talk to the Fediverse and is trying to create its own version. Yet my fear is Bluesky will end up being mainstream and those for-profit CEOs will continue running the internet into the ground. I hope people end up realizing Mastodon already exists, and is a better version of what Bluesky wants to be.
There was the original idea of microtransactions, where you could buy some credit, say $10, and every time you read an article, the author would get fraction of a cent. Or you'd need to manually approve it, such as with a like.
Of course companies saw a good idea and ran it into the ground, so now microtransactions mean something very different, and in their stead there are subscriptions for everything.
So people don't want advertisements but they also don't want to pay for a bajillion subscriptions. I think the solution is socialization of the Internet. Governments should simply guarantee funding and make up the cost in taxes.
i think most people would be fine with advertising, as long as it 1: isn't overly obnoxious, 2: isn't scammy and doesn't contain malware or other garbage, and 3: doesn't track you and everything you do. advertising itself isn't the problem, it's the way it's being currently handled on the internet that's the issue.
I'm not inherently against the idea of advertising. I get why it exists, and I'm all for it. What I resent and have no intention of complying with, are the attempts at identifying me and collecting my data, as a means to 'manipulate' me into buying things. And, it also can't ruin my experience on the site. If advertisements were minimal and invasive, didn't try installing all kinds of ad/bloat-ware on my machine, you'd never see me making any attempt to protect myself against it.
I feel like that's where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn't a privacy and fee nightmare, I'm sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.
But I also fear a lot of the damage could've been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.
Im sure you could go to a site to load up your tip jar and then click a tip button on sites you want to tip.
However, I don't think taking the internet away from poor people is a good move.
I could imagine it functioning as a tax-funded budget, but coordinating such a thing globally and coming to a consensus seems impossible, that's something we're really bad at, and it would have the very same underfunding problems as other even more urgent expenses have.
As an existing alternative to ad-funded sites, I've seen non-profit news survive on donations and tax deductions, so maybe strengthening that model could work, but it would only help with larger entities that can be registered.
We need something to replace ads, that's for sure, or at least decrease their influence.
Definitely. It creates a monoculture and theres a few that are easily identifiable that have had terrible repercussions.
I like your suggestion with easily payable small amounts. Because the way payment currently works is just not scale-able on an individual level. Sure, $20 per month for a technical news site would be worth it ... if that was the only news site you are consuming. But it isn't. I consume multiple tech news, local news, etc. I can't get back my full worth of spent money per site, because my time is split between multiple sites; and my time is finite.
I also can't just say "well, this month I consume only site A, next only site B, etc.", because that defeats how "news" work. In the end I skim headlines (or even sometimes content) and THEN it shows what is actually of interest and where I stay longer/dig deeper/actually read full.
In a perfect world we probably could have a "tip jar" at the end of every article that people throw in digital cash when the article was worth it. Unfortunately too many people would abuse it and simply not pay at all, so authors will have to ask for payment upfront ... but then I pay for something which I don't even know will be good. Maybe after seeing the full article (not yet reading it in detail) I realize it's not the kind of content I hoped for.
That thing was indeed easier with print media. You go to the store, flick through the magazine/paper and if you like it you pay for it and go read it.
I worked for a startup in the 90s, pre-enshittification, that wanted to empower micropayments on the web. Obviously, even when mostly "frictionless", users rejected the concept. Capitalism is going capitalize, but this is also the fault of users who demand "free".
This is in my opinion the crux of the matter. People want content for free: they won't pay for it directly and they won't watch ads (because they're often much too intrusive.) Of course the root problem is the economic system, but barring a near global revolution that's not going to change
Great comment. I made a community called !oldweb today to share and discuss old style websites and sites that aren't just the top social media sites. So things like quirky personal websites, webrings, website lists made by others etc.
Until there's enough traction, would you be open to having digital garden discussions there too?
Not gonna lie, I Don't know what that is, but if its somewhat related then why not!
In a broad sense its bringing old school web architecture (everyone owns their own self contained corner of the internet with internal and external links) to modern web technology (things look nice)
Then 100% yes. Love the idea.
I love this idea. I'm gonna teach myself how to make a website specifically to help bring the web back to its roots.
I'm new to lemmy. Do you know a way to link to a community that works everywhere? I see only „!oldweb“ as text without a link in your post an don’t know on which instance it runs. Probably !oldweb@lemmy.ml? Or what is the correct way to link to a community?
I'm still trying to figure this stuff out myself man. I just went onto the community and the link in the URL bar is https://lemmy.ml/c/oldweb
Not sure if that works for you?
Ok, I’m able to paste this link on the search box of the instance I’m on and then I can subscribe to this community.
I’ve seen some communities mentioned in the form of !oldweb@lemmy.ml but it probably depends of the client if it gets parsed as a clickable link?
I have much to learn. 😁
It reminds me when Jaron Lanier said in today's world, anytime two people come together on the Internet, that arrangement is financed by a third party, that believes he can manipulate the first two. I really miss the good old days when the Internet was still a dirt road you could meet fellow travelers on, and have fun exploring it.
It was free, as long as we paid for every minute of phone line use.
The first big problem was malware in ads (and web in general). This has caused people to install adblocks on their parents' and friends' devices.
Then there were the annoying ads: autoplaying videos, popups and other shit. This has caused a lot of normies to install adblockers themselves.
Then the privacy concerns, where even basic users notice that they look at a product on one store and now the recommendations follow them everywhere.
But the marketing companies keep pushing, and the OS providers like Google, MS and Apple keep restricting what you can install on your machine, this is a full-on war between users and the big tech.
Nobody was complaining about small banner ads. But they just have to keep pushing and break things. It's like with banks, or mythological creatures - insatiable.
I use uBlock Origin in Firefox, with all the boxes ticked. It's not only adds it blocks also plentiful of trackers. Just to make my visits on today's web usable. As a result, my laptops / smartphone resources are saved up, more battery time or cooler device as example.
Personally I like ads, totally ok for it - if informative, sharing some kind of relevant value with greater good. Companies should let the product or service itself advertise, not throw these on people constantly.
This is why I whitelist duckduckgo in firefox in my ublock extension. I will gladly look at the relevant ads at the top of the list, knowing they are just that. I glance at them, most of the time it's a sales pitch, I go "not interested" and just move down the page to the results. 100% fine with that.
If the content was paid, a lot of countries would simply be excluded from the internet.
Unfortunately, for most sites, using ads in the only viable alternative. I think we are so fast to reject ads, instead of finding ways to make non invasive ones. A balanced use of ads could make the web free and readable.
There are balanced ways to use ads, and a few places use them... but most soon get onto the "maximize income" bandwagon, and turn their site or app into an ad infected cesspool. They don't get penalized for that, all to the contrary, while advertisers see their ad conversion go down from sites over-infected with ads, so they don't want to offer deals good enough for those who only show a reasonable amount to survive.
This is a real problem. Ans they don't realize it just push people into using adblock, which, in turn, reduce their revenue and push them into more aggressive adds, which push even more people into using adblock...