2026-06-06
I frequently see people use the term "new web" or "modern web" to refer to mainstream sites, with phone-centric web design and mountains of JS you have to run for basic functionality, all funded by surveillance capitalism. You know, 5 websites all filled with screenshots of the other 4. They're very similar to each other because they have the same advertising-based incentive structure.
People also use the term "old web" to refer to small independent sites, with a different funding model or more often no funding at all, implying that they're some sort of ancient relic still ambling along, even if they were created recently and reflect a fundamentally novel culture.
I think this old/new distinction is a hold-over from back when social media were new. Like all those towns and cities with "new" in the name that are hundreds of years old. Or New Super Mario Bros., which is probably considered a retro game by now.
Mainstream social media are the old web. They're the massive, traditional, old-fashioned incumbents who are currently falling apart under their own weight, too large and too slow to adapt to problems of their own making, being overtaken, at least in useability and value provided, by smaller sites.
If this were really the old old web, we wouldn't be using HTTPS, for starters. The technical and social elements of modern small sites are massively different from the web of the 2000s when I was a child.
Whatever you call it, this is not the old web.