7 ms·

I wish the web was still like that. No advertising, no tracking, there's not 5 mb of CSS and javascript, just information presented in a readable format.

geofft 10y ago
Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic. The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  > Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic. That's simply not true. By the mid-90s academics were already a small minority on the web. The OP's sample links are biased because it's a somewhat academic topic. There was plenty of free and cheap hosting around back then, and for those types of pages bare-bones shared hosting works just fine. For the longest time I paid about $60 a year to host a static site, and it worked great. Hardly the type of money that I needed sell out to advertisers to recoup my costs. Even GeoCities, while mostly crap, hosted its fair share of useful content. > The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism. Nowadays there is technically a lot more information available, but there's significantly more crap to dig through to find it. And FWIW, I disagree that StackOverflow is "better" than the old style internet. Most StackOverflow answers are shallow - they answer the question, but there's no researching or learning, it's usually just an answer handed to you. It's like the old "teach a man to fish..." thing.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    The issue is that there's more and more information put online by someone wanting to get something out of it - and for the absolute minority who are putting stuff up without expectation of direct return, it's easier to use a proprietary service than learn HTML.
  - mrkgnao 10y ago
    I think it's interesting to note that (anecdotally, at least) things that are "less practical" attract far more in-depth SO answers than those that are more "useful in the real world" (insert connection to capitalism) - Haskell/"help me push this into the typesystem" questions tend to attract very well-thought-out answers oftentimes, and usually multiple answers at different levels of abstraction. (Not that I'm discounting things like the excellent low-level questions on things like cache misses/alignment/"why are sorted lists faster to process", but I think they're rarer.) If anyone here knows their way around the StackOverflow API and has some time, I think it could lead to an interesting couple of hours.
khedoros1 10y ago
Every time I say something like that, someone tells me that we're better off the way things are. Tracking is BS. Ads are a great way to make my computer fetch data that I neither need nor want, and to run programs that work against my best interests using my own CPU cycles. I'm not completely convinced that we wouldn't be better off dumping the current state of the art and re-designing from first principles.
- monsieurbanana 10y ago
  We're better off the way things are, when compared to before. I'm not saying things are perfect, or even good, but we're definitely better than before. You complain about ads, but think about what they enable. How many times do you use google per day? It lives off ads. Do you use any social network? They live off ads. Ads are certainly not the best way for us to obtain those kind of commodities, but between having them and not having anything I still choose them.
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    > You complain about ads, but think about what they enable. Saying that the ends justify the means certainly simplifies things. It's not a compelling argument to me; I suppose that I'm too much of an idealist. > Do you use any social network? They live off ads. Indeed, they do. And I use the benefit of my education to block them every way that I can, pushing the cost onto others. Without ads, or at least some kind of financial support, networks like that would fall apart. Necessity being the mother of invention, and interpersonal connections being necessary, we'd invent another solution. I like the idea of small, independent, federated social networks, but I don't know that they'd actually be practical.
- aethertap 10y ago
  I agree with the sentiment, but with a slightly different angle. I think one of the things that made the early Internet interesting was that it was populated almost exclusively by enthusiasts (geeks, artists, etc) with little commercial motivation. Stuff was quirky and interesting. Today's Internet is a fantastic platform for commerce. I'd be very sad to see it go, but I also think there's a need for the weird old quirky net we had before marketing took over. What I'd like to see is the emergence of a new enthusiast network that's inherently difficult and inconvenient to commercialize alongside the existing net. One is good for getting eyes on content and marketing stuff, which is important, and the other is good for just putting up whatever you find interesting simply because you want to. When I want to buy something I'll use what we have now, but the other net would be more interesting to just browse around and share stuff on. I think IPFS [1] or something similar might have the potential to resurrect the geek net. IPFS with a distributed mesh network infrastructure seems like it would be slow, inconvenient for commerce, and probably attractive only to the kind of people that made the early net interesting, especially with the current net as competition. 1. https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io
wldcordeiro 10y ago
Three of the linked examples aren't that readable, not that I disagree with your point.

geofft 10y ago

Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic. The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism.

jlarocco 10y ago
> Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic. That's simply not true. By the mid-90s academics were already a small minority on the web. The OP's sample links are biased because it's a somewhat academic topic. There was plenty of free and cheap hosting around back then, and for those types of pages bare-bones shared hosting works just fine. For the longest time I paid about $60 a year to host a static site, and it worked great. Hardly the type of money that I needed sell out to advertisers to recoup my costs. Even GeoCities, while mostly crap, hosted its fair share of useful content. > The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism. Nowadays there is technically a lot more information available, but there's significantly more crap to dig through to find it. And FWIW, I disagree that StackOverflow is "better" than the old style internet. Most StackOverflow answers are shallow - they answer the question, but there's no researching or learning, it's usually just an answer handed to you. It's like the old "teach a man to fish..." thing.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  The issue is that there's more and more information put online by someone wanting to get something out of it - and for the absolute minority who are putting stuff up without expectation of direct return, it's easier to use a proprietary service than learn HTML.
- mrkgnao 10y ago
  I think it's interesting to note that (anecdotally, at least) things that are "less practical" attract far more in-depth SO answers than those that are more "useful in the real world" (insert connection to capitalism) - Haskell/"help me push this into the typesystem" questions tend to attract very well-thought-out answers oftentimes, and usually multiple answers at different levels of abstraction. (Not that I'm discounting things like the excellent low-level questions on things like cache misses/alignment/"why are sorted lists faster to process", but I think they're rarer.) If anyone here knows their way around the StackOverflow API and has some time, I think it could lead to an interesting couple of hours.

khedoros1 10y ago

Every time I say something like that, someone tells me that we're better off the way things are. Tracking is BS. Ads are a great way to make my computer fetch data that I neither need nor want, and to run programs that work against my best interests using my own CPU cycles. I'm not completely convinced that we wouldn't be better off dumping the current state of the art and re-designing from first principles.

monsieurbanana 10y ago
We're better off the way things are, when compared to before. I'm not saying things are perfect, or even good, but we're definitely better than before. You complain about ads, but think about what they enable. How many times do you use google per day? It lives off ads. Do you use any social network? They live off ads. Ads are certainly not the best way for us to obtain those kind of commodities, but between having them and not having anything I still choose them.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  > You complain about ads, but think about what they enable. Saying that the ends justify the means certainly simplifies things. It's not a compelling argument to me; I suppose that I'm too much of an idealist. > Do you use any social network? They live off ads. Indeed, they do. And I use the benefit of my education to block them every way that I can, pushing the cost onto others. Without ads, or at least some kind of financial support, networks like that would fall apart. Necessity being the mother of invention, and interpersonal connections being necessary, we'd invent another solution. I like the idea of small, independent, federated social networks, but I don't know that they'd actually be practical.
aethertap 10y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but with a slightly different angle. I think one of the things that made the early Internet interesting was that it was populated almost exclusively by enthusiasts (geeks, artists, etc) with little commercial motivation. Stuff was quirky and interesting. Today's Internet is a fantastic platform for commerce. I'd be very sad to see it go, but I also think there's a need for the weird old quirky net we had before marketing took over. What I'd like to see is the emergence of a new enthusiast network that's inherently difficult and inconvenient to commercialize alongside the existing net. One is good for getting eyes on content and marketing stuff, which is important, and the other is good for just putting up whatever you find interesting simply because you want to. When I want to buy something I'll use what we have now, but the other net would be more interesting to just browse around and share stuff on. I think IPFS [1] or something similar might have the potential to resurrect the geek net. IPFS with a distributed mesh network infrastructure seems like it would be slow, inconvenient for commerce, and probably attractive only to the kind of people that made the early net interesting, especially with the current net as competition. 1. https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io

wldcordeiro 10y ago

Three of the linked examples aren't that readable, not that I disagree with your point.