Remember way back when the internet was hard

Remember the internet? You know, when you had a shitty, disappointing website on some shitty server somewhere in your uncle’s house that your 14 year old cousin put together and you linked to other people? Remember that?

There was no liking, poking, rebloging or reposting. Most importantly, there was no pictures of people’s breakfast.

I miss that Internet, when it was hard to fill it up with nothing. When people put up cat pictures it was just as pointless and vapidly mindless, but at least it took effort. That meant of course you only got the really good ones. This is how publishing used to work, there used to be a massive barrier to entry. Paper was expensive and printing lots of words on loads and loads of it was even more expensive, so you had to make sure what you put on all that paper was worth reading. We don’t have this anymore. Things are too easy.

As designers and people who make the internets, we should think about how potentially we can make things harder, or at least make them seem like it will take some time. We need to think about how to make things worthwhile not only for you, but for the person’s life who’s going to read, watch or otherwise experience what you’re putting out there.