19 ms·

Does anyone remember websites?

895 points by dfps 9y ago

mdhughes 9y ago
As the former perpetrator of several hand-coded sites and blogs full of text organized by 52-card-pickup principles, going back to '80s BBS's, online services, USENET, and then Gopher and WWW on a University shared network… Switching to Wordpress (obLink: https://mdhughes.tech/ https://mdhughes.tech/ ) and slowly reposting the stuff I want visible in an organized, searchable format with a consistent style and a nice CMS is the best possible improvement. My latest change is a "Starred posts" category, so I can surface the longer, more thought-out pieces and still have ephemeral content like semi-daily music links and status updates. Manton Reece's http://micro.blog/ http://micro.blog/ is putting Twitter-like interaction under a blog framework, hosted on m.b or on your own site. Discovery of these things is still hard, and Google's ad-searching site unsurprisingly only surfaces ads, but http://duck.go http://duck.go and social media (like HN) can point you at content you want to see. [ed: sp]
agumonkey 9y ago
recent re-found http://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/ http://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/ great example of dense cool passion driven site
p4bl0 9y ago
This is why I really love initiatives such as https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ :). I don't have a use for it myself as I have my own servers, but I'm glad this kind of service exists!
themodelplumber 9y ago
This is pretty harsh critique. I first got on the web in 1992 and what we have now is a paradise compared to what we had then. Sure, you may have to look with intent for what you want, but freely coasting around the web has always carried liabilities. It used to be "you'll find lots of junk" and the junk has simply diversified since then. I also noticed the author doesn't even use a single hyperlink in his own article. Be the change you want to see. I was just checking out Project Rho. Before that I was building a link page of my own because I'm getting into ham radio. The old web we love is still here and it'll always be around in some form.
- jstimpfle 9y ago
  I don't think the author talks about hyperlinks. It's fine to have pages without them. What links do you miss?
  - themodelplumber 9y ago
    > Some bigger websites at the time were like mazes with some of the words on each page hyperlinked to other pages on the site that were about each of those separate topics, and you had to open up multiple links from each page otherwise you'd lose them, and you wanted to read every word.
    - nandemo 9y ago
      This was a nightmare before tabs were a thing.
      - millstone 9y ago
        why?
        yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
        Follow a link, lose your place and have to start over.
        brlewis 9y ago
        I don't get this. What's wrong with the back button plus visited link colors? I feel like the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and the number of open tabs makes things more confusing.
        yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
        Usually, the next page also has interesting links, and the tree quickly becomes painful to traverse.
ggambetta 9y ago
> Does anyone remember websites? These might be unfamiliar to anyone unexposed to the internet before 2005 or so [...] it was largely a collection of websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write about it and put it online. Does the author mean web rings? I do remember these :)
- sixstringtheory 9y ago
  Yes, I very recently thought about them for the first time in decades, while pondering the platformization of the web. Those and stumbleupon were fun surfing!
- dfps 9y ago
  I wasn't exactly talking about webrings, but now I'd like to see one. Can you link me to one please? (- the author)
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    http://www.homebrewcpu.com/ http://www.homebrewcpu.com/ Bottom of the page.
  - feedbeef 9y ago
    http://www.myth-and-fantasy.com/misc/webrings.html http://www.myth-and-fantasy.com/misc/webrings.html These webrings with graphical designs most accurately capture my memories of them (possibly at their height) from the late 90s.
- almostarockstar 9y ago
  I also got thinking about them in the last month or so. I thought it might be fun/interesting to put one together today for the sake of nostalgia.
- ambrosite 9y ago
  I remember web rings. I used to own a couple of sites that were part of a web ring. I remember it was actually hard to get into them back then -- the maintainers only wanted quality sites and you had to submit yours for review and explain to them why you deserved to be included. They were actually a decent source of traffic in the early days, before search engines became a thing.
kaoD 9y ago
> This article can be discussed on r/TTTThis. Oh the irony. The web has changed: in some ways for the worse, and in others for the better. I remember websites being like a lottery: sometimes you'd hit jackpot but most of them were "Under construction" GIFs over ugly tiled backgrounds. There is still ton of content and much more than what I would've dreamt on the 90s. Platforms like Reddit allow everyone, whether they know HTML or not, to publish their own content and even comment on others'. Yes, Facebook and Twitter suck, but that's mostly it. I'm very, very grateful for everything else on modern internet. This smells like 'memberberries.
- alphaalpha101 9y ago
  >There is still ton of content and much more than what I would've dreamt on the 90s. Platforms like Reddit allow everyone, whether they know HTML or not, to publish their own content and even comment on others'. The amount of good content on reddit is no larger than the amount of good content that existed before. The difference is now it's drowned out by all the Trump supporters.
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    Please don't bring politics into a thread that has nothing to do with politics
    - nandemo 9y ago
      Besides, there's very little politics in niche subreddits. I'm subscribed to /r/pic (not /r/pics!), /r/flute, /r/stonerrock, /r/chess, /r/boardgames, /foreignmovies, /r/vermiculture and /r/japanlife and the latter is the only one where American politics sometimes creeps up.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - alphaalpha101 9y ago
      Personality cults aren't political.
tonyarkles 9y ago
Last night I ended up, for some weird nostalgic reason, installing a Gopher client, just to see if there was anything still around. Amazingly, there's a bunch of blogs (called phlogs in Gopherspace) that people are updating regularly! Pretty amazing!
- pavlov 9y ago
  I hope there’s a Gopher phlog CMS called Phlogiston?
- KGIII 9y ago
  I check every couple of years and both Gopher and Usenet lumber on.
  - tonyarkles 9y ago
    Yup! I still use my eternal-september account on a weekly basis!
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  Shameless Plug (ahem): http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/gopher-browser-for-windows/ http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/gopher-browser-for-windows/
- tree_of_item 9y ago
  How did you find these Gopher sites? Is there a Gopher search engine, or is it just a hand-updated list?
  - tonyarkles 9y ago
    After installing the gopher client (apt install gopher) and running it, you can navigate through the menus to Veronica-2, which indexes a ton of them. You can also just browse around. The linking reminds me a lot of the old days of the web.
  - dogcow 9y ago
    Gopher is a great protocol. I never really used it back in its heyday; I'm not sure I knew it existed at the time (I didn't really get "real" Internet access until 1995 or so). I recently discovered it after having similar sentiments as the author of this article concerning the state of the WWW. After you get your Gopher client set up (lynx in the terminal works great), a good starting point is gopher://sdf.org There are many active "phlogs" published on SDF.org; there is also an aggregator that tracks some 20-odd phlogs at: gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/bongusta (though it seems to be down at the time of this posting). The "Gopherspace" is a refreshing wormhole -- with a surprising amount of present-day activity -- into the Internet of yesteryear. I highly recommend checking it out and perhaps publishing your own content on Gopher if you're tired of the dumpster fire that is the WWW.
joosters 9y ago
Another thing was that there was no dross, because everything had to be written and uploaded by a person. Some rose-tinted glasses right there!
- Semiapies 9y ago
  Yeah, I've been on the web since NCSA Mosaic, and there was a lot of dross.
alkonaut 9y ago
Wait, we don't call websites "websites" anymore? What do we call them now?
- Semiapies 9y ago
  This is a variation of the "RSS is dead (but everything provides RSS feeds)" thing.
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  Webapps.
- dabockster 9y ago
  > What do we call them now? Startups /s
agumonkey 9y ago
resonnates with my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586839
clydethefrog 9y ago
See also the analysis (from 2015) of an Iranian blogger who got arrested in 2008 and got free in 2015 - he did not recognize the new web. (Ironically also posted on Medium...) According to him, hyperlinks turned into a social media stream. https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426 https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a4...
- username223 9y ago
  After blocking all the JavaScript and hiding the position=fixed garbage, that was an interesting article. > So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it. I write a blog, and publish links to posts on Facebook because doing so costs me nothing. It also gets me next to nothing. People click on those links about as often as Facebook asks me for my credit card to "boost" them.
  - gboudrias 9y ago
    > hiding the position=fixed garbage Oh wow, I literally never want this behavior! Do you have a generic trick? "Inspect element" is tedious.
    - delta1 9y ago
      You could use ublock origin (or similar) to "block" the offending elements.
    - mabcat 9y ago
      I have a "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet to do that job, as the first thing on my bookmarks toolbar. I'm clicking that thing all the time, it works great. So long stupid sliding navbars, enter-your-email popups, fixed video autoplayers, etc. I think I got it from here: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
    - username223 9y ago
exabrial 9y ago
No. Even basic documentation sites now has to be a fricken enriched browser experience
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ambrosite 9y ago
I do remember those websites. For me, the difference is that now the Web is much more useful, but back then it was a lot more fun. True, you could sometimes waste hours following random links hoping to find something good, but the thrill of discovery when you stumbled across a gold mine of information was a huge part of the appeal. Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. That makes the Web on the whole much more useful, but the thrill of the hunt is gone -- that's what Jakob Nielsen was referring to all those years ago when he talked about "information scent". https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/
- KGIII 9y ago
  Browsing vs. searching. We don't seem to do much browsing anymore. We search and selectively pick what we consume. It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. Now, I search a term and click on the first few results, at most. Sure, there are exceptions but they are rare. As you say, it's much more useful.
  - ambrosite 9y ago
    >> I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. Yep, that's exactly what I used to do. That's really what "surfing the web" meant back in those days -- that you would spend hours just clicking links, seeing where they would take you. And of course, they would quite often take you to completely unexpected but cool things that you never would have found or even thought to look for otherwise.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Is that any different from spending an hour finding links on Wikipedia or HN or Reddit or Facebook or whatever you're into?
qznc 9y ago
They are still out there. Probably even more than ever. You just don't find them because the SEO-sites drain away all traffic. I believe my own site would qualify? http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/ http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/
- astura 9y ago
  Well it's uncommon to refer to yourself in the third person on the web like that. Makes it seem much more, um, impersonal and sterile I guess.
  - qznc 9y ago
    Yes, but that text gets copy-pasted when a short bio is needed. That is very convenient.
- krylon 9y ago
  The article on using Lua from D looks very interesting! I've been meaning to get to know D in more depth for a while now, this looks like a good starting point for a small toy project.
  - qznc 9y ago
    Thanks. I still believe it is one of the best examples how powerful D meta programming is.
- sgt 9y ago
  That would be interesting - a search engine that was resistant to most SEO techniques and allowed one to find these types of sites. Would be a great alternative to Google sometimes.
  - taftster 9y ago
    The only search engine that is resistant to SEO is one that doesn't have enough traffic for any SEO to matter. If it's popular, it will be gamed.
deleted 9y ago
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shams93 9y ago
I was a part of the Geocities team in 1998. Part of the reason a large part of the early web no longer exists is that many of these web pages were hosted for free by Geocities. Tragically when they were purchased by Yahoo, Yahoo decided to simply shred the early web, they decided it was not worth it to keep supporting the service and simply hit delete on a huge chunk of the content of the early web.
- shmerl 9y ago
  https://archive.org/web/geocities.php https://archive.org/web/geocities.php Here is an interesting example: https://archive.org/details/TheGeocitiesMidiCollectionVersion1.2 https://archive.org/details/TheGeocitiesMidiCollectionVersio...
- astura 9y ago
  In fairness, Yahoo ran geocities for an entire decade before shutting it down.
fiala__ 9y ago
> Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique. Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by `<marquee>`s, poorly-laid out flashing gifs and bright yellow text on a white background.
- Latty 9y ago
  I saw a lot of people trying to avoid HTML in their websites in the past. The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly. That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.
  - fiala__ 9y ago
    Oh yes, totally forgot about flash and `<map>`s – but one could argue even those were originally designed to solve the problems of 'vanilla' HTML. They of course failed and HTML kind of prevailed, but only by being coupled with a massive set of APIs on the Web Platform. If it wasn't for those JS APIs, we might be stuck with Flash forever.
  - donatj 9y ago
    Lol, I remember working in a place where half the devs SWORE Flex was the future of all websites. Really worked out :) I also remember converting a site made entirely of Java applets to html and JavaScript in the early 2000s.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. Unstyled HTML (optionally with user style sheets) is more usable and accessible than today's one-size-fits-the-designer design for the kind of content that used to dominate (and is still a large segment of) the web. (We've got better tools for making usable and accessible content, but they are mostly not used for that purpose.) For interactive applications, its a different story.
tek-cyb-org 9y ago
is that a new app?
robertdicabrio 9y ago
i remember a website letmewatch.ch have any one heard it.
mpetrovich 9y ago
One of the few websites I can still lose hours on: https://waitbutwhy.com/ https://waitbutwhy.com/
indigochill 9y ago
Does http://3564020356.org http://3564020356.org count? It does appear to use Alexa for tracking now, but otherwise it looks pretty "home-grown".
schnevets 9y ago
10 years from now, we'll be waxing nostalgia about entrepreneurs who made a living off Instagram, Amazon, WordPress, and other platforms. 'There was a kid who used to "rate dogs" and he was hilarious! And he did it for free without any corporate backing! Made a killing on T-Shirts and stuff as well!'
rch 9y ago
I think Ward's Federated Wiki approach could help bring some personality back to the web.
disconnected 9y ago
> Does anyone remember when you they stumbled on a new website written by some guy and read his first article, then clicked back to his homepage and saw he had a list of similar articles that looked like they'd be just as interesting. Or, more likely, you clicked "back" on the "navigation bar" and it would 404 because the author messed up the links, since it was all hand crafted HTML. Funny stuff aside, there are still loads of "websites" out there. If I understand the criteria here, we are looking for mostly hand crafted pages maintained by individuals (or small groups) that have interesting content. Something, should I say, very "web 1.0"? Here's a good one. Make sure to check the GUI Gallery section: http://toastytech.com http://toastytech.com User Friendly is always hilarious (unfortunately, updates stopped ages ago, but going through the archive is sill fun): http://www.userfriendly.org/ http://www.userfriendly.org/ And here's something random, the best page in the universe: http://maddox.xmission.com/ http://maddox.xmission.com/ Like I said, there are TONS of these out there. You just have to, you know, look for them.
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  We need a good search index of these and all the other sites likes them. Something that deliberately doesn't include pages from bigger sites or sites full of cruft.
  - discreditable 9y ago
    It could probably be easily accomplished by filtering out sites that use JS libraries like jquery, etc.
    - fenwick67 9y ago
      "best viewed with" followed by your query (ex: "best viewed with" dragons) gets you lots of great old results in a regular search engine. It will grab any sites that said "best viewed with truetype fonts", "best viewed with Netscape" et cetera from the internet's heyday.
mamcx 9y ago
Something close today, Go to: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/randomitem.php?p=1 http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/randomitem.php?p=1
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
i6Respawns 9y ago
Yes I think I know how you feel. You might like reading books haha.
adrianratnapala 9y ago
It's clever of the author to use "website" in this more specific sense. Technically a "website" roughly means anything served as HTML over HTTP. But all us fogeys know what his title meant anyway. But I still think he protests too much. The style subject-oriented websites which the author is referring to evolved slightly and got the new name "blogs". The blogosphere might not be as popular as social networking, but it is still huger than the web of the '90s.
- gfodor 9y ago
  Eh, I don't think blogs are really that equivalent to old school websites. Blog, being short for "web log" implies a temporal-based feed of posts. Old school sites were often much more varied, webs of pages broken up by subject or topic with links scattered everywhere to the rest of the web.
jumpkickhit 9y ago
Can't say I miss Geocities inundating the search engines. Still though, it was pretty fun when there were more than 5 or so websites to go to, like a lot of people tend to only do these days.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
anthk 9y ago
http://neoticies.org http://neoticies.org Welcome back :) I am currently doing a minimal OpenBSD site in Spanish :D
igorgue 9y ago
I miss them, they were a great example of how creative everyone can be, now doing "awesome" things on the internet is so cookie cuttered.
- astura 9y ago
  And "welcome to my website it is still under construction please sign my guestbook" isn't cookie cutter?
osteele 9y ago
I remember the NCSA Web Site of the Day, circa 1993. It was a page that listed new web sites that had appeared on the web, with a brief summary and link to each one. Many days there wasn't a new web site. Some days there were two.
dwheeler 9y ago
I understand the sarcasm, but really, there are a lot of "real" websites, directly controlled by individuals who post what they want. I point you to my own website, https://www.dwheeler.com https://www.dwheeler.com .... it's not the latest in CSS, no Megabytes of JavaScript, and no cross-site tracking either.
edflsafoiewq 9y ago
The site I remember feeling that way about was the Robot Wisdom Homepage, now preserved only on the WayBack Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20130409045156/http://www.robotwisdom.com/home.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130409045156/http://www.robotw...
jimmeyotoole 9y ago
Member websites??
peterburkimsher 9y ago
The most ironic part to me is that the page is PHP, not static HTML. Although this type of style isn't common with the online web these days, it's still visible in offline caches of popular websites (e.g. offline Wikipedia). Pages load so fast, and the total file size is much smaller because of the lack of JS/jQuery/React/etc bloat.
canoebuilder 9y ago
http://fusionanomaly.net/nodebase.html http://fusionanomaly.net/nodebase.html
tutuca 9y ago
It even has got a broken hit counter and all... 000020083 at time of reading :)
dbshapco 9y ago
The Internet has become a carrier signal for advertising.
joeblau 9y ago
I thought about this a few weeks ago. I remember the late 90's actually searching around the web. Now there are so many walled gardens that individual creation is limited to posting a Medium blog or Facebook post. Today, I only visit a handful of sites and developer documentation.
bluetwo 9y ago
Remember when the Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" button was interesting and took you to one of these random sites?
dickclucas 9y ago
Shameless plug but what he describes was partly my inspiration for building https://nogradient.com/ https://nogradient.com/. It is very stripped down and minimal. Would love some feedback on it.
albeebe1 9y ago
My website still uses tables http://albeebe.com/ http://albeebe.com/
- nautilus12 9y ago
  What? None of the many notable Indiana sites? ;)
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  Legit table use there. It's bad to use tables for layout mind you. Because you should use the much more semantic <div class="col-3">...
- DamonHD 9y ago
  Here is my '90s vintage still alive and kicking (we were one of the first UK ISPs): http://www.exnet.com/ http://www.exnet.com/ and a new old site also built with hand-crafted HTML but CSS rather than tables! http://m.earth.org.uk/ http://m.earth.org.uk/ It's nonsense to say that such things no longer exist.
tacosmell 9y ago
Try to find more better information on very specific topics, however, and you'll find that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the popular content, making it harder to find the anything else. I don't think that's a good thing.
tacosmell 9y ago
Try to find better information on very specific topics, however, and you'll find that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the bad content, making it harder to find the other stuff. I don't think that's good.
dogcow 9y ago
Check out the search engine at http://wiby.me http://wiby.me From their about page: Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web. The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.
- exadeci 9y ago
  Haha if look for google under the url it says: "a wise guy eh? ಠ_ಠ"
- rb666 9y ago
  I hit "Surprise me" and first site it hits autodownloads a .mid file, that used to work better I 'member.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I hit "Surprise me" and got this gem: http://g2mil.com http://g2mil.com. I like that search site already.
    - hawski 9y ago
      Great quote from this one: > What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism, all else is publicity. > Paul Fussell
    - fractallyte 9y ago
nagakp 9y ago
Nowadays, everyone with a basic understanding of search engines easily find almost anything they need within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimizing more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the content.
citruscomputing 9y ago
I wrote a little program that does the "follow links and see if I find anything interesting" thing. It takes seed links, pulls all links that don't go back to the same domain, and then chooses 50 and repeats. Then there's another program to find the uncommon sites from everything gathered. Check it out at https://github.com/riley-martine/water_skimmer https://github.com/riley-martine/water_skimmer
davesque 9y ago
Unfortunately, a large part of the reason the web used to be fun is that there didn't used to be anything like it. The only way we can get that again is by inventing the next world-changing communications technology, not by trying to dig up the old web. It pains me as much as anyone else to say this since I got started on the web back in 1994 and experienced its early magic first-hand.
chewz 9y ago
I remember that spending time on a web was actually interesting back then. Interesting like discovering and learning something new not like browsing shopping sites and FB, Instagram because there is nothing else to do...
minikomi 9y ago
I've found amateur ham radio stations are a good thread to tug on to find that older weird-internet. - Look for the sites with 4-5 letter callsigns on them - Go to their links page - Keep going down the rabbit hole. EG. here's a few I just found googling: http://www.qsl.net/kp4md/ http://www.qsl.net/kp4md/ https://k7nv.com/ https://k7nv.com/ http://www.w8ji.com/ http://www.w8ji.com/
starboy1996 9y ago
Sure. If it's really worth visiting. You remember them somehow and never forget
scroot 9y ago
Ian Milligan has done some interesting work [1] on the history of GeoCities, including some archives I think [1] http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers/milligan.pdf http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers/milligan.pdf
blue100 9y ago
I remember all those websites.
pers0n 9y ago
Another thing is people often just go to Wikipedia, Wikipedia replaced the need for many fan sites. I had things copied from my sites and put on Wikipedia and tired to get a link back or a source mentioned and it was removed each time. So I lost motivation to even update fan sites, since whatever I type is going to get pasted onto Wikipedia with no link back.
- cheschire 9y ago
  And wikia. That replaced much of the need for fictional fan sites. I visit memory alpha weekly.
  - djur 9y ago
    Unfortunately, Wikia looks like it's in the process of becoming a cautionary tale, with its recent move to start injecting its own video content into certain high-traffic wikis and a general decline in customizability and independence.
    - CM30 9y ago
      Wikia seems to be gradually being replaced by self hosted wikis, at least where larger fandoms are concerned. The Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance (Mario Wiki, Zelda Wiki, Bulbapedia, etc) are one example, the Square Enix Wiki Alliance are another, and I'm sure the likes of the Simpsons Wiki have moved away from the service as well.
      - Hedja 9y ago
        Zelda Wiki is hosted on Gamepedia. It's like Wikia but specifically for Video Games and less obstrusive.
        CM30 9y ago
        Well it used to be self hosted. Not sure I like the move much, feels like they're betraying the organisation they're supposedly part of.
arca_vorago 9y ago
I do, which is why many years ago I told myself I was going to make my websites as js free as possible. Pure, simple, readable html5+css is my long term goal. The thing is, this part of the web still exists, it's actually just simply harder to find due to the control on the filter big corps have these days. You just have to search. I am regularly adding hackers blogs to my bookmarks. Sometimes they stopped updating in 2012, but their writing still looks worthwhile. The real democratization of knowledge the internet offers to us is there for the taking if people would break free from their self-forged filter-bubble shackles.
- acuozzo 9y ago
  > I am regularly adding hackers blogs to my bookmarks. Sometimes they stopped updating in 2012, but their writing still looks worthwhile. Can we start sharing these somewhere? I have several I'd like to contribute.
lovemetwotimes 9y ago
Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds.
- vog 9y ago
  That's simply not true: Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15634089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15634089 (Unless, of course, you mean by "almost anything" everything of your personal interest.)
frik 9y ago
MySpace, Tripod, GeoCities, LiveJournal, and similar free hosted/services had a lot of interesting, weird, etc pages. It was easy and friction free to create a new site. Everyone had a copy of Frontpage/Dreamweaver/GoLive/HomeSite/iWeb/Composer on his PC and uploading worked with a browser form, one file at a time.
superkuh 9y ago
The web of the 90s is alive on .onion.
jancsika 9y ago
I've never been particularly nostalgic for websites. I'm slightly nostalgic for shared Windows folders on LANs at college dorms. I remember seeing the first South Park short from such a folder as it was going viral. I'm extremely nostalgic for the original Napster. I don't ever remember searching for a piece of music and coming up short. And I remember it being a very sudden shift-- one month you're making a mental note to search for a CD you misplaced somewhere back home, the next month you're getting on Napster to check if the theme to Ghostbuster's 2 has lyrics that recount the plot of the movie. It does. A few weeks ago I typed "Battlestar Galactica" into Netflix, and guess what? It showed me lots and lots of results, none of which were Battlestar Galactica. And this isn't your run of the mill entitlement of a fool addicted to his Iphone apps. That is entitlement of a person yearning for modern functionality to match a shitty piece of software that saw its last stable release 15 years ago. I'm having a hard time finding any numbers for the actual amount of music that was available on the original Napster at the time. Can anyone put some hard data to my rose colored glasses?
- tomduncalf 9y ago
  Check out Soulseek, it is very similar to how I remember the original Napster. Lots of obscure rarities on there music-wise, I've not tried it for anything else. The one P2P thing I am nostalgic for is Audio Galaxy - it had an awesome system where it they indexed everyone's content on their website, so you could see every file that had ever been on the network and add it to your "want list", then when that person came online, it would start downloading. To be fair "wish list searches" in Soulseek serve a similar purpose, but I loved that ability to browse every file that had ever been online!
  - sixstringtheory 9y ago
    Soulseek is incredible, discovered all sorts of smaller-time musicians that never wouldve been sold at the Best Buy in the suburban wasteland of my youth. I can’t believe it’s under active maintenance after all these years!
- yread 9y ago
  > I'm extremely nostalgic for the original Napster. I'm even more nostalgic of Direct Connect: Hey this person has this cool and rare thing I'm searching for let's download his file list to see what else they like.
Illniyar 9y ago
"it was largely a collection of websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write about it and put it online. " Oh,you mean like blogs? Seriously, this sounds like being nostalgic for it's own sake. I fail to see how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a good idea - now everyone can have their own website. I really don't miss the "glorious 90's" type of websites - with the thousand of animated images, weird background images and marquee everywhere. Sure it made every site unique - every site was terrible to the eyes in it's own special way. Also the idea that all sites now look the same is quite preposterous - sure a lot of sites are cookiecutter websites - especially marketing websites, but there are tons of unique designs - especially for blogs and personal websites.
- fphilipe 9y ago
  > Oh,you mean like blogs? Yes, but before they all looked the same and were hosted on the same platform. I miss the days where you would encounter a blog filled with great content and with a unique look and feel. It's as if it almost burned in in my memory. I still remember how the website looked of some great articles that resonated with me. That's one of the reasons I dislike Medium et al.
  - Illniyar 9y ago
    I don't think it matters where they are hosted, but I think it's disingenuous to say that all blogs look the same. Sure everything on medium looks the same, but there are many many blogs not on medium. Here, just after a simple search, a list of personal websites/blogs that look nothing alike: https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-35-best-personal-websites-weve-ever-seen https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-35-best-personal-websites...
  - peterwwillis 9y ago
    > Yes, but before they all looked the same and were hosted on the same platform. "LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick."
thallukrish 9y ago
This is what I wrote years ago in this blog http://productionjava.blogspot.sg/2014/07/the-broken-web.html http://productionjava.blogspot.sg/2014/07/the-broken-web.htm... and I have been working since then to fix it.
somberi 9y ago
I would like to add photo.net and particularly Philip Greenspun's "Travel with Samantha".
keerthivar 9y ago
very interesting website, and easy time pass
keerthivar 9y ago
easy identify methode
pythonist 9y ago
A very fine example of such site http://www.jeffbridges.com/ http://www.jeffbridges.com/.
galfarragem 9y ago
That's just Capitalism. Once Capitalism takes over a system, everything is optimized for profit. Some diehard hobbyists might remain but most convert. I'm still keeping 2 niche blogs.. let's see till when.
ForFreedom 9y ago
I started my career as a web designer back in the 1998-2000 which was fun then. People wanted gifs like crazy.
woodbot 9y ago
How about this for a website: https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/ The Beaker Browser! P2P browser, bringing back (the web and) websites since 2017
HaoZeke 9y ago
For me the web is more alive than ever... Just look at the way static websites are taking over.. However JS is the real threat to websites, react and its ilk are not amenable to being stored long term.. Too many things break.
ashtube 9y ago
The hit counter is what makes this website.
EngineerBetter 9y ago
I remember websites, and I remember that some were made by women, too. The author seems to have only read websites made by men.
mfukar 9y ago
Things change, nostalgia happens. Nothing to see here.
vinsingh0289 9y ago
I have so many websites but never got much traffic on any one of them, so i forgot all domain name of the website i created long back.
koancone 9y ago
The problem is the advertising model for content monetization. This is the same reason TV is mostly crap.
halr9000 9y ago
I'm "old" and I remember websites, and Bulletin Board Systems too, for that matter. But technology changes, and you gotta keep up, man. Don't let the kids bother you--they're just running through your yard to the next house over. It's a cool house, maybe check it out someone.
zapperdapper 9y ago
Couldn't agree with you more! Now sites seem to be spread out across the behemoth sites like Medium and of course all the social media platforms. A lot of the fun and sense of adventure that was present in the early days of the web is gone. Now it's "just business" - that blows! When did everyone get so obsessed with boosting their "online presence" in order to make a quick buck? I will also give a big thumbs up to Neocities. It's brilliant. There's a great retro feel to many of the sites there. People are having fun creating sites with HTML and a dash of CSS - for free.
epigramx 9y ago
They are called home pages.
SimpleLogin 9y ago
It really is interesting how incredibly niche everything was once upon a time.
DamnInteresting 9y ago
As the operator of a website old enough to still have a "webmaster" email address, it can be hard to remain relevant in the age of Google's search monopoly. Their algorithm has become the de facto gatekeeper to the entire Internet, and it happens to favor newer content over old. Consequently it favors those crappy flip-shop[1] sites where "writers" find quality content, perform a mild thesaurus modification, and re-post it. The original source, where the actual research and writing occurred, is stomped into insignificance. Yes, perhaps I'm slightly bitter, why do you ask? Between that and the "Wikipedia wall," boutique websites have been an endangered species for some time. [1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flip%20shop https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flip%20shop
jwm4 9y ago
Steve den Beste's original website, USS Clueless, was a perfect example of early website/blog.
rogerweissman77 9y ago
I have to bookmark everything.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Joseph Wood Krutch: "bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people, good roads bring bad people". http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm
bengrunfeld 9y ago
The old die and the young grow up, and if they're lucky, they get to eventually become old themselves. That is the natural order of things, even for the internet. That said, I miss them too ;)
Chiba-City 9y ago
Early business Web was Decision Support and not ad distraction based. There were cool "calculators" that would match relocation zip codes in Tulsa most like my favorite DC zip code or pick optimum breed/age/weight dog food. Product Selection Engines (PSE's) were a different value proposition than product or brand promotion. They are fun to write for engineers because they correct purchase errors with IT good deeds like Consumer Reports but with user variables on priorities or constraints. The Consumer Web threw out a great deal of baby with the .com era bathwater.
zacvivo 9y ago
I have been thinking on this idea lately and trying to build a tool to filter out the crap. What I have found is operators help, but the only things I have found to work are EDU sites, pre-2010 operator, and intext: welcome to my site. Beyond that, nothing seems to work to find complex content. I also thought about maybe making a tool to filter out content from the top million sites or so, but for now I am going to just use operators.

895 points by dfps 9y ago

As the former perpetrator of several hand-coded sites and blogs full of text organized by 52-card-pickup principles, going back to '80s BBS's, online services, USENET, and then Gopher and WWW on a University shared network… Switching to Wordpress (obLink: https://mdhughes.tech/ https://mdhughes.tech/ ) and slowly reposting the stuff I want visible in an organized, searchable format with a consistent style and a nice CMS is the best possible improvement. My latest change is a "Starred posts" category, so I can surface the longer, more thought-out pieces and still have ephemeral content like semi-daily music links and status updates. Manton Reece's http://micro.blog/ http://micro.blog/ is putting Twitter-like interaction under a blog framework, hosted on m.b or on your own site. Discovery of these things is still hard, and Google's ad-searching site unsurprisingly only surfaces ads, but http://duck.go http://duck.go and social media (like HN) can point you at content you want to see. [ed: sp]

agumonkey 9y ago

recent re-found http://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/ http://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/ great example of dense cool passion driven site

p4bl0 9y ago

This is why I really love initiatives such as https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ :). I don't have a use for it myself as I have my own servers, but I'm glad this kind of service exists!

themodelplumber 9y ago

This is pretty harsh critique. I first got on the web in 1992 and what we have now is a paradise compared to what we had then. Sure, you may have to look with intent for what you want, but freely coasting around the web has always carried liabilities. It used to be "you'll find lots of junk" and the junk has simply diversified since then. I also noticed the author doesn't even use a single hyperlink in his own article. Be the change you want to see. I was just checking out Project Rho. Before that I was building a link page of my own because I'm getting into ham radio. The old web we love is still here and it'll always be around in some form.

jstimpfle 9y ago
I don't think the author talks about hyperlinks. It's fine to have pages without them. What links do you miss?
- themodelplumber 9y ago
  > Some bigger websites at the time were like mazes with some of the words on each page hyperlinked to other pages on the site that were about each of those separate topics, and you had to open up multiple links from each page otherwise you'd lose them, and you wanted to read every word.
  - nandemo 9y ago
    This was a nightmare before tabs were a thing.
    - millstone 9y ago
      why?
      - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
        Follow a link, lose your place and have to start over.
        brlewis 9y ago
        I don't get this. What's wrong with the back button plus visited link colors? I feel like the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and the number of open tabs makes things more confusing.
        yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
        Usually, the next page also has interesting links, and the tree quickly becomes painful to traverse.

ggambetta 9y ago

> Does anyone remember websites? These might be unfamiliar to anyone unexposed to the internet before 2005 or so [...] it was largely a collection of websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write about it and put it online. Does the author mean web rings? I do remember these :)

sixstringtheory 9y ago
Yes, I very recently thought about them for the first time in decades, while pondering the platformization of the web. Those and stumbleupon were fun surfing!
dfps 9y ago
I wasn't exactly talking about webrings, but now I'd like to see one. Can you link me to one please? (- the author)
- jacquesm 9y ago
  http://www.homebrewcpu.com/ http://www.homebrewcpu.com/ Bottom of the page.
- feedbeef 9y ago
  http://www.myth-and-fantasy.com/misc/webrings.html http://www.myth-and-fantasy.com/misc/webrings.html These webrings with graphical designs most accurately capture my memories of them (possibly at their height) from the late 90s.
almostarockstar 9y ago
I also got thinking about them in the last month or so. I thought it might be fun/interesting to put one together today for the sake of nostalgia.
ambrosite 9y ago
I remember web rings. I used to own a couple of sites that were part of a web ring. I remember it was actually hard to get into them back then -- the maintainers only wanted quality sites and you had to submit yours for review and explain to them why you deserved to be included. They were actually a decent source of traffic in the early days, before search engines became a thing.

kaoD 9y ago

> This article can be discussed on r/TTTThis. Oh the irony. The web has changed: in some ways for the worse, and in others for the better. I remember websites being like a lottery: sometimes you'd hit jackpot but most of them were "Under construction" GIFs over ugly tiled backgrounds. There is still ton of content and much more than what I would've dreamt on the 90s. Platforms like Reddit allow everyone, whether they know HTML or not, to publish their own content and even comment on others'. Yes, Facebook and Twitter suck, but that's mostly it. I'm very, very grateful for everything else on modern internet. This smells like 'memberberries.

alphaalpha101 9y ago
>There is still ton of content and much more than what I would've dreamt on the 90s. Platforms like Reddit allow everyone, whether they know HTML or not, to publish their own content and even comment on others'. The amount of good content on reddit is no larger than the amount of good content that existed before. The difference is now it's drowned out by all the Trump supporters.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Please don't bring politics into a thread that has nothing to do with politics
  - nandemo 9y ago
    Besides, there's very little politics in niche subreddits. I'm subscribed to /r/pic (not /r/pics!), /r/flute, /r/stonerrock, /r/chess, /r/boardgames, /foreignmovies, /r/vermiculture and /r/japanlife and the latter is the only one where American politics sometimes creeps up.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - alphaalpha101 9y ago
    Personality cults aren't political.

tonyarkles 9y ago

Last night I ended up, for some weird nostalgic reason, installing a Gopher client, just to see if there was anything still around. Amazingly, there's a bunch of blogs (called phlogs in Gopherspace) that people are updating regularly! Pretty amazing!

pavlov 9y ago
I hope there’s a Gopher phlog CMS called Phlogiston?
KGIII 9y ago
I check every couple of years and both Gopher and Usenet lumber on.
- tonyarkles 9y ago
  Yup! I still use my eternal-september account on a weekly basis!
Jaruzel 9y ago
Shameless Plug (ahem): http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/gopher-browser-for-windows/ http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/gopher-browser-for-windows/
tree_of_item 9y ago
How did you find these Gopher sites? Is there a Gopher search engine, or is it just a hand-updated list?
- tonyarkles 9y ago
  After installing the gopher client (apt install gopher) and running it, you can navigate through the menus to Veronica-2, which indexes a ton of them. You can also just browse around. The linking reminds me a lot of the old days of the web.
- dogcow 9y ago
  Gopher is a great protocol. I never really used it back in its heyday; I'm not sure I knew it existed at the time (I didn't really get "real" Internet access until 1995 or so). I recently discovered it after having similar sentiments as the author of this article concerning the state of the WWW. After you get your Gopher client set up (lynx in the terminal works great), a good starting point is gopher://sdf.org There are many active "phlogs" published on SDF.org; there is also an aggregator that tracks some 20-odd phlogs at: gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/bongusta (though it seems to be down at the time of this posting). The "Gopherspace" is a refreshing wormhole -- with a surprising amount of present-day activity -- into the Internet of yesteryear. I highly recommend checking it out and perhaps publishing your own content on Gopher if you're tired of the dumpster fire that is the WWW.

joosters 9y ago

Another thing was that there was no dross, because everything had to be written and uploaded by a person. Some rose-tinted glasses right there!

Semiapies 9y ago
Yeah, I've been on the web since NCSA Mosaic, and there was a lot of dross.

alkonaut 9y ago

Wait, we don't call websites "websites" anymore? What do we call them now?

Semiapies 9y ago
This is a variation of the "RSS is dead (but everything provides RSS feeds)" thing.
jiggunjer 9y ago
Webapps.
dabockster 9y ago
> What do we call them now? Startups /s

agumonkey 9y ago

resonnates with my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586839

clydethefrog 9y ago

See also the analysis (from 2015) of an Iranian blogger who got arrested in 2008 and got free in 2015 - he did not recognize the new web. (Ironically also posted on Medium...) According to him, hyperlinks turned into a social media stream. https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426 https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a4...

username223 9y ago
After blocking all the JavaScript and hiding the position=fixed garbage, that was an interesting article. > So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it. I write a blog, and publish links to posts on Facebook because doing so costs me nothing. It also gets me next to nothing. People click on those links about as often as Facebook asks me for my credit card to "boost" them.
- gboudrias 9y ago
  > hiding the position=fixed garbage Oh wow, I literally never want this behavior! Do you have a generic trick? "Inspect element" is tedious.
  - delta1 9y ago
    You could use ublock origin (or similar) to "block" the offending elements.
  - mabcat 9y ago
    I have a "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet to do that job, as the first thing on my bookmarks toolbar. I'm clicking that thing all the time, it works great. So long stupid sliding navbars, enter-your-email popups, fixed video autoplayers, etc. I think I got it from here: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
  - username223 9y ago

exabrial 9y ago

No. Even basic documentation sites now has to be a fricken enriched browser experience

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ambrosite 9y ago

I do remember those websites. For me, the difference is that now the Web is much more useful, but back then it was a lot more fun. True, you could sometimes waste hours following random links hoping to find something good, but the thrill of discovery when you stumbled across a gold mine of information was a huge part of the appeal. Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. That makes the Web on the whole much more useful, but the thrill of the hunt is gone -- that's what Jakob Nielsen was referring to all those years ago when he talked about "information scent". https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/

KGIII 9y ago
Browsing vs. searching. We don't seem to do much browsing anymore. We search and selectively pick what we consume. It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. Now, I search a term and click on the first few results, at most. Sure, there are exceptions but they are rare. As you say, it's much more useful.
- ambrosite 9y ago
  >> I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. Yep, that's exactly what I used to do. That's really what "surfing the web" meant back in those days -- that you would spend hours just clicking links, seeing where they would take you. And of course, they would quite often take you to completely unexpected but cool things that you never would have found or even thought to look for otherwise.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Is that any different from spending an hour finding links on Wikipedia or HN or Reddit or Facebook or whatever you're into?

qznc 9y ago

They are still out there. Probably even more than ever. You just don't find them because the SEO-sites drain away all traffic. I believe my own site would qualify? http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/ http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/

astura 9y ago
Well it's uncommon to refer to yourself in the third person on the web like that. Makes it seem much more, um, impersonal and sterile I guess.
- qznc 9y ago
  Yes, but that text gets copy-pasted when a short bio is needed. That is very convenient.
krylon 9y ago
The article on using Lua from D looks very interesting! I've been meaning to get to know D in more depth for a while now, this looks like a good starting point for a small toy project.
- qznc 9y ago
  Thanks. I still believe it is one of the best examples how powerful D meta programming is.
sgt 9y ago
That would be interesting - a search engine that was resistant to most SEO techniques and allowed one to find these types of sites. Would be a great alternative to Google sometimes.
- taftster 9y ago
  The only search engine that is resistant to SEO is one that doesn't have enough traffic for any SEO to matter. If it's popular, it will be gamed.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

shams93 9y ago

I was a part of the Geocities team in 1998. Part of the reason a large part of the early web no longer exists is that many of these web pages were hosted for free by Geocities. Tragically when they were purchased by Yahoo, Yahoo decided to simply shred the early web, they decided it was not worth it to keep supporting the service and simply hit delete on a huge chunk of the content of the early web.

shmerl 9y ago
https://archive.org/web/geocities.php https://archive.org/web/geocities.php Here is an interesting example: https://archive.org/details/TheGeocitiesMidiCollectionVersion1.2 https://archive.org/details/TheGeocitiesMidiCollectionVersio...
astura 9y ago
In fairness, Yahoo ran geocities for an entire decade before shutting it down.

fiala__ 9y ago

> Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique. Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by `<marquee>`s, poorly-laid out flashing gifs and bright yellow text on a white background.

Latty 9y ago
I saw a lot of people trying to avoid HTML in their websites in the past. The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly. That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.
- fiala__ 9y ago
  Oh yes, totally forgot about flash and `<map>`s – but one could argue even those were originally designed to solve the problems of 'vanilla' HTML. They of course failed and HTML kind of prevailed, but only by being coupled with a massive set of APIs on the Web Platform. If it wasn't for those JS APIs, we might be stuck with Flash forever.
- donatj 9y ago
  Lol, I remember working in a place where half the devs SWORE Flex was the future of all websites. Really worked out :) I also remember converting a site made entirely of Java applets to html and JavaScript in the early 2000s.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. Unstyled HTML (optionally with user style sheets) is more usable and accessible than today's one-size-fits-the-designer design for the kind of content that used to dominate (and is still a large segment of) the web. (We've got better tools for making usable and accessible content, but they are mostly not used for that purpose.) For interactive applications, its a different story.

tek-cyb-org 9y ago

is that a new app?

robertdicabrio 9y ago

i remember a website letmewatch.ch have any one heard it.

mpetrovich 9y ago

One of the few websites I can still lose hours on: https://waitbutwhy.com/ https://waitbutwhy.com/

indigochill 9y ago

Does http://3564020356.org http://3564020356.org count? It does appear to use Alexa for tracking now, but otherwise it looks pretty "home-grown".

schnevets 9y ago

10 years from now, we'll be waxing nostalgia about entrepreneurs who made a living off Instagram, Amazon, WordPress, and other platforms. 'There was a kid who used to "rate dogs" and he was hilarious! And he did it for free without any corporate backing! Made a killing on T-Shirts and stuff as well!'

rch 9y ago

I think Ward's Federated Wiki approach could help bring some personality back to the web.

disconnected 9y ago

> Does anyone remember when you they stumbled on a new website written by some guy and read his first article, then clicked back to his homepage and saw he had a list of similar articles that looked like they'd be just as interesting. Or, more likely, you clicked "back" on the "navigation bar" and it would 404 because the author messed up the links, since it was all hand crafted HTML. Funny stuff aside, there are still loads of "websites" out there. If I understand the criteria here, we are looking for mostly hand crafted pages maintained by individuals (or small groups) that have interesting content. Something, should I say, very "web 1.0"? Here's a good one. Make sure to check the GUI Gallery section: http://toastytech.com http://toastytech.com User Friendly is always hilarious (unfortunately, updates stopped ages ago, but going through the archive is sill fun): http://www.userfriendly.org/ http://www.userfriendly.org/ And here's something random, the best page in the universe: http://maddox.xmission.com/ http://maddox.xmission.com/ Like I said, there are TONS of these out there. You just have to, you know, look for them.

Jaruzel 9y ago
We need a good search index of these and all the other sites likes them. Something that deliberately doesn't include pages from bigger sites or sites full of cruft.
- discreditable 9y ago
  It could probably be easily accomplished by filtering out sites that use JS libraries like jquery, etc.
  - fenwick67 9y ago
    "best viewed with" followed by your query (ex: "best viewed with" dragons) gets you lots of great old results in a regular search engine. It will grab any sites that said "best viewed with truetype fonts", "best viewed with Netscape" et cetera from the internet's heyday.

mamcx 9y ago

Something close today, Go to: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/randomitem.php?p=1 http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/randomitem.php?p=1

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

i6Respawns 9y ago

Yes I think I know how you feel. You might like reading books haha.

adrianratnapala 9y ago

It's clever of the author to use "website" in this more specific sense. Technically a "website" roughly means anything served as HTML over HTTP. But all us fogeys know what his title meant anyway. But I still think he protests too much. The style subject-oriented websites which the author is referring to evolved slightly and got the new name "blogs". The blogosphere might not be as popular as social networking, but it is still huger than the web of the '90s.

gfodor 9y ago
Eh, I don't think blogs are really that equivalent to old school websites. Blog, being short for "web log" implies a temporal-based feed of posts. Old school sites were often much more varied, webs of pages broken up by subject or topic with links scattered everywhere to the rest of the web.

jumpkickhit 9y ago

Can't say I miss Geocities inundating the search engines. Still though, it was pretty fun when there were more than 5 or so websites to go to, like a lot of people tend to only do these days.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

anthk 9y ago

http://neoticies.org http://neoticies.org Welcome back :) I am currently doing a minimal OpenBSD site in Spanish :D

igorgue 9y ago

I miss them, they were a great example of how creative everyone can be, now doing "awesome" things on the internet is so cookie cuttered.

astura 9y ago
And "welcome to my website it is still under construction please sign my guestbook" isn't cookie cutter?

osteele 9y ago

I remember the NCSA Web Site of the Day, circa 1993. It was a page that listed new web sites that had appeared on the web, with a brief summary and link to each one. Many days there wasn't a new web site. Some days there were two.

dwheeler 9y ago

I understand the sarcasm, but really, there are a lot of "real" websites, directly controlled by individuals who post what they want. I point you to my own website, https://www.dwheeler.com https://www.dwheeler.com .... it's not the latest in CSS, no Megabytes of JavaScript, and no cross-site tracking either.

edflsafoiewq 9y ago

The site I remember feeling that way about was the Robot Wisdom Homepage, now preserved only on the WayBack Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20130409045156/http://www.robotwisdom.com/home.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130409045156/http://www.robotw...

jimmeyotoole 9y ago

Member websites??

peterburkimsher 9y ago

The most ironic part to me is that the page is PHP, not static HTML. Although this type of style isn't common with the online web these days, it's still visible in offline caches of popular websites (e.g. offline Wikipedia). Pages load so fast, and the total file size is much smaller because of the lack of JS/jQuery/React/etc bloat.

canoebuilder 9y ago

http://fusionanomaly.net/nodebase.html http://fusionanomaly.net/nodebase.html

tutuca 9y ago

It even has got a broken hit counter and all... 000020083 at time of reading :)

dbshapco 9y ago

The Internet has become a carrier signal for advertising.

joeblau 9y ago

I thought about this a few weeks ago. I remember the late 90's actually searching around the web. Now there are so many walled gardens that individual creation is limited to posting a Medium blog or Facebook post. Today, I only visit a handful of sites and developer documentation.

bluetwo 9y ago

Remember when the Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" button was interesting and took you to one of these random sites?

dickclucas 9y ago

Shameless plug but what he describes was partly my inspiration for building https://nogradient.com/ https://nogradient.com/. It is very stripped down and minimal. Would love some feedback on it.

albeebe1 9y ago

My website still uses tables http://albeebe.com/ http://albeebe.com/

nautilus12 9y ago
What? None of the many notable Indiana sites? ;)
quickthrower2 9y ago
Legit table use there. It's bad to use tables for layout mind you. Because you should use the much more semantic <div class="col-3">...
DamonHD 9y ago
Here is my '90s vintage still alive and kicking (we were one of the first UK ISPs): http://www.exnet.com/ http://www.exnet.com/ and a new old site also built with hand-crafted HTML but CSS rather than tables! http://m.earth.org.uk/ http://m.earth.org.uk/ It's nonsense to say that such things no longer exist.

tacosmell 9y ago

Try to find more better information on very specific topics, however, and you'll find that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the popular content, making it harder to find the anything else. I don't think that's a good thing.

tacosmell 9y ago

Try to find better information on very specific topics, however, and you'll find that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the bad content, making it harder to find the other stuff. I don't think that's good.

dogcow 9y ago

Check out the search engine at http://wiby.me http://wiby.me From their about page: Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web. The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.

exadeci 9y ago
Haha if look for google under the url it says: "a wise guy eh? ಠ_ಠ"
rb666 9y ago
I hit "Surprise me" and first site it hits autodownloads a .mid file, that used to work better I 'member.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I hit "Surprise me" and got this gem: http://g2mil.com http://g2mil.com. I like that search site already.
  - hawski 9y ago
    Great quote from this one: > What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism, all else is publicity. > Paul Fussell
  - fractallyte 9y ago

nagakp 9y ago

Nowadays, everyone with a basic understanding of search engines easily find almost anything they need within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimizing more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the content.

citruscomputing 9y ago

I wrote a little program that does the "follow links and see if I find anything interesting" thing. It takes seed links, pulls all links that don't go back to the same domain, and then chooses 50 and repeats. Then there's another program to find the uncommon sites from everything gathered. Check it out at https://github.com/riley-martine/water_skimmer https://github.com/riley-martine/water_skimmer

davesque 9y ago

Unfortunately, a large part of the reason the web used to be fun is that there didn't used to be anything like it. The only way we can get that again is by inventing the next world-changing communications technology, not by trying to dig up the old web. It pains me as much as anyone else to say this since I got started on the web back in 1994 and experienced its early magic first-hand.

chewz 9y ago

I remember that spending time on a web was actually interesting back then. Interesting like discovering and learning something new not like browsing shopping sites and FB, Instagram because there is nothing else to do...

minikomi 9y ago

I've found amateur ham radio stations are a good thread to tug on to find that older weird-internet. - Look for the sites with 4-5 letter callsigns on them - Go to their links page - Keep going down the rabbit hole. EG. here's a few I just found googling: http://www.qsl.net/kp4md/ http://www.qsl.net/kp4md/ https://k7nv.com/ https://k7nv.com/ http://www.w8ji.com/ http://www.w8ji.com/

starboy1996 9y ago

Sure. If it's really worth visiting. You remember them somehow and never forget

scroot 9y ago

Ian Milligan has done some interesting work [1] on the history of GeoCities, including some archives I think [1] http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers/milligan.pdf http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers/milligan.pdf

blue100 9y ago

I remember all those websites.

pers0n 9y ago

Another thing is people often just go to Wikipedia, Wikipedia replaced the need for many fan sites. I had things copied from my sites and put on Wikipedia and tired to get a link back or a source mentioned and it was removed each time. So I lost motivation to even update fan sites, since whatever I type is going to get pasted onto Wikipedia with no link back.

cheschire 9y ago
And wikia. That replaced much of the need for fictional fan sites. I visit memory alpha weekly.
- djur 9y ago
  Unfortunately, Wikia looks like it's in the process of becoming a cautionary tale, with its recent move to start injecting its own video content into certain high-traffic wikis and a general decline in customizability and independence.
  - CM30 9y ago
    Wikia seems to be gradually being replaced by self hosted wikis, at least where larger fandoms are concerned. The Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance (Mario Wiki, Zelda Wiki, Bulbapedia, etc) are one example, the Square Enix Wiki Alliance are another, and I'm sure the likes of the Simpsons Wiki have moved away from the service as well.
    - Hedja 9y ago
      Zelda Wiki is hosted on Gamepedia. It's like Wikia but specifically for Video Games and less obstrusive.
      - CM30 9y ago
        Well it used to be self hosted. Not sure I like the move much, feels like they're betraying the organisation they're supposedly part of.

arca_vorago 9y ago

I do, which is why many years ago I told myself I was going to make my websites as js free as possible. Pure, simple, readable html5+css is my long term goal. The thing is, this part of the web still exists, it's actually just simply harder to find due to the control on the filter big corps have these days. You just have to search. I am regularly adding hackers blogs to my bookmarks. Sometimes they stopped updating in 2012, but their writing still looks worthwhile. The real democratization of knowledge the internet offers to us is there for the taking if people would break free from their self-forged filter-bubble shackles.

acuozzo 9y ago
> I am regularly adding hackers blogs to my bookmarks. Sometimes they stopped updating in 2012, but their writing still looks worthwhile. Can we start sharing these somewhere? I have several I'd like to contribute.

lovemetwotimes 9y ago

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds.

vog 9y ago
That's simply not true: Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15634089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15634089 (Unless, of course, you mean by "almost anything" everything of your personal interest.)

frik 9y ago

MySpace, Tripod, GeoCities, LiveJournal, and similar free hosted/services had a lot of interesting, weird, etc pages. It was easy and friction free to create a new site. Everyone had a copy of Frontpage/Dreamweaver/GoLive/HomeSite/iWeb/Composer on his PC and uploading worked with a browser form, one file at a time.

superkuh 9y ago

The web of the 90s is alive on .onion.

jancsika 9y ago

I've never been particularly nostalgic for websites. I'm slightly nostalgic for shared Windows folders on LANs at college dorms. I remember seeing the first South Park short from such a folder as it was going viral. I'm extremely nostalgic for the original Napster. I don't ever remember searching for a piece of music and coming up short. And I remember it being a very sudden shift-- one month you're making a mental note to search for a CD you misplaced somewhere back home, the next month you're getting on Napster to check if the theme to Ghostbuster's 2 has lyrics that recount the plot of the movie. It does. A few weeks ago I typed "Battlestar Galactica" into Netflix, and guess what? It showed me lots and lots of results, none of which were Battlestar Galactica. And this isn't your run of the mill entitlement of a fool addicted to his Iphone apps. That is entitlement of a person yearning for modern functionality to match a shitty piece of software that saw its last stable release 15 years ago. I'm having a hard time finding any numbers for the actual amount of music that was available on the original Napster at the time. Can anyone put some hard data to my rose colored glasses?

tomduncalf 9y ago
Check out Soulseek, it is very similar to how I remember the original Napster. Lots of obscure rarities on there music-wise, I've not tried it for anything else. The one P2P thing I am nostalgic for is Audio Galaxy - it had an awesome system where it they indexed everyone's content on their website, so you could see every file that had ever been on the network and add it to your "want list", then when that person came online, it would start downloading. To be fair "wish list searches" in Soulseek serve a similar purpose, but I loved that ability to browse every file that had ever been online!
- sixstringtheory 9y ago
  Soulseek is incredible, discovered all sorts of smaller-time musicians that never wouldve been sold at the Best Buy in the suburban wasteland of my youth. I can’t believe it’s under active maintenance after all these years!
yread 9y ago
> I'm extremely nostalgic for the original Napster. I'm even more nostalgic of Direct Connect: Hey this person has this cool and rare thing I'm searching for let's download his file list to see what else they like.

Illniyar 9y ago

"it was largely a collection of websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write about it and put it online. " Oh,you mean like blogs? Seriously, this sounds like being nostalgic for it's own sake. I fail to see how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a good idea - now everyone can have their own website. I really don't miss the "glorious 90's" type of websites - with the thousand of animated images, weird background images and marquee everywhere. Sure it made every site unique - every site was terrible to the eyes in it's own special way. Also the idea that all sites now look the same is quite preposterous - sure a lot of sites are cookiecutter websites - especially marketing websites, but there are tons of unique designs - especially for blogs and personal websites.

fphilipe 9y ago
> Oh,you mean like blogs? Yes, but before they all looked the same and were hosted on the same platform. I miss the days where you would encounter a blog filled with great content and with a unique look and feel. It's as if it almost burned in in my memory. I still remember how the website looked of some great articles that resonated with me. That's one of the reasons I dislike Medium et al.
- Illniyar 9y ago
  I don't think it matters where they are hosted, but I think it's disingenuous to say that all blogs look the same. Sure everything on medium looks the same, but there are many many blogs not on medium. Here, just after a simple search, a list of personal websites/blogs that look nothing alike: https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-35-best-personal-websites-weve-ever-seen https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-35-best-personal-websites...
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  > Yes, but before they all looked the same and were hosted on the same platform. "LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick."

thallukrish 9y ago

This is what I wrote years ago in this blog http://productionjava.blogspot.sg/2014/07/the-broken-web.html http://productionjava.blogspot.sg/2014/07/the-broken-web.htm... and I have been working since then to fix it.

somberi 9y ago

I would like to add photo.net and particularly Philip Greenspun's "Travel with Samantha".

keerthivar 9y ago

very interesting website, and easy time pass

keerthivar 9y ago

easy identify methode

pythonist 9y ago

A very fine example of such site http://www.jeffbridges.com/ http://www.jeffbridges.com/.

galfarragem 9y ago

That's just Capitalism. Once Capitalism takes over a system, everything is optimized for profit. Some diehard hobbyists might remain but most convert. I'm still keeping 2 niche blogs.. let's see till when.

ForFreedom 9y ago

I started my career as a web designer back in the 1998-2000 which was fun then. People wanted gifs like crazy.

woodbot 9y ago

How about this for a website: https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/ The Beaker Browser! P2P browser, bringing back (the web and) websites since 2017

HaoZeke 9y ago

For me the web is more alive than ever... Just look at the way static websites are taking over.. However JS is the real threat to websites, react and its ilk are not amenable to being stored long term.. Too many things break.

ashtube 9y ago

The hit counter is what makes this website.

EngineerBetter 9y ago

I remember websites, and I remember that some were made by women, too. The author seems to have only read websites made by men.

mfukar 9y ago

Things change, nostalgia happens. Nothing to see here.

vinsingh0289 9y ago

I have so many websites but never got much traffic on any one of them, so i forgot all domain name of the website i created long back.

koancone 9y ago

The problem is the advertising model for content monetization. This is the same reason TV is mostly crap.

halr9000 9y ago

I'm "old" and I remember websites, and Bulletin Board Systems too, for that matter. But technology changes, and you gotta keep up, man. Don't let the kids bother you--they're just running through your yard to the next house over. It's a cool house, maybe check it out someone.

zapperdapper 9y ago

Couldn't agree with you more! Now sites seem to be spread out across the behemoth sites like Medium and of course all the social media platforms. A lot of the fun and sense of adventure that was present in the early days of the web is gone. Now it's "just business" - that blows! When did everyone get so obsessed with boosting their "online presence" in order to make a quick buck? I will also give a big thumbs up to Neocities. It's brilliant. There's a great retro feel to many of the sites there. People are having fun creating sites with HTML and a dash of CSS - for free.

epigramx 9y ago

They are called home pages.

SimpleLogin 9y ago

It really is interesting how incredibly niche everything was once upon a time.

DamnInteresting 9y ago

As the operator of a website old enough to still have a "webmaster" email address, it can be hard to remain relevant in the age of Google's search monopoly. Their algorithm has become the de facto gatekeeper to the entire Internet, and it happens to favor newer content over old. Consequently it favors those crappy flip-shop[1] sites where "writers" find quality content, perform a mild thesaurus modification, and re-post it. The original source, where the actual research and writing occurred, is stomped into insignificance. Yes, perhaps I'm slightly bitter, why do you ask? Between that and the "Wikipedia wall," boutique websites have been an endangered species for some time. [1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flip%20shop https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flip%20shop

jwm4 9y ago

Steve den Beste's original website, USS Clueless, was a perfect example of early website/blog.

rogerweissman77 9y ago

I have to bookmark everything.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Joseph Wood Krutch: "bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people, good roads bring bad people". http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm

bengrunfeld 9y ago

The old die and the young grow up, and if they're lucky, they get to eventually become old themselves. That is the natural order of things, even for the internet. That said, I miss them too ;)

Chiba-City 9y ago

Early business Web was Decision Support and not ad distraction based. There were cool "calculators" that would match relocation zip codes in Tulsa most like my favorite DC zip code or pick optimum breed/age/weight dog food. Product Selection Engines (PSE's) were a different value proposition than product or brand promotion. They are fun to write for engineers because they correct purchase errors with IT good deeds like Consumer Reports but with user variables on priorities or constraints. The Consumer Web threw out a great deal of baby with the .com era bathwater.

zacvivo 9y ago

I have been thinking on this idea lately and trying to build a tool to filter out the crap. What I have found is operators help, but the only things I have found to work are EDU sites, pre-2010 operator, and intext: welcome to my site. Beyond that, nothing seems to work to find complex content. I also thought about maybe making a tool to filter out content from the top million sites or so, but for now I am going to just use operators.