What everyone misses are the personal, hobbyist, non-commercial websites. This was replaced by things like Facebook, Wikia, Pinterest, Twitter, Medium, which are both constrained and ad-ridden. A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
The "every site looking the same" thing is fine, however, and still preferred for commercial sites, government, newspapers, startups, other utilities. In fact most of those could still look more of the same, because visitors rarely care about the differentiation for marketing purposes. You could get away with removing all parallax effects from those sites and nobody would miss them. Same for advertisements: nobody cares for the forced variety of colourful banners in web advertisement.
The sad part is that those websites do exist, but are nigh impossible to stumble upon except in association with a particular context.
For example, small communities around specific interests, and personal sites of authors of specific works.
We really just need a concentrated effort to catalogue and curate them under a single banner. These efforts also do exist, but haven't yet reached critical mass. Probably because policing content is a full-time job.
> A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
It will be a sad sad day when/if Tumblr gets shut down.
I really appreciate the fact that users can customize their own pages in many more ways than just changing their profile picture and header image, it gives it a lot more personality than you can get on Instagram/Tumblr/Facebook.
It also has a timelessness that you don't really get on other sites, at least not to the same degree. Posts have timestamps, but on the dashboard they're only visible if you look for them. So most people don't notice if the post they just reblogged was originally posted yesterday -- or seven years ago. This also gets rid of much of the repost issues you see on Reddit and similar sites, since the original post can remain relevant for much longer.
- It has all the tools for newbies (WYSIWYG)
- It has tools for advanced users (HTML editors)
- It has a marketplace for templates for those in-between
- It has the "good" social features (follow, republish)
- It doesn't use too many dark patterns
- It's not a walled garden that blocks or pollutes Google search results, like Facebook or Pinterest
- It has no "algorithm" encouraging people to consume the same bullshit as in Twitter/FB/Youtube
- It encourages people browsing specific blogs instead of doing pointless doom-scrolling
Of course it also has a lot of problems, but I'd say they're mostly social and not related to how the platform is built. On the other hand the same issues happen on Twitter and Facebook, so...
What everyone misses are the personal, hobbyist, non-commercial websites. This was replaced by things like Facebook, Wikia, Pinterest, Twitter, Medium, which are both constrained and ad-ridden. A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
The "every site looking the same" thing is fine, however, and still preferred for commercial sites, government, newspapers, startups, other utilities. In fact most of those could still look more of the same, because visitors rarely care about the differentiation for marketing purposes. You could get away with removing all parallax effects from those sites and nobody would miss them. Same for advertisements: nobody cares for the forced variety of colourful banners in web advertisement.