Splitting the Web
hubie writes:
I came across an interesting blog post that suggests the Web is splitting into two with an offshoot made up of a commercial dystopia that is increasingly viewed as the "normal web," leaving an insurmountable chasm developing between the two. Regular readers of SN will appreciate the points made, but do you agree with them, particularly where you'll eventually need to pick one side or the other?
https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html
There's an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web. A web which has only one objective: making us click. It measures clicks, optimises clicks, generates clicks. It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles.
A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a complete cyberpunk dystopia.
Then there's the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.
Between those two extremes, the gap is widening. You have to choose your camp. When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.
[...] Something strange is happening: it's not only a part of the web which is disappearing for me. As I'm blocking completely google analytics, every Facebook domain and any analytics I can, I'm also disappearing for them. I don't see them and they don't see me!
Think about it! That whole "MBA, designers and marketers web" is now optimised thanks to analytics describing people who don't block analytics (and bots pretending to be those people). Each day, I feel more disconnected from that part of the web.
[...] It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can't stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.
Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.