Ideally websites are unique with their own styling, identity and quirks.

Having done a lot of webdesign in the early 2000s I also do miss the real identity even corporate websites had back then compared to now.

Having said that, for some contexts there is a real benefit to websites being very similar. Specifically for navigating corporate websites it is nice to not have to entirely guess where to find something or to figure out how to navigate that particular website.

For personal websites that doesn't matter as much and I love coming across websites crafted by hand and love. Though, the only thing I wish people would remember is that for long form context there are some good practices for line width, font types and readability in general. It's a shame to come across a well written blog and struggle to read it comfortably.

Edit: I might go in a bit more detail later. Wrote this on my phone while on a train.

Edit2: Had an excellent day btw, thanks! Hope your part of day is also going well!

I have to preface this by stating that, as we're on tildes, you're going to get a somewhat biased response simply due to fact that tildes primarily "draws in" specific types of people that in many ways differ significantly from the average internet user. For instance, check out this post: https://tildes.net/~tech/1pkd/one_million_screenshots

That aside - yeah, I very much do empathise a lot. I also really like unique stuff in general, and I am especially pretty annoyed at the fact that the majority of the web (especially corporate web) looks so identical. The latest annoyances for me concerned some sites I'm using in the fashion sector.

There are some very good arguments and technical reasons as to why everything looks the same right now - which I assume @creesch might get around to as he knows those things a lot better than me¹ - but even so, I'm very strongly opinionated about this topic; I genuinely want every corporate (and also every non-corporate) site to look very different and actually show off its identity, even if they do end up converging on some "conveniences". Then again, my partner would say I'm very strongly opinionated about way too many things. Though, I certainly am not fond of whatever https://pierre.co/ has going on, so maybe let's not go that way. That said, in my experience, the old WWW style more or less died as soon as "being constantly connected to the internet" became obiquitous. Having been around on the interwebz since the early 2000s, the "decline" was really noticeable to me in the early 2010s when android went mainstream in my area but could be traced back to the late 2000s overall.

Then again, I'm alienated by almost all technology nowadays. I don't like where almost any consumer (or enterprise) technology has been heading towards since, idk, the mid 2010s, and it's only been getting worse and worse. Which, in turn, means I've only become more and more of a "luddite" as time went/goes on. There are some exceptions I genuinely like a lot - especially self-checkout machines in stores, which I love - but, overall, sometimes I genuinely feel like I'm practically becoming a "hermit" in terms of actually using the internet. For example, let's take a peek at my app history on my phone. My top app, on the regular and with a big difference vs anything else, is Signal. My second and third most used app alternate between Three Cheers For Tildes & Firefox Focus, with the latter mainly just being used almost exclusively for reading things posted on tildes + googling random things. Any other app on my phone is almost never used. And I don't use my laptop much at this point either, unless I'm having a call, I wanna order something, or I'm joining the tildes MC server (rip).

1 (edit): Turns out @PierogInTheButt got into that topic before @creesch did ;)

I think a big reason why so many websites look the same is what web development has became. Everyone uses the same frameworks, design systems, libraries or pre-made UI components, which makes things faster to build (and cheaper) but also very standardized. Personally, that’s what made me lose interest in getting into web development commercially as it didn’t feel as creative as I imagined it would be. I felt more like using specific patterns rather than actually making something unique.

And honestly, that's not exactly connected to your question but I think Android applications are even worse when it comes to that. I realized this during a mobile app development lesson at university, where it found out how strongly Google pushes Material Design. It standardizes almost everything you can think of, which is good for performance but in my opinion it leaves very little room for real creativity.

Today most mainstream sites look similar, but there are plenty of oddly-formatted niche sites. There's the "indie web" (ex: indieweb.org, neocities.org, melonland.net) which emphasize Web 1.0 style, and old sites that are still updated and haven't been redesigned. There are also new-style sites that still do something to try and "stand out", like hermes4.nousresearch.com, although they get lots of criticism (ex: that site for hogging memory, other sites for scrolljacking or being hard to read, generally along "just show me the content").

I think it's unfortunate that mainstream taste is what I'd call "bland", but if most people prefer that, I think it's not worth caring about. What we should care about is finding our own groups with interesting taste. The nice thing about the web is that random people can publish almost anything they can create, and you can visit almost any site. There's nothing really stopping groups like the indie web from becoming mainstream except that the mainstream audience doesn't notice them, and when it does doesn't find them worthy of attention/contribution.