On the state of the web – Manu

On the state of the web

It's almost 10 pm on a Sunday, I just finished working on a client project while listening to a podcast where among the many things discussed there was the apparently impending implosion of the web because people are using AI to generate an inordinate amount of valueless content and putting out there for reasons unknown.

Actually, the reasons are known and it's to capture traffic, slap ads everywhere, and generate money. A tale as old as the web itself.

The web is going through a weird phase. Twitter is allegedly DDoS-ing itself. Reddit is at war with its users and destroying communities in the process. Google search is spiraling down with results that are more and more useless. Amazon is a landfill full of crappy counterfeit products.

To make things worse, it looks like money is no longer growing on trees and many, many companies are now facing the wild reality that if you run a business, you should, hopefully, at some point, make more money than you're spending to run your business. Crazy stuff, I know. Who would have thought.

And so now we're seeing services turning to aggressive monetization because it turns out that we can't just have an entire world of sites and services all available for free with just a few ads slapped on top of them.

I don't know what's going to come out of this moment but I do hope more people realize that human connections are still available out there. You can still set up your tiny quiet corner on the web, do your own things, and connect slowly with other people. You can still set up a forum dedicated to something you're passionate about and create a community with 50 other people, even if Reddit turns to shit. Things can live on the web simply because enough people care about them and pour time and love into them. And that is what makes the web special.

Where do you go from here?

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