The internet has always been obsessed with what it once was - the days when you could go to someone’s blog and see rainbow text on a background of cat pictures, when this new site called YouTube started to blow up, and downloading music was a coin flip between the copy of Crank That you wanted or some file called “in the end.mp3.exe”.

Today, all we see is material design color palettes, thousands of different, shitty JavaScript frameworks and Twitter bots trying to sell you pictures of cartoon monkeys.

The web has become littered with things a majority of users simply just don’t care about. While all of these features look good on paper or a resume, there is no real benefit to the end user by adding functionality that will never be utilized. This is why “reader modes” in browsers are becoming a thing - people don’t care about anything except for what the headline promised them.

In today’s fast-paced society, there is no tool more powerful than the ability to comprehend information efficiently. Why should we give this up just for some corporate overlord’s convenience?

Justin Jackson wrote a great blog post outlining this entire situation, called I’m a fucking webmaster.

Jackson writes, “We couldn't draw, but we harnessed simple design patterns and made them work. We weren't engineers, but we could bend a script to our will. We weren't writers, but we discovered that words were the core of every page. In the process of doing all these things, we fell in love.”

The Internet enabled people to express themselves without boundary. People made things that they are proud of. We created things that make us happy. Today’s biggest websites prioritize enticing visuals, maximizing their profit from intrusive ads and shilling you their latest products.

Finally, Jackson includes one quote here, from the father of the internet:

Let's use the web to create neat new exciting things. Let's use the web to help people understand each other.

Tim Berners-Lee

In my opinion, today’s internet violates his second request. If we want to keep an internet we can sustain, grow, and improve upon, the only way is to remember how we started.