Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.
I do remember those websites. For me, the difference is that now the Web is much more useful, but back then it was a lot more fun. True, you could sometimes waste hours following random links hoping to find something good, but the thrill of discovery when you stumbled across a gold mine of information was a huge part of the appeal.
Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. That makes the Web on the whole much more useful, but the thrill of the hunt is gone -- that's what Jakob Nielsen was referring to all those years ago when he talked about "information scent".
The web has changed: in some ways for the worse, and in others for the better. I remember websites being like a lottery: sometimes you'd hit jackpot but most of them were "Under construction" GIFs over ugly tiled backgrounds.
There is still ton of content and much more than what I would've dreamt on the 90s. Platforms like Reddit allow everyone, whether they know HTML or not, to publish their own content and even comment on others'.
Yes, Facebook and Twitter suck, but that's mostly it. I'm very, very grateful for everything else on modern internet.
I didn't put discussion on the page in order to keep it as code-light as possible. Reddit is a good option for discussion (at the time of writing), especially considering I didn't want to clutter HN up with a discussion page for each article (no problem on a subreddit).
I agree with you on the value of reddit and platforms (and I actually value Facebook-type platforms as well, with the obvious qualifications), but the old html sites I write about here have a different type of construction, material, and value.
most of them were "Under construction" GIFs over ugly tiled backgrounds
Oh you remind me of the beautiful paean to those GIFs in Olia Lialina's "A Vernacular Web", which is a pretty cool discussion of early internet aesthetics.
This is pretty harsh critique. I first got on the web in 1992 and what we have now is a paradise compared to what we had then. Sure, you may have to look with intent for what you want, but freely coasting around the web has always carried liabilities. It used to be "you'll find lots of junk" and the junk has simply diversified since then.
I also noticed the author doesn't even use a single hyperlink in his own article. Be the change you want to see.
I was just checking out Project Rho. Before that I was building a link page of my own because I'm getting into ham radio. The old web we love is still here and it'll always be around in some form.
> what we have now is a paradise compared to what we had then
Here's how I recall it:
Back in the day, you'd search for subject {$foo} and you would find mostly websites written by some cranky bearded weirdo who is obsessed with {$foo}, who has devoted weeks of his time to personally collating his every thought about {$foo} into one ghastly-looking site.
Nowadays, you search for {$foo} and find mostly beautifully template-designed pages of text written by indifferent fiverr freelancers who had about 20 minutes to stuff in as many keywords into as many column inches wrapped around as many ad slots as possible before moving on to the next subject.
Actually, it wasn't meant as a critique, as I like most people highly value the modern internet.
I will be putting in more internal hyperlinks as I have more pages on the website to link to. Most of the articles there are still in progress, and this one is a sort of introduction to the HN community (which is my main source of news and analysis these days).
Please link me to your ham radio site when you get it ready for us. I'm also building a list of these types of blogs/sites.
I've never been particularly nostalgic for websites.
I'm slightly nostalgic for shared Windows folders on LANs at college dorms. I remember seeing the first South Park short from such a folder as it was going viral.
I'm extremely nostalgic for the original Napster. I don't ever remember searching for a piece of music and coming up short. And I remember it being a very sudden shift-- one month you're making a mental note to search for a CD you misplaced somewhere back home, the next month you're getting on Napster to check if the theme to Ghostbuster's 2 has lyrics that recount the plot of the movie. It does.
A few weeks ago I typed "Battlestar Galactica" into Netflix, and guess what? It showed me lots and lots of results, none of which were Battlestar Galactica. And this isn't your run of the mill entitlement of a fool addicted to his Iphone apps. That is entitlement of a person yearning for modern functionality to match a shitty piece of software that saw its last stable release 15 years ago.
I'm having a hard time finding any numbers for the actual amount of music that was available on the original Napster at the time. Can anyone put some hard data to my rose colored glasses?
Check out Soulseek, it is very similar to how I remember the original Napster. Lots of obscure rarities on there music-wise, I've not tried it for anything else.
The one P2P thing I am nostalgic for is Audio Galaxy - it had an awesome system where it they indexed everyone's content on their website, so you could see every file that had ever been on the network and add it to your "want list", then when that person came online, it would start downloading. To be fair "wish list searches" in Soulseek serve a similar purpose, but I loved that ability to browse every file that had ever been online!
> I'm extremely nostalgic for the original Napster.
I'm even more nostalgic of Direct Connect: Hey this person has this cool and rare thing I'm searching for let's download his file list to see what else they like.
10 years from now, we'll be waxing nostalgia about entrepreneurs who made a living off Instagram, Amazon, WordPress, and other platforms. 'There was a kid who used to "rate dogs" and he was hilarious! And he did it for free without any corporate backing! Made a killing on T-Shirts and stuff as well!'
Last night I ended up, for some weird nostalgic reason, installing a Gopher client, just to see if there was anything still around. Amazingly, there's a bunch of blogs (called phlogs in Gopherspace) that people are updating regularly! Pretty amazing!
Last year I made some minor changes to my blogging engine [1] to support gopher, so now my blog [2] is also available via gopher [3]. The source code to the gopher server is online [4].
> Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique.
Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible.
I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by `<marquee>`s, poorly-laid out flashing gifs and bright yellow text on a white background.
> People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible.
Then gradually forgot about it? These days we have our WingDings (FontAwesome), popups ("please subscribe to our newsletter" modals), best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4 ("you are using an outdated browser"), best viewed in 800x600 ("please rotate your device"), auto-playing General MIDI music (auto-playing videos), slow load times (not due to a 28.8k modems, but bloat) and other ridiculous practices that don't really have any 1998 equivalents (hijacking scrolling, pop-in-pop-out menus, hijacking the browser history or giant banners that follow you around as you scroll (without using frames, so good practice!)). Often for no good reason. Where we had <marquee> we now have pop-in chat bots, subscription reminders, social media sharing links using a third of the screen, nonsensical page transitions etc.
It's all exploiting what could be very useful technology, and I'm not saying it's much better or much worse, but at least in the 90s the regression you'd experience by not running any scripts was that there wouldn't be any asterisk snowflakes falling around christmas, not that the plain text article you were about to read suddenly became unreadable or unnavigable. It seems the lessons consistently learned from the past are the most trivial and are ignorant of the cause of the original criticisms. Don't use tables for layout (instead implement your convoluted page layout using <div> pyramids and CSS hacks!), don't use frames (use "position: fixed;" to waste screen real estate instead, and use JS to break navigation!)
Web people were for a brief moment enthused with the idea of proper human- and machine readable content markup respecting established standards. But we're not there any more if we ever were, developers preferring to serve the most simple content using 500k of JavaScript and 200k of CSS browser workarounds over plain (X)HTML with simple styling.
I saw a lot of people trying to avoid HTML in their websites in the past.
The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly.
That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.
> Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible.
Unstyled HTML (optionally with user style sheets) is more usable and accessible than today's one-size-fits-the-designer design for the kind of content that used to dominate (and is still a large segment of) the web. (We've got better tools for making usable and accessible content, but they are mostly not used for that purpose.)
For interactive applications, its a different story.
Websites used to do something that completely disappeared: not using javascript to fuck with the behaviour of the browser. You used to be able to scroll down and the page would scroll down. Right click on a link and see your contextual menu. Copy or paste something and it would actually copy and paste. Half of the sites today break the browser in one way or another.
That would be interesting - a search engine that was resistant to most SEO techniques and allowed one to find these types of sites. Would be a great alternative to Google sometimes.
The article on using Lua from D looks very interesting! I've been meaning to get to know D in more depth for a while now, this looks like a good starting point for a small toy project.
See also the analysis (from 2015) of an Iranian blogger who got arrested in 2008 and got free in 2015 - he did not recognize the new web. (Ironically also posted on Medium...) According to him, hyperlinks turned into a social media stream.
Another thing is people often just go to Wikipedia, Wikipedia replaced the need for many fan sites. I had things copied from my sites and put on Wikipedia and tired to get a link back or a source mentioned and it was removed each time. So I lost motivation to even update fan sites, since whatever I type is going to get pasted onto Wikipedia with no link back.
Even when Wikipedia does link to the original source, that has minimal benefit to the original source. Very few Wikipedia readers follow the links through to the source, so Wikipedia essentially replaces the original.
"it was largely a collection of websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write about it and put it online. "
Oh,you mean like blogs?
Seriously, this sounds like being nostalgic for it's own sake. I fail to see how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a good idea - now everyone can have their own website.
I really don't miss the "glorious 90's" type of websites - with the thousand of animated images, weird background images and marquee everywhere. Sure it made every site unique - every site was terrible to the eyes in it's own special way.
Also the idea that all sites now look the same is quite preposterous - sure a lot of sites are cookiecutter websites - especially marketing websites, but there are tons of unique designs - especially for blogs and personal websites.
> Does anyone remember when you they stumbled on a new website written by some guy and read his first article, then clicked back to his homepage and saw he had a list of similar articles that looked like they'd be just as interesting.
Or, more likely, you clicked "back" on the "navigation bar" and it would 404 because the author messed up the links, since it was all hand crafted HTML.
Funny stuff aside, there are still loads of "websites" out there. If I understand the criteria here, we are looking for mostly hand crafted pages maintained by individuals (or small groups) that have interesting content. Something, should I say, very "web 1.0"?
Here's a good one. Make sure to check the GUI Gallery section:
We need a good search index of these and all the other sites likes them. Something that deliberately doesn't include pages from bigger sites or sites full of cruft.
It's clever of the author to use "website" in this more specific sense. Technically a "website" roughly means anything served as HTML over HTTP. But all us fogeys know what his title meant anyway.
But I still think he protests too much. The style subject-oriented websites which the author is referring to evolved slightly and got the new name "blogs". The blogosphere might not be as popular as social networking, but it is still huger than the web of the '90s.
This is why I really love initiatives such as https://neocities.org/ :). I don't have a use for it myself as I have my own servers, but I'm glad this kind of service exists!
> Does anyone remember websites? These might be unfamiliar to anyone unexposed to the internet before 2005 or so [...] it was largely a collection of websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write about it and put it online.
Does the author mean web rings? I do remember these :)
I remember web rings. I used to own a couple of sites that were part of a web ring. I remember it was actually hard to get into them back then -- the maintainers only wanted quality sites and you had to submit yours for review and explain to them why you deserved to be included. They were actually a decent source of traffic in the early days, before search engines became a thing.
I understand the sarcasm, but really, there are a lot of "real" websites, directly controlled by individuals who post what they want. I point you to my own website, https://www.dwheeler.com .... it's not the latest in CSS, no Megabytes of JavaScript, and no cross-site tracking either.
I thought about this a few weeks ago. I remember the late 90's actually searching around the web. Now there are so many walled gardens that individual creation is limited to posting a Medium blog or Facebook post. Today, I only visit a handful of sites and developer documentation.
I was a part of the Geocities team in 1998. Part of the reason a large part of the early web no longer exists is that many of these web pages were hosted for free by Geocities. Tragically when they were purchased by Yahoo, Yahoo decided to simply shred the early web, they decided it was not worth it to keep supporting the service and simply hit delete on a huge chunk of the content of the early web.
[+] [-] dogcow|8 years ago|reply
From their about page:
Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.
[+] [-] ambrosite|8 years ago|reply
Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. That makes the Web on the whole much more useful, but the thrill of the hunt is gone -- that's what Jakob Nielsen was referring to all those years ago when he talked about "information scent".
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/
[+] [-] kaoD|8 years ago|reply
Oh the irony.
The web has changed: in some ways for the worse, and in others for the better. I remember websites being like a lottery: sometimes you'd hit jackpot but most of them were "Under construction" GIFs over ugly tiled backgrounds.
There is still ton of content and much more than what I would've dreamt on the 90s. Platforms like Reddit allow everyone, whether they know HTML or not, to publish their own content and even comment on others'.
Yes, Facebook and Twitter suck, but that's mostly it. I'm very, very grateful for everything else on modern internet.
This smells like 'memberberries.
[+] [-] dfps|8 years ago|reply
I agree with you on the value of reddit and platforms (and I actually value Facebook-type platforms as well, with the obvious qualifications), but the old html sites I write about here have a different type of construction, material, and value.
(- The author)
[+] [-] Typhon|8 years ago|reply
Oh you remind me of the beautiful paean to those GIFs in Olia Lialina's "A Vernacular Web", which is a pretty cool discussion of early internet aesthetics.
http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/uc/
[+] [-] rospaya|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alphaalpha101|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] themodelplumber|8 years ago|reply
I also noticed the author doesn't even use a single hyperlink in his own article. Be the change you want to see.
I was just checking out Project Rho. Before that I was building a link page of my own because I'm getting into ham radio. The old web we love is still here and it'll always be around in some form.
[+] [-] outsidetheparty|8 years ago|reply
Here's how I recall it:
Back in the day, you'd search for subject {$foo} and you would find mostly websites written by some cranky bearded weirdo who is obsessed with {$foo}, who has devoted weeks of his time to personally collating his every thought about {$foo} into one ghastly-looking site.
Nowadays, you search for {$foo} and find mostly beautifully template-designed pages of text written by indifferent fiverr freelancers who had about 20 minutes to stuff in as many keywords into as many column inches wrapped around as many ad slots as possible before moving on to the next subject.
I know which one I prefer.
(I may exaggerate. But only slightly.)
[+] [-] dfps|8 years ago|reply
I will be putting in more internal hyperlinks as I have more pages on the website to link to. Most of the articles there are still in progress, and this one is a sort of introduction to the HN community (which is my main source of news and analysis these days).
Please link me to your ham radio site when you get it ready for us. I'm also building a list of these types of blogs/sites.
(- the author)
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jstimpfle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jancsika|8 years ago|reply
I'm slightly nostalgic for shared Windows folders on LANs at college dorms. I remember seeing the first South Park short from such a folder as it was going viral.
I'm extremely nostalgic for the original Napster. I don't ever remember searching for a piece of music and coming up short. And I remember it being a very sudden shift-- one month you're making a mental note to search for a CD you misplaced somewhere back home, the next month you're getting on Napster to check if the theme to Ghostbuster's 2 has lyrics that recount the plot of the movie. It does.
A few weeks ago I typed "Battlestar Galactica" into Netflix, and guess what? It showed me lots and lots of results, none of which were Battlestar Galactica. And this isn't your run of the mill entitlement of a fool addicted to his Iphone apps. That is entitlement of a person yearning for modern functionality to match a shitty piece of software that saw its last stable release 15 years ago.
I'm having a hard time finding any numbers for the actual amount of music that was available on the original Napster at the time. Can anyone put some hard data to my rose colored glasses?
[+] [-] tomduncalf|8 years ago|reply
The one P2P thing I am nostalgic for is Audio Galaxy - it had an awesome system where it they indexed everyone's content on their website, so you could see every file that had ever been on the network and add it to your "want list", then when that person came online, it would start downloading. To be fair "wish list searches" in Soulseek serve a similar purpose, but I loved that ability to browse every file that had ever been online!
[+] [-] yread|8 years ago|reply
I'm even more nostalgic of Direct Connect: Hey this person has this cool and rare thing I'm searching for let's download his file list to see what else they like.
[+] [-] schnevets|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyarkles|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jaruzel|8 years ago|reply
http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/gopher-browser-for-windows/
[+] [-] spc476|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog
[2] http://boston.conman.org/
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/1Gopher:Src:
[+] [-] tree_of_item|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KGIII|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiala__|8 years ago|reply
Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible.
I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by `<marquee>`s, poorly-laid out flashing gifs and bright yellow text on a white background.
[+] [-] boomlinde|8 years ago|reply
Then gradually forgot about it? These days we have our WingDings (FontAwesome), popups ("please subscribe to our newsletter" modals), best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4 ("you are using an outdated browser"), best viewed in 800x600 ("please rotate your device"), auto-playing General MIDI music (auto-playing videos), slow load times (not due to a 28.8k modems, but bloat) and other ridiculous practices that don't really have any 1998 equivalents (hijacking scrolling, pop-in-pop-out menus, hijacking the browser history or giant banners that follow you around as you scroll (without using frames, so good practice!)). Often for no good reason. Where we had <marquee> we now have pop-in chat bots, subscription reminders, social media sharing links using a third of the screen, nonsensical page transitions etc.
It's all exploiting what could be very useful technology, and I'm not saying it's much better or much worse, but at least in the 90s the regression you'd experience by not running any scripts was that there wouldn't be any asterisk snowflakes falling around christmas, not that the plain text article you were about to read suddenly became unreadable or unnavigable. It seems the lessons consistently learned from the past are the most trivial and are ignorant of the cause of the original criticisms. Don't use tables for layout (instead implement your convoluted page layout using <div> pyramids and CSS hacks!), don't use frames (use "position: fixed;" to waste screen real estate instead, and use JS to break navigation!)
Web people were for a brief moment enthused with the idea of proper human- and machine readable content markup respecting established standards. But we're not there any more if we ever were, developers preferring to serve the most simple content using 500k of JavaScript and 200k of CSS browser workarounds over plain (X)HTML with simple styling.
[+] [-] Latty|8 years ago|reply
The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly.
That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
Unstyled HTML (optionally with user style sheets) is more usable and accessible than today's one-size-fits-the-designer design for the kind of content that used to dominate (and is still a large segment of) the web. (We've got better tools for making usable and accessible content, but they are mostly not used for that purpose.)
For interactive applications, its a different story.
[+] [-] superkuh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|8 years ago|reply
I believe my own site would qualify? http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/
[+] [-] sgt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krylon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astura|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clydethefrog|8 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a4...
[+] [-] pers0n|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheschire|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DamnInteresting|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Illniyar|8 years ago|reply
Oh,you mean like blogs?
Seriously, this sounds like being nostalgic for it's own sake. I fail to see how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a good idea - now everyone can have their own website.
I really don't miss the "glorious 90's" type of websites - with the thousand of animated images, weird background images and marquee everywhere. Sure it made every site unique - every site was terrible to the eyes in it's own special way.
Also the idea that all sites now look the same is quite preposterous - sure a lot of sites are cookiecutter websites - especially marketing websites, but there are tons of unique designs - especially for blogs and personal websites.
[+] [-] disconnected|8 years ago|reply
Or, more likely, you clicked "back" on the "navigation bar" and it would 404 because the author messed up the links, since it was all hand crafted HTML.
Funny stuff aside, there are still loads of "websites" out there. If I understand the criteria here, we are looking for mostly hand crafted pages maintained by individuals (or small groups) that have interesting content. Something, should I say, very "web 1.0"?
Here's a good one. Make sure to check the GUI Gallery section:
http://toastytech.com
User Friendly is always hilarious (unfortunately, updates stopped ages ago, but going through the archive is sill fun):
http://www.userfriendly.org/
And here's something random, the best page in the universe:
http://maddox.xmission.com/
Like I said, there are TONS of these out there. You just have to, you know, look for them.
[+] [-] Jaruzel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianratnapala|8 years ago|reply
But I still think he protests too much. The style subject-oriented websites which the author is referring to evolved slightly and got the new name "blogs". The blogosphere might not be as popular as social networking, but it is still huger than the web of the '90s.
[+] [-] p4bl0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggambetta|8 years ago|reply
Does the author mean web rings? I do remember these :)
[+] [-] ambrosite|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixstringtheory|8 years ago|reply
Those and stumbleupon were fun surfing!
[+] [-] dfps|8 years ago|reply
(- the author)
[+] [-] almostarockstar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwheeler|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minikomi|8 years ago|reply
- Look for the sites with 4-5 letter callsigns on them
- Go to their links page
- Keep going down the rabbit hole.
EG. here's a few I just found googling:
http://www.qsl.net/kp4md/
https://k7nv.com/
http://www.w8ji.com/
[+] [-] joeblau|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shams93|8 years ago|reply