I don’t think that the issue is that we changed to designing web sites for developers. I think that the problem is that we started designing web sites for mone

I don’t think that the issue is that we changed to designing web sites for developers. I think that the problem is that we started designing web sites for monetization. And this required adding a language and ecosystem that far exceeded the capabilities of the original WWW hypertext vision. Ad based monetization means that there are going to be all sorts of business requirements to optimize for the monetization case: detailed surveillance metrics, various design requirements related to branding and to fulfill the designers’ “vision“, paywalls allowing search engines to peek through, etc. oh, and a chat assistant, preferably AI powered, because OMG why would we possibly expend the resources to communicate with a customer. Ad based monetization is just evil; 50 years from now people will look back on the last couple of decades as a lesson on what not to do. It’s not that ads are evil or that monetization is evil, it’s that optimizing the web for ad based monetization causes people to do so many things that are bad for humans.