Nowadays everyone can get a Website; but then again, who cares about Websites anymore? What made Websites attractive between the 2000's and mid 2010's was that they somewhat, on average, provided each a different feel and take on interaction within the context of Web browsing, because the design process was very idiosyncratic.

"Oh you got a Website? That's cool I must check it out [to see what kind of interaction it proposes, and what kind of feeling it conveys [that others do not]]!"
We've lost that thought reflex ten years ago. Nobody thinks like this anymore.

Amongst most developpers and designers, an idea of "democratisation" of the tools for Web hosting and development plays the role of the usual suspect.

I do disagree with this idea. It's not that democratisation is the culprit, it's that Web design philosophy was standardised by an industry (informally called the "UI/UX" industry/sector/expertise), and that is what killed most idiosyncrasy and the resulting shared social interest this idiosyncrasy in interface design was responsible for. Web design got widely institutionalised in the 2010's as derivative of user experience, and thus compels those who do not know better to bend over to the latter's doxa.

So, the story of the downfall of Websites as a popular cultural phenomenon is not just about sectors losing jobs, market shares and skills that are no longer relevant. And it's not caused at the core by non‑programming people getting access to newfound powers of expression through visual interface programming (or even conversational interface using LLMs). Instead, it's the story of a structural loss in cultural interest in philosophy, caused by those who, well meaning or not, control the narratives about how design should be handled, and who control the newfound tools of expression.

Let me illustrate with an example using books as a medium, and calligraphy as one option of expression to communicate through and within this medium:

Our society never came to care as a whole about calligraphy, because calligraphy carried less legible politics, less legible public meaning, morals, sense‑making, and was only physically accessible to a select few people. However the whole of society cared a lot about Websites at one point.

Mirroring the case of calligraphy, I suppose there are two reasons for this:

• - Starting from the mid 2000's, Websites became quite easy to reach for due to terminals and Internet provision being more affordable and accessible;
• - Interface design used to carry a lot of both widely accessible and legible politics; not explicitly legible politics, but felt politics. It carried motivated interaction choices that were each a tangible take on what we should collectively care about in a whole novel ground for collective expression. Basically a collection of places full of personal takes about what we should pay attention to in digital spaces, according to the opinions of the people who published content much on their own terms.

Of course, words weren't put on all of this, but the collective sentiment was real.

But this comparison begs the question: why did interest in Websites die from a seemingly benign industrial revolution that is usually interpreted as a mere "democratisation"?

To understand it, I propose going back to books:
How is it that interest in idiosyncrasy in books survived the death of calligraphy? More casually put, why is it that even today when you say "I've made a book" and said book is published in the most standardised fashion, people are still going to feel a motivation to read it? To look forward to it instead of thinking "another book? Meh, they're all the same"? Well it's straightforward: the interest of a book as a concept, was lain not in calligraphy. It lay first in the semantics of its contents, and the choice and perceived quality of its constitutive materials far behind in second. Calligraphy was, in fact, a relatively small factor determining the overall philosophical idiosyncrasy in books for most people, hence why its abandonment was not considered big enough of a loss to make the book format irrelevant to publics in itself.

However, when you standardise interaction design in Web interfaces through any heavy‑handed form of templating, you're not merely losing ornament like books losing calligraphy; you're literally losing the primary expressive axis of the medium... You're removing its main cause of public interest.

If you compare this persistent interest in books, to the relatively easy to notice loss of public interest in Websites more recently, you will notice that it's because Web design fails to carry public meaning now where it used to before. It's not because the tools used to design are more accessible, and that "no‑coding masses cause a drop in artistic quality"; it's that the design philosophy of said no‑code tools and the design philosophy of environments where you learn as a person on the Web to create interfaces, those now promote overbearing templates and standards where they previously enticed people on the Web to share differences (against the initial philosophical intents of Berners‑Lee's Web... The "true" first public Web project).

If you want to know where all of that meaning went (because meaning is always sought after by humans, so if it goes away from a place, it flows to another to compensate), well it's quite simple: it was transferred to so‑called "platforms"; social media if you will. YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Medium... You name them. Sense making was transferred from all Websites, to a tiny subset of Websites that specialise in centralising philosophical idiosyncrasy, to then broadcast as "content"; a way of conveying information that kills idiosyncrasy within the medium of interaction, thusly consecrating value as found in "content" only. Basically, defining a strict line between interface and interaction on one side, and content on the other. Medium and meaning would‑be existing in separation, unwise of McLuhan's say on the matter.

The Web talks about itself in oddly specific places now, because it no longer allows itself to think through its shapes. Every professional and their moms having to do with Web activities will chant that to you, trembling with foam at the edges of their lips and eyeballs rolling up their sockets: "Content is King", "Less is more" and "The medium is the message" but they don't even understand the context and depth of these mottos they've ended up reducing to corporate word salad:

• - Bill Gates' "Content is King" meant that, at a time where builders, providers and hosting services were controlling (gatekeeping, even) most of the revenue coming off the Internet, that the physical Web infrastructure was in fact less relevant and valuable than the data that was hosted on the servers. It's a cold‑blooded, capitalistic way to say "the companies that build, secure and maintain the museum are all less important than the art pieces in the museum";
• - "Less is more", as a motto most often attributed by interface designers to Mies van der Rohe; an architect; meant for the latter that a building (or any object, even) should strive to show what it is made of, how it is made and how it operates instead of hiding it all for convenience. It was a point for democratic empowerment in design and engineering of those who actually interact with these designed objects;
• - "The medium is the message" meant not that the message defines the medium (which is a complete, damned inversion of McLuhan's point), but that the way the medium operates is more important than the intended content it conveys. The medium has more influence than the explicit message/"content".

By the working hands guided by these distorted beliefs, meaning not only shifted place to concentrate and inhabit a now unbearably tiny subset of the Web, but it also trained people not to expect any explicit meaning in interfaces... Even though they subconsciously crave meaning still. And that is the reason why people now feel hollow browsing the Web where they previously were happy to do it even though it was a technically crappy adventure we used to call "surfing" (!!!). Some of them even are conscious enough to express laments over that situation though various cyclical cultural cries and trends for a renewal of sense‑making in interaction and aesthetics: brutalism, Y2K, Clippy, cassette futurism, renewed niche interests in mechanical/analog/digital hybrid designs, Frutiger Aero, et j'en passe. But of course, all of these cries are expressed on, and caught by the platforms.

There is a persistent social malaise because of how interfaces are designed now, and instead of acknowledging the issue being industrials standards (so, politics!), we try to naturalise these as some kind of weird inevitability coming from progress. This disguises a form of alienation under a veil of popular power, and also fools technical experts into believing that performing a reactionary cultural gatekeeping act of Web development against people who do not share their proficiency may help. The gatekeepers should perhaps remember how the average Website's legacy code looked like in the 2000's before claiming that "proper" coding abilities are required to make the Web a relevant place for technical philosophy.

If it was so inevitable, so mechanical as a process flowing from democratisation itself instead of mainly due to how the democratisation is handled through design politics, we would not really need tons of "experts", digital gurus and their LinkedIn followers to recite canticles (now generated by LLMs) every day about industrial myths such as "invisible", "user oriented/friendly" or even "natural" interfaces that absolutely require that you constrain your designs to fit the current trends. These myths must be recited because they are fragile. They are political settlements that require constant re‑legitimation, unlike the laws of gravity, TCP/IP protocol, or nutritionally balanced diets.

Website interfaces stopped speaking as a medium, because we collectively thought that in the Web, a hollow, poorly thought conception of "content" was indeed king, whilst it just can't be the case because we fucking spend our entire lives on the Web. But you can't live in "content", you can only live in an environment! Whereas books kept feeling relevant, as for them, content was indeed king and it was logical, as books were only at the center of the lives of the few who had the specific role of crafting them.

I think, and think you should think that specific void of meaning in interfaces as the direct cause of the sentiment of a "hollow" and/or "dead" Web.