The Bullshit Web

The Web is the quintessential human artifact. This is what happens when large groups of people crap and eat from the same pile, the fast, the slow, the brilliant and the stupid, the refined, mundane, bloodthirsty and curious, the intricate and obscure.

I think of the web in layers. Not discrete, divisible layers, but more like the layers of any ancient city that's seen habitation for centuries. At the lowest level is the oldest stuff: mud huts, stone tools, open fireplaces, graves even. This is like the earliest layers of the web: the webrings, the no-css, no-script HTML bulleted lists, tables of blue links. Even garish black backgrounds. That old web was full of great things; so many enthusiastics and fanatics! So much information and content, written by real people. Short stories, poems, hackers, phreakers, crackers, IRC, that whole great era. That old stone age is mostly buried now, preserved here and there in museum quality, crumbling here and there, broken links, missing images. A mute reminder, hard to find even, of what it was like back then. BACK THEN, before the next layer of the web evolved on top. BACK THEN people on the internet were mostly curious but not nosy or malicious. BACK THEN people put effort into their sites, had to pay money to host their domains, didn't need CDNs and VMs and Cloud Computing.

But a layer evolved on top of that old web. It came with CSS in my estimation. Pages started getting fancy, using new fonts. Ads started popping up. Ads always started popping up. Search engines popped up. Then people started making money. Little trickles at first, then a gush, then a torrent. Online businesses, the FIRST BUBBLE, and everyone was rushing to pets.com and eBay and online pharmacies...you know, companies selling actual stuff. Amazon. Online publishing, news sites.

That bubble blew up. It grew too fast, people went into far too much debt to puff up their businesses. But quietly chugging along, always increasing, the little banners and annoying popups gave way to a more insidious form of advertising...the watching eye behind it all. The internet started watching us. First it was search history, then cookies and then fingerprinting, then whole underground economies of trackers. And all the while the SEO battles and trollers came along, so fast paced...

And something...else...grew on top of the web. You can see it now, maybe just the tip, when you go to one of the news sites that the OP talked about. The massive, heavy sites. Those are just the most polished of this massive avalanche of click-baity slide shows and fake news and crap that is heavy, laden with strewn together junk parts and oriented to only one purpose: making money, by hook or crook.

Now you can't hardly see through this layer anymore. It's like a fog. Go to any search engine and search for anything! What do you get? Aggregated, evolved--I won't say optimized--evolved content that is designed to keep you away from the older layers. I say evolved because that is exactly the right metaphor--the crap that survived by natural selection and crowded out the other, more carefully crafted, humble and matter-of-fact content. This new crap evolved to get straight to the top of the search ranking and grab those clicks. It doesn't matter what the original content was. The more commercial it is, the crappier it is for real content, and the more driven it is towards getting you to click through and BAM make a sale. For god sakes, try to find some neutral information about insurance. Try to find that one guy's website that as part of a trip report to the southwest to go hiking with his kids, talks about how the rental agency wouldn't reimburse him for a flat tire. Or some basic, old-web archaeology like that. You cannot find that stuff anymore. It's hidden by a huge layer of commercial bullshit that is designed to lure you in, sell you crap, get you to sign up for newsletters, take surveys, or at the very least track your ass at the slightest sign you might be interesting. And don't think for a minute that it's all an accident, or some unforeseen consequence or poor search ranking function. The whole system is set up to, and rewarded by, and fed by, their ability to serve themselves, not you. Make no mistake. If the algorithm makes more money, it's gonna get shipped. People might wring their hands about it, but the slippery slope is still slippery, and no one can hold the line forever. Least of all when that takes mental energy and forethought...something SO much better suited to ML algorithms and scale. Just scale up to the whole web.

We lost our way. The web isn't run by us anymore. It's run by them. And them...whoever they are...search engines, advertisers, publishers, people with political agendas, psychos, dictators, people with power. They don't even have control either. Look at the news sites and aggregators. They tell you want they want to tell you. You can't even set preferences anymore. It's all drive by AI. For fuck's sake nobody really knows what to tell the AI to do, except make money.

AI. AI to rank what's important. To tell us what we should look at, watch. Buy. Adjusting news to either make us mad or placate us. Creating and reinforcing a bubble that absolutely always benefits someone else besides ourselves. We keep giving it subgoals, but it'll just keep going around them to what we really want, making money, because that's all we ever reward it for!

The fat ass webpages is just a symptom. The disease is that everyone is shoveling shit into your face just to make a buck. Everyone is trying to automate their crap as fast as they can, throwing crap at the wall to see what will stick. And they just. don't. give. a shit.

I'm sure I am more consciously aware of the bloat but I do think that subconsciously "non-techy" people still dislike it.

I feel like this is similar to the apple vs microsoft/IBM debates. I'm not even sure what the popular take on it is these days but I do believe that to some extent a pleasing user experience was/is championed by Apple (in a specific aesthetic sense). And, if apple never existed we would have less tech products with that user experience philosophy embedded in them. I believe that illusive "pleasing" user experience that apple seemed to try to build in its products is similar to the idea of not having as much bloat on websites.

There is business value of consuming every single morsel of user tracking data possible but that tracking also has some cost in terms of user experience. Just because companies have tended towards bloat doesn't mean that they are definitely right. Apple has made a great deal of money and I believe some of that is due to their style of user experience.

I mean, if most of that is a few images, then those images could just be bigger today for nicer screens and faster internet.

Not that that is the case.

Oh, wait a minute...what if we twist the existing non-net neutrality for our consumer purposes? What if we had easier mechanisms to slow down the more annoying aspects of websites we visit - such as those extraneous scripts on CNN, etc.? And, as we visit personal blogs that we value, we don't slow those down. (And, yes, if you're thinking to ask me about netflix, yes i would NOT slow that down. ;-) Anyway, if we had the "ease" with which to de-incentivize these web platforms, perhaps they'll be pushed to slim down their content delivery?

Now, before anyone replies with something like, "but you can implement ad blockers, etc."...yes, i know there are mechanisms...but i mean "easy" mechanisms...that is, something my grandma could implement with ease. i think this would serve to give true power to the consumer both on the net neutrality front as well as the content consumption front.

Since this is posted to a site focused on developers, I’m surprised you didn’t mention the third option: Developers, stop adding all this crap to the software you’re writing and excusing it with “I’m just doin what I’m told!”