'The Plain-Text Internet is Coming'
Protocol reports: The web is overrun with junk. This is so obvious, I almost don't need to say it. But I will: Between the pop-ups, the autoplaying videos, the cookie banners, the incessant calls for sign-ups, the coupon offers, the "Don't forget to subscribe!" reminders on top of the other "Don't forget to subscribe!" reminders, the in-line ads slowing the page down, the slew of trackers also slowing the page down ... you get the idea. For lots of reasons, some good and some bad, much of the internet has become totally unusable. Plain Text Sports is nothing like any of those sites. The site, created by developer Paul Julius Martinez (who you might know as CodeIsTheEnd all over the internet), is more like something out of the 1970s, a wall of monospaced plain text with ASCII-art boxes surrounding real-time scores for all the professional sports games happening right now. It has no images, no pop-ups, no trackers. It loads practically instantly, even on a bad connection. I've been refreshing it obsessively the last few weeks, through the end of the NBA seasons and the beginning of March Madness. Not only is it a useful site for sports fans, but it feels like a harbinger of things to come.... He loves that Plain Text Sports is simple. "There's no cookie banner, there's no GDPR banner, there's no asking-you-to-donate banner...." Plain Text Sports manages to be that simple on the front end with a surprising amount of complexity on the back end, making sure the whole sports world is represented in real time on that page. In general, we're starting to see developers and designers rebel against the general overwhelm of the internet, as sites and apps ditch their cruft and complications for things that load faster and work more intuitively. Social networks are bringing back chronological feeds; reading modes are now everywhere in browsers. Even apps like Obsidian, a favorite among productivity obsessives, are based primarily on plain text. They don't look like much, but that's kind of the point.
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