RIP WWW

(This is a follow-up to what I wrote 10 years ago in 2014: Social media is killing ‘our’ Internet!)

The tombstone reads:

WWW

1989-2024

RIP

It was fun while it lasted, but it’s obvious that the Web’s days are numbered.

The web as we knew it is dead.

There’s a common statement you’ll hear these days: Google sucks. But this isn’t entirely a problem with Google. The problem is the web. The web is a ghost town. Nobody uses it anymore. Everybody is hanging out on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter or Reddit. They’re all busy spending their time creating content in these walled gardens safe from the prying eyes of search engines. And the people that run those services want to keep the content all to themselves, because content creates engagement, and engagement is the new currency of the internet.

Folks sometimes forget that the web—not the technology, but the living breathing machine that we all got excited about in the 90s—was created by us. It was created by people that created web sites, by the people that participated in forums, by the people that created content that was available for everyone. We made the web. But every year, fewer and fewer people are interacting with the web, and every year, more and more of the content we have taken for granted for so long is disappearing. People are giving up on the dream of the web, forum owners are shutting down due to the onslaught of spam, and people are simply dying. The rate die-back of the web is rapidly picking up speed, and the only new content on the web is coming from marketers that are using LLMs to flood the web with SEO garbage that dilutes and masks what little good content there was left. The signal to noise ratio is orders of magnitude worse than it’s ever been.

Google’s search results suck because they are running out of good content to index. And unlike their social media tech bros, Google has no way to incentivize content creation on the web because they don’t own the platform. Sure, you could argue that AdWords is their incentivization mechanism, but “marketers” chasing the AdWords high is also the same mechanism that is presently sucking any remaining traces of life out of the web at an alarming rate.

This isn’t the enshittification of Google. This is the enshittification of the entire World Wide Web. The web is a dumpster fire, google has just been aggressively fanning the flames.

Sadly, I don’t think that it’s going to get better. The damage has been done, and it’s irreversible. The internet has shifted away from being a community of individuals towards being a community of corporations. What’s perverse about it is that the corporations didn’t take the web away from us. No, we gave it to them. We made a deal with the devil, and traded an open and free internet for a walled garden in exchange for likes, comments, and an endless stream of analytics telling us we’re wanted.

The web was awesome because people were happy to help build it for free, but that’s not “cool” anymore.

Hopefully I’ll see you in another 10 years.