It's nearly the end of 2019. As I write this Christmas is hurtling toward us and
will be in the rearview mirror in a few days, then comes the traditional 'do a
lot of nothing for a week while we wait for the calendar to run out'. Activities
during that week involve a lot of thinking about new beginnings and making 'New
Year's Resolutions'.

New Year's Resolutions don't work. There are lots of reasons why they don't
work, from being too vague ("I'm going to lose weight this year"), to
underestimating the amount of work that will go into doing the thing ("I'm going
to learn to speak Korean this year"), to just grand proclamations with no plan
about how those things are going to be done.

The main reason, that I don't do New Year's Resolutions, though, is because I
think that self-improvement is something that should be done all the time. I
think that if you want to make a change you should do it any time you want to.
If you decide you want to lose 20 pounds, but it's April, then start working on
a plan to lose 20 pounds. Don't wait until December to get started.

Of course, the end of a calendar year is a convenient time to take stock of
everything that you did in a year and look toward the next one (and, yes, I know
that years are arbitrary, and you could as easily pick a date in June and call
that your new year if you wanted to).

And, as I look back, I've noticed a lot about how I use the Internet and how I
want to use the Internet, and I think that my relation with the World Wide Web
needs to change.

I remember the Web before ads. I remember the Internet being a place where
people had the freedom to connect to each other a hundred different ways. The
Internet seemed like a bigger place then, full of wonder and excitement. Where
anyone could stake out their claim and put up whatever content they wanted. I
loved finding a site and taking in its content, finding links to the pages that
the author thought were interesting, and going down this rabbit hole all night
finding odd corners of of the human psyche rendered in my browser window.

Now the concept of a personal home page is all but dead. The only people with
personal pages are techies with blogs that they use to show off how clever they
are in the hopes that they can hit the front page of Hacker News. Non-techies
have all moved to Facebook.

I could go into any random IRC server and find a thousand channels, all of them
buzzing with activity (except for that one channel where someone got kicked out
and tried to steal the channel's regular users by creating a 'new and improved'
channel), and find a channel to discuss whatever I wanted.

Now, IRC is all but dead. I've tried going to a few IRC networks and browsing
around, and there are channels with hundreds of users (like, say #ubuntu on
Freenode) where nobody is chatting. Discussions flare up and die in seconds like
solar flares. Everyone has moved to Slack (or Matrix or Twitter or Facebook
Messenger or whatever), and the die-hards that stayed are barely there as it is.

Message boards? Replaced by Yahoo! Groups and Facebook.

BBS's? There's no good equivalent these days.

Email? Replaced by twitter, Facebook Messenger, et al.

Newsgroups? Used primarily to distribute pirated media. Replaced by message
boards, which got replaced by Facebook.

I won't bemoan every service that got replaced by Facebook of absorbed by
Google otherwise we'll be here all day. The point of all this is that the
Intenet has become the GoogleFacebookNet.

Statistically, you use Chrome (as of this writing, Chrome is used by about 65%
of web users). If you use Chrome, statistically, you use Google for search and
you see what Google allows you to see. I've seen it expressed that if Google
doesn't know about you, then you don't exist. If you're a google.com user, you
live in a Google-shaped bubble.

Statistically, you use Facebook. As of this writing Facbook has around 2.5
billion active users. As of this writing the population of the United States is
around 330 million, and the population of the world is around 7.6 billion. If
you use Facebook, you give them unprecedented access to your personal
information. They have a dossier on nearly every internet-connected person on
the planet, even the holdouts that have resisted Facebook's siren call. They can
use that information any way they want, including psychologically manipulating
you into spending more time on their site so they can collect more information
about you and the cycle continues.

Facebook and Google are advertising companies, and part of their job is to make
you pay as much attention to their product as possible so they can show you more
ads. The actual content you care about is inconsequential. They use all kinds of
tricks to make you want to spend time using their services. Tricks made possible
by things like Javascript and cookies and tracking pixels and a hundred other
methods, with new ones being invented almost daily. Adblockers help, but they're
like putting duct tape on a cracked water pipe. It works for a while, but it
will eventually fail. The water finds a way to seep out.

And that's annoying. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating some grand return to the 'Good old days'
of the Internet or anything like that. It's a shame that large swathes of the
Internet have gone offline or are otherwise rendered inaccessible because the
web browsers no longer speak the language that the servers do (it does not
escape me that I'm posting this to a Gopher hole, which uses a protocol that is,
for all intents and purposes, dead as a doornail) and that it's been replaced by
whatever it is that we have now. The personal homepages have faded into
obscurity. The thrill of discovery has been replaced by an algorithm trying to
figure out what I want and giving it to me before I've asked for it. 

Heck, even the concept of the URL is basically gone. Most users don't know what
it is or what it does. You can't really type them in, either, since they've
essentially turned into database queries. If I found a page that I wanted to
share with someone, I could tell them the URL or bookmark it for later. 

But those bookmarks largely don't work any more. Domains change hands and
content is lost. Or someone loses interest and takes a site down. Or, more
often, someone makes a change to the content management system behind the scenes
and didn't bother preserving the old link structure (because websites aren't a
collection of pages, they're a collection of records in a database). Google is
actively crippling the display of the URL in Chrome because showing it is
'confusing'. 

And all of that has got me thinking about how I use the World Wide Web and the
Internet these days. I usually visit less than a dozen websites in a day (we're
not counting the sites I get linked to via a news aggregator). Discoverability
is completely broken. 

The personal home page with an eclectic collections of links is dead. Not that
it would really matter if anyone bothered to make a personal homepage anyway
since there aren't any interesting sites to link to. I'm not counting anyone who
has a website as part of their business (including stuff like webcomics) or
anyone who runs a 'blog', but is really just a resume that they can point to to
show potential employers how clever they are. 

Discoverability is dead. The most used search engine on the planet is Google.
Google ignores a lot of the web. Google prioritizes newness over usefulness.
Google tries to guess what you mean instead of what you searched for. Google
tries very hard to not return zero results, even if there are no results for
your query. Google Chrome forgets things that are older than a certain threshold
in your personal history. Google wants you to view the web through AMP. Google
wants you to view the Web solely via Google Searches. 

Not that most of that matters anyway because we have billions of websites now.
Millions of small news outlets regurgitating the stories that the big sites
broke first in the hopes of generating enough ad revnue to make a few dollars
without having to do much work.

And, I realized a while back that I didn't really want to be part of that
machine. I installed a Pi-hole, which helped some, but it's an arms race. I ran
with Javascript disabled (since that's how most of the ads are served and
tracking is done), but most websites require that you enable Javascript to even
view plain text, which is ludicrous, and finding which specific scripts I have
to run to enable a page to show me the information I'm interested in while also
keeping tracking to a minumum is tiresome. 

One option would be to just turn off all the ad-blockers and use the web in all
its advertising-encrusted-ness. 

But I can't go back to the ad-filled Web. I won't. Every time I sit down at
another person's computer and I see the percentage of web pages that are covered
with ads or when I see that someone's 'AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User
Data\Default\Code Cache\js' folder has over 100,000 cached files in it or
Firefox takes up gigabytes of memory to display what amounts to a few kilobytes
of plain text... I have a pause. I think of what we've lost to get to where we
are now. 

Even more than that, though. Browsing the World Wide Web should be fun. It's
something I used to do in my spare time because it was fun. It was fun to find
interesting sites. It was fun to create sites and share them with my friends.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped having fun. 

It's not fun exploring a featureless grey mush that's been prediscovered for me,
optimized for maximum engagement, and then spoonfed to me every day by The
Algorithm(tm).

That's the Web we have now. It's not a Web built for fun. It's not a Web built
for disseminating information. It's a Web built for maximizing engagement as a
means to drive advertising revenue. It's a Web built to psychologically
manipulate you. 

And it's a Web that we, collectively, in the technology industry, allowed to be
built. Maybe it was inevitable, given how open the Internet was designed.

Which brings me to my not-New-Year's resolution.

The ad-covered user-tracking scumware-funded Web is here to stay. Too many
people use it every day and know no other way that a world wide web could exist.
There will be no critical mass of people who quit browsing the Web as it exists
now just as there will never be a critical mass of people who quit
binge-watching television (I'm including streaming video services here) even
though sitting around watching anything for eight hours in a row isn't very good
for you, either. 

I can't change the nature of the Web, no matter how hard I advocate for it. I
can tell someone all the ways that Web ads are insidious and don't respect
privacy and how services like Facebook are designed to keep you addicted to
them. But what I can't do is make someone care about those things. 

If you're okay with trading your privacy for being able to post pictures of your
dog on Facebook, I can't convince you that you shouldn't do that.

If you spend all day trawling twitter and retweeting stuff that just confirms
what you already know or believe without forming an opinion of your own, I can't
convince you to set up a page somewhere where you can create something more
meaningful than a 280 character snippet of a thought.

What I can do, though, is to abandon the web.

I mentioned something like this at the beginning of 2019 (see: Slowly Kicking
ads out of my life), and I've mostly done what I set out to do. But I realize
that just kicking ads out of my life is not enough. What I need to do is kick
most of the Web out of my life, too (sorry, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!).

I'm not going to kick it all out, at least, not all at once. I recognize that
there are lots of sites that are useful. For instance, it's useful to be able to
place a purchase on a store's website and then go pick it up at the store.
There are also lots of sites with good educational information that require a
modern web browser to use.

So I'll probably keep a modern web browser around for a while. I'll evaluate the
handful of sites I visit and prune them down as far as I'm comfortable doing.
I'll also have to scavenge the Web for other interesting sites that are out
there (I know they're out there, I just have to find them) that aren't
completely ruined by ads. 

I have to do this because browsing and using the Web, as it stands right now, is
not fun. Being psychologically manipulated into engaging with content is not
fun. I can't even remember the last time I felt a genuine sense of fun and
discovery when browsing the Web. If I'm not having fun doing something in my
free time to relax, then I'm doing something wrong.

Maybe this experiment won't last. Maybe I'll miss the Full Web Experience(tm) so
much that I'll come back in a month like nothing ever happened and I'll pretend
like this entry never existed.

But I suspect that it will be more like my Twitter experiment from late last
year. I stopped checking Twitter for about nine months and didn't miss it much
after the first few weeks. I only started checking it again so I could promote
my YouTube channel and my Extra-Life marathon.

The next few months will definitely be interesting.