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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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