For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline” (with regard to advertising, kinda-sorta)
Even browsing existing small to medium sized sites has become such a chore, with all these verifications and rate limiters as part of the anti AI scraper effort.
So many cloudflare verification checkboxes. So many Google sign ins. So many cross site cookies and tracking for even basic functionality.
Care about privacy and restrict browsing data even a little? Captcha hell.
And guess how awesome that is with blocked google. I fucking hate lazy bastard sysops who prefer recaptcha. Half the web is basically locking me out. And cloudflare is another bad thing that monopolized infrastructure.
Especially since discoverability has pretty much gone down the toilet, between SEO and spam sites.
You’re not going to as easily find a new and interesting website, when the first few results are just computer generated regurgitated text, stuffed with ads by the gill.
Time to bring back the webring and every site having a “links” section.
That shit did work pretty decent. Yet hard to find the initial go to when you’re looking for something specific.
SEO should be a crime.
That’s basically unenforceable unfortunately. Search engines are effectively made to be gamed by the way they function. SEO up to a certain point is what makes your website actually findable, it has just gotten out of hand.
Then you get to load and execute 10MB of JavaScript while another 5MB of ad content loads and displays in the background. With the obligatory two dozen API calls to various trackers, counters, taggers, and “optimizers” in the background of course.
Glad someone else noticed this. I don’t care that the “small” web isn’t as extensive or as polished as the corporate web, but all the anti-scraper stuff and cookie pop-ups are the actual death. It’s horrible.
Off to gopher and Gemini I guess.
And then after all that have to read a page full of ego and and thinly veiled sales waffle just to find the tiny bit of info you are looking for.
You have to give up too much time and privacy to get little back. It’s not the internet we knew. It’s a hyper monitized sales board.
I miss being excited about what online would unfurl for me each day.
Yeah. We saw the peak of the web and since then its ugly decline. Surfing today is actually more frustrating than satisfying. For me. Half the shit doesn’t work, bugs me with paywally or any other wall just to - MAYBE - finally reveal not really an answer but my problem…rephrased, dragged to five hundred words, or worse, a 20 minute video of a shit bird that shows me how he types text into notepad.
I miss the times where we had to search the search-engines. And the web would be so damn fast today if not every shit would also load 583u2 libraries of blingbling and tracktrack
Some mainstream websites and services are practically unusable when using a VPN, too. I’m glad I stopped using imgur years ago but I wish the rest of the world would catch up…