What Made the Old-Web Feel Different?
The old-web has a unique feel to it. That's why many of us are here, to try and immerse our selves back into the feeling of a time since passed. But for many, if you ask them what specifically makes the old-web feel different, they'd struggle to find an answer. I simply seek to put forward my reasons I believe are the four major aspects that separate old-web from new-web. These essentially summarize the article.- The Lack of Pre-Made Formatting
- The Lack of High-Speed Internet
- The Lack of Corporate Money
- The Lack of Similarity Algorithms
So firstly, formatting. On FaceBook, you make an account which automatically has your friends, information, etc. on the sidebar, you have a profile photo on the top left, and your background photo as a banner. You cannot create background tiling, shift your profile photo to the center, and so on. All pages are uniform and orderly. But is this a good thing? Compare this to how old sites used to be. Assets, images, and text was placed where the creator deemed it fit, not where he was forced to. The unique, colorful, and highly personal webpages have been destroyed with hammers and replaced with identical webpages. There is no more personality, you don't get to express yourself through your webpage, but must work with what you have. Imagine if everyone had to wear the same identical outfits. People would lack individuality, they would have less ability to express their self, and would lose much autonomy over their presentation to others. Same with websites. By removing the individual's formatting, you have removed the individual. No one will ever argue that a FaceBook page is more personalized than a hand-made webpage.
But it is personal in another way, as well. Because there is a lack of formatting, all websites must be created by hand. This often results in the creator being much mroe proud of his work, proud of what he has accomplished. It is like building a table yourself versus going to Ikea, or like gardening versus going to the grocery store. The site becomes an extension of yourself and, as such, the creator grows fond of his creation. But there is another benefit as well. The creator then becomes more understanding of how computers work and process code, they are forced to learn. It is near universally agreed that it is good to learn. When making a website, a creator may want to input a certain feature, so must seek out possible ways to do this. The creator must learn to code, and the more he learns, the better his site will be. I did this myself. I started with a template I found, dissected it to find out how certain functions, inputs, and commands worked, and began to create many new parts and features based off of what I had learned from the dissection.
However, there is another part of making a website that makes the old-web different: no JavaScript. This means websites are less dynamic, interactive, and flashy. Being based on pure HTML and CSS means there is much less in terms of functionality, and so much of it feels a lot more straightforward and simple, not out of choice but out of necessity. This is one reason why old-web sites are much less flashy and visual, and rely much more on looping gifs and such.
There is another reason as well: lower internet speeds. Back then, bandwidth was much harder to come by. As such, websites needed to be more compact, more precise, more efficient. You didn't have the space for images that were dozens of megabytes. You had to use gifs that were in the kilobytes. You couldn't put in high-definition video. Because internet back then was in kilobytes per second and not megabytes, you had to make your website efficient to actually retain a user for any amount of time. Now, with modern internet speeds comes a shift. Now, pages load quickly, so there is no need for efficiency. Bad code, excessive image resolution, and flashy graphics everywhere. This has rendered much of the modern internet unusable to those with low-bandwidth internet. As well as this, websites are bloated in other ways. For example, a cooking website will have a recipe that has dozens of paragraphs of preamble. Tech and help articles will go incredibly in depth in unrelated topics before getting to the actual content of the article. Why is this? Search Engine Optimization. By putting more keywords into your website, it will show up higher on search results. More search results means more traffic and more viewers. Now think about this for a moment. If you have the money to finance developers who are experts in Search Engine Optimization, you will show up more often in search results, your ideas and opinions will be put forth more because you can afford to optimize your site for search engines. The deeper your pockets, the louder your voice. But because of the nature of Search Engine Optimization, this results undoubtedly in a worse end-user experience. Why would sites want a worse experience for more traffic? The answer should be apparent, and is the third reason for web-bloat besides internet speed and Search Engine Optimization, and it's a big one. Advertising.
Let's be honest, it's everywhere. As long as there has been trade, there has been advertising. But on the internet, there has been a change as of late. Go on any new-web website, and find one without advertisements. Hint, it's just not possible. FaceBook puts them between posts, G-Mail puts them between your e-mails. Google puts them before more relevant search results. YouTube puts them before, during, after, and over videos. News articles have them on sidebars and after the articles. They're omnipresent online. They're even embedded into some operating systems themselves. So why is advertising so prominent now? Well, believe it or not, when you stop caring about efficiency and just make websites bloated, they cost a lot of money to operate. Not only this, but running a webpage in general has become more of a business than before. Back in old-web, people would often create websites for fun, or to show off cool ideas. Now, instead of trying to give the end-user a memorable and enjoyable experience, websites are designed to be just good enough to keep scrolling through, to get more ad views. In other words, the end-user has become a profit-generating tool for large websites. Remember, Google is primarily an advertising company and generated over three hundred billion dollars in revenue in 2023. That number doesn't even sound real.
How do companies like Google even know what ads to serve? Surely a company wouldn't want to serve advertisements to just everyone. A dress company doesn't want to waste money advertising to men, and a company selling skateboards likely doesn't want to advertise to old men, or people without legs. So how do they know that their advertisements will reach their intended demographics? Fingerprinting. Google and other sites collect immense data about you, often times just handed over. Google catalogs every single search you make on the site, and processes it, dissecting it into what insights it shows about your hobbies, interests, and views. This is all openly stated information.
Imagine this. You post on FaceBook under your name John Doe that you went to Iowa recently. Then you watch a video on YouTube, with the account JD409. You share the link on FaceBook, forgetting to remove the &si= string at the end of the link. Now, Google webcrawlers associte that FaceBook account and all associated posts with you, and now Google knows you went to Iowa recently. And imagine a friend has a Google account, BD202. They click your link with your &si=, and suddenly Google now knows that you two are in contact with each other. This is just one way that Google learns about your personality, so they can better sell you products. Even if you give Google no information, but your friends click your links, and they all are into skating, now Google will likely assume that you're into skating as well.
Besides this, it has been proven incontrovertably many times that Google collects very intimate data. The microphone is always hot, always listening and adding everything it hears into its database on you. Every single voice message you send with a Google speech recognition software is sent to Google's servers for processing. Even your exact location, speed, and whether you're on foot or in a vehicle is automatically transmitted to Google. Again, this is not a conspiracy, this is just publicly available information.
And that is how they know what to advertise to you. They know you often times better than you know you. These algorithms like Google's advertising algorithm are prevalent everywhere. Every major social media site will use it to keep you scrolling. Why? More scrolling means more ad revenue. What keeps you scrolling? Content you like. There is an obvious downside to this. When you're shown only things you are proven to already like, it's a feedback loop. Imagine a music store from the 1990's. When you walked in, you were presented with everything the store had, regardless of whether or not you may like it. Now imagine YouTube Music's homepage. It'll be songs you're known to like, songs you've listened to before, songs similar sounding to that you like. Nothing new. You don't get exposed to new genres, new artists, new bands. The same goes for many other websites and the internet in general. These algorithms insulate us from seeing new ideas and content, because if we do, we may stop scrolling through advertisements.
That is all. Nothing more to be said on this topic I think. New internet is full of ads, constantly tracking you, bloated, focused on profitability, and without personality.