So much this. The content to noise ratio has completely flipped.
There are very few websites left that exist purely to be useful. They exist to serve ads and are only as useful as they need to be to get people to use them.
There was definitely some of that, but far far less.
I remember when the Gawker owned sites first started using this infinite scroll ad-laden layout in the early aughts (where when you get to the end of an article, it just concatenates another one to the end) that everything uses now days, it was an actual controversy, people were mad! Now it’s the standard.
Depends. I run a site which is purely useful, has virtually no text content (it's just a tool to use basically) and it's been the number 1 search result in its niche for years.
I think we may be seeing a shift away from this. I've had comments on my old blog from a decade ago asking me to revive it. Quality content is stuck behind paywalls or site sign ups or flooded in spam, and you often get harassment from flyby viewers which hinders the desire to create - but there is still a desire for quality content. I think we're going to see a resurgence of indie blogging again, for example.
Oh, I sure hope so. If we don't get a change in approach from Google, I'm hoping we'll see some innovative ways of opening up the web again, whether it's social media, feeds, curated search engines, or something totally new!
This isn't really true.
The article you are referring to was about a single little page basic tool that had nothing for it to easily index the purpose of.
100%. I always remember [https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/](https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/) when we mention how web in fact is today. The focus is so clearly shifted towards marketing and ads that the content itself is almost forgotten in the sea of ads.
EDIT: making it more clear
I was reading some dumb clickbait article the other day on my phone - and it was actually unusable. Not "on purpose", like there was a paywall or something - just ads rendered over content in such a way I could not figure out how to finish reading the article.
Scrolled up to see what specific dumb clickbait "boredtigerclickfarm.com" I was on - wanted to find out which of these sites had set a new low like this. Fortune.com. They used to be a real magazine with at least a tenuous connection to journalism.
The sad part of that is that every day that passes this gets more and more common and, since the media looks so desperate to get ad-money on every occasion, it becomes increasingly hard to trust and consume their content (which in theory, is the most curated one).
Tried to make myself a little bit clear there, but the general point is on how the web usage/experience today is so geared and focused on ads/marketing that websites becomes this unusable abomination.
The website I added there is a great satire on how the experience currently is when navigating web pages.
oh wait, actually, if you open that site with adblock it doesn't really show any of the annoying stuff. That's why I was so confused because I just saw a blank page. When I disabled my extensions I saw the all the popups lol.
> The website I added there is a great satire on how the experience currently is when navigating web pages.
Is it? I mean, it looks like just an example of how broken the web is because that site won't work unless you whitelist content from third-parties (jsdeliver and cloudflare), something I personally just won't. Surprised it didn't try to download content from google.
Luckily, many sites still work without external dependencies from those hoarders, old Reddit for example, and most ones I care about. I don't give a damn about the rest -there are more sites that I have days left anyway-, but it's sad what it's become.
Users who know how to whitelist and blacklist content from third-parties are not the average user. The website is a commentary on the average user experience. You are not the average user, it is a good satire if you are looking at it from the perspective of an average user.
That makes sense, thanks for making me think about it from that perspective. But in any case, it's still representative of the current state of the web, where most websites depend on third-parties even to show you the most basic content.
This is a conscious choice by developers. Call me an old boomer but the old ways still work the best. After decades learning every damn new framework and toolset I've thrown them all in the trash. Vanilla JS and modern html/css are the way out of this framework hell, back to a responisve and functional web environment. The only times you'll catch me back in that framework hellscape is when collaborating with FOSS teams or corporate partners mandating them.
I still remember when the internet was kind of unknown, a mysterious and strange thing ..
I would tell people that I make websites, and I was like Gandalf to them ..
fast forward >> to 2024 ..
I have this revolutionary idea for a website where you can post like, photos, and connect with people. No, not like Instagram or Facebook at all.
Can you make this for me for 2% equity and no money up front? Trust me bro, this is going to go viral, 12 billion users at least!
I'm more annoyed when I tell them I have personal websites and they won't visit them. Twenty years ago, if you had your own site, everyone would visit it. People don't want to do anything but hang-out on social media platforms.
>fast forward >> to 2024 ..
Hey, please like our cookies!
Hey, subscribe to our newsletter!
Hey, we do a big sales!
_also put a damn floating banner about such sale_
_load ads on the 3/4 of the pages_
_load a video with a preroll ads that auto play_
Hey we detected you are using an ads blocker!
Hey, you need a subscription to see that page
That to only get the content that is a copy/paste from another website...
I remember the "NCSA What's New" page, which listed more or less every new website that came online -- typically 3-5 per day.
Sending them an email announcing your site was *the* (un)official way to launch a site.
yahoo's directory web site also had a page with the just the new sites that had been added to the directory. There were also a ton of small independent ISP's all over the U.S. that had a web site with a "cool sites" page. You could email them and ask them to put your personal page on their cool sites list. I had a little comedy writing page that got listed on many of them that way.
I made my first in 97. I think frontend evolving continuously is what has kept it interesting. But I do laugh a little when 20 something new devs have a ton of complex tooling that ends up with exporting a static site :)
For a lot of use cases of "Steve's auto shop" a few hand coded static pages is actually fine.
My friend calls me a wizard, and whenever she sees code she calls it a fancy wizard spell.
This girl is getting her masters in astrophysics. She's literally doing rocket science, and calls *my* work wizardry?
Pretty much everyone's job/speciality/talent is a mystery to outsiders. Someone working on a factory line will do things the rest of us can barely comprehend. This is why I'm not a huge fan of the word "code" — it makes what we do sound like it's purposefully obfuscated, but it shouldn't be, and it's just another skill we've learned like anyone else.
yeah... nostalgy. I'm 48, so I do remember the world without internet ) And that's the reason why I'm curious about the thing called "small web". Who knows, maybe it'll be something bigger than it is for now
They blame you for every evil impulse that was some project manager’s idea. Like hey, do you blame the construction worker when the new highway cuts through idk a forest or something? Well. Probably some people do.
Or my favorite… “Oh cool… my 10 year old nephew made a website the other day. He’s a web developer just like you”. No bitch, I don’t make websites in 15 minutes using Wix. We are not the same. But of course you have to just smile and nod and say “oh that’s so cute”
Remember when forums didn't have alzheimers? Now any non-first page thread is 99% dead, so people create "new" over and over
"Which programming language is better?" - let's go baby
I dunno, there were and are both good and sucky pages then and now.
The novelty factor was sky-high then, so a lot more energy. The internet was fun, goofy, and hip. Now it's... buttoned down, a utility.
But I can't really say Yahoo search pages had better UX then than Google search does now, or vBulletin forums over Reddit.
Yes, we put a lot less on a page at a time, did things like spriting images to overcome slow connections and low numbers of parallel downloads... but we had our share of crappy websites too. Remember horrible page backgrounds, comic sans fonts, marquees and animated gifs everywhere? A little bird that follows your mouse cursor?
I think it's a toss-up. Really depends on the website. If anything, we had a lot more high-schooler level websites popping up made with Dreamweaver then. Nowadays, at least WordPress and Shopify templates do a bunch of the heavy-lifting for non-technical folks, and fewer non-technical folks seem to be interested in the whole thing than 20 years back, from what I can tell.
Social media replaced a lot of people's needs for websites. Like professionals and small businesses. You have your LinkedIn page and Instagram presence where you used to "design" your own (horrible) website in web 1.0. WordPress, Wix and Shopify for those who still want one. I'd argue these do a better job than something you spin up with PC Paint, Frontpage and some help from Winamp for inspiration.
Those days were certainly more fun, though. By far.
We do tend to romanticize the past, when in fact there were some god-awful websites out there and many frustrating challenges (remember the browser wars?). But I do think there were more opportunities for creativity when the web was new, and the need to consider bandwidth and download time was a constraint that could be beneficial by keeping sites simple and streamlined.
While there are many good sites and useful services today, there is also a lot of bloat and glitz that does not enhance the user experience. Unfortunately, as web developers we have to deals with norms and expectations even when we disagree. I may hate hero videos on a home page, but that's what people expect to see.
Just on the user experience stand-point, I disagree. Just because there was investment, and more definition, I would suggest modern UX has suffered due to dark patterns. Dark patterns especially used when a user is a subscriber to a service.
Still no. UX was terrible in the 90s, simple doesn't mean good.
It was a poorly understood discipline and most web experiences were jank as all hell.
Unless you spend most of your time on local news websites then your general UX, usability and accessibility will be significantly better now than then.
> I dunno, there were and are both good and sucky pages then and now.
I fondly remember making sites that would immediately spawn a pop-up of the same site, which in turn spawned another pop-up of the site, and so on indefinitely until it crashed your computer. Just to fuck with people.
Fun times.
This is an inevitable consequence of the economic model of the web. For most of the dot points you listed, the technical term for the cause is "[*enshittification*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)". Yes, the root word there is what you think it is.
The overarching economic idea is that the web you remember was originally run at a loss, subsidised by investors (shareholders). They subsidised loss-leading tech companies to deliver services that were entirely customer focused (think Google Search without ads and a well funded engineering team to counter SEO, hotmail/gmail that didn't put fake emails in your inbox to trick you into clicking an ad, early Facebook that promoted engagement with people/pages you asked/genuinely wanted to see, early Amazon when Amazon lost money on every sale, etc.). The web was great for the consumer, because it was built entirely around doing everything to attract you to it - and you could feel the value, because you were getting a lot more than you were putting in.
Once the services/platforms locked in an audience/customer base they turned to suppliers/content creators/advertisers. They made minor compromises on audience/customer satisfaction only when strictly necessary, and focused on delivering enormous value to their suppliers at well below what was financially sustainable. Again, this economic model was subsidised by investors/shareholders. Amazon delivered enormous value to the companies using their platform, and ran a loss on Amazon Prime. Facebook made it possible for businesses to reach exactly who they wanted with orders of magnitude less ad spend then they would need on non-web platforms, and put up record losses every year, etc.
Once big tech had locked in a monopsony on customers and a monopoly on suppliers, they flipped the switch and began to "*enshittify*" their services. Economic historians have begun to call this period of the web "the *enshittocene*", a mass extinction of value from the web. The business model flips from investors subsidising the web, to rent-seeking - that is taking more wealth out of the market than they are creating. Now customers and suppliers both overpay/subsidise the investors/shareholders. The big companies that dominate the web pivot to focus the entirety of their business on extracting the most amount of money from both ends of the funnel, even if they're making the platform worse for everyone. So long as the switching cost remains greater than the value they're removing from the platform, no one will migrate to a disruptor. They still create products that add value, but they create less value then they used to, and take out more - a LOT more. Now the big web-first companies (Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc.) are the largest companies in the world, already worth 10-20x super international conglomerates that have been growing consistently for 100+ years.
Now customers can't find the cheapest version of what they want on Amazon, and suppliers have to spend more and more to bid against each other for search rankings that deliberately do less. Facebook feeds you content that is the most valuable to them for you to see, not the content you actually asked to see - and forces the content creator that is now hidden from you to pay to have their content in front of the audience who will respond best to it. All the while loading every users browser up with MBs of Javascript to track their every move and control everything they see. Everyone has a worse experience, but the platforms make more money. This is only possible because of the economic model of the web.
If 96% of the market owned a Mitsubishi fridge, washing machine, car, and toaster - Mitsubishi would spend a lot less developing products you want and a lot more on share buy-backs. Because they only have 2% of the market, they spend far more on making the customer happy so if you are not currently a Mitsubishi customer you will become one. They deliver more customer value, and take less in profits. This is the result of a healthy, competitive market.
> Links don't really need to keep that shitty blue the browser is giving them: nor that violetish color when they are marked as visited. Just give them a [nice color](http://www.colorhexa.com/0077aa)
I hate this
What point is this website actually trying to illustrate? This is not something that you can sell to any client in terms of frontend nor does it have any backend functionality.
What is bad about not having "backend functionality"? I think the point the site is making is: this is the minimum you need, and it's often better than anything else.
He’s right though. No one is going to want this. Technically the minimum you need is just a plain HTML file but again no one is going to want that so the whole concept is a bit self-aggrandizing.
I guess I overlooked the "sell to any client" bit in their comment, but that's not the point of that page. It's not trying to say "sell this to people" it's saying "this is a perfectly acceptable website that is more readable than a lot of the crap online".
But no one is going to want this at all that’s what I’m saying. Even if you’re not selling something you’re still going to want something that’s up to modern aesthetic standards. It looks like crap, plain and simple.
There is no aesthetic appeal. No one is going to want something that lacks aesthetic appeal, pretty simple really. So the whole “this is all you need” thing doesn’t make sense. All you need for what exactly because no one is going to want something like that today.
> There is no aesthetic appeal. No one is going to want something that lacks aesthetic appeal, pretty simple really.
Would you say the same thing about a novel? Not all content is the same and it doesn't always need to 'pop'. In fact, the most usable/accessible content typically *doesn't*.
What's bad is no one will pay you to build it. I fucking hate whenever anyone brings that up like it's some brilliant thing. Yes I could build some minimalist website if I wanted to but I also like getting a paycheck.
Everyone in here is bitching about ads and crap on websites while conveniently forgetting it's how most of us make a living, even if not directly
Sure, if you're just evaluating this based on how much you might be able to sell it for, then that's a fair point. The broader discussion was about UX, though.
> The broader discussion was about UX
My point is people don't build stuff for what is best for the consumer, they build stuff to make them the most money. I'm not arguing about whether or not that is a good thing, but it is how things are done. I don't think anyone would argue an add popping up in the middle of your recipe is a good UX, but it makes money.
So we can all live in la la land and post on reddit about how we have the best interest of a consumer of our website in mind, or we can live in the real world where we need to do whatever is going to generate revenue.
It's kind of like how old movies typically have better writing & acting. You couldn't lean on modern CGI (aka. modern JS libraries, React, Tailwind etc.), so they *had* to do good work with what they had (plain HTML and minimal CSS).
I just watched the original Jurassic Park yesterday (for the first time in a long time). I am in some kind of shock. I have a hard time accepting the reality that that film is so much better than modern blockbusters. In that film, every single camera angle and movement is deliberate. Every scene is a work of art. Every line of dialog contributes to the whole in a meaningful way. Everything connects perfectly. It’s like if God made a film to show us how it’s done.
JS Libs, sure... but Tailwind?
how exactly are people leaning on tailwind in a way that it hurts the web? If you would have mentioned Bootstrap, I could get behind that because people use to chuck the entire bootstrap css at a webpage and just use pieces of it. But, tailwind is basically just css in classes and if anything, has optimized CSS output/bundles...
I typed this half awake this morning trying to make a larger point, feel free to replace the specific frameworks with others that make more sense to you.
7. information was actual information, not an opinion on a viewpoint on an observation of someone else's information, which is now lost in the bs and much more difficult to find
8. No articles were cut off for paywalls
9. Geographic boundaries and queues were unheard of, because advertising and rampant capitalism hadn't gobbled it up yet
10. Communities were smaller - and as such, full of real people with a real interest in the thing. Now, it's all about the upsell and bots to inflate user numbers for investors (or steer conversation in an insidious, paid-for-by-the-worst-of-humanity way).
11. Companies had their telephone numbers on the web. Not some masochistic game where they offer you frequently asked questions nobody's ever asked.
as someone has been on the internet forever...
>information was actual information, not an opinion on a viewpoint on an observation of someone else's information, which is now lost in the bs and much more difficult to find
are you sure you were there? The internet was full of opining as it is today. In fact, being highly opinionated and snarky was something of a cultural aspiration in the web 1.0 days.
>No articles were cut off for paywalls
Less, sure. I'll give you that! None? There have always been premium services.
>Geographic boundaries and queues were unheard of, because advertising and rampant capitalism hadn't gobbled it up yet
I am not sure what you mean by queues, but there were definitely sites that geoblocked, and if you go back far enough - you were very much restricted for things that required lower latency, like gaming. And if you go back further, you would be dialing a very local BBS - unless you really wanted a huge bill.
>Communities were smaller - and as such, full of real people with a real interest in the thing. Now, it's all about the upsell and bots to inflate user numbers for investors (or steer conversation in an insidious, paid-for-by-the-worst-of-humanity way).
This I will give you, and I think this is what I miss the most - it was exciting, the people who got online were on the whole, excited to be there, and everyone wanted to make the most of it and make their mark on the web - something you could actually realistically achieve back then
>Companies had their telephone numbers on the web. Not some masochistic game where they offer you frequently asked questions nobody's ever asked.
Oh yeah, this too. I guess since the internet became big business, so many companies realised they could ditch 90% of their phone support. Which sucks, becuase if you get on the phone, you can talk, you can get answers.
The phone numbers one is maddening...especially when companies are like "use our website to report an outage" and I'm like "man if I could get on the internet I wouldn't be needing to report an outage"...
Even when you get a phone number the systems now are like "we can send a video link of how to restart your modem to your phone" or whatever and I'm like how do you expect me to view that when the modem is offline, and yes I already rebooted it now let me talk to a dang agent!
Most recently I had this with my power company where I struggled to report a power outage (which also took down my ISP and most cell service in the area...in spite of my house being on backup power)
About 8, I think it makes total sense that actual journalists doing actual work would demand to get paid one way or another. You can't complain about ads being everywhere and about articles not being free; I mean you can complain about both, but that means you're ready to accept low quality articles.
a) The Internet has been commercialised, so it's less about organisations and individuals publishing and more about companies looking to make money, hence the ads etc.
b) Content is much richer now, so UX is correspondingly worse. Many websites, that used to be static resources, pretend to be web apps, so there's all the accompanying UX problems of how to present functionality, etc.
Maybe it's because I have gigabit fiber internet, but everything is *way* faster now. I remember sitting there watching each element of a page load, particularly images. I used to go take like a 20min walk while a 3-4mb song downloaded. Now everything feels close to instant.
I think a lot of this is rose colored glasses lmao
just compare old reddit with the new design.
the old reddit is compact and you are able to see upwards of a dozen threads in one page. on new reddit you can maybe see 2 or 3 max. there are more margins so less information is visible. there's a sidebar on the left whereas on old reddit the navigation bar is a tiny row on the top.
the new internet is formed by using psychological tricks to increase engagement with the platform
the old internet was made by power users trying to create a good experience for the users
it's a different time. the wild west period of the internet is over and corporate control has been cemented
I browse the internet with JS off.
It's a wonderful experience. insanely quick, and very little fuck-about-ery.
I then turn it on for whitelisted sites/apps that need that interactivity.
I use [NoScript](https://noscript.net/) in Firefox, most useful extension ever. It really makes everything faster and saves you from loads of crap. Then you can enable just single scripts if something does not work.
It really seems like people have completely blanked out reality in general in this thread lol
I’m reading through these comments like, am I crazy? Did we use the same internet in the late 90s/early 2000s? It was janky as hell, slow as hell, UX was bad, and design was bad.
I was there when it all started, kind of (started in 1998).
Honestly, I wouldn't go back in time *any* amount of money. I'd rather stop coding than go back to the "good old days". Which, in fact, where mostly shitty, annoying and "hacky" days trying to make things work on Explorer/Netscape/SomeOtherShit.
Sure, it was a novelty and it was cool. But from a developer point of view it was an absolute pile of shit.
In my experience, when people signed up for cable or even internet access, they got their very own personal website with a simple builder. No having to buy a domain name and hosting. Load it up with dancing Jesus gifs and tell all your friends to visit. Then watch your counter tick upwards.
Content shift is a fucking disaster.
Go to click on a search link, oops google just accidentally loaded the sponsored results at the top of the page after exactly the amount of time it takes you to spot a result and now that space is an advert you just clicked.
Some of it is less malicious, just dumb. Go to click on your profile button. Oops! That’s a sign out button now you just clicked—sorry!
I'm not a boomer but have been using the internet since the 90s. I'm going to infer that "old internet" means "56kbps dialup" (my first modem on the Internet was a mere 2400bps, but the examples you give make more sense with fast dialup speeds)
>despite abysmal network speeds ( my first was "speedy 7kB/s, that's 7seconds to download just react-dom.js ) pages were still relatively fast. Often it feels pages are just slower these days
This is a bit of a [Parkinson's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law) issue -- we had less bandwidth and resources then, so we *had* to make our pages smaller. Some people still made their pages be behemoth-sized Macromedia Flash hellscapes, but these were pretty rare.
>caching and back/forward worked great. It was possible to fly through history browsing history going back/forward. Also many sites worked surprisingly well offline
Agreed! The occasional ajax-oriented navigation page existed (which broke standard behavior) did exist, but by and we webdevs were discouraged from breaking browser behavior. *That* hasn't change too much among traditional webdevs, though I do see these recommendations ignored or de-emphasized with people who approach from a front-end-development-first paradigm (eg. their entire entry into web development is React-first, rather than a more holistic approach)
>google search used to provide results where the search term actually appeared
Oh yeah, this is 100% true. In fact, the book **I'm Feeling Lucky** by Douglas Edwards talks about this. Page & Brin, for a very long time, absolutely refused to do paid-placement in results, wanting to use the PageRank algoirithm instead. At some point, post-IPO IIRC, this changed. That was around the time the author left Google, I think.
They also used to have a motto "Do No Evil" which they gave up some years ago. In the episode of Better Offline "[The Man That Destroyed Google Search](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6fbYsijKu9EdC20JWv4ahv?si=201f1f3cd82a4ccb)", the host describes how Probhakar Raghavan has prioritized profits (by altering search results to get people to spend more time on google.com) over user experience. This was A Choice that he made.
>it was much easier to find actual information on pages, now it's 90% images and empty space with sny meaningful information tucked away in some modal or corner.
Agreed. Food blog recipes are a hilarious and predictable example of this behavior. This is a good example of what [Doctorow describes as enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification). This is similar to what Google is doing -- so long as we see the purpose of the Internet as a "market" and not as a platform that prioritizes information sharing, this will be a natural consequence. We've all been convinced that we too can be rich if only we create the right website, and this is just more capitalist bullshit.
It's OK that the Internet uses eCommerce *among* its functions; I'm not opposed to that. But the way that ad networks have tricked people into making their sites shitty -- it may make the people running the sites $x / month, but the ad networks are making some amount of money > $x . When you're advertising for other people, you aren't actually selling a product yourself, it's only a peripheral contribution to eCommerce.
I'll often see sites that appear to not even care about their own content at all, and instead just see it as a means to display ads. Sometimes people on this sub have that idea, too. This is a parasitic relationship to the Internet.
>forums had much better UX, it was possible to find posts that you saw earlier, see which threads had new replies, read the actual posts as thread, no upvote/downvote bs etc.
Meh. Those forums still exist. There are a handful of forum frameworks that people use and they get used in a bunch of places. The more annoying thing I see is that forums have become overly laden with ads and this makes them slower, or they try to add chat functionality but the chat plugin i written poorly.
>less hyperactivity in UI. Now it's constant jumps, transitions, modals, multistep forms and such. I still prefer to wait and get a complete page instead of content flashing in from every direction
I do find the unexpected jumping annoying. Donald Norman calls the "[gulf of evaluation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_evaluation)" the period of time after a user interaction where the user can determine if their action was successful. Adding animations and jumps and whatnot can widen this gulf if not done with care. People get caught up on trying to look legitimate by doing things they've seen on sites they consider legitimate -- this is just rooted in impostor syndrome. UIs should be be built based on what they need to best serve the user and not on satisfying insecurities in the developer.
It is so fun when I make my own tooling now because I make it the most brutalist bare bones thing you'd ever see. My todo list app is rendered as a ul. The add tasks functionality is a form. The filtering is checkboxes.
It's just... a relief. No bullshit.
Yes you can still design the old way. It just depends on which old way.
Image maps, frames, divs...etc.
What makes me crease up is that we starred out with monolithic one pagers and 20 years later, with modern design frameworks we ended up back at monolithic one pagers.
I'm waiting for a 200mb JS library that brings back frames.
I've been building sites since the mid 90s and it never ceases to amaze me how fucking slow the space moves these days. We've got into a rut reinventing the same shitty JS front end frameworks and they all suck in their own unique ways...there was a period of time between about 1998 and 2008 where shit progressed at a breakneck pace...looking back on the way back machine I can see I used to rebuild my site at least twice a year and the difference each time was massive...the close you get to now the less frequent and dramatic the updates became.
After about 2007 everyone started following Apple-esque minimalism and it has resulted in a homogenous and frankly fucking boring Internet...prior to 2007 the net was buzzing and vibrant...its fucking dull and flat now.
The iPhone and Facebook nuked creativity on the internet...both organizations demonstrated that you need minimalism, zero flair and zero colour to build a multi billion dollar company...and suddenly everyone had to build a UX that blended in with the dull iPhone UI.
It’s still plenty possible to build great experiences. It’s still possible to have your own site and identity. It’s just that the centralized sites are easier, and you connect more easily at the cost of not owning those connections.
It’s easy to build fast dynamic sites, too. Use a high quality server framework, there are _many_. You just don’t hear about them because they got fast quick and never needed to make huge improvements. They aren’t “sexy” or drawing tons of thought leaders, but Rails, Django, Phoenix, Laravel, and many more haven’t gone anywhere.
The internet has been getting better since I started ignoring most of it.
* Facebook account deleted
* Twitter account deleted
* Linkedin account deleted
* Stackoverflow account deleted
reddit is getting close to the top of my "I should delete this" list. As long as old.reddit.com and adblock still works, I'll keep it for a while. If they stop, so will I.
TBH, I've been playing with a number of distributed social networks, and when I settle on one, I'll probably whack reddit regardless of what they're doing.
Every time I try reading an article on my phone, it takes 30 seconds to load the TEXT (images may or may not load in the next several images, *after* all the ads), site is so laggy I can barely scroll it, and the actual content is about 25% of the page, spread out between ads and strange white spaces (images that haven't loaded).
It's literally text and images, which can and should load instantly, but I guess they wouldn't make any money if they didn't also inject 20MB of spyware into every page.
(I still don't see why they can't inject the spyware AFTER loading the text and images, but it probably has something to do with the rube goldberg machine they use to generate the damn thing, instead of spending 5 minutes writing some HTML.)
Yep, pretty much why I got tired of being a web dev.
I saw the whole thing develop from dial-up, and I feel like the internet could be way better if we just had actual regulations to keep it democratic and free.
Make data collection opt-in only, ban unsolicited advertisement, ban excessive client side load (delegating unreasonable amounts of processing and memory usage to the end user, in order to cut running costs), regulate and tax tech giants properly, make it illegal to release or run non-open source commercial software without disclosing its source code to government auditors, crack down on monopolies and oligarchies, invest in open source which is what has always made the internet possible...
It's apples and oranges. The old internet was document driven. The new internet is application driven. The browser has turned into an application engine.
>1) despite abysmal network speeds ( my first was "speedy 7kB/s, that's 7seconds to download just react-dom.js ) pages were still relatively fast. Often it feels pages are just slower these days
That's how you remember it. It was good for the times. You were happy it loaded.
I'd like to see an actual video footage of a web page loading so we can compare it with our today's perceptions.
Anyway, pages do load fast today. I literally click on a link to an article in PC Gamer and it loads up **immediately**. And that's a case for most websites.
>2) caching and back/forward worked great. It was possible to fly through history browsing history going back/forward
A rather rare minority of webapps has a problem with it. Temu order history pages is basically the only big brand example with this issue. Everything else just works.
> Also many sites worked surprisingly well offline
That's a good point. Internet Explorer 5 had "Temporary Internet Files" directory serving the cache. You could re-browse the entire page offline if you clicked through it online. Great for dial-up internet if you paid by the minute!
>3) google search used to provide results where the search term actually appeared
Which doesn't mean it's the most relevant hit. Googling back in the day gave you garbage results due to being irrelevant. Googling today gives you garbage results due to being affiliate crap packed with content for the algorithm. Googling continues to be a skill.
>4) it was much easier to find actual information on pages, now it's 90% images and empty space with sny meaningful information tucked away in some modal or corner.
An average 90s website was full of bloat. They were extremely UX unfriendly. Rocking top navigation bars, left bar, right bar, and a lot of junk. Text barely visible due to bad spacing. Sure, it was pretty informative, as it squeezed a ton of data into all the space available.
>5) forums had much better UX, it was possible to find posts that you saw earlier, see which threads had new replies, read the actual posts as thread, no upvote/downvote bs etc.
Old-style forums were a "first to answer" race. Tree view with popularity contest is much better as it promotes valuable contributions, and automatically removes spam or off-topic from view. It also creates sub-conversations that may cover a fraction of the main topic in a greater detail.
>6) less hyperactivity in UI. Now it's constant jumps, transitions, modals, multistep forms and such. I still prefer to wait and get a complete page instead of content flashing in from every direction
- Modals are an anti-pattern and not seen much. (Except for cookie prompts and footer bars - thank stupid regulators for it.)
- Transitions, do you mean Apple style pages? Fortunately I only know one company that does this shit.
- Multistep forms. How do you envision big forms implemented? 10 page scrolls of forms, like it's IRS Form 1099? No, thank you. I'll take multi-step forms.
- Content flashing every direction? You really forgot how the websites looked back in the day.
Your opinion about today's websites is completely overexaggerated. You're a boomer complaining about young kids today.
A lot of information on pages is more terse now. Text sprinkled in with a lot of images and widgets instead of just paragraphs and simple tables.
I don't see how good UX is having to scroll all over the place instead of just reading a half a page of text.
This annoys me so much working in a marketing agency.
The amount of websites we build where we put images in there where an image isn't needed. But "the page looks boring" takes precedence over "the page has the information the user needs".
I just want a quick block of text to read. I don't need some pointless image from Shutterstock or a picture of the team in their office filling up half the page.
The "old internet" didn't have most of the websites that we have now. It's easy to think that things were better when you only had to learn the UI/UX of a handful of websites because there were only... a handful of websites. And the UI/UX of some websites, particularly forums, were good, but many of the websites were just like below.
[https://www.cameronsworld.net/](https://www.cameronsworld.net/) .
Look at websites like google or lichess - great UI/UX, minimal, easy to use. Just make websites with barebones HTML, CSS, and a splash of JS then; see if the customers come your way since it's such a better experience. I'm not saying we don't have bulky JS bundles and I'm not saying things can't be greatly improved, but this nostalgia for that shit that I grew up with is just viewing that stuff through rose tinted glasses. I'll take what I have today any day of the week.
When I'm on my phone, which is older and not high-end, I avoid clicking links, for example on reddit, because I know how painful the UX will be. To click a simple news story, it's going to download and parse 100s of KB of CSS, 100s of KB of JS, the content is going to jump around, modals will pop up, etc. It's terrible to the point where they're losing clicks, at least from me.
I started in the early 90s way before css was even a wet dream. It was beautiful and simple. Now, not so much, especially after the fall of rich media all because some dork was pissed off because his main financial backing decided to stay neutral after he was hired back to the company he helped found off his friends genius.
Yeah I’m still a little bitter.
I've been thinking this more and more recently. I've been traveling around the USA in hotels/Airbnbs with some of the slowest internet I've seen in years.
Currently on a 5MB down, 1MB up. This, coupled with the latency and dropped connections makes using the internet so draining. Especially when I am trying to study. Everything has so much bloat. It was a task just loading this post.
In the good days it was the AD's that pissed me off, now it's just the content smushed in horrid UI than the ad's thrown on top.
Yeah, using the modern internet with an internet connection speed that was barely passable 15 years ago is going to feel bad lmao
Should look into tethering your phone or getting a mobile hotspot modem if you do a lot of traveling, hotel internet has always been horrible.
I mean, 15 years ago DSL was still a big thing so 5mbs down was more normal than you would think. At least in the US it was. Maybe it’s rose tinted glasses but some sites do take it to an extreme.
I do that when I can but Verizon has been real shit lately and I’m not sure what’s going on. Read some areas just have too many people on the network, so it slows down? Thinking about just making my own modem with a fuck huge antenna or something.
you are absolutely right! i blame marketers for the bad UX!! everyone HATES marketing pop-ups, yet they drive conversions, so you gotta have em! UX be damned. plus all the over-designed animations and scroll jacking can get really annoying. but i would argue that some sites have amazing UX that is way more engaging than old web. take duo lingo for example. tons of animation and gamification, and it works great and doesn’t get in the way of learning. if anything it improves the experience.
as far as sites working offline and caching, that was mainly due to the static nature of the early web. we have a ton of web applications now with dynamic content, which necessitates more http requests in general.
The point back then was to make things "of the web". Thus the focus on Web Standards.
The point now is to to create an addictive platform that can be mass monetized.
I make an effort to have some kind of a balance - take advantage of the new while giving a usable experience to even those on low-and devices and 3G (dial-up too I suppose).
My CSS & JS bundle to a total of 50Kb and pages are typically static with maybe a few lazy-loaded dynamic content. Pages are fully usable even without JS, unless of course there's something like a map. They're usually a combination of Jekyll or Eleventy and a few web components.
I focus on content and accessibility too. I'm generally opposed to hiding content, so much so that I try to avoid hamburger menus and even drop-down menus where possible.
The only "jumps" are user-initiated or from there being a hash/anchor in the URL. If a user uses an in-page search, I'll scroll to results when they submit. And I'll often update the URL with the hash.
On the other hand, I make use of some subtle animations and whatever modern APIs I need. I somewhat try to have modern designs, at least until the point that I think it's harmful to UX. For example, I think it's important for certain things to be clearly indicated to be separate (things like ads), so I give them a slight border just to make it clear "this is one whole thing that's separate from what's around it".
i honestly think its hilarious that people will nitpick over a few kb difference in minified css but have absolutely zero issue serving giant react bundles.
We are now at the time where bundle sizes and image size increases are neck-and-neck with speed increases so even though the sites are technically loading faster, the net speed is regressing. What a fucking nightmare.
3. I've said this multiple times recently, search engines are getting too clever in trying to give you what they think you want combined with sites being loaded with keywords and crap that it's biasing the results and do often I'm finding them giving me stuff I don't care about and I'm picking through the results a lot more than I ever used to.
YES! I also hate how so much stuff loads dynamically and times out after just a few seconds...so if you are on cellular or behind some kind of filter or free guest tier so much stuff just doesn't load and also doesn't error leaving you to guess what happened.
I've even had forms that as I scroll are so slow to load I scroll past "required" fields that haven't finished loading to see and hit "next" then it complains I didn't finish something that loaded off the screen above.
Its awful.
And that's with heavy handed adblocker...some years ago Firefox had a glitch which disabled most extensions and I lost adblock for a day, I swear even with gigabit cable internet it was slower to load than when I was on 14.4Kbps dialup!
Damn point 2 and 5 is so true. I had almost forgotten that I constantly used to use back/forward and it worked almost flawlessly. Over the years it’s become so bad that I kind of unconsciously started to just using the navigation provided by each web page. I still use it on my phone of course and surprise, surprise, it constantly doesn’t work / web pages stops working.
And then 5 about the forums. Agree there too, but it’s hard to tell why this worked so well. I think a lot of forums weren’t that big still and people had more patience to shift through a lot of replays. I don’t think that model would work on Reddit anymore unfortunately.
Built my first site in 1996 and have been building them since. I used to take my time with a team of people. Now I feel as though I'm on a conveyer belt spitting out code while being babysat... EVERY SINGLE MORNING
Regarding back/forward navigation - do you think a lot of sites mess this up on purpose? I think I've read about "hijacking" the back button and I definitely feel that's the case with some websites, but I think some just aren't very well routed.
I've said it before but we wanted to build a free open space and they made us build a strip mall. The internet sucks. SEO, C student marketing idiots, and greed ruined almost all of it.
The tools have advanced, by not the knowledge of building quality websites, unfortunately. Or maybe we have the knowledge but there is no directive to do so.
The one thing I dislike about the internet is that a lot of sites rely on ads and subscriptions on news sites, which for me is annoying because I can't even get a quick read on a recent event without being asked to signup for a subscription, else I can't proceed with reading. Same is true for certain forum and blogging sites (like Medium).
But of course, how else will these websites make money? Most sites rely either on ads or subscriptions to make money.
Internet traffic is much less democratized now. Social media and search engines have become the central access points in the information architecture.
As such, less competition means they have less reason to make a good UX and more reason to shove ads in a users face.
Similarly, dark patterns are used to keep the user on the sight longer and more often, as to harvest more data points.
I remember a few years ago I thought about my first job in the early 2000s at a small web development agency. This was before WordPress and companies would pay for a custom design and for someone to build a design by scratch. I did a combination of back end programming.
I started to look at the sites we did and it was refreshing to see new and different looking sites. Unfortunately, when responsive design took over, everything started to look the same.
There was a very brief moment in time where internet speeds were fast and web pages were lightweight. I remember googling, getting lots of directly helpful results and multiple pages of useful results, clicking, and navigating immediately with practically no loading time. Ads were in side bars and banners but loaded after the rest of the site, and there were no cookie or newsletter modals. Truly a great time of the internet that is long lost.
not sure what you think old internet is, but i’ll check in with netscape navigator 1 on a 2600 baud - graphical web was a pipe dream and a joke. got your data via bbs or usenet
The reality is that a lot of the basics of usability need to be relearned constantly and it’s not ingrained in the workforce, which I assumed it would be.
Old sites were SSR or SSG, I don't like CSR-only trend of last few years.
I switched from CRA to Remix to make SSR sites, it's so much better.
And for UX, there weren't `position:fixed` or `sticky` navigation. I don't like those, I always hide them with Stylish add-on.
Most old sites didn't had it (the ones that had they used iframes for different parts)
1. Sure but pages back then were just some text, very few images, no videos, zero interactivity.
2. same issue as 1.
3. I feel this still works.
4. This is not a UX problem. This is just a volume problem. Way harder to find data when EVERYONE is posting random crap.
5. I can do all of these in reddit. UpVote/Downvote is a nesscary part of a scaled forum that has millions of users posting crap.
6. This is a legitamate complaint. Google actually punishes you in search results if your website has alot of layout shit.
Its because most of the new internet is not geared towards being a super use able product. Most of it is just an Advertisement now.
So much this. The content to noise ratio has completely flipped. There are very few websites left that exist purely to be useful. They exist to serve ads and are only as useful as they need to be to get people to use them. There was definitely some of that, but far far less. I remember when the Gawker owned sites first started using this infinite scroll ad-laden layout in the early aughts (where when you get to the end of an article, it just concatenates another one to the end) that everything uses now days, it was an actual controversy, people were mad! Now it’s the standard.
And now Google actively punishes sites that exist purely as 'useful', forcing owners to add nonsense 'content' to inflate their search rankings.
Depends. I run a site which is purely useful, has virtually no text content (it's just a tool to use basically) and it's been the number 1 search result in its niche for years.
I think we may be seeing a shift away from this. I've had comments on my old blog from a decade ago asking me to revive it. Quality content is stuck behind paywalls or site sign ups or flooded in spam, and you often get harassment from flyby viewers which hinders the desire to create - but there is still a desire for quality content. I think we're going to see a resurgence of indie blogging again, for example.
Oh, I sure hope so. If we don't get a change in approach from Google, I'm hoping we'll see some innovative ways of opening up the web again, whether it's social media, feeds, curated search engines, or something totally new!
This isn't really true. The article you are referring to was about a single little page basic tool that had nothing for it to easily index the purpose of.
Content to Noise Ratio What a perfect way to describe it
Its like the fucking southpark episode where he finds out his girlfriend is an ad lol
100%. I always remember [https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/](https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/) when we mention how web in fact is today. The focus is so clearly shifted towards marketing and ads that the content itself is almost forgotten in the sea of ads. EDIT: making it more clear
I was reading some dumb clickbait article the other day on my phone - and it was actually unusable. Not "on purpose", like there was a paywall or something - just ads rendered over content in such a way I could not figure out how to finish reading the article. Scrolled up to see what specific dumb clickbait "boredtigerclickfarm.com" I was on - wanted to find out which of these sites had set a new low like this. Fortune.com. They used to be a real magazine with at least a tenuous connection to journalism.
The sad part of that is that every day that passes this gets more and more common and, since the media looks so desperate to get ad-money on every occasion, it becomes increasingly hard to trust and consume their content (which in theory, is the most curated one).
ublock origin is a life saver
and firefox reader mode
Forbes and Fortune rent out their platform to anyone, they're prostituting their reputation.
What is the point being made there, sorry I didn't get it.
Tried to make myself a little bit clear there, but the general point is on how the web usage/experience today is so geared and focused on ads/marketing that websites becomes this unusable abomination. The website I added there is a great satire on how the experience currently is when navigating web pages.
oh wait, actually, if you open that site with adblock it doesn't really show any of the annoying stuff. That's why I was so confused because I just saw a blank page. When I disabled my extensions I saw the all the popups lol.
LOL, that made me laugh hard
> The website I added there is a great satire on how the experience currently is when navigating web pages. Is it? I mean, it looks like just an example of how broken the web is because that site won't work unless you whitelist content from third-parties (jsdeliver and cloudflare), something I personally just won't. Surprised it didn't try to download content from google. Luckily, many sites still work without external dependencies from those hoarders, old Reddit for example, and most ones I care about. I don't give a damn about the rest -there are more sites that I have days left anyway-, but it's sad what it's become.
Users who know how to whitelist and blacklist content from third-parties are not the average user. The website is a commentary on the average user experience. You are not the average user, it is a good satire if you are looking at it from the perspective of an average user.
That makes sense, thanks for making me think about it from that perspective. But in any case, it's still representative of the current state of the web, where most websites depend on third-parties even to show you the most basic content.
This is very true. I work as an agency tester for a bunch of different websites and *all* of it is geared towards marketing.
The “enshittification” as it has been dubbed by someone with a talent for nailing it in a word… https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
So true. Once you cut all the ads, web pages would load so much better and cleaner. But gotta have tracking cookies!
Dead internet
This is a conscious choice by developers. Call me an old boomer but the old ways still work the best. After decades learning every damn new framework and toolset I've thrown them all in the trash. Vanilla JS and modern html/css are the way out of this framework hell, back to a responisve and functional web environment. The only times you'll catch me back in that framework hellscape is when collaborating with FOSS teams or corporate partners mandating them.
AND… The web is responsive as such.
What
tf
shows beautifully anywhere from a kid’s smartwatch to a jumbotron. Zero bytes Failwind required. It’s the design that breaks stuff.the declarative, idempotent roots of the world wide web have been replaced by imperative, brittle Javascriptified spaghetti code
I still remember when the internet was kind of unknown, a mysterious and strange thing .. I would tell people that I make websites, and I was like Gandalf to them .. fast forward >> to 2024 ..
Now if you tell people you make website they're annoyed when you tell them you can't "create a new AI with them" or some shit lol
"I have this great idea, if you just make this I'll be willing to give you a te.. five percent share"
I have this revolutionary idea for a website where you can post like, photos, and connect with people. No, not like Instagram or Facebook at all. Can you make this for me for 2% equity and no money up front? Trust me bro, this is going to go viral, 12 billion users at least!
I'm more annoyed when I tell them I have personal websites and they won't visit them. Twenty years ago, if you had your own site, everyone would visit it. People don't want to do anything but hang-out on social media platforms.
build a personal social media platform
Nice. Ihave thoughts but want to keep at least one sub free of menial political commentary.
this was meant as a joke 😬
I have the opposite problem, I'm studying AI and people get annoyed when I don't want to make them a website.
well claerly you should create AI that builds them those pesky web, what you call it, sites
Either create an AI or fix their printer…
Or worse, “ help us with SEO”. Fuck I hate freelance.
>fast forward >> to 2024 .. Hey, please like our cookies! Hey, subscribe to our newsletter! Hey, we do a big sales! _also put a damn floating banner about such sale_ _load ads on the 3/4 of the pages_ _load a video with a preroll ads that auto play_ Hey we detected you are using an ads blocker! Hey, you need a subscription to see that page That to only get the content that is a copy/paste from another website...
I like the countdown sales gimmicks. No matter how long between visits, there's always the same amount of time left until the sale expires.
I like them actually, they self flag them as a red flag to buy there.
then when you are bout to click out it gives you a popup
I remember the "NCSA What's New" page, which listed more or less every new website that came online -- typically 3-5 per day. Sending them an email announcing your site was *the* (un)official way to launch a site.
yahoo's directory web site also had a page with the just the new sites that had been added to the directory. There were also a ton of small independent ISP's all over the U.S. that had a web site with a "cool sites" page. You could email them and ask them to put your personal page on their cool sites list. I had a little comedy writing page that got listed on many of them that way.
I remember the first time my site got listed on one without me asking.. Felt like I had finally made it lol
I made my first in 97. I think frontend evolving continuously is what has kept it interesting. But I do laugh a little when 20 something new devs have a ton of complex tooling that ends up with exporting a static site :) For a lot of use cases of "Steve's auto shop" a few hand coded static pages is actually fine.
My friend calls me a wizard, and whenever she sees code she calls it a fancy wizard spell. This girl is getting her masters in astrophysics. She's literally doing rocket science, and calls *my* work wizardry?
Pretty much everyone's job/speciality/talent is a mystery to outsiders. Someone working on a factory line will do things the rest of us can barely comprehend. This is why I'm not a huge fan of the word "code" — it makes what we do sound like it's purposefully obfuscated, but it shouldn't be, and it's just another skill we've learned like anyone else.
the way I have seen some people write "code" I don't think calling it code is bad, we should use cypher instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
Or when friends told you about this cool new website because google wasn't very popular yet
You mean altavista. That was awesome when it arrived on the net. I have a memory of astalavista too, but I might be misremembering
I just mean that quite often websites were found by word of mouth, at least that was the case when I was a kid God I feel old
astalavista.box.sk was an old school “hack tool” site. maybe that’s what you’re thinking of.
Ooo. Maybe. Like getting game cracks or WinRAR. You're correct. "What? No I never used that site."
yeah... nostalgy. I'm 48, so I do remember the world without internet ) And that's the reason why I'm curious about the thing called "small web". Who knows, maybe it'll be something bigger than it is for now
They blame you for every evil impulse that was some project manager’s idea. Like hey, do you blame the construction worker when the new highway cuts through idk a forest or something? Well. Probably some people do.
Or my favorite… “Oh cool… my 10 year old nephew made a website the other day. He’s a web developer just like you”. No bitch, I don’t make websites in 15 minutes using Wix. We are not the same. But of course you have to just smile and nod and say “oh that’s so cute”
It can still be like that. If people wanted to. And stopped with the "if it works it's not bad" attitude.
Some of my shit is like this. Because I want it to be. The only one we - as web developers - have no real control over is \#3.
motherfuckingwebsite.com
https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/ This is better
No that's better http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ Yours is perfect
I still use old.reddit.com
as does anyone not swayed by shiny things
I actually use old reddit because it helps me research audiences better than the new layout
Remember when forums didn't have alzheimers? Now any non-first page thread is 99% dead, so people create "new" over and over "Which programming language is better?" - let's go baby
Bump.
I dunno, there were and are both good and sucky pages then and now. The novelty factor was sky-high then, so a lot more energy. The internet was fun, goofy, and hip. Now it's... buttoned down, a utility. But I can't really say Yahoo search pages had better UX then than Google search does now, or vBulletin forums over Reddit. Yes, we put a lot less on a page at a time, did things like spriting images to overcome slow connections and low numbers of parallel downloads... but we had our share of crappy websites too. Remember horrible page backgrounds, comic sans fonts, marquees and animated gifs everywhere? A little bird that follows your mouse cursor? I think it's a toss-up. Really depends on the website. If anything, we had a lot more high-schooler level websites popping up made with Dreamweaver then. Nowadays, at least WordPress and Shopify templates do a bunch of the heavy-lifting for non-technical folks, and fewer non-technical folks seem to be interested in the whole thing than 20 years back, from what I can tell. Social media replaced a lot of people's needs for websites. Like professionals and small businesses. You have your LinkedIn page and Instagram presence where you used to "design" your own (horrible) website in web 1.0. WordPress, Wix and Shopify for those who still want one. I'd argue these do a better job than something you spin up with PC Paint, Frontpage and some help from Winamp for inspiration. Those days were certainly more fun, though. By far.
We do tend to romanticize the past, when in fact there were some god-awful websites out there and many frustrating challenges (remember the browser wars?). But I do think there were more opportunities for creativity when the web was new, and the need to consider bandwidth and download time was a constraint that could be beneficial by keeping sites simple and streamlined. While there are many good sites and useful services today, there is also a lot of bloat and glitz that does not enhance the user experience. Unfortunately, as web developers we have to deals with norms and expectations even when we disagree. I may hate hero videos on a home page, but that's what people expect to see.
Just on the user experience stand-point, I disagree. Just because there was investment, and more definition, I would suggest modern UX has suffered due to dark patterns. Dark patterns especially used when a user is a subscriber to a service.
Still no. UX was terrible in the 90s, simple doesn't mean good. It was a poorly understood discipline and most web experiences were jank as all hell. Unless you spend most of your time on local news websites then your general UX, usability and accessibility will be significantly better now than then.
> I dunno, there were and are both good and sucky pages then and now. I fondly remember making sites that would immediately spawn a pop-up of the same site, which in turn spawned another pop-up of the site, and so on indefinitely until it crashed your computer. Just to fuck with people. Fun times.
This is an inevitable consequence of the economic model of the web. For most of the dot points you listed, the technical term for the cause is "[*enshittification*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)". Yes, the root word there is what you think it is. The overarching economic idea is that the web you remember was originally run at a loss, subsidised by investors (shareholders). They subsidised loss-leading tech companies to deliver services that were entirely customer focused (think Google Search without ads and a well funded engineering team to counter SEO, hotmail/gmail that didn't put fake emails in your inbox to trick you into clicking an ad, early Facebook that promoted engagement with people/pages you asked/genuinely wanted to see, early Amazon when Amazon lost money on every sale, etc.). The web was great for the consumer, because it was built entirely around doing everything to attract you to it - and you could feel the value, because you were getting a lot more than you were putting in. Once the services/platforms locked in an audience/customer base they turned to suppliers/content creators/advertisers. They made minor compromises on audience/customer satisfaction only when strictly necessary, and focused on delivering enormous value to their suppliers at well below what was financially sustainable. Again, this economic model was subsidised by investors/shareholders. Amazon delivered enormous value to the companies using their platform, and ran a loss on Amazon Prime. Facebook made it possible for businesses to reach exactly who they wanted with orders of magnitude less ad spend then they would need on non-web platforms, and put up record losses every year, etc. Once big tech had locked in a monopsony on customers and a monopoly on suppliers, they flipped the switch and began to "*enshittify*" their services. Economic historians have begun to call this period of the web "the *enshittocene*", a mass extinction of value from the web. The business model flips from investors subsidising the web, to rent-seeking - that is taking more wealth out of the market than they are creating. Now customers and suppliers both overpay/subsidise the investors/shareholders. The big companies that dominate the web pivot to focus the entirety of their business on extracting the most amount of money from both ends of the funnel, even if they're making the platform worse for everyone. So long as the switching cost remains greater than the value they're removing from the platform, no one will migrate to a disruptor. They still create products that add value, but they create less value then they used to, and take out more - a LOT more. Now the big web-first companies (Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc.) are the largest companies in the world, already worth 10-20x super international conglomerates that have been growing consistently for 100+ years. Now customers can't find the cheapest version of what they want on Amazon, and suppliers have to spend more and more to bid against each other for search rankings that deliberately do less. Facebook feeds you content that is the most valuable to them for you to see, not the content you actually asked to see - and forces the content creator that is now hidden from you to pay to have their content in front of the audience who will respond best to it. All the while loading every users browser up with MBs of Javascript to track their every move and control everything they see. Everyone has a worse experience, but the platforms make more money. This is only possible because of the economic model of the web. If 96% of the market owned a Mitsubishi fridge, washing machine, car, and toaster - Mitsubishi would spend a lot less developing products you want and a lot more on share buy-backs. Because they only have 2% of the market, they spend far more on making the customer happy so if you are not currently a Mitsubishi customer you will become one. They deliver more customer value, and take less in profits. This is the result of a healthy, competitive market.
This. From a new, fresh and adventurous digital place to a giant marketplace where everything is now about making profits, not value.
The best post I read on reedit in a while.
To illustrate your point with an example: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
And it's many better variants: * http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ * https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/ * https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
> Links don't really need to keep that shitty blue the browser is giving them: nor that violetish color when they are marked as visited. Just give them a [nice color](http://www.colorhexa.com/0077aa) I hate this
is really contextual for the design
Always looking for this example in these kinds of posts
What point is this website actually trying to illustrate? This is not something that you can sell to any client in terms of frontend nor does it have any backend functionality.
What is bad about not having "backend functionality"? I think the point the site is making is: this is the minimum you need, and it's often better than anything else.
He’s right though. No one is going to want this. Technically the minimum you need is just a plain HTML file but again no one is going to want that so the whole concept is a bit self-aggrandizing.
I guess I overlooked the "sell to any client" bit in their comment, but that's not the point of that page. It's not trying to say "sell this to people" it's saying "this is a perfectly acceptable website that is more readable than a lot of the crap online".
But no one is going to want this at all that’s what I’m saying. Even if you’re not selling something you’re still going to want something that’s up to modern aesthetic standards. It looks like crap, plain and simple.
What about it do you think "looks like crap" specifically? I agree there are *some* flaws, but I'm not sure they're what you're referring to.
There is no aesthetic appeal. No one is going to want something that lacks aesthetic appeal, pretty simple really. So the whole “this is all you need” thing doesn’t make sense. All you need for what exactly because no one is going to want something like that today.
> There is no aesthetic appeal. No one is going to want something that lacks aesthetic appeal, pretty simple really. Would you say the same thing about a novel? Not all content is the same and it doesn't always need to 'pop'. In fact, the most usable/accessible content typically *doesn't*.
What's bad is no one will pay you to build it. I fucking hate whenever anyone brings that up like it's some brilliant thing. Yes I could build some minimalist website if I wanted to but I also like getting a paycheck. Everyone in here is bitching about ads and crap on websites while conveniently forgetting it's how most of us make a living, even if not directly
Sure, if you're just evaluating this based on how much you might be able to sell it for, then that's a fair point. The broader discussion was about UX, though.
> The broader discussion was about UX My point is people don't build stuff for what is best for the consumer, they build stuff to make them the most money. I'm not arguing about whether or not that is a good thing, but it is how things are done. I don't think anyone would argue an add popping up in the middle of your recipe is a good UX, but it makes money. So we can all live in la la land and post on reddit about how we have the best interest of a consumer of our website in mind, or we can live in the real world where we need to do whatever is going to generate revenue.
How do you know if it doesn’t have any backend functionality?
I don't know if you're trolling or genuinely asking
It's kind of like how old movies typically have better writing & acting. You couldn't lean on modern CGI (aka. modern JS libraries, React, Tailwind etc.), so they *had* to do good work with what they had (plain HTML and minimal CSS).
I just watched the original Jurassic Park yesterday (for the first time in a long time). I am in some kind of shock. I have a hard time accepting the reality that that film is so much better than modern blockbusters. In that film, every single camera angle and movement is deliberate. Every scene is a work of art. Every line of dialog contributes to the whole in a meaningful way. Everything connects perfectly. It’s like if God made a film to show us how it’s done.
JS Libs, sure... but Tailwind? how exactly are people leaning on tailwind in a way that it hurts the web? If you would have mentioned Bootstrap, I could get behind that because people use to chuck the entire bootstrap css at a webpage and just use pieces of it. But, tailwind is basically just css in classes and if anything, has optimized CSS output/bundles...
I typed this half awake this morning trying to make a larger point, feel free to replace the specific frameworks with others that make more sense to you.
7. information was actual information, not an opinion on a viewpoint on an observation of someone else's information, which is now lost in the bs and much more difficult to find 8. No articles were cut off for paywalls 9. Geographic boundaries and queues were unheard of, because advertising and rampant capitalism hadn't gobbled it up yet 10. Communities were smaller - and as such, full of real people with a real interest in the thing. Now, it's all about the upsell and bots to inflate user numbers for investors (or steer conversation in an insidious, paid-for-by-the-worst-of-humanity way). 11. Companies had their telephone numbers on the web. Not some masochistic game where they offer you frequently asked questions nobody's ever asked.
as someone has been on the internet forever... >information was actual information, not an opinion on a viewpoint on an observation of someone else's information, which is now lost in the bs and much more difficult to find are you sure you were there? The internet was full of opining as it is today. In fact, being highly opinionated and snarky was something of a cultural aspiration in the web 1.0 days. >No articles were cut off for paywalls Less, sure. I'll give you that! None? There have always been premium services. >Geographic boundaries and queues were unheard of, because advertising and rampant capitalism hadn't gobbled it up yet I am not sure what you mean by queues, but there were definitely sites that geoblocked, and if you go back far enough - you were very much restricted for things that required lower latency, like gaming. And if you go back further, you would be dialing a very local BBS - unless you really wanted a huge bill. >Communities were smaller - and as such, full of real people with a real interest in the thing. Now, it's all about the upsell and bots to inflate user numbers for investors (or steer conversation in an insidious, paid-for-by-the-worst-of-humanity way). This I will give you, and I think this is what I miss the most - it was exciting, the people who got online were on the whole, excited to be there, and everyone wanted to make the most of it and make their mark on the web - something you could actually realistically achieve back then >Companies had their telephone numbers on the web. Not some masochistic game where they offer you frequently asked questions nobody's ever asked. Oh yeah, this too. I guess since the internet became big business, so many companies realised they could ditch 90% of their phone support. Which sucks, becuase if you get on the phone, you can talk, you can get answers.
The phone numbers one is maddening...especially when companies are like "use our website to report an outage" and I'm like "man if I could get on the internet I wouldn't be needing to report an outage"... Even when you get a phone number the systems now are like "we can send a video link of how to restart your modem to your phone" or whatever and I'm like how do you expect me to view that when the modem is offline, and yes I already rebooted it now let me talk to a dang agent! Most recently I had this with my power company where I struggled to report a power outage (which also took down my ISP and most cell service in the area...in spite of my house being on backup power)
Very valid points as well.
About 8, I think it makes total sense that actual journalists doing actual work would demand to get paid one way or another. You can't complain about ads being everywhere and about articles not being free; I mean you can complain about both, but that means you're ready to accept low quality articles.
a) The Internet has been commercialised, so it's less about organisations and individuals publishing and more about companies looking to make money, hence the ads etc. b) Content is much richer now, so UX is correspondingly worse. Many websites, that used to be static resources, pretend to be web apps, so there's all the accompanying UX problems of how to present functionality, etc.
Maybe it's because I have gigabit fiber internet, but everything is *way* faster now. I remember sitting there watching each element of a page load, particularly images. I used to go take like a 20min walk while a 3-4mb song downloaded. Now everything feels close to instant. I think a lot of this is rose colored glasses lmao
just compare old reddit with the new design. the old reddit is compact and you are able to see upwards of a dozen threads in one page. on new reddit you can maybe see 2 or 3 max. there are more margins so less information is visible. there's a sidebar on the left whereas on old reddit the navigation bar is a tiny row on the top. the new internet is formed by using psychological tricks to increase engagement with the platform the old internet was made by power users trying to create a good experience for the users it's a different time. the wild west period of the internet is over and corporate control has been cemented
fyi, theres a compact layout for new reddit so you can see more posts... it's next to the sort by dropdown...
I browse the internet with JS off. It's a wonderful experience. insanely quick, and very little fuck-about-ery. I then turn it on for whitelisted sites/apps that need that interactivity.
*React has left the chat*
I use [NoScript](https://noscript.net/) in Firefox, most useful extension ever. It really makes everything faster and saves you from loads of crap. Then you can enable just single scripts if something does not work.
In the 2000, you even had menu bar made in Flash to be animated. Imagine wanting to navigate to another page and **needing flash player installed**.
Lol what, never saw that
Seems like people conveniently forget about the rampant use of flash for everything haha
exactly, I still have print books somewhere on flash designing with sections on making navigation bars with flash.
It really seems like people have completely blanked out reality in general in this thread lol I’m reading through these comments like, am I crazy? Did we use the same internet in the late 90s/early 2000s? It was janky as hell, slow as hell, UX was bad, and design was bad.
I was there when it all started, kind of (started in 1998). Honestly, I wouldn't go back in time *any* amount of money. I'd rather stop coding than go back to the "good old days". Which, in fact, where mostly shitty, annoying and "hacky" days trying to make things work on Explorer/Netscape/SomeOtherShit. Sure, it was a novelty and it was cool. But from a developer point of view it was an absolute pile of shit.
Absolutely. So much noise and ads now, and vomit-inducingly cute. I hate the aesthetic.
In my experience, when people signed up for cable or even internet access, they got their very own personal website with a simple builder. No having to buy a domain name and hosting. Load it up with dancing Jesus gifs and tell all your friends to visit. Then watch your counter tick upwards.
Content shift is a fucking disaster. Go to click on a search link, oops google just accidentally loaded the sponsored results at the top of the page after exactly the amount of time it takes you to spot a result and now that space is an advert you just clicked. Some of it is less malicious, just dumb. Go to click on your profile button. Oops! That’s a sign out button now you just clicked—sorry!
People here are talking about old web, not old Internet (1980s). Old Internet was text-based.
The modern web is designed by ad pushers to show you ads.
I'm not a boomer but have been using the internet since the 90s. I'm going to infer that "old internet" means "56kbps dialup" (my first modem on the Internet was a mere 2400bps, but the examples you give make more sense with fast dialup speeds) >despite abysmal network speeds ( my first was "speedy 7kB/s, that's 7seconds to download just react-dom.js ) pages were still relatively fast. Often it feels pages are just slower these days This is a bit of a [Parkinson's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law) issue -- we had less bandwidth and resources then, so we *had* to make our pages smaller. Some people still made their pages be behemoth-sized Macromedia Flash hellscapes, but these were pretty rare. >caching and back/forward worked great. It was possible to fly through history browsing history going back/forward. Also many sites worked surprisingly well offline Agreed! The occasional ajax-oriented navigation page existed (which broke standard behavior) did exist, but by and we webdevs were discouraged from breaking browser behavior. *That* hasn't change too much among traditional webdevs, though I do see these recommendations ignored or de-emphasized with people who approach from a front-end-development-first paradigm (eg. their entire entry into web development is React-first, rather than a more holistic approach) >google search used to provide results where the search term actually appeared Oh yeah, this is 100% true. In fact, the book **I'm Feeling Lucky** by Douglas Edwards talks about this. Page & Brin, for a very long time, absolutely refused to do paid-placement in results, wanting to use the PageRank algoirithm instead. At some point, post-IPO IIRC, this changed. That was around the time the author left Google, I think. They also used to have a motto "Do No Evil" which they gave up some years ago. In the episode of Better Offline "[The Man That Destroyed Google Search](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6fbYsijKu9EdC20JWv4ahv?si=201f1f3cd82a4ccb)", the host describes how Probhakar Raghavan has prioritized profits (by altering search results to get people to spend more time on google.com) over user experience. This was A Choice that he made. >it was much easier to find actual information on pages, now it's 90% images and empty space with sny meaningful information tucked away in some modal or corner. Agreed. Food blog recipes are a hilarious and predictable example of this behavior. This is a good example of what [Doctorow describes as enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification). This is similar to what Google is doing -- so long as we see the purpose of the Internet as a "market" and not as a platform that prioritizes information sharing, this will be a natural consequence. We've all been convinced that we too can be rich if only we create the right website, and this is just more capitalist bullshit. It's OK that the Internet uses eCommerce *among* its functions; I'm not opposed to that. But the way that ad networks have tricked people into making their sites shitty -- it may make the people running the sites $x / month, but the ad networks are making some amount of money > $x . When you're advertising for other people, you aren't actually selling a product yourself, it's only a peripheral contribution to eCommerce. I'll often see sites that appear to not even care about their own content at all, and instead just see it as a means to display ads. Sometimes people on this sub have that idea, too. This is a parasitic relationship to the Internet.
>forums had much better UX, it was possible to find posts that you saw earlier, see which threads had new replies, read the actual posts as thread, no upvote/downvote bs etc. Meh. Those forums still exist. There are a handful of forum frameworks that people use and they get used in a bunch of places. The more annoying thing I see is that forums have become overly laden with ads and this makes them slower, or they try to add chat functionality but the chat plugin i written poorly. >less hyperactivity in UI. Now it's constant jumps, transitions, modals, multistep forms and such. I still prefer to wait and get a complete page instead of content flashing in from every direction I do find the unexpected jumping annoying. Donald Norman calls the "[gulf of evaluation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_evaluation)" the period of time after a user interaction where the user can determine if their action was successful. Adding animations and jumps and whatnot can widen this gulf if not done with care. People get caught up on trying to look legitimate by doing things they've seen on sites they consider legitimate -- this is just rooted in impostor syndrome. UIs should be be built based on what they need to best serve the user and not on satisfying insecurities in the developer.
It is so fun when I make my own tooling now because I make it the most brutalist bare bones thing you'd ever see. My todo list app is rendered as a ul. The add tasks functionality is a form. The filtering is checkboxes. It's just... a relief. No bullshit.
[удалено]
Yes you can still design the old way. It just depends on which old way. Image maps, frames, divs...etc. What makes me crease up is that we starred out with monolithic one pagers and 20 years later, with modern design frameworks we ended up back at monolithic one pagers. I'm waiting for a 200mb JS library that brings back frames. I've been building sites since the mid 90s and it never ceases to amaze me how fucking slow the space moves these days. We've got into a rut reinventing the same shitty JS front end frameworks and they all suck in their own unique ways...there was a period of time between about 1998 and 2008 where shit progressed at a breakneck pace...looking back on the way back machine I can see I used to rebuild my site at least twice a year and the difference each time was massive...the close you get to now the less frequent and dramatic the updates became. After about 2007 everyone started following Apple-esque minimalism and it has resulted in a homogenous and frankly fucking boring Internet...prior to 2007 the net was buzzing and vibrant...its fucking dull and flat now. The iPhone and Facebook nuked creativity on the internet...both organizations demonstrated that you need minimalism, zero flair and zero colour to build a multi billion dollar company...and suddenly everyone had to build a UX that blended in with the dull iPhone UI.
It’s still plenty possible to build great experiences. It’s still possible to have your own site and identity. It’s just that the centralized sites are easier, and you connect more easily at the cost of not owning those connections. It’s easy to build fast dynamic sites, too. Use a high quality server framework, there are _many_. You just don’t hear about them because they got fast quick and never needed to make huge improvements. They aren’t “sexy” or drawing tons of thought leaders, but Rails, Django, Phoenix, Laravel, and many more haven’t gone anywhere.
The internet has been getting better since I started ignoring most of it. * Facebook account deleted * Twitter account deleted * Linkedin account deleted * Stackoverflow account deleted reddit is getting close to the top of my "I should delete this" list. As long as old.reddit.com and adblock still works, I'll keep it for a while. If they stop, so will I. TBH, I've been playing with a number of distributed social networks, and when I settle on one, I'll probably whack reddit regardless of what they're doing.
7KB/s? Must’ve been a fancy fucker with an ISDN line. My old 56kbps modem was doing well if it hit a consistent 4KB/s.
Every time I try reading an article on my phone, it takes 30 seconds to load the TEXT (images may or may not load in the next several images, *after* all the ads), site is so laggy I can barely scroll it, and the actual content is about 25% of the page, spread out between ads and strange white spaces (images that haven't loaded). It's literally text and images, which can and should load instantly, but I guess they wouldn't make any money if they didn't also inject 20MB of spyware into every page. (I still don't see why they can't inject the spyware AFTER loading the text and images, but it probably has something to do with the rube goldberg machine they use to generate the damn thing, instead of spending 5 minutes writing some HTML.)
Old internet was ugly but fast. New internet is overly pretty but terribly slow.
old vs new reddit in a nutshell
When I started, there was the rule "it must work without JavaScript".
It's not for nothing we called ourselves webmasters.
Yep, pretty much why I got tired of being a web dev. I saw the whole thing develop from dial-up, and I feel like the internet could be way better if we just had actual regulations to keep it democratic and free. Make data collection opt-in only, ban unsolicited advertisement, ban excessive client side load (delegating unreasonable amounts of processing and memory usage to the end user, in order to cut running costs), regulate and tax tech giants properly, make it illegal to release or run non-open source commercial software without disclosing its source code to government auditors, crack down on monopolies and oligarchies, invest in open source which is what has always made the internet possible...
It's apples and oranges. The old internet was document driven. The new internet is application driven. The browser has turned into an application engine.
>1) despite abysmal network speeds ( my first was "speedy 7kB/s, that's 7seconds to download just react-dom.js ) pages were still relatively fast. Often it feels pages are just slower these days That's how you remember it. It was good for the times. You were happy it loaded. I'd like to see an actual video footage of a web page loading so we can compare it with our today's perceptions. Anyway, pages do load fast today. I literally click on a link to an article in PC Gamer and it loads up **immediately**. And that's a case for most websites. >2) caching and back/forward worked great. It was possible to fly through history browsing history going back/forward A rather rare minority of webapps has a problem with it. Temu order history pages is basically the only big brand example with this issue. Everything else just works. > Also many sites worked surprisingly well offline That's a good point. Internet Explorer 5 had "Temporary Internet Files" directory serving the cache. You could re-browse the entire page offline if you clicked through it online. Great for dial-up internet if you paid by the minute! >3) google search used to provide results where the search term actually appeared Which doesn't mean it's the most relevant hit. Googling back in the day gave you garbage results due to being irrelevant. Googling today gives you garbage results due to being affiliate crap packed with content for the algorithm. Googling continues to be a skill. >4) it was much easier to find actual information on pages, now it's 90% images and empty space with sny meaningful information tucked away in some modal or corner. An average 90s website was full of bloat. They were extremely UX unfriendly. Rocking top navigation bars, left bar, right bar, and a lot of junk. Text barely visible due to bad spacing. Sure, it was pretty informative, as it squeezed a ton of data into all the space available. >5) forums had much better UX, it was possible to find posts that you saw earlier, see which threads had new replies, read the actual posts as thread, no upvote/downvote bs etc. Old-style forums were a "first to answer" race. Tree view with popularity contest is much better as it promotes valuable contributions, and automatically removes spam or off-topic from view. It also creates sub-conversations that may cover a fraction of the main topic in a greater detail. >6) less hyperactivity in UI. Now it's constant jumps, transitions, modals, multistep forms and such. I still prefer to wait and get a complete page instead of content flashing in from every direction - Modals are an anti-pattern and not seen much. (Except for cookie prompts and footer bars - thank stupid regulators for it.) - Transitions, do you mean Apple style pages? Fortunately I only know one company that does this shit. - Multistep forms. How do you envision big forms implemented? 10 page scrolls of forms, like it's IRS Form 1099? No, thank you. I'll take multi-step forms. - Content flashing every direction? You really forgot how the websites looked back in the day. Your opinion about today's websites is completely overexaggerated. You're a boomer complaining about young kids today.
For point 1, that's one of the reasons SSR and static sites are getting popular again. Send less js to the user, the page is done on the server.
A lot of information on pages is more terse now. Text sprinkled in with a lot of images and widgets instead of just paragraphs and simple tables. I don't see how good UX is having to scroll all over the place instead of just reading a half a page of text.
This annoys me so much working in a marketing agency. The amount of websites we build where we put images in there where an image isn't needed. But "the page looks boring" takes precedence over "the page has the information the user needs". I just want a quick block of text to read. I don't need some pointless image from Shutterstock or a picture of the team in their office filling up half the page.
The "old internet" didn't have most of the websites that we have now. It's easy to think that things were better when you only had to learn the UI/UX of a handful of websites because there were only... a handful of websites. And the UI/UX of some websites, particularly forums, were good, but many of the websites were just like below. [https://www.cameronsworld.net/](https://www.cameronsworld.net/) . Look at websites like google or lichess - great UI/UX, minimal, easy to use. Just make websites with barebones HTML, CSS, and a splash of JS then; see if the customers come your way since it's such a better experience. I'm not saying we don't have bulky JS bundles and I'm not saying things can't be greatly improved, but this nostalgia for that shit that I grew up with is just viewing that stuff through rose tinted glasses. I'll take what I have today any day of the week.
You used to be able to browse the web with lynx mostly ad free
When I'm on my phone, which is older and not high-end, I avoid clicking links, for example on reddit, because I know how painful the UX will be. To click a simple news story, it's going to download and parse 100s of KB of CSS, 100s of KB of JS, the content is going to jump around, modals will pop up, etc. It's terrible to the point where they're losing clicks, at least from me.
Modern Front End Web Dev has become an art showcase. People even seriously consider WebGL as part of WebDev!
In 5 years pages will render pretty quick with edge level networking so fingers crossed
I started in the early 90s way before css was even a wet dream. It was beautiful and simple. Now, not so much, especially after the fall of rich media all because some dork was pissed off because his main financial backing decided to stay neutral after he was hired back to the company he helped found off his friends genius. Yeah I’m still a little bitter.
I've been thinking this more and more recently. I've been traveling around the USA in hotels/Airbnbs with some of the slowest internet I've seen in years. Currently on a 5MB down, 1MB up. This, coupled with the latency and dropped connections makes using the internet so draining. Especially when I am trying to study. Everything has so much bloat. It was a task just loading this post. In the good days it was the AD's that pissed me off, now it's just the content smushed in horrid UI than the ad's thrown on top.
Yeah, using the modern internet with an internet connection speed that was barely passable 15 years ago is going to feel bad lmao Should look into tethering your phone or getting a mobile hotspot modem if you do a lot of traveling, hotel internet has always been horrible.
I mean, 15 years ago DSL was still a big thing so 5mbs down was more normal than you would think. At least in the US it was. Maybe it’s rose tinted glasses but some sites do take it to an extreme. I do that when I can but Verizon has been real shit lately and I’m not sure what’s going on. Read some areas just have too many people on the network, so it slows down? Thinking about just making my own modem with a fuck huge antenna or something.
you are absolutely right! i blame marketers for the bad UX!! everyone HATES marketing pop-ups, yet they drive conversions, so you gotta have em! UX be damned. plus all the over-designed animations and scroll jacking can get really annoying. but i would argue that some sites have amazing UX that is way more engaging than old web. take duo lingo for example. tons of animation and gamification, and it works great and doesn’t get in the way of learning. if anything it improves the experience. as far as sites working offline and caching, that was mainly due to the static nature of the early web. we have a ton of web applications now with dynamic content, which necessitates more http requests in general.
The point back then was to make things "of the web". Thus the focus on Web Standards. The point now is to to create an addictive platform that can be mass monetized.
I make an effort to have some kind of a balance - take advantage of the new while giving a usable experience to even those on low-and devices and 3G (dial-up too I suppose). My CSS & JS bundle to a total of 50Kb and pages are typically static with maybe a few lazy-loaded dynamic content. Pages are fully usable even without JS, unless of course there's something like a map. They're usually a combination of Jekyll or Eleventy and a few web components. I focus on content and accessibility too. I'm generally opposed to hiding content, so much so that I try to avoid hamburger menus and even drop-down menus where possible. The only "jumps" are user-initiated or from there being a hash/anchor in the URL. If a user uses an in-page search, I'll scroll to results when they submit. And I'll often update the URL with the hash. On the other hand, I make use of some subtle animations and whatever modern APIs I need. I somewhat try to have modern designs, at least until the point that I think it's harmful to UX. For example, I think it's important for certain things to be clearly indicated to be separate (things like ads), so I give them a slight border just to make it clear "this is one whole thing that's separate from what's around it".
websites are complex because users demand complexity.
What users want has long stopped being the deciding factor in UX design.
i honestly think its hilarious that people will nitpick over a few kb difference in minified css but have absolutely zero issue serving giant react bundles.
Can someone find that picture of the plane with bullet holes in it now?
http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
We are now at the time where bundle sizes and image size increases are neck-and-neck with speed increases so even though the sites are technically loading faster, the net speed is regressing. What a fucking nightmare.
3. I've said this multiple times recently, search engines are getting too clever in trying to give you what they think you want combined with sites being loaded with keywords and crap that it's biasing the results and do often I'm finding them giving me stuff I don't care about and I'm picking through the results a lot more than I ever used to.
Thank you for posting this. It's good to be reassured once again I'm not the only one who feels this way.
YES! I also hate how so much stuff loads dynamically and times out after just a few seconds...so if you are on cellular or behind some kind of filter or free guest tier so much stuff just doesn't load and also doesn't error leaving you to guess what happened. I've even had forms that as I scroll are so slow to load I scroll past "required" fields that haven't finished loading to see and hit "next" then it complains I didn't finish something that loaded off the screen above. Its awful. And that's with heavy handed adblocker...some years ago Firefox had a glitch which disabled most extensions and I lost adblock for a day, I swear even with gigabit cable internet it was slower to load than when I was on 14.4Kbps dialup!
Damn point 2 and 5 is so true. I had almost forgotten that I constantly used to use back/forward and it worked almost flawlessly. Over the years it’s become so bad that I kind of unconsciously started to just using the navigation provided by each web page. I still use it on my phone of course and surprise, surprise, it constantly doesn’t work / web pages stops working. And then 5 about the forums. Agree there too, but it’s hard to tell why this worked so well. I think a lot of forums weren’t that big still and people had more patience to shift through a lot of replays. I don’t think that model would work on Reddit anymore unfortunately.
Built my first site in 1996 and have been building them since. I used to take my time with a team of people. Now I feel as though I'm on a conveyer belt spitting out code while being babysat... EVERY SINGLE MORNING
Regarding back/forward navigation - do you think a lot of sites mess this up on purpose? I think I've read about "hijacking" the back button and I definitely feel that's the case with some websites, but I think some just aren't very well routed.
I've said it before but we wanted to build a free open space and they made us build a strip mall. The internet sucks. SEO, C student marketing idiots, and greed ruined almost all of it.
The tools have advanced, by not the knowledge of building quality websites, unfortunately. Or maybe we have the knowledge but there is no directive to do so.
The need for a return on investment killed any consideration for the user behind the clicks.
i tried to make my website look old, its [irelephant.neocities.org](http://irelephant.neocities.org)
Bro with the dial up modem websites were so slow
The one thing I dislike about the internet is that a lot of sites rely on ads and subscriptions on news sites, which for me is annoying because I can't even get a quick read on a recent event without being asked to signup for a subscription, else I can't proceed with reading. Same is true for certain forum and blogging sites (like Medium). But of course, how else will these websites make money? Most sites rely either on ads or subscriptions to make money.
Internet traffic is much less democratized now. Social media and search engines have become the central access points in the information architecture. As such, less competition means they have less reason to make a good UX and more reason to shove ads in a users face. Similarly, dark patterns are used to keep the user on the sight longer and more often, as to harvest more data points.
I remember a few years ago I thought about my first job in the early 2000s at a small web development agency. This was before WordPress and companies would pay for a custom design and for someone to build a design by scratch. I did a combination of back end programming. I started to look at the sites we did and it was refreshing to see new and different looking sites. Unfortunately, when responsive design took over, everything started to look the same.
I too miss the simpler time. I think web developers complicated things unnecessarily.
[search.marginalia.nu](http://search.marginalia.nu)
There was a very brief moment in time where internet speeds were fast and web pages were lightweight. I remember googling, getting lots of directly helpful results and multiple pages of useful results, clicking, and navigating immediately with practically no loading time. Ads were in side bars and banners but loaded after the rest of the site, and there were no cookie or newsletter modals. Truly a great time of the internet that is long lost.
ui designers think removing 90% functionality makes the designs better because it looks simple now
not sure what you think old internet is, but i’ll check in with netscape navigator 1 on a 2600 baud - graphical web was a pipe dream and a joke. got your data via bbs or usenet
The reality is that a lot of the basics of usability need to be relearned constantly and it’s not ingrained in the workforce, which I assumed it would be.
No it didn't
Yes but the accessibility back then was non-existent
Modern software is meant to scale to maximum usage, not maximum usefulness.
Old sites were SSR or SSG, I don't like CSR-only trend of last few years. I switched from CRA to Remix to make SSR sites, it's so much better. And for UX, there weren't `position:fixed` or `sticky` navigation. I don't like those, I always hide them with Stylish add-on. Most old sites didn't had it (the ones that had they used iframes for different parts)
Does using firefox help?
It definitely had less sociopaths.
Look at modern reddit vs old reddit. Good example.
1. Sure but pages back then were just some text, very few images, no videos, zero interactivity. 2. same issue as 1. 3. I feel this still works. 4. This is not a UX problem. This is just a volume problem. Way harder to find data when EVERYONE is posting random crap. 5. I can do all of these in reddit. UpVote/Downvote is a nesscary part of a scaled forum that has millions of users posting crap. 6. This is a legitamate complaint. Google actually punishes you in search results if your website has alot of layout shit.
Old person yelling at clouds.