17 ms·

I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but th

I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.

77pt77 9y ago
I just miss that it was mainly text and could be used in a terminal without missing much. More content density, better S/N ratio.
- Frondo 9y ago
  Not specifically directed at you, but sort of directed at you: I wish everyone who pined for the 25-years-ago days of mostly text pages would, instead of pining, just go out there and produce that content they want to see. Instead of pining, start writing. Hosting is cheap or free, browsers still parse simple HTML, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a return to that simpler form.
  - 77pt77 9y ago
    I don't write on-line content (no blog for example) but if I did I'd test it in (e)links for sure. :)
  - mi100hael 9y ago
    I do and I test my personal website on lynx. Doesn't change the fact that sites like this are under the misguided impression that it's cheaper to ship 2 MB of JavaScript with each request rather than just responding with the fucking 2 KB of article text so they end up looking like: # I Bought a Book About the Internet From 1994 and None of the Links Worked - Motherboard #motherboard Quantcast [p?c1=2&c2=8568956&cv=2.0&cj=1]
    - Frondo 9y ago
      So how much would you pay for a bare-bones, text-only version of the content, if you're going to read JS-decorated content?
      - mi100hael 9y ago
        Are you suggesting that ads can't appear in text articles? Or that ad blockers don't exist for graphical browsers?
      - exergy 9y ago
        The question isn't one of us creating it, although, unlike those downvoting you, I understand where you come from. The question is, who will (and how to) create a curation of sorts. A Google for the simple web. A one stop shop that encourages barebones simplicity and fosters a community where people only allow a simplified internet, and adtech is a nonstarter.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    Rent is expensive in my city, do you think it is reasonable to tell someone who can't afford rent to just buy their own building? That's what you are suggesting.
    - throwawaywonk 9y ago
      Building a web page costs basically nothing; commercial real estate is much more expensive.
    - JCharante 9y ago
      You're not going to be in the Alexa top 10,000. Go run a docker container for $3/month to host your site, cache it with cloudflare's free plan and pay $12/year for a domain. Its only $48/yr to host all your content. It's really not that ridiculous.
      - mulmen 9y ago
        It is ridiculous because time is scarce. We have to decide how to spend our time. That doesn't mean we have to shut up and accept everything else.
      - kwhitefoot 9y ago
        For the kind of static content we seem to be talking about you can use https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/. No need to spend any money.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    It's impossible to produce that content because the culture was very different. For one, it was largely un-monetised. There were no banner ads, no ad trackers, no giant shopping sites, no market-driven content design. But many ISPs offered free web space, and HTML 1.0 was so simple almost anyone could hack together a basic site with a plain vanilla text editor. So people did. For fun. Lots and lots of them. It looked like crap, but it was weird/hilarious/insane/inspiring in equal measures in a way that's impossible to reproduce today.
    - krapp 9y ago
      > It's impossible to produce that content because the culture was very different. What? It's not at all impossible. Get a server, put whatever you want on it. No one is going to force you to monetize or market anything, or use a Node.js backend with AWS and React, or whatever the kids are doing these days. Basic HTML in a plain text editor still works just fine.
      - wolfgke 9y ago
        > What? It's not at all impossible. Get a server, put whatever you want on it. Not in Germany. There is a set of laws called "Impressumspflicht" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht) which forces you to add a mandatory imprint on your website. If you do something wrong or forget to include some mandatory information (what is mandatory also depends on the kind of website), you can easily get sued (and this has often happened). In other words: It is not easy for a layperson to set up a website in a way that will not easily become a risk of becoming sued.
        krapp 9y ago
        The context of this conversation seems to have more to do with code and complexity than legal necessities but point taken. The parent was suggesting it was impossible to create the sort of simple, personal, just for fun sites that people used to, but there's no technical reason for that to be the case. It just happens that people add unnecessary complexity to their projects nowadays because 1) they use frameworks and tools that facilitate it and 2) it looks better on their resumes.
  - squeaky-clean 9y ago
    All the content I read will still be the way I don't want it though.
  - discreditable 9y ago
    For my site, I created a Pelican theme which is HTML-only. There's no JS at all! I plan on publishing the theme eventually, once I'm a bit happier with it. You can see it at https://brashear.me https://brashear.me. I'm very happy with how quickly it loads. I mentioned to one of my friends that it feels like upgrading to DSL back in the dial-up days. If you very badly want to rip off the theme, it's stealable from my GitHub copy of my site: https://github.com/KeenRivals/brashear.me/tree/master/themes/pelican-feather https://github.com/KeenRivals/brashear.me/tree/master/themes...
- Mateon1 9y ago
  Recently I came across the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day website[1], it's old-school HTML, started in 1995 and still updated today. All the HTML takes 2-4 kB on average, but you might not get much use from the site in a terminal :) [1]: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html
Apocryphon 9y ago
Maybe Neocities should add a webring feature.
- wcummings 9y ago
  Is this a joke?
  - kyledrake 9y ago
    No, I get this request quite a bit from people that sincerely miss web rings. I'm not sure how much of it is anachronistic nostalgia and how much of it is a true desire to bring it back. To give an example of this, I've gotten more than a few requests to add the Gopher protocol to Neocities.
    - wcummings 9y ago
      But aren't web rings just composed of vanilla hyperlinks? Why does that need to be added as a feature? What's stopping people from making them now?
      - kyledrake 9y ago
        IIRC the old webrings had a CGI backend that would collect the addresses and then you would click "next" and it would take you to the next site. But yeah you could just make a vanilla one. You could also just make one outside of the context of Neocities. But if the next site went down or didn't link to the next site correctly, you couldn't proceed. That was always my problem with webrings. They depended on each site to embed the ring code properly, and usually they didn't, so you were stuck trying to find a working one. It was a pretty lousy UX overall.
        wcummings 9y ago
        That's interesting the ones I remember were literally rings of static links, coordinated by the webmasters, presumably over email. I see what you mean now.
dep_b 9y ago
I remember browsing the internet was much more of a networked thing. If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still can get lost in a never ending deeper web of links. However WikiPedia is a very cleaned up version of the early web. It lacks animated .gifs for sure. But the difference with Wikipedia was that people would maintain a Links section full of interesting stuff and people would join web rings for various subjects, interlinking vastly different sites. Finding information often happened through Yahoo! (AltaVista was there too but it was lacking the quality of handpicked results) through a tree based discovery system, to continue through whatever you could find through links on an interesting page. Exchanging links was something that really frequently happened. It resulted in an internet where you just kept clicking and discovering and digging. Sometimes also frustrating as browsers lacked tabs and I would navigate all links one by one by loading it and going back. I would forget how I arrived at a certain page sometimes because it was so deep and I never found the breadcrumbs again.
- neonnoodle 9y ago
  > It lacks animated .gifs for sure Um excuse me what do you call this masterpiece https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Ellipses_with_SliderCrank_Ellipses_at_Crank_Side.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Ellipses...
  - Danihan 9y ago
    Doesn't count unless it's a spooky skull. https://media3.giphy.com/media/6SPkShZNS9Uqs/giphy.gif https://media3.giphy.com/media/6SPkShZNS9Uqs/giphy.gif
    - cooper12 9y ago
      https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Articular_tubercle_of_temporal_bone_-_skull_-_animation01.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Articula...
  - hawski 9y ago
    Wow! That's nice. I started to imagine how it could be used in a geeky clock.
addicted 9y ago
Is it richer and deeper now? Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook. When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about. Today it's basically Wikipedia at the top, with results from the same list of about 3-4 sites depending on the topic of what I searched for.
- hawski 9y ago
  I'm beginning to think that there is a niche for a peculiar kind of a search engine. A search engine for static almost-none to none JavaScript pages. It would penalize pages for ad-network usage. I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or data extraction operations. Just pages put there by people that want to share knowledge and ideas. I mostly find it on pages that lack ads and often are pure HTML - no CSS and no JS. At least in areas that interest me. Maybe there is a place for a search engine that would index only pages like that? It certainly would be easier than competing with Google on indexing whole of the attention-whoring Internet.
  - throwaway0071 9y ago
    https://stumbleupon.com https://stumbleupon.com
  - bloaf 9y ago
    https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
    - vxNsr 9y ago
      This is terrific, I wanna add this as a ddg bang...
lkrubner 9y ago
I especially miss the blogosphere of the era 1999-2006, before the emergence of Facebook and Twitter. I miss the era when tech people could debate a new technical protocol by posting thoughtful essays on their blogs, and then other technical people would post rebuttals on their own blogs, and the conversation would go back and forth, among the various blogs, but out in the open, and very democratic. Nowadays a lot of the new protocols are, for all practical purposes, designed inside of Google or Facebook or Apple, and then announced to the world, without much debate. For a close look at the earlier era, see this very long essay I wrote in 2006 (which was popular back in 2006) in which I summarized the tech world's blog debate about RSS: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-... "RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it"
qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
I miss the dial-up BBS boards.

77pt77 9y ago

I just miss that it was mainly text and could be used in a terminal without missing much. More content density, better S/N ratio.

Frondo 9y ago
Not specifically directed at you, but sort of directed at you: I wish everyone who pined for the 25-years-ago days of mostly text pages would, instead of pining, just go out there and produce that content they want to see. Instead of pining, start writing. Hosting is cheap or free, browsers still parse simple HTML, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a return to that simpler form.
- 77pt77 9y ago
  I don't write on-line content (no blog for example) but if I did I'd test it in (e)links for sure. :)
- mi100hael 9y ago
  I do and I test my personal website on lynx. Doesn't change the fact that sites like this are under the misguided impression that it's cheaper to ship 2 MB of JavaScript with each request rather than just responding with the fucking 2 KB of article text so they end up looking like: # I Bought a Book About the Internet From 1994 and None of the Links Worked - Motherboard #motherboard Quantcast [p?c1=2&c2=8568956&cv=2.0&cj=1]
  - Frondo 9y ago
    So how much would you pay for a bare-bones, text-only version of the content, if you're going to read JS-decorated content?
    - mi100hael 9y ago
      Are you suggesting that ads can't appear in text articles? Or that ad blockers don't exist for graphical browsers?
    - exergy 9y ago
      The question isn't one of us creating it, although, unlike those downvoting you, I understand where you come from. The question is, who will (and how to) create a curation of sorts. A Google for the simple web. A one stop shop that encourages barebones simplicity and fosters a community where people only allow a simplified internet, and adtech is a nonstarter.
- mulmen 9y ago
  Rent is expensive in my city, do you think it is reasonable to tell someone who can't afford rent to just buy their own building? That's what you are suggesting.
  - throwawaywonk 9y ago
    Building a web page costs basically nothing; commercial real estate is much more expensive.
  - JCharante 9y ago
    You're not going to be in the Alexa top 10,000. Go run a docker container for $3/month to host your site, cache it with cloudflare's free plan and pay $12/year for a domain. Its only $48/yr to host all your content. It's really not that ridiculous.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      It is ridiculous because time is scarce. We have to decide how to spend our time. That doesn't mean we have to shut up and accept everything else.
    - kwhitefoot 9y ago
      For the kind of static content we seem to be talking about you can use https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/. No need to spend any money.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  It's impossible to produce that content because the culture was very different. For one, it was largely un-monetised. There were no banner ads, no ad trackers, no giant shopping sites, no market-driven content design. But many ISPs offered free web space, and HTML 1.0 was so simple almost anyone could hack together a basic site with a plain vanilla text editor. So people did. For fun. Lots and lots of them. It looked like crap, but it was weird/hilarious/insane/inspiring in equal measures in a way that's impossible to reproduce today.
  - krapp 9y ago
    > It's impossible to produce that content because the culture was very different. What? It's not at all impossible. Get a server, put whatever you want on it. No one is going to force you to monetize or market anything, or use a Node.js backend with AWS and React, or whatever the kids are doing these days. Basic HTML in a plain text editor still works just fine.
    - wolfgke 9y ago
      > What? It's not at all impossible. Get a server, put whatever you want on it. Not in Germany. There is a set of laws called "Impressumspflicht" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht) which forces you to add a mandatory imprint on your website. If you do something wrong or forget to include some mandatory information (what is mandatory also depends on the kind of website), you can easily get sued (and this has often happened). In other words: It is not easy for a layperson to set up a website in a way that will not easily become a risk of becoming sued.
      - krapp 9y ago
        The context of this conversation seems to have more to do with code and complexity than legal necessities but point taken. The parent was suggesting it was impossible to create the sort of simple, personal, just for fun sites that people used to, but there's no technical reason for that to be the case. It just happens that people add unnecessary complexity to their projects nowadays because 1) they use frameworks and tools that facilitate it and 2) it looks better on their resumes.
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
  All the content I read will still be the way I don't want it though.
- discreditable 9y ago
  For my site, I created a Pelican theme which is HTML-only. There's no JS at all! I plan on publishing the theme eventually, once I'm a bit happier with it. You can see it at https://brashear.me https://brashear.me. I'm very happy with how quickly it loads. I mentioned to one of my friends that it feels like upgrading to DSL back in the dial-up days. If you very badly want to rip off the theme, it's stealable from my GitHub copy of my site: https://github.com/KeenRivals/brashear.me/tree/master/themes/pelican-feather https://github.com/KeenRivals/brashear.me/tree/master/themes...
Mateon1 9y ago
Recently I came across the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day website[1], it's old-school HTML, started in 1995 and still updated today. All the HTML takes 2-4 kB on average, but you might not get much use from the site in a terminal :) [1]: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

Apocryphon 9y ago

Maybe Neocities should add a webring feature.

wcummings 9y ago
Is this a joke?
- kyledrake 9y ago
  No, I get this request quite a bit from people that sincerely miss web rings. I'm not sure how much of it is anachronistic nostalgia and how much of it is a true desire to bring it back. To give an example of this, I've gotten more than a few requests to add the Gopher protocol to Neocities.
  - wcummings 9y ago
    But aren't web rings just composed of vanilla hyperlinks? Why does that need to be added as a feature? What's stopping people from making them now?
    - kyledrake 9y ago
      IIRC the old webrings had a CGI backend that would collect the addresses and then you would click "next" and it would take you to the next site. But yeah you could just make a vanilla one. You could also just make one outside of the context of Neocities. But if the next site went down or didn't link to the next site correctly, you couldn't proceed. That was always my problem with webrings. They depended on each site to embed the ring code properly, and usually they didn't, so you were stuck trying to find a working one. It was a pretty lousy UX overall.
      - wcummings 9y ago
        That's interesting the ones I remember were literally rings of static links, coordinated by the webmasters, presumably over email. I see what you mean now.

dep_b 9y ago

I remember browsing the internet was much more of a networked thing. If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still can get lost in a never ending deeper web of links. However WikiPedia is a very cleaned up version of the early web. It lacks animated .gifs for sure. But the difference with Wikipedia was that people would maintain a Links section full of interesting stuff and people would join web rings for various subjects, interlinking vastly different sites. Finding information often happened through Yahoo! (AltaVista was there too but it was lacking the quality of handpicked results) through a tree based discovery system, to continue through whatever you could find through links on an interesting page. Exchanging links was something that really frequently happened. It resulted in an internet where you just kept clicking and discovering and digging. Sometimes also frustrating as browsers lacked tabs and I would navigate all links one by one by loading it and going back. I would forget how I arrived at a certain page sometimes because it was so deep and I never found the breadcrumbs again.

neonnoodle 9y ago
> It lacks animated .gifs for sure Um excuse me what do you call this masterpiece https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Ellipses_with_SliderCrank_Ellipses_at_Crank_Side.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Ellipses...
- Danihan 9y ago
  Doesn't count unless it's a spooky skull. https://media3.giphy.com/media/6SPkShZNS9Uqs/giphy.gif https://media3.giphy.com/media/6SPkShZNS9Uqs/giphy.gif
  - cooper12 9y ago
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Articular_tubercle_of_temporal_bone_-_skull_-_animation01.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Articula...
- hawski 9y ago
  Wow! That's nice. I started to imagine how it could be used in a geeky clock.

addicted 9y ago

Is it richer and deeper now? Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook. When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about. Today it's basically Wikipedia at the top, with results from the same list of about 3-4 sites depending on the topic of what I searched for.

hawski 9y ago
I'm beginning to think that there is a niche for a peculiar kind of a search engine. A search engine for static almost-none to none JavaScript pages. It would penalize pages for ad-network usage. I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or data extraction operations. Just pages put there by people that want to share knowledge and ideas. I mostly find it on pages that lack ads and often are pure HTML - no CSS and no JS. At least in areas that interest me. Maybe there is a place for a search engine that would index only pages like that? It certainly would be easier than competing with Google on indexing whole of the attention-whoring Internet.
- throwaway0071 9y ago
  https://stumbleupon.com https://stumbleupon.com
- bloaf 9y ago
  https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
  - vxNsr 9y ago
    This is terrific, I wanna add this as a ddg bang...

lkrubner 9y ago

I especially miss the blogosphere of the era 1999-2006, before the emergence of Facebook and Twitter. I miss the era when tech people could debate a new technical protocol by posting thoughtful essays on their blogs, and then other technical people would post rebuttals on their own blogs, and the conversation would go back and forth, among the various blogs, but out in the open, and very democratic. Nowadays a lot of the new protocols are, for all practical purposes, designed inside of Google or Facebook or Apple, and then announced to the world, without much debate. For a close look at the earlier era, see this very long essay I wrote in 2006 (which was popular back in 2006) in which I summarized the tech world's blog debate about RSS: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-... "RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it"

qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago

I miss the dial-up BBS boards.