More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.
If you haven't checked out the "Surpise me" button on https://wiby.me I strongly suggest you do. These digital gardens are still out there even if sadly stuck in time.
I was just thinking today that I should just start posting my stuff on a personal site. Photos, blogs, life updates, etc.
It gives me that control that I want, and I don't have to worry about Meta, etc trying to monetize it. Plus I get to unplug from those "n liked your post" dopamine hits.
I am running my personal web crawler since September of 2022. I gather internet domains and assign them meta information. There are various sources of my data. I assign "personal" tag to any personal website. I assign "self-host" tag to any self-host program I find.
I still rely on google for many things, or kagi. It is interesting to me, what my crawler finds next. It is always a surprise to see new blog, or forgotten forum of sorts.
This is how I discover real new content on the Internet. Certainly not by google which can find only BBC, or techcrunch.
It is extraordinarily difficult for me to believe this is indicative of the reality of the entire Internet. I've probably visited a good chunk of this amount of personal sites.
There's plenty of great fascinating wild Internet out there. The problem is finding it, since it typically struggles to be heard in a sea of well funded SEO-optimized garbage. It's a discovery problem, above all.
I agree with you, although I wonder how we found the great fascinating wild websites before search engines even existed. I remember “web rings” but I don't think that's the whole story.
The reinforcement learning algorithm of facebook, instagram, youtube, tik-tok needs to move at the edge for that to happen. Nowadays, this seems much more probable than any other time in history, i.e last 15 years.
Personal recommendation algorithms using RL, are certainly possible, because RL is the least computationally intensive training, compared to supervised, unsupervised etc. They also require some kind of social structure, but that will be setup on a blockchain, in an totally open and transparent way, yet private.
Self hosting is definitely the way toward rewilding the internet.
If everyone ran their own blogs, chats, email, etc. and let their systems federate thru protocol rather than on a single platform, the forests will thrive again.
Smartphones enabled internet addiction to reach the masses. Previously it only engaged those who had the patience and wits to maintain a PC and sit down at a desk to read and write on the internet. As long as the professional and volunteer skills to invest in a "wild" project are transferrable to that of a centralized platform, creators will gravitate to the side that has more users and can pay them more and consumers will gravitate toward the one that is easier to access and worth the according cost of entry (oftentimes free).
This isn't a unique phenomenon. Look at video games. When any subculture/industry goes mainstream you don't see it preserving the thriving ecosystem of before and just adding on a synergistic mainstream bloc. Rather, the mainstream bloc cannibalizes and leaves dwindling ghost towns. That's the price of attention competition and opportunity cost.
It reads like something a GPT model would write, they go all over the place.
I also wonder what would their point of view be if the internet truly was wilder, like 4chan or everything behind TOR.
On one hand, I kind of like the idea of spreading and atomizing the internet to the masses, a bit like it was at the beginning, but at the beginning the people that were part of the internet were a particularly well educated elite. It was definitely not for everyone.
Not everyone was online, what we had was people with disposable income to have a computer, usually with some form of college education and some technical knowledge.
> It reads like something a GPT model would write, they go all over the place.
It's nothing like GPT IMO; it's opinionated, for one thing. I think it's just hard to follow because it does draw from a large variety of sources and ideas and doesn't weave them together very smoothly. This is showcased with the horrible modern trend of displaying a large quote of something the article literally just said, or will say next. This practice is always a bad choice, but failure scales with the complexity of the article; the author would have done better to use more headings, which would help them organize the work.
I do completely agree with your assessment of why the earlier internet was... a more rewarding experience. (I don't think "better" is a meaningful term here.) But, the article is explicitly rejecting the idea of returning to the past, and instead building something new that fosters emergent behavior and diversity. The goal is empowerment of agents who have a will to cultivate their ideas.
I don't think they were referring to moderation in itself. 4chan isn't a decentralized platform like the Fediverse (AFAIK), so, if it was theoretically large enough (like, TikTok-sized), it would be just as big a problem.
No matter what you do, 90/00s internet is never coming back
They demonstrated the ready willingness use of violence by special interest groups bankrolling and giving insider trading tips to your political leaders. Meanwhile some college student torrents some Hollywood movie and gets arrested.
The Internet is not Detroit, but like Detroit it expanded very very fast and was very very innovative and open. Then it consolidated, which is ongoing. Things settled… for a while. The early days of Detroit saw hundreds of little innovative experimental companies that over time became the big three. The rest is history. Detroit is the victim of its own invention.
Luckily my analogy isn’t a very good one, the Internet is nothing like Detroit. It is, however, interesting how quickly wild things can be tamed, and that may beckon a cautionary lesson.
"The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late."
I really agree. so often simplification alone is not enough. it should be a guiding principle, but not ignorant of the necessary complexity
I'm pessimistic about the likelihood of any new "wild" internet ecologies thriving the way they did in the past.
If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to its most logical extreme already. There's not a lot of boundaries to explore.
There are weird places online already, sure. And curiosities still abound. But idk… I wonder if a generation lost in cyberspace is exactly the reason why we are actually so unhappy with the internet writ large.
> If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to its most logical extreme already.
I think this is an odd framing. It's not about pushing things to further extremes, it's about using all these mediums that have been allowed to wither and die. It's about getting out of the sterile high-walled gardens.
This is a great article, but it's missing the elephant in the room: copyright.
There's a reason that our society has allowed <10 companies to own the internet: the internet is content. Anyone who can claim to "own" content has the right to monopolize it. We didn't simply allow corporations to build walls of garden around us: we enshrined those walls as a legal right!
This article opens with a great metaphor, comparing the internet to a forest. Let's continue that metaphor, and see how copyright fits in. What is a tree made of? Content. Copyright doesn't simply give someone ownership of their garden, it gives them ownership of entire species. Want to grow an Apple tree? Too bad: you don't have the right to copy Apple's species. Want to pollinate your gnu tree with an Apple tree? No can do: Apple trees were intentionally designed to be incompatible with free range bees.
Every thing we do on the internet is carefully managed with contracts centered around copyright. Giant corporations own nearly all the copy rights. Is it any surprise that they write all the contracts?
We need to rewild the internet; and to do that, we (and our peers) will need seeds.
I think internet was way awesome before digital advertising era. There should be areas of internet which should try to replicate the early internet i.e text-only design, bring back forums and no advertising revenue.
Even with advertising, Google Ads (then called AdSense) was a lot more generous with their revenue share than they are now. Lots of little blogs and forums thrived because the money coming in was enough to keep the proprietors interested in maintaining a community of commenters.
Then comment bot spam started growing out of control, webmasters ceded the comment platform to centralized services like Disqus, and finally Google slashed ad premiums, so websites either started disappearing or getting folded into the properties of 'blog networks' and lost their personality in search of pageviews.
I swear search engines are getting borderline useless. And it's not necessarily their fault, it's just very difficult to find search results these days that aren't lists of affiliate links. And in fairness, this is probably less to do with SEO'ers "gaming" the system and more to do with the fact that all of the content we actually cared about just disappeared behind walled gardens.
I abandoned Google Search a few years ago because I was tired of it trying to guess what I was "really" trying to search for instead of just matching my keywords. But DuckDuckGo seems to be getting worse in this regard lately too. I will get a bunch of results that are about something I don't care about, identify a keyword that I could easily filter out and add the "-<keyword>" modifier to my search string only to see it have no effect what-so-ever. Grrr....
I also can't believe the amount of search results that take you to a walled garden. Instagram for example. You can't lurk without an account and every single time I've tried to create an account it gets automatically suspended after a few days because their system flags it as a "fake account", whatever that means. It used to mean a bot but I can easily prove that I'm a real human being and yet when I've appealed the suspension it has stuck. So it blows my mind that they rank so highly in the search results despite doing everything they can to prevent people without accounts from even being able to create accounts, let alone browse those results.
Geocities wasn't something you discovered via search. It was a directory you could explore, like walking through the streets of a city instead of cabbing it straight to a top-rated restaurant.
> ... So-called “scientific forestry,” was that century’s growth hacking: it made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. ...
This is a general principle of optimization, which maximises efficiency at the expense of redundancy and anti-fragility. Unfortunately, the ability to withstand an unexpected catastrophe does not appear on a balance sheet until the catastrophe strikes.
"Whatever we do, the internet isn't returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or each organization running its own mail server, rather than operating off G-Suite."
It does not need to "return" to FTP because FTP is still in use. Periodically I am submitting examples of FTP servers to HN that are still operated today that are often critical to software developers and so-called "tech" companies.
NB. When I submit examples of FTP servers to HN I submit the HTTPS mirror, so even people using popular web browsers that have removed FTP support can still access the files. I prefer using a dedicated FTP client myself but it's good to have an HTTPS mirrors, too.
Not to disparage spaces like NeoCities, but to quote the great American singer/songwriter David Berman:
Punk rock died when the first kid said
"Punk's not dead, punk's not dead"
That is - these spaces will never quite be the same as what we once had, because they're fundamentally nostalgic. The "wild" internet was also once the vanguard, the future, and that excitement won't be recaptured by going back.
>Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange stuff
I was just about to say this. The new pockets of internet communities are filled with interesting and fun things again. It’s just that a lot of them are for and run by teenagers. As adults, we either feel immediately out of place or just get banned outright.
The ones run by adults are incredibly niche focusing on “non-mainstream” interests.
Discovery is a little harder, yes. And it feels more ephemeral than the static sites of yore. But they’re out there. And they thrive.
friend of mine told me this exactly : going on telegram feels like being back to the original internet. But that's probably because of all the illegal/uncensored content you can find there
>>"...a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late."
This a thousand times over. This should be taught in schools and repeated from the earliest grades to post-grad. It bears repetition, sufficient that it is seen by everyone as obvious. Then, perhaps the society will value complexity and diversity as the true strengths that they are. Homogenizing and monoculture will kill us all, whether it is forestry, agriculture, human cultures, economies, the internet, or mil or corporate orgs. Uniformity is brittleness.
[+] [-] urda|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] properbrew|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] notaustinpowers|1 year ago|reply
It gives me that control that I want, and I don't have to worry about Meta, etc trying to monetize it. Plus I get to unplug from those "n liked your post" dopamine hits.
[+] [-] renegat0x0|1 year ago|reply
I have less than 3k of personal websites.
Data are in the repository.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
I still rely on google for many things, or kagi. It is interesting to me, what my crawler finds next. It is always a surprise to see new blog, or forgotten forum of sorts.
This is how I discover real new content on the Internet. Certainly not by google which can find only BBC, or techcrunch.
[+] [-] squigz|1 year ago|reply
It is extraordinarily difficult for me to believe this is indicative of the reality of the entire Internet. I've probably visited a good chunk of this amount of personal sites.
[+] [-] blackhaj7|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rkuykendall-com|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Timwi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] emporas|1 year ago|reply
Personal recommendation algorithms using RL, are certainly possible, because RL is the least computationally intensive training, compared to supervised, unsupervised etc. They also require some kind of social structure, but that will be setup on a blockchain, in an totally open and transparent way, yet private.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chadsix|1 year ago|reply
If everyone ran their own blogs, chats, email, etc. and let their systems federate thru protocol rather than on a single platform, the forests will thrive again.
[+] [-] drak0n1c|1 year ago|reply
This isn't a unique phenomenon. Look at video games. When any subculture/industry goes mainstream you don't see it preserving the thriving ecosystem of before and just adding on a synergistic mainstream bloc. Rather, the mainstream bloc cannibalizes and leaves dwindling ghost towns. That's the price of attention competition and opportunity cost.
[+] [-] statquontrarian|1 year ago|reply
1. The Neocities random page: https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=random
2. The Neocities recently updated page: https://neocities.org/activity
3. Status Cafe: https://status.cafe/
4. The MidnightPub: https://midnight.pub/
[+] [-] juancn|1 year ago|reply
I also wonder what would their point of view be if the internet truly was wilder, like 4chan or everything behind TOR.
On one hand, I kind of like the idea of spreading and atomizing the internet to the masses, a bit like it was at the beginning, but at the beginning the people that were part of the internet were a particularly well educated elite. It was definitely not for everyone.
Not everyone was online, what we had was people with disposable income to have a computer, usually with some form of college education and some technical knowledge.
Then the masses came, and social media thrived.
[+] [-] digging|1 year ago|reply
It's nothing like GPT IMO; it's opinionated, for one thing. I think it's just hard to follow because it does draw from a large variety of sources and ideas and doesn't weave them together very smoothly. This is showcased with the horrible modern trend of displaying a large quote of something the article literally just said, or will say next. This practice is always a bad choice, but failure scales with the complexity of the article; the author would have done better to use more headings, which would help them organize the work.
I do completely agree with your assessment of why the earlier internet was... a more rewarding experience. (I don't think "better" is a meaningful term here.) But, the article is explicitly rejecting the idea of returning to the past, and instead building something new that fosters emergent behavior and diversity. The goal is empowerment of agents who have a will to cultivate their ideas.
[+] [-] mondobe|1 year ago|reply
I don't think they were referring to moderation in itself. 4chan isn't a decentralized platform like the Fediverse (AFAIK), so, if it was theoretically large enough (like, TikTok-sized), it would be just as big a problem.
[+] [-] spxneo|1 year ago|reply
They demonstrated the ready willingness use of violence by special interest groups bankrolling and giving insider trading tips to your political leaders. Meanwhile some college student torrents some Hollywood movie and gets arrested.
ex) Megaupload
[+] [-] thesagan|1 year ago|reply
Luckily my analogy isn’t a very good one, the Internet is nothing like Detroit. It is, however, interesting how quickly wild things can be tamed, and that may beckon a cautionary lesson.
[+] [-] kderbyma|1 year ago|reply
I really agree. so often simplification alone is not enough. it should be a guiding principle, but not ignorant of the necessary complexity
[+] [-] efields|1 year ago|reply
If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to its most logical extreme already. There's not a lot of boundaries to explore.
There are weird places online already, sure. And curiosities still abound. But idk… I wonder if a generation lost in cyberspace is exactly the reason why we are actually so unhappy with the internet writ large.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
[+] [-] SamBam|1 year ago|reply
I think this is an odd framing. It's not about pushing things to further extremes, it's about using all these mediums that have been allowed to wither and die. It's about getting out of the sterile high-walled gardens.
[+] [-] thomastjeffery|1 year ago|reply
There's a reason that our society has allowed <10 companies to own the internet: the internet is content. Anyone who can claim to "own" content has the right to monopolize it. We didn't simply allow corporations to build walls of garden around us: we enshrined those walls as a legal right!
This article opens with a great metaphor, comparing the internet to a forest. Let's continue that metaphor, and see how copyright fits in. What is a tree made of? Content. Copyright doesn't simply give someone ownership of their garden, it gives them ownership of entire species. Want to grow an Apple tree? Too bad: you don't have the right to copy Apple's species. Want to pollinate your gnu tree with an Apple tree? No can do: Apple trees were intentionally designed to be incompatible with free range bees.
Every thing we do on the internet is carefully managed with contracts centered around copyright. Giant corporations own nearly all the copy rights. Is it any surprise that they write all the contracts?
We need to rewild the internet; and to do that, we (and our peers) will need seeds.
[+] [-] rajeshp1986|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|1 year ago|reply
Then comment bot spam started growing out of control, webmasters ceded the comment platform to centralized services like Disqus, and finally Google slashed ad premiums, so websites either started disappearing or getting folded into the properties of 'blog networks' and lost their personality in search of pageviews.
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|1 year ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20060902030402fw_/http://www.stu...
[+] [-] curious_cat_163|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bingbangboom|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] d--b|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gspencley|1 year ago|reply
I swear search engines are getting borderline useless. And it's not necessarily their fault, it's just very difficult to find search results these days that aren't lists of affiliate links. And in fairness, this is probably less to do with SEO'ers "gaming" the system and more to do with the fact that all of the content we actually cared about just disappeared behind walled gardens.
I abandoned Google Search a few years ago because I was tired of it trying to guess what I was "really" trying to search for instead of just matching my keywords. But DuckDuckGo seems to be getting worse in this regard lately too. I will get a bunch of results that are about something I don't care about, identify a keyword that I could easily filter out and add the "-<keyword>" modifier to my search string only to see it have no effect what-so-ever. Grrr....
I also can't believe the amount of search results that take you to a walled garden. Instagram for example. You can't lurk without an account and every single time I've tried to create an account it gets automatically suspended after a few days because their system flags it as a "fake account", whatever that means. It used to mean a bot but I can easily prove that I'm a real human being and yet when I've appealed the suspension it has stuck. So it blows my mind that they rank so highly in the search results despite doing everything they can to prevent people without accounts from even being able to create accounts, let alone browse those results.
The Web is dead.
[+] [-] rchaud|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DebtDeflation|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mmaniac|1 year ago|reply
This is a general principle of optimization, which maximises efficiency at the expense of redundancy and anti-fragility. Unfortunately, the ability to withstand an unexpected catastrophe does not appear on a balance sheet until the catastrophe strikes.
[+] [-] euroderf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|1 year ago|reply
It does not need to "return" to FTP because FTP is still in use. Periodically I am submitting examples of FTP servers to HN that are still operated today that are often critical to software developers and so-called "tech" companies.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kristopolous|1 year ago|reply
And even people with weird myspace style social networking sites like https://spacehey.com/browse
Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange stuff.
They're just not mainstream. Probably better that way.
[+] [-] wk_end|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] quartesixte|1 year ago|reply
I was just about to say this. The new pockets of internet communities are filled with interesting and fun things again. It’s just that a lot of them are for and run by teenagers. As adults, we either feel immediately out of place or just get banned outright.
The ones run by adults are incredibly niche focusing on “non-mainstream” interests.
Discovery is a little harder, yes. And it feels more ephemeral than the static sites of yore. But they’re out there. And they thrive.
And 4chan still exists.
The kids will be alright.
[+] [-] rumdz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bsaul|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] peppertree|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] toss1|1 year ago|reply
This a thousand times over. This should be taught in schools and repeated from the earliest grades to post-grad. It bears repetition, sufficient that it is seen by everyone as obvious. Then, perhaps the society will value complexity and diversity as the true strengths that they are. Homogenizing and monoculture will kill us all, whether it is forestry, agriculture, human cultures, economies, the internet, or mil or corporate orgs. Uniformity is brittleness.