Ugly by Design · Tales on the wire&darr;<br>Skip to main content<br>Tales on the wire

There has been an idea lingering in the back of my mind, slowly growing with each passing day. A disturbing sensation entrenching itself page after page. The internet feels empty …<br>I know this feeling isn’t just my own, talk of the “dead internet” indicates as much. Yet, it feels like the talk of bots taking over is actually distracting us from another culprit, very much human this time.<br>The idea emerged to the front of my mind when I stumbled onto this discussion where someone was talking about how they had just rebuilt their old website from 15 years ago with a sleek new design, incorporating all the best practices.<br>And it was through this side by side comparison that I finally understood something … this was done by design.<br>What changed? The frontend simplified radically. The best websites of 2026 look like printed magazines, not sci-fi dashboards. Decoration left. Typography and space took center stage. We stopped showing off our tools and started getting out of the content&rsquo;s way.

Bamwor 2026Claude Shannon, the father of the deliberately awfully named “information theory” defined information as &ldquo;surprise&rdquo;, in the sense that the less probable an event is, the more surprising it is and the more information it yields. These events are the heavy tails of distribution, your outlier events.<br>Ironically, in an attempt to get out of the way of the content, they removed the information.<br>This revived website is a fact book, it compiles geographic information like demographics, airports and city data. It’s a place you can go if you want to know the beer consumption per capita in Algeria, and it is deliberately designed to that effect: as a tool.<br>Bamwor 2011The old 2011 version was different, it feels like a distinct place, behind its role as a factbook, it&rsquo;s a virtual space you would spend time exploring. But its 2026 counterpart deliberately shed that skin, it’s goal is purely utilitarian. And behind the talk of SEO optimization, MCP servers, and structured geographic data APIs, lies a disturbing reality: humans exploring the web are not the target audience.<br>That the market for structured geographic data APIs is still surprisingly underserved. RestCountries exists but only covers basics. GeoNames has raw data but a dated API. There&rsquo;s a real gap for a modern, developer-friendly service that combines both.

Descent into blandness<br>Do you also get the sense that everything feels the same?<br>How most personal blogs feel like the same uninspired copy/paste loop of repetitive themes?<br>And then there is the content, the 2 to 6 minute long posts that barely scratch the surface of a topic, written as if the author was afraid any more would aggress the poor reader’s attention span. With all the angles massaged into an inoffensive blob. The impersonal language of “we”, making you wonder if even small bulletins are written by committee now.<br>Content produced in an attempt to please everyone but actually talks to no one.<br>Personal websites<br>We didn’t want to get in the way of the message!<br>We wanted this to be accessible!<br>We wanted this to be SEO optimized!<br>We wanted this to be inoffensive!<br>And surprise surprise, you have killed surprises, you have killed personality, we have killed exploration. These were never the goals.<br>This was a premeditated murder.<br>There is another corner of the internet, a small retreat intentionally built brimming with personality. It’s opinionated, doesn’t neatly scale to your window sizes, it hurts your eyes, and guess what: that is by design!<br>Aesthetic norms are binding, norms are binding. They don’t just constrain what people make, they constrain what people think about making.<br>And so on some small ignored corner of the internet people are deliberately rejecting all the convention that have sucked the life out of our modern web and creating their own small internet. These sites are designed by and for their creators, they are not meant to be monetized, most of them are never even meant to be linked back to their original authors. They are pure expressions of their creators&rsquo; whims, subservient to no design convention. Between the gauhtly fuchsia pinks and animated favicon cats many would qualify as ugly.<br>And so be it.<br>The freedom that comes with being ugly is part of the message.<br>Down the rainbow comic sans rabbit hole<br>Oh wait ? Did you think this post was going to stop here ?<br>How ironic would it be if after all my ranting I was to stop here, with a perfectly curated 5 minute readtime and the bare minimum context for setting the stage.<br>Let&rsquo;s go for a ride, and if I do my job right, you will get lost on the way.<br>The politically incorrect<br>Exhibit A: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/<br>Their are the friends you invite to public events and then there is Ludic Mataroa, the<br>friend you invite to sit down and chat over drinks at your place on Friday nights.<br>Like a dirty little secret of the tech world...