Going to a website for the content is nostalgia

When I started building websites professionally in 1998, everybody used the same phrase about getting traffic. Content is king.

It was a play on the cash is king motto that small businesses ran on and it was accurate. If you wanted people to arrive you had to build something they’d tell each other about because search engines weren’t remotely as good as they are now and word of mouth did most of the work. The advice was real advice and it worked.

Then the web shifted. Between roughly 2005 and 2015 people moved from consuming what was on the web to making it, and everybody called that Web 2.0. Content was still king through all of that. People went to the sites they liked in order to make things that other people would then sit and read.

What came next was visible to anyone paying attention. Around 2015 people stopped making things for others to spend time with, and started making things that get seen for exactly as long as it takes to hit a like button. Content in any meaningful sense died there. It became a sentence, or a photograph, or a video short enough to finish before you’ve decided whether you want to.

Which means the entire premise that people visit websites for the content is nostalgia. That part of the internet is effectively dead, and I say that with no pleasure at all. There are noble and really good attempts to keep it alive and some of them work and they’re a rounding error against where attention actually goes.

The consequence for anyone doing this for a living is straightforward and gets argued about far more than it deserves. Very few people are paid to build static content sites any more. If you’re working as a web developer, you’re being paid to build an application that lets people do things in a browser and that means working with something like React whether it’s your preference or not.

Most of the rants about modern frontend are really grief about that transition. The complaint is that the tools are heavy and the builds are slow and nobody needs a framework to display an article and every part of that is correct about the case being described. It just isn’t the case most people are being paid for, and hasn’t been for close to a decade.

You can see the confusion clearly whenever somebody demonstrates that their blog loads in forty milliseconds without any JavaScript. That’s true and it’s good work and it isn’t an argument about the thing anyone is complaining about because a blog is a document and the thing being complained about is an application that happens to be delivered through a browser.

The honest version is that the web split in two and only one half is a job. The document half still exists, still works, and is better served now than it has ever been by the platform itself. The application half is where the money is and it has the constraints applications have always had, and those constraints are not going to be argued away by pointing at how fast a page of text can render.

There’s a version of this that isn’t defeatist, and it’s the one worth holding onto if you build things for the document half anyway. The audience is smaller than it was and it’s also more deliberate, because anyone who arrives at a long piece of writing in 2024 has had to actively choose it over roughly nine hundred easier options. That’s a better reader than the ones the old web delivered by default, and building for them is a completely reasonable thing to spend your time on.

Just don’t expect it to be the job. It’s the hobby that used to be the job, which is a thing that has happened to a great many crafts before this one.