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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 proprieta

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.
- robertrobot 8y ago
  Ah yes, this is another great point. When people think they are being watched or monitored, activity fundamentally changes.
zackmorris 8y ago
Well you have all proven my hypothesis wrong. Please stop upvoting this comment before you give me a complex :-P
- Reedx 8y ago
  We should invent a term for this, if it doesn't already exist? "I'm going to get downvoted, but..." - proceeds to get upvoted "Unpopular opinion: " - is actually a popular opinion
  - smacktoward 8y ago
    I propose we reach for Dickens to name this form of insincere disclaimer, and call it a "Heepsclaimer": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uriah_Heep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uriah_Heep
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      According to Google, you are the first person on the internet to ever use this word. I like it. I'm going to start using this.
    - ehecatl 8y ago
      Aristotle's already got you covered with "aporia". _Ars Rhetorica_, BTW is great read.
  - yuchi 8y ago
    I don’t know how to translate it in English, but in Italian there’s a specific term: Cleuasmo. It’s a rhetorical device meant to captivate the audience by humility.
    - yuchi 8y ago
      To add context, is a type of captatio benevolentia (“obtaining benevolence/captivating”) and as such is typically placed at the start of a discussion. Someone uses cleuasms (I’m gonna create a word by inferring a translation) many times in a discussion. Pay attention: this unsolicited and reiterated form of humbleness can be too much. If you shouldn’t have right for a statement, apply suspension instead ;)
noir_lord 8y ago
I was on the internet in the mid-90's (I was 15 in 95 which I think is the year I got on the net, I'd been on BBS's for about 5-6 years before that) and it did used to be much more weird as a percentage of sites than now (though the number of sites was tiny). As the grownups came along and commercialised everything a lot of that went away and back then if you wanted to say something online you had to learn HTML and what FTP was as a minimum. So things were weird because quite a few early adopters were not techies by nature. It's different now. It's one of the reasons I don't use facebook, instagram, snap etc, they just don't stick for me. I do use twitter but that is because it's a nice way to follow projects and programmers I admire so it has some utility to me. I was an early user of reddit but since the redesign (on the back of cleaning up the community) the trend towards just another social network (EDIT: speaking of which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571) is pretty clear at this point, it's utility is going down as is the quality of the average posts in the subreddit's I cared about. HN has been fairly consistent since I join over the last 5 years, a testament to the effectiveness of decent moderation. It used to be I checked HN after reddit but that switched over the last year or two.
- mysterydip 8y ago
  I wonder if there is a way to combine the weird fun that was geocities/tripod/etc with the connections of a social network and modern ease of updating. Like how you use twitter, but for following webpages about butterflies or a shrine to the 6502 processor.
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    RSS - (partially) Google killed it. My first website was about about TNG and why DS9 sucked balls. Ironic since I now consider DS9 the better series (but TNG still has the truly stand out episodes, I think young me was just oblivious to a lot of the subtler stuff but I digress), it was shockingly bad (and I'd been programming since the 80's, HTML was just weird). I spent about five years hating the crap out of it and never even considered web development as a career, if you'd have asked me back then I'd have said you'd claw the compiler out of my cold dead hands. 20 odd-years later and I do enterprise web dev (and C#/WPF and Java)
convolvatron 8y ago
i'm intrigued by your comment(2) concerning declarative, idempotent roots. could you add more language to that?
- AlunAlun 8y ago
 To take a simple example, HTML was originally a pure markup language, so if you wanted to make text bold you would do it like this; simple, declaritive But then it was decided that there was no semantic purpose to the tag, so it became this. Now, with the ubiquity of js, it's more like this (along with something like getElementById("bold-text").setAttribute("style", "font-weight:bold") in the background). It should be pointed out that things come full-circle: frameworks like Bootstrap define the tag which, via similar JS to above, all-but-duplicate the functionality of the original tag. I think the OP's point though is that you have to add a JS framework to do this.
 - zozbot123 8y ago
 I think this is a bit confused? bold text would be appropriate for a span of text that is to be set in bold for no semantically-relevant reason, otherwise you would use something like this (please read carefully!), and then use CSS to style the "important" class as bold. The tag has actually been revived, but it is reserved for a span of text that is to be clearly set apart from its surroundings for some semantic reason unrelated to emphasis, importance or anything that's covered by other HTML tags or features.
 - fenwick67 8y ago
 is not invalid from a literalist perspective. It will still be bold. Semantic markup is nice, but 'div/span soup' is still very popular and isn't technically incorrect.
 - detaro 8y ago
 What? is a tag defined in the HTML standard (with a bold default-styling in browsers). There is absolutely no need for frameworks to do anything to it, especially not with JS. vs vs have different semantic meaning, and all have valid uses in modern HTML.
jlarocco 8y ago
I think a bigger reason than any of those is that the web became a corporate advertising tool, run by bean counters and marketing people who don't like "weird" content because it may scare some people away. Just like TV, web content now targets the lowest common denominator and anything confrontational or "weird" gets put on niche sites or self hosting out of the limelight. I think there are still a ton of "fun and weird" sites out there, they're just not on highly promoted, corporate backed platforms. And they're now a much smaller percentage of the entire web.
- robertrobot 8y ago
  Excellent comment. I fondly remember the old advertisements and banner ads. Now-a-days most online ads are by major international corporations.
- pferde 8y ago
  Actually, they're not that much scared that weird content will scare people off, they just don't like weird content exactly because it's weird and therefore unpredictable and hard to put into Excel planning charts. Marketing people like boring and predictable.
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    The end result is still things like “wow, my tumblr account sure is a lot quiet now that all the people I was following because I liked their weird cartoon porn are gone”.
    - strken 8y ago
      That was mostly FOSTA, wasn't it?
      - throwanem 8y ago
        No, FOSTA hit sex workers. Tumblr just decided that lewd stuff would make it hard for Verizon to sell ads, so they banned lewd stuff and anything their shitty algorithm thought was lewd-adjacent. Now they're down something like a quarter of their former userbase, depending on whose estimates you believe; it might be higher. So that'll really help them sell those ads!
rblion 8y ago
Is this all set in stone?
anonytrary 8y ago
This is an amusing comment. You're trying to attribute social problems to underlying technological "problems". This is something an engineer would try to do, but I think the social problems of the internet have nothing to do with what framework a website was written in or whether or not software is proprietary.
- csallen 8y ago
  I came here to say the same thing. This reads like a list of technical issues that bother HN users the most. As such it's understandably a very popular comment with the HN crowd, but it has almost nothing to do with why we rarely encounter fun/weird things on the internet.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  >whether or not software is proprietary. I think this has made a huge difference, not so much if it is open source our not but how much things have become locked down. Before if you made a cool program you could hand it out to your friends on a usb stick and run it. These days you have to pay $100 to apple and go through a long approval process before you get listed on the app store. Its the same with all the platforms people use now. They have become more and more locked down pushing the regular user in to simply consuming content and only the corporations with large dev teams are able to make anything.
  - csallen 8y ago
    How is sending your friends a URL that they can easily send to others any more difficult than handing over a USB stick? Seems far easier to me.
    - baroffoos 8y ago
      Now you need to buy a domain name, understand dns, understand web hosting and rent out a server because many home ISPs and routers don't support hosting servers. Sure you can still do things but we are constantly raising the bar for creating and making consuming easier.
lanewinfield 8y ago
I'd agree with #1 and #4, combined— "regular" people are very much siloed into apps that narrow the kind of media that get to them. Sure, the videos and photos are better than before, but that's just two types of content. In my mind, weird/interesting internet died with the phrase "link in bio."
jancsika 8y ago
Show me a declarative, idempotent API that will render MAME games and run old OSes inside a browser window. Even show me a declarative, idempotent API that can generate an arbitrarily long scroll of user-generated content. If your answer is that users shouldn't expect to be able to do these things, then you have aliased the word "web" to mean something that 99% of web users will not recognize.
- zackmorris 8y ago
  You bring up a good point, and I've had similar conversations with my friend who is an avid Unity developer, which has a mostly imperative programming (IP) runtime with a declarative GUI. Since functional programming (FP) and declarative programming (DP) have many similarities, the same issue of hardness (for lack of a better term) exists in languages like Elixer/Clojure/Julia/Haskell/Scala/F# etc etc. This all comes down to one of the most poorly understood concepts in FP, the monad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming)#I/O_monad_(Haskell) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming)... Honestly, I'm still not sure I understand internally how monads work, or if there are related terms for how I think of them. But monads (and related devices) are a way to deal with imperative logic and side effects when pure FP can't. Imagine you're writing Tetris in a spreadsheet. It's easy to visualize how you might enter a piece's (x,y) coordinate in 2 cells and then pipe that through a series of cells containing logic that examines the blocks and outputs the next (x,y) coordinate for the following main loop. But the actual main loop (that grabs input events) is very hard to visualize as a spreadsheet. This "glue" with the imperative stuff is where the monad comes in. Another way to think of it is, how to represent exceptions in a spreadsheet or a pure functional implementation of a promise chain (you can't without monads). To write Tetris in HTML/CSS with no Javascript, we'd probably have to write a ton of CSS rules to show/hide/move DOM elements based on the state. That's an intractable problem for humans, so we'd probably compile the CSS from another language, which defeats the whole purpose. Maybe someone has tried it, I can't tell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709466 https://codepen.io/alexdevp/pen/pgdKf https://codepen.io/alexdevp/pen/pgdKf But if we had something like a CSS monad, then we could write rules that are based on dynamic state from other rules. Writing this all out now, something like this might be useful, if anyone knows of such a thing. Anyway, from what I understand, languages like Clojurescript get around this by suspending execution via a monad and then entering again with new input. Here is an almost purely functional Tetris clone written in Clojurescript: https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris Piece definitions, with code to offset/rotate the matrices and check for collisions by counting the number of cells to see if any have overlapped: https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris/game.cljc#L12-L18 https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris... https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris/game.cljc#L35-L54 https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris... What I assume to be a thread sleep and JS setTimeout monads: https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris/core.clj#L109 https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris... https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris/core.cljs#L73 https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris... https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris/core.cljs#L83 https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris... I know that code looks a little strange. But conceptually it's orders of magnitude simpler than that equivalent imperative code. Note that this is different from easy: https://medium.com/@kiksdium/simple-vs-easy-bfd897ab293c https://medium.com/@kiksdium/simple-vs-easy-bfd897ab293c TL;DR; you bring up a really good point. FP and DP probably shouldn't be considered proven techniques until they can be used in the same problem domains as IP.
lkrubner 8y ago
This is 100% correct. The only thing I can add is that the profit seeking and consolidation is now hurting the remaining enclaves of weird fun on the Internet. For instance, many of niche subcultures that once thrived on Geocities still thrive on Tumblr, but the leadership of Tumblr is not happy about this fact. When Marissa Mayer was in control of Yahoo (which included Tumblr) she used to brag about how she was using a "data driven" approach to maximize the revenue from Yahoo. This seems to have been abysmal for the actual users. Engagement on Tumblr stagnated, then declined. The great business guru Peter Drucker has pointed out that entrepreneurs often ruin their own products because they are uncomfortable with the type of success they end up with. Marissa Mayer would be an example of this. She had one of the great gems of the Internet, but she was uncomfortable with how weird it was. And it is difficult for leadership to really lead when the leadership is uncomfortable with the product they have. I tried to capture how destructive her rhetoric about "data driven decision making" can be when I wrote the essay "When companies make a fetish of being data driven they reward a passive aggressive style": "I’m especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on “data”. I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I’ve worked at that supposedly valued “data” in meetings actually valued something darker. The use of “data” in meetings tends to be a passive aggressive negotiating tactic for a group of people who for cultural or emotional reasons don’t think it is reasonable to express strong disagreement or actual anger. Instead of expressing strong emotion, people are taught to quote data — they then cherry pick whatever statistics back up their beliefs." As far as I know, there has never been a company that said “We want the worst informed people to make the decisions” so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn’t make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be “data driven” they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics. Trust your instincts. Over the years, we often condense many years of learning to a few simple rules. If you asked me from what peer-reviewed study I learned to value minimalist design, I would not be able to answer you — it comes from dozens of books, hundreds of articles, thousands of conversations, and countless observations, and if the accumulated wisdom of my years of experience is of no value to you, then why did you hire me? Obviously I am not advocating that meetings should be abusive. No one should be allowed to talk over another person, as that would be disrespectful, but when one has a chance to speak, often the most effective kind of communication is one where people show how strongly they feel about an issue. If you are an experienced professional, then presumably you’ve been hired because the company wants to know the lessons you’ve learned over the years. If your instincts tell you that a given policy will be a disaster, don’t let anyone silence you with their demands for “data.” Speak the truth that you know." http://www.smashcompany.com/business/when-companies-make-a-fetish-of-being-data-driven-they-are-often-rewarding-a-passive-aggressive-style http://www.smashcompany.com/business/when-companies-make-a-f...
lcfcjs2 8y ago
How does JS Build systems slow creativity?
thinkloop 8y ago
MySpace was a centralized for-profit site that owned your data, no different than any other, they just happened to allow more advanced design editing than similar sites today (which we look back on nostalgically, but I promise you they were ugly and crappy and fb an amazing breath of fresh air at the time). They do not, however, represent any sort of utopian free internet. The problem is our wants have become too complex. A blog site that used to be simple self-hosted markup, now requires commenting, moderation, voting, recommendations, authentication, backup, performance, media, analytics, seo, and more. How much coding skill can we expect from people? And even if they had it, should everyone use their time re-implementing or deploying and maintaining tens of individual platforms to participate on the web? There doesn't seem to be a feasible way but to centralize. And now you need to monetize and people have shown they are not willing to pay money, leaving the only other possibility we know: monetizing the data - which, of course, only encourages even more centralization and data capture. None of this is new, but these are the fundamental natural forces that need to be addressed.
throwaway415415 8y ago
You're missing the point completely. The deprecation of flash and the push for CSS are the unique reason things have changed
- wolco 8y ago
  I believe mobile / response / bootstrap killed the unique designs. CSS helped make things easier over inline style tags
- phirschybar 8y ago
  This is completely on point ^. I remember those times, and I also long for a weirder, more creative and more frontier-like internet! The combination of a strong reaction to Flash, which had begun to dominate the web around 2001, and the well-intended, but simultaneous push for web standards created an insurmountable course over-correction. Then the iPhone's non-support for Flash in 2007 was the final nail in the coffin. The web was never the same. We got standards (yay), but we made it unfashionable to be really CREATIVE with code. It was no longer cool to do something totally different and unique with code. There was no longer any point in putting information on the web if it wasn't cross-browser, cross-device, and future-proof. While standards have been a boon to our profession, they completely zapped the old internet. I am hopeful the pendulum will swing the other way.
topkai22 8y ago
I don’t think it’s how we build websites per se, I think it has to do with how just a few websites have made themselves so phenomenally useful that they’ve eliminated the need for what I’ll call the “discoverabilty infrastructure” we used to have. The first is Google. Google was such a phenomenally good search engine that you rarely needed to “surf” the web to accomplish a task. You could search “order a hand powered woodworking drill” and likely be taken to a page that let you do just that. Much of the discoverability of “fun, weird” stuff came from the “surfing” aspect of the web, Google vastly reduced that. The second is Wikipedia (and the Wikia networks). Much of the wonderful weirdness of the early web was passionate amateurs compiling information, wrapped in their own design aesthetic (or lack thirst of.). Wikipedia as amazing and wonderful as it is, gets rid of the need to find these sites to answer a question about the world (again, reducing surfing behavior, at least outside of Wikipedia.) The last is Facebook. So much of geo cities and the early web was the “personal website”- a Sort of combination of Facebook profile, blog, and experiment in web art. These sometimes grew into impressive little gems of content, but mostly they were terrible quips and “under construction” banners. Then came the Friendster->MySpace-> Facebook and LinkedIn transition, and the need for these personal sites dropped away. They still exist, but the interaction patterns for using fbook and LinkedIn are so much easier. I feel like YouTube still has the early web experience to it. Much of the content remains the domain of passionate amateurs and the “up next” algorithm regularly takes me in serendipitous locations (and sometimes down some darker paths). The fun and weird communities now seem like “islands in the net” if you will, they are there and probably larger than ever, but much harder to get to (or at least stumble upon), due to tooling that allows use to accomplish tasks without detours.
- userbinator 8y ago
  Much of the discoverability of “fun, weird” stuff came from the “surfing” aspect of the web, Google vastly reduced that. One must not forget that Google is actively optimising search results away from the "weird stuff" and blocking users that try to dig deeper into the results to find it, insulting them with the accusation that they're a bot (a bit ironic, considering that if you behave "like the billion other mindless drones" you don't get singled out...) and presenting them with endless CAPTCHAs. On the other hand, Bing still feels a bit like the "old school" search engines, and I've had better success finding the rare and niche "weird stuff" with it; apparently you can even find stuff horribly beyond legality, which is not surprising given how "dumb" it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18876361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18876361 I'd say the "fun and weird" Internet is definitely still alive; but the efforts of search engines to "clean up" their results have basically resulted in censorship and hiding of the less popular parts.
Justsignedup 8y ago
Incorrect. I was there the moment this flipped. It was actually with a bang, not a whimper. The iPhone came out. Before the iPhone DSL was a thing, making big-ish pages was a thing. Suddenly your pages had to be downloaded on a 2g connection. Eventually 3g, and 3g today is seen as insanity, but back then was the best we can get and still only few could get that. We started to minify the hell out of our code. Every byte was critical. CDNs were used to speed every bit of our site up. Google came out with their research that you have ~150ms to serve content before it stops feeling instantaneous. Boom. Eventually tools came out to make all this so easy, why wouldn't you do it. And thus here we are today. I was using the internet when AltaVista was a thing. Searching was SLOW! If you wanted to find something online, grab a cup of tea, because its gonna be a while.
andrepd 8y ago
>Monopolies and duopolies now receive the lion's share of funding for research This for me is especially soul-crushing. Some of the biggest minds of our time are working, devoting their talents and their ful attention, to the noble goal of... making us click more ads. These people could be trying to research diseases, to come up with solutions for the big problems that affect us -- in short, working to to improve our lives. Instead, we reward those that make our lives even more miserable/erode democracy/help concentrate power even more. In our economic system, those are the ones that get rewarded. Sigh.
m-p-3 8y ago
And ad companies like Google who have become so big that they can basically crush their competition. If you said 10 years ago that the most popular web browser right now is made by an ad company, people would have thought you're nuts but here we are. They basically control the very code that fetch and render those ads right at the end-user level.

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.
robertrobot 8y ago
Ah yes, this is another great point. When people think they are being watched or monitored, activity fundamentally changes.

zackmorris 8y ago

Well you have all proven my hypothesis wrong. Please stop upvoting this comment before you give me a complex :-P

Reedx 8y ago
We should invent a term for this, if it doesn't already exist? "I'm going to get downvoted, but..." - proceeds to get upvoted "Unpopular opinion: " - is actually a popular opinion
- smacktoward 8y ago
  I propose we reach for Dickens to name this form of insincere disclaimer, and call it a "Heepsclaimer": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uriah_Heep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uriah_Heep
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    According to Google, you are the first person on the internet to ever use this word. I like it. I'm going to start using this.
  - ehecatl 8y ago
    Aristotle's already got you covered with "aporia". _Ars Rhetorica_, BTW is great read.
- yuchi 8y ago
  I don’t know how to translate it in English, but in Italian there’s a specific term: Cleuasmo. It’s a rhetorical device meant to captivate the audience by humility.
  - yuchi 8y ago
    To add context, is a type of captatio benevolentia (“obtaining benevolence/captivating”) and as such is typically placed at the start of a discussion. Someone uses cleuasms (I’m gonna create a word by inferring a translation) many times in a discussion. Pay attention: this unsolicited and reiterated form of humbleness can be too much. If you shouldn’t have right for a statement, apply suspension instead ;)

noir_lord 8y ago

I was on the internet in the mid-90's (I was 15 in 95 which I think is the year I got on the net, I'd been on BBS's for about 5-6 years before that) and it did used to be much more weird as a percentage of sites than now (though the number of sites was tiny). As the grownups came along and commercialised everything a lot of that went away and back then if you wanted to say something online you had to learn HTML and what FTP was as a minimum. So things were weird because quite a few early adopters were not techies by nature. It's different now. It's one of the reasons I don't use facebook, instagram, snap etc, they just don't stick for me. I do use twitter but that is because it's a nice way to follow projects and programmers I admire so it has some utility to me. I was an early user of reddit but since the redesign (on the back of cleaning up the community) the trend towards just another social network (EDIT: speaking of which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571) is pretty clear at this point, it's utility is going down as is the quality of the average posts in the subreddit's I cared about. HN has been fairly consistent since I join over the last 5 years, a testament to the effectiveness of decent moderation. It used to be I checked HN after reddit but that switched over the last year or two.

mysterydip 8y ago
I wonder if there is a way to combine the weird fun that was geocities/tripod/etc with the connections of a social network and modern ease of updating. Like how you use twitter, but for following webpages about butterflies or a shrine to the 6502 processor.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  RSS - (partially) Google killed it. My first website was about about TNG and why DS9 sucked balls. Ironic since I now consider DS9 the better series (but TNG still has the truly stand out episodes, I think young me was just oblivious to a lot of the subtler stuff but I digress), it was shockingly bad (and I'd been programming since the 80's, HTML was just weird). I spent about five years hating the crap out of it and never even considered web development as a career, if you'd have asked me back then I'd have said you'd claw the compiler out of my cold dead hands. 20 odd-years later and I do enterprise web dev (and C#/WPF and Java)

convolvatron 8y ago

i'm intrigued by your comment(2) concerning declarative, idempotent roots. could you add more language to that?

AlunAlun 8y ago
To take a simple example, HTML was originally a pure markup language, so if you wanted to make text bold you would do it like this; simple, declaritive But then it was decided that there was no semantic purpose to the tag, so it became this. Now, with the ubiquity of js, it's more like this (along with something like getElementById("bold-text").setAttribute("style", "font-weight:bold") in the background). It should be pointed out that things come full-circle: frameworks like Bootstrap define the tag which, via similar JS to above, all-but-duplicate the functionality of the original tag. I think the OP's point though is that you have to add a JS framework to do this.
- zozbot123 8y ago
 I think this is a bit confused? bold text would be appropriate for a span of text that is to be set in bold for no semantically-relevant reason, otherwise you would use something like this (please read carefully!), and then use CSS to style the "important" class as bold. The tag has actually been revived, but it is reserved for a span of text that is to be clearly set apart from its surroundings for some semantic reason unrelated to emphasis, importance or anything that's covered by other HTML tags or features.
 - fenwick67 8y ago
 is not invalid from a literalist perspective. It will still be bold. Semantic markup is nice, but 'div/span soup' is still very popular and isn't technically incorrect.
- detaro 8y ago
 What? is a tag defined in the HTML standard (with a bold default-styling in browsers). There is absolutely no need for frameworks to do anything to it, especially not with JS. vs vs have different semantic meaning, and all have valid uses in modern HTML.

jlarocco 8y ago

I think a bigger reason than any of those is that the web became a corporate advertising tool, run by bean counters and marketing people who don't like "weird" content because it may scare some people away. Just like TV, web content now targets the lowest common denominator and anything confrontational or "weird" gets put on niche sites or self hosting out of the limelight. I think there are still a ton of "fun and weird" sites out there, they're just not on highly promoted, corporate backed platforms. And they're now a much smaller percentage of the entire web.

robertrobot 8y ago
Excellent comment. I fondly remember the old advertisements and banner ads. Now-a-days most online ads are by major international corporations.
pferde 8y ago
Actually, they're not that much scared that weird content will scare people off, they just don't like weird content exactly because it's weird and therefore unpredictable and hard to put into Excel planning charts. Marketing people like boring and predictable.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  The end result is still things like “wow, my tumblr account sure is a lot quiet now that all the people I was following because I liked their weird cartoon porn are gone”.
  - strken 8y ago
    That was mostly FOSTA, wasn't it?
    - throwanem 8y ago
      No, FOSTA hit sex workers. Tumblr just decided that lewd stuff would make it hard for Verizon to sell ads, so they banned lewd stuff and anything their shitty algorithm thought was lewd-adjacent. Now they're down something like a quarter of their former userbase, depending on whose estimates you believe; it might be higher. So that'll really help them sell those ads!

rblion 8y ago

Is this all set in stone?

anonytrary 8y ago

This is an amusing comment. You're trying to attribute social problems to underlying technological "problems". This is something an engineer would try to do, but I think the social problems of the internet have nothing to do with what framework a website was written in or whether or not software is proprietary.

csallen 8y ago
I came here to say the same thing. This reads like a list of technical issues that bother HN users the most. As such it's understandably a very popular comment with the HN crowd, but it has almost nothing to do with why we rarely encounter fun/weird things on the internet.
baroffoos 8y ago
>whether or not software is proprietary. I think this has made a huge difference, not so much if it is open source our not but how much things have become locked down. Before if you made a cool program you could hand it out to your friends on a usb stick and run it. These days you have to pay $100 to apple and go through a long approval process before you get listed on the app store. Its the same with all the platforms people use now. They have become more and more locked down pushing the regular user in to simply consuming content and only the corporations with large dev teams are able to make anything.
- csallen 8y ago
  How is sending your friends a URL that they can easily send to others any more difficult than handing over a USB stick? Seems far easier to me.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    Now you need to buy a domain name, understand dns, understand web hosting and rent out a server because many home ISPs and routers don't support hosting servers. Sure you can still do things but we are constantly raising the bar for creating and making consuming easier.

lanewinfield 8y ago

I'd agree with #1 and #4, combined— "regular" people are very much siloed into apps that narrow the kind of media that get to them. Sure, the videos and photos are better than before, but that's just two types of content. In my mind, weird/interesting internet died with the phrase "link in bio."

jancsika 8y ago

Show me a declarative, idempotent API that will render MAME games and run old OSes inside a browser window. Even show me a declarative, idempotent API that can generate an arbitrarily long scroll of user-generated content. If your answer is that users shouldn't expect to be able to do these things, then you have aliased the word "web" to mean something that 99% of web users will not recognize.

zackmorris 8y ago
You bring up a good point, and I've had similar conversations with my friend who is an avid Unity developer, which has a mostly imperative programming (IP) runtime with a declarative GUI. Since functional programming (FP) and declarative programming (DP) have many similarities, the same issue of hardness (for lack of a better term) exists in languages like Elixer/Clojure/Julia/Haskell/Scala/F# etc etc. This all comes down to one of the most poorly understood concepts in FP, the monad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming)#I/O_monad_(Haskell) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming)... Honestly, I'm still not sure I understand internally how monads work, or if there are related terms for how I think of them. But monads (and related devices) are a way to deal with imperative logic and side effects when pure FP can't. Imagine you're writing Tetris in a spreadsheet. It's easy to visualize how you might enter a piece's (x,y) coordinate in 2 cells and then pipe that through a series of cells containing logic that examines the blocks and outputs the next (x,y) coordinate for the following main loop. But the actual main loop (that grabs input events) is very hard to visualize as a spreadsheet. This "glue" with the imperative stuff is where the monad comes in. Another way to think of it is, how to represent exceptions in a spreadsheet or a pure functional implementation of a promise chain (you can't without monads). To write Tetris in HTML/CSS with no Javascript, we'd probably have to write a ton of CSS rules to show/hide/move DOM elements based on the state. That's an intractable problem for humans, so we'd probably compile the CSS from another language, which defeats the whole purpose. Maybe someone has tried it, I can't tell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709466 https://codepen.io/alexdevp/pen/pgdKf https://codepen.io/alexdevp/pen/pgdKf But if we had something like a CSS monad, then we could write rules that are based on dynamic state from other rules. Writing this all out now, something like this might be useful, if anyone knows of such a thing. Anyway, from what I understand, languages like Clojurescript get around this by suspending execution via a monad and then entering again with new input. Here is an almost purely functional Tetris clone written in Clojurescript: https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris Piece definitions, with code to offset/rotate the matrices and check for collisions by counting the number of cells to see if any have overlapped: https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris/game.cljc#L12-L18 https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris... https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris/game.cljc#L35-L54 https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris... What I assume to be a thread sleep and JS setTimeout monads: https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris/core.clj#L109 https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris... https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris/core.cljs#L73 https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris... https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris/core.cljs#L83 https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris... I know that code looks a little strange. But conceptually it's orders of magnitude simpler than that equivalent imperative code. Note that this is different from easy: https://medium.com/@kiksdium/simple-vs-easy-bfd897ab293c https://medium.com/@kiksdium/simple-vs-easy-bfd897ab293c TL;DR; you bring up a really good point. FP and DP probably shouldn't be considered proven techniques until they can be used in the same problem domains as IP.

lkrubner 8y ago

This is 100% correct. The only thing I can add is that the profit seeking and consolidation is now hurting the remaining enclaves of weird fun on the Internet. For instance, many of niche subcultures that once thrived on Geocities still thrive on Tumblr, but the leadership of Tumblr is not happy about this fact. When Marissa Mayer was in control of Yahoo (which included Tumblr) she used to brag about how she was using a "data driven" approach to maximize the revenue from Yahoo. This seems to have been abysmal for the actual users. Engagement on Tumblr stagnated, then declined. The great business guru Peter Drucker has pointed out that entrepreneurs often ruin their own products because they are uncomfortable with the type of success they end up with. Marissa Mayer would be an example of this. She had one of the great gems of the Internet, but she was uncomfortable with how weird it was. And it is difficult for leadership to really lead when the leadership is uncomfortable with the product they have. I tried to capture how destructive her rhetoric about "data driven decision making" can be when I wrote the essay "When companies make a fetish of being data driven they reward a passive aggressive style": "I’m especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on “data”. I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I’ve worked at that supposedly valued “data” in meetings actually valued something darker. The use of “data” in meetings tends to be a passive aggressive negotiating tactic for a group of people who for cultural or emotional reasons don’t think it is reasonable to express strong disagreement or actual anger. Instead of expressing strong emotion, people are taught to quote data — they then cherry pick whatever statistics back up their beliefs." As far as I know, there has never been a company that said “We want the worst informed people to make the decisions” so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn’t make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be “data driven” they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics. Trust your instincts. Over the years, we often condense many years of learning to a few simple rules. If you asked me from what peer-reviewed study I learned to value minimalist design, I would not be able to answer you — it comes from dozens of books, hundreds of articles, thousands of conversations, and countless observations, and if the accumulated wisdom of my years of experience is of no value to you, then why did you hire me? Obviously I am not advocating that meetings should be abusive. No one should be allowed to talk over another person, as that would be disrespectful, but when one has a chance to speak, often the most effective kind of communication is one where people show how strongly they feel about an issue. If you are an experienced professional, then presumably you’ve been hired because the company wants to know the lessons you’ve learned over the years. If your instincts tell you that a given policy will be a disaster, don’t let anyone silence you with their demands for “data.” Speak the truth that you know." http://www.smashcompany.com/business/when-companies-make-a-fetish-of-being-data-driven-they-are-often-rewarding-a-passive-aggressive-style http://www.smashcompany.com/business/when-companies-make-a-f...

lcfcjs2 8y ago

How does JS Build systems slow creativity?

thinkloop 8y ago

MySpace was a centralized for-profit site that owned your data, no different than any other, they just happened to allow more advanced design editing than similar sites today (which we look back on nostalgically, but I promise you they were ugly and crappy and fb an amazing breath of fresh air at the time). They do not, however, represent any sort of utopian free internet. The problem is our wants have become too complex. A blog site that used to be simple self-hosted markup, now requires commenting, moderation, voting, recommendations, authentication, backup, performance, media, analytics, seo, and more. How much coding skill can we expect from people? And even if they had it, should everyone use their time re-implementing or deploying and maintaining tens of individual platforms to participate on the web? There doesn't seem to be a feasible way but to centralize. And now you need to monetize and people have shown they are not willing to pay money, leaving the only other possibility we know: monetizing the data - which, of course, only encourages even more centralization and data capture. None of this is new, but these are the fundamental natural forces that need to be addressed.

throwaway415415 8y ago

You're missing the point completely. The deprecation of flash and the push for CSS are the unique reason things have changed

wolco 8y ago
I believe mobile / response / bootstrap killed the unique designs. CSS helped make things easier over inline style tags
phirschybar 8y ago
This is completely on point ^. I remember those times, and I also long for a weirder, more creative and more frontier-like internet! The combination of a strong reaction to Flash, which had begun to dominate the web around 2001, and the well-intended, but simultaneous push for web standards created an insurmountable course over-correction. Then the iPhone's non-support for Flash in 2007 was the final nail in the coffin. The web was never the same. We got standards (yay), but we made it unfashionable to be really CREATIVE with code. It was no longer cool to do something totally different and unique with code. There was no longer any point in putting information on the web if it wasn't cross-browser, cross-device, and future-proof. While standards have been a boon to our profession, they completely zapped the old internet. I am hopeful the pendulum will swing the other way.

topkai22 8y ago

I don’t think it’s how we build websites per se, I think it has to do with how just a few websites have made themselves so phenomenally useful that they’ve eliminated the need for what I’ll call the “discoverabilty infrastructure” we used to have. The first is Google. Google was such a phenomenally good search engine that you rarely needed to “surf” the web to accomplish a task. You could search “order a hand powered woodworking drill” and likely be taken to a page that let you do just that. Much of the discoverability of “fun, weird” stuff came from the “surfing” aspect of the web, Google vastly reduced that. The second is Wikipedia (and the Wikia networks). Much of the wonderful weirdness of the early web was passionate amateurs compiling information, wrapped in their own design aesthetic (or lack thirst of.). Wikipedia as amazing and wonderful as it is, gets rid of the need to find these sites to answer a question about the world (again, reducing surfing behavior, at least outside of Wikipedia.) The last is Facebook. So much of geo cities and the early web was the “personal website”- a Sort of combination of Facebook profile, blog, and experiment in web art. These sometimes grew into impressive little gems of content, but mostly they were terrible quips and “under construction” banners. Then came the Friendster->MySpace-> Facebook and LinkedIn transition, and the need for these personal sites dropped away. They still exist, but the interaction patterns for using fbook and LinkedIn are so much easier. I feel like YouTube still has the early web experience to it. Much of the content remains the domain of passionate amateurs and the “up next” algorithm regularly takes me in serendipitous locations (and sometimes down some darker paths). The fun and weird communities now seem like “islands in the net” if you will, they are there and probably larger than ever, but much harder to get to (or at least stumble upon), due to tooling that allows use to accomplish tasks without detours.

userbinator 8y ago
Much of the discoverability of “fun, weird” stuff came from the “surfing” aspect of the web, Google vastly reduced that. One must not forget that Google is actively optimising search results away from the "weird stuff" and blocking users that try to dig deeper into the results to find it, insulting them with the accusation that they're a bot (a bit ironic, considering that if you behave "like the billion other mindless drones" you don't get singled out...) and presenting them with endless CAPTCHAs. On the other hand, Bing still feels a bit like the "old school" search engines, and I've had better success finding the rare and niche "weird stuff" with it; apparently you can even find stuff horribly beyond legality, which is not surprising given how "dumb" it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18876361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18876361 I'd say the "fun and weird" Internet is definitely still alive; but the efforts of search engines to "clean up" their results have basically resulted in censorship and hiding of the less popular parts.

Justsignedup 8y ago

Incorrect. I was there the moment this flipped. It was actually with a bang, not a whimper. The iPhone came out. Before the iPhone DSL was a thing, making big-ish pages was a thing. Suddenly your pages had to be downloaded on a 2g connection. Eventually 3g, and 3g today is seen as insanity, but back then was the best we can get and still only few could get that. We started to minify the hell out of our code. Every byte was critical. CDNs were used to speed every bit of our site up. Google came out with their research that you have ~150ms to serve content before it stops feeling instantaneous. Boom. Eventually tools came out to make all this so easy, why wouldn't you do it. And thus here we are today. I was using the internet when AltaVista was a thing. Searching was SLOW! If you wanted to find something online, grab a cup of tea, because its gonna be a while.

andrepd 8y ago

>Monopolies and duopolies now receive the lion's share of funding for research This for me is especially soul-crushing. Some of the biggest minds of our time are working, devoting their talents and their ful attention, to the noble goal of... making us click more ads. These people could be trying to research diseases, to come up with solutions for the big problems that affect us -- in short, working to to improve our lives. Instead, we reward those that make our lives even more miserable/erode democracy/help concentrate power even more. In our economic system, those are the ones that get rewarded. Sigh.

m-p-3 8y ago

And ad companies like Google who have become so big that they can basically crush their competition. If you said 10 years ago that the most popular web browser right now is made by an ad company, people would have thought you're nuts but here we are. They basically control the very code that fetch and render those ads right at the end-user level.