The web up to circa 2010.
Here you go, you asked for this, here it is.
The 2026 web.
You asked for this, but first do this, look at that, agree to this, have you considered that. Wait, why is this not working for any of us?
Discussion
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…Imagine if we just didn’t do all those stupid things. Instead said things like:
“NO. It is fucking stupid to invoke half a megabyte of JavaScript with every page request – an entire terrible novel’s worth of text – just so we can have another marketing meeting to read the tea leaves of numbers that don’t in any case tell us a damn thing about why the miserable user experience we’ve created is miserable.
No, we’re not doing that anymore.”
…“Instead, we’re going to focus on making good-spirited content and trust that our site visitors will value it and reward us for it in ways we *cannot possibly track* and trying to track it has been what destroys that trust.
Tracking robs us of our creative energies. It deludes us into thinking we know how our content is being used and what people think about it when for all the fat bergs of data we don’t know Jack shit. And that’s ok. It’s unknowable.”
…In the above respects it is ok to *not know*. Most of what actually matters is just not reducible to numbers anyway
…Tracking is the GDP of the web.
We can increasingly see just how **fucking stupid** GDP is as a measure of economic health.
Why do we think that knowing a microscopic fraction of the experience of a site visit is any different?
…The way back to trust is to become comfortable with *not knowing*, and to listen when our site visitors actually tell us stuff, of their own volition.
The web is intrinsically impersonal and implacable as a medium. Having numbers does not change that essential quality one tiny bit
…In general, make pages that are lean – no more complex than they need to be. There’s less to go wrong.
Sure, aspire to complexity sometimes. Playfully aiming for something is ok, but make sure it can fall back to something lesser at the user’s need.
But building a fat berg into *every page* just clogs the shit out of, well… shit. And things like cookie overlays are the inevitable effluent coming up through the drains