I’ve been wondering about something like this for years. Websites have been aggressively enshittifying for a long time now. Everything defends against accessing their content via any unapproved means. Getting a full resolution image from anywhere via image search becomes more difficult every day. If a search engine lands you on a site, the site deliberately withholds the content that brought you there and dangles the carrot to keep you using the site for as long as possible, always making sure you fall just short of what you’re after so you keep looking. Most links that you share directly from your URL bar are littered with telemetry data so that unless you first sanitize the link, sharing it on social media means that now the site is able to link your session to the account that shared the link and map your social connections on platforms they don’t even own.
I have a foreboding of a future internet where everything, even the structure of URLs themselves is obscured behind a layer that is opaque to the end user. People will be completely locked in to only using the site in an approved manner from an active account in “good standing” with the platform. You can use the site as normal as long as you’re logged in, but the URL itself would only ever be something like website.com/sU6ecjejfE32Jy7w94. You could share that link as normal and people could click it and be directed to the thing you want to share, but they can’t view the content without logging in, and even if they don’t log in, the mere fact that they clicked it still links the two of you together in the user map. Nothing ever escapes the sandbox and nobody is able to share content from the site unless they accessed it from approved means, and they can only share it to others who are also using approved means. The more websites adopt this model, the more user-mapping takes place until eventually anonymity on the internet is completely dead. Every single site knows exactly who everyone is and every social connection that they have. Everyone who refuses to submit to this new paradigm is blocked from accessing the site at all, yet they are still mapped all the same. Making a new website that’s this restrictive would probably mean that it never gets off the ground, but making that change on a platform where users are already dependent and tolerating increasing levels of enshittification just might work. If one major platform pulls it off, others will follow.
The world wide web a legacy platform at this point. It’s treated as such by both the tech industry and average people. Most people use social media through apps. All the government organizations and banks are consolidating their services to apps. Nobody makes their own websites anymore.
The reality hasn’t sunk in yet for the rest of us, but it’s happening. We assumed it would be a forever thing once it was created. It turns out the world wide web is going to be brief historical period at the turn of the century that you tell your grandkids about.
Maybe some day the PC will go back to being a novelty appliance found in few living rooms. Where you have to power it up, sign on, and browse the few handful of websites in existence. When you’re done, you turn it off and go about your day again.
You could share that link as normal and people could click it and be directed to the thing you want to share, but they can’t view the content without logging in, and even if they don’t log in, the mere fact that they clicked it still links the two of you together in the user map. Nothing ever escapes the sandbox and nobody is able to share content from the site unless they accessed it from approved means, and they can only share it to others who are also using approved means.
Next: reddit is killing its HTTP interface to stop AI bots
I’ve been wondering about something like this for years. Websites have been aggressively enshittifying for a long time now. Everything defends against accessing their content via any unapproved means. Getting a full resolution image from anywhere via image search becomes more difficult every day. If a search engine lands you on a site, the site deliberately withholds the content that brought you there and dangles the carrot to keep you using the site for as long as possible, always making sure you fall just short of what you’re after so you keep looking. Most links that you share directly from your URL bar are littered with telemetry data so that unless you first sanitize the link, sharing it on social media means that now the site is able to link your session to the account that shared the link and map your social connections on platforms they don’t even own.
I have a foreboding of a future internet where everything, even the structure of URLs themselves is obscured behind a layer that is opaque to the end user. People will be completely locked in to only using the site in an approved manner from an active account in “good standing” with the platform. You can use the site as normal as long as you’re logged in, but the URL itself would only ever be something like website.com/sU6ecjejfE32Jy7w94. You could share that link as normal and people could click it and be directed to the thing you want to share, but they can’t view the content without logging in, and even if they don’t log in, the mere fact that they clicked it still links the two of you together in the user map. Nothing ever escapes the sandbox and nobody is able to share content from the site unless they accessed it from approved means, and they can only share it to others who are also using approved means. The more websites adopt this model, the more user-mapping takes place until eventually anonymity on the internet is completely dead. Every single site knows exactly who everyone is and every social connection that they have. Everyone who refuses to submit to this new paradigm is blocked from accessing the site at all, yet they are still mapped all the same. Making a new website that’s this restrictive would probably mean that it never gets off the ground, but making that change on a platform where users are already dependent and tolerating increasing levels of enshittification just might work. If one major platform pulls it off, others will follow.
The world wide web a legacy platform at this point. It’s treated as such by both the tech industry and average people. Most people use social media through apps. All the government organizations and banks are consolidating their services to apps. Nobody makes their own websites anymore.
The reality hasn’t sunk in yet for the rest of us, but it’s happening. We assumed it would be a forever thing once it was created. It turns out the world wide web is going to be brief historical period at the turn of the century that you tell your grandkids about.
Maybe some day the PC will go back to being a novelty appliance found in few living rooms. Where you have to power it up, sign on, and browse the few handful of websites in existence. When you’re done, you turn it off and go about your day again.
apps are so much more terrible to use than the browser, much more limited ui and features. like your bank and healthcare apps is so not intuitive.
Me: [presses PrntScrn, shares the result of that]
That would be one way to force people to use their shitty app.
This seems likely? I’ve had several services that I used to use, which deprecated their website in favour of their app 🤮