[Bjorkbat]

I'm keenly aware, I have a pretty extensive collection of Hacker News bookmarks. It's hard to articulate why I think these are different, but I think the best way to put it is that cachemonet feels a lot more avant garde, and perhaps also a reflection of a very particular form of "web culture" that has no clear successors.

People are experimenting with what you can do on the web, but the experiments aren't very "aesthetically inspiring". For that reason I'm kind of lukewarm on neal.fun.

EDIT: so I think a better way to describe it is that when artists experiment with technology, you get something like cachemonet. When developers experiment with technology, you get a web experiment that challenges conventional notions of what you can do with the web, but with varying degrees of creativity. I think terra.layoutit.com is best appreciated by other web devs who can appreciate the sheer amount of work required to figure out how to render a terrain map in CSS, but otherwise it's basically just a tool to generate terrain height maps, and not a particularly good one. Generating terrain maps in CSS is not a feature, but a handicap.

[jgord]

I wonder when peak demoscene occurred .. some of those mini code demos seem artistically and technically innovative.

[keepamovin]

I believe the demoscene is still ongoing, especially in France. Would love to understand why that is (French tech: parallel early teletype internet, high demoscene, more open approach to UFOs (GEIPAN) - French don't seem obviously "that different" to Americans, but there's obviously something different going on).

[Bjorkbat]

To me demoscene is kind of synonymous with the Amiga, so I would argue that peak demoscene lines up with the rise and fall of the Amiga brand.

So I think that's maybe the other differentiator between web experiment and art, because demoscene has a very distinct but difficult to describe cultural element that makes me identify it as art.

[keepamovin]

This is a good description. Well done.