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Riders on the Storm
- chipsy 17y agoI love the imagery of this article. I recall one of the attractions of the 90's Web was the unpredictable nature of every link - since the bulk of interesting pages were personal and semi-autobiographial, it was a voyeuristic trip into the lives of random people. For me, it got less easy to do that when the Web shifted towards larger, consolidated sites with more community behind them. The insane rants and confessionals of the old homepages were overwhelmed in a sea of vague, repetitive one-line comments, heavily edited Wikipedia pages, and advertisements for various products I don't really need. It became comforting and familiar to go to an aggregator of some kind and see "random" new links that were usually, in fact, overly predictable and based on a trend or meme. Occasionally, I still make an effort to go out and find something genuinely new. It's hard to know where to start, but I usually succeed with a little effort, so I know the old Web is still there.