57 ms·

Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?

• roywiggins 8y ago
  I've been saying that MySpace was the last time the internet was at all good for... years now. Of course most of it was annoying, but if you don't let people be annoying you're also restricting the range of everyone's speech. 99% of everything is crap, but if you don't allow the crap, the 1% of good stuff will evaporate, too. Between the sanitized Facebook and the siloing of people into apps, there's fewer obvious social on-ramps to coding on the internet, especially now that so much is mediated by apps.
• dammod 8y ago
  While it's true that platforms on the internet become more and more similar to each other, both in terms of functionality, lack of customizability, and design, it's not possible to allow unsanitized input anymore. There are too many ways to exploit input, not only with JS, but also with CSS, and trying to allow custom styles while preventing exploits is an arms race. That said, social platforms not allowing users to express themselves through canvas and styles could be a matter of consistency and usability, while the myspace pages were a form of expression; they were certainly a pain to use and navigate through.
• ggggtez 8y ago
  >Nobody ever talks about why this was bad for the world. Stop just a minute there. Who says that random people copy pasting CSS and HTML they don't understand is even a good thing? Let's be clear, 99% of people don't understand that stuff, it's just copy pasting. If you want a glitter blog, then launch a blog with that option. But letting people do it themselves just adds risk to themselves they'll never understand. Edit: to be clear, if you said pasting <script>alert(911)</script> can be used to call the cops from your computer, then 99% of people would assume that's what it did until they tried it. 99% of people are not coders and it might as well be a foreign language they are pasting into a Google Translate to see what it means. If it happened to contain JS, well, too late. See the warnings in the FB JS console for a reminder that people are gullible and will copy paste anything they are told to.
  • newen 8y ago
    How is CSS and HTML with no JavaScript and okay, no frames, risky?
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • roywiggins 8y ago
      Hotlinked images can be replaced with whatever the host desires, so you might have cats today, goatse tomorrow.
    • ggggtez 8y ago
      >no JavaScript >no frames I think you are remembering. In the blog screenshot of myspace, when it says "Javascript is not allowed", it was acting as "a sign, not a cop" [0]. Most websites were riddled with security flaws, to the point that you'll find there wasn't really any comprehensive listing of major vulnerabilities in websites because people didn't really understand that an XSS was a problem until someone actually used it in an attack. This example from 2005 shows that their security to prevent JS was sorely lacking. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)
  • floatrock 8y ago
    To be fair, lots of random people (myself included) `npm install`'ing things they don't understand but seem to do the trick has generally been a good thing. Or, at least there's been far fewer incidents of that blind trust spectacularly blowing up than the pitchfork mobs about to come after this comment might lead you to expect. Perhaps you might say that npm users at least understand the risks we take on when we do it, but I still don't think most npm users give it all that much thought...
• franze 8y ago
  The internet of 2006 was not fun. We saw what we could do - but could not do it because of creating workarounds for IE6. A typical case of retroactive romantecism. picking one aspect, romantecising it, ignoring everything else.
  • jakelazaroff 8y ago
    Why does it need to be all-or-nothing? There wasn't anything about MySpace that hinged on browser incompatibilities. We can try to bring back the parts of the old Internet that were cool and fun without bringing back all the baggage too.
  • noja 8y ago
    Sure it was fun, despite the IE part. Don't over-simplify.
    • paulgb 8y ago
      I made pocket change in high school by debugging IE CSS issues for strangers on the internet, which was absolutely fun and occasionally also quite weird :)
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • conductr 8y ago
    was nice when you could assume all screens were the same resolution though
  • krapp 8y ago
    The web of 2006 was fun, but to be honest, I find the modern web to be even more fun. I mean, if we want to take off the rose tinted glasses and look at it honestly, disregarding the homogeneity of modern frameworked layouts versus a Geocities page with a fire background and crimson Morpheus text, the quality and variety of content is much better on the modern web than the old, as is the availability of media and depth of interaction that social media, for all its negatives, provides. I feel like what the modern web may lack in style, it gains (and surpasses the old web) in substance. And I think that's a fair trade.
• Romanulus 8y ago
  Evidently, the OP conflates "fun and weird" with "annoying and stupid."
  • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    It's impossible to block "annoying and stupid" without also blocking "fun and weird". You wind up with identical beige blandness.
    • Romanulus 8y ago
      No, you're left with content the content which hopefully isn't terrible.
      • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
        Well, we don't know what the content would be like with a modern "fun/weird" internet, but the content we have right now is mostly shit, so...
  • Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
    Different strokes for different folks. But yeah, a lot of custom MySpace pages were just terrible. A friend of mine set the background to his to a snowy forest and set the foreground text to white, making it basically unreadable. He tried to defend it by pointing out that if you highlight the text, it becomes readable. I tried to show him that if he really wanted that image as a background, he should spend two seconds in Photoshop to lighten the image so he can put black text over it and keep it readable, but he just went off about how much he prefers white text.
• mc32 8y ago
  Why? Because people with bad intentions discovered its potential and took advantage. It’s the iconic example of the lament “That’s why we can’t have good things”
  • dwringer 8y ago
    Are you referring to Zuckerberg capitalizing on the ideas of others, or Rupert Murdoch buying out MySpace and making everyone jump ship to Facebook?
  • rock_hard 8y ago
    Yeah, what people want is often times at odds...specially at scale. What I find funny you might find horrible. Everything boils down to the most agreeable format in the end
• SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  > It was a beautiful mess. As the internet grew up, consumer products stopped trusting their users, and the internet lost its soul. I think that's the wrong assumption to make - we figured out the language of the internet, and developed a design methodology that worked, though it continues to evolve.
  • k__ 8y ago
    Also, messes like 4chan still exist. It's just that back in the days 1% of the Internet population would use them and today 0,0001%. With Smartphones the non-outcasts found the Internet finally interesting and filled it with boring stuff like Instagram and Tinder.
  • vokep 8y ago
    Its the removal of user-designed anything. Got a facebook page? Same format for everyone. Just another brick in the wall Got a MySpace page back then? You have a playground to express yourself, you are a human being.
• jerf 8y ago
  The answer is simple: Security. Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header. Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions. Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page. Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn. This is just a sample of the problems. You have to sandbox this stuff, and the crazier the line you try to draw with the sandbox around what is safe to do, the harder it is to secure.
  • _bxg1 8y ago
    Most of those problems are specific to JavaScript. Just strip out JavaScript.
    • untog 8y ago
      Then you strip out interactivity. Which is a pretty huge component of making the internet interesting and weird. For its many sins, Flash was actually a pretty great sandbox for people to play with that way (as long as it didn't have one of its many security issues at the time)
      • roywiggins 8y ago
        There was a period when you could use Flash to invoke a javascript: protocol link and it would be executed in the containing page! They fixed it eventually but it was a great way to escape the Flash sandbox.
      • jandrese 8y ago
        Flash seems like a good example of how it's incredibly difficult to secure a system like that, even with a sandbox. How many security updates did Flash have over the course of its life? Back in the heyday I remember it having to update multiple times a week.
• dasil003 8y ago
  It’s commercialized, that’s it. You still have the same weird stuff, probably even with some growth but it doesn’t get visibility relative to all the commercialism. Having been on BBSes and the internet since the mid 80s I’m as sad and nostalgic about it as anyone but you can’t turn back the clock. Instead we need to fight today’s battle—big tech company hegemony.
• skybrian 8y ago
  It's as weird as it ever was but the format has changed. It's all in animated gifs and YouTube videos for easy sharing.
• dekhn 8y ago
  it used to be (i "grew up" on usenet and muds) but then it got popular and emasculated.
  • cimmanom 8y ago
    emasculated?
    • dekhn 8y ago
      it had its balls cut off. What made it edgy and fun was removed as it was promoted to normal people who just wanted to read movie listings, or whatever.
      • cimmanom 8y ago
        Well, I sort of agree with that, and I was with you until you used the term. But I don’t see anything less masculine about the internet now than as it was in 1993. Perhaps “sanitized” would be more applicable?
        • dekhn 8y ago
          sure, I agree the term definitely has a masculinity implication. but, I actually think the term is roughly correct given that at the time, the net was 95% male while now it's much closer to 50-50. Sanitized is also appropriate.
          • cimmanom 8y ago
            The way you put it seems to suggest you're disappointed it isn't still male-dominated. As one of the women who was online back then, I didn't perceive it as "masculine", fwiw.
            • dekhn 8y ago
              Understood. And I MUDded with some women. Am I disappointed that the net is less masculine? Not particularly. I certainly felt more welcome, and more comfortable with the net before when it was a more masculine environment, and in some sense I miss that. But I'm not the deciding user, and as a parent with kids... my feelings are complicated.
• abraae 8y ago
  Would have been nice to know this was borderline astroturfing for CodeBlog before investing time.
  • ARandomerDude 8y ago
    "borderline" -- I'm impressed by your restraint. :-)
  • duxup 8y ago
    I just quit readding there ;) I think the initial observation is interesting.
  • hoorayimhelping 8y ago
    This is why the internet isn't fun. Because assholes write useless press releases for yet another product that's not new or interesting and disguise it as someone putting their thoughts out there.
    • ShorsHammer 8y ago
      And then others get paid to Sybil attack voting systems on various platforms in order to promote that useless content. Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Reddit likes are good value from a marketing perspective. It's the circle of life.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • ai_ia 8y ago
    Exactly my thoughts. Why is this post at the top?
• duxup 8y ago
  I think the question maybe is why users in social media spaces can't .... be more creative? I used to use Geocities and yeah the internet and HTML were sort of synonymous. As users my friends and I all had pages we'd do things on and show each other. I suspect the issue is that long term that doesn't bring in users who DO NOT want to do that and thus your user base is limited, and once you make a place that does appeal to the folks who don't want to dip their toes in code.... you just stick everyone there.
  • LinuxBender 8y ago
    If you miss Geocities, there is always its open source successor NeoCities [1] :-) [1] - https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
    • duxup 8y ago
      Oh that's super cool.
      • cr0sh 8y ago
        Be sure to check this out, too: http://www.oocities.org/ http://www.oocities.org/ ...and no, it all wasn't able to be saved - but a massive amount was managed to be preserved (it used to be available as a torrent - assuming it is still being seeded, you might be able to download a copy if you really want it - but it ain't small).
        • duxup 8y ago
          Oh man I bet I have stuff in there ;)
  • general8bitso 8y ago
    Myspace allowed customization to the detriment of the visitor sometimes.
    • 8y ago
• cal5k 8y ago
  Jarred was probably young when the internet was first taking shape, and every generation shares the feeling that things were better in their youth (aka the Golden Age Fallacy). The internet was a lot smaller and inhabited by curious nerds - to find similar fun and weirdness, just find a community today that shares those properties. Packet radio, infosec, crypto, gaming, music production, etc. - there's plenty of weird and fun to be found if you look for it.
  • general8bitso 8y ago
    Darkweb?
    • mav3rick 8y ago
      Reddit ?
  • beezischillin 8y ago
    A lot of online communities today are unbearable tho as everything's become so politicised. It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention. It was probably something that also happened before that but it somehow became really prevalent, at least. And often that took the fun out of it. I kind of think fondly of those times. Now of course this is just anecdotal, but that's what I've experienced in most communities I used to frequent and perhaps lots of other people here did too. In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic and it's very rare to see people intentionally driving it into the ground, although in contrast to something like a Facebook group it's a lot less personal.
    • weinzierl 8y ago
      >It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention. It was actually in September 2013 when it started ... or was it September 1993 ...? Uh, oh, how time flies, never mind.
• soneca 8y ago
  Today we have things like: https://glitch.com/ https://glitch.com/ That Glitch is not as popular as My Space was tells something about what people that use internet want; and shows that the internet is still fun and weird for people that like fun and weird.
  • minimaxir 8y ago
    Sites like Glitch assume that you already have a good grasp of tech/software engineering. The big appeal of the early internet was that anyone could make something neat with simple HTML shenanigans, and learn to code by hacking the HTML templates to their needs. Many coders got their start by hacking Neopets storefronts. (there were actual coding puzzles on Neopets too for their events!)
    • wuliwong 8y ago
      I think it is much easier for a non-technical person to put up a website today than in the 90s. Today you need absolutely zero coding knowledge, not even HTML.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • ylesaout 8y ago
        Back in the 90s (at least in the second half) you didn't need how to code. You just used Dreamweaver or Frontpage and you got your site! The only technical bits were to use FTP to upload it to your free hosting provider.
  • roywiggins 8y ago
    Glitch sounds amazing, and way better than the tools that existed back then. But back then, Geocities was popular and loads of people had heard of it. I have never heard of Glitch. It seems like there's become a re-division between "people who like to tinker" and "literally everyone else". On the one hand that's great but it kind of feels like everything is AOL again now. The last vestige of fun, weird and popular is probably Tumblr, which everyone agrees has the absolute worst user interface. But you can theme your Tumblr page to your absolute heart's desire.
• stcredzero 8y ago
  The internet is the great equalizer (1996). People used to believe that. Today, it sounds sarcastic. We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products. Users are too stupid. They'd break stuff. Coding is too complicated for ordinary people. Besides, we can just do the coding...so why does it matter? As a programmer, let me say that when I've switched over to the role of user: As for our bedside manner, we programmers xxxxcould stand to improve a bit! (Not all. But on average.) Remember to treat users as people you're supposed to serve, not as an underclass that needs to be kept in line.
• robbrown451 8y ago
  As annoying as MySpace tended to be, I fully appreciate what the article is getting at. I miss the days where people who wanted to have an online presence could create a website, and it was actually a comparatively good experience. Facebook is the defacto standard now, and you have to do things their way. Yes it is by far the easiest way for most people to share their photos and thoughts if they want their friends to see them. Unless they are twitterers or whatever. But I really wish the internet had continued to progress as....it could have.
• the-pigeon 8y ago
  I see we have different definitions of "fun" and "weird".
• elorant 8y ago
  The Internet is not fun and weird anymore because it was used to be a hobby. Nowadays content creators do it for the money. When you create content for your hobby you're more relaxed. You can say stupid things, make mistakes, interact with your visitors, try and build a community because relationships is all there is. The moment advertising comes into play everything has to look professional. You start asking for emails to send newsletters and you shove advertisements into the visitor's face in order to get a click. Your site becomes impersonal after a while.
  • davidy123 8y ago
    I agree, along with a corresponding point, production values. Now, everyone who makes a video has to have theme music, an intro, and use specific cues. Podcasts all tend to sound the same too. Do these aspects really add anything or are they just gatekeepers about who can conform? I've seen plenty of slick videos on Youtube that have little content, while less produced videos may have way more useful content but they don't take off because they don't have support. Maybe the slick presentations put people in a headspace, but that on its own is the start of the slippery slope of not being original because then everything has to be streamlined to those expectations, and productions aren't recognized unless they have these features. It will probably take another leap before the internet moves past this, where presentations aren't videos with one view and one soundtrack focused on particular personality types, where text and charts aren't pictures but rather mixable data used to render arbitrary views. I guess ironically if Flash had taken over the Web in the early days we might be closer to that vision now since it was more the focus to create an interactive work rather than using a desktop application to generate a video, or the generally harder slog to create interactives in Web technologies.
• 1337shadow 8y ago
  I don't see enough spoonerism in technical papers (except mine obviously). Let's face it: computers are boring (for most people). Once we face it, we can do something about it.
• sramsay 8y ago
  But the author (vendor?) seems to miss what was actually fun and weird about the "old days." When you screwed around with MySpace like that, you got that pleasurable frisson borne of thinking that you were doing something you weren't supposed to do -- or that you were doing something the developers of MySpace hadn't foreseen. Creating a tightly circumscribed environment in which "glitter" is one of your built-in affordances is hardly the same thing. It's the difference between discovering rocket jumping in Doom and having rocket jumping become an intentional mechanic in Quake. The latter might still be fun, but it's no longer weird (and certainly not fun because it is weird).
• weberc2 8y ago
  Man, this really resonates with me. I learned how to program because I wanted a website for my Halo 2 team back in late HS early college. I started with a MySpace and learned some basic HTML and CSS (a minute after I learned that making a website was not just dragging things around in MS office and saving the file as "www.my-cool-website.com"). It was ugly and it was hard. Then a friend told me he had some hosting we could use and I learned to hack together some PHP in notepad.exe with just enough MySQL to add and remove things. I used for loops and that was it. No functions or classes. One big file, similar things were copied and pasted all over. No version control, just a handful of different copies of the PHP file on my computer, and deploying was uploading via FTP. I got a bootleg version of photoshop and learned how to make fancy web 2.0 graphics, and I installed PHPBB and integrated it into our site. The forum was actually pretty successful for a hot minute (a hundred or so active users) and I learned a little bit about community management. I do disagree that "coding is now a privilege" or at least that it's more a privilege because of the demise of MySpace. It's easier than ever to learn how to program; it just takes time and motivation. The only thing that's harder is figuring out which technologies you actually need to learn to realize your vision (because there are so many more ways of doing things than there were in 2006); however, people are also generally nicer now than in 2006 (when I would ask people for help, they often would expect me to have read certain textbooks or know C before they would send me the link on standing up a LAMP stack). The toxic bits of StackOverflow culture were just normal--if you didn't already know the answer, you didn't deserve to know it. Anyway, that's my 5 minute stream of recollection.
  • FactolSarin 8y ago
    Yeah, I think the issue is there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit anymore. No one hacks together some PHP scripts to create a community website anymore, they just make a Facebook group, or use Discord or whatever.
    • weberc2 8y ago
      Agreed. I think it's a deficiency of imagination. If I had the time I'd reinvent wheels all day. I'd especially love to figure out how to make some of the cool open source cloud native projects feasible for use by some college kid who wants to run a distributed ecosystem on a cluster of old laptops and raspberry pis without 10 years of devops or sysadmin experience.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• faissaloo 8y ago
  This still exists you just have to dig quite deeply for it. I created https://ratwires.space https://ratwires.space (NSFW) specifically to try and bring back some of the things that made the internet weird and wonderful when I was growing up but within a more modern framework rather than simply trying to make another GeoCities clone.
• Reedx 8y ago
  This is a pretty clever way to introduce a new service.
• KangLi 8y ago
  How can I post a question on Hacker News?
  • Jaruzel 8y ago
    You prefix your post[1] title with 'Ask HN:', although unless it's a _really_ good question, you probably wont get any answers. --- [1] Via the submit button at the top.
• otabdeveloper2 8y ago
  Because it's owned by Google and Facebook. - Always yours, your Cap.
• alpb 8y ago
  It's great, but won't sign up for another blogging platform because it makes it fun and weird. I've been successfully running my own blog for the past 15+ years while I've seen many blogging services come and go. Remind yourself that Medium, Blogger, Twitter will all be gone in some years from now, it's only a matter of time. Anything you self host, even a WordPress blog has higher chances of surviving.
  • colecut 8y ago
    Codeblog can be self-hosted.
• youdontknowtho 8y ago
  When this is used to create a worm of some kind that puts obscene pictures in emails to people's mothers...it will then make more sense why people stopped taking code in inputs.
• honkycat 8y ago
  Should probably be a Show HN, but a fun idea otherwise.
• omarforgotpwd 8y ago
  Funny that MySpace’s famous design was essentially created by mistake due to a code injection vulnerability.
• rehevkor5 8y ago
  As a student developer working for my University, I would occasionally add ASCII art to my coworker's (also students) branches in SVN as a lighthearted way to encourage code reviews. If I saw an ASCII art in the main branch, it was a poke in the ribs that they hadn't gotten it reviewed. I agree that we've lost a lot of the character that used to make things more fun.
• jaabe 8y ago
  I think the article has a point, but I'm not convinced the fun and weird stuff really went away. Social media probably had a pretty big impact on people losing ownership over their online presence, but often I think it's just harder to find the cool stuff. A few years ago I attended a 60th birthday, and I was seated next to a retired biologist. He was a wonderful man, full gray unkept beard, and, the only man attending who wasn't wearing a suit. Instead he wore a striped shirt, some green work pants, suspenders and a green hat that he only reluctantly took off as his wife shot him a look. A real character, and a great conversationalist. When he found out that I worked with EDB he enthusiastically told me about his blog about the fauna of Bornholm (one of our islands). I looked it up when I got home, and it was exactly what I had expected. He obviously build it himself, without the use of any form of blogging engine or framework, and it was this really nerdy thing full of stories and pictures of the fauna of Bornholm along with his journals of discovery. Sadly I didn't keep the link, and I haven't been able to find it since. I have another great gem though, it's the webpage of my psychologist: http://psykoweb.dk http://psykoweb.dk (please don't crash it). I think it certainly lives up to what the article is about, but it's actually also full of useful information and science done, found and tested in a long life of psychology. Most of the other places I follow aren't like this. They look more akin to https://www.valdemarsro.dk https://www.valdemarsro.dk , but unlike the article, I don't think the uglyness was really the true value, I think it was the content, and you can certainly have that in a nice package. I personally hope a lot more people start taking ownership, and start building their own little places on the internet and I wish it wasn't so hard to find these days. I don't think they need to look like Geocites, I really don't. But I do miss the bravery in the openness and honesty of the early internet, because that stuff was just more interesting. As I write that, I know I'm a bit of a hypocrite, because I'm completely guilty of being uninteresting myself. My main socialmedia is linkedin, and it's where I put most of my musings, and as such they're marketed to represent exactly the sort of message you'd expect to find on linkedin. They're informative, but they're also selling either myself or my points. Which is fine for linkedin, but it's also a lot less interesting than the authentic interent where things were actually fun, weird and entirely geninue.
• mey 8y ago
  https://itch.io/ https://itch.io/ is an interesting community of people doing hello world to full indie games. There is weird and wonderful stuff in that messy pile. https://asmb.itch.io/dmcas-sky https://asmb.itch.io/dmcas-sky [NSFW] https://radiatoryang.itch.io/the-tearoom https://radiatoryang.itch.io/the-tearoom [NSFW] https://captaingames.itch.io/enviro-bear-2000 https://captaingames.itch.io/enviro-bear-2000 For a sampling of the fun and weird
  • deleted 8y ago
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• danmg 8y ago
  A lot of stupid rules.
• logfromblammo 8y ago
  It stopped being a hobby, or art, and started being a platform for making money. With the money came the scammers and other malicious actors, and so now, everything that used to be fun is also a security vulnerability. Everything even remotely interesting has to be sandboxed and sanitized, to contain the damage when someone inevitably figures out how to weaponize a toy and upload the resulting bomb to your site. And the moneymaking parts also had to be simplified, so that users without a lot of technical knowledge could still figure out how to enter their payment information. All clicks; no command lines. I suspect fun and weird is still out there, but their signal is drowned by the noise. You have to already know where it is to get to it. An army of fun-finders could constantly troll through the dark waters of the out-of-mainstream net, looking for new and interesting, and then recommend whatever they may find to their social networks. Otherwise, the best site you will never see might be on page 200 for the nearest search term you will ever enter that matches it--ranked well behind all the disturbing rule 34 interpretations of it. The niche-dwellers just can't find each other easily any more. The crowd standing between them is too vast and noisy. And if you don't have a strong community already, your tentative steps into forming one can easily be annihilated by spammers advertising boner pills and 419 scams, sometimes in a language you can't understand, or someone renting a DDoS botnet just to kill your server, or any of a dozen other ways to pave over your paradise.
• 8bitsrule 8y ago
  Appreciate the point, and that ads ruin everything. But get away from the endless promotion of 'big name' sites and there is still a lot of fun&weird going on on the net. Just one example: 'Tumbler' isn't mentioned a lot anymore. But fun abides. It's not hard to get caught up in the big names, all echo'd by all the wannabees. It's a lot like the rest of mainstream culture. Fun's in the subcultures. As true now as all thru the rock era. EDIT: Wanna try a fun experiment? Limit all profitable enterprises (including advertising) to one or two domains, say .com or .biz . Watch what happens to those over time.
• kingkawn 8y ago
  because we are all tired of looking at our screens
• skrebbel 8y ago
  Lots of the internet is fun and weird. https://pouet.net https://pouet.net is the unofficial home of the demoscene, even though it's much weirder than the demoscene itself. https://dwitter.net https://dwitter.net needs no comment Stack Overflow has answers like: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454 Half of tumblr is totally out there. I personally wouldn't call 4chan and its relatives fun, but they sure are weird. There's dedicated, active, shitty phpbb forums for every single weird sexual fetish you can imagine. And that's just the fun and weird patches of the internet that I happen to know about. There must be 3 orders of magnitude more. I'd wager that if you think the internet isn't fun and weird anymore, then you're just looking in the wrong places. The problem is with you and not the internet.
  • jacoblambda 8y ago
    I would pitch in https://lainchan.org/ https://lainchan.org/ and https://arisuchan.jp/ https://arisuchan.jp/ which are nice little tech image boards. They are that lovely blend of out there and slightly off kilter that I remember from the image boards of old.
    • rc-1140 8y ago
      I would not merely because the denizens of those kinds of boards are in some state of obnoxious wallowing in self-pity (not clinical depression outside of the actual one or two posters who actually might have it), unless you consider that "off kilter". Reading people incessantly moan about the "good ol' days" of everything is negative content. The discussion is all fueled by that wallowing and none of it is constructive or interesting.
      • threwawasy1228 8y ago
        I would argue that smaller *chan boards are much different from larger boards you are referencing in this post. Smaller chan boards are more akin to single topic forums with a distinct community. Lainchan for instance has a large lisp and functional programming community on it, and lots of positivity. You should try clicking links before you judge them.
• leowoo91 8y ago
  Because it's normalized? Until next thing invents itself..
• sayno3 8y ago
  Because it is more dangerous. When the internet was treated as just images on a screen that one could turn off, it wasn't taken seriously and people weren't afraid to put up stuff on textfiles. Now some trash people would dox you and it is easy because your entire personal network is ubiquitously connected. So all it takes is persistence from a malicious actor and they will have a lot of influence on your real life.
• zackmorris 8y ago
  I submit that the reason the internet is boring is that these causes are all obvious to us, and this comment won't get upvoted: 1) apps created niche proprietary software everywhere that used to be free and open media 2) the declarative, idempotent roots of the world wide web have been replaced by imperative, brittle Javascriptified spaghetti code 3) Javascript build systems have largely obfuscated any code that can be seen 4) Web 2.0 introduced private social networks in walled gardens that in many ways offer fewer privacy guarantees than before (due to the profit motive of exploiting user info) 5) Monopolies and duopolies now receive the lion's share of funding for research (which tends to aim for increasing profits and attracting eyeballs instead of fundamentally advancing the state of the art) I'll stop there. It's hard to say how many of these are fundamental impasses to having an open internet again..
  • Hydraulix989 8y ago
    I think the de-anonymization of online users is another shift that (among many other things) caused the Internet to be less fun and weird. You can see a very different tone in YouTube video comments, for example, before they switched to using real names. Now, people are afraid to risk damaging their own personal reputation by posting "weird" things (I don't mean extremely weird either -- people are extremely self-conscious in general of saying things that MIGHT be considered weird in front of others, so they don't be themselves as much as they did when they were anonymous). And often, "fun" is synonymous with "weird". It's not ALL bad -- people also say FAR less offensive things to each other when their real names are attached (but it still happens), but if you're looking for reasons for the shift, user de-anonymization is definitely one of them.
    • andai 8y ago
      To add to this, the few remaining pockets of anonymity are still as weird as ever :)
      • baroffoos 8y ago
        I'm in a private forum and its funny to see how strangers with anime profile pics are able to discuss topics that would be flamed to death in seconds on most of the internet.
• nyfresh 8y ago
  Reddit
• evesprini 8y ago
  This is a perfect sales pitch.
• LeoPanthera 8y ago
  I don't see this opinion very often, so I might just be insane, but I firmly believe that the fun was removed from the internet with the invention of NAT. Without the ability to receive connections on your home computer, the list of "fun" things you can build is hugely reduced.
  • cr0sh 8y ago
    What makes you think NAT prevents you from receiving connections on your home PC? You can "easily" set up a server: https://blog.mindorks.com/how-to-convert-your-laptop-desktop-into-a-server-and-host-internet-accessible-website-on-it-part-2-cdb4b3633fa9 https://blog.mindorks.com/how-to-convert-your-laptop-desktop... Ok - it isn't something for the faint of heart - but it can be done. If your public IP changes often - you'll have to use a service like this: https://freedns.afraid.org/ https://freedns.afraid.org/ Many if not most home router/firewalls have some provision to allow you to resolve thru NAT to a server at home. Please note that this -may- violate TOS with your ISP; most officially don't allow servers, but some turn a blind eye to it as long as you aren't hosting something nefarious or popular (and if you are hosting something popular, it's better to just bite the bullet and get actual server hosting somewhere, given how cheap and easy it is today).
    • LeoPanthera 8y ago
      You're kinda proving my point. You have to jump through all these hoops. Most people never will.
      • nsgi 8y ago
        It's only one more hoop compared to doing it with a static IP. Pretty trivial to anyone capable of setting up a server.
        • notatcomputer68 8y ago
          Trivial for anyone who can click "host server" button in a multiplayer game / file sharing program / voice chat?
• deleted 8y ago
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• deleted 8y ago
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• raesene9 8y ago
  I'd suggest that if you don't think the Internet is "fun" or "weird" you're just not looking hard enough. I've been a regular net user since 1995 and there's every bit (in fact more) weird unusual content than there's ever been. You want creativity, look at today's meme culture. Sure there's a lot of "hit or miss" content out there, but there's no shortage of weird. Deviantart, tumblr, LNI on imgur, a huge section of subreddits and that's just the easily accessible stuff. If you like video content, tiktok and similar have no shortage of fairly odd stuff. You can head off into far weirder territory than that with a little effort (*chans, or ToR based content) Is it MySpace, I guess not, but there's nothing stopping anyone putting up flashy HTML content easily, Netlify or GH pages aren't that difficult to get started with.
  • acomjean 8y ago
    superbad still exists. http://superbad.com http://superbad.com but world new york /memepool/ suck/ are all memories. Its hard to keep up the content creation.
  • aasasd 8y ago
    Exactly, the web became less weird because it got bigger. Back then, the entire web consisted of early adopters, so obviously they were trying out whatever they could. One “simply” needs to look for communities where this happens now. But of course, these days it's a pure game of chance and/or years-long riding on the edge to find oneself in such a community. Just like in any other saturated creative field.
• sonaltr 8y ago
  The internet always has been (and is) whatever we make it to be. I do really mean that - in fact, it's more accessible than ever. For example, personally for me, it means that I can go online and access vast resources of knowledge to make myself better at my job, my business etc. It provides me with hours of entertainment - both free and paid. It also has enabled be to in touch with friends and family across the world. For my mom, it means she gets to see videos and tv shows she had given up on decades ago (Indian tv drama - 1 ep / day, it adds up quite quickly). It also means, I can send her stuff that I know she'll find funny. She can keep in touch with her family, friends etc. For my dad, it means he can see places online that he's never been to. He loves maps and the internet has enabled him to see detailed maps he'd never even dream of. For others, it could a dark place of business - a place to sell drugs, or organs or others. For some it's a glimmer of hope that their stories / struggles could be put out there for the world to see and empathize. The internet is what you make of it. For those looking for what the author mentioned - those still exist - you have to know where to look. But for the "normies" - Those that are not concerned about programming, internet etc. - it's something totally different and they've moulded what internet is for them.
• debt 8y ago
  idk bro, I think you're hanging out in the wrong parts of the internet. the weirdness and funnest is out there. the internet is global, you sure you looking in all the right places?
• retail101 8y ago
  Here is my question. Why isn't there a new social networking site using the old myspace layout as their template where you can just choose your theme song, your top friends, post weird stuff and have it just be fun?
• empath75 8y ago
  I think the reason the internet isn't as fun and weird as it used to be is that it's now Important and it's been weaponized by powerful interests in pursuit of political ends. It's just non-stop ideological warfare, which is both stressful and boring.
• slackfan 8y ago
  Because you broke it.
• quickthrower2 8y ago
  Wow, markdown with markup ... and imports! inside it. I'm dizzy.
• tpaschalis 8y ago
  A phrase that I read, and sums up my feelings went like "In the early 2000's, in the internet you went to places, but now you just go to the mall". Many parts of the internet are weird and fun, but you gotta look for them. You need to decide to get past the over-designed mall, which is meant to capture your time to sell ads, and support your run of the mill mom-and-pop shops.
• danso 8y ago
  I humbly submit that if you haven’t found fun and weird stuff on today’s Internet, you haven’t tried TikTok, or checking out subreddits outside of your bubble.
• rglover 8y ago
  Because the majority of people are not fun and weird. Every fringe thing that becomes mainstream inevitably drifts toward the mean in one way or another.
• dfischer 8y ago
  I am looking forward to a fully decentralized internet. I know that carries a bit of “hype” right now but I’ve been playing with it lately and I think it’s exacty what a lot of people are thirsting for. The original feeling of geocities, bbs, forums. Actual sense of community and discovery without worry. It’s definitely too early / the projects I’ve played with have a lot of progress to go on. Things that need to be improved for a real Dapp to exist: 1. Storage layer with encryption / p2p / access control. Allows “back-end” logic to be distributed amongst peers. 2. UX tooling that makes it extremely easy to sign in with identities and manage encryption. 3. Developer tooling to easily package app code and deploy to users. 4. Absolutely no 3rd party dependencies outside of the app itself. It must be self sustaining. 5. Open source for a true Dapp. If value is being provided at a cost of a company/dev team then monetize it by selling access to a client or data within the app. This can be done easier with wallet integrations and crypto.
• deleted 8y ago
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• antepodius 8y ago
  There's plenty of weirdness to be found. The *chan websites, for a start- the more obscure, the more idiosyncratic and possibly pure. Trawling through IRC channels is mysterious experience for me.
  • cr0sh 8y ago
    What little is left of news servers can also be interesting to troll thru - but there's more noise than anything out there on those today, so it can be frustrating at best. There are also small pockets of gopherspace if you dare to look for 'em. For more "mainstream", you can also still find old-school style ANSI BBS systems (I know, redundancy) on certain IP addresses; most are simple hobby projects, or focused on certain niche things (retro computing, for instance).
• benkarst 8y ago
  Because of clickbait fake news...like this.
• sodosopa 8y ago
  It was. The early 90’s-2000 had a hugely creative backbone which ultimately was crushed by businesses.
• chasing 8y ago
  Because people want what they create to be seen by other people. And today that means they have to use Instagram or Twitter. Or maybe Medium. Or something else very highly constrained. So you see a fucktonne of creativity within the very narrow bounds of those formats: Our level of innovation when it comes to the 280-character format is through the goddamn roof. Otherwise, the perceived effort required to create something innovating and fun/weird simply isn't worth the result. Unless you're doing it for a client.
• screenhole 8y ago
  internet can still be super fun & weird. Screenhole is a fun community with their own currency instead of likes, buttcoin: https://screenhole.net https://screenhole.net
• noobermin 8y ago
  So this is an ad for the author's publishing tool "codeblog"? Worst, when you click on the link in the article, it only has a form to put your email in. I have no idea what this tool does or what it's used for.
• 0db532a0 8y ago
  If you're looking for another dose of nostalgia: https://www.cameronsworld.net/ https://www.cameronsworld.net/.
• jacebot 8y ago
  My jam used to be to go to alta vista or hotbot and search "weird shit" and see what came up. Boy howdy...but nowadays I can agree with a lot of the comments. It is about monetization (thanks Mitch) and the user base. Also the rise of what I will call super social sites like Reddit, FaceBook, etc. Allowing users to tailor their content into a funneled feed, where before you had to search for it. Literally. Then bookmark it/rss feed, hopes it stays up. Save some websites/data to a zip drive.... ohhh I did, I did. <3 me some iomega zips. Thanks for a walk down internet history lane. Enjoyed it!
• asdfman123 8y ago
  Because there was money to be made, and thus it was taken over by large corporations. Everything becomes less fun and weird when taken over by large corporations.
• avar 8y ago
  So many commentators in this thread seemingly only read the title of the article, and are (somewhat rightly) decrying the increased commercialization of the Internet as one cause, without realizing that they're commenting on an article that's just a thinly veiled advertisement for a blogging product.
  • roymurdock 8y ago
    The author has a good thought but the wrong solution (most likely there is no solution and the public internet of the late 90s early 2000s is gone forever)
  • preommr 8y ago
    Also, there's no way the people here would support the monstrosity that was the average self-designed myspace page. People here complain constantly about small usability issues like scroll hijacking or overall bloat from minor animations; just imagine sites wantonly abusing things like flashing headers or an entire page full of glitter.
• _trampeltier 8y ago
  It's not just the internet, it is the whole life. For ex. in Switzerland, almost almost all citys did forbid cheap (plastic) chairs in street restaurants. We used to have very old cars, when we started to drive a car. Today they start with a new leased car. We could do funny things and if the car broke it was an easy fix (one door has a different color, who cares). Today if you do just a little bit something forbidden,10 people make a picture with a cellphone and send it to a newspaper. Also just on the street, people dress much nicer than a couple of years ago, allways ready for a selfie .. Jokes are not allowed about anything, because somebody could get a bad feeling, etc...
• gnuking 8y ago
  There is a search engine (https://wiby.me https://wiby.me) that is pretty good for finding old/weird websites. Feels like I'm browsing the web in 1997 again.
• tanilama 8y ago
  Well the internet is military project to begin with, it is not born to be fun and weird.
• the_other_guy 8y ago
  in an era where the internet is controlled by a handful of internet monopoly businesses and where any fun can easily be seen as offense by someone somewhere, then fun has to disappear or relabeled to not hurt businesses sole raison d'etre which is profit. It's not 2007 anymore, sadly.
• Kamogo 8y ago
  If anyone is interested, I made a site to show all the fun and weird things developers are making. https://justforfun.io/ https://justforfun.io/
• amelius 8y ago
  Why isn't fashion more fun and weird? Everybody is wearing jeans ...
• virtuexru 8y ago
  That confetti button is addicting! Well done. I also totally agree that the MySpace era was one of the funnest on the internet.
• edoo 8y ago
  I think we are in a funk part where there are now so many people and so much info available it kind of washes everything out with no personal touch. The natural response to this will be to form ever and ever more specific communities. I had an idea for social site. You can only belong to a single group of traditional common evolutionary size, say 30-50 people. All these groups self organize and people can leave or be voted in/out. The groups form goals and plans to get stuff done, like testing recipes or anything they have fun doing. Groups could communicate if they wanted, and based on the abilities of each group you'd form these abstract chains of interdisciplinary volunteerism. Inter group communication would be more meaningful as each communication could represent the knowledge of the entire group. Our brains are pretty much designed for a close knit group of that size. Our current way of living is kind of nuts. By keeping the group to a size that the mind can actually grasp and form relationships within I think is the powerful part. A lot of people are living lives now where that might add serious long term value with meaningful relationships, as well as crazy efficiency on hobbies.
• Zenst 8y ago
  Standards - In the early days of any technology, you have an open playing field in innervation, with this you get some quirky and diverse solutions forward. Take the early days of computing, every one was unique and today, standards give you a narrower choice. Sure, you will always have the option to innovate, but the market will be more standard and less openly receptive to such change. But to advance, you need to draw lines in the sand, and standards are just that. So in the early days of the web, each page was unique and crafted with minimum standards and lots of opportunity to innovate. Today, much of those early layers of innovation have become templated, and the majority of what you get are just that and less quirky. But there will be exceptions, just less of them than the pioneering days, proportionally. Not saying standards are bad, and indeed without them, we end up stuck at one point in advancement and there is that point when a line in the sand has to be drawn. Hence a focus shift from hardware towards software. But then, anybody today looking at yesteryears solutions will call them weird, amongst other things. That's progress for you and for that, lots of small lines in the sand moving forwards tend to happen over big leaps. Though they do happen, mostly in new advancements of technology, the early days when the foundation standards are written, which we still have. Though I'm sure in a decade or two when people have phototic processors with optical memory coils or whatever the future holds for computing. They will look back upon today's computers as...fun and weird.
• modernerd 8y ago
  The Internet is still fun and weird! You just need to know where to look. Dig into https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ to recapture the feel of those home-spun web playgrounds of old. Look at the amazing things the https://glitch.com/ https://glitch.com/ and https://repl.it https://repl.it and https://codepen.io/ https://codepen.io/ communities create. Check out the buzz and creativity in the communities gathered around YouTube creators like Daniel Shiffman on The Coding Train: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw Discover amazing indie game creators doing wacky things at https://itch.io/ https://itch.io/. Visit the front pages of http://giphy.com http://giphy.com and https://imgur.com/ https://imgur.com/ for a dose of silliness and creativity. Hack around on a hundred different coding challenge sites like https://www.codewars.com/ https://www.codewars.com/ and https://www.codingame.com/ https://www.codingame.com/ and https://exercism.io/ https://exercism.io/. Get free education and meet other learners on https://www.freecodecamp.org/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/ or https://www.khanacademy.org/ https://www.khanacademy.org/. Browse new and interesting projects to contribute to at https://github.com/explore https://github.com/explore. And these are just fun nerdy tech sites — there is something fun or weird for every walk of life. It's easy to get nostalgic about the internet of old (and I appreciate the OP is writing to promote their own neat creative coding/blogging playground), but the premise that the Internet is no longer as fun somehow because you can't inject crazy JavaScript into your Facebook pages seems misguided. Outside of those strictly controlled communities, it has never been easier to join a group of people who like to make and break weird shit online.
• stevewilhelm 8y ago
  I think the internet is still fun and weird. I think the flaw is equating "the internet" to html encoded content. Much of the internet's creativity is encoded in audio, video, and photography.
• sjs382 8y ago
  Every time I see an article like this, I feel the need to pour one out for Kuro5hin. Man, how do I wish the archives were accessible somewhere!
• deleted 8y ago
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• pryelluw 8y ago
  Lose yourself in neocities.org for a night.
• rammy1234 8y ago
  Internet is no more fun cause, people are making money out of it DOT
• fixermark 8y ago
  It's weird to me when people bring up MySpace as a positive example. MySpace gave people headaches. Pulling all the stops on CSS manipulation without any associated training on design, color, or style gave us precisely what we got: an often-unreadable mess that bordered on the physiologically unpleasant. I think we have seen few recapitulations of that style of system today (in spite of the fact that the tools to allow it never vanished) because most people don't want it, end of story.
  • Andrex 8y ago
    People may forget, but everybody was excited to switch from MySpace to Facebook almost exactly for this reason. It just felt cooler and more grown up.
• arcaster 8y ago
  People who get offended all the time ruined the fun?
• epistemology 8y ago
  Ego
• jonplackett 8y ago
  I blame the death of Flash. Flash let a whole bunch of people make stuff who can't now. Artists, kids, people just dicking around. You could make something fun in a day and it didn't even need testing. Now you need to code properly and use git and libraries. A vast swathe of fun people have been cut off from making weird shit.
  • mattlondon 8y ago
    Hmm not sure on this - if I recall correctly, you needed super-expensive Adobe software to make Flash applications (or were they called "animations"?) which I am guessing most people did not have - IIRC the price of the software was several hundred GBP (£200+) in a time when a mid-range desktop PC was like £600-800. I think it also only ran on Windows and Mac OS? Its all half-forgotten memories no though so those figures may be incorrect. HTML, Javascript and CSS is free and openly available in any browser on open source OSes as well as Windows & OSX these days. You can still make some weird stuff on the web platform if you want to, although I would agree that there are not nice WYSIWYG editors (that I am aware of anyway) that makes this easy.
• danschumann 8y ago
  Role playing... you used to have usernames and you could be whoever you wanted.. now you're expected to be yourself. Thanks facebook.
• icedchai 8y ago
  It's pretty simple: The Internet is mainstream now. The original users of the Internet were academics, techies, and nerds. Now everyone and their mother, literally, is online. Do you remember Wired magazine in the 90's? It was wayyyy weirder... How about Mondo 2000?
• Waterluvian 8y ago
  If you can wade through the slime, 4chan has some pockets of weird/fun original stuff.
• uptownfunk 8y ago
  The truth is pretty much no one cares. As long as instagram still works the under 30s are happy, as long as FB still works the 30+ers are happy. As long as WhatsApp still works, most everyone outside of US is happy. At the same time, I understand the sentiment. But who is going to bother maintaining this functionality which if done wrong exposes you to Bobby'); DROP TABLE STUDENTS
• delblues 8y ago
  It use to be...
• bfuller 8y ago
  The internet IS fun and weird there are tons of niche communities doing crazy stuff http://reddit.com/r/reptiliandude http://reddit.com/r/reptiliandude http://reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle http://reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle http://reddit.com/r/sarahai http://reddit.com/r/sarahai http://reddit.com/r/echerdex http://reddit.com/r/echerdex http://reddit.com/r/tao_of_calculus http://reddit.com/r/tao_of_calculus
• mikekchar 8y ago
  I think the old internet is still there. It's just buried under the new internet. There are billions of people who think it's a good idea to communicate with proprietary platforms and use SaaS. But software freedom and communities that encourage users to become producers are also flourishing -- you just have to know where to look.
• jancsika 8y ago
  Oh, that Dark Mode Toggle! 1. the widget has a secret toggling hotspot that is only discovered when the user clicks the circle and observes that the action failed to toggle the widget. 2. widget looks like it should behave like a mobile widget (where touching any part of the widget will trigger a toggle) but behaves differently 3. dragging the little circle to the other side of the widget generates a dragging animation, but does not update the toggle. Instead, upon releasing the pointer the little circle will animate back to its original position, defeating the user's expectations. 4. attempting to drag the circle past its own widget boundaries will fail to drag the circle to that distance. However, it will succeed in toggling the widget! So the obvious analogic behavior in #3 fails to trigger the desired widget behavior, where this fantasy-world interaction does (e.g., like sliding a penny with one's finger past the edge of a borderless table to get the penny to stop right at the edge, yet moving the penny right to the edge will cause it to travel back to its original position). 5. the cursor icon changes from the "move" icon to some other icon when attempting to drag outside the widget bounds. But remember that #4 requires a drag to the outside of the bounds to trigger the toggle. This means that the user is likely to see the wrong cursor icon the moment before a successful toggle event occurs. I.e., "cursor change to reflect a concern other than this widget" likely means "this widget is about to do its thing!" I'd like to suggest the following additional feature to the Dark Mode Toggle: * when user drags the toggle with the pointer outside the bounds of the widget and then releases, immediately show a dialog that reads: "Ok to Cancel Toggle? [Ok] [Cancel]" Edit: clarification
• oarabbus_ 8y ago
  If you don't think the internet is fun and weird, you're visiting the wrong sites. Period.
• habosa 8y ago
  I have a feeling most of the commenters here did not read the article and are just arguing the headline. After some brief discussion on the topic a hand, the author gets to the point and introduces their new product, Codeblog: https://codeblog.app/ https://codeblog.app/ It's like Medium and MySpace and Markdown and React had a baby. I don't know what I think about it but I am sad nobody here is discussing it.
  • bradlys 8y ago
    It could be that few read it. But the product itself doesn't exist yet. I think the more interesting discussion isn't about the product itself anyway. More interesting discussions would be about why have such a product and why such a product doesn't exist in high amounts like it used to.
  • zapzupnz 8y ago
    Actually, a lot of comments show that people realised very quickly that they were being astroturfed, and only discuss the article up to the point where the product was slyly introduced.
• binarymax 8y ago
  Great post. I started reading it thinking it was just a nice nostalgic rant. Then he goes all twist ending and announces he actually did something about it. Bravo.
• kavalec 8y ago
  The internet is like sex: if it isn't fun and weird, you're doing it wrong.
• d_white 8y ago
  A few years ago, I saw @r0ml touch on this in his linux.conf.au keynote. It had some really interesting ideas around how software could be democratized. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3nJR7PNgI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3nJR7PNgI4
• oskkejdjdkjd 8y ago
  The answer is really simple. It’s because most people who use the internet are not fun and weird. Trying to blame it on anything else is wrong.
• charliebrownau 8y ago
  Western Society is getting taken over by the GLOBAL SOCIALIST LEFT that does not base reality on: Common Sense Logic Bilogy Sceince Facts People over the last 3-5 years getting censored for disagreeing with Global Socialist LEFT Software seems to be getting worse , now merit is removed , bug testing+QA removed and activism is in place in commerical and corporations Main steam TV+Movies ruined Scifi ruined Comics ruined Scouts killed AU+CA+NZ cost of living is sky rocketing and we keep on getting taxed till out death or breaking point The only decent media outlet for entertainment now as JP anime
• williesleg 8y ago
  The Government.
• bb88 8y ago
  Fun is awesome, it just doesn't pay the bills.
• lokedhs 8y ago
  I'd say the weirdness is still there. There is probably even more weirdness than in the old days, but these days it's dwarfed by the boring stuff. Remember that weird stuff is only weird when you have something boring to compare it with. Did we even think of the old stuff as weird back then? I don't really remember, but I don't think so. Today you can go to Mastodon to find funny and weird stuff. I'm having fun on there, and I really like weird stuff.
• dbg31415 8y ago
  Man... fundamentally because we aren't all trying to invent things ourselves any more. We inherit so much. And it gets us to production faster, but it also locks us in on how things work. One toaster... you can adjust all the dials, but as a result you get burnt toast. One toaster... it's locked in, but makes near-perfect toast every time (assuming you like toast that way). Which do you use?
  • miluge 8y ago
    The dialed toaster! I have one and probably had one of the funniest nights with my girlfriend being drunk and doing "burning" test with different bread, etc...I own that toaster for years and yet still burn a few slices once in a while. A lot of people nowadays just want a streamlined experience or doesnt bother to look/experience.
• canadaduane 8y ago
  Beaker Browser is quite interesting. It allows anyone to fork a page and create their own version, all using decentralized file storage.
• wolco 8y ago
  The darkweb is weird and can be fun but is mostly nothing just like the earlier weird internet.
• x3tm 8y ago
  Maybe the author of the article is simply growing older? This is the geeky equivalent of "modern music is crap, unlike the one of my youth".
• phs318u 8y ago
  I was on the internet before http - a time when nntp and gopher ruled the waves. At that time and in the decade that followed, the net was populated with geeks, nerds and people who could be considered on the edges of the distribution of societal/behavioural norms in some way. This population was responsible for the overwhelming majority of "content" - said content being published directly by the "content creators". Hence the weird and wacky world of oddball websites that the early www was comprised of. As the skew of netizens changed to reflect that of wider society, so too did the inclination/ability to self-publish content without some help, creating the demand that gave rise to Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. As for the content, its variety came to reflect that of broader society i.e. overwhelmingly vanilla, inane, mundane. The gems are still out there - just like needles in the proverbial haystack. My 2c.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• njharman 8y ago
  Wat? The internet is great. The absolute best. It is or can be the superset of everything else. All of everything is just a post, one upload away from being part of internet. I'm sure the top 1 or 80% is cheap but that is always the case. Pop stuff is lowest comm denominator. The interest, the unique, the original is in tiny niches. And that is where internet shines. Niches are cheap to publish and have frictionless audience of the world.
• RickSanchez2600 8y ago
  Corporate takeover, and censorship as the Internet becomes commercialized. Takeover of payment systems that can ban anyone's account for political reasons. It brought on the neoliberal trolls on 4Chan and Reddit. In some areas anyway. The Internet is like working a job now, all fun is blocked by management.
• mettamage 8y ago
  I hope that my explorable explanation on neural nets will be a bit more fun and weird [1]. It is still very much in the early drafting phase but I already have cats! Neural nets shouldn't be scary, they should be fun. I will do a more formal submission once I'm done. If anyone has an idea how I can make it more fun and weird, please let me know! [1] https://mettamage.github.io/Interactive-Neural-Networks/ https://mettamage.github.io/Interactive-Neural-Networks/
• willart4food 8y ago
  you want fun & werid? Here's fun & weird: * https://www.reddit.com/r/ImGoingToHellForThis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ImGoingToHellForThis/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/ P.S.: there's also 4chan, if you so dare!
  • citrusui 8y ago
    Each of these subreddits has more than 800K subscribers -- it's possible, but highly unlikely you'll see something truly strange from there. A good place to start is a smaller subreddit. Here, I'll link two of my favorites just for the hell of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/bruhmoment https://www.reddit.com/r/bruhmoment https://www.reddit.com/r/arabfunny https://www.reddit.com/r/arabfunny Side note: I think the article meant weird as in "obscure". Personally, I'd describe weird internet content as something you wouldn't show to your friends (except if you're close, of course.)
• porpoisely 8y ago
  I thought about this as well. The internet was very fun and very weird from the late nineties to 2012 or so. Then something changed and it became very boring, very stale and very censored. Then corporations, journalists and politics happened. Now those with the megaphones complain day and night about anything and everything they disagree with and demand everything be censored. Every day there is a new list of words you can't stay, sites you can't visit or content that is going to be filtered. Somehow, the most annoying and prudish people were given the role of internet hall monitor and we are suffering for it.
• franciscop 8y ago
  IMHO the reason MySpace got so big is different: It targeted a community of musicians in a moment when indie music on the web was blowing up. It also allowed those naturally creative people to style their profiles. And then it brought the fans and everyone else. It would not be a stretch to say that, had myspace not existed, I wouldn't have played in 2 music bands in my teens. And I also started programming there! Even though I didn't know I was programming. I just wish I knew about archive.org back then to keep my profile somewhere with my cool hair and horrible design xD
• gbaygon 8y ago
  It's nice to try to recover the spirit of it, but also for this to work it should be also lightweight (or at least usable). I'm getting: "This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac." That's Safari on my 15" mbp 17 2018. edit: formatting
• alanlamm 8y ago
  1. Based on personal experience, I don't really buy the many comments here that say the web is boring bc most people are boring vs some fun geeky outlier elite. I remember IT class 20 years ago and everybody - including the most mainstream jocks if one were to stereotype - had great fun making colorful html, watching sheep walk around the windows desktop, chatting on icq, etc. Even orkut several years later was zany. 2. It is ironic that in the age of google, many responses here are lists of cool urls - almost like mini directories. reminds me of the physical Guide To The Internet (or some similar name) book we had (and which was great). 3. It is a little ironic that the OP is a rant about an uncool internet that proceeds to plug a product, which is typical of the uncool internet. I dont mean to criticize, though, bc refering to a problem and proposing a solution is legitimate. But u have to smile. 4. FWIW strongly share the feeling that the web is less fun. 5. No data, but I have a gut feel that as powerful as the big cos may be, it is not an inevitable process - just a matter of going out there and building alternatives (not that they'd necessarily be as profitable or big as the googles and facebooks) - [in my country] we've switched from icq to msn to orkut to fb to ig+whatsapp. Who is to say there won't be another 5 switches over the next 20 years?
• overgard 8y ago
  I think things really changed about 2007 or so when AJAX and mobile really took off, and the web went from being document centric to being more of an application platform. That raised the barrier to entry because things did legitimately get better, but you needed specialist knowledge to do anything respectable. I don’t think specialised markdown languages really changes anything though.
• bigboijohnson 8y ago
  You fucking foagies just don't go to the fun parts of the internet
• SN76477 8y ago
  I suffer from a strange sexual fetish and I will not soon forget the feelings I had in the 90s when I realized I wasn’t the only one. It was a surreal feeling to know that not only was I not alone I wasn’t the weirdest person anymore. Some were much more into it and much weirder than I was.
• lazyjones 8y ago
  Historically, it all went downhill with iterations of the W3C specs, particularly the strict HTML/XHTML fad. As browsers began to sloppily implement the rapidly changing specs and sometimes add their own nonstandard elements, it was no longer feasible to make single static webpages look the same for all users. JavaScript and its potential for nasty security issues also played a major role.
• jackcosgrove 8y ago
  Along with the points others have made about a more representative user base making the internet lamer, there was also a change in behavior by users within the last 10 years which I myself have undergone. Instead of going on web safaris like I used to, I eventually found a trusted shortlist of sites and aggregators which scratched my itch, and I return to those fewer sites rather than going hunting for new information like I used to. My slice of the web has shrunk, which either means the boringness of the web is my own confirmation bias, or a lot of other people are behaving the same and the web is being winnowed into a few portals rather than a constellation of sites. I tend to think I'm not alone in this. Also just as a vignette, a classmate of mine in high school in the late 90s had a personal web site (which was very well done at the time) with a GIF of an aerial shot of our high school with a targeting crosshairs superimposed on it, and flickering red. Naturally he did not fit in, but that sort of early web freedom would get you a visit by a police officer nowadays. There are many, many more restrictions on content than there used to be.
• Adamantcheese 8y ago
  The internet isn't fun and weird because you don't actively seek it out. You're content with what you're given and what everyone else uses and put no effort into getting what you want because you can't bring yourself to care enough for it.
• roadkillon101 8y ago
  The internet these days is alot more accessible than it use to be. Back in the 90's you had to be more tech savy and you needed to be able to code because no one has written the software that could do that thing and there was even less documentation. Now these days, you get a web hosting account. run C-panel and install WordPress in just one click (Wix if you know even less). Heck, you don't even have to code the HTML, just select a template you like. Probably 50% of the static sites are CMS. The point is, as the software and platforms become standardized commodities where you don't have to learn anything to use it, the less innovation you will see from individuals as most people don't want to learn, they want the benefits without paying their dues.
• intrasight 8y ago
  I've a daughter who is now 23. Growing up she dabbled extensively in the evolving Internet - through the transitions it has made over the last 15 years. Seeing the sites and apps that she has used over those years has, as a techie, been an oustanding experience. I say "Don't trust anyone over 25 to make the Internet fun and weird". I've not doubt that in 15 years we will look back at the current internet as tame or simplistic - like I look back at the computers I used in the early 80s. We might still be carrying "smartphones" but I doubt it. Lastly, I am more concerned about us users controlling the internet than I am about it being fun or weird.
• bfuller 8y ago
  The internet is fun and weird but all my links got caught in the spam filter.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• jbhatab 8y ago
  I don't know what internet this person is on, but the internet I'm on can get pretty fun and weird.
• randomacct3847 8y ago
  The internet has definitely gotten more annoying. Autoplay video should be illegal.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• Semiapies 8y ago
  It's weird to look at nearly 400 comments and realize how few people actually finished the article.
• ethanpil 8y ago
  And of course, the amazing https://www.lingscars.com/ https://www.lingscars.com/
• kirillzubovsky 8y ago
  Want weird internet? My friends made http://newhive.com http://newhive.com a while back, and that site is as weird internet as it gets, with glitter, gifs, code, and anything your heart might desire.
• jungletime 8y ago
  I watched a 45 minute video "Web Development In 2019 - A Practical Guide" Its him just listing off upto date technologies you need to learn to call your self full stack in 2019 for 45 minute. It's really ridiculous, how complicated web development is. The technology is broken. No one wants to admit it. They just keep building on top of a rotten core. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnTQVlqmDQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnTQVlqmDQ0
• davidork 8y ago
  it used to be. Then the internet became a product. It became a storefront, and home to the advertising apocalypse that will probably wind up being the catalyst for the downfall of the human species. there's still funny/weird shit out there, but you have to dig pretty deep, sift through the ads, copypasta, and general crap content to find it... eventually it'll all be banned/deleted for some reason or another.
• Krasnol 8y ago
  People who liked X liked Y. That's why.
• cwkoss 8y ago
  The internet has literally everything on it now. Thus, what you think about the content is more a reflection of yourself.
• miguelmota 8y ago
  That was a fun blog article to read because it had interactive components to it; particularly the 'Confetti me' button which I pressed more times than I should have. One of my favorite fun and weird website is The Useless Web: https://theuselessweb.com/ https://theuselessweb.com/
• Agnosco 8y ago
  This post is good marketing. Not overly complicated, but it gets a lot of reads and the reader is gently forwarded to a call-to-action.
• _pmf_ 8y ago
  "Fun and weird" is hate speech. Humor does no longer have to be funny, according to the Huffington Post.
• rijoja 8y ago
  It is it's just that you don't know where to look. http://sigma.eruditenow.com/ http://sigma.eruditenow.com/
• Medox 8y ago
  Is you want fun and weird then maybe check out the sites where teenagers get creative: https://9gag.com https://9gag.com and Reddit. Although Reddit is more serious compared to 9gag while 9gag users often just "steal" from Reddit.
• rutierut 8y ago
  I completely agree with the author and love the idea, however I'm more of a Vue guy. The system the author is describing already exists for Vue.js, it's called VuePress[0]. I think it's amazing, not only for docs but also for blogs, portfolios, etc. Shameless plug but for an example you can check out how it's used in one of the tutorials about VuePress I'm writing. This link will take you to a Vue component used inside a markdown file: https://willwillems.com/posts/building-a-website-with-vuepress.html#command-generator https://willwillems.com/posts/building-a-website-with-vuepre... And naturally the source[1] is available online. [0] https://http://vuepress.vuejs.org/ https://http://vuepress.vuejs.org/ [1] https://github.com/NickolasBoyer/willwillems/blob/master/posts/building-a-website-with-vuepress.md https://github.com/NickolasBoyer/willwillems/blob/master/pos...
• kriro 8y ago
  One of my favorite sites of all time is searchlores.org I still visit it sometimes. I'd say it qualifies as fun and probably a little weird as well. RIP Francesco.
• itsfun10213123 8y ago
  You're not looking hard enough. Even flat-earthers find their own niche on the internet. http://platelets.fun http://platelets.fun (You're supposed to click)
• swah 8y ago
  I had this flash of "old internet" the other day, when this little guy (https://twitter.com/andrezadelgado/status/1089745376616374272 https://twitter.com/andrezadelgado/status/108974537661637427...) had his drawings displayed on a Facebook page by his older brother, and everyone supported. This pure feeling of "let me show you what I did", with no business involved, not trying to get a job, just happy with this thing he made. Reminds me of _why as well, which I miss for some reason. One could argue that this is simply nostalgia of a time when I would do things just for fun... I might agree.
• aembleton 8y ago
  Lings Cars is fun, weird and actually a profitable leasing company https://www.lingscars.com/ https://www.lingscars.com/
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• ranman 8y ago
  https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/1090723836209872897?s=21 https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/1090723836209872897?s=...
• tzjmetron 8y ago
  How very English-centric. There are whole worlds out there if you deign to learn at least one more language.
• antibland 8y ago
  People keep bringing up existing "weird" websites as a sort of proof that life on the web is as fun and weird as ever. What's really missing on the web is a sense of raw discovery and wonder. I can't recall the last time the web really surprised me. We're so connected we stopped changing. I had no idea what today's web might have looked like back in 1997. Tomorrow's web feels a lot easier to predict.
• Aissen 8y ago
  The "source available" part kind of reminds me of MarkDeep (though in markdeep, the source is the document itself): https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/
• muzani 8y ago
  It seems to be a phase. Things are fun and weird when they are new and fresh. Remember early Facebook and Stack Overflow? After a while, they attract more serious types and evolve to be more... well dressed. When people start to put Stack Overflow and Facebook branding on their resume, they start to take it real seriously.
• hiccuphippo 8y ago
  So how long until someone writes a codeblog post that steals your cookies when you open it? Or do they not really allow code?
• rebornshellfish 8y ago
  Oh wow, even just trying to read the "Internet is the great equalizer (1996)" article runs into a paywall. That's where we've come.
• EADGBE 8y ago
  Not one mention of <marquee> /sad
• buboard 8y ago
  because the millenials had kids
• sailfast 8y ago
  Mainstream things are almost never fun or weird. Most of the "big websites" are now serving mainstream customers. As a result, they're not fun or weird. When the internet was younger, it was mostly early adopters creating their own culture, so it was weirder. The great thing about the internet is that there's a bunch of stuff on it that is not in the main stream. It's harder to FIND that stuff now because, as a percentage, it is not as prevalent, but it's definitely out there and it can be located. If the internet were a city then yes, we'd be struggling to "Keep it weird" but since it's an ever-expanding universe there will always be weird corners and cultures, just like here on earth. Stay weird, internet.
• lucideer 8y ago
  For once I'm glad most comments here seem to ignore the article content and instead are responding to the (much more interesting) headline, because the article is really pretty terrible, and very much misses the point of what made/makes the internet "fun". For anyone who hadn't read: it's a marketing piece for a React-based blogging platform that posits that the reason the "old" internet was fun was because websites didn't sanitize inputs, and that we can somehow bring that back by using a platform with a limited set of sanitized "fun" components...
  • Izkata 8y ago
    It's kinda funny how their "fun" components totally miss the point of what made the unsanitized inputs fun: Not having limitations.
• auiya 8y ago
  Because most of the Internet is controlled by four or five big companies now.
• mitchtbaum 8y ago
  Take a look and you'll see into your imagination We'll begin with a spin, trav'ling in the world of my creation What we'll see will defy explanation If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it Anything you want to, do it. Want to change the world, there's nothing to it There is no life I know, to compare with pure imagination Living there, you'll be free, if you truly wish to be. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/TheWonka https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/TheWonka
• AtlasBarfed 8y ago
  The kooky internet starts on the second or third page. Most of the main entry points for the internet have been intercepted and squatted by "big internet". Google is where you go, and the top searches are all squatted throughout the front page and the ranking algorithm biases the bigger companies. Even the "long tail" went through a period of ad revenue extraction/industrialization. So even those corners are wrapped by crappy aggregators and SEO spammers/interceptors. If there was a dime to be made, someone has tried it. Actually, I'm wrong about my first statement. After the big companies/adwords spenders comes all the SEO spammers. Google stopped caring about how SEO spammers drown out small corners of the internet since all their revenue is first page results/adwords. Your best shot for kooky stuff is finding a kooky site that is pretty good, and doing a manual walkback of the google algorithm: find other pages that link/reference that kooky page and see what non-spam links are on those pages. Hopefully you'll find some subreddits or discussion boards or other stuff that also centers around that kookiness. I almost think that the old categories/directory/yellowpages style that is manually maintained used to hold good results for kooky subjects. But those all got closed off.
  • code_duck 8y ago
    This isn’t really about eccentric topics as much as expressing personality through personalization.
• house_atr 8y ago
  Webpages are just like real estate. Do you drive around your neighborhood and see fun and weird? You see conformity homogeneity.
• sambf 8y ago
  Actually, some subreddits are deeply customized and bring back that web 1.0 feeling. Two of them on my mind: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating, https://www.reddit.com/r/jungle https://www.reddit.com/r/jungle
• sudovancity 8y ago
  I assume that his version of the internet is boring. I will say the majority of the popular internet or applications are similar in some regard.