Ask HN: Is building for the web even worth it now?

I also miss the creatively built small websites where people shared their hobbies etc. "Social" media killed a lot.

The web is becoming less and less genuine, it's depressing.

I don't think this is true for many people.

The best example is the movie industry. Hollywood was using AI (in the form of convolutional neural networks mostly) a decade ago to produce CGI effects for film. The younger versions of the actors in Captain America: Civil War (2016) was basically done with AI. No one outside of movie effects and CGI nerds really cared. They just enjoyed the film because the AI was done well.

When AI is done really well you can't tell. It's similar to good design. If something is designed well you don't notice. You only ever see bad design. Same for AI, you only see it when it's bad.

(Someone will now reply to say they thought the effects in Captain America were terrible, obviously. :) )

Actually yes, but as a result, I left the internet I know behind. I don't use Twitter (aka X) or Facebook. I'm following friends on Instagram, but not adding any photos to the training pool anymore. I read Reddit as a last resort.

I use a small Mastodon instance, follow people who are interesting. Read blogs of a select few, and discover new ones via their links or rings. Instead of IRC, I have found a Discord server frequented by the same people. Oh, also, I frequent here.

I also left GitHub because of their AI shenanigans and don't miss that place. I still use it for work reasons, but my code lives in quieter places. Left Google search for Kagi. Started to self-host things, cutting ties with online services more.

As a result, I'm building my own sub-internet with the resources I choose to use. I refuse to be bombarded with ads and AI-slop. I miss the old internet, but not the new one. The one I'm curating for myself serves all purposes for me.

But in absolute terms, I think there's still A LOT of good, human content out there and the web is still full of interesting people worth following and engage with.

Personally I'm a big fan of blogs as a way to get to know people and see what they're up to. And those are still going strong. If you want to go down that path for example, there are plenty of starting point:

- The ooh.directory (https://ooh.directory) has thousands of blogs listed from all over the world - My own blogroll.org (https://blogroll.org) has just passed 1k blogs listed - Kagi has their own small web tool thingy https://kagi.com/smallweb

And then you even have even more old school style projects like the Internet Phone Book (https://internetphonebook.net)

Are.na (https://www.are.na) is also an excellent place to stumble on more quirky and obscure corners of the web.

The list goes on and on and on. Interesting content is still out there. And there are plenty of people who still maintain personal sites and forums. But in 2025 you're not going to just casually stumbled on them. You have to actively go hunt for them because everything is now getting drowned by the sea of AI garbage.

That's partly the reason why I started my people and Blogs (https://peopleandblogs.com) series a couple of years ago, to help people discover other humans more easily.

I think just accepting that the web is shit and we have to let it die is the wrong mindset. The web is, for you, what you make of it. If you want to find more interesting content, go search for it. And when you find it, share it on a space you control.

Unrestrained SEO and the failure of search engines (or, in Google's case, complicity veering towards enthusiastic support) to do anything about that was the first thing that, for me, took a lot of the fun out of the web.

Cheap botting, engagement farming, walled gardens, social media, and now AI has left me in a state of active avoidance. I don't feel good when I use the web. Like, any of it, at all.

Casual cruelty has always been a problem of online interaction, but at one time it was also balanced out by familiarity, friendliness sometimes, creativity ... but those things have gotten a lot harder to find.

The most engaging online interaction I've had recently has been some local community groups on Signal, and even that is best in small and infrequent doses.

This is the wrong way to look at this though because it would occur everywhere it could anyways.

Instead there are two things you should consider: what do you want to build and do you want it to work. Don’t worry about anything else.

I can’t fucking stand React so my career as a JavaScript developer is dead. I also can’t stand jquery or working with whiners and quitters too complicated by first world problems to learn things or apply any concept of engineering, so my career as a web developer has been dead for a very long time.

Nonetheless, I still build projects for the web because I enjoy JavaScript (now TypeScript). It’s fast and doesn’t force OOP decoration nonsense on you. It’s a great place to produce MVPs if you are comfortable with it at a low level. I don’t enjoy it for other people’s admiration. I enjoy it for the things I build primarily for personal use.

Do what you enjoy and make it work for you the way you want it to work.

and the webstewards are all paid better if the only thing you see is that autogen sewage, nobody gets paid anything from you reading a handcrafted blog page with no ads or ai built into it.

There are extensions that disable youtube's recommended page and redirect you to your subscriptions page.

There are extensions that disable twitter's for-you tab.

If you're using said sites' mobile apps, uninstall them and use stuff like Revanced or whatever.

You don't need to radically disconnect from everything, there are smaller steps that can be taken to make "being online" a radically better experience.

A whole lot of super smart people interacting in mainly civilized fashion? I'm in, even when there's the occasional disagreement.

Curiously, I find the ArsTechnica forums a tad toxic, although I would have expected a similar audience.

I gravitate to the forums that have that usenet feel, there are some, although many are sadly behind Discord (which is great, but it feels much like a walled garden to me).

you don't need social media, everybody as excuses as to why they're there, but none of them are real

self hosting saved most of the internet for me, from jellyfin for movies TV shows and movies to piped for YouTube

Degoogling and removing big tech from your life also helps a lot, changing from gmail to protonmail was a small change from the outside but it made how I interact with account creation and handling of my data so much more enjoyable

so I dont personally feel this way, but I dont engange with any part of the internet terrorized by AI (and human) slop

When you build a sand castle on a beach, you can't say you did not expect waves.

Are you a bot?

I'm being pushed back to books and personal relationships and I love it.

One can find snippets of it here and there, stumbling upon a niche forum for a hobby is still exciting, participating in those and recognising the users over time, that sense of community still lurks around for some stuff. Overall it's just gone, it's not what the web is anymore.

Most of it has been monetised, captured in a few big platforms, closed off in walled gardens, made to be ephemeral. I don't mean that there isn't remnants of the old web at all, you can find some treasures around but there's no more discoverability for it, it's kinda like finding the underground scene of your city.

It's more than figuring out who is real and who is a bot, there's no sense of permanence of a community around, you don't recognise the names/nicknames to form any bond/rapport...

"Building" websites? Indeed eroded by social media, many businesses are happy with only a Facebook/Instagram presence.

"Building" software? Yes and no: it's all still on the web but the increasing number of developers, and now AI, are making it easier to fill niches. There aren't many low hanging fruit left, you won't get rich quick with a todo app.

You can tell I've been through a lot to be able to give you this advice here.

Even TikTok is just slopaganda, AI videos to promote fascism. So it's not just text, it's all content online only unless it's come from someone you trust and know.

I even like AI somewhat, some things it produces. pretty pictures i guess. scfi-fi. but still its not engaging anymore, you get saturated very quickly if things are always available.

The internet seems pretty much dead for a long long time already. a few bastions here n there of maybe-real-people talking. I had some minor hope AI/ML might actually improve things, get rid a bit of the bubbles caused by algos, but its gotten much much worse actually.

AI is not the cause of the decline or rot, but its definitely accelerating it.

A lot of things I cared about are taken over by the loud-n-stupid bunch who yells only in blanket statements and never seems to be able to produce any sound reasoning or evidence for their discourse. i call them bots despite them likely being confused humans...

The worse thing is, that it seems now more and more actual people in the real world are mimicking this behavior. Trying to say smart things about topics they know nothing about, because if chatGPT can give some smart sounding lines, why shouldnt I be able to? I am researcher of technology and the number of times people hand my vibe-coded or written totalgarbage to review or fix, (papers, experiments etc.). Their capacity to think and reason is diminishing fast. They will be fierce and toxic if you highlight this as a concern, or point at any of their hallucinations.

I've expeirenced already a few times that people, like a group of zombies, gang up on me (debate/argument) and all jump on arguments which are trivially proven to be incorrect. Even if you prove them incorrect infront of them, they will just try to eat your brain/prove you wrong by talking louder etc. - and these are 'highly educated individuals'.

Considering to leave my research job, after about 12 years of trying to work myself into such a position, and just go back where i started.. to drive a forklift. its more likely i'd be working with real humans there. and if it's a robot, atleast its a real fuckin robot, not one of these infiltrator units...