The Internet Is Being Ruined by Bloated Junk
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I'm not even sure personal sites are the answer, hosted platforms like neocities seem to have all the benefits with few of the hassles.
What's ruining the internet is that we use it too much, endless scrolling, social platforms that don't prominently feature the actual user avatar and name near the content, algorithmic curation, etc.
Decentralization would be nice to have, but federation isn't really decentralized, and it doesn't matter if the content and community is so awful nobody wants to use it.
Most "Let's fix the internet" proposals are actively part of the problem which is that the internet has very little real world to reflect anymore. They're just putting the focus more on the tech itself.
90s internet tech was awful. Tech in general was worse in almost every way compared to now. I don't think I own any gadgets I'd like to replace with the old version... but we did seriously amazing things with it all, because the focus was on doing cool stuff, solving real problems, making art, etc, not making more tech and vaguely handwaving about what we might use it for.
People never do anything but scroll, so there's nothing to write about, and no familiar reference points outside the internet to allow any understanding.
Even the world's most major political issues are thought of in terms of memes these days.
Until you need to use it. No, more than 1 second loading time in 2024 is not acceptable. Gray on gray, missing scrollbars, needed to click every damn thing on a page, to discover where is a menu or a hyperlink, is not acceptable.
And from a security perspective, is a disaster waiting to happen.
Security is also better than I can remember at any previous point, including pre-internet.
Privacy is pretty terrible by most coders standards, but that's probably less of a technical thing and more of a "It does exactly what it was designed to because free stuff where you're the product sells really well" issue.
A side note about YouTube in particular, I find SEO tactics to be like dart frogs. Bold titles with garish bright thumbnails means avoid!
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Wadsworth%20...