The Last Good Website

Yes, the Internet is becoming less usable. But one fire still burns bright.

Here is what happens when you read an article on a website in 2023. You open the page. You start to read the first sentence. You X out of a pop-up video after it claims its five mandatory seconds of your life. You start to read again. You X out of a newsletter pop-up asking for your email. You start to read again. You scroll down. A video swoops in on the right hand side. You X out of it. You scroll past an ad playing an on-loop video. Maybe you accidentally click it, maybe you don’t. Then you hit the paywall (the same one you are about to hit in a few paragraphs. I am part of the problem!)

It is a deeply unpleasant experience — so unpleasant that a lot of us bail before we even make it to the paywall. Add to this that a lot of the ad experiences are full of glitches, making it hard or even impossible to close them. A lot of old, beloved websites are literally unusable even if you pay for them. A not-insignificant number of recent AV Club articles were written by AI and I still can’t stand to use that website, which used to be my single favorite place on the internet.

You don’t even have to go to an actual webpage to enjoy this excruciating experience. Google has become steadily more useless, since the first several dozen results for any search are all sponsored content before devolving into an AI-generated slurry. 

This isn’t a new observation, and a lot of people have written about the death of the internet as a usable place. But that’s only made me all the more grateful for a website that’s bucked the trend. There is one, last major website that still seems like it’s more or less delivering on its potential. And while it’s far from perfect, this website does seem like one of the last really manageable browsing experiences on the internet. I’m talking about Wikipedia.