I don’t usually frequent /r/conspiracy, but I stray into it sometimes just to see what crazy is going on in the world. Like macabre entertainment that makes me feel a little better about myself. Gone are Bigfoot and aliens, replaced with COVID-19 vaccination fear and politicians being pedophiles, with the occasional randomness thrown in. One such post caught my eye that discussed the need to have modern devices to just view webpages, and it has a point.

Don’t get me wrong. The thoughts are muddled, the technology knowledge very thin — but like a child with a stick, they hit the point somewhere along the road. The web is a mess. Full of tracking, adverts and complex things that all need to load. Sure, they may look nice when viewing them with a good connection and a nice device, but if you don’t, the web can suck.

Consuming content often means you have to put up with some of the worst websites. Ones that suck all the life out of the web, consuming resources and slowing down the load time down to a crawl. Not to mention the acceptable practice of popping things up in front of your face, most of them not properly optimised. The result of all this is often a terrible experience, and users have a habit of blaming the hardware in their hands.

Kevin Wammer went on from the tweet above to talk about this a few days ago. The fact that I often have to save an article to a read later service (Upnext is wonderful) is a testament to how broken everything really is. Instead of building the best possible experience for users, much of the web is made for the most gain possible. It might be displaying adverts, it might be putting up a paywall, or it might just be for attention. It all boils down to personal gain and nothing more. Greed broke the web and it may never recover.