The Web Sucks

Capitalism has claimed another victim. The web is dead. RIP

2025-11-06 | Web, Neoliberalism, Unfinished

T he web has become largely unusable. That is not to say that it was all sunshine and roses in the past, but it has decayed further into the cesspool it is now. There are a few reasons why sucks is the correct term, without being hyperbolic. There has been a cultural shift in society and by extension the web, in how it is used and interacted with.

Welfare check!

The headline was a hyperbole, the web is not dead yet, its alive and unwell. It is also important to note what “dead” would mean in this context, for no web at all is not the only way it can be considered dead. For some, the web is currently the best it ever has been, with those delicious bucks rolling in. Before going into further detail what a good web would look like, we will first look at its current state.

Ads and Trackers

You cannot use the web normally without being bombarded with ads. Be it pop ups, ads that create intentional layout shifts so you click them by accident, autoplaying videos with sound, the list is long. People are being presented more ads than content. Ad count per article seems to be in the dozens 1 , 2 (reliable?). They are often advertise outright fraud, to the great disadvantage of boomers.

Tracking on the other hand makes sure that every visit to any websites is logged, often across sites using third party cookies, your user agent and device information is used to track you between different pages without using cookies. This is then used to construct large databases of users behaviour and preferences, to be sold to anyone interested. This robs you of your privacy, even when using a VPN and deleting cookies. You then get served personalized ads based on the data collected about you, in addition to your data being used for who knows what.

Bloat

Instead of being used to just present some form of content and connecting that very content by so called links, the web has become an interactive circus. Simple blog sites load 30 MB of javascript used to track you and make core functionalities work, that could have been implemented through better site generation or simply omitted altogether, as they usually don’t add anything useful.

You don’t need a comment section, you don’t need flashy effects or features on your site. Obviously people have been conditioned to like and expect this, I suggest unlearning it.

Example: What does an indicator on the top of the page showing your current progress through the article add? What do you gain? “Oh, finally, I am three quarters through, reading is so horrible, and I don’t have 15 minutes of time”.

Nobody forces you to read, and even if – suppose you are held at gunpoint and desperately need to know how much you still have to read, take a look at the scrollbar position. The feature is already there.

A website should be as simple as it has to be. It has to be minimal in this regard. That however does not mean that simplicity should be enforced. This can be a problem. Minimalism has become so incredibly trendy, often inspired by Dieter Rams "Ten Principles for good design", I say inspired, because all other nine principles are usually ignored in favor of "As little design as possible". Minimalism has become the goal and metric, while often making the site actually more bloated by adding fancy hover effects and selective presentation. Additionally it makes sites and products borderline unusable. Feature minimalists are also guilty of this, but in turn making the result completely undreadable for humans. There are legitimate reasons to add certain features using javascript or more css to increase usability. I can understand the minimal features standpoint, even though I value good typography, so there is simple.pelleha.nl.

Content

The amount of content on the web steadily increased, with the event of social media and more and more people using it on a daily basis. The quality however has not, quite the opposite. It’s a collection of 95% soulless drivel, in both social media and popular outlets. The attention economy has destroyed thoughtful and proper discussion. The modern web runs on instant gratification, short form content, ragebait, superficiality and LLM generated slop. It is a soulless hellhole almost devoid of any quality, with a few gems sprinkled in.

This content of terrible quality is then further locked into very big platforms like twitter, reddit or similar. The communities grow there, discourse happens there and once established, have big difficulty migrating elsewhere. Splinter groups are abandoned because they are not active enough, which causes members to gravitate to the big platforms. This stratification is extremely harmful, because human discourse can be filtered, censored and influenced much more easily.

Neoliberal Heaven

None of these things happen in a vacuum. These are the results and consequences of a neoliberal society. This is entirely unsurprising, as most forms of art and culture have been eroded, commodified and mutilated beyond recognition by neoliberalism. The focus on capital gain inevitably forces one to either secure a safe niche, or cater to the lowest common denominator, which in fact is, as it says – the lowest. The internet, once hailed as the bright future, as one of humanities greates technological advancements, has in fact become extremely important, just as prophecized. Unfortunately not in any humanist way, but as a cold and deeply anti human device of capitalist oppression.

A lot of social interaction is happening on the web. The nature of these interactions is vastly different from any real world connection, while at the same time replacing exactly this. Real interaction is substituted by short and shallow messages, comments and other forms of posts. There is an ever greater pressure to conform, to not be weird as to not be considered an outcast.

The conformity and fear of isolation is exploited for profit by large corporations who use influencers or other actors to change the publics perception and increase consumption. This is a problem with a substantial share of the population –independent of the internet. The internet simply makes it way easier to exploit this weakness on a large if not global scale, affecting everyone, because there are fewer and fewer ways for (especially young) people to connect with others outside the internt.

The human is reduced to a mere means of revenue generation I always disliked the notion of "generating" revenue. While there are situations in which revenue is created from essentially nothing, making the term "generate" appropriate, it is often _produced_ or _created_ by labour. Depending on how much hairsplitting one wants to do here, there are steps in between, but labor is a necessary criterion in that case. Used in the context here, I believe it makes sense to call it generate, as there was little labor involved for content creators to force ads on their readers. , while any criticism can be countered with “Well, ackshually, maybe just don’t use it then”. This answer is of the same nature as telling someone who has conveyed his unhappiness with his current job to “just get a new one”, and is overly simplistic and lazy. It dismisses any critique and blights discussion and action. Instead of engaging with the subject and proposing ways to fix or improve the situation, the critic is painted as the problem, he is too “human” for this antihuman machine through which hypercapitalism acts.

The critic has few alternatives to using the internet. What is he supposed to do but participate against his will, even if to his own detriment? He well knows that there can be (is) more to human interaction than what is mediated through the web, yet the alternative is often even worse, there is significant normative social influence and above that a rising level of coercion resulting from the increasingly “online only” services needed for everyday life. Take the smartphone as an example. Many banking apps can’t be used with a privacy-focused operating system, e.g. GrapheneOS. Similar for software like M$ Authenticator, without using Google Play services. Not using a smartphone at all is possible, but at a significant social cost for most people.

Your smartphone is capable of listening to all your conversations and possibly does so, tracks your location – even without GPS it can triangulate your position using cell towers and wireless networks. It knows what other devices are close by and for what duration. It knows everything about you, yet if one chooses not to feed the very few corporations who collect that data, you are met with disbelief, are labeled as paranoid and lose some level of connection with people.

There may be a silver lining: only the people who really care about you (or your money) will bother calling you, or sending SMS. If you are very lucky, maybe even PGP encrypted email. But most people don’t know the first thing about technology, so I don’t expect the average Joe to educate himself on the basics, that would be too much effort for someone who uses technology from dusk till dawn.

Technology has been “democratized”, while the education around it hasn’t. And I think changing this would be against capitals interest. The web is no exception, its current state has been normalized and while it annoys most people, they have grown accustomed to it. There are people who don’t know that something like an adblocker exists or could exist. Watching ads all day is has become so normal that they don’t even think about an alternative. If you don’t know about adblockers, here you go: ublock for desktop. This is a plugin for your desktop browser and it possibly won't work on mobile, unless you use firefox or brave o algo. For more advanced adblocking you can google "dns adblock" or "vpn adblock". If you care about it, you will find the energy to google it yourself.

A good Web

W hat would a good web even look like? It's pretty simple. Noncommercial, privacy friendly, somewhat decentralized, not bloated. The noncommercial part being the most important of them all.

There shouldn’t be ads or trackers on a blog. It disrespects the reader and is a sign of great self-importance. “But people need money, why shouldn’t they get paid for their labour?” The discussion of this question does not belong here and will be a seperate post. But in short: People should get paid independently of what they are doing, or whether they are doing anything. Creating anything for monetary profit in a system such as ours is immoral and degrades expression. That is not to say that you cannot accept money. If someone likes what you create, they can simply send you some. Maybe you project your internalized greed onto everyone else? (Also true for “Artists” crying out when being replaced by LLMs)

No ads, no trackers, no dark patterns, all of this is but a pipedream. Capitalism truly is a living beast, and it will devour everything. A small unknown blog of a nobody is not going to change this. In fact there most likely is nothing that can, but if that leads one to participating, then one is soulless. You are trading your humanity for the spectacle of connection.

Purely Fictional

Due to these aforementioned problems, it’s hard to design a site that doesn’t suck. Everything sucks, the question usually is: “To what degree?”

This site should be enjoyed by actual humans who have an interest of reading what I write. I don’t need to write for an audience, I will never do so. If nobody is interested in reading what I have to say, why would I care. Nothing of value was lost. But if a single person ever ends up here and gains something from it, then creating this site has been worthwhile. For those interested in the technical details, continue reading. Otherwise, do whatever or jump to the end.

Static Site Generator

I set out to create my page using some static site generator. Choosing one was hard, for there are what feels like one gazillion SSTs out there. Note that saait apparently didn't make it into this list. Maybe it doesn't use enough third party libraries to solve a very basic problem. Or it is too obscure. One can only speculate. So chosing one was pretty tedious. Many of them suck, but our universally beloved linux and politics subject matter expert once presented HUGO. I was intrigued and tried to use it to create my first website. Almost immediately it became obvious that hugo’s documentation is bad, to say the least. It lacks proper structure, gives you the most simple overview possible only to abandon you with what I do not consider “documentation” in the usual sense of software docs. It is essentially a treelike reference of semantic atoms (not unlike the nLab) with no apparent context if you want to actually get started with hugo. It could be that this is a personal problem of mine – a skill issue if you will, but I don’t want to waste hours of time to find out about absolute basics, which could have been laid out in 500 words.

Looking for proper tutorials is also mostly futile, as most of them use some kind of theme and then repeat the five lines of “tutorial” as presented in the official docs.

I first used Zola to build this site, but actually ended up using hugo instead. Zola lacked some key features I needed, like render hooks and I knew I would have to migrate at some point, so why not immediately, before the site would grow even more complex.

Features

While using no javascript at all, the site has a few notable features I deem necessary. They are not essential strictly speaking, yet I think their usefulness justifies the added complexity and some of the hacks necessary to make them work.

Sidenotes / Marginalia

The most important feature. If you are reading this page on a sufficiently large display with generous margins you have already seen them. On smaller screens, they are hidden by default and can be opened by clicking the little superscript This is a sidenote. If this is the first one you see, there are also a few above you missed. . I use sidenotes in my Typst notes all the time and find them very useful. They are less disruptive than footnotes because you don’t slip between lines as easily when scrolling back up, as you would when using footnotes. They are also useful to display figures.

Currently, they are implemented the Tufte CSS way. I am not particularly happy with that. The sidenotes are a hack to avoid javascript so one has to make a value judgement here: css hack and sidenotes with basically no features or javascript. Whats worse? Hard to tell. For now I prefer the hack. If I need more featureful sidenotes at some point, I may use js. Small notes on the right may also be a feature worth considering.

Simple Version

The simple version exists because it should. It can be read by screen readers for visually impaired people, or for people with very bad hardware or internet connection. A year ago this almost became the default design, but it was a little too unreadable. Remarkably this minimalist style is also associated with schizophrenia, because most schizo sites look like this. But that alone wouldn’t be a reason to not have a very minimal site.

Style

The style of this site is very deliberate and was inspired by my LaTeX/Typst template, some other websites as well as my personal taste. In line with the pictures that I took in the past, I wanted it to be monochrome with clear contrast, and a somewhat booklike appearance. It should be minimal without being soulless or overtly bloated. Here I can recommend Robert Bringhursts The Elements of Typographic Style. I don’t use smallcaps for the section titles, because it was hard to make them look right.

Line height is proper, I don’t understand people who set their leading like they are writing homework, so the grader can write his notes between the lines. It’s ugly and unreadable. Don’t do it.

The dropcaps are rendered using the initial-letter property in all browsers except for Firefox, which is the only major browser without support (for more than nine years now). Dropcaps still work in firefox by using first-letter and styling each letter manually. This is extremely painful (for me).

Microtypographic tweaks are nonexistent in favor of not using js. Subject to change, because I really dislike the hyphenation at times, the missing overhang and visual consistency. All in all this design was conceived to be readable and somewhat booklike.

I primarily plan on publishing some longer essays, as well as random stuff that I care about. There will also be some posts on programming and data science related stuff I have been working on, but this is not the priority. Most importantly, there is no point in the billionthst blog post about some uninteresting bullshit only to please a recruiter. Technical stuff only when it is interesting or actually helpful.

Then there is also the thoughts section, where I could in theory post some thoughts like a Xitter user. Don’t know if I will remove this, it sounds like a retarded idea.

AI

Nothing of what I publish is written using AI. It isn’t proof read by AI, it isn’t inspired by AI, it is not edited or structured using AI. Using AI for personal writing could be considered a sign of profound mental retardation or lack of taste.

What You Could Do

Here some expert level advice for free: Use an AdBlocker. Use noscript. Better yet, reduce using sites that display ads. That means reducing xitter usage, ACKSHUALLY, one shouldn't use twitter at all. It is the worst platform on the web. It's sole purpose is to make people seethe, stay on there longer to rake in more ad revenue and to divide. Real discussion is impossible by design, due to character limit and secondly due to the userbase. , no stupid news sites or newspapers with 100 word “articles” that contain nothing of value. Reddit etc. View harmful websites through archive links if possible. Delete TikTok forever.

Don’t use google when e.g. the Wikipedia search would do the job as well. Don’t use google services. Avoid facebook services as much as possible. (I am guilty of still having an instagram account though.) Don’t use nonfree software. Use Linux or similar instead of windows or MacOS, if you have the time. (This needs some dedication). Maybe create your own blog. Don’t use cloudflare. Don’t use google fonts, don’t use tracking, don’t display ads, don’t use apache.

NEVER pay for books, research papers etc. The fact that publicly funded research is not open access is a marvel of our culture and one of the great features of capitalism. Springer needs to make their $500,000,000.00 (five hundred million dollars) profit (2025) somehow.

Finally, I highly suggest everyone to touch grass, limit internet usage, talk to friends, family, strangers or whoever, you can even contact me.

Reach out to people. Write an E-Mail to someone you haven’t seen in a long time or send them a real letter. Have a real life discussion. Go outside, without your phone from time to time.