Before I start my rant it is worth mention that when I am speaking about the internet in this context I mean the side what casual normie will normally see. The pages what they will find easily using Google or Bing or whatever basic search engine.
I personally know that there is a better version of internet out there still (more on that later in this post), but casual person never find it. Surely that might be a good thing as well, but when the Google and other search engines have gone crap it affects to me as well and that is the reason for this rant.
What drives me crazy nowadays is useless sites with useless information what does not give me direct answers to direct questions. For example, if I google "How to use nmap" I find sites what does not give me directly answers to that, but instead use huge amount of space to tell me "what is nmap", "What Does Nmap Do?", "How to use nmap" (without goign to actual explanation still), "How to install nmap" and finally "Nmap tutorial and examples" where you can found at least some actual examples what I was trying to find.
And this is not the only case - almost every subject you will search (or at least what I search quite often) you will get same kind of pages what is just lots of unnecesary filler for it's reader. If I am searching how to use nmap, I do not ask what it is and I don't want to know it on this page - I already know it. Heck.
This kind of sites are mostly so useless that they could be written by AI. I haven't thought it before until I saw a video from Luke Smith where he ranted this same thing I rant here. Surely I have ranted this same thing long time also in real life so maybe it is good to write this rant here as well since I have now started to write my opinions.
If you have been long enough in Interwebz you might have seen how internet have grown from fun and strange wild west to annoying retardville where all what you can easily found with search engines is just ads and selling with lots and lots of crappy bloatware "content" what gives no any benefit to any human.
Only reason (I think) that this kind of sites exists in the first place and is found on Google and other search engines are just SEO optimizations and way how they will bring more money to Google. Of course those sites also generate money for site admin as well so it is a good deal in money sense, but terrible for the development of the humanity.
Current way of monetization your content in internet makes internet full of crappy sites what have no any reason to exists and humankind would be better if none of those sites would ever be found on search engines.
It is worth mentioning that I am not against adding ads on your site per se, I am only against making the whole site unusable because you have so many ads that the actual content is not anymore easy to find at all on your page.
Also I am against current way of ads when they track users. They collect every piece of information about you they can find and follow you. That is also annoying and sick behaviour and should be illegal, but I am not against just using ads to get money itself. As long they do not track and follow user and the ads are not the whole point of the page I don't care. Sadly, this does not seem to be very common anymore on internet.
Most - or all? - mainstream websites are full of crap. They load lots and lots of content, terrible amount of JavaScript files what do who knows what, huge images, videos and of course those annyoing ads. And if that is not enough, many sites will have also auto play -feature in their videos what makes you annoyed even more immediately you have gone to that site.
That kind of huge pages are laggy to browse on older machines, heavy to load from the server and therefore those cause huge amounts of wasted electricity, disk space and other resources. For what? Mostly for nothing. If you want to see news sites you would be most of the time probably happy with the actual content of the news without any kind of blinking ads, videos and other unnecessary stuff.
Current web is bloated. Sites are huge and I am not the only one ranting about it. I guess most who are ranting about this bloat are people who knows that web does not need to be like this. You know, old(er) folks who have been on Internet since the end of 90's or beginning of 00's.
Internet connections were slow in that time (at least there where I lived), but it wasn't the issue. Sites were made for slower internet connections in mind and therefore even huge spaces had some kind of sensible size.
Of course, back in the days people also had a thing called patience. If the web site was slow, you just waited longer if that site was something you really wanted to see. Nowadays I don't have much patience to wait. Back in the 00's it was ok to wait since the internet connections were poor. Nowadays we have so fast web connections in many places that it just drive me nuts that we have slow web pages. It is ok still if the site is slow because server have slow connection (you host it at home for example), but if your site is slow because it loads 20 MB of crap just to say "Hello World" then I do not see any kind of reason to be happy to wait your site to load. Just write better site.
And yes, about that. There is a cure for that sickness. Start doing again web sites with hand crafted HTML using only text editor, write content with text editor and Markdown and convert those to HTML, use small and minimalistic static site generators or combination of all of those. You know, web does not need to be this kind of pit of sadness and if you have skills to participate, please do so. Create own web page and be the change for the better.
Another thing what is broken in current Internet is the lack of peronality. You know, it seems that 99 % of pages are looking same. Huge top banner, lots of ads, small place for actual content and then huge footer.
Almost every Wordpress site looks same. Yes, there is different templates, but still they mostly just look the same. No more exploration needed or wanted for the sake of exploration since it does not matter on what current page you land, it is all the same without much personality.
Of course there is still some web sites what I like even those are done with Wordpress, so it is possible to do good pages with it also. For example mnmlist.com looks good for me.
Web pages without unique personality are just as interesting than filling a tax form or seeing how to snow will melt away after the winter.
Oh and of course, since you are reading this page probably on Neocities you probably know that there is still hope. Old school kind of sites still exists and neocities hosts huge amounts of web pages what have uniqueness. Sad that you don't normally see that kind of pages in Google results.
If you are keen to search oldish kind of sites, you can also use wiby.com. I especially love that randomize feature :)
If you are here still with me, good. You might think that I am just an old unix neckbeard who does not understand how the current era is just different but no worse. If you think so then of course you are free to think so, but that is not the case.
In my point of view Web was much better on 2013 as well - you don't have to jump to end of 90's or to beginning of the 00's if you think that those old web pages were just plain ugly. I personally like those sites since they have more personality and uniqueness, but if we forget about that and just jump to year 2013 we can still have much more modern looking web pages and time when internet was still much better. Search results were much more sensible and not everything in web what was found with Google were useless filler sites what give no value to its reader.
Time will show what the future will hold. If the hippies and other wannabe world savers are loud enough bloat will be tackled with more lightweight web pages to greenwash companys imago. I won't be holding my breath still.