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Is it because websites are converging on what boosts search rank? Or maybe there is a consolidation in the frameworks used to build web sites? Perhaps users gravitate to using sites whose layouts are "familiar"?
Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar:
Over the past few years, articles and blog posts have started to ask some version of the same question: "Why are all websites starting to look the same?"
These posts usually point out some common design elements, from large images with superimposed text, to hamburger menus, which are those three horizontal lines that, when clicked, reveal a list of page options to choose from.
My colleagues Bardia Doosti, David Crandall, Norman Su and I were studying the history of the web when we started to notice these posts cropping up. None of the authors had done any sort of empirical study, though. It was more of a hunch they had.
We decided to investigate the claim to see if there were any truth to the notion that websites are starting to look the same and, if so, explore why this has been happening. So we ran a series of data mining studies that scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites.
[...] This outsize power is part a larger story of consolidation in the tech industry—one that certainly could be a cause for concern. We believe aesthetic consolidation should be critically examined as well.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @07:51AM (6 children)
I can attest to this. The other day I found this site that's a blatant ripoff of SoylentNews. The only thing they changed is that they made it green, and then slapped some ads on it to make a quick buck. Even some of the stories are the same!
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @08:15AM
I had the misfortune to encounter the site of which you speak.
The garbage-tier editors, broken system for Anonymous Coward posts, and lack of Unicode support clearly demonstrate its inferiority though.
(Score: 3, Touché) by driverless on Thursday May 14 2020, @10:49AM (1 child)
Naah, it's such an obvious low-quality knockoff, you can tell immediately that it's just a bad clone, it can't even handle i18n in posts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @01:50AM
Properly simulating intercrystallization is hard, so not too surprising their MVC engine would have difficulty with doing it in posts.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday May 14 2020, @11:54AM (1 child)
SOME ads? Hell, I had an adblocker installed, I had an account over there, and it even showed me the old "disable advertising" option that I had checked, and clicking on a story still raped my eyes with an entire screen full of advertising.
When a site gets that much advertising, it is a sure sign they are about to go out of business.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Friday May 15 2020, @03:14PM
You need a better adblocker. I run Firefox with Noscript, uBlock Origin, and Ghostery. The only ad I see is the closable "announcement" banner ad they put at the top, which I can close.
You are right about ad laden. Noscript is blocking 10 items, uBlock 12, and Ghostery 11. SoylentNews I am happy to say has nothing to block.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday May 14 2020, @01:05PM
I find Soylent News to be green, too.
But then I have it configured in the old-fashioned green-text-on-black-background more.
-- hendrik