The Web Is for People
The article argues that the web should remain a human-centric space, cautioning against trends that prioritize automation, algorithms, and profit over genuine human connection and creativity. It emphasizes the importance of building and preserving an open, accessible internet that serves people's needs rather than corporate interests.
Background
- This post pushes back on the idea that the web should primarily serve AI bots, automated crawlers, and large language model (LLM) training data — arguing instead that the web's original purpose and value is serving human readers.
- The author, likely a web veteran or indie blogger, is reacting to shifts where sites optimize for machine readability (e.g., structured data for AI) at the expense of human experience: cluttered layouts, paywalls, cookie consent walls, content designed to be scraped rather than read.
- "The Web Is for People" echoes the ethos of early web standards and the IndieWeb movement, which emphasizes personal ownership of content, human-scale interaction, and resistance to platform monopolies and algorithmic feeds.
- Key prior context: recent years have seen a surge in AI crawlers (like those from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic) scraping public web content without permission; many sites now block bots or charge for API access, while others restructure their content to rank higher in AI-generated answers rather than to inform humans.