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Every time I see an article lamenting the loss of the early internet I think that it boils down to community quality vs. scale. As communities get too large, th
by fundamental 8y ago
Every time I see an article lamenting the loss of the early internet I think that it boils down to community quality vs. scale. As communities get too large, then content and discussion will gravitate to whatever seems to get a response from the biggest group. That can easily leave things feeling bland and make efforts to start conversations feel too competitive. Smaller specialized communities that are somewhat insulated do have the chance to avoid this phenomena, though often times they fail under their own success or are too insulated to pick up new individuals. It's a hard balance to be made.
I personally miss the prevalence of technical and personal web logs of the late 90s. That's not to say that they aren't still around, there's simply more alternatives to shift through and many of them do focus on marketing themselves for visibility (which seems to take something away from the feeling of the older net IMO). A large focus on centralization certainly seems to have shifted the broader tone online, though there's still plenty of gems floating out there.
- _hemlock 8y agoCan you give some examples of those type of websites? I've been really interested in the idea of stripped down personal static sites.
- rchaud 8y agoThe demise of Geocities (in 2009, much later than I imagined) has caused a mass migration of these types of sites to places like Tumblr, whose search functionality leaves a lot to be desired.
- solarkraft 8y agoNow that Tumblr is dead there's some hope the alternative will offer better features.
- fundamental 8y agoI don't think "stripped down" or "static" would be what would really describe the sites. Things were broken, varied, and sometimes simplified in handcrafted ways. I would say that old university pages for professors would be a good example of something basic which reflected the era, though there's been such a big churn in university URLs over the past decade (and presumably other times as well) that it's difficult to find an example which hasn't been mutated by university IT into something more 'presentable' or just hosted at a different URL. While most of what I could still locate dates only back to the mid-2000s , consider https://web.archive.org/web/20050122063815/http://matt.might.net:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050122063815/http://matt.might... , around that time blogspot was pretty active and well ranked for search engines at the time, freestanding wordpress instances were fairly popular after individuals moved past writing html posts manually and uploading them over ftp to a simple host, phpbb instances were available for most topics in the mid 2000s. The key thing is that once you move before the easy availability of php based webhosts, then you get into the territory of hand edited plain html (or microsoft frontpage) and very very little to no-javascript.
- userbinator 8y agohttps://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/ https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/ (German, some English pages) Lots of interesting stuff about hardware and software. Minimal fluff, maximal content.
- h0p3 8y agohttps://philosopher.life/ https://philosopher.life/