The internet is broken. We take notes.
AI-generated content farms are pumping out thousands of articles a day, and search engines are eating it up like it's fine dining. The result? You're wading through a swamp of machine-slop every time you try to find a real answer to a real question. Welcome to the dumbest era of the web.
Aug 25, 2026
Every time a company redesigns its website, kills a product, or gets acquired, another chunk of the internet's institutional memory quietly disappears. We talked to archivists, historians, and people who've tried to fact-check a press release from 2011 about how the web is eating its own past — and what we're going to lose when it's gone.
Aug 25, 2026
Your bank's website looks like it was assembled in a basement during the Bush administration, and honestly? There's a reason for that. A deep dive into why financial institutions treat web design trends like a communicable disease — and why they might be onto something, even when they're absolutely not.
Aug 25, 2026
Modern websites have quietly declared war on one of the internet's most fundamental features: the ability to go back to where you were. Infinite scroll didn't just change how we browse — it nuked the entire concept of a returnable location. Your browser history is now a crime scene.
Aug 06, 2026
Your bank's website looks like a startup's website looks like a newspaper's website looks like a government portal. This isn't a coincidence — it's the aesthetic consequence of a handful of UI frameworks quietly colonizing every corner of the internet. We lost something when the web stopped looking different, and it wasn't just beauty.
Aug 06, 2026
Every dead link on the internet is a small act of destruction — a reference that no longer references anything, a source that can no longer be verified, a piece of knowledge that has been functionally erased. The web's link rot problem isn't just annoying. It's undermining the reliability of journalism, research, and collective memory at a scale we've barely begun to reckon with.
Aug 06, 2026
Somewhere between the hamburger menu that hides everything and the sticky header that refuses to leave, the modern website stopped trying to help you and started trying to trap you. Navigation has become a psychological obstacle course, and the designers building it know exactly what they're doing.
Aug 04, 2026
The promise of the early web was radical: all of human knowledge, freely accessible to anyone with a connection. What we got instead was a subscription archipelago where reading five articles a month costs you more than your gym membership. The paywalled internet isn't a business model. It's a hostage situation.
Aug 04, 2026
Every website on the internet now wants you to create an account, link your Google profile, and verify through a separate app just to do something you used to do in two clicks. The dirty secret is that all this authentication theater isn't protecting you — it's farming you. And the fragmented login ecosystem it created is a hacker's buffet.
Aug 04, 2026
Modern websites didn't accidentally become impossible to leave — that was the plan all along. From vanishing footers to auto-loading feeds, the design choices keeping you glued to your screen are deliberate, calculated, and deeply weird when you stop to think about them.
Aug 01, 2026
Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram spent years recruiting creators with promises of independence and viral riches, then systematically moved the goalposts once the content was flowing. The dream was freedom. The reality is a gig economy with better lighting equipment.
Aug 01, 2026
Web pages haven't gotten more complicated because the internet got smarter — they got more complicated because every corporate stakeholder with access to a CMS wanted their tracking pixel, their A/B testing script, and their third-party ad network loaded before you see so much as a headline. The web didn't get slower by accident.
Aug 01, 2026
AI-powered search is answering your questions so efficiently that the websites who originally answered those questions are quietly going bankrupt. When the middleman becomes the destination, the original source becomes irrelevant — and the whole economic engine that built the modern web starts sputtering.
Jul 22, 2026
Somewhere between the fourth stakeholder meeting and the seventeenth A/B test, your favorite website stopped being a website and became a PowerPoint deck made flesh. The people who built it didn't lose their minds — they just had too many bosses. Here's how elegant design dies, one committee vote at a time.
Jul 22, 2026
Hyperlinks are the connective tissue of the internet, and they're rotting in real time. The web you're reading today is already half-dead, held together by habit, cached pages, and the polite fiction that the URL you clicked will still exist tomorrow. Spoiler: it won't.
Jul 22, 2026
Notifications were supposed to make your phone useful. Instead, they turned it into a device that vibrates at you until you submit. Here's who built that machine, why they built it, and why turning it off feels like quitting cigarettes.
Jul 21, 2026
Email was supposed to be the cockroach of the internet — indestructible, unglamorous, and always there when you needed it. Instead, it became a rigged carnival game where your dentist's appointment reminder lands in spam while a coupon for 15% off throw pillows gets prime real estate in your inbox. Here's how the most durable protocol on the web got quietly ransacked.
Jul 21, 2026
What was once a clean white box promising the entire internet has quietly become a sponsored obstacle course. Google's search results page is now so stuffed with ads, AI blurbs, and shopping carousels that finding an actual website feels like a scavenger hunt inside a strip mall. The original deal — you search, Google finds — has been quietly renegotiated without your consent.
Jul 21, 2026
Every day, millions of hyperlinks quietly stop working — old URLs that once pointed to real content now route to error pages, domain squatters, or absolute nothing. Link rot is the internet's least glamorous crisis, and it's steadily hollowing out the web's ability to function as a collective memory. Nobody's fixing it, and the reasons why say everything about how we built this thing.
Jul 21, 2026
Search used to be a tool. Now it's a funnel. Google spent a decade quietly replacing the open web with a curated marketplace of sponsored results, AI hallucinations, and Reddit threads — and somehow convinced everyone this was progress.
Jul 20, 2026