It’s Time to Stop🛑Milking Portals
Do you remember when you actually typed a URI into a browser? Sure, you’ve got Stack Overflow in your history but that doesn’t quite count.
Even developers are using TikTok as a front page of the Internet, and boomers go through Reddit. If you’re typing a domain into a search bar you might just be from a bygone era (and you should be scared of AI).
What is happening is that we have a selection of portals that give a controlled view of the Internet, and people want this. We seldom go directly to a specific domain except for the feels.
And, I guess, that is precisely what the milk.com domain is all about.
The Age of Portals
We’ve run into the age of portals. No, we aren’t getting Portal 3 — this is about how we access the Internet.
Photo by Nadine E @nadineshaabana on Unsplash
The portals in question are Facebook, Twitter, Google and TikTok. Instead of a web where users could roam freely and stumble on quirky sites, we see the Internet through curated subsets of the Internet.
In the past, most people typed addresses into their browsers and were given pages, and perhaps they were surprised about the content received on their machine. A case in point: milk.com.
A Bygone Age: Milk.com
A website that defied expectations when I first visited it. No, it wasn’t a dairy lobby, and it wasn’t for sale either. Instead, it was a personal page, filled with jokes, odd projects, and a resume.
Dan Bornstein, the owner, registered the domain back in 1994 when the internet still had a frontier spirit. Back then, a domain was like a plot of land. You had your space, and it was yours to cultivate.
Visiting that website is like a blast to the more interesting past.
Now also take this from milk.com and swallow it. Dan won’t sell the domain for less than $10 million dollars. I don’t think they are likely to achieve this lofty price these days, but it shows how the bubble grew for something (a domain name) that has no value in the real world.
Now, in 2024 does anyone care anymore?
The Last of the Free-Range Internet
The future doesn’t look great for domains like milk.com. The web’s reliance on a handful of platforms has led to a chilling realization: no one is going to be typing in URLs anymore.
Google and OpenAI’s chatbots spoon-feed information directly to users, eliminating the need to even click a link. AI gives you answers — no need to bother with the “where” and even the experience of getting the information is quite irrelevant these days. That means domains are becoming relics of a bygone time, like when people ate unhealthy food like McDonalds and the Middle East faced unrest.
The death of domains is a real shame. The early internet, where anyone could build a little corner of the world was beautiful. It didn’t have to be optimized for clicks, likes, or shares. It just had to exist. Is there anything left to discover? I’ll tell you something for nothing, ChatGPT isn’t going to help you find milk.com and spend a few happy minutes investigating the jokes and fun within.
Conclusion
When the adventure is gone, what is the point anymore? We are simply left with a scrolling feed, being distracted by whatever algorithm thinks we need next.
And that’s simply no fun.