Using The Web in 2024 -

Fair warning, this is a longer post than normal and is the result of a series of meditative sessions where I have contemplated the essence of the web; its evolution, subsequent revolutions and ultimately its distillation into what we now euphemistically call the internet.

My conclusion? I have absolutely no idea what happened.

Using the internet in 2024 is akin to dunking your brain in radioactive waste. Not only is it a desperately unpleasant experience, it also poisons you slowly but surely as your physiology mutates to accommodate its malevolence. You become numb to the experience, accepting that this must be the most optimal design possible, that surely our benevolent creator would not submerge us in so much filth if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

I beg you to cast your mind back to 2014, because it wasn’t as bad then I promise and we can make it nice again. We just have to believe, and also fundamentally restructure the way that sites generate revenue.

2014 is relevant because it was the year that mobile internet traffic overtook desktop ‘surfing (ask your parents). Developers realised that your site had to be optimised for a screen no more than 6 inches across, which meant condensing your content whilst also ensuring enough screen real estate was given over to the life-sustaining advertisements.

I, in the sum total of my admittedly anecdotal experience, have never visited a website that got this balance right or even close. Instead the adverts encroached more and more, became more and more obnoxious and the ad/ad blocker arms race has led to some truly appalling design decisions that make me queasy just to think about.

Pity, most of all, the developers, who have no choice but to sustain this Faustian pact to pay their bills. Publishers, managers, money-men, bean counters, all demanding more and more of their websites be given over to advertisers to up the revenue and win some more industry awards for squeezing a thimble of blood from an especially dry stone.

Oddly, these suited buffoons don’t seem to realise it is an absolute monkey-paw of an arrangement. Bad sites don’t get visitors, good sites don’t even get visitors (bitter? me? no?) but bad ones certainly don’t. Marketers are famously in favour of people seeing their ads, and if you run your website experience into the ground with awful ads then those same Mad-Man will desert you faster than NFTs went out of fashion.

Short-termism is the problem here, as it is in almost every walk of human life. As a species we are perennially incapable of looking past the tips of our own noses, which is incidentally why I think playing chess should be taught in schools, but I am going to buck that historic trend to suggest we look a little way down the road. And what is that on the horizon I see; looming over us all, a towering behemoth, great harbinger of the end times?

Oh great, its AI.

No but seriously, AI represents the path to prosperity, at least right up until the moment it destroys us all. Think about it; all these large language models are trained on data. When you ask a question, these models analyse vast quantities of the stuff to find the most probabilistically correct answer (hefty citation needed but I think that’s about right), and that data is at least partly derived from websites. Now if you can prove that some of the data used to answer the question was yours, then you should receive some of the revenue.

But how would it know that the data was yours?

This is going to upset the web-3 deniers, but the blockchain could be a crucial element in redesigning the commercial mechanisms that underpin the open internet. A properly implemented blockchain could theoretically allow you to watermark your data, and if its processed by an LLM (AI) then you can prove it and you can charge for it and be paid in Bitcoin, all without raising a single invoice. Each charge might only be worth a fraction of a penny, but if AI queries reach the same prolific density of Google searches, then it should be enough to sustain any website willing to put the work in to making sure they’re content is worth including in the models. Replace Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) with Language Model Advertising Optimisation (LMAO) - that acronym might need some work…

I may just be a grumpy old man who hates adverts on the internet, but that could be the perfect person to come up with a way to save us all.