The web starts on page four

After 25 years of working for, on and with the web, I am looking at the current state of it and I don’t like it. There is still a lot of beautiful, creative and amazing work out there, but on the whole, we lost an amazing opportunity. In its place we have a consumption machine that creates bubbles and assumes new users to be incapable of making own decisions. I’ve talked about the sorry state of the internet back when it was all about replacing it with apps in my keynote of the Internet Days 2016. I likened apps to Tamagotchi that keep pestering us to feed them but won’t even die if we don’t. Moving on to now, this is what every web site has become. Probably in a senseless attempt to beat apps and the Facebooks, Amazons and Video consumption platforms out there. Want proof? I worked on a lot of progressive web apps functionality over the years and believe that there is a middle ground of canned application and web site. And when it comes to demands from publishers of PWAs, there is not much about access to hardware or clever new web APIs. The biggest demand was about notifications and making sure people stay in the app or keep coming back to it. That’s what happens to any web site right now. I click an ad for a product I am actually happy to buy. I go to the web site and get asked to allow for notifcations. No, I came here for a certain reason, I don’t want to be your friend. While I am looking at the product I will get a popup to sign up for a newsletter or friends and family program. And that is how you lose me. I don’t care if I save money, I get this from somewhere else where I learn about the product, not get pestered about my future dealings with the store I went to. This is about me as the customer, not about you and your monthly active user numbers. Even worse are image results. I love that search engines allow me to look for images and even filter by licence and many other features. I loathe that 90% of image results are pointing to walled gardens that ask me to sign up before seeing it. I really wished search engines would not show me Facebook or Pinterest results unless I am also logged in there.

I miss the web

I miss having the web as a resource. As a library of knowledge and a collection of weird and wonderful entertainment and subculture art. When the web came out it was revolutionary and challenged TV and radio. I didn’t have to wait for a certain time to learn about a new movie – I could read up on it any time I wanted. I could read from other people what they thought of it, instead of having paid influencers with pre-fed soundbites tell me why it is sooooo amazing. The problem is that search engine results – especially on mobile – are not how you find that any longer.

One thing that didn’t change as much over the years and has quite a renaissance right now are curated link collections. In the past these were social bookmarking sites with delicious being the big player there until Yahoo axed it because it had its own bookmarks product. These days I personally use Pinboard.in to record all the links I tweet about. I also use Feedly to read RSS feeds and most of what I post in social media came from there. Both are products that allow me to curate my findings, share it with people and follow others. Much like the web used to be in the past. Photo by pxfuel / opusj