I just miss organization. Everything feels like a mess now. Content is either in an endless scroll or it's only accessible through a search box and you have absolutely no idea whether the site doesn't have the content you wanted or if you just failed to use the correct terms. Increased reliance on CDNs and cross-site content has simultaneously made web pages expire faster than ever and made them harder to archive.
Multimedia is also a shadow of what it once was. Twenty years ago it was common for material to be presented in a way that integrated text, sound, pictures, and video together in an easily navigable way. A page on, say, Lewis and Clark would offer you an audio introduction, an interactive map that brought up text journal entries for clickable points of interest, and relevant pictures. Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry, or a video that may or may not offer you any useful way to navigate it aside from jumping around at random and most certainly doesn't give you rich annotations throughout.
I miss organization too. Every time I use Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc I feel at the mercy of the website as it shows me rocks one by one and I shake my virtual head "no.. no.. no.." until by chance something looks interesting. They have the metadata, why can't I browse by year or filter by director or actors, or any arbitrary combination of the available data?
And this is the same for news sites, where there should be a 20+ year history of articles but I can't browse it. And obviously social media where information is ephemeral and you only need to see what's happening right now. Shopping is ok on smaller sites, where inventory is static and items are either in stock or not. But earlier this year I could have snapped my keyboard in half trying to find a specific piece of hardware on the Lowes/Home Depot/Amazon website. There's no clear answer like "we don't carry that item" instead the search box vomits back all kinds of misinformation. Web Search itself might be the worst, only giving the most shallow corporate results, I'm not surprised it feels like there are few personal website when our index to the internet is so polluted.
Easy navigation of hierarchical/structured links just encourages visitors to turn sideways away from the content they are being funnelled towards.
The cattle farmers that currently run the web only want you clicking away once you’ve had a couple of opportunities to see ads, and it will be via some highly tuned clickbait “related links”.
But why wouldn’t they want you to spend more time on their site, you ask? Because people who are conducting a structured search for information will focus on finding that information, not on clicking the adverts. They are bad customers. What the farmers want is people who are only casually looking for information, who will be easily diverted to click on something else.
>Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry
Don't knock encyclopedias/dead tree layouts. It's been a hell of an information transmission medium for centuries, and comes loaded with haptic shortcuts to aid recall and indexing.
I often call UX people on this when they want to do away with pagination and go to search bars. Yes, Boolean search is cool and all. Most people don't think in query languages for getting them all the way to where they are looking. They usually just want a starting set, then let them flip pages, or refine their query. Generally, when searching an unknown datastore, I like unrefined queries and manually perusing the data to get the lay of it by landmarking pages.
Point being, I still remember my first media center 101 on boolean searching, and my early years with search engines. To be honest, I feel like I got way more out of search indexes that didn't have agendas (piracy site suppression, artificially propping up marketing efforts, etc), than I do today.
I'm sure this is partially true but I don't remember it being the norm. I remember it being harder to find things (Netscape days, Altavista, etc), content embedded in Flash or jsp mess, low resolution, non interactive maps (let alone 3D), low quality audio and video 360p or worse. Dot matrix printing and just generally lower fidelity. Super slow connections requiring the phone line is totally incapacitated while using the net.
I agree that I can't find a recipe without an obnoxious amount of crap writing around it, at least it's there if I scroll far enough. Wikipedia, by the way, suffers almost none of the complaints I see here, loads extremely fast and is free (donate!).
So I guess what I'm saying is it could be better, but the Internet is pretty incredible still.
> Multimedia is also a shadow of what it once was. Twenty years ago it was common for material to be presented in a way that integrated text, sound, pictures, and video together in an easily navigable way.
Yes, I fondly remember the multimedia experience of Encarta and the likes.
Ableton's "Learning Music" is a pretty good modern example, though:
Lack of organisation has affected other areas of software too. An example is the gallery in Ios. It used to have an album called "camera roll" which would contain all the photos and videos taken by you. Now that is gone. You have absolutely no way to restrict your view to items that you captured. Instead it is a big jumble of random crap from whatsapp groups and screenshots and your captures all in one feed called "recents".
> Content is either in an endless scroll or it's only accessible through a search box and you have absolutely no idea whether the site doesn't have the content you wanted or if you just failed to use the correct terms.
What alternatives or solutions do you envision for search? How would you build a content heavy site in a way that gives a user confidence when searching for something?
> Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry, or a video that may or may not offer you any useful way to navigate it aside from jumping around at random and most certainly doesn't give you rich annotations throughout.
Maybe I'm mentally blocked in thinking of the era of flash intros and marquee tags, but do you have any examples of sites that achieved what you're describing?
Were the annotations created by the site owner or by the community?
Me too, it was personal, whimsical, and serendipitous.
It was also a lot of work, and visions of “success” were different. On the work side, creators had to work to produce the content, but consumers had to work harder to find it. I had a physical “yellow pages of the internet” book in the mid 90s. You’d look up the subject then go to a site and surf around till you found what you were looking for (or not.)
The expectations were also different, especially for creators. If you put content up and got 100 page hits that was really cool. 10,000 was amazing. Reaching an audience that big would have required pre-internet would have required formally publishing something, which wasn’t easy. The sheer novelty of being a “normal” person and connecting with / influencing 100 or 10,000 strangers was a huge selling point.
I think the massive scale and reach of the biggest properties/stars has devalued the type of content creation the author talks about in the eyes of the creators. It’s just harder to get excited about 100 or even 1000 page views when you know people are getting millions or billions, and when your low quality Facebook post can get 100s of likes.
I really miss the old internet, but I also know I don’t have the time or capacity to consistently go back to the old “surfing” metaphor- search is too good and convenient, and I don’t think others are going to be willing to pour their time and souls into passion projects like they used to. Perhaps it’ll be a new frontier (VR?) that captures that sense of newness and whimsy next.
I have noticed the same sense that hundreds or thousands of views or likes or whatever is unfairly compared to those others with the tens of thousands and millions, with one critical exception: forum karma. It seems like when people communicate to each other through text, even a few down votes are often cause for extraordinary negative reaction on the part of the creator. So much so that it's a rule to not complain about it, here.
Assuming I'm not alone in witnessing this, I wonder two things: 1) what makes a forum environment different? and, 2) do people who react poorly to negative karma (or meager positive karma) ALSO expect high engagement IF they create on other platforms?
For example, I present a hypothetical person on reddit with accumulated "high" karma (say, high 8000s). This person also has 10k followers on TikTok, 3 YouTube videos with 6 digit views, and several viral tweets. They get -5 karma on a random reddit post and freak out. What makes the raw number differ between platforms? Is it raw number or a ratio of potential to actual?
(yes I know this is the epitome of a strawman, but I'm basing it off of a cohort of roughly similar real people)
There were several iterations of commercialization that took away the quaintness of the internet, little by little. But some innovations along the way also counterbalanced it with new ways for content producers to express themselves.
When Flash was originally released (by Macromedia), there were so many unique sites with really great interfaces. Nowadays, everything seems to follow the long, scrolling mono design. I loved what people could create in those early days of Flash without the restrictions of html. There are some sites I wish I could go back and revisit because they would be impressive by today's standards.
Before MySpace, there was some personalization with Angelfire and Geocities. Every once in a while, you'd find a really interesting site that someone had created.
That era around '95, '96 is probably what I miss the most.
> I loved what people could create in those early days of Flash without the restrictions of html.
I still remember the first time I discovered http://eye4u.com and watched their incredible flash intro. At the time I thought it was one of, if not the best flash intro on the web, and it instilled a sense excitement for what was possible with Flash.
I agree it was refreshing and exciting to see all of the creative designs and ideas one could express using Flash. If only they hadn't added those pesky "skip intro" buttons!
I think the shift to platformization was the biggest death knell. Up to around 2007 or so it was common for people and companies to have their own websites or blogs. Then everyone jumped into someone else platform, and today we've been riding on third party platforms for so long that people don't even bother with visiting or making independent websites at all. Some people don't even search the internet, they just search facebook.com.
>The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.
I have found some excellent websites using this which I would have never found via Google or elsewhere on the modern web. Very reminiscent of exploring the “Old Internet.”
I know hundreds of interesting websites and I can discover more thousands with ease.
My problem is not with information discovery but in finding the EXACT bit of information that I am interested in. The old Internet wasn't better in this regard. I've came around information that was of interest by lots of digging and sheer luck.
Already now that site gives me significantly better results for certain queries (try searching for something along the lines of
dual boot windows linux
or
git fixup
or similar on marginalia to see what I mean.)
Warning: it seems to be a one person thing and my experience is that results might differ somewhat from week to week.
Edit: someone usually point out that SEO spammers will arrive shortly. I say that if SEO spammers start optimizing their pages by making them useful, lightweight, readable and without most tracking and ads I see that as a win.
Nice search engine! Is it yours? Pretty accurate and nice for content discovery. Just read some interesting stuff after searching for 'bicycle carts', which is not your everyday topic I suppose.
This is exactly what I’m trying to fix - and why I quit a job at Stripe to do it. We had mainframes, we had data centers, we have the cloud - and now folks are talking about fixing the internet with blockchains.
What we really need is more -server software- in the hands of every day people. The first web browser was also a web server - and today almost every human alive has a web-client in their pocket - but server software is for nerds, highly paid working at Facebook or Amazon.
Home hosting, self hosting, hobby sites - it’s not just some fond memory to me - it’s a legitimate possibility for human communication that was swept away by the vast monetary power of advertising. And it doesn’t have to be weird text only blogs about science fiction. It’s time to bring the internet back home!
In absolute terms, the internet has many many more people now than it did in the early days. If you want to create a small quirky community, you only need a tiny fraction of those people to sign up. So in theory the modern day could be a Cambrian explosion of tiny communities. Is this the case? If not why not? Maybe there are a lot of them hiding and they fear eternal september? I can think of a few but maybe I shouldn't be linking them...
I think the biggest issue is the majority of internet users don't want to join small communities, just one website or app that has all their friends and family. Aside from this, the cost of making a big (the main goal of every social network is go big or go home) social network is increasing as "big" gets bigger and safety requirements get harder to meet.
>So in theory the modern day could be a Cambrian explosion of tiny communities. Is this the case?
Yes, it has been.
>Maybe there are a lot of them hiding and they fear eternal september?
They're mostly on centralized social media platforms like Reddit, and discovery of niche content is more difficult on the modern web, but that doesn't mean that content isn't out there. I'm using "community" here to refer to a group of people with common interests, not an individual website. So "Reddit" is not a community in and of itself, but /r/niche_subreddit_youve_never_heard_of is.
Yes, that exists in subreddits and Facebook and other site groups. The problem is that those mediums suck, can be hard to find, want to remain exclusive and in many cases the content is walled. Subreddits are generally the most open, but there is so much content in Facebook groups but with terribly low accessibility
Honestly most of the old internet was kind of crap, of course we have this nostalgic feeling for it because of aesthetic and personal reasons.
But let's not pretend it was fun having a subpar experience in most areas.
For me I liked the 200X web because communities were flourish but was insulated and wasn't poisoned with nonsense (politics, extreme trolling, doxxing, and pseudosocial relationships).
On one hand the author complains that niche info is to be found just on niche websites, drowned in the millions commercial websites and apps used by billions of people. And he complains that the niche info is not accessed by many people.
On the other hand, he envisions the internet of 90s with Geocities and most websites being personal catering to a particular niche.
But if the Internet today was like the internet of the 90s, it would have been an empty place since the billions of today's users are not interested in what the few Internet users were interested in the 90s.
I too missed the early Internet (the first time I used Internet was at University in 1998 and by 2000 I had home Internet which was quite a thing in my poor country.) but I don't think is feasible to have it now.
I liked the early Internet because most users were literate both in the technical and classic ways, they were helpful and each one of that had a particular interest in something. Information sharing and communication was quite a thing.
Today most of the trouble is not that information is scarce, it is that you have to filter interesting information from junk and the signal to noise ratio is very poor. In the 90s the signal to noise ratio was quite good.
Neocities for me is like picking up a game I used to love as a child. There are about 20 minutes of "OMG yes, this is what I have been wanting" and then you very quickly get bored and realize there isn't actually very much special or desirable about this old stuff. It was so great back then because it was new and novel. Once it stops being something to explore and be surprised by, the value is gone.
Nah, trying to browse individual Neocities sites always feels like a chore. There are too many sites that have barely any content. I'm talking about 1 line of HTML.
It reminds me of those online dating profiles where there's no description besides "I'll fill this out later".
I cannot recommend strongly enough using Million Short to search the web for these kinds of websites. It's a search engine that allows you to filter out commercial results and also filter out the top one million biggest websites.
"And every few days, I still get a hit with news.ycombinator.com (no subpages, just the front page) in the referer header. And my heart rate kicks up: what if I'm on the front page? And I go to the front page, and, much to my relief, I'm nowhere to be seen. I've dodged the Cathedral for another day."
And later a good credo for net users: (this site) "doesn't exist for you to debate over, or moral-grandstand about yourself. It doesn't exist to vindicate you, or validate your preconceived notions of who I am, of who I could become.
It doesn't exist for you.
It exists for me."
I remember the days growing on dialup using AOL and 'WoW(? i think)' this is much better
there's collaborative fiction and art all over the place, people easily talking and sharing their work and hobbies from homebrewing and math to the wookiepedia, gamejams, SCP, game mods, whatever is it kids do in minecraft and roblox even when it comes the mainstream there's stuff like (blockclub, the athletic ..etc ..etc ..etc)
If anything I think what all of these "old internet" articles illude to is the authors feeling nostalgic for when they were part of what they considered to be counter-culture or lost interests they want to burry themselves in
> ...it's getting increasingly hard to find them through the commercial smog thrown up by Google.
I agree with this statement 100%. I miss the old internet too, not because of the simpler interaction specifically, but because the current state of availability of information is massively broken due to commercialization. The internet has been turned into a 5 store strip mall, everything has a rent seeker, a middleman or a gate keeper. It is increasingly difficult to find any information online that has not been created for the sake of commercialization and delivered to you for a price.
Very Online people complain about social media censorship, but the entire internet, overall, has gone downhill and is full of censorship, not just social media sites.
The problem is spammers, trolls, and opportunists ruined and squandered any good will and presumption of innocence, so everyone pays and is presumed guilty.
Forums have very strict registration and posting requirement, unlike 10- years ago.
Many sites req. phone number to do anything
Reddit subs have very high comment and post karma thresholds in order to post, tons of censorship and ghosting, especially for popular communities. And also arbitrary rules that get your posts auto-ghosted, sometimes without an explanation.
Twitter also ghosts posts and users too even though the liar CEO and said it doesn't.
Youtube allows blatant crypto scams to run, but bans accounts and removed vidoes for arbitrary and automated copyright claims or 'misinformation'.
I don't miss the old internet. It was full of personal hard to read websites where you find some useful articles but a lot of fluff too. It is the same today, not much changed. Its hard to find people who produce focused content. The useful stuff is always mixed with posts about politics, personal stories, and status updates. Same on blogs, same on twitter, same on youtube.
The internet I like to see is where you can follow someones work and ideas without being sidelined. If a person is active in a few different fields then two separate websites are in order. My feeling is that this has not changed between the "old internet" and the "new". There is a small fraction people producing content in this way. Maybe today its a bit easier to find them.
I never see the kind of performative posting on those personal sites that I do on Twitter or FB.
The difference is simple. Personal websites don't have "like/share/retweet" buttons that incentivize playing to the crowd instead of being true to oneself.
[+] [-] neonate|4 years ago|reply
https://archive.md/2sOOm
[+] [-] Causality1|4 years ago|reply
Multimedia is also a shadow of what it once was. Twenty years ago it was common for material to be presented in a way that integrated text, sound, pictures, and video together in an easily navigable way. A page on, say, Lewis and Clark would offer you an audio introduction, an interactive map that brought up text journal entries for clickable points of interest, and relevant pictures. Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry, or a video that may or may not offer you any useful way to navigate it aside from jumping around at random and most certainly doesn't give you rich annotations throughout.
[+] [-] aimor|4 years ago|reply
And this is the same for news sites, where there should be a 20+ year history of articles but I can't browse it. And obviously social media where information is ephemeral and you only need to see what's happening right now. Shopping is ok on smaller sites, where inventory is static and items are either in stock or not. But earlier this year I could have snapped my keyboard in half trying to find a specific piece of hardware on the Lowes/Home Depot/Amazon website. There's no clear answer like "we don't carry that item" instead the search box vomits back all kinds of misinformation. Web Search itself might be the worst, only giving the most shallow corporate results, I'm not surprised it feels like there are few personal website when our index to the internet is so polluted.
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
Easy navigation of hierarchical/structured links just encourages visitors to turn sideways away from the content they are being funnelled towards.
The cattle farmers that currently run the web only want you clicking away once you’ve had a couple of opportunities to see ads, and it will be via some highly tuned clickbait “related links”.
But why wouldn’t they want you to spend more time on their site, you ask? Because people who are conducting a structured search for information will focus on finding that information, not on clicking the adverts. They are bad customers. What the farmers want is people who are only casually looking for information, who will be easily diverted to click on something else.
[+] [-] salawat|4 years ago|reply
Don't knock encyclopedias/dead tree layouts. It's been a hell of an information transmission medium for centuries, and comes loaded with haptic shortcuts to aid recall and indexing.
I often call UX people on this when they want to do away with pagination and go to search bars. Yes, Boolean search is cool and all. Most people don't think in query languages for getting them all the way to where they are looking. They usually just want a starting set, then let them flip pages, or refine their query. Generally, when searching an unknown datastore, I like unrefined queries and manually perusing the data to get the lay of it by landmarking pages.
Point being, I still remember my first media center 101 on boolean searching, and my early years with search engines. To be honest, I feel like I got way more out of search indexes that didn't have agendas (piracy site suppression, artificially propping up marketing efforts, etc), than I do today.
[+] [-] atmartins|4 years ago|reply
I agree that I can't find a recipe without an obnoxious amount of crap writing around it, at least it's there if I scroll far enough. Wikipedia, by the way, suffers almost none of the complaints I see here, loads extremely fast and is free (donate!).
So I guess what I'm saying is it could be better, but the Internet is pretty incredible still.
[+] [-] cseleborg|4 years ago|reply
Yes, I fondly remember the multimedia experience of Encarta and the likes.
Ableton's "Learning Music" is a pretty good modern example, though:
https://learningmusic.ableton.com/
[+] [-] cheschire|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perryizgr8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] holler|4 years ago|reply
What alternatives or solutions do you envision for search? How would you build a content heavy site in a way that gives a user confidence when searching for something?
> Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry, or a video that may or may not offer you any useful way to navigate it aside from jumping around at random and most certainly doesn't give you rich annotations throughout.
Maybe I'm mentally blocked in thinking of the era of flash intros and marquee tags, but do you have any examples of sites that achieved what you're describing?
Were the annotations created by the site owner or by the community?
[+] [-] pmlnr|4 years ago|reply
"How the Blog Broke the Web" https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/
[+] [-] machiaweliczny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PUNKI3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topkai22|4 years ago|reply
It was also a lot of work, and visions of “success” were different. On the work side, creators had to work to produce the content, but consumers had to work harder to find it. I had a physical “yellow pages of the internet” book in the mid 90s. You’d look up the subject then go to a site and surf around till you found what you were looking for (or not.)
The expectations were also different, especially for creators. If you put content up and got 100 page hits that was really cool. 10,000 was amazing. Reaching an audience that big would have required pre-internet would have required formally publishing something, which wasn’t easy. The sheer novelty of being a “normal” person and connecting with / influencing 100 or 10,000 strangers was a huge selling point.
I think the massive scale and reach of the biggest properties/stars has devalued the type of content creation the author talks about in the eyes of the creators. It’s just harder to get excited about 100 or even 1000 page views when you know people are getting millions or billions, and when your low quality Facebook post can get 100s of likes.
I really miss the old internet, but I also know I don’t have the time or capacity to consistently go back to the old “surfing” metaphor- search is too good and convenient, and I don’t think others are going to be willing to pour their time and souls into passion projects like they used to. Perhaps it’ll be a new frontier (VR?) that captures that sense of newness and whimsy next.
[+] [-] jimmygrapes|4 years ago|reply
Assuming I'm not alone in witnessing this, I wonder two things: 1) what makes a forum environment different? and, 2) do people who react poorly to negative karma (or meager positive karma) ALSO expect high engagement IF they create on other platforms?
For example, I present a hypothetical person on reddit with accumulated "high" karma (say, high 8000s). This person also has 10k followers on TikTok, 3 YouTube videos with 6 digit views, and several viral tweets. They get -5 karma on a random reddit post and freak out. What makes the raw number differ between platforms? Is it raw number or a ratio of potential to actual?
(yes I know this is the epitome of a strawman, but I'm basing it off of a cohort of roughly similar real people)
[+] [-] DarknessFalls|4 years ago|reply
When Flash was originally released (by Macromedia), there were so many unique sites with really great interfaces. Nowadays, everything seems to follow the long, scrolling mono design. I loved what people could create in those early days of Flash without the restrictions of html. There are some sites I wish I could go back and revisit because they would be impressive by today's standards.
Before MySpace, there was some personalization with Angelfire and Geocities. Every once in a while, you'd find a really interesting site that someone had created.
That era around '95, '96 is probably what I miss the most.
[+] [-] holler|4 years ago|reply
I still remember the first time I discovered http://eye4u.com and watched their incredible flash intro. At the time I thought it was one of, if not the best flash intro on the web, and it instilled a sense excitement for what was possible with Flash.
I agree it was refreshing and exciting to see all of the creative designs and ideas one could express using Flash. If only they hadn't added those pesky "skip intro" buttons!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOUw2tF7agM
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuckcensorship|4 years ago|reply
>The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.
I have found some excellent websites using this which I would have never found via Google or elsewhere on the modern web. Very reminiscent of exploring the “Old Internet.”
[1]: https://search.marginalia.nu/
[+] [-] DeathArrow|4 years ago|reply
My problem is not with information discovery but in finding the EXACT bit of information that I am interested in. The old Internet wasn't better in this regard. I've came around information that was of interest by lots of digging and sheer luck.
[+] [-] eitland|4 years ago|reply
Warning: it seems to be a one person thing and my experience is that results might differ somewhat from week to week.
Edit: someone usually point out that SEO spammers will arrive shortly. I say that if SEO spammers start optimizing their pages by making them useful, lightweight, readable and without most tracking and ads I see that as a win.
[+] [-] rambambram|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HenryKissinger|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
I Miss the Old Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518 - Oct 2019 (306 comments)
Other missings:
I Miss the Old Internet (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27491537 - June 2021 (424 comments)
Tell HN: I miss the old internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552 - June 2018 (221 comments)
[+] [-] erulabs|4 years ago|reply
What we really need is more -server software- in the hands of every day people. The first web browser was also a web server - and today almost every human alive has a web-client in their pocket - but server software is for nerds, highly paid working at Facebook or Amazon.
Home hosting, self hosting, hobby sites - it’s not just some fond memory to me - it’s a legitimate possibility for human communication that was swept away by the vast monetary power of advertising. And it doesn’t have to be weird text only blogs about science fiction. It’s time to bring the internet back home!
[+] [-] h0nd|4 years ago|reply
This is now replaced by third parties with dependence.
[+] [-] qPM9l3XJrF|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingofclams|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krapp|4 years ago|reply
Yes, it has been.
>Maybe there are a lot of them hiding and they fear eternal september?
They're mostly on centralized social media platforms like Reddit, and discovery of niche content is more difficult on the modern web, but that doesn't mean that content isn't out there. I'm using "community" here to refer to a group of people with common interests, not an individual website. So "Reddit" is not a community in and of itself, but /r/niche_subreddit_youve_never_heard_of is.
[+] [-] hattmall|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0dayz|4 years ago|reply
But let's not pretend it was fun having a subpar experience in most areas.
For me I liked the 200X web because communities were flourish but was insulated and wasn't poisoned with nonsense (politics, extreme trolling, doxxing, and pseudosocial relationships).
[+] [-] DeathArrow|4 years ago|reply
On the other hand, he envisions the internet of 90s with Geocities and most websites being personal catering to a particular niche.
But if the Internet today was like the internet of the 90s, it would have been an empty place since the billions of today's users are not interested in what the few Internet users were interested in the 90s.
I too missed the early Internet (the first time I used Internet was at University in 1998 and by 2000 I had home Internet which was quite a thing in my poor country.) but I don't think is feasible to have it now.
I liked the early Internet because most users were literate both in the technical and classic ways, they were helpful and each one of that had a particular interest in something. Information sharing and communication was quite a thing.
Today most of the trouble is not that information is scarce, it is that you have to filter interesting information from junk and the signal to noise ratio is very poor. In the 90s the signal to noise ratio was quite good.
[+] [-] diveanon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 29athrowaway|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chunes|4 years ago|reply
Many of them are created by teenagers and young adults which is nice to see. Web rings are making a comeback as an alternative to search.
[+] [-] Gigachad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
It reminds me of those online dating profiles where there's no description besides "I'll fill this out later".
[+] [-] mdoms|4 years ago|reply
https://millionshort.com/
[+] [-] bm3719|4 years ago|reply
https://wiby.me/
[+] [-] pengaru|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busymom0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] User23|4 years ago|reply
It really was qualitatively different before and it’s impossible to explain to those who weren’t there in the before times.
There was so much more to the ‘net than the web.
[+] [-] daverol|4 years ago|reply
"And every few days, I still get a hit with news.ycombinator.com (no subpages, just the front page) in the referer header. And my heart rate kicks up: what if I'm on the front page? And I go to the front page, and, much to my relief, I'm nowhere to be seen. I've dodged the Cathedral for another day."
And later a good credo for net users: (this site) "doesn't exist for you to debate over, or moral-grandstand about yourself. It doesn't exist to vindicate you, or validate your preconceived notions of who I am, of who I could become. It doesn't exist for you. It exists for me."
[+] [-] snuser|4 years ago|reply
there's collaborative fiction and art all over the place, people easily talking and sharing their work and hobbies from homebrewing and math to the wookiepedia, gamejams, SCP, game mods, whatever is it kids do in minecraft and roblox even when it comes the mainstream there's stuff like (blockclub, the athletic ..etc ..etc ..etc)
If anything I think what all of these "old internet" articles illude to is the authors feeling nostalgic for when they were part of what they considered to be counter-culture or lost interests they want to burry themselves in
[+] [-] tigerlily|4 years ago|reply
This could be in and of itself countercultural, and I think perhaps the walled gardens are our thing to rage against today.
[+] [-] betwixthewires|4 years ago|reply
I agree with this statement 100%. I miss the old internet too, not because of the simpler interaction specifically, but because the current state of availability of information is massively broken due to commercialization. The internet has been turned into a 5 store strip mall, everything has a rent seeker, a middleman or a gate keeper. It is increasingly difficult to find any information online that has not been created for the sake of commercialization and delivered to you for a price.
[+] [-] human|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
The problem is spammers, trolls, and opportunists ruined and squandered any good will and presumption of innocence, so everyone pays and is presumed guilty.
Forums have very strict registration and posting requirement, unlike 10- years ago.
Many sites req. phone number to do anything
Reddit subs have very high comment and post karma thresholds in order to post, tons of censorship and ghosting, especially for popular communities. And also arbitrary rules that get your posts auto-ghosted, sometimes without an explanation.
Twitter also ghosts posts and users too even though the liar CEO and said it doesn't.
Youtube allows blatant crypto scams to run, but bans accounts and removed vidoes for arbitrary and automated copyright claims or 'misinformation'.
Low trust=worse quality internet experience.
[+] [-] kkoncevicius|4 years ago|reply
The internet I like to see is where you can follow someones work and ideas without being sidelined. If a person is active in a few different fields then two separate websites are in order. My feeling is that this has not changed between the "old internet" and the "new". There is a small fraction people producing content in this way. Maybe today its a bit easier to find them.
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
The difference is simple. Personal websites don't have "like/share/retweet" buttons that incentivize playing to the crowd instead of being true to oneself.