josefthe first computer that was ever mine was a toshiba satellite 420 (hehe) running windows 95. no internet connection whatsoever. all the software i had access to was from shareware/warez/cover CDs. so many great programs, creative tools, games, hidden behind the little icons of .exe files. in contrast, my first experiences of the web were "iexplore pops up with a broken page". maybe as a result of this i still don't really value the web as a platform or feel like it's a 'real' medium
when we eventually got dial-up, and i was able to access the actual web, i wasn't impressed by that either. just a load of dead ends and broken jpegs, while the phone bill was gradually increasing. tick, tick. i liked a lot of the websites, the good ones had Downloads, which meant you could grab something, hang up the connection and actually start having fun. but they were still very subpar compared to the glory of the 750MB warez CD-R
there has always been something uncanny about websites and web interfaces to me. the actual operating system i was using had satisfying 3D buttons that felt like they'd go 'clunk' when you hit them, and something exciting would happen, like you'd be playing a video game or something. web sites just had these underlined words, and you'd click them, and nothing would happen for ages, so you'd click them again, and eventually something really boring would slowly appear on the screen
as the years went on, i started seeing more and more stuff that was web-based rather than being an actual computer program i could own. PHP forums, java applets, flash, javascript SPAs. people tried to make websites do more and more, but they still always felt like... not real software? there was always something janky and bad about the whole experience, or the design, and that feeling's never really gone away for me. everything on a computer is like this now, even the OS feels like a web page
i've spent years trying to work out whether this very strong and idiosyncratic feeling i have is underpinned by any kind of technical reality. i doubt it is. obviously you can make a 'good' web 'app'. but i can't get away from feeling like it should be for reading scrolling pages of text and images that link to eachother. it's too ephemeral and non-deterministic and clearly not intended for making actual, solid-feeling software. yet that's what everybody does now
you can't have this discussion with technical people at all usually, because the entire argument i have amounts to is "idk, the vibes are off", and the nerds are like "okay have you got a test suite? can you benchmark the vibes? our A/B tests say otherwise"
also, this is entirely a UX problem, and it's a MUCH smaller problem than actual big problems with computers, like "all software, over time, gradually turns into some form of malware"
Polychrome 
@jk I'm a nerd who agrees with despite my different background with the PC.
I started with DOS which meant a command prompt and whatever GUI I landed on was wildly different from program to program. Then Windows 3.x "standardized" the look of programs and by the time 95 showed up I remember being somewhat disappointed because the new button design was less chunky and I liked the big round rectangle look better.
My first experience with online services was with text based BBSes - just text and ANSI art made by underground hacker types and underaged wannabes who put a lot of effort into pushing a limited medium (extremely limited compared to DOS games) into looking as wild and personal as possible.
So when I started using the web it was as underwhelming as you describe it - basic, simple looking web pages without the solid feel of a DOS or Windows program or the odd and underground artistic designs of BBSes.
Even when HTML capabilities improved something felt off and not quite right. I hated flash sites and the artistic sites that made it difficult to navigate - I expected a document and instead started getting lost in incoherent UI mazes. Turns out that while BBSs were also wild and artistic they mostly followed a UI design formula where as the web at the time was still evolving so everyone was doing their own standard.
And then native applications started mimicking web design, occasionally done as an Internet Explorer embed. And webapps happened and it all felt wrong for the same reason you're describing.
I think the other reason I hated Windows 8, beside them trying to kill a perfectly usable design in favor of something that belongs on tablets instead of PC, was that their new 'flat design' looked like a corporate website instead of an operating system. No more chunky clicky buttons, no shading of light on windows and widgets to make them feel present. Just basic square bars and crude, simple icons thrown around with lots of whitespace for touchscreen finger taps that weren't going to happen.
That feeling hasn't gone away even now with Windows 10, 11, and modern Gnome on Linux, and even KDE somewhat.
Today everything is a 'website' even when it's not and it all just feels wrong.
I started with DOS which meant a command prompt and whatever GUI I landed on was wildly different from program to program. Then Windows 3.x "standardized" the look of programs and by the time 95 showed up I remember being somewhat disappointed because the new button design was less chunky and I liked the big round rectangle look better.
My first experience with online services was with text based BBSes - just text and ANSI art made by underground hacker types and underaged wannabes who put a lot of effort into pushing a limited medium (extremely limited compared to DOS games) into looking as wild and personal as possible.
So when I started using the web it was as underwhelming as you describe it - basic, simple looking web pages without the solid feel of a DOS or Windows program or the odd and underground artistic designs of BBSes.
Even when HTML capabilities improved something felt off and not quite right. I hated flash sites and the artistic sites that made it difficult to navigate - I expected a document and instead started getting lost in incoherent UI mazes. Turns out that while BBSs were also wild and artistic they mostly followed a UI design formula where as the web at the time was still evolving so everyone was doing their own standard.
And then native applications started mimicking web design, occasionally done as an Internet Explorer embed. And webapps happened and it all felt wrong for the same reason you're describing.
I think the other reason I hated Windows 8, beside them trying to kill a perfectly usable design in favor of something that belongs on tablets instead of PC, was that their new 'flat design' looked like a corporate website instead of an operating system. No more chunky clicky buttons, no shading of light on windows and widgets to make them feel present. Just basic square bars and crude, simple icons thrown around with lots of whitespace for touchscreen finger taps that weren't going to happen.
That feeling hasn't gone away even now with Windows 10, 11, and modern Gnome on Linux, and even KDE somewhat.
Today everything is a 'website' even when it's not and it all just feels wrong.
toffee the cat šø@Polychrome @jk similar experience here, agree with all of this so much ough..
modulux@jk Can't deny to having some of those urges (this stuff is mushy and hard to talk about so there's a more or less natural urge to consider it hopelessly subjective, a matter of taste and not productive to discuss). That said, the fact people do really tight loop things like word processing or email on the web, and even by choice, suggests many people don't have this perception of the web.
Richard Barrell@jk There's this idea that if a building has really low frequency vibrations below the lower end of human hearing (Ā¹), it makes people get extremely weirded out but they can't articulate why because they can't hear it.
(Ā¹ I'm not confident this is accurate but let's go with it anyway for analogy's sake)
Now I'm thinking about that but instead of shaking buildings it's UI latency in spots where there just shouldn't be any, tripping the uncanny valley but for software.
@jk also the web has a lot of flat design just by default and that's terrible. Flat UI design is a sin against UX and against humankind.
wb x64@0x2ba22e11 @jk this was my thinking as well. We've loaded our UI libraries with so much that there's too much lag, and randomly in weird places. When I switch from Gnome to TTY2 for example to kill a runaway process I'm impressed and dismayed by the snappiness of that terminal.
JP@jk i guess i count as coming from a non technical background despite having taught myself code and shit but i def see the objections here. there's an old debate among web historians and developers about whether the web should've remained a mostly-static document definition language as it was originally designed - before javascript grew large and terrible enough to make full web apps possible ~20 years ago, there was this idea of having a separate protocol to define applications.
@jk and when i try to imagine concretely what that alternate "online application web" would've looked and felt like to use, i think of desktop applications of the mid 00s and everything that comes with that. but it's still possible that that would've followed a lot of the same UX trends that web app trends have since then. ultimately UX is shaped by a combination of the strategic goals of capitalists, simple fashion (vista style glassy skeumorphicism vs today's oppressive flatness),
@jk and occasional dissenting UX ideas from other directions. one thing that's pretty certain regardless of whether you feel the web as it evolved was a bad deal is that the whole process was very messy and bottom-up. it wasn't "designed" in the same sense that the UX of the classic or modern Mac OS or the various versions of Windows etc. i think that chaos was at least interesting and aesthetically diverse until the corporations fully took over the web.
@jk the closest thing i can think of to the early web's janky eclecticism in the desktop space were keygen programs that had cool tunes and little demoscene visuals going on around their otherwise basic boring function. but those were actually cooler than most early webpages! partly because desktop apps have fewer technical headaches keeping them from being rich experiences like that.
no-no@jk i basically agree about the ux stuff. i had a lot of fun with the old web, though, once my family got it. felt like flying through a huge library on a (very slow) magic carpet. but i guess i really preferred the web as documents over the web as apps. no real reason for me either, i just got used to it first
daebb@jk yes!!!! EVERY web app noticeably feels slower and more sluggish than real apps. No matter how optimized. I don't care if browsers can allegedly run at a gazillion frames per second, as soon as I type into a text box and interact with buttons I just know it's a web app even in a wrapper. It always feels kind of wrong.
@jk It's like the menus in a video game, especially 3d games. They are always kinda at a lower resolution and run at 60-120 fps and there's some kind of lag. They feel wrong in the same way but it's fine because they're not the point of the game. I think if you made software in a 3D game engine it would feel similar to web apps
Tom Walker@jk It's definitely a feeling I have if I have to commit some minor "let's pretend this is a desktop UI" annoyance in JS, like a dropdown menu, close button, etc. "Ugh, this is extremely not meant to do this." It's all just fakery aimed at vaguely recalling a "real" UI.
crab@jk i feel like it doesn't help that there are seemingly still no good UI frameworks. if I wanted to write some program and not make it a webapp and have it run on most computers and look kind of nice I genuinely wouldn't know what to use for it.
_3Jane@jk I think itās real but Iām not aware of anyone measuring it; itās how fast the interface reacts to your actions. There is definitely a difference between IntelliJ and VS Code for example, but once you get used to the slower UI, you donāt notice
JamesGecko@jk I grew up hating webapps because they were slow, but having to use them b/c I wasn't allowed to install stuff. I *love* the concept of software that just works on anything without any setup. And I love finding webapps that feel snappy and solid and persistent, almost like you're interacting with a physical object behind the screen. I really want to make that sort of software. But everything around the platform seems dedicated to making that harder than it needs to be.
Robert Atkins@jamesgecko @jk My take on why and how we got here: https://frabjousdei.net/post/120516531351/web-apps-are-90s-corporates-fault
David@jamesgecko @jk agreed. It's unnecessarily obtuse.I also wish the Android platform worked a layer closer to bare metal for faster performance. Sadly, even main Linux distros are creating higher layers of abstraction.
@jk I hear you on this one. Part of the problem is how difficult it is to scale effectively across a myriad of screen sizes. Consistent workflow suffers for end users.
the predominant feeling i have about the Wordpress thing, as someone that used to set people up with wordpress-based websites about 10,000 years ago and hasnāt even thought of it once since then, is waking up one morning and suddenly reading dozens of articles titled like āphpBB is suing NeoPets: 1 trillion dollars is at stakeā
4c31 š@jk phpBB my beloved
Vx. Princess "size_t queen" Grace 
@jk i remember seeing it described in the java gui days as, like, "aliens have studied earth with telescopes so they know what food looks like, but not that it's supposed to taste like anything". A lot of it's, like, if you're using a native GUI, everything on your computer shares the same paradigm, the same keyboard shortcuts, and behaves in generally the same way. they're using the same set of components, they share keyboard shortcuts, the buttons all behave the same way, and they have the benefit of microsoft/google/qt/whoever's UX testing". The web is the wild west. Are there keyboard shortcuts? If someone bothered! They're probably not gonna match some other website's idea of what they should be. Is the tab order reasonable? Do buttons, like, bother to look different when you click on them?
@jk instead of "everyone writing windows apps uses the same toolkit", it's "well, what's getting some middle manager a raise today"
@jk yep. Mostly itās deskilling. To some degree itās the greatest common denominator for cross platform development.
Something stable and awesome doesnāt generate churn nor the opportunity for rent taking. Capitalism squeezes. Software gets lower and lower effort the same way that long form video creators eventually devolve to rambling twitch streams.