8 ms·

Why the ‘Weird Internet’ of the GeoCities Era Had to Die

63 points by jasoneckert 7y ago

vikramkr 7y ago
The weird internet went away not because people on the internet became boring, but because the internet opened up to non weird people. The article talks about how complicated it can seem to build your own site now, but it's easier then ever to build your own website - the whole point is that the internet isn't necessarily dominated by the types of people that are willing to put in that kind of work anymore. Its not like there are some mysterious new barriers preventing you from building a custom site on the internet that have been thrown up now. This post itself didn't have to be on medium - but medium and Facebook and YouTube deliver that "boring, non weird" audience that you want to read your stuff.
- 1337biz 7y ago
  And the battle is long from over. The whole anti free speech crowd is just living on a similar effect. People who are so intolerant to weirdness that they want to censor it away just because they feel offended by it.
  - dinkudunk 7y ago
    That feels like a straw man. Perhaps we have to define weirdness before we pass judgement. Blatant fascism/racism/homophobia etc.: Justifiably censurable according to the ECHR [0], specifically see Article 10.2, Article 11.2 and Article 17. See for example _E.S v Austria_. Google hammer: Weird but not in violation of human rights conventions. [0]: https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf
  - Volundr 7y ago
    Sorry who is trying to censor weirdness? Last I knew albinoblacksheep.com and zombo.com where doing just fine, and no one was trying to take them down. Maybe you are aware of something I'm not, and there really is a campaign against weirdness that I just haven't seen, but it feels to me like you are trying to drag this topic down an unrelated political tangent. Please don't.
    - jameskegel 7y ago
      This reply seems needlessly obstinate and accusatory
      - Volundr 7y ago
        Accusatory? Probably. I'll acknowledge that I'm making assumptions about GPs motivations based on the language he used. Obstinate however implies stubbornness in the face of reason, and there is absolutely none in the original comment to be stubborn in the face of. It simply states, with no evidence, that there is an "anti-free speech" crowd, and that it hates weirdness. If there is a real campaign against weirdness on the internet, I'd genuinely like to know about it and where it's coming from.
  - drngdds 7y ago
    The people you consider anti-free-speech don't dislike your ideas because they're weird.
    - yoz-y 7y ago
      Only if they are "one weird tricks".
- lkrubner 7y ago
  "but because the internet opened up to non weird people" For my tastes, the original blogosphere of 2000-2008 was one of the finest things the human race ever created, and the intellectual stimulation of the debates has no equal in any other age. But also there was still plenty of weirdness. I'd extend the era of "early Web" all the way to 2008, and I'd focus on advertising as the thing that killed it. In 2000 advertising on the Web meant banner ads, which had the reputation of being over-priced and ineffective. Especially when the crash hit in 2001, many companies swore they would never again waste money on advertising on the Web. But Overture came up with the idea of buying keywords for specific searches, and then Overture was absorbed into Google and became the Google business model, and by 2007 or 2008 many businesses were willing to get serious about advertising on the Web. At which point advertising, as a business model, took off, and it helped drive the consolidation of the Web, and it helped give us the boring Web of today. I should add, the worst aspects of the consolidation were driven, specifically, by the adoption of algorithms that are designed to maximize engagement, because the goal is to serve as many ads as possible. The algorithms have a deadening effect. To his endless credit, Clay Shirky sketched out some of the forces that were likely going to lower quality on the Web over time: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_weblog.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w... That was way back in 2003. The key passage is: "Finally, there is no real A-list, because there is no discontinuity. Though explanations of power laws (including the ones here) often focus on numbers like "12% of blogs account for 50% of the links", these are arbitrary markers. The largest step function in a power law is between the #1 and #2 positions, by definition. There is no A-list that is qualitatively different from their nearest neighbors, so any line separating more and less trafficked blogs is arbitrary." But this turned out to be incorrect: "Third, the stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake." The algorithms are designed to fake a kind of preference, or to distort those preferences, because of the desperation of the company to move higher on the power law curve. The point is, Shirky pointed to a natural process, and advertising money provided a powerful incentive to hack that natural process and try to distort it for the benefit of the company.
  - buboard 7y ago
- buboard 7y ago
  That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true? Tech has been moving in the direction of oversimplifying technology and telling people white lies (such as that they can be private and secure on the internet). They created tablets and phones, removed any "quirky" options that might cause their owners to think a little harder , and often dumbed down devices. I think smartphone is a misnomer, it's not smart, and it doesnt really think for you, it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information. All people are weird, just ask them to explain their dream or paint a picture if you want to be disturbed by their weirdness. But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates. We need to add back complexity and optionality to devices and interfaces.
  - jasode 7y ago
    >That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true? It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low active participation rates. There's a wikipedia article[1] about this that happens to focus on the internet and its low ratio of contributors. However, this phenomenon of passive consumption has been happening all through history before the internet and it is independent of technology. Whether it's the Gutenberg Press or earlier primitive technology as simple as the quill pen & paper, there's always been a very small group of people that create the content vs the much larger group that consumes it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
    - buboard 7y ago
      > It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low you 're speaking of a different thing, and as u said participation was low even before the internet's eternal september of 2005-10 happened.
      - jasode 7y ago
        >you 're speaking of a different thing. No, I was responding to your claim of smartphone technology being the barrier to creativity by the mainstream audience: >smartphone [...], it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information.[...] But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates. That claim assumes that there's a pent up wave of creativity that's being held back by smartphones. However, that misunderstands the fact that new technology doesn't really change the ratio of the people expressing creativity vs those that consume it. There wasn't really any massive creativity to "evaporate"; the desire to "be creative" was never there in the mainstream audience. You can't put the blame on technologies such as smartphones / Gutenberg press / pen & paper.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  There's a lot of truth to that, though I think what makes the situation even worse is algorithms. Algorithms can be good for the individual(or at least seem as such), but they can be bad for a community that could benefit from a more common experience. The internet does still have interesting stuff on it, but discovering it may be difficult for the average person when algorithms are steering them towards things they either know the user already likes or things that are profitable.
  - petra 7y ago
    As for the good stuff, who says it's bad for it to be hard to find? Or maybe it's the opposite, the fact that information is so easy to find, and everybody knows it, had devalued it. But the hard stuff ? Because it's hard to find, it has some value. Maybe you could become better at your job, comparatively, and earn more money. Or develop a unique skill and gain self esteem. Or offer some helpful bit of info for someone, and help the relationship.
- Zak 7y ago
  > This post itself didn't have to be on medium - but medium and Facebook and YouTube deliver that "boring, non weird" audience that you want to read your stuff. I think the problem here is that content discovery and hosting have become complected. Most people reading Hacker News can figure out how to self-host a video, for example, but if it's to reach a mainstream audience, it must be on Youtube.
- jsgo 7y ago
  > but it's easier then ever to build your own website Is it though? When I was 9, I created a site on Angelfire (and loved the fact that the default page was this craptastic html example where you could view source and kind of learn various html tags relating to lists, tables I believe, and various other things as a quick primer for those uneducated in HTML). I also created one on Geocities (different use cases in the end, but more or less I just wanted to see which was better/easier. Ended up with Angelfire as my main one as you could actually "name" your site as opposed to the generic "city"/"street" name-ish thing of Geocities). And if memory serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page. Tried it, think there was a work around for that one, but I didn't like battling it so didn't retain. Now, sure, I can find a host that I can pay $x to host the HTML that I build outright, but I don't know if kids coming up have the same resources I did as it relates to starting up a free site and having a default page with various HTML elements (too many at this point for a single page to be of value. Would probably have to look something like W3Schools or whatever with a list on the left you could go through). Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    Back in 1996 a friend of mine with no computer training put together a simple website in Notepad and uploaded it to free web space provided by her ISP. That doesn't happen today. People bumble along with Wordpress or services like Wix, but the customisation options for non-experts are very limited and generic. Hosting has become much more complicated and confusing, and the web simply doesn't do simple any more. Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time. There really isn't anything equivalent to AF/Geo. And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling.
- bamboozled 7y ago
  Yes if you think weird stuff is no longer available on the Internet, look a bit harder.
- JohnBooty 7y ago
  but it's easier then ever to build your own website It's almost irrelevant though, right? Because the bigger thing is that the web itself is going away. Kids don't browse the web. Most people don't browse the web. People, particularly kids, use apps. Let's suppose you could create a high-quality website literally at the speed of thought. For free. Who would look at it? (to be clear, I hate this state of affairs)
- krapp 7y ago
  It can't be the case that the "weird internet" went away because the "internet opened up to non weird people," because it opened up to everyone as soon as it was available outside of university research labs, and there are exponentially more weird people on the internet now than there ever were. You seem to be mistaking the creation of layout with the creation of content and assuming, incorrectly, that one must be boring, uncreative or uninteresting to not want to put in the effort of manually creating an HTML page, maybe with a black starry background and some flames and a spinning skull gif. That because layouts have become homogeneous and centralized in services, content and the web itself must as well. You don't think there's "weird" content on Youtube and Facebook? I would assert that there is more of it, and more of higher quality, than there ever was on the old web. Sure, there are real barriers preventing someone from creating their own website and hosting their own fan group or videos or whatever, but people don't do so because it's a waste of time when what they want to do is create content. Once making your own site no longer became necessary, it became a specialized interest.
lobotryas 7y ago
I skimmed the article. It’s reasonable, but can someone please tell how it explains the “had to die” part of the title or is that just clickbait? Also to add to what another poster said: after Eternal September (if there was ever a milestone for this) most people on the internet become just regular users. Therefore the internet’s offerings evolved to cater to this majority. That’s ok (I guess). In my opinion the biggest issue is centralization. Ex: want to have a video channel about guns or hacking? Best pound sand because you don’t have a spot on the biggest video platform that currently exists.
- type0 7y ago
  Some kind of fad of writing to end your title with "... had to die", to me it just indicates that such articles have this sloppy writing style. One of the subtitles was "Growing up". The Web didn't "grew up" it just became old and we still can't figure out how to use it, hopefully when WASM becomes the standard everyone can live happily. Centralization is what everyone is familiar with. All those giant social media channels are like tv channels of the past, the Web has never gotten to it's true potential and who knows if it ever will.
  - tannhaeuser 7y ago
    I don't know if WASM, of all things, will help the web evolve. WASM comes straight from a programmer's/nerd's desire for portability, performance, and "optimal" programming languages (eg choice of PL, reuse of code) above all, but doesn't do anything for content. In fact, it makes browsers and web development even more complex and certainly doesn't take the web into the direction of GeoCities of old.
    - type0 7y ago
      Sorry, my mentioning of WASM wasn't intended to be taken seriously *(should have used /s). I know equal number of people who would be happy as well unhappy about it.
FearNotDaniel 7y ago
Gotta love the implicit ageism in the first para's assumption that the web already existed when current web developers first got interested in coding. I wrote my first code on a ZX81, or possibly an Apple II, and I'm still getting paid to build web applications today!
- dlphn___xyz 7y ago
  same - i had a class in middle school where we programmed animations in hplot on apple IIe
type0 7y ago
> The internet was weirder back then — full of quirky ideas, personal pages, custom blogs, and far more viable platforms to build on than we have on the streamlined web of today. The Internet is not the Web, also what platforms? Sure besides Geocities, many ISP's gave a few MBs for personal html files but for the most part you didn't had your own URL, now you can have that for a few pennies a month. But we're not playing web pages game anymore, it's interactivity bit times otherwise we feel bored without infinite scroll and even a regular forum doesn't cut it anymore (no one wants no register for yet another one). > In the last two decades, custom stylesheets have become a dying breed. I'm not so sure about it, at least not for the regular personal pages, you just don't find those as often with "the search engine". Try https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ to get a feel for it. Maybe we need to resurrect the gopher protocol and make the search unbiased again, hell yeah, Make the Search Great Again!
- visiblink 7y ago
  It's strange to say this, since I'm a gopher user and everyone else seems interested in popularizing or resurrecting the protocol, but I hope that never happens. Gopher today is a cool, thoughtful, and quirky place. I think that's because it is a niche. Add the masses and it would be bland-ified.
- mxuribe 7y ago
  Thanks for reminding me of https://wiby.me https://wiby.me! I can't recall where i first heard of this search engine...but it made me smile then, and now that you mentioned it (and after i clicked around a bit today), made me smile again; thanks for that!
gottam 7y ago
And we've traded it for a sea of advertising and astroturfing.
HocusLocus 7y ago
People experience the dismal anti-literate Twitter (concept and style and non-member popup 'experience') and think it's... normal? And the Twitter embed system is hilarious at times. There is nothing as face-palmy as a controversial tweet that gets embedded in a news article describing it and then the owner deletes it, leaving a news article with a tweet-not-available hole. Facebook, where you are 10 narrow screens and 1500 back-end js-directed cloud bloat loads loads away from something you saw yesterday? The Modern Web where even scroll keys do not really work anymore? Or for that matter Youtube, whose text comments are designed to explode into illiterate mush with no hint or hope of proper spaces or paragraph breaks if copied to clipboard? Predatory. Here we are in the 21st century where people take SCREENSHOTS of things rather than copy information. This is regression, devolution. Back in the dark ages of 2000 it was considered bad manners to design a system that appeared to scroll endlessly until the web browser simply gummed up and crashed. Search engines wouldn't bother to render any of that. Now it's the preferred way to do it. And now Google is replacing their results page text stream paragraphs with tile-crap that is rects within rects with acres of white space, and less context. If only the whole Internet was built like Hacker News.
- chriswarbo 7y ago
  > There is nothing as face-palmy as a controversial tweet that gets embedded in a news article describing it and then the owner deletes it, leaving a news article with a tweet-not-available hole. There is something more face-palmy: when the owner spots that they've been embedded in a news article, and change the post accordingly. The latest issue of Private Eye gives an example of this happening, where the Mail Online embedded a Facebook post about a mis-spelled party banner; the poster (Simon Harris) saw it was being embedded and changed the text: > For a while, until someone noticed and replaced the linked post with a screenshot, the article proudly stated: "The Daily Mail is an utter shiterag that is only read by Middle England tossbags who voted Leave because some Polish guy called Piotr served them in Tesco, once."
- qwsxyh 7y ago
  Am I so out of touch? No, it's everyone else who is wrong.
chasing 7y ago
The Internet's still pretty weird. It's possible that it's just weird in a way that's not nostalgic for those of us who cut our teeth on the late-90s / early-00s Internet.
- george_morgan 7y ago
  Yes. I think many in their 30s and older have missed the new reality. That more culture is being created on the internet on mobile platforms and apps they've never heard of (and in languages they don't speak) than ever before. The weird web is alive but it lives in TikTok and WeChat etc.
allan_golds 7y ago
Paywall
AndrewStephens 7y ago
The article mentions the rise of smart phones as a factor but fails to grasp the real reason for their impact. Smart phones made making web pages much harder. Before Smart Phones a user could slap together some HTML and perhaps some simple CSS with underconstruction.gif and have an OK looking page. That same page would look terrible on a cell phone because the simple table-based layouts that people could understand do not render well on small screens. Sure they could rewrite the site but that was a lot of effort. Plus HTML was very much a moving target back then. Much easier to move your "I like potatoes" or whatever page to Facebook, which takes care of everything for you and provides a nice network effect. If we want the weird web back then we are going to have to provide tools to make websites look good on all screens while still being expressive enough that a child can pick them up but also provide the kind of instant feedback of Facebook likes and comments. Perhaps Indyweb or Mastodon will be the key but right now they are still to complex for random-j-blogger to deal with.
- al2o3cr 7y ago
  simple table-based layouts Nobody who ever used table-based layouts for anything of substance would describe them as "simple". Back in those days, websites would regularly specify a minimum screen size (800x600 and 1024x768 were popular) and woe to anybody with a smaller display...
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Back in the day to get things like "nice rounded corners" required hacks in your tables like 1px empty spacer gifs and rounded corner gifs. CSS may seem less "simple" to learn, but compare it to "borrowing" a copy of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and learning that tool just to get something as boringly nice as "rounded corners" that you had control over. (Source: I rebuilt my blog a few years back mostly specifically to make my 90's kid self envious that I could actually do the LCARS things I had wanted to do back then with no corner gifs or spacer gifs, and in a way that responsively reflows content that TABLEs never could.)
vincent-toups 7y ago
Love to see someone trying hard to say "capitalism sucks" but not knowing how.
nerdymishka 7y ago
The weird part of the web still exists. neocities.org is a more modern geocities with the same ability to experiment and modify a static page that geocities had. You just need to dig deeper and promote parts of the weird web on the new gateways like reddit, facebook, etc.
youFuckingHomo 7y ago
I noticed that you're gay.
filmgirlcw 7y ago
TikTok is the weird internet for kids today the way GeoCities was for those of us who were kids in the 90s. The internet is still weird. It’s just shifted to apps and other communities.
- Japhy_Ryder 7y ago
  > The internet is still weird. It’s just shifted to apps and other communities. Nah. It's wannabe weird.
abdulmuhaimin 7y ago
the internet and computer now is much too important to let bug/glitch/exploits/hacks gets away. I dont think there will ever be bug that will become accidental feature like how Myspace was.
pixelbath 7y ago
> I still run a personal blog on a custom website I built, but every year it feels a bit stranger, and a little rarer. Many people default to Facebook Pages or cookie-cutter Squarespace designs, if they have their own website at all. Posted on Medium, which is nearly the Facebook equivalent of a blogging site. The author mentions Glitch, for which the first step to getting started is either "clone a project" or start with React, Vue, Ember, Angular, or any other number of nontrivial frameworks. Is this really the same as HTML/CSS into Geocities? For better or worse (feels like worse), Internet users are becoming consumers of content rather than producers. When this was all still newer (say, 1997-2005), the novelty of having an online presence was still a dominant factor. As that process has become more homogenized and simplified with the rise of social media platforms, there's much less incentive to bother with learning HTML, CSS, and possibly JS just to put some information on a page. Modern social media platforms walk you through profile creation, posting interests and having those lead to like-minded people, contact management, and so on. Everything's just there. I think it's a hard sell to try and walk that back to "just do it yourself" for someone without that mentality, and it's amusing to see people keep trying. For those of us who value personal expression over ease-of-use, personal websites will continue to be preferable.
rchaud 7y ago
I think what's missing in discussions over the death of the old web, is that people fundamentally want their work to be seen, or discovered. The weird web thrived when there weren't many websites out there, and discovery was as easy as being listed in a web directory like what Yahoo! had. You could "surf" them one by one like you can with cable TV. That ended in the early 2000s as search engines prioritized their own news, sports and entertainment content (Yahoo and MSN especially) and the explosion of blogs made keeping sites in a directory totally un-scalable. As others have said, the weird web exists on channels like Vine (rip), Youtube, TikTok etc, but the discovery UX is bad because there are so many people trying to show up on your home screen. So the result is most of the content is very standardized, because people want to be seen, and doing what's popular is the 'reliable' way of achieving it.
xrd 7y ago
I misread this quote at first: "For many developers, figuring out how to do something cool on their Myspace page or building a GeoCities site full of animated “under construction” GIFs was the genesis of their tech careers." I read it as "apex of (my) tech career." It felt like everything since then has been a slow decent into disappointment. Everything feels so rigid now. Back then it was just fun. Feels like every thing I make now is loaded with anxiety about future changes and scalability and code rot. Tragic that this is gone for me.

63 points by jasoneckert 7y ago

The weird internet went away not because people on the internet became boring, but because the internet opened up to non weird people. The article talks about how complicated it can seem to build your own site now, but it's easier then ever to build your own website - the whole point is that the internet isn't necessarily dominated by the types of people that are willing to put in that kind of work anymore. Its not like there are some mysterious new barriers preventing you from building a custom site on the internet that have been thrown up now. This post itself didn't have to be on medium - but medium and Facebook and YouTube deliver that "boring, non weird" audience that you want to read your stuff.

1337biz 7y ago
And the battle is long from over. The whole anti free speech crowd is just living on a similar effect. People who are so intolerant to weirdness that they want to censor it away just because they feel offended by it.
- dinkudunk 7y ago
  That feels like a straw man. Perhaps we have to define weirdness before we pass judgement. Blatant fascism/racism/homophobia etc.: Justifiably censurable according to the ECHR [0], specifically see Article 10.2, Article 11.2 and Article 17. See for example _E.S v Austria_. Google hammer: Weird but not in violation of human rights conventions. [0]: https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf
- Volundr 7y ago
  Sorry who is trying to censor weirdness? Last I knew albinoblacksheep.com and zombo.com where doing just fine, and no one was trying to take them down. Maybe you are aware of something I'm not, and there really is a campaign against weirdness that I just haven't seen, but it feels to me like you are trying to drag this topic down an unrelated political tangent. Please don't.
  - jameskegel 7y ago
    This reply seems needlessly obstinate and accusatory
    - Volundr 7y ago
      Accusatory? Probably. I'll acknowledge that I'm making assumptions about GPs motivations based on the language he used. Obstinate however implies stubbornness in the face of reason, and there is absolutely none in the original comment to be stubborn in the face of. It simply states, with no evidence, that there is an "anti-free speech" crowd, and that it hates weirdness. If there is a real campaign against weirdness on the internet, I'd genuinely like to know about it and where it's coming from.
- drngdds 7y ago
  The people you consider anti-free-speech don't dislike your ideas because they're weird.
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    Only if they are "one weird tricks".
lkrubner 7y ago
"but because the internet opened up to non weird people" For my tastes, the original blogosphere of 2000-2008 was one of the finest things the human race ever created, and the intellectual stimulation of the debates has no equal in any other age. But also there was still plenty of weirdness. I'd extend the era of "early Web" all the way to 2008, and I'd focus on advertising as the thing that killed it. In 2000 advertising on the Web meant banner ads, which had the reputation of being over-priced and ineffective. Especially when the crash hit in 2001, many companies swore they would never again waste money on advertising on the Web. But Overture came up with the idea of buying keywords for specific searches, and then Overture was absorbed into Google and became the Google business model, and by 2007 or 2008 many businesses were willing to get serious about advertising on the Web. At which point advertising, as a business model, took off, and it helped drive the consolidation of the Web, and it helped give us the boring Web of today. I should add, the worst aspects of the consolidation were driven, specifically, by the adoption of algorithms that are designed to maximize engagement, because the goal is to serve as many ads as possible. The algorithms have a deadening effect. To his endless credit, Clay Shirky sketched out some of the forces that were likely going to lower quality on the Web over time: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_weblog.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w... That was way back in 2003. The key passage is: "Finally, there is no real A-list, because there is no discontinuity. Though explanations of power laws (including the ones here) often focus on numbers like "12% of blogs account for 50% of the links", these are arbitrary markers. The largest step function in a power law is between the #1 and #2 positions, by definition. There is no A-list that is qualitatively different from their nearest neighbors, so any line separating more and less trafficked blogs is arbitrary." But this turned out to be incorrect: "Third, the stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake." The algorithms are designed to fake a kind of preference, or to distort those preferences, because of the desperation of the company to move higher on the power law curve. The point is, Shirky pointed to a natural process, and advertising money provided a powerful incentive to hack that natural process and try to distort it for the benefit of the company.
- buboard 7y ago
buboard 7y ago
That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true? Tech has been moving in the direction of oversimplifying technology and telling people white lies (such as that they can be private and secure on the internet). They created tablets and phones, removed any "quirky" options that might cause their owners to think a little harder , and often dumbed down devices. I think smartphone is a misnomer, it's not smart, and it doesnt really think for you, it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information. All people are weird, just ask them to explain their dream or paint a picture if you want to be disturbed by their weirdness. But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates. We need to add back complexity and optionality to devices and interfaces.
- jasode 7y ago
  >That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true? It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low active participation rates. There's a wikipedia article[1] about this that happens to focus on the internet and its low ratio of contributors. However, this phenomenon of passive consumption has been happening all through history before the internet and it is independent of technology. Whether it's the Gutenberg Press or earlier primitive technology as simple as the quill pen & paper, there's always been a very small group of people that create the content vs the much larger group that consumes it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
  - buboard 7y ago
    > It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low you 're speaking of a different thing, and as u said participation was low even before the internet's eternal september of 2005-10 happened.
    - jasode 7y ago
      >you 're speaking of a different thing. No, I was responding to your claim of smartphone technology being the barrier to creativity by the mainstream audience: >smartphone [...], it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information.[...] But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates. That claim assumes that there's a pent up wave of creativity that's being held back by smartphones. However, that misunderstands the fact that new technology doesn't really change the ratio of the people expressing creativity vs those that consume it. There wasn't really any massive creativity to "evaporate"; the desire to "be creative" was never there in the mainstream audience. You can't put the blame on technologies such as smartphones / Gutenberg press / pen & paper.
ravenstine 7y ago
There's a lot of truth to that, though I think what makes the situation even worse is algorithms. Algorithms can be good for the individual(or at least seem as such), but they can be bad for a community that could benefit from a more common experience. The internet does still have interesting stuff on it, but discovering it may be difficult for the average person when algorithms are steering them towards things they either know the user already likes or things that are profitable.
- petra 7y ago
  As for the good stuff, who says it's bad for it to be hard to find? Or maybe it's the opposite, the fact that information is so easy to find, and everybody knows it, had devalued it. But the hard stuff ? Because it's hard to find, it has some value. Maybe you could become better at your job, comparatively, and earn more money. Or develop a unique skill and gain self esteem. Or offer some helpful bit of info for someone, and help the relationship.
Zak 7y ago
> This post itself didn't have to be on medium - but medium and Facebook and YouTube deliver that "boring, non weird" audience that you want to read your stuff. I think the problem here is that content discovery and hosting have become complected. Most people reading Hacker News can figure out how to self-host a video, for example, but if it's to reach a mainstream audience, it must be on Youtube.
jsgo 7y ago
> but it's easier then ever to build your own website Is it though? When I was 9, I created a site on Angelfire (and loved the fact that the default page was this craptastic html example where you could view source and kind of learn various html tags relating to lists, tables I believe, and various other things as a quick primer for those uneducated in HTML). I also created one on Geocities (different use cases in the end, but more or less I just wanted to see which was better/easier. Ended up with Angelfire as my main one as you could actually "name" your site as opposed to the generic "city"/"street" name-ish thing of Geocities). And if memory serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page. Tried it, think there was a work around for that one, but I didn't like battling it so didn't retain. Now, sure, I can find a host that I can pay $x to host the HTML that I build outright, but I don't know if kids coming up have the same resources I did as it relates to starting up a free site and having a default page with various HTML elements (too many at this point for a single page to be of value. Would probably have to look something like W3Schools or whatever with a list on the left you could go through). Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Back in 1996 a friend of mine with no computer training put together a simple website in Notepad and uploaded it to free web space provided by her ISP. That doesn't happen today. People bumble along with Wordpress or services like Wix, but the customisation options for non-experts are very limited and generic. Hosting has become much more complicated and confusing, and the web simply doesn't do simple any more. Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time. There really isn't anything equivalent to AF/Geo. And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling.
bamboozled 7y ago
Yes if you think weird stuff is no longer available on the Internet, look a bit harder.
JohnBooty 7y ago
but it's easier then ever to build your own website It's almost irrelevant though, right? Because the bigger thing is that the web itself is going away. Kids don't browse the web. Most people don't browse the web. People, particularly kids, use apps. Let's suppose you could create a high-quality website literally at the speed of thought. For free. Who would look at it? (to be clear, I hate this state of affairs)
krapp 7y ago
It can't be the case that the "weird internet" went away because the "internet opened up to non weird people," because it opened up to everyone as soon as it was available outside of university research labs, and there are exponentially more weird people on the internet now than there ever were. You seem to be mistaking the creation of layout with the creation of content and assuming, incorrectly, that one must be boring, uncreative or uninteresting to not want to put in the effort of manually creating an HTML page, maybe with a black starry background and some flames and a spinning skull gif. That because layouts have become homogeneous and centralized in services, content and the web itself must as well. You don't think there's "weird" content on Youtube and Facebook? I would assert that there is more of it, and more of higher quality, than there ever was on the old web. Sure, there are real barriers preventing someone from creating their own website and hosting their own fan group or videos or whatever, but people don't do so because it's a waste of time when what they want to do is create content. Once making your own site no longer became necessary, it became a specialized interest.

lobotryas 7y ago

I skimmed the article. It’s reasonable, but can someone please tell how it explains the “had to die” part of the title or is that just clickbait? Also to add to what another poster said: after Eternal September (if there was ever a milestone for this) most people on the internet become just regular users. Therefore the internet’s offerings evolved to cater to this majority. That’s ok (I guess). In my opinion the biggest issue is centralization. Ex: want to have a video channel about guns or hacking? Best pound sand because you don’t have a spot on the biggest video platform that currently exists.

type0 7y ago
Some kind of fad of writing to end your title with "... had to die", to me it just indicates that such articles have this sloppy writing style. One of the subtitles was "Growing up". The Web didn't "grew up" it just became old and we still can't figure out how to use it, hopefully when WASM becomes the standard everyone can live happily. Centralization is what everyone is familiar with. All those giant social media channels are like tv channels of the past, the Web has never gotten to it's true potential and who knows if it ever will.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  I don't know if WASM, of all things, will help the web evolve. WASM comes straight from a programmer's/nerd's desire for portability, performance, and "optimal" programming languages (eg choice of PL, reuse of code) above all, but doesn't do anything for content. In fact, it makes browsers and web development even more complex and certainly doesn't take the web into the direction of GeoCities of old.
  - type0 7y ago
    Sorry, my mentioning of WASM wasn't intended to be taken seriously *(should have used /s). I know equal number of people who would be happy as well unhappy about it.

FearNotDaniel 7y ago

Gotta love the implicit ageism in the first para's assumption that the web already existed when current web developers first got interested in coding. I wrote my first code on a ZX81, or possibly an Apple II, and I'm still getting paid to build web applications today!

dlphn___xyz 7y ago
same - i had a class in middle school where we programmed animations in hplot on apple IIe

type0 7y ago

> The internet was weirder back then — full of quirky ideas, personal pages, custom blogs, and far more viable platforms to build on than we have on the streamlined web of today. The Internet is not the Web, also what platforms? Sure besides Geocities, many ISP's gave a few MBs for personal html files but for the most part you didn't had your own URL, now you can have that for a few pennies a month. But we're not playing web pages game anymore, it's interactivity bit times otherwise we feel bored without infinite scroll and even a regular forum doesn't cut it anymore (no one wants no register for yet another one). > In the last two decades, custom stylesheets have become a dying breed. I'm not so sure about it, at least not for the regular personal pages, you just don't find those as often with "the search engine". Try https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ to get a feel for it. Maybe we need to resurrect the gopher protocol and make the search unbiased again, hell yeah, Make the Search Great Again!

visiblink 7y ago
It's strange to say this, since I'm a gopher user and everyone else seems interested in popularizing or resurrecting the protocol, but I hope that never happens. Gopher today is a cool, thoughtful, and quirky place. I think that's because it is a niche. Add the masses and it would be bland-ified.
mxuribe 7y ago
Thanks for reminding me of https://wiby.me https://wiby.me! I can't recall where i first heard of this search engine...but it made me smile then, and now that you mentioned it (and after i clicked around a bit today), made me smile again; thanks for that!

gottam 7y ago

And we've traded it for a sea of advertising and astroturfing.

HocusLocus 7y ago

People experience the dismal anti-literate Twitter (concept and style and non-member popup 'experience') and think it's... normal? And the Twitter embed system is hilarious at times. There is nothing as face-palmy as a controversial tweet that gets embedded in a news article describing it and then the owner deletes it, leaving a news article with a tweet-not-available hole. Facebook, where you are 10 narrow screens and 1500 back-end js-directed cloud bloat loads loads away from something you saw yesterday? The Modern Web where even scroll keys do not really work anymore? Or for that matter Youtube, whose text comments are designed to explode into illiterate mush with no hint or hope of proper spaces or paragraph breaks if copied to clipboard? Predatory. Here we are in the 21st century where people take SCREENSHOTS of things rather than copy information. This is regression, devolution. Back in the dark ages of 2000 it was considered bad manners to design a system that appeared to scroll endlessly until the web browser simply gummed up and crashed. Search engines wouldn't bother to render any of that. Now it's the preferred way to do it. And now Google is replacing their results page text stream paragraphs with tile-crap that is rects within rects with acres of white space, and less context. If only the whole Internet was built like Hacker News.

chriswarbo 7y ago
> There is nothing as face-palmy as a controversial tweet that gets embedded in a news article describing it and then the owner deletes it, leaving a news article with a tweet-not-available hole. There is something more face-palmy: when the owner spots that they've been embedded in a news article, and change the post accordingly. The latest issue of Private Eye gives an example of this happening, where the Mail Online embedded a Facebook post about a mis-spelled party banner; the poster (Simon Harris) saw it was being embedded and changed the text: > For a while, until someone noticed and replaced the linked post with a screenshot, the article proudly stated: "The Daily Mail is an utter shiterag that is only read by Middle England tossbags who voted Leave because some Polish guy called Piotr served them in Tesco, once."
qwsxyh 7y ago
Am I so out of touch? No, it's everyone else who is wrong.

chasing 7y ago

The Internet's still pretty weird. It's possible that it's just weird in a way that's not nostalgic for those of us who cut our teeth on the late-90s / early-00s Internet.

george_morgan 7y ago
Yes. I think many in their 30s and older have missed the new reality. That more culture is being created on the internet on mobile platforms and apps they've never heard of (and in languages they don't speak) than ever before. The weird web is alive but it lives in TikTok and WeChat etc.

allan_golds 7y ago

Paywall

AndrewStephens 7y ago

The article mentions the rise of smart phones as a factor but fails to grasp the real reason for their impact. Smart phones made making web pages much harder. Before Smart Phones a user could slap together some HTML and perhaps some simple CSS with underconstruction.gif and have an OK looking page. That same page would look terrible on a cell phone because the simple table-based layouts that people could understand do not render well on small screens. Sure they could rewrite the site but that was a lot of effort. Plus HTML was very much a moving target back then. Much easier to move your "I like potatoes" or whatever page to Facebook, which takes care of everything for you and provides a nice network effect. If we want the weird web back then we are going to have to provide tools to make websites look good on all screens while still being expressive enough that a child can pick them up but also provide the kind of instant feedback of Facebook likes and comments. Perhaps Indyweb or Mastodon will be the key but right now they are still to complex for random-j-blogger to deal with.

al2o3cr 7y ago
simple table-based layouts Nobody who ever used table-based layouts for anything of substance would describe them as "simple". Back in those days, websites would regularly specify a minimum screen size (800x600 and 1024x768 were popular) and woe to anybody with a smaller display...
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Back in the day to get things like "nice rounded corners" required hacks in your tables like 1px empty spacer gifs and rounded corner gifs. CSS may seem less "simple" to learn, but compare it to "borrowing" a copy of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and learning that tool just to get something as boringly nice as "rounded corners" that you had control over. (Source: I rebuilt my blog a few years back mostly specifically to make my 90's kid self envious that I could actually do the LCARS things I had wanted to do back then with no corner gifs or spacer gifs, and in a way that responsively reflows content that TABLEs never could.)

vincent-toups 7y ago

Love to see someone trying hard to say "capitalism sucks" but not knowing how.

nerdymishka 7y ago

The weird part of the web still exists. neocities.org is a more modern geocities with the same ability to experiment and modify a static page that geocities had. You just need to dig deeper and promote parts of the weird web on the new gateways like reddit, facebook, etc.

youFuckingHomo 7y ago

I noticed that you're gay.

filmgirlcw 7y ago

TikTok is the weird internet for kids today the way GeoCities was for those of us who were kids in the 90s. The internet is still weird. It’s just shifted to apps and other communities.

Japhy_Ryder 7y ago
> The internet is still weird. It’s just shifted to apps and other communities. Nah. It's wannabe weird.

abdulmuhaimin 7y ago

the internet and computer now is much too important to let bug/glitch/exploits/hacks gets away. I dont think there will ever be bug that will become accidental feature like how Myspace was.

pixelbath 7y ago

> I still run a personal blog on a custom website I built, but every year it feels a bit stranger, and a little rarer. Many people default to Facebook Pages or cookie-cutter Squarespace designs, if they have their own website at all. Posted on Medium, which is nearly the Facebook equivalent of a blogging site. The author mentions Glitch, for which the first step to getting started is either "clone a project" or start with React, Vue, Ember, Angular, or any other number of nontrivial frameworks. Is this really the same as HTML/CSS into Geocities? For better or worse (feels like worse), Internet users are becoming consumers of content rather than producers. When this was all still newer (say, 1997-2005), the novelty of having an online presence was still a dominant factor. As that process has become more homogenized and simplified with the rise of social media platforms, there's much less incentive to bother with learning HTML, CSS, and possibly JS just to put some information on a page. Modern social media platforms walk you through profile creation, posting interests and having those lead to like-minded people, contact management, and so on. Everything's just there. I think it's a hard sell to try and walk that back to "just do it yourself" for someone without that mentality, and it's amusing to see people keep trying. For those of us who value personal expression over ease-of-use, personal websites will continue to be preferable.

rchaud 7y ago

I think what's missing in discussions over the death of the old web, is that people fundamentally want their work to be seen, or discovered. The weird web thrived when there weren't many websites out there, and discovery was as easy as being listed in a web directory like what Yahoo! had. You could "surf" them one by one like you can with cable TV. That ended in the early 2000s as search engines prioritized their own news, sports and entertainment content (Yahoo and MSN especially) and the explosion of blogs made keeping sites in a directory totally un-scalable. As others have said, the weird web exists on channels like Vine (rip), Youtube, TikTok etc, but the discovery UX is bad because there are so many people trying to show up on your home screen. So the result is most of the content is very standardized, because people want to be seen, and doing what's popular is the 'reliable' way of achieving it.

xrd 7y ago

I misread this quote at first: "For many developers, figuring out how to do something cool on their Myspace page or building a GeoCities site full of animated “under construction” GIFs was the genesis of their tech careers." I read it as "apex of (my) tech career." It felt like everything since then has been a slow decent into disappointment. Everything feels so rigid now. Back then it was just fun. Feels like every thing I make now is loaded with anxiety about future changes and scalability and code rot. Tragic that this is gone for me.