The Internet Has Ruined Websites

You used to be able to have a perfect experience on a website. You could read words, maybe click on some of them, and then read other words. You could while away many hours doing this. Most of the words were good, too, as if they had come from a book, or from a human mind.

In fact, websites used to be like a book, but one with endless options, like the longest choose your own adventure book ever written. But it seems we chose one of the bad options where we end up stuck in a vat of acid, flailing about, yearning to go back a page and choose the other door in the temple.

But unlike an endless adventure book or even a normal boring book that stops, we have websites that look like an architect allowed a toddler to revise the blueprints with ad-infested crayon and a video-feed streaming live from their undeveloped little brains. Don’t trust a toddler, I always say.

What happened to websites? The internet, that’s what!

Visiting websites was meant to be like driving on the information superhighway, but I guess by ‘information’ we meant a car with the wrong fuel in it, and by ‘superhighway’ we meant a road that’s just been washed away by a storm. All aboard the bullshit bullet train, everyone. Next stop, a factory that makes free fire.

What was once an experience designed for a person is now apparently a neverending carousel of content designed for machines. We allowed the largest audience for internet content to become the machines designed to absorb and replicate that content. Human beings will never be able to compete with an audience of that size and with that much spare time.

And what sort of content is it? It’s barely content at all. It feels in fact like I’m being swamped with discontent.

And what has that done to websites? The damage is horrific. If websites were soap, I wouldn’t use them now. You would end up with a rash and the company would probably just blame your water.

I just wish we could have pure websites back, uncluttered by endless ads, pop-up video content, or constant demands to accept cookies or permissions or whatever temporary futures are being A/B tested at any given time. What does this get us anyway, all this rewarding of our “desires”? Maybe the subconscious is in the basement for a reason.

If EmotionEric could see what websites have become, he would definitely show Disgust.