Ask HN: Is building for the web even worth it now?

You're not alone. I've been on the web since around 1997, something like that. I remember it as a fun distraction, but also as a place that had recognizable handles, behind which sat a real person somewhere else in the world.

Unrestrained SEO and the failure of search engines (or, in Google's case, complicity veering towards enthusiastic support) to do anything about that was the first thing that, for me, took a lot of the fun out of the web.

Cheap botting, engagement farming, walled gardens, social media, and now AI has left me in a state of active avoidance. I don't feel good when I use the web. Like, any of it, at all.

Casual cruelty has always been a problem of online interaction, but at one time it was also balanced out by familiarity, friendliness sometimes, creativity ... but those things have gotten a lot harder to find.

The most engaging online interaction I've had recently has been some local community groups on Signal, and even that is best in small and infrequent doses.

I believe you're conflating too much "the internet" with "your feed", you cna step away from any feed that exploits your attention and now does so easily with ai generated content. That's not the internet that's mostly social media. If you love builsing for the web why don't you and many others step up and start something new? You're even in the right place here. Whatever you want to do to make the web a place where you'd still hang out do it. But first, close the feed. The internet is not the feed, the feed is you behaving like a zombie

At first I thought you were a bit contemptuous. After all, we don't know what OP is really doing on the net.

But after reading a lot of the other comments, I think you're on to something. A lot of people mistake social media with the Internet (not saying OP or any one here is), showing that they (SM) somehow won (for now) and it's sad.

It's the nineties back again, when most ISP logged you in their application (looking at you AOL) or on their website. People open their phone and go directly on Instagram, Fb, or whatever, and they're "on the web" they think.

You are definitely not alone - I miss the days of small forums, articles not written by AI or for SEO etc...

I also miss the creatively built small websites where people shared their hobbies etc. "Social" media killed a lot.

The web is becoming less and less genuine, it's depressing.

They're still out there... See https://bearblog.dev/discover/, https://kagi.com/smallweb, https://peopleandblogs.com/, and probably lots of others.

Not as many though - and especially when it comes to websites about hobbies non tech related.

Chipping in with the list I used for my newsletter: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/places-to-find-indie-web-co...

I've been on some weird path of discovery of the internet and am loving it. Generating my own ambient sounds for work from freesound.org. Finding internet radio stations to stream. Music from bandcamp and https://www.nts.live/. Rediscovering RSS and building my own tooling on top of it. You just have to be deliberate and step away from the convenience of big aggregators and algorithms and there's a whole wonderful world out there.

You are not alone in feeling that way but personally, I don't think it's like pouring into a rapidly emptying cup. I think that, relatively speaking, the signal vs noise ratio is changing and noise is increasing, percentage wise.

But in absolute terms, I think there's still A LOT of good, human content out there and the web is still full of interesting people worth following and engage with.

Personally I'm a big fan of blogs as a way to get to know people and see what they're up to. And those are still going strong. If you want to go down that path for example, there are plenty of starting point:

- The ooh.directory (https://ooh.directory) has thousands of blogs listed from all over the world - My own blogroll.org (https://blogroll.org) has just passed 1k blogs listed - Kagi has their own small web tool thingy https://kagi.com/smallweb

And then you even have even more old school style projects like the Internet Phone Book (https://internetphonebook.net)

Are.na (https://www.are.na) is also an excellent place to stumble on more quirky and obscure corners of the web.

The list goes on and on and on. Interesting content is still out there. And there are plenty of people who still maintain personal sites and forums. But in 2025 you're not going to just casually stumbled on them. You have to actively go hunt for them because everything is now getting drowned by the sea of AI garbage.

That's partly the reason why I started my people and Blogs (https://peopleandblogs.com) series a couple of years ago, to help people discover other humans more easily.

I think just accepting that the web is shit and we have to let it die is the wrong mindset. The web is, for you, what you make of it. If you want to find more interesting content, go search for it. And when you find it, share it on a space you control.

Yes: don't think that the web == social platforms. I'm old too (got my first dial-up connection in 1996) and it comes easy for me not to use big social media platforms. I find tons of interesting things to read from: RSS feeds, some close friends sharing links on chats, and Mastodon (mostly for web development stuff @indieweb.social).

Also in my late 30s, and I've accepted that the web from the past we grew up in is gone.

One can find snippets of it here and there, stumbling upon a niche forum for a hobby is still exciting, participating in those and recognising the users over time, that sense of community still lurks around for some stuff. Overall it's just gone, it's not what the web is anymore.

Most of it has been monetised, captured in a few big platforms, closed off in walled gardens, made to be ephemeral. I don't mean that there isn't remnants of the old web at all, you can find some treasures around but there's no more discoverability for it, it's kinda like finding the underground scene of your city.

It's more than figuring out who is real and who is a bot, there's no sense of permanence of a community around, you don't recognise the names/nicknames to form any bond/rapport...

I just find it hard to engage with anything AI-made, no matter how good

I don't think this is true for many people.

The best example is the movie industry. Hollywood was using AI (in the form of convolutional neural networks mostly) a decade ago to produce CGI effects for film. The younger versions of the actors in Captain America: Civil War (2016) was basically done with AI. No one outside of movie effects and CGI nerds really cared. They just enjoyed the film because the AI was done well.

When AI is done really well you can't tell. It's similar to good design. If something is designed well you don't notice. You only ever see bad design. Same for AI, you only see it when it's bad.

(Someone will now reply to say they thought the effects in Captain America were terrible, obviously. :) )

Yes, but 100 or 1000x the amount of it and make grandma curate it and that analysis changes.

That's not what anyone means when they talk about AI.

I wouldn't say the de-aging was done well, at best acceptably. I can only assume you've never watched The Irishman which really highlights the limitations and uncanny valley realms it's in.

The effects in Captain America were terrible - joking! The thing is, AI is plastered everywhere these days on platforms (that were already deteriorating before AI, lets be honest). A lot of people don't want to be bombed with fake content.

A lot of people don't want to be bombed with fake content.

People don't want to be bombed with obviously fake content. If the content is sufficiently good enough for them to accept it they'll happily click Like on it. And that bar is a heck of a lot lower for most people than you'd think. People crave novelty over almost every other attribute of content. They want to see things they've not seen before, and to share those things with their friends so they get the kudos of being the person who discovered something first.

It is obvious that the generative AI era is different qualitatively. There are still some developments in non-generative AI that are having positive impacts but I think if you ask most people about what they understand about AI they are alarmed and concerned by it, or bored and depressed with it, on some level. This is caused by Generative AI and it will affect perceptions of all AI tools, causing growing cynicism, and this will rapidly spread to very broad distrust and loathing of the tech industry as a whole. This is not an industry people trust to bring liberating progress anymore; rather they see it as a machine that empowers arrogant, uncultured, fragile middle-aged male overlords.

It may be because I am British and we are cynical about the disruptive confidence of US tech people (especially two or three who loom over our politics, threatening to empower the very worst of them) or it may be that upwards of 90% of my friends are involved in the creative industry in some way, but there is no good feeling at the moment. Nobody is excited about what it will bring, and the interesting thing is that many of my friends who are unaware of the concerns about circular money movements or the AI bubble collapsing have a strong sense that an edifice is going collapse and take a lot of positive things with it.

We are not just heading towards an AI bubble collapse. We are heading towards a collapse in belief in progress at all, because every time we see progress, it is enshittified and "disrupted" by callous forces chained to grotesque private equity firms and the new kings.

I think this is missing the point - it is a bit like saying "you only ever notice bad fraud, if the fraud is well done you never notice it" - the point is what it is, not whether you notice it or not. With AI in films at the moment there are still people behind, and reviewing, the AI output, so it is just another creative tool, which is fine. However, if someone were to generate an entire 90 minute film and put it online without even having the decency to spend 90 minutes of their own time watching it themselves first, that would not be fine. But that is happening with AI slop on the internet now. Whether it is any good or not is not the point - the point is that it is disrespectful of people's time and attention.

I like some communities more than others. Hacker News I enjoy a lot for example.

A whole lot of super smart people interacting in mainly civilized fashion? I'm in, even when there's the occasional disagreement.

Curiously, I find the ArsTechnica forums a tad toxic, although I would have expected a similar audience.

I gravitate to the forums that have that usenet feel, there are some, although many are sadly behind Discord (which is great, but it feels much like a walled garden to me).

Are you using "building" to mean "creating content" for the web? Then yes, in absolute numbers, it's more worth it (monetarily) than ever to create content. There are more people than ever making serious revenue with things they are publishing on the big platforms -- even if competition is increasing, consumption is also high.

"Building" websites? Indeed eroded by social media, many businesses are happy with only a Facebook/Instagram presence.

"Building" software? Yes and no: it's all still on the web but the increasing number of developers, and now AI, are making it easier to fill niches. There aren't many low hanging fruit left, you won't get rich quick with a todo app.

This happens for decades - Eternal September, email spam, login-only social networks, curated algorithmic feeds - AI is but one late-stage catalysator. I'm actually glad that the change happens faster. Every revolution needs a high pressure tipping point. The internet changed from being a niche platform to an actually global (if not main) scene of society, with all the very human abuse, crime, slave work, authoritarian controls that come with it. I'm excited for what the same forces - that created the early internet - will now make over these emptied fiber veins.

You should probably engage more with (or find) your hobbies, because this definitely feels like a "recommendation algorithms decide what I see" issue.

There are extensions that disable youtube's recommended page and redirect you to your subscriptions page.

There are extensions that disable twitter's for-you tab.

If you're using said sites' mobile apps, uninstall them and use stuff like Revanced or whatever.

You don't need to radically disconnect from everything, there are smaller steps that can be taken to make "being online" a radically better experience.

I have always been an offline only guy but I do see the need to build for the web. I feel small good at one thing tools are as useful as ever and can still have a place. The issue is people thinking every tool they need, use, or build, needs to incorporate the latest tech or reasoning behind it. A lot of needs have never changed, but the way we have met them for some reason has become far more complex and that is what needs to change.

> Anyone else feel the same way?

Actually yes, but as a result, I left the internet I know behind. I don't use Twitter (aka X) or Facebook. I'm following friends on Instagram, but not adding any photos to the training pool anymore. I read Reddit as a last resort.

I use a small Mastodon instance, follow people who are interesting. Read blogs of a select few, and discover new ones via their links or rings. Instead of IRC, I have found a Discord server frequented by the same people. Oh, also, I frequent here.

I also left GitHub because of their AI shenanigans and don't miss that place. I still use it for work reasons, but my code lives in quieter places. Left Google search for Kagi. Started to self-host things, cutting ties with online services more.

As a result, I'm building my own sub-internet with the resources I choose to use. I refuse to be bombarded with ads and AI-slop. I miss the old internet, but not the new one. The one I'm curating for myself serves all purposes for me.

I'm also building out a sub-internet...

I have more media than I can ever watch, more ebooks/comics than I can read in 10 lifetimes, a copy of pre-2021 reddit, a copy of pre-2021 Wikipedia, etc etc.

I also have a physical library too, for the more crucial knowledge.

You're searching for authenticity in a world with almost none left. I 100% empathize with you. View it through a lens of authenticity; this goes beyond social media or even the internet. Find authentic people and have authentic experiences and your spirit will be lifted.

You can tell I've been through a lot to be able to give you this advice here.

Well, you built it. You built internet and now dismantling it, or filling it with garbage. You can't complain as if it is being done by aliens. The transformation was very gradual and long the expected lines. There is nothing drastic. You knew it all along.

When you build a sand castle on a beach, you can't say you did not expect waves.

Are you a bot?

There are a growing number of disillusioned makers that have the capacity to build alternatives - maybe that critical mass will lead to a reactive innovation cycle where an authentic and grassroots internet will reassert itself.

removing social media and focusing on the good parts of the internet is the best approach (and was even before AI trend)

you don't need social media, everybody as excuses as to why they're there, but none of them are real

self hosting saved most of the internet for me, from jellyfin for movies TV shows and movies to piped for YouTube

Degoogling and removing big tech from your life also helps a lot, changing from gmail to protonmail was a small change from the outside but it made how I interact with account creation and handling of my data so much more enjoyable

so I dont personally feel this way, but I dont engange with any part of the internet terrorized by AI (and human) slop

The 'web' has been dead for about 10 years now. That is just becoming more obvious to more people.

I'm being pushed back to books and personal relationships and I love it.

quality content is MUCH harder to find, not because there’s less of it in absolute terms, but because it is getting absolutely swamped by the tsunami of autogen sewage.

and the webstewards are all paid better if the only thing you see is that autogen sewage, nobody gets paid anything from you reading a handcrafted blog page with no ads or ai built into it.

I know exactly how you feel. There is too much noise. It isn’t just the internet though. It’s phone calls, snail mail, and everywhere else conmen can try to steal parts of your attention.

This is the wrong way to look at this though because it would occur everywhere it could anyways.

Instead there are two things you should consider: what do you want to build and do you want it to work. Don’t worry about anything else.

I can’t fucking stand React so my career as a JavaScript developer is dead. I also can’t stand jquery or working with whiners and quitters too complicated by first world problems to learn things or apply any concept of engineering, so my career as a web developer has been dead for a very long time.

Nonetheless, I still build projects for the web because I enjoy JavaScript (now TypeScript). It’s fast and doesn’t force OOP decoration nonsense on you. It’s a great place to produce MVPs if you are comfortable with it at a low level. I don’t enjoy it for other people’s admiration. I enjoy it for the things I build primarily for personal use.

Do what you enjoy and make it work for you the way you want it to work.

What do YOU want that doesn’t exist? Go make that.

you survived a lot longer than I did. I feel like this for a long time now. I just use it now to do research, check HN feed for some news / procrastinating when I'm bored. Despite posting here n there I kind of assume its just talking into the wind or getting reviewed by bots.

I even like AI somewhat, some things it produces. pretty pictures i guess. scfi-fi. but still its not engaging anymore, you get saturated very quickly if things are always available.

The internet seems pretty much dead for a long long time already. a few bastions here n there of maybe-real-people talking. I had some minor hope AI/ML might actually improve things, get rid a bit of the bubbles caused by algos, but its gotten much much worse actually.

AI is not the cause of the decline or rot, but its definitely accelerating it.

A lot of things I cared about are taken over by the loud-n-stupid bunch who yells only in blanket statements and never seems to be able to produce any sound reasoning or evidence for their discourse. i call them bots despite them likely being confused humans...

The worse thing is, that it seems now more and more actual people in the real world are mimicking this behavior. Trying to say smart things about topics they know nothing about, because if chatGPT can give some smart sounding lines, why shouldnt I be able to? I am researcher of technology and the number of times people hand my vibe-coded or written totalgarbage to review or fix, (papers, experiments etc.). Their capacity to think and reason is diminishing fast. They will be fierce and toxic if you highlight this as a concern, or point at any of their hallucinations.

I've expeirenced already a few times that people, like a group of zombies, gang up on me (debate/argument) and all jump on arguments which are trivially proven to be incorrect. Even if you prove them incorrect infront of them, they will just try to eat your brain/prove you wrong by talking louder etc. - and these are 'highly educated individuals'.

Considering to leave my research job, after about 12 years of trying to work myself into such a position, and just go back where i started.. to drive a forklift. its more likely i'd be working with real humans there. and if it's a robot, atleast its a real fuckin robot, not one of these infiltrator units...

Yes I feel the same way. Early 40s.

Even TikTok is just slopaganda, AI videos to promote fascism. So it's not just text, it's all content online only unless it's come from someone you trust and know.

How are we sure you are not a bot? Wait, am I a bot?