Social media over-hyping and undermining high quality web

In the dawn of times that matter to me, ie. when I first got online in 1998 and my life took a sudden upward swing in all things awesome, everything online was still fun and games and the big businesses were trying to wrap their heads around what to do with the damned thing. Still, in the year 2000, Sebastian Bach’s website looked like this. Granted, he was behind the times and made me scream in horror, but nonetheless, those were much more innocent times all around. The Internet was still an even playground, where having a big marketing budget didn’t make much of a difference, after all, nobody sold ads to speak of. We had banner advertising and banner exchange networks and webrings and that sort of stuff, and the web was largely about hobbyist web designers doing their own thing undisturbed by anyone with a dollar to spend on advertising.

We could still find each other.

Now… we are drowning in easy-to-browse, two-second attention grabbing graphics and over-sensationalized headlines generated by automates such as this, that give you a headline that you then write about so that your content will be attention grabbing. People write content to suit the headline these days, not write headlines to fit the content. Why? Because these headlines make you money, and you gotta give people what they want.

In the meanwhile, quality websites are dying because who wants to keep writing to oneself…

First, blogs came about and killed unique website design

Back in the day, websites and blogs looked like these. (I hope the original creators don’t mind me posting these, because I have no idea who made these, these are simply screen captures I took years ago of websites that were so  numerous I no longer know who created them, I grabbed these screen shots in ONE SITTING, and now I struggle to find one blog to feed my design envy:)

There was always a style to follow, but it changed gradually like fashion, it wasn’t led by major companies but by individual designer’s work that inspired others to follow suit… Or to be a copy cat. It was beautiful to look at, sometimes too beautiful to even read the content, but it was an art form among others.

At first, blogs became popular. The fantastic innovative and artistic complex layouts that you first had to figure out how to navigate before you could get to the content (lovely puzzle sometimes, deliberately done to entertain,) you now found nothing but boxed two or three column layouts that were decorated with nothing but a heading image or nothing at all. If you had a lot of control over the way your blog looked like, the theme creator had made it easy to change colors, but often that was too much to ask – and for a long time it was. I hated blogs when they first arrived and didn’t learn to love them until I learned to make my own themes from scratch, but I still miss the people who used to design from scratch, too.

Now, if you’re into online publishing, you’re much more likely to start a Facebook page or a Tumbler blog if you’re really into it, and nothing wrong with that – the learning curve is a lot less steep than what it was to learn HTML from scratch, as easy as that was, and if that wasn’t bad enough, you are also sharing the same content as everyone else is sharing, and you can grab them off websites that list the most shared content for each day, and you can simply copy links to feed to your own readers, spewing the same clickable, shareable content to the masses, drowning out the obscure content that… might actually be of real value.

If I was into conspiracies, I could claim that this would be the perfect plan to keep expensive expert and consulting services in business, because you can’t find the free information available as it is drowned in low-quality numbered lists intended to give you the impression of understanding the topic while you speed onto the next one. But no. This is not a conspiracy, it is what people want. Bread and circuses, panem et circenses, the poet Juvenal pointed out in ancient Rome, A.D. 100, so this is hardly anything new, but also the frustration philosophers and artists feel about it is nothing new. Separated by an ocean of bullshit, the frustrated thinkers of this world are trying to make a connection to each other, rather than those who have a brain of a monkey and no intention of developing it, and they are so used to being separated by morons, that even when they meet each other, they still suspect each other for being a moron, partly to protect their own ego from getting bruised by the sudden realization they are no longer the only brainiac in the room, but also out of sheer shock of meeting someone with a half a brain, and… Out of terror of losing that brain to the realization of “nope, I was wrong again. STILL no headache.”

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