The magic of browsing the web isn't quite gone, but it's waiting to be reinvented
I’ve been following Paul Stamatiou, aka ‘Stammy’, since he was at Georgia Tech. He’s worked at Twitter, co-founded a couple of startups, and now seems to be pivoting into AI search.
What I like about Stammy’s deep dive blog posts is that he blends an understanding of technology through the lens of design with a level of pragmatism you don’t usually see. In this post, he talks about the serendipity of the web we’re increasingly losing in favour of AI answers. But, at the same time, he talks about the convenience and value of those answers, wondering if there’s another way of using these tools to serve human curiosity.
To my mind, there’s a design angle here on the ‘supply’ side, but there’s also an opportunity to cultivate AI literacies in order to use these kind of tools effectively.
Browsing with traditional search engines wasn’t exactly seamless but you were in the driver’s seat. You would occasionally end up on some obscure personal site or forum that was unexpectedly right up your alley.
Those magical detours defined our web experience, enriching us with insight and creativity while establishing human connections. Today’s instant answers with these AI tools sacrifice this beautiful chaos that once made the internet so captivating. But there’s hope—a new kind of browsing experience might just be around the corner.
[…]
Serendipity while browsing the web wasn’t just a byproduct of how the web began to form. It stretched our empathy by exposing us to diverse voices, nudged us out of echo chambers, and kept our web from becoming monotonous.
That style of surfing the web is fading away. What social media hasn’t already taken over, or search engines haven’t already diluted by sending us to ad-laden mainstream sites, is now steadily being eroded by AI-powered answer engines.
[…]
Today’s AI answer engines face fundamental challenges that go beyond the feeling of nostalgia for the old web, surfacing some bespoke notion about serendipitous discovery, or wanting more indie content bubbled up. The real issues—weak attribution, black-box decision-making, and homogenized responses—threaten to flatten rather than enrich how we use the web. Browsing the web isn’t and shouldn’t be a one size fits all experience.
The current generation of AI tools faces a prodigious challenge: how can they surprise and delight you when they know almost nothing about you?
[…]
AI personalization doesn’t have to be about consuming every detail of your life or cloning yourself. We’ve fended off giving too much personal data to individual companies, why start now? You don’t need to be digitally cloned to help you throughout your day. Even a little bit of info about your past interactions, goals, and interests can go a long way to delivering experiences that resonate more deeply with you.
[…]
Even with light personalization, AI answer engines could meaningfully tailor their responses to you. They would know you’re very technical and experienced with the topic at hand to skip the basics and dive deeper into technical concepts. They would know you’ve been writing about technology for 20 years and really enjoy the underlying ways things work and always want that deeper understanding. And so many other things that might seem like minute details at first, but combined really add up.
[…]
The magic of browsing the web isn’t quite gone, but it’s waiting to be reinvented.
Source & image: Paul Stamatiou