Recently I had to intensively research a couple of topics involving potential purchase decisions. I needed answers to some relatively simple questions. The websites that answered my questions stood to win my purchase. It was money on a plate to whoever could give me the clearest answers.
My experience was utterly miserable.
We all know using the web has become a terrible experience. Every conversation about digital experience is now an exercise to see how quickly someone will use the word “enshittification”. (I even did it in a recent post.)
But you find a way of coping. You have the websites you know, the ones you tolerate, the ones you trust the most. Going beyond those familiar websites is now like riding a digital ghost train. Unstable, rickety, and with lots of unexpected, unpleasant obstacles being thrown your way.
In these recent intensive web-based research activities, I needed to find answers to my questions. Instead, I was left utterly exasperated.
It all started, as most research tasks do, with a search query.
Using Google Search is now next to useless for most tasks. It is widely known that Google search has gone down the pan in the past few years. But I don’t necessarily blame Google for it. For decades, they did a decent job of warding off the spammers and the slimy search engine optimisers. But now the war has been lost.
The issue is that for any exploratory search query, you are just presented with a barrage of clickbait listicles that are utterly devoid of original useful content.
This sludge exists not because the website has useful information to provide on the topic. It exists because a content marketing copywriter has been told to churn something out based on something someone has seen in a search log somewhere — all in the name of traffic and engagement.
There might not even be real content on the page. Sometimes there is just placeholder text with misleading titles. It’s only there to game the system.
But the situation doesn’t even improve much when you find a website from a legitimate company. You would think a website that sells products would bend over backwards to explain what their products actually do.
Instead, you are inflicted with:
- Cringe marketing claptrap.
- Buzzword bullshit bingo.
- Inauthentic feel-good vibes.
- Unreal shiny people with rictus grins.
All squashed into:
- Autoplaying videos.
- Carousels that move before you can even perceive what’s inside them.
- Fonts that are entirely unreadable but are presumably deemed on-brand.
- Text that animates on in a way that probably excites the marketing manager, but all the lines hang off the end of the viewport so you can’t read it. (Yes, this was my genuine experience on one of the websites.)
Resulting in:
- Your machine grinding to a painful halt under the sheer horrifying weight of it all.
And most frustratingly of all:
- Absolutely zero useful information.
It’s worth pointing out that I run an ad blocker. So goodness knows how bad this situation would have been if I was experiencing the full-fat ad-choked web.
You already know how dearly we need to do away with constant modal pop-ups. Desperately begging us to “sign up to our newsletter for 10% off”. Or an invitation to talk to a worse-than-useless chatbot before we have even been given three seconds to browse the information ourselves.
The biggest lie on the web today is “your privacy is important to us”. This is the online marketing equivalent of “I’m not a racist, but…”
It always precedes a hostile interface that makes you individually decline the cookies that will send your personal data to hundreds of “partners”. It makes protecting your privacy feel like being a contestant on Takeshi’s Castle.
And that’s all before we even talk about AI-generated slop, which is only set to make the situation even worse.
The web is now full of information-free content.
Recently there was a profile in the New Yorker of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. His invention is 36 years old, and he is now 70. He has had a lot of time to reflect on the successes and mis-steps of the web.
It’s interesting how two of the biggest controversies in the web’s history surrounded non-text content.
One was the introduction of the <img> element, which allowed images to appear on webpages. It was introduced by a browser vendor in 1993 before being adopted as an official standard in 1995.
Another was the decision to allow digital rights management in videos as part of a W3C web standard.
Perhaps the focus on these multimedia aspects has been a distraction from what made the web so vital in the first place.
We need information that actually informs.