The Web We Know Is Going to Disappear

Every generation of computing believes the interface it loves will last forever. It never does. I saw information move from floppy disks to BBSs, from BBSs to the Web, from the Web to Flash, from Flash back to open standards, from websites to mobile apps, and now from search engines to AI chat interfaces. The Web will not vanish overnight, but the Web as we know it, the open place where people search, click, read, browse, publish, and discover, is already being replaced by something more convenient, more centralized, and much harder to escape.Another Drama Rant, With Modem Noises I am 48 years old. I started using computers in 1990. Back then, I did not have access to networks. Everything was local. Information moved physically, usually through floppy disks. It sounds primitive now, but at the time it felt like magic with a plastic shell. Every week, I exchanged what felt like an insane amount of information for that era. Maybe 20 MB. Today that is basically one screenshot from a modern phone, but back then it was treasure. People gathered with bags full of disks ready to share video games, text magazines, software, weird utilities, manifestos, manuals, books, and things nobody could properly categorize. I remember collecting legendary articles, technical texts, strange essays, and digital magazines like they were sacred objects. You did not "bookmark" things. You physically had them. You labeled them. You protected them. You prayed the disk did not die. The Web did not exist in my life yet. Search did not exist. Social media did not exist. There were no feeds, no timelines, no notifications, no "like and subscribe," and no algorithm trying to guess whether you wanted to buy shoes because you once looked at a chair. Information still moved. It just moved through people. The First Network That Felt Like the Future My first real encounter with a network was a BBS, a Bulletin Board System. Around 1995, I started one with friends. Our modem was 14,400 bps. Yes, bits per second. Not megabits. Not gigabits. Not fiber. A 14.4 kbps modem that screamed like a tiny robot being tortured by a fax machine. We were a small group of friends who gathered at night to receive calls from strangers.

People connected to our system, chatted, uploaded files, downloaded files, left messages, and disappeared into the darkness of the telephone line. It was not massive. It was not scalable. It was not "cloud native." If someone had said "cloud" in that room, we would probably have looked out the window. But the experience was magical. The first thought I had was simple: this is the future. I was convinced every person would communicate this way. Every business would have a BBS. Every community would have one. Every company would run its own small digital place where people could connect, talk, trade information, and build something. I was wrong. Not completely wrong about the direction, but very wrong about the interface. The future was not the BBS. The future was the behavior behind it: people wanted to connect, publish, exchange, and discover. The BBS was just an early container. Then the Web Arrived Then came FidoNet, other networks, and eventually the early World Wide Web. The first time I saw a webpage rendering in Netscape Navigator, my opinion changed instantly. The Web was the future. Not BBSs. Not CD-ROM encyclopedias. Not isolated digital islands. The Web. Suddenly, the idea of buying an encyclopedia on discs felt absurd. Why would you keep knowledge frozen in plastic when it could be updated online? Why would artists, writers, developers, companies, communities, and weird hobbyists depend on publishers when they could have their own websites? The early Web was messy, ugly, slow, inconsistent, and full of broken pages. It was also alive. Artists had websites. Musicians had websites. Game developers had websites. Writers had websites. Companies had websites. Nerds had websites. Some people had websites that should probably have remained private, but that is the cost of civilization. Audio and video came early. Images loaded line by line like some kind of digital archaeology. You waited. You watched. You hoped nobody picked up the phone. Compared with BBSs, the accessibility of the Web made adoption explode. The Web was easier to reach, easier to link, easier to publish, easier to explain, and easier to commercialize. BBSs became obsolete almost instantly. I still remember a group of maybe 10 or 20 of us meeting every Friday in downtown Buenos Aires to drink, talk, play video games, and discuss technology.

We were the sons of the BBS era. We had seen one world appear, and then we watched it disappear under our feet. That would not be the last time. The Web Almost Became Flash A few years later, around the late 1990s and early 2000s, I became deeply involved in advocating for Web Standards. That was not an academic preference. It felt like a battle for the soul of the Web. At the time, Macromedia Flash was everywhere. Flash sites had animation, interactivity, video, custom typography, music, transitions, games, menus, intros, splash screens, and all kinds of visual effects that made normal HTML pages look like tax forms with hyperlinks. People loved Flash. And I understood why. Flash made the Web feel alive. HTML at the time was limited. CSS was still maturing. JavaScript was inconsistent across browsers. If you wanted smooth animation, rich interaction, custom fonts, and a controlled visual experience, Flash was very tempting. The problem was that Flash was also a walled garden. A Flash website was often expensive, hard to maintain, hard to search, hard to make accessible, hard to update, and dependent on proprietary tooling. Creating a serious Flash site could feel like building a Pagani Zonda every time you wanted a homepage. Beautiful? Yes. Reasonable for most businesses? Not really. Macromedia introduced ActionScript, and Flash became more powerful. For many agencies and companies, it looked like the next application platform. Against server-rendered HTML websites, Flash seemed modern, visual, interactive, and emotional. But there was a cost. A lot of the Web became less open. Content was trapped inside binary files. Search engines could not understand much of it. Browsers depended on plugins. Accessibility suffered. Performance was often bad. Development required specialized teams. Maintenance was painful. There were huge projects, sometimes with absurd budgets, trying to create the next great e-commerce experience or brand platform with Flash. Some of them looked amazing. Many of them were operational nightmares. Flash was spectacular. Flash was also a beautiful cage. The iPhone Changed the Direction Again Then came the iPhone. The iPhone did not kill Flash overnight, but it changed the direction of the industry. Apple refused to support Flash on iPhone, iPod touch, and later iPad.

In 2010, Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash", arguing against Flash for mobile devices and in favor of open web standards. You can agree or disagree with all of Apple's motivations, but the practical result was obvious: Flash was in trouble. Mobile changed the constraints. Battery life mattered. Touch mattered. Performance mattered. Security mattered. Standards mattered. Plugin-based experiences were a bad fit for the mobile era. Eventually, Flash died as a mainstream browser technology. Adobe officially ended support for Flash Player on December 31, 2020, and blocked Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021. The Web survived. Actually, the Web became more important again. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, video, canvas, WebGL, WebAssembly, responsive design, and browser APIs kept evolving. What used to require proprietary plugins became possible through open standards. For a while, it looked like the Web had won. Again. Then Mobile Apps Built Another Walled Garden Of course, the story did not end there. Native mobile apps became the next walled garden. People loved them. They were faster, smoother, more integrated, and easier to monetize. They had app stores, push notifications, payments, device APIs, ratings, updates, and distribution. The Web remained open, but mobile apps became the interface people used all day. For a while, it looked like websites would become secondary. Why open a browser when every service had an app? Why type a URL when an icon was already on your home screen? Still, the Web survived another punch to the stomach. It survived because links matter. Search matters. Publishing matters. Interoperability matters. Businesses still needed websites. Developers still built web apps. Media still published on the Web. People still searched. Google still sent traffic. Blogs still existed. Documentation still lived in public pages. Open source still depended on the Web. The Web adapted. But then came something different. ChatGPT Was the First Real Crack When ChatGPT appeared in 2022, I quickly realized the Web was being forced into another battle. This one is different. With BBSs, the Web won because it was more accessible. With Flash, the Web won because open standards eventually became powerful enough. With mobile apps, the Web survived because search, links, and publishing were still essential.

AI changes the interface itself. People no longer need to search in the same way. They do not need to open ten tabs. They do not need to scan five articles. They do not need to compare Stack Overflow answers from 2013, 2017, and one angry comment from a person named "NullPointerDestroyer." They ask the chat. Developers ask AI to explain errors, write code, compare libraries, generate SQL, refactor functions, write documentation, summarize logs, explain architecture, and solve daily dilemmas. Non-technical people ask for recipes, legal summaries, travel plans, email drafts, product comparisons, health questions, school help, business plans, relationship advice, and everything else humans used to throw at Google. This is not a small change. This is the browser losing its position as the primary interface to knowledge. Search Is Becoming an Intermediate Layer For more than two decades, search engines were the front door of the Web. You wanted something. You searched. You clicked. You visited a website. That website received traffic, attention, analytics, ad impressions, newsletter signups, brand recognition, or maybe just the satisfaction of being read by another human being. That model is weakening. AI assistants and AI-powered search summaries increasingly answer the question before the user clicks. Google's AI Overviews are a good example. The answer appears at the top. The sources may be cited, but the user often gets enough information without visiting them. From a user perspective, this is convenient. From a publisher perspective, this is terrifying. If the answer is extracted, summarized, reformatted, and presented inside someone else's interface, what happens to the original website? What happens to the writer? The blog? The documentation page? The independent expert? The small publisher? The person who spent 12 hours writing the answer that became two clean sentences in an AI box? The Web was built on a simple habit: click the link. AI breaks that habit. Not completely. Not immediately. But enough to change the economics of publishing. Stack Overflow Was the Warning Shot Look at developers. For years, Stack Overflow was the sacred panic room of software development. You had an error. You copied it. You pasted it into Google. You opened Stack Overflow. You found someone with the same problem from eight years ago. You ignored the accepted answer, scrolled to the second one, and prayed.