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The Spinoff
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
Imagining a new web aesthetic where every platform doesn't look exactly the same
First platforms forced us all into their stylised boxes. Now they've made all the boxes look and feel the same. How do we get the best of the old internet back? Lately I've been thinking about what being online looks like. The actual look of it. The aesthetic. As I continue to think and write and talk about escaping walled gardens, I've begun to notice more and more the bricks in those walls. Or the kind of concrete, the colours of the barbed wire, whatever metaphor works in your head. Take a look at this photo quickly and tell me what app this: Is this Snapchat? Maybe the border colours in the screenshot tipped you off – but this is how Instagram shows you its app on its own website. Look like the fave photo sharing site you remember? Let's go again. Which app is this: Is this TikTok? This is Spotify. Try finding the music you love amid its current front page onslaught of video, podcasts, video podcasts, and audiobooks – I dare you. Then talk to a parent of young kids who has carefully controlled their access to YouTube, only to find that the innocent 'music app' is now feeding them the exact same dross. One more: Is this X, the everything app? This is the one that set me off, actually. This is Substack's app, jam-packed with every dark pattern I've come to hate about the current era. If you haven't done this lately, let me show you what trying to sign up to receive a free email newsletter is like now: Ugh, I just needed to get that off my chest, sorry. Back to the look of it all, though. The independent web never had a single coherent aesthetic, obviously, because everyone made it look like whatever they wanted it to. It was constrained only by what the html/css could do. And so it was individual, chaotic, often weird and it was always personal. It was the sewing and embroidery site that didn't close its tags and the Time Cube guy. If you're too young to have experienced this first hand, hit 'surprise me' on this page and get shown web1.0 sites that are still around (Wiby is a search engine of the early web). Now we think about this era as a pixelly time of flashing 'under construction' gifs and hit counters and tiled backgrounds. But the core components were more 'here is what I care about' and 'here are some other things you might be interested in'. The early platforms started to consolidate us together, but they were still deeply personalisable. MySpace and Geocities pages were as eclectic as the self-built ones. Early Tumblr was all about your template, and let you muck around in the css yourself to make it look exactly the way you wanted. Early subreddits were styled to the hilt, and browser extensions like RES let you further make your experience exactly your own. Then sometime around the mid 2010s it started to change, and platforms started to coalesce around clean, uniform interfaces. We saw more template-driven content structures (profile grids, feeds, carousels). Everything had to conform to brand guidelines and UI patterns, and as a consequence it was suddenly homogenised – even wildly different creators' pages looked the same. You can point to various reasons for this – Google acquired Blogspot, Yahoo! acquired Tumblr, Pinterest moved into its shopping-first era, everything became an app. To begin with these platforms forced us all into their stylised boxes, and now, as you can see above, they've made all the boxes look and feel the same. So if web aesthetic = the messy, expressive look of the open internet, and platform aesthetic = the polished, standardised design of closed ecosystems, both aesthetics say a lot about power, creativity, and who controls the experience. That's probably uncontroversial. What I want to think about now, though, is what the new web aesthetic is. As we start to focus on building the good internet, it's cute and fun to nod to the retro stylings of the web1.0 era – reinventing webrings and blogrolls and giving everything an anti-Squarespace feel. But whatever is next shouldn't be retro. It should be its own thing. Over the last few months in my newsletter I've been talking about exploration, and gardens, and archiving – how to bring discovery back when search has been killed by AI slop and Google tells you to eat rocks. I'm not a designer, so I'm not about to tell you anything about layouts or typefaces or colour palettes. But here's what I think can be the core of the next era of the web. I think the new web aesthetic is about getting active again. Platforms encourage passivity. They want us to stay still and scrolling, looking at what the algo wants to show us. Like, swipe, repeat. But the new web aesthetic is non-linear. It encourages you to move from one site to another, to dive down rabbit holes, and crucially, to continue sharing what you find. Sites that reflect a person's process, not just their conclusions. It's working with the garage door up. Recently I was ranting to a friend about a thinkfluencer who annoys me, because he tends to gather together the ideas of others and publish what he sees as the definitive essay on a topic without crediting any of the other thinking that's fed into it. By contrast, the new web aesthetic is link-heavy. It constantly references out to other spaces, to past work and to related ideas. It sees the web as an ongoing conversation, not a feed. You're encouraged to leave the page. Platform aesthetic is ephemeral. We all know the experience of going to show someone a post, only to find the feed has refreshed and the meme has vanished, and you're never going to find it again. Older content disappears from view by design. The new web aesthetic is persistent and browsable archives (that don't rot!). Content is meant to be discovered over time, not posted once and done. The new web aesthetic returns agency to the explorer. You decide what's interesting. You wander, and as a consequence you stay with things longer. Anne-Helen Peterson wrote last week about the demise of Pocket (ironically on Substack): 'Welp, I read the internet,' he'd sometimes tell me around 10 am. 'Got anything else for me?' I always did, because I also read the internet in that way. I used a combination of Google Reader, favourite websites I'd refresh multiple times daily (The Hairpin, The Toast, Grantland, Jezebel, Go Fug Yourself), and followed links from those sites to other stuff the editors thought worth my time… I've come to think of these years as the halcyon days of the post-recession internet, a sort of second golden digital age. It was before so many publications' fate became inextricable from social media, so even though everyone over at Gawker Media was still being badgered by the traffic leaderboard in their offices, the idea of the homepage still held power. People navigated to your site because they liked your site and knew they found good stuff on your site; then they read stuff there. Not just scrolled, but read. The new web aesthetic wants to make us readers again. And not whatever this is. My own site design doesn't embody all of this yet, but it does reflect the colourful, chaotic, joy-filled nature of the fandom spaces I love. You can find everything I've written or talked about there. You can find my weird little side projects. And through this newsletter you can follow my thought processes and dive down the rabbitholes with me. The next iteration, for me, is surfacing more of this. Making it more discoverable. The map may not be the territory, but it's a good place to start.
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Blue Prince is the wrong kind of frustrating
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We'll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you're playing this weekend, and what theories it's got you kicking around. I showed the notes I've been keeping while playing Blue Prince to my wife recently, because I like giving her periodic reminders that she's married to a definitively unwell person. I won't replicate them here—spoilers, and all—but suffice it to say that they resemble nothing so much as a rudimentary version of classic internet mainstay Time Cube, full of half-scrawled ideas, snippets of code, rough descriptions of images, and hastily crafted maps. The product of a cheerfully disordered mind. I like this kind of stuff. The last game that caused me to fill pages with these kinds of rantings (in a physical journal, although my Prince stuff is just in an email draft) was Lorelei And The Laser Eyes, which Dogubomb's first-person exploration game resembles in many ways. Blue Prince—say it out loud, if the pun eludes you at first, as it did me—can't match Simogo's 2024 puzzler on things like style and tone, for all that it comes in an appealing package. But as a giant puzzle box, masquerading as a house? It might have the edge—when it lets you get to the good stuff, at least. Here's where I'm forced to make my terrible confession: Not only have I not finished Blue Prince, despite having had weeks to do so, but I also find myself woefully out of step with my peers in the gaming press when it comes to what it does right. I like the game—bordering on a mild obsession. But its dedication to randomness, to making me play a game I don't like very much in order to get to the one that's burning its way through my brain, was ultimately too much for me. I had to set it aside, for my tattered sanity if nothing else. It's like this: Blue Prince puts you in the shoes of the young inheritor of a vast mansion called Mt. Holly, tasked with discovering its mysterious '46th room.' (Tricky, given that the house is clearly laid out on a 5 x 9 grid.) Mt. Holly is no ordinary manse, though: Every day, starting from its entrance hall, you draft a new floorplan for it, picking rooms from a set of possibilities every time you approach a new door. The day progresses until you either run out of stamina, or somehow block yourself from forward progress—either flummoxed by increasingly stringent security measures that pop up the deeper you get into the house, or just because you were an idiot who always loses at Carcassone, and blocked off all possible exits from all your available rooms. Within the various bedrooms, pantries, hallways, and more, you'll find clues, puzzles, and lore notes, helping you to figure out the game's intriguing story, or just how to open some door you've accidentally dropped halfway across the damn house. Through a blend of deliberate building and random discovery, you slowly build up your options, and your understanding, making Mt. Holly feel like it's truly yours. I don't like it. I get it, mind you. I understand the ways the game deploys randomness to break up its basic puzzle-solving rhythms; the ways it deliberately courts feelings of triumph and frustration as you try to work your way toward one particular map point that you know has something pivotal lurking within it, only to be stymied because you've been presented with nothing but fucking left-turning rooms for the fifth goddamn time in a row. Building the house is a game, and a mildly interesting one: You slowly unlock new resources that give you more options, better ways to predict paths or overcome locked doors. Cracking a big secret that gets you better access to resources, tools, or new routes feels exultant—as does drafting a room you've never used before because you desperately need it to fit in on your map, only to realize it holds the secret to some other mystery. It's all cool, in theory. In practice, half the time I feel like I'm doing a fascinating escape room, only to be suddenly forced to switch over to a Sudoku, or maybe some jumping jacks, in order to get back to the thing that's actually got me excited to play. Randomness has value in game design—I'm a person who can count his playtime in The Binding Of Isaac in terms of weeks, so I'm well aware of that. But Blue Prince's random layer, and its more thoughtful one, don't gel for me in the way I think they're supposed to. Sometimes, navigating around that randomness becomes a game in itself, forcing a different kind of lateral thinking than the work of cracking codes or navigating combinations. But I'll be 100 percent honest and say that it's not a game I'm especially jazzed to play. (And while I'm drawing parallels, I'll note that Lorelei had this same irritation baked into it: Intrusions meant to break up the puzzles, except I really like the puzzles, guys, I swear.) The key breaking point came the last time I stumbled onto some clue that gave context to a different puzzle in a different room of the house—and the broken sigh I let out when I realized the game would force me to jump through its various hoops before letting me test that newfound knowledge out. I know I'll revisit the game at some point, crack back open that insane and rambling email draft, and start teasing out new mysteries again. But I also know I won't be able to stop myself from asking: Dang, what if this was just the parts of the video game that I liked? More from A.V. Club This real-life Lord Of The Flies had a happy ending Deborah and Ava try to find a new equilibrium in Hacks' season 4 premiere Paul Verhoeven thought Starship Troopers was "too subtle for the American consciousness"
