Websites are becoming disposable
I love that you can now have a crazy idea for a website and try it the same evening. You don't have to decide whether it's worth two months of your life before you even know if you like it. That's one of my favorite things about AI.
But lately I've been thinking about something a bit weird. You can build an entire website just to have something to post on X.
Generate it, take a screenshot or record a video, share it, collect some reactions. Two days later, nobody remembers the website. You could delete it and probably nobody would notice. Maybe even the person who made it would forget about it.
The whole thing feels so normal in my feed now that it took me a while to stop and think about it. We're making disposable websites. You have a working page with animations and things you can click, and people forget about it as quickly as any other post.
And I don't mean that someone launched a project and it failed. That happens. I mean someone built a website just so people would watch a few seconds of it while scrolling. That's all they wanted from it.
People have always made demos. I know. I've been a developer for years, and I understand making something just because it looks cool. You don't need a business plan for a weird experiment. I don't want every little website to have to make money.
What feels different is how easy it is to make another one.
If a demo would take you two months to build, that's a lot of time to spend just hoping your Reddit post gets popular. Maybe a hundred people see it. Maybe the algorithm barely shows it to anyone. You might still do it because you love the idea, but you probably wouldn't spend months on a new demo every time you wanted some reactions.
Now you can try twenty versions in a day. Post the ones that look good, see what happens, and do it again tomorrow. If none of them gets attention, you haven't lost four months of your life. You can just forget about all of them.
I understand why people want to try it. And one of those attempts might give someone an idea worth spending more time on. That's exciting to me. People used to give up on a lot of ideas before even trying them because they would take too much work.
Still, seeing people do this every day just to get more likes feels a bit depressing.
Someone posts a screen recording on X, hoping their latest engagement bait goes viral. The replies fill up with "this is insane," because obviously the people commenting need their engagement too. A few people open the site, click around, and leave. By tomorrow, everyone is commenting on another site. The old one can stay online, but nobody has a reason to visit it again.
I guess even websites have been TikTokified now. I wasn't expecting to have that thought about web development, but here we are.
The AI companies seem very aware of how well this kind of thing spreads. Looking at model releases, I get the impression that each one needs something people can immediately try and show off. The Studio Ghibli image wave (external link) was a very visible example. More recently, there's Astra working in Blender (external link), and people sharing motion graphics and launch videos made with Opus 5.5 (external link).
A video of a model doing something you didn't think it could do is easy to get excited about. I like seeing what these models can do too. Of course a company wants to show that. And of course people want to try it after watching a good demo. None of that surprises me.
What annoys me is opening the feed and seeing people act equally shocked by every new demo. You know the kind of post I mean. "WTF, Opus 5.5 one-shotted this. OpenAI is cooked."
Apparently we have enough time to say an entire company is dead, but I'm sometimes not sure anyone watched the full video before posting it.
That's where I start losing interest. Some of this stuff feels like the author took whatever the model generated, attached a recording, and started writing the post. I don't know how much they checked. But when even the person sharing it doesn't seem very interested in the actual website, it's hard for me to care about it either.
And there are good projects mixed in with all of this. That's the frustrating part. Someone might have made a useful little tool, or built something I would love to try. It appears in the same feed, with the same kind of excited post, between ten pages that all look similar. I'd have to open them all to find out.
I don't have the patience for that every day. I wish I did, because I'm sure I miss things I'd enjoy.
I also don't want to end up complaining that making websites has become too easy. I like easy. I use AI, I enjoy it, and I really don't want to spend two months on something I could try tonight. Spending more time on a project doesn't automatically make it interesting anyway.
I think I'd enjoy those posts more if the person sharing them said why they found the project interesting. Tell me what made you want to build this. Maybe there's one detail you kept changing because the first version annoyed you. Maybe it's a silly idea and you're still laughing that it works. I'd happily read about that, even if you delete the whole thing tomorrow.
I'm glad we can make these things in an evening now. I just want to feel that the person asking me to look at one still cares about it after they've posted the video.