[alightsoul]

The web started dying with mobile social media apps, in which hyperlinks are a poor UX choice. Then again with SEO banning outlinks. Now this. The web of interconnected pages that was the World Wide Web is dead. Not on social media? No one sees you. Run a website? more bots than humans. Unless you sell something on the side with the website it's not profitable. Hyperlinking to other websites is dead.

Gen Alpha doesn't know what a web page is and if they do, it's for stuff like neocities aka as a curiosity or art form only. Not as a source of information anymore. I don't blame them. Apps (social media apps) have less friction than web sites but have a higher barrier for people to create. We are going back to pre World Wide Web days in a way, kind of like Bulletin Board Systems on dial up without hyperlinking, and centralized (social media) Some countries mostly ones with few technical people llike the ones in Central America have moved away from the web almost entirely and into social media like Instagram.

Due to the death of the web, google search and friends now rely mostly on matching queries with titles now so just like before the internet you have to know people to learn new stuff or wait for an algorithm to show it to you or someone to comment it online or forcefully enroll in a university. Maybe that's why search results have declined and poeple search using ChatGPT or maybe perplexity. Scholarly search engines are a bit better but frankly irrelevant for most poeple.

Now I understand why Google established their own DNS server at 8.8.8.8. If you have a directory of all domains on DNS, you can still index sites without hyperlinks between them, even if the web dies. They saw it coming.

[zelphirkalt]

This. Only recently I realized, that in China for example many young people do not have a browser on their phone. Everything they do is via messenger "mini apps", which I can't imagine to be easier to create than a website. At every restaurant you get a QR code to scan, to download a so called mini app, which is a website in disguise. They run (un)social media apps like Tiktok or Xiaohongshu as their information input. I am not even sure they still use Baidu or something else as a search engine. Maybe that is another app, but they don't have a browser installed to go to a search engine's website.

I think it is an extremely debilitating situation and it results in people not even knowing what a website is. What it consists of, or how one could possibly make one oneself. They would have to go straight to app development and have it in big tech's stores, in order to make anything their peers could see or use.

[alightsoul]

Speaking of app development, people often use the same 25 apps (dependent on region) so this situation monopolizes hosting of information within a few apps. It might seem paranoid but what if they went down like Vine or decided to delete or downrank content to please advertisers? Or in other words uprank content to drive advertising revenue via engagement? Their UI makes it so that downranked content is inaccessible and invisible by almost any means. The chances of finding that content are very near zero.

Tiktok and Instagram already do it. The algorithm reinforces biases which might seem like a personal problem, but there's no real way to escape them because the app doesn't have any UI to do it. Bluesky is an improvement but it hasn't really taken off and that feature is kind of buried. It also doesn't really let you browse through everything posted to the site. This situation reduces discoverability of information. Like in the old days before the internet except everything is online now.

Maybe Bluesky indicates, that people don't really care. Web surfing is dead. Or is it just a consequence of not allowing hyperlinks anymore? Like in the old days when hyperlinks didn't exist? I hope to use AI to facilitate hyperlinking, based on how common a word is. What if you had to tap and hold to access a hyperlink on mobile, hopefully solving the UX problem? What if all hyperlinks were buttons on a side of the screen? There has to be a way to keep an area clear for scrolling with fingers without banning hyperlinks..

But then how would they be presented to the user without making them think that you want to keep them hooked? TT and IG give the illusion of being able to quit anytime, in an uncluttered UI. Then you have social media banning outlinks too in order to keep you on their app and drive up ad revenue. This again kills the web because it reduces linking. When they do show links like hashtags, they are hard to press since they are close together and look cluttered. How can we bring hyperlinks to a mobile-friendly, user-friendly UI? E-commerce apps do it well, are highly discoverable, but why not social media? The algorithm has been proven to drive ad revenue instead of hyperlinks and discoverability, and they still ban outlinks.

Apps are a single point of failure. It reduces information diversity in several ways: sources, hosting and contents. It's as if all books were published by the same or a few publishers (apps) which might not seem like a big deal, but it's very very hard to move to another publisher. And its very very hard to make new publishers available to people, because they don't know any better. The migration costs are very high. Everyone only knows how to read from that particular publisher and maybe 2 others.

If the publisher thinks something won't sell or will harm it, it's not revealed even if it would be very helpful and drive sales. AKA the algorithm. I've had to create and painstakingly curate new accounts because of this, and people don't even know it's possible. Since they can't read stuff published by another publisher they don't learn about it. It's very hard to find out about other publishers and migrate to them due to familiarity, muscle memory and frankly the algorithm. Existing publishers can prevent people from moving to other publishers by preventing people from learning about them. For example Instagram banned links or even mentions of pixelfed and 404 media.

Hyperlinks are probably the most underrated, revolutionary invention of the last century. They are being eliminated for the sake of UI cleanliness. But at the cost of going back to darker times.