The unbearable sameness of the modern web
blog.rachelbinx.com
blog.rachelbinx.com
Tell me this looks like every other website: https://www.anumberfromtheghost.com/asleep-in-trees
But still, this misses the authors point - that mainstream websites have become homogenous. Obviously its not about literally every last website, but bemoaning what is currently trendy.
I made a few experimental VRML websites in the late 90s (on a lovely SGI Irix..) and I can see why you'd say that, but it's only superficially similar in the 3D-in-a-browser sense. VRML experiences were usually terrible and never pretty.
It is pretty, and there are some nice aesthetic touches. But the overall look is still very blocky and VRML-ish.
I guess at some point we'll get photorealistic rendering - most likely in AR glasses rather than in the browser - and there will be a lot more experimentation for a while, some of it driven by AI.
But even this is in a tiny niche far, far outside the web mainstream, and if it hadn't been linked here hardly anyone would find it.
I remember the exact moment in the mid-90s when I realised the suits were moving in and the web was going to be transformed from a weird, colourful, mad eccentric thing into a generic mall.
From a corporate POV it has far exceeded my worst nightmares. Sites like this are a very small pushback, but they're not going to make a dent in the overall crapification and hustle-driven corporatisation of our biggest and most interesting planetary cultural resource.
Having said that, I think what you're saying is some very superficial pattern-matching. I found it a fantastic experience, and I'm not a particularly arty person.
In my experience researching ways of building different and better discovery tools, the ice-berg of stuff that you'll virtually never find on Google/Facebook/Reddit/Twitter runs extremely deep, and is often much more interesting.
But it's still enough to subscribe to some newsletters or reddit or listapart of the decade, etc. It's really not far away.
Now the problem is turbulence.org. Man, that hurts.
I find reddit super exciting as well, it's THE place to talk quickly with random english speakers and I wish that existed when I was a french kids pinging randos on ICQ...
It all became so corporate and milquetoast - all that matters are ads and so that they don't appear near "controversial" content to not to loose revenue.
HN isn't much better with flagging of posts. The highwater mark of this was PG's heresy post being kept off the front page for 6 hours before dang made the post unflaggable. I would have loved to see the Monday meeting where he had to explain why that was needed.
Being honest I think religion is kinda hard-wired into the human brain and if it isn't the mystique kind like with Jesus or Allah then it (d)evolves into this kind of agno-atheistic fanaticism where some flavor of the year "problem" appears that these people obsess with. And this is coming from a long time atheist btw.
/r/homelab was interesting, now it's just pictures of people's setups
/r/garmin was interesting, now it's screenshots of people's VO2max stats
etc...
Repeat ad nauseam. Everything is bragging or showing off for fake internet points.
I don't know what is driving it but I think those posters really feel they're part of a community. The give gold, repeat the same tired jokes, and feel better. It's insane to me.
But I don't want my news headlines presented like this. I'm kinda ok with the standardization of the regularly-visited sections of the web - in fact I think it's just UX principles in action.
If you call it a website, then Unity is a web authoring tool.
The fellow who made it recommends: https://threejs-journey.com
I know what I am doing this weekend. Cheers.
You would expect fully custom UIs made by non-professionals to be the most complicated to parse, but even simple single-page apps with their react-component dynamically updating sections, pop overs, modals and switching screens are rarely accessible at all
Bring back failed attempts to be the next CSS Picasso, but also bring back a social web. Offloading comments to social networks hinders discovery of networks.
1. SPAM. They will find a way to do it. Not even automated, employed cheap labor just spamming blog comments.
2. The extreme hatred and scorn from people who spew venom from behind their anonymous screen names.
Not just me as a person but my family had been threatened (on my blog comments). Not worth the effort, I have done away with the thousands of comments my blog had collected since 2001. A lot of them were nostalgic, sweet, and many a friends, colleagues, co-founders, and girlfriends were the result of comments on my blog but now -- NOT worth my time.
What did move the needle, in the end, was blocking all IPs from India. A bit heavy-handed, maybe, but it was a small company with only local customers anyway.
Try browsing the modern web in an incognito window and see how far you get before you are asked to login and then forced to login to read more. The big social networks force you to not only login to read stuff, they also strongly push you towards the mobile app because there's so much more data they can harvest from your phone.
Oh, and the ads. In the late 90s we had to contend with popup ads and animated gif banners but the modern web without an ad blocker is much worse. I'm not against ads, but why do 95% of them have to be so scummy?
This is also a terrible waste of resources to rebuild the wheel over and over. A few components, sure, when there is a compelling case for custom. But you do the business a disservice by consuming so much time on items just because you want to.
I also find it incredibly demoralizing trying to advance a project and the bug log is full of bugs about basic component behavior you would just get out of the box with a pre built set.
The most likely alternative to boring, functional, and WORKING, is BROKEN and dysfunctional. Please don't break navigation. Have predictable menu behavior. Etc... There are other ways to be creative.
The geocities approach was that everyone creates their own site design with an editor, which was actually pretty good and effective. There were many website where you could create your own website, such as maxpages and xpages.
They would let you create pages on your site and link to other pages. There was a lot of funky pages out there.
Maybe people decided they don't want to do design anymore?
I remember being in school and have computer class where one part of the class was dedicated to setting up a website and learning the ins and outs. I still recall as I left the schooling system the class and activities still survived albeit adapted. Time has passed and things do change but I still see the modern web exactly as it has been if anything discoverability has been the biggest factor of exposure to more uniqueness in the web.
I like having the same design philosophy and navigation on wildly different websites. I like knowing exactly where to find information at a glance because things have been put in roughly the same way across multiple information sources. I don't like to scour through the asinine design decisions of some guy with a handcrafted HTML website that "represents his personality".
Sure, if you browse the web for the "human aspect" or for entertainment, having quirky website sure is fun and interesting. But the moment you need the web to actually search for stuff in the most efficient way possible the façade of the early web quickly shows its true colors.
I certainly agree that there are many usability patterns that should be implemented in every website. That doesn't mean that every website has to look the same in terms of padding, color design, and content, though.
I have zero desire to bring back the exciting mess of flash websites, vrml, etc etc. it’s bad enough that everything is endless scrolling now.