The internet is a creative medium but websites are a terrible creative medium

Due to reasons i am enjoying a lot of time to think about my career. “software engineering” is going through a big transformation now or so i hear, tragic.

Like many people i still respect I got into this field through being a ‘web designer’ a job that at the time meant ‘i pirated flash in high school and things got weird’ it’s always been a fun creative endeavor for me. And many others! I learned my css imitating websites i thought looked cool. Had more wordpress templates than clothes and so on.

At the time most internet places looked unique and interesting instead of like a shopify template so that helped but anyway there’s this recurrent lament among elder millennials that this just doesn’t happen anymore right, i bet you thought i was going this way and no fuck that, im here to tell you websites suck and you probs got stockholm syndrome about them.

We used to have to care about IE vs Firefox vs the other one i can’t remember and that was it? There was a creative explosion because everybody was fundamentally looking at 800 pixel wide pictures sliced into chunks so you could put text in the middle. It was awesome.

Try doing that today and it won’t really work on a phone, so now you need to scale this. Did you phone in your hover states to not exist on small screens? congratulations you dumb bitch you forgot ipads exist. did you remove them altogether for touch screens? now they wont work on a microsoft surface. got all of this right? is this all accessible? did you add some shit on the background so gamers on a 4k screen that have never heard of the maximize button wont complain about wasted space? is there any vague semblance of integrity left? cool thats design taken care of. oh shit, dark mode. People who use dark mode are somehow the most annoying entitled shits on the internet (a really high bar to clear) so you better support that. you can probably drop light mode tho, who gives a shit.

Anyway so thats cool. Are you gathering user data? dropping cookies? do users interact on your website? wanna sell items? enjoy the 200 page legal read. Phew thats over now on to host this so people can access it. ssl, domain names, dns, scrapping/bot prevention, oh yeah btw this will probably cost money if more than 2 people at a time visit or you make a typo and need to redeploy so thats cool.

in an incredible twist, netlify fucked up deploying this and i had to get my phone to authenticate logging in to debug and sdkhfkhsdhjf you get the point. still not sure why things dont work anymore but oh well we usin github pages now

I hear some folks use ‘javascript’ to further enhance the functionality of their websites, that sounds like another even bigger can of worms just waiting to be opened so im not gonna.

As an elder millennial this was a little bit like what I imagine Fortnite is to gen z where every single one of these increasingly insane stacking layers of complexity came incrementally so it was all parseable as time developed, but when dipping into the pool now this is just a big ball of fuckery and nonsense that’s just not worth the squeeze.

Ahhh where was I going with this. I respect that websites suck now. Making them sucks. Maintaining them sucks. Making them do anything sucks. Making videos doesn’t have any of this bullshit attached to it. Games sit in an interesting place with editors that still center around a canvas view of your work instead of your typescript errors. More traditional media? I’m assembling a gun for a cos now and it’s a knife and glue and paint, it doesn't need me to set up ssl certificates, it’s a beautiful thing. i look forward to sharing a picture of that with you

Thanks for reading! if you got thoughts I have probably posted this on bluesky and you can respond there! And if I haven't just ping me there or email me.

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