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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: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Thursday May 14 2020, @09:44AM
Web developers have wholly given over the reigns [sic] to js Frameworks and the like.
Yes, copy-pasta is part of it. Why spend a week setting up a sleek, efficient to use site which anyone can maintain when you can get paid for two months of "development" followed by indefinite maintenance and upgrade contracts by copy-pasta of megabytes of broken javascript? Bonus if the trail of debris left behind requires too much overhead to be cost effective to switch maintaining companies.
The other part is that the interfaces for more and more services, especially for social control media, are designed around engagement rather than usability. That is where the interface is designed to keep people busy fiddling with it as long as possible rather than letting them get a task done seamlessly and being as unnoticeable as possible. Social control media is the worst in that regard. The money maker there is the data mining and the mass manipulation of opinion. The prerequiste for that is for those companies to mine the population by keeping them online and continually "emitting" behaviors which can be measured. The measurements are then analyzed and the analyses used for bringing in big money and power. As younger crowds spend way too much time interacting with social control media's interfaces and that same media is designed to be as addictive as possible, they find these slow, tangled, inefficient interfaces familiar and thus implement them if left unsupervised.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.