The Bullshit Web (2018)
It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilobits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG instead of GIF, MozJPEG compression for JPEGs, SVG for vector graphics, CSS for reducing repeated code and getting rid of table-based layouts, etc.But, obviously, the web hasn't gotten faster, because the increased bandwidth has been filled with increased nonsense, and browsers now download 2MB of nonsense to show a 200-character text post. It's this sort of nonsense that is partly the genesis for ideas like Gemini, a return to Gopher, or my own KyuWeb; limit the capabilities of the medium to vastly improve its speed and legibility.This sort of thing isn't exclusive to the web, either. Is an old late-'90s version of Microsoft Word that could run on a machine with 4MB of RAM really a thousand times better than one from today that requires 4GB?I really love the web, but sometimes it does piss me off a bit.