- Google (and other search engines) trying to fight and downrank or de-list, rather than giving up and embracing, webspam sites.
That's what's made what remains of, and the continuations of, the old Web, practically invisible. It's all top sites and blogspam or domain-name-spam sites on the first couple pages, now. Even those "skip the first hundred" or whatever sites don't really fix it.
There are MUDs still around last I knew, but I think that Eternal September was the harbinger of the end.
I think we need to look at more P2P communication to make the web smaller again. Share things with only your connections again, not FAANG & the entire world.
If your friends want to signal boost something, sure they can to their connections, but the default should be that you get stuff from someone directly connected to you, not via systems run by giant companies trying to learn how best to sell things to & manipulate the world.
I’m actually building a website where you can navigate/explore my local national forest with the camps and trailheads are organized like rooms in a MUD.
I have it set up so you can navigate and traverse it using the numpad keys for the directions of a compass.
The 2012-2013 timeframe matches my general timeline for things as well, though mine is a bit hazier as it's a transition timeframe, not an event.
The 2012 era was when we really started to see the weaponization of attention take off. Smartphones weren't that terrible (Crackberry jokes aside) pre-2012, at least in terms of being attention vampires. In app purchases had become a thing a year or two before, and people were figuring out how to make it work - with 2012 being around the time they figured it out.
The variable reward "drive your users crazy" stuff hit around then, and with it, the wave of "algorithmic feeds" - not just chronologically ordered stuff.
Facebook moved to a more heavily algorithmic feed in 2011, mobile apps stared more actively driving their users crazy, etc.
So that timeframe was when the internet went from "Everyone sees the same thing on the same site, and you easily hit the end of new content if you care" to "It's a slot machine, and it's in your pocket, and there's a notification to get you back into the slot machine."
I hate threads like this, because they tend to degenerate into extremely solipsistic negativity. I'm also pretty circumspect about claims like "the good internet died" which seem to me to reek of unexamined nostalgia. That throat clearing being done, one of the single greatest degradations of the internet I can remember is when The Ringer replaced Grantland.
Just because they were both started by the same guy does not make one a replacement for the other. ESPN ran Grantland into the ground ages before The Ringer was even launched.
Agreed. Threads like this make me want to quit HN. There's an overwhelming amount of cynicism and negativity on these forums.
The indie web is alive and well. The bar to creating awesome products has lowered and indie developers are working on cool shit daily. Go check Product Hunt, Makerlog (disclaimer: I made it), or Twitter. Dozens of indie apps and websites launching every sunrise.
The indie open web isn't dead, not by a long shot. It's only got better.
A new generation of indie developers are rediscovering what it means to be a small creator online, embracing their communities and building products that put the user's interests first.
Saw the title, thought "nope, they're wrong, that'll be the day the plug was pulled on Google Reader" -- and lo and behold, that's exactly what the article is about.
If you can’t achieve the same levels of joy and curiosity with the Internet of 2021 as you could 10 or 20 years ago, that’s on you. The moment I fell in love with the web in the early 90s was looking at weather satellite images, and realising I could see stars in the background. I was sat at my dad’s computer, talking to a satellite in space, beholding the universe. And yet the internet’s immeasurably more powerful and magical now.
I know people mourn the ‘decentralised’ web of the blogosphere but I really think people forget some of the failure modes of that world. Much of the conversation was driven by ‘A-listers’ who in many cases were garbage human beings. It was hard to get eyeballs and interactions on your stuff without them though. Most of the time you were writing for half a dozen friends. Hint: that’s what you miss! You can still do it though. You used to have your corner of the Internet and now most people hang out in a busy mall, but there’s nothing stopping you going back. There are all sorts of niche sites or corners of other platforms out there (many of which still have RSS if that’s your actual problem). But I think if most people are honest, deep down they find these venues a bit parochial now and avoid them while simultaneously lamenting their loss. Many of them are also run by young people you no longer have much in common with.
I’m as much of a curmudgeon as anyone but I find these increasingly regular articles about how the Internet is rubbish now absolutely baffling. The pie got much bigger, it’s flavours more diverse. Yes you maybe have to work harder to find your place in it. In exchange, everyone now has a place in it. That’s good.
Maybe what they mourn is that that WAS "the internet" whereas now it's on the fringes while "the internet" by and large is brainwashing corporate shit sites that bleep and bloop like a kid's toy every 5 seconds to try and keep your attention.
Yeah, I mostly agree. I'm on a niche interest-based Discord server with about 20 other people and it feels exactly the same as it did on IRC 20 years ago, except that I can do it on my phone and I don't miss anything when I'm not connected.
People really look at this stuff through some bizarre rose-tinted glasses. IRC, Something Awful, etc. were on average just as toxic if not worse than the average modern-day online community.
It's not Google Reader, but it's a clean interface for reading RSS, Twitter, and newsletters. And there's a view of the latest post from each feed, so I don't get lost in the firehose and miss out on updates from people who post less frequently.
The organic variety of internet destinations of those days in particular. Now it’s just a choice of which walled garden of algo driven attention optimising dark pattern-ish place you prefer.
There must be more sites these days I’d imagine but it sure doesn’t feel that way. All roads seem to lead back to Rome/ major platform.
That’s also what makes hn so nice. It’s maintained some of that old vibe somehow not just in atmosphere but also in the links.
> walled garden of algo driven attention optimising dark pattern
The devices are further enabling this. My first smartphone had a physical keyboard. It was the best. Now you can't find one at all. Makes me just that less likely to attempt to type what I'm really looking for and instead to scroll to what the algorithm thinks I want, or pull-to-refresh. If I do venture to type/swipe, I often mangle it terribly or wind up leaning on another algorithm that thinks it knows what I want to say.
> The organic variety of internet destinations of those days in particular
Ironically, this is what a lot of people criticised Google Reader for: "it's killing variety in the space, empowering Google to control the RSS ecosystem as a whole". Which it did - the death of Reader was the death of that ecosystem.
I really want a Yahoo style internet portal back. It could be wiki-style. You click down through subjects until you find what you're looking for. It could effectively be the anti-Amazon if you include alternative options to buy item xyz.
Is it one of the usual "eternal September" article?
Eternal September started in 1993. I think it is the first time the "good internet died". I wasn't there, I really started to use the internet somewhere in the late 90s, with a home dial-up modem, making me one of the people who "killed the good internet".
The author of the article, and many people here are probably eternal September kids too, so internet killers accusing other, younger ones of killing the internet. The youngest ones are already from a lineage of internet killers and are getting ready to designate the next in line.
My opinion: despite everything we like to complain about, today's internet is the best internet, and tomorrow's internet will be even better. I have my nostalgia too, and some things really became worse, but there is so much we can do with it now, a lot of it we take for granted that I don't think I want to go back in time. Let memories be memories.
Oh no, it's someone lamenting the loss of a program which didn't even exist until 2005.
Things were always better in the past, that's because we don't remember the bad things. Apart from Punch the Monkey.
The internet is what you make of it. There are risks to it in the future (centralisation of DNS and requirements on centralised SSL being the current ones), but there always have been. Some things are easier (running your own server, or multiple servers, on multiple contents, with tons on bandwidth), some things are harder (getting other people to accept your email), but the internet is what you make of it, and there's far more you can make of it today if you want once you stop worrying what other people do.
Tip: it didn't actually die. I use Miniflux, which is a self-hosted RSS reader. It has a page with all the feeds on it, when you click on a feed, it displays the articles for that feed. You can also just look at the river, like the HN front page. I never do it that way though lol.
That day I switched to feedly.com, it's good, but I miss the social features of Google Reader, where I could just mark things as interesting and I and other friends could see what each other thought was interesting without it polluting other channels.
If I were to be nostalgic, I would say I miss majordomo mailing lists filtered by procmail, and not just to be a kermudgeon.
If this predates you, imagine the content of your favorite subreddit or HN, where membership itself was curated by people credible in a topic, where you could read sincere conversations and arguments between knowledgable (or perhaps just enthusiastic) indviduals, with a defacto Chatham House rule around opinions and pseudonymity, and read it at your leisure without the risk of missing anything, without ads, cookies, popups, or PII hoovering, and with a real-time responsive threading interface (via mutt or even pine) where you could use simple / or vi-like commands, where you could index and pile the whole thing into a database if you wanted to.
What made the old internet good was it was mostly a privilege to be a part of it, granted and revoked by the communities themselves, and not by a back end layer of unskilled governance activists.
I managed news servers back in the day, and I'm tempted to just spin up an NNTP server again with my own damn cabal (TINC!LLTC!) and to hell with everyone else. The main change I would make is limit the binaries hierarchy, strip any and all markup for anything that isn't code, provide support only for an open pyCurses client, provide a robust killfile interface for filtering low energy shitposts, facilitate reasonable pseudonymity, no idiotic picture profiles, and probably apply some modern ML moderation tools.
HN already does about 40% of this today, but the idea of starting something that emmulates the platforms today only with a different political flavour is predicated on the same fundamental problem that it is for the public instead of being for people who can pass a basic skills and literacy bar.
The fediverse is based on real time addictive interaction, whereas time in news threads was measured in days and weeks. Discord seems to be for people who really want to talk to you, but you don't really want to talk to them. Blockchains appear mainly to be a market for matching money launderers with people nurturing untreated mental illness. (together at last!), and one-off radical political sites are just honeypots for patsies to get set up to justify law enforcement budgets.
As far as I can tell, an influencer on a social platform is just someone who shares pictures of their butt, and twitter seems to have found their sweet spot as a broadcast system for people united in their shared predicament of having nothing challenging to say.
The text based internet solved a lot of problems platforms struggle with today using simple rules, because the platforms have scaled beyond their use cases, and their future looks a lot like that of AOL/Compuserve. The good internet is still ahead of us, and probably using tools we have neglected.
> I managed news servers back in the day, and I'm tempted
> to just spin up an NNTP server again with my own damn
> cabal (TINC!LLTC!) and to hell with everyone else
I've thought about doing this exact thing over the years, but could never get anyone else interested. If you do it, I'd happily join and contribute
> If I were to be nostalgic, I would say I miss majordomo mailing lists filtered by procmail, and not just to be a kermudgeon.
I literally just had an email arrive from a mailman list, which from what I remember (it's been 20 years since majordomo) is pretty much the same as majordomo.
the weekly posts like this always come off as self-centered to me, whining about how the world revolves around the author and how it really should've created the perfect community for them and sent it over without any effort on their part
[+] [-] dangrossman|4 years ago|reply
- A webring at the bottom of every website
- Websites having "awards" pages, full of random little picture awards given out by other random websites
- Hand-curated directories of everything imagineable
- When internet ads were just static 468x60 banners placed on individual sites by individual advertisers
- "Guided tours" in AOL chat rooms, where a host guided everyone in a live chat on a split-screen tour of their favorite websites
- MUDs
- Stumbleupon's stumble toolbar
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
- people trying brand new formats instead of filling in templates
- curated hierarchy, rather than every site feeling like querying a database
- weird people doing weird stuff
- visitor counters
[+] [-] handrous|4 years ago|reply
That's what's made what remains of, and the continuations of, the old Web, practically invisible. It's all top sites and blogspam or domain-name-spam sites on the first couple pages, now. Even those "skip the first hundred" or whatever sites don't really fix it.
[+] [-] Natsu|4 years ago|reply
I think we need to look at more P2P communication to make the web smaller again. Share things with only your connections again, not FAANG & the entire world.
If your friends want to signal boost something, sure they can to their connections, but the default should be that you get stuff from someone directly connected to you, not via systems run by giant companies trying to learn how best to sell things to & manipulate the world.
[+] [-] stevesearer|4 years ago|reply
I have it set up so you can navigate and traverse it using the numpad keys for the directions of a compass.
[+] [-] hopesthoughts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FranksTV|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dirtyid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Syonyk|4 years ago|reply
The 2012 era was when we really started to see the weaponization of attention take off. Smartphones weren't that terrible (Crackberry jokes aside) pre-2012, at least in terms of being attention vampires. In app purchases had become a thing a year or two before, and people were figuring out how to make it work - with 2012 being around the time they figured it out.
The variable reward "drive your users crazy" stuff hit around then, and with it, the wave of "algorithmic feeds" - not just chronologically ordered stuff.
Facebook moved to a more heavily algorithmic feed in 2011, mobile apps stared more actively driving their users crazy, etc.
So that timeframe was when the internet went from "Everyone sees the same thing on the same site, and you easily hit the end of new content if you care" to "It's a slot machine, and it's in your pocket, and there's a notification to get you back into the slot machine."
And it's just been downhill from there. :(
[+] [-] mr_toad|4 years ago|reply
Before smartphones and the web we used to waste time with email lists, minesweeper and paper publications. Most offices had newspaper subscriptions.
[+] [-] woopwoop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eachro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiomattei|4 years ago|reply
The indie web is alive and well. The bar to creating awesome products has lowered and indie developers are working on cool shit daily. Go check Product Hunt, Makerlog (disclaimer: I made it), or Twitter. Dozens of indie apps and websites launching every sunrise.
The indie open web isn't dead, not by a long shot. It's only got better.
A new generation of indie developers are rediscovering what it means to be a small creator online, embracing their communities and building products that put the user's interests first.
[+] [-] nkoren|4 years ago|reply
Confirmation bias for the win. Upvoted.
[+] [-] thom|4 years ago|reply
I know people mourn the ‘decentralised’ web of the blogosphere but I really think people forget some of the failure modes of that world. Much of the conversation was driven by ‘A-listers’ who in many cases were garbage human beings. It was hard to get eyeballs and interactions on your stuff without them though. Most of the time you were writing for half a dozen friends. Hint: that’s what you miss! You can still do it though. You used to have your corner of the Internet and now most people hang out in a busy mall, but there’s nothing stopping you going back. There are all sorts of niche sites or corners of other platforms out there (many of which still have RSS if that’s your actual problem). But I think if most people are honest, deep down they find these venues a bit parochial now and avoid them while simultaneously lamenting their loss. Many of them are also run by young people you no longer have much in common with.
I’m as much of a curmudgeon as anyone but I find these increasingly regular articles about how the Internet is rubbish now absolutely baffling. The pie got much bigger, it’s flavours more diverse. Yes you maybe have to work harder to find your place in it. In exchange, everyone now has a place in it. That’s good.
[+] [-] mike_hock|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cehrlich|4 years ago|reply
People really look at this stuff through some bizarre rose-tinted glasses. IRC, Something Awful, etc. were on average just as toxic if not worse than the average modern-day online community.
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tofukid|4 years ago|reply
It's not Google Reader, but it's a clean interface for reading RSS, Twitter, and newsletters. And there's a view of the latest post from each feed, so I don't get lost in the firehose and miss out on updates from people who post less frequently.
[+] [-] Havoc|4 years ago|reply
There must be more sites these days I’d imagine but it sure doesn’t feel that way. All roads seem to lead back to Rome/ major platform.
That’s also what makes hn so nice. It’s maintained some of that old vibe somehow not just in atmosphere but also in the links.
[+] [-] Igelau|4 years ago|reply
The devices are further enabling this. My first smartphone had a physical keyboard. It was the best. Now you can't find one at all. Makes me just that less likely to attempt to type what I'm really looking for and instead to scroll to what the algorithm thinks I want, or pull-to-refresh. If I do venture to type/swipe, I often mangle it terribly or wind up leaning on another algorithm that thinks it knows what I want to say.
[+] [-] toyg|4 years ago|reply
Ironically, this is what a lot of people criticised Google Reader for: "it's killing variety in the space, empowering Google to control the RSS ecosystem as a whole". Which it did - the death of Reader was the death of that ecosystem.
[+] [-] Andrex|4 years ago|reply
1. Still around
2. Still independent (and run by Tom Fulp)
I'm a proud paying member on two accounts (one from '05, one from '07, though I lurked as early as '02) and I hope it never, ever goes away.
[+] [-] iaw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kickscondor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Igelau|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|4 years ago|reply
Eternal September started in 1993. I think it is the first time the "good internet died". I wasn't there, I really started to use the internet somewhere in the late 90s, with a home dial-up modem, making me one of the people who "killed the good internet".
The author of the article, and many people here are probably eternal September kids too, so internet killers accusing other, younger ones of killing the internet. The youngest ones are already from a lineage of internet killers and are getting ready to designate the next in line.
My opinion: despite everything we like to complain about, today's internet is the best internet, and tomorrow's internet will be even better. I have my nostalgia too, and some things really became worse, but there is so much we can do with it now, a lot of it we take for granted that I don't think I want to go back in time. Let memories be memories.
[+] [-] dirkmode|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iso1631|4 years ago|reply
Oh no, it's someone lamenting the loss of a program which didn't even exist until 2005.
Things were always better in the past, that's because we don't remember the bad things. Apart from Punch the Monkey.
The internet is what you make of it. There are risks to it in the future (centralisation of DNS and requirements on centralised SSL being the current ones), but there always have been. Some things are easier (running your own server, or multiple servers, on multiple contents, with tons on bandwidth), some things are harder (getting other people to accept your email), but the internet is what you make of it, and there's far more you can make of it today if you want once you stop worrying what other people do.
[+] [-] hopesthoughts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meepmorp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dariusj18|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codpiece|4 years ago|reply
Larry Rodriges chronicles his life as a blimp jockey in Geocities. His daughter keeps this running after he passed away. This is the good internet.
[+] [-] motohagiography|4 years ago|reply
If this predates you, imagine the content of your favorite subreddit or HN, where membership itself was curated by people credible in a topic, where you could read sincere conversations and arguments between knowledgable (or perhaps just enthusiastic) indviduals, with a defacto Chatham House rule around opinions and pseudonymity, and read it at your leisure without the risk of missing anything, without ads, cookies, popups, or PII hoovering, and with a real-time responsive threading interface (via mutt or even pine) where you could use simple / or vi-like commands, where you could index and pile the whole thing into a database if you wanted to.
What made the old internet good was it was mostly a privilege to be a part of it, granted and revoked by the communities themselves, and not by a back end layer of unskilled governance activists.
I managed news servers back in the day, and I'm tempted to just spin up an NNTP server again with my own damn cabal (TINC!LLTC!) and to hell with everyone else. The main change I would make is limit the binaries hierarchy, strip any and all markup for anything that isn't code, provide support only for an open pyCurses client, provide a robust killfile interface for filtering low energy shitposts, facilitate reasonable pseudonymity, no idiotic picture profiles, and probably apply some modern ML moderation tools.
HN already does about 40% of this today, but the idea of starting something that emmulates the platforms today only with a different political flavour is predicated on the same fundamental problem that it is for the public instead of being for people who can pass a basic skills and literacy bar.
The fediverse is based on real time addictive interaction, whereas time in news threads was measured in days and weeks. Discord seems to be for people who really want to talk to you, but you don't really want to talk to them. Blockchains appear mainly to be a market for matching money launderers with people nurturing untreated mental illness. (together at last!), and one-off radical political sites are just honeypots for patsies to get set up to justify law enforcement budgets.
As far as I can tell, an influencer on a social platform is just someone who shares pictures of their butt, and twitter seems to have found their sweet spot as a broadcast system for people united in their shared predicament of having nothing challenging to say.
The text based internet solved a lot of problems platforms struggle with today using simple rules, because the platforms have scaled beyond their use cases, and their future looks a lot like that of AOL/Compuserve. The good internet is still ahead of us, and probably using tools we have neglected.
[+] [-] agiacalone|4 years ago|reply
I've thought about doing this exact thing over the years, but could never get anyone else interested. If you do it, I'd happily join and contribute
[+] [-] iso1631|4 years ago|reply
I literally just had an email arrive from a mailman list, which from what I remember (it's been 20 years since majordomo) is pretty much the same as majordomo.
[+] [-] freen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowfish|4 years ago|reply