You know when the Web Dark Ages are? They're upon us right now. With Google, Fb extracting all value out of the extant web, github & co having "educated" developers what to expect from software download sites and depending on network effects, StackExchange and a couple other sites covering "How To" material (not meant as a SE critique) and ad prices going down, the only "rational" incentive for new content is to publish polarizing clickbait. In the 1990s and 2000s, all kinds of Wikis and collaboration sites emerged; in the early 2010s, the nascent mobile web prompted a vibrant web design community, but when was the last time you went to a new web site? The web was once meant as an easy way for self-publishing, bypassing middle-men. Turns out we've just exchanged one middleman with another. I'm especially pissed at the staged HTML5 campaign to yield power over web standards to Google. HTML5 chose a shield as a logo, but who's going to shield us from Google and WHATWG destroying the web?
Facebook is perhaps the most frightening for me, because for many people Facebook is the internet!
Something I absolutely hate is when I want to learn more about a local business and search for them on Google, but all I find is a Facebook page with minimal info - what happened to websites?!
I'm a self-taught developer with no professional experience, but for over a year I learned everything I needed to know to build a massive web application to fulfill my own need: a collaborative annotation wiki. I poured my freaking heart into it and could never get a single user.
I drew on Jimmy Wales' experiences founding Wikipedia for a lot of inspiration. But got nowhere near the traction he got. As in, I got zero users after nine months since launch. Now it's largely a portfolio piece as I try to search for a real job in tech, by leveraging the 14,000 lines of code in Python/Flask to prove that I know how to develop an app. ( https://anno.wiki is the url if you're curious).
I can only hope that the real reasons I haven't gained traction are that (a) the interface just isn't welcoming enough (I tried too hard to do progressive enhancement with almost no experience in UX) and (b) simply not advertising. After a nine month break I'm getting ready to start re-developing a new front end in React to maybe make it more welcoming to non-techie lit nerds, and then maybe target advertise on Facebook, but I just don't know.
My deepest fear is just that the web is not an interesting place anymore, and Wikipedia just wouldn't get a foothold now, and that's why I can't. I just don't know.
I dislike targeted advertising, because I find it useless. I like context advertising much more: When I browse X then I find ads related to X sometimes useful. I use some of their products like gmail and drive sometimes. But for browsing and searching I use Firefox and DDG.
But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing.
This issue is different from the things we criticize about Google. They neither restrict me as a user nor as a developer. I can avoid using their stuff and I can avoid aggressively targeted ads (in fact they have a psychologically negative impact on me).
As for personal sites and blogs: I still very much read personal blogs. The quality (whatever that means, but you know...) of articles on those is generally much higher than on medium/dev.to or whatever platform.
In fact there is so much good content on small/personal sites, that I don't have time to read it all.
To add, a lot of practices that were considered "spyware" or "malware" during the web dark ages have become normalized as growth-hacks or the cost of using free (as in beer) software.
I assume you were being rhetorical - but it definitely still happens. Radiohead's website redesign being the last one I personally experienced earlier this year https://www.radiohead.com/library/#ir (mostly sharing because it's great).
I think the Web Dark Ages are yet ahead of us. I've grown extremely pessimistic with the state of modern web, with corporate censorship and disinformation on ad-driven social media, dissolution of many open Web standards and WebKit/Blink hegemony that is impossible to topple. A decade ago I expected Web to become more open, but instead it has become a hellscape of closed gardens where maintaining even reasonable amount of privacy is nearly impossible.
90s web was a wild west, but it was a far cry from its "dark ages".
For what it's worth, during those "dark ages" web pages conveying useful information were typically no heavier than ten times the character count of the information. Sure, we had the <blink> tag, and garish geocities pages, hamsterdance and the rest. But that web delivered information really efficiently. Maybe we can start a movement to bring that back. Let's call it MarsMission: let's build web stuff that might be usable by the crew of a mission to Mars when they're hundreds of gigameters away.
I've come to believe that, in retrospect, 'AJAX' was a mistake. For the first decade of the web, nearly all its functionality was implemented using HTML tags.
What roles does the web serve that benefit humanity? Some of the most important are: 'literary', 'research', 'educational', 'financial service', 'commercial service', 'audio/video'.
Then we have a 'typesetting/graphic-design' role, which is 99% of the reason the web 'requires' JS and CSS. As long as we were happy with a "one-size-fits-all" design, we could enable the other roles via (existing, and future) HTML tags alone (the way we did prior to the introduction of JS).
Now, what are the trade-offs we make to gain the 'typesetting/graphic-design' role? They are a loss of: security, privacy, legibility, compatibility, accessibility, ease-of-use, and page load speed. To be fair, we also gain fantastic abilities for web developers to innovate, but we could probably find some workaround, without 'AJAX', to allow devs to experiment.
The world would be better off, in may ways, if we scrapped the web's dynamic features, created a few new HTML tags, and re-implemented them using HTML alone.
Trends like using medium.com as blog replacements are also troublesome. These companies own your content. When they go away, so does your content. When they want to censor you, then can.
Well that was the endgame here. Our beloved overlords now control the tech, policies and 'privacy' of the Web. They're the ones proposing the 'standards' they want and control the direction of the browsers they have. It's either Chrome, Firefox (Gecko) or Safari (WebKit) / Edge (Chrome again). There is little choice here for the users.
I thought the "Web Dark Ages" refered to people imagining us looking back on it in 20 years and finding it had dissapeared with only a tiny fraction of it archived. Under that definition the web dark ages ended when web archival services started to save snapshots of a majority of sites.
> WebKit/Blink hegemony that is impossible to topple
The hegemony you're referring to is Blink, and it doesn't help the "toppling" effort when you lump WebKit in with it. WebKit is an effective check against Google's power, but not if folks continue imagining that two distinct projects that diverged years ago are one and the same.
Is completely wrong; Even today the most popular desktop screen resolution by a country mile is 1366x768. All the budget laptops sold in supermarkets etc. still use that resolution and most people simply can't afford to drop ~1,000 GBP/USD on the 'family computer'.
Fun fact... 1366x768 exists because it was trivial for far-east manufacturers to switch from 1024x768 4:3 to 1366x768 16:9, as the latter could still use 90% of existing LCD controller design, thus making it really cheap to switch their fabrication over.
It's super interesting to look at and filter for various categories. For desktop 1366x768 wins out slightly ahead of 1920x1080. But for mobile, devices report a lot of 360x640. Fascinating.
Here's the mandatory stackexchange discussion on why that is:
As a follow up on this website's name. What does "web dark age" mean to HN people? I've seen political comments but no consensus yet.
For a long time I have thought of it as a period where all our data was stored in decaying media that would be lost to future historians, much like the real dark ages. My source for this idea comes from sci-fi author Charles Stross:
>In the future, the 20th century will be seen as a dark age — while previous centuries left books and papers that are stable for centuries with proper storage, many of the early analog recordings were stable enough to survive for decades, but the digital media and magnetic tapes and optical disks of the latter third of the 20th century decay in mere years. And if they don't decay, they become unreadable: the original tapes of the slow-scan video from the first moon landing, for example, appear to be missing, and the much lower quality broadcast images are all that remain. So stability is important, and I'm not even going to start on how we store data and metainformation describing it.
Lately, I've been having thoughts about this a lot. I've yearned for a simpler age in technology. I grew up on the internet around 96/97ish, mostly because I wanted to play games over dial-up. In those formative years, I forged a lifelong fascination with wanting to know how all (most? some?) of this worked.
Things have changed a lot for me personally and for technology. In general, I feel my enthusiasm has dwindled somewhat in the way tech's role has played out in society. In my opinion the big "Web 2.0" and social rush was more about bending the Internet to the wills of private enterprise rather then private enterprise bending to the wills of the Internet. Or maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now, a salty junior level graybeard.
I do have hope, though. It's probably that my youthful enthusiasm has given way to cautious optimism.
The aspect ratio is wrong for the 2 middle resolutions, really bothers me :D
PS: I don't think tables are a bad layout option. It's not as flexible as CSS obviously but you could make it scale really well to vastly different UI sizes with a combo of fixed and percentage based dimensions. Most "modern" sites just dump everything in a column in the middle. And scale everything as if everyone is on a fat-finger touch interface.
And I do miss the gradient button designs, I hate today's obsession with flatness. Bt that's a matter of taste I suppose. Maybe I don't have any :)
PS It should realllly have mentioned the <marquee>!
It's an exaggeration, I know. The web was visually unpleasant those days. Techwise too. Flash?! IE-only? OGM...
But almost all information was opened and text-search-ready.
Now information is behind walls (facebook, google) and hidden in videos. Websites lost control with amp-fication of the web, and we're seeing more and more Chrome-only signs.
Ads? everywhere. I remember long time when people despised the idea of using a computer with always-on ads display if it was cheaper. Now we have exactly that.
The web did evolve, but mainly in the wrong direction.
Imo, those were the times of unbounded creativity. With the limited, primitive tools, devs (webmasters?) of that era achieved great results.
A big chunk of modern websites lack character and look nearly the same to me. I know - consistency, principle of least surprise, et al. Maybe it is just me, but designing a website engaged more of my creative juices and certainly felt like more fun 20y ago.
Say what you will about the Flash website boom of the early 2000s, creative design did peak at the time. Discovering a new site and wowing over the unique design and interactions is an experience lost in time.
Unpopular opinion: there never was much wrong with the table layout, and subsequent standards efforts never really managed to properly support a lot of use-cases. You can still see people using display: table and display: table-cell for exactly this reason.
Where's my vertically centered div? Where is my elastic newspaper column layout? How much Javascript exists because people couldn't figure out how to position things the way they wanted?
And many websites have the div version of the "table nightmare", especially Facebook and Instagram. It's also popular to put a transparent div over images to prevent people casually saving them.
There's a lot missing from here but a pretty nice site.
- Java applets
- metacrawlers
- IE conditional stylesheets
As a side note, I've never understood "tag clouds". They're definitely not "dark ages" because they're still used unfortunately. I think they're the intersection between business-speak gibberish and graphic design and the represent the dangers of mixing product managers with graphic designers.
And how about dialing malware that connected your modem to a very coslty phone number. Was that a thing in other countries? in Germany quite a few people got ripped off this way and I always disconnected my modem whenever I wasn't online.
haha "dark ages"...in my opinion, these were the GOOD TIMES! the only thing you needed to know was HTML, and you could just "view source" and see how everyone else was doing it.
but yeah...a lot of people got paid a lot of money to do things that are so trivial nowadays, that there's a whole industry of workers who get paid to NOT do them.
Well they look like a lot of fun for dark ages. If anything that was the spring of the web, nowadays things have moved to mobile and web is neglected.
And i dont get the hate for tables, they are really handy to center stuff vertically/horizontally, and to scale an interface gracefully (e.g. image column takes up 15% of width), in a way that 12-grid systems fail. HN is tables.
One thing that responsive design does is it makes the zoom out/in gesture useless, while tables can preserve that.
I appreciate the celebration retrospective on what the web used to look like. However I take issue with the name. Since this is Hacker News, I hope you're okay with this kind of unimportant semantic argument.
From Wikipedia:
> The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th century) that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.
If you're trying to keep with how "Dark Age" I don't think the periods you're referring to are at all "Dark". The cultural output of the web back then was _massive_, novel, and growing. It's even more massive now, and growing at a faster rate than before. Whether that output is quite as novel now is up for debate, but what I'm saying is that if there is such a thing as a "Web Dark Age", we haven't seen it yet.
Back then, it was the early days and things were still being worked out. It wasn't a deterioration, since there was nothing to deteriorate.
Nonetheless, I like the website and it's a nice snapshot of some design trends of the time.
The Web 2.0 section with the ultra shiny, shadowy buttons and stickers was particularly amusing to see again.
I'm certainly glad a standardised way of handling custom fonts emerged though, I remember SIFR being particularly painful.
That said, this site could almost do with a "Best viewed in Chrome" sticker, as the removal of -webkit-font-smoothing does some weird things to text in desktop Safari for me.
Not to mention the evolution of Google from "a better search engine than the others" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Facebook to gobble up the web."
Or, conversely, the evolution of Facebook from "bulletin board system for college students" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Google to gobble up the web."
I’d say the real problem is that social media platforms became the predominant publishing mechanism now. There was a time when millions of people had their own home pages, and now they’ve been replaced with templated social network posts.
Even tumblr and blogger were better in the sense that there was some diversity and of course GeoCities while centralized, allowed people much greater content control.
The Dark Ages are the fact that Twitter and public Facebook pages eT al, won’t be backed up by Archive.org and decades of human culture will vanish one day when these sites go the way of GeoCities.
The rising appification of everything behind app stores also mean the death of content preservation. I can still load the first Web page ever published, I can still run spacejam.com, but tens of thousands of 32bit apps have disappeared from app stores never to be runnable again.
I can run 8bit and 16bit apps on emulators from my childhood, but can’t run games I enjoyed on iOS just a few years ago. Death of culture.
This is missing the main reason we used Flash: it was basically the Java of the web. Or maybe the jQuery of the web. Since no browser were standards compliant (or rather every browser adhered to their own version of a standard) writing web pages that were cross browser compatible was a pain (hence all the Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator or IE messages). Flash, on the other hand, took care of the cross-platform mess. You could use Flash and be reasonably sure it would look and work the same on every browser and OS that had a Flash player.
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GordonS|5 years ago|reply
Something I absolutely hate is when I want to learn more about a local business and search for them on Google, but all I find is a Facebook page with minimal info - what happened to websites?!
[+] [-] annowiki|5 years ago|reply
I'm a self-taught developer with no professional experience, but for over a year I learned everything I needed to know to build a massive web application to fulfill my own need: a collaborative annotation wiki. I poured my freaking heart into it and could never get a single user.
I drew on Jimmy Wales' experiences founding Wikipedia for a lot of inspiration. But got nowhere near the traction he got. As in, I got zero users after nine months since launch. Now it's largely a portfolio piece as I try to search for a real job in tech, by leveraging the 14,000 lines of code in Python/Flask to prove that I know how to develop an app. ( https://anno.wiki is the url if you're curious).
I can only hope that the real reasons I haven't gained traction are that (a) the interface just isn't welcoming enough (I tried too hard to do progressive enhancement with almost no experience in UX) and (b) simply not advertising. After a nine month break I'm getting ready to start re-developing a new front end in React to maybe make it more welcoming to non-techie lit nerds, and then maybe target advertise on Facebook, but I just don't know.
My deepest fear is just that the web is not an interesting place anymore, and Wikipedia just wouldn't get a foothold now, and that's why I can't. I just don't know.
[+] [-] dgb23|5 years ago|reply
I dislike targeted advertising, because I find it useless. I like context advertising much more: When I browse X then I find ads related to X sometimes useful. I use some of their products like gmail and drive sometimes. But for browsing and searching I use Firefox and DDG.
But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing.
This issue is different from the things we criticize about Google. They neither restrict me as a user nor as a developer. I can avoid using their stuff and I can avoid aggressively targeted ads (in fact they have a psychologically negative impact on me).
As for personal sites and blogs: I still very much read personal blogs. The quality (whatever that means, but you know...) of articles on those is generally much higher than on medium/dev.to or whatever platform.
In fact there is so much good content on small/personal sites, that I don't have time to read it all.
[+] [-] AlexandrB|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkagerer|5 years ago|reply
That was my first thought too, when I read the headline.
[+] [-] PJDK|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drno123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngold|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mard|5 years ago|reply
90s web was a wild west, but it was a far cry from its "dark ages".
[+] [-] OliverJones|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uniqueid|5 years ago|reply
What roles does the web serve that benefit humanity? Some of the most important are: 'literary', 'research', 'educational', 'financial service', 'commercial service', 'audio/video'.
Then we have a 'typesetting/graphic-design' role, which is 99% of the reason the web 'requires' JS and CSS. As long as we were happy with a "one-size-fits-all" design, we could enable the other roles via (existing, and future) HTML tags alone (the way we did prior to the introduction of JS).
Now, what are the trade-offs we make to gain the 'typesetting/graphic-design' role? They are a loss of: security, privacy, legibility, compatibility, accessibility, ease-of-use, and page load speed. To be fair, we also gain fantastic abilities for web developers to innovate, but we could probably find some workaround, without 'AJAX', to allow devs to experiment.
The world would be better off, in may ways, if we scrapped the web's dynamic features, created a few new HTML tags, and re-implemented them using HTML alone.
[+] [-] TedDoesntTalk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgraves|5 years ago|reply
I may get my Photoshop in the browser dream, but it is another nail in coffin for the free and open web.
[+] [-] ImaCake|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vekker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiba|5 years ago|reply
Censorship as opposed to moderation?
In any case, the corporations exacerbate the problems of dredge going viral, prioritizing engagement over information.
Our corporate overlords choose what to display, and thus they choose what to take away.
[+] [-] cxr|5 years ago|reply
The hegemony you're referring to is Blink, and it doesn't help the "toppling" effort when you lump WebKit in with it. WebKit is an effective check against Google's power, but not if folks continue imagining that two distinct projects that diverged years ago are one and the same.
[+] [-] xwdv|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jaruzel|5 years ago|reply
Is completely wrong; Even today the most popular desktop screen resolution by a country mile is 1366x768. All the budget laptops sold in supermarkets etc. still use that resolution and most people simply can't afford to drop ~1,000 GBP/USD on the 'family computer'.
Fun fact... 1366x768 exists because it was trivial for far-east manufacturers to switch from 1024x768 4:3 to 1366x768 16:9, as the latter could still use 90% of existing LCD controller design, thus making it really cheap to switch their fabrication over.
[+] [-] ketzu|5 years ago|reply
https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/
It's super interesting to look at and filter for various categories. For desktop 1366x768 wins out slightly ahead of 1920x1080. But for mobile, devices report a lot of 360x640. Fascinating.
Here's the mandatory stackexchange discussion on why that is:
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/98985/why-the-360x640...
[+] [-] psim1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] classified|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImaCake|5 years ago|reply
For a long time I have thought of it as a period where all our data was stored in decaying media that would be lost to future historians, much like the real dark ages. My source for this idea comes from sci-fi author Charles Stross:
>In the future, the 20th century will be seen as a dark age — while previous centuries left books and papers that are stable for centuries with proper storage, many of the early analog recordings were stable enough to survive for decades, but the digital media and magnetic tapes and optical disks of the latter third of the 20th century decay in mere years. And if they don't decay, they become unreadable: the original tapes of the slow-scan video from the first moon landing, for example, appear to be missing, and the much lower quality broadcast images are all that remain. So stability is important, and I'm not even going to start on how we store data and metainformation describing it.
From here: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping...
[+] [-] dgb23|5 years ago|reply
Our consensus was that the persistence of digital information is extremely fragile compared to physical media and oral tradition.
This is kind of scary. Our biological niche is very much dependent on culture and passing on information.
[+] [-] hnlmorg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datalus|5 years ago|reply
Things have changed a lot for me personally and for technology. In general, I feel my enthusiasm has dwindled somewhat in the way tech's role has played out in society. In my opinion the big "Web 2.0" and social rush was more about bending the Internet to the wills of private enterprise rather then private enterprise bending to the wills of the Internet. Or maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now, a salty junior level graybeard.
I do have hope, though. It's probably that my youthful enthusiasm has given way to cautious optimism.
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|5 years ago|reply
PS: I don't think tables are a bad layout option. It's not as flexible as CSS obviously but you could make it scale really well to vastly different UI sizes with a combo of fixed and percentage based dimensions. Most "modern" sites just dump everything in a column in the middle. And scale everything as if everyone is on a fat-finger touch interface.
And I do miss the gradient button designs, I hate today's obsession with flatness. Bt that's a matter of taste I suppose. Maybe I don't have any :)
PS It should realllly have mentioned the <marquee>!
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply
What css will work on what element of a table or won't work and why feels like an endless rabbit hole for me.
[+] [-] danilocesar|5 years ago|reply
It's an exaggeration, I know. The web was visually unpleasant those days. Techwise too. Flash?! IE-only? OGM... But almost all information was opened and text-search-ready.
Now information is behind walls (facebook, google) and hidden in videos. Websites lost control with amp-fication of the web, and we're seeing more and more Chrome-only signs.
Ads? everywhere. I remember long time when people despised the idea of using a computer with always-on ads display if it was cheaper. Now we have exactly that.
The web did evolve, but mainly in the wrong direction.
[+] [-] factorialboy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subir|5 years ago|reply
A big chunk of modern websites lack character and look nearly the same to me. I know - consistency, principle of least surprise, et al. Maybe it is just me, but designing a website engaged more of my creative juices and certainly felt like more fun 20y ago.
Say what you will about the Flash website boom of the early 2000s, creative design did peak at the time. Discovering a new site and wowing over the unique design and interactions is an experience lost in time.
[+] [-] DarkWiiPlayer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
Where's my vertically centered div? Where is my elastic newspaper column layout? How much Javascript exists because people couldn't figure out how to position things the way they wanted?
And many websites have the div version of the "table nightmare", especially Facebook and Instagram. It's also popular to put a transparent div over images to prevent people casually saving them.
[+] [-] ascotan|5 years ago|reply
- Java applets
- metacrawlers
- IE conditional stylesheets
As a side note, I've never understood "tag clouds". They're definitely not "dark ages" because they're still used unfortunately. I think they're the intersection between business-speak gibberish and graphic design and the represent the dangers of mixing product managers with graphic designers.
[+] [-] TedDoesntTalk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jansan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomphoolery|5 years ago|reply
but yeah...a lot of people got paid a lot of money to do things that are so trivial nowadays, that there's a whole industry of workers who get paid to NOT do them.
[+] [-] buboard|5 years ago|reply
And i dont get the hate for tables, they are really handy to center stuff vertically/horizontally, and to scale an interface gracefully (e.g. image column takes up 15% of width), in a way that 12-grid systems fail. HN is tables.
One thing that responsive design does is it makes the zoom out/in gesture useless, while tables can preserve that.
[+] [-] basicallydan|5 years ago|reply
From Wikipedia:
> The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th century) that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.
If you're trying to keep with how "Dark Age" I don't think the periods you're referring to are at all "Dark". The cultural output of the web back then was _massive_, novel, and growing. It's even more massive now, and growing at a faster rate than before. Whether that output is quite as novel now is up for debate, but what I'm saying is that if there is such a thing as a "Web Dark Age", we haven't seen it yet.
Back then, it was the early days and things were still being worked out. It wasn't a deterioration, since there was nothing to deteriorate.
Nonetheless, I like the website and it's a nice snapshot of some design trends of the time.
[+] [-] shrew|5 years ago|reply
I'm certainly glad a standardised way of handling custom fonts emerged though, I remember SIFR being particularly painful.
That said, this site could almost do with a "Best viewed in Chrome" sticker, as the removal of -webkit-font-smoothing does some weird things to text in desktop Safari for me.
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
In a broader sense, I'd like to see sections on Altavista, Lycos, Geocities, the rise and decline of Myspace and how Paypal and IE sucked.
[+] [-] flyinghamster|5 years ago|reply
Or, conversely, the evolution of Facebook from "bulletin board system for college students" to "a lumbering behemoth that's competing with Google to gobble up the web."
[+] [-] tutfbhuf|5 years ago|reply
IE and Paypal still sucks.
[+] [-] cromwellian|5 years ago|reply
Even tumblr and blogger were better in the sense that there was some diversity and of course GeoCities while centralized, allowed people much greater content control.
The Dark Ages are the fact that Twitter and public Facebook pages eT al, won’t be backed up by Archive.org and decades of human culture will vanish one day when these sites go the way of GeoCities.
The rising appification of everything behind app stores also mean the death of content preservation. I can still load the first Web page ever published, I can still run spacejam.com, but tens of thousands of 32bit apps have disappeared from app stores never to be runnable again.
I can run 8bit and 16bit apps on emulators from my childhood, but can’t run games I enjoyed on iOS just a few years ago. Death of culture.
[+] [-] irrational|5 years ago|reply