The Bullshit Web (2018)

With that said, I am wary of my memory of the web of the 90's because everything was so new.

There are games I remember loving and seeing no serious flaws in twenty-five years ago, that I now go back to at original resolutions and original framerates and find completely unplayable. But having no point of comparison, what I was enthralled by at the time wasn't necessarily excellent control or excellent design -- it was being able to move in virtual 3d space at all.

My dad tells a similar story about Atari's Pong in the 1970's. Everyone was so excited by being able to control something on the TV screen that nothing else about the experience really mattered by comparison.

When the web became popular, the prospect of being able to interact with like-minded people anywhere in the world and from all walks of life and in communities of a size and power and with resources otherwise impossible -- it was all so new. And when I remember the time, I remember that. I didn't care about having to log into web sites on every visit. I didn't care about replicating data across devices. I didn't care about unprofessional web pages. I didn't care that everything was under construction, the design was universally bad, and that things often broke. I didn't care that any interaction had to go back to the server. I didn't care that pages were typically pretty static, and exploring meant constantly finding new ones rather than connecting with an author or community.

But if you dropped me back in the 90's now, I would care about all of that stuff.

I'm not defending the bloated and the awful. I often install video games now and think "GIGAbytes? What on earth FOR??" I often work on software now and see chains of chains of chains of dependencies and despair that we have clearly lost our way. Web sites crowded with ad-blocker defeating ads make me wish for the days when they would merely blink at you, rather than waiting 15 seconds and then starting up a video with sound in some random corner of the site. I do feel like if someone made me emperor, I could start over and do it right. I do wish we could all collectively agree to just not suck.

I'm just very skeptical that going back in time is quite as awesome as memory would lead one to expect.

Still, modern web sites are incredibly bloated. There was a period in the late 90's where I had an early cable modem connection (3 megabits.) All sites were still built for dialup, so things loaded at lightning speed. In general, I'd say effective speeds have remained constant since the early 2000's since site bloat has kept pace with increasing broadband speeds.

I wish I had a scalpel I could use to cut away the webcruft that comes from every direction. Setting up a pihole and turning off JS can help, I reckon, but there is still tons of cruft that simply doesn't belong.

The internet, much like the real world, is full of untrue information, bad advice, and outright lies. Things that don't overcome this: Trusted experts, Wikipedia type citations, comment sections. Of those I think comment sections are the closest to being successful because they at least provide an open platform to raise doubt about any info.