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by dormento 62 days ago
One thing that i just realized is i don't know exactly when things got bad.

I remember the 90s when we had to "go" online, when the digital was apart from the analog and we kept online and offline separate. I remember simpler sites, not as many ads, I remember a time before "feeds".

However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck. It might be that I was busy with other things in life, but still it leaves me with an unsettling feeling. Maybe it was around the arrival of home broadband? The end of Orkut (community based social media)? The advent of algorithmic feeds?

2 comments

> However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck.

Whatever the date, it's tightly coupled with the explosion of internet-capable mobile devices.

My personal pick would be 2012, because that's when the Samsung Galaxy S3 came out and outsold its predecessor more than twofold.

Coincidentally that's when the small agency I was working for at the time started offering making pages look on mobile devices.

In terms of units the market for mobile devices peaked just four years later.

yeah, a lot of people pinpoint the moment when it started going downhill at around 2010. re: explosion of mobile devices, i'd say the release of apple's iPhone was a key event
Cookie wall was a big shift. I noticed that since the introduction of the cookie wall, websites now have about 3 to 4 modals that I have to click away before I can start interacting with the website. Typically it is the cookie wall I have to reject first through a secondary modal, then something about a newsletter, then the paywall and finally I have to hit ignore on the "Do you want to login with Google" on the top-right.