| I trace the death of the Web I loved to around 2007-2010. That's about when it seemed like it stopped getting better and started getting worse. - Google seemed to give up the spam war and start just returning only major sites for the top of most results around that time. - Youtube started to become a way to make money, which was the beginning of the end for it. Google advertising IIRC started to get big on it around that time, too. - Facebook started to expand beyond college networks and the recently-graduated to grandma and grandpa. - Google generally started to Be Evil in a real way, fairly consistently. - Amazon started to get all crapped-up with 3rd party retailers and print-on-demand garbage infecting even their book results, making it worse overall. The main difference now is that instead of sorting through some small-time spam and ad-junk material to find the good stuff, the whole damn thing, practically, is spam and ad-junk. Local news sites look like click farm ad spam sites from the early 2000s. Ads in google results. Wading through disguised and explicit advertising and self-promotion on Youtube to find anything good. "1 weird trick!" on once-respectable sites. "Buy my (shitty) ebook to learn my secrets!" everywhere. We didn't beat spam—it ate the Web. It is the Web. The weird-but-good still exists but is harder to find. The Web kinda sucks now, unless you like advertising. I'm pessimistic about it ever getting better. Maybe some new frontier will follow it, and that'll be OK for 1-2 decades before it gets ruined, too. |
That hits the mark for me. It feels as though the entire web is one big advertisement for stuff you don't need. It's made people apathetic. They don't even see it though it enters their subconsciouses.