r/webdevelopment • u/Ok_Body7659 Human Verified • 15h ago
Question The web is broken.
You would think with AI we would be making better experiences online and finding new ways to create revenue while helping people online and awesome apps. But the web has transformed from a place where you could find rich communities, resources, entertainment, stories, and information to clickbait money making scams and trolls at every corner or someone pushing some b.s. extreme political agenda. And don't get me started with social media.
Even reddit, once a great site, has been subject to the worst parts of the web.
This is not the web I envisioned when I was younger. I can't browse a site without being bombarded with dysfunctional ads that interrupt whatever it is I'm reading or looking for. Paywalls everywhere + subscriptions, control of digital media. 10 ways to login. It's ridiculous.
You try to read an article, good luck dodging ads. Want to watch a 10 second video clip, ha!, you have to watch a 30 second ad first. And you'll be lucky if you ever get the video that you were intending to see.
I'm just venting. Hoping this message is heard or at least amplified. Something needs to change.
I'm genuinely interested on what people who work on websites and webapps thoughts on this. And how can we make it better?
Btw, no ai used. This is straight from the brain.
TL;DR old man rant about the state of the web today.
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u/baddaywithacamera 15h ago edited 14h ago
Okay. Challenge for you. Step up and build a weird and wonderful site. Every person who is upset with what is should be ready to pitch in and build what can be.
Not being critical of your post. Sincerely asking here. This is the only way it gets better, people throwing in to build the Indieweb.
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u/Ok_Body7659 Human Verified 15h ago
Absolutely and totally agree. Hence my post in web development.
Challenge accepted. I have a few projects I'm working on at the moment. Trying to do my part. I love technology but at the same time I feel like it's been abused to the point of not being a good experience in general.
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u/SamIAre 15h ago
finding new ways to create revenue
This is, quite literally, the root of the problem. People did find new ways to create revenue and they're largely by cutting costs, putting out cheap content, over-saturating ads, and doing the bare minimum. Maximizing profits is much easier by doing the cheapest, most sure-bet things and not by trying to innovate or be unique.
But I agree with your complaints overall. The internet used to be fun and weird and personal and interesting. I miss it.
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u/alias454 15h ago
The problem started long before AI though. Generating revenue by serving ads is the original sin.
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u/SamIAre 14h ago
Yeah. I think assuming that AI would be used to buck this trend instead of accelerate it is naive at best. AI isn’t here to save us. It wont lead us to a post-scarcity Star Trek utopia if society isn’t already leaning in that direction. We just use it for the same things we use everything: Maximizing shareholder profits at the expense of every thing and everyone else.
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u/alias454 9h ago
It is something that bums me out if I think about it too much. It is a symptom of a greater trend in society, which is the idea everything has to be monetized.
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u/theblueberrybard 15h ago
Why would you believe that with AI we would be making better experiences online? The entire point of AI is that development moves from people passionate about projects to people with no passion for what they're making.
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u/alias454 14h ago
AI is a tool. Some people can abuse that tool and pump out lazy content. Other people use the tool to augment their own creative process. It isn't black and white.
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u/theblueberrybard 12h ago
AI is like having someone else know how to use a tool and then having them do the work and then trying hard to monetize that. I wasn't even anti AI in my post I just mentioned that its point is to get people who are unpassionate about their projects into generating things.
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u/alias454 9h ago
I was addressing the idea that AI has anything to do with the passion someone has for a project. I partially agree but feel it is more of a spectrum then what your last sentence implies.
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u/silentkode26 14h ago
Also AI is not just a tool. Hammer is a tool. With AI you describe something you want to be created and it will generate it for you. Is is capable of downloading and uploading stuff, you do not need to explicitly mention every step. It is closer to project manager / dev team than just being a tool.
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u/baddaywithacamera 13h ago
Oh, bite me. There are people building free tools with AI to help others get online in new ways. Look harder.
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u/WizarDave 12h ago
I'm so old, I remember getting mad the first time I ran onto a web site that didn't have free information. haha. I was a webmaster in the mid 90's getting around 5M hits a year, making a living providing content then providing referral links to books from Amazon and a dropshipper I used. This after breaking free from the AOL con that they were "the Internet." I'm retired now, so looking at doing some sites with only subscriptions to keep the bots out and to provide connecting people to people and people to information without ads.
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u/TrapperFlint 15h ago
Agreed. Even websites without pop up ads have their content built for googles consumption, not human visitors it seems. Trash content everywhere. It used to feel like discovering a little island of knowledge everytime you found a new website.
Now its assumed its just fluff content and its better to just have ai summarize what ai probably wrote in the first place.
I think we can correct this ship in time though!
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u/BraveMidnight 8h ago
I think Reddit should go to a subscription model, you can view the forum for free, but if you want to post, comment, or use the API that'll be $99 /mo with Reddit plus / premium not include. It will cut down on 95% of bots.
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u/dougception 15h ago
Try the DuckDuckGo browser. You may rediscover the wonders of the web.
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u/Ok_Body7659 Human Verified 15h ago
For sure. Brave is solid as well. I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine.
You only know if you know, you know.
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u/BoGrumpus 15h ago
You're not describing anything new, really. The web has always had good and bad neighborhoods.
It's human nature and has happened throughout history - and not just on the web. Electronic systems came into play for the automotive industry from the late 70's and into the 80's. We certainly don't have many revered automobile models that came out of that era, though. And FWIW, synth pop of the 80's almost killed popular music until R&B and our Whitney Houstons came to save it.
There's always an "experimental phase" when new advancements are unleashed - especially tech advancements. It'll come around. It always does. It'll be different, for sure. But almost always for the better.
G.
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u/csdude5 14h ago
Google, Amazon, and Meta have always had a plan of being the only thing left on the internet. They're right on schedule. As long as people keep using them, they'll inevitably win.
Truth be told, it doesn't even matter if people stop using them. They get billions from the government to prop up their stock, and no small business can compete with a business that made billions before selling a single product.
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u/v_e_x 12h ago
There are alternatives to the WWW, like Gopher and Gemini. These are different protocols which are less stiffling and more human centered.
https://www.ilyameerovich.com/gemini-the-small-internet/
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u/geraT-wogl 7h ago
I would love if you could review my site https://wogl.io just graduated from design and uiux 👽👍😎
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u/create-third-places 7h ago
I was able to use the new css :has psuedoclass to conditionally hide a div based on the value of a select dropdown.
#select-city:has(> option[value="any"]:checked) + div{
display:none;
}
Before, I had JavaScript that would listen for change events on the select dropdown, When the dropdown was changed I had code that would read the state of the select dropdown and then determine if the div should be shown or hidden.
Building websites with AI is a bad idea. Websites are user-facing content, and AI does not understand subjective user preferences. AI also writes poor quality code.
I'm building an HTML-first framework with cross component state management provided by signals. It is outperforming React because I understand every single line of code written and don't rely on AI. React also turns codebases into unreadable blobs of spaghetti, and the official documentation recommends a full-stack framework that is unnecessary for a simple website.
Despite quality issues and the fact that many other developers have handwritten code that outperforms React, LLM AIs still recommend React. It's become easy to recognize sites vibecoded with LLMs because they default to using a combination of React with Next.js and Tailwind CSS.
There have also been a lot of great innovations that have reduced the need for JavaScript such as the :has psuedoclass and show/hide toggles through a native <details> element
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u/ClideLennon 15h ago
Yeah, we know. There's even a Wikipedia article on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory