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What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publis

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which they are not really interested in, but did just to have a new post. Or often the writing is bad. Maybe today's problem isn't the blogs, but the SEO that puts the crap blogs at the top of the search results. Or maybe I'm misremembering and the old content was crap too, or maybe my standards are higher than they were in my teenage years.

mtgp1000 6y ago
I think what you're saying about reduced barriers to entry has lowered the standard of all popular media. It used to be expensive to publish anything - especially the further back in time you go. So classics for example typically represent particularly bright writers, as having something published before the printing press, and widely disseminated, was simply unlikely to happen. But today anyone can create an account on YouTube or stream on twitch and it doesn't matter if the content is of any particular quality or veracity, so long as the common man sees what he wants to see. I think there's a major secondary effect, in that now that we are surrounded by low quality media, the average person's ability to recognize merit in general is lessened.
- chrisjarvis 6y ago
  The secondary effect you mention is absolutely the case. There is unlimited media and unlimited platforms on which to consume it. "Content" is truly a commodity now. I would like to try to make watching movies/tv a special thing again for myself, as opposed to little more than background noise. I think this will require careful curation and research, rather than just trusting an algorithm.
  - dragandj 6y ago
    Yes, there is unlimited media and content, but the thing is that most of this content is either total crap, or polished content that was too much optimized for the median viewer. There is great, non-polished but authentic content for every niche, but it is very, very difficult to find it. Such content is not a commodity, but unfortunately, it seems that the average content is good enough for the average viewer...
- kickscondor 6y ago
  I don't quite follow - if low quality media is everywhere, doesn't high quality media stand out? Perhaps you're saying that so much low quality media drowns out the high quality media - such that it can't be found. The ratio is off, right?
  - worble 6y ago
    >if low quality media is everywhere, doesn't high quality media stand out? You would think so, but more often than not, most people don't want high quality. What happens is that the media that panders to the lowest common denominator stands out the most, since that what the majority focus on.
    - curiouser2 6y ago
      The psychology of the "hot take" on twitter is a prime example of this. Is it less friction to read a 3 page blog post that critically analyzes a subject and takes into account different viewpoints that all have merit, or to read someone's 280 character reaction? I am guilty myself, I often find myself jumping to the comments section even here on HN to understand what people are taking away from an article without even finishing it.
      - sacado2 6y ago
        And that's where we need more journalitic (does that word exist?) writing. Even by non-journalists, I mean. Make a long form content, start with the most important information in the first paragraph, and give more and more developments in the following paragraphs. Someone who thrives for short content will be happy with the first paragraph. Someone who want to delve into the details will ready each and every word. Heck, your first paragraph could even be a tweet containing a link to the long form. This is clickbait taken backwards. You will get very few clicks as you already delivered the main information for free, but those who clicked will be there for a good reason.
  - dragandj 6y ago
    It stands out, but it's so far away from you when you search for it, that it's below the horizon...
- reaperducer 6y ago
  I think what you're saying about reduced barriers to entry has lowered the standard of all popular media. You're more right than you know. When there were only a handful of television channels, the content was higher quality than what we have now. When there were only a couple of dozen cable channels, the content was higher quality than the endless reruns we have now. When publishing a book went through the big publishing houses, the quality of what was available was higher than it is now where anyone can self-publish and pretend to be an expert. See also: radio. Content can only be created so fast. There are only so many talented content creators out there. While the number of media channels has exploded, the number of good content creators has not kept pace. Keep adding paint thinner, and eventually you can see through the paint. The internet was supposed to give everyone an equal voice. All it ended up doing is elevating the drek and nutjobs to have equal footing with people who know what they're doing and what they're talking about. The quality is drowned out by the tidal wave of low-grade content.
  - koreth1 6y ago
    > When there were only a handful of television channels, the content was higher quality than what we have now. As someone who watched TV in the 1970s, before cable was a thing, I have to disagree here. I think we look back today and see "MASH" and "Columbo" still holding up great after 40+ years and think of it as representative. But nearly all TV was formulaic dreck back then, just like it is now. And even if the average quality level is worse now (which I'm not convinced is the case, but let's assume) the quantity is much higher and there's a large amount of really good stuff to choose from on the right side of the bell curve. It's true that content can only be created so fast, but it can also only be consumed so fast. Once you have access to enough high-quality content to fill all the spare time you want to spend watching TV or reading or gaming or whatever, having more of it to choose from doesn't improve your experience much.
  - Tiltowait-- 6y ago
    It's more like the powers that be were very badly jolted to see that the people, at last, had a voice to speak back with, and we could show that they were lying to us. They then had a reaction and attempted to silence us again, which is still playing out today.
izietto 6y ago
My theory is that the more companies you throw in the less humanity you can find
duxup 6y ago
I remember visiting big corporate websites and there was always a little corner for the 'webmaster' often with a photo of the server the site was running on... or a cat... or something like that. Geocities was a beautiful mess as ... it was just folks trying to figure out HTML and post silly stuff, but it was genuine.
kickscondor 6y ago
People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track. This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out: * https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/ https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/ * https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/ https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/ * https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/ (which led me to this gem: https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/ https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/) Competing with Google in search has become an insurmountable task. Personal directories attack from the opposite direction (human curation, no algorithm) in a way that actually puts Google far behind. It's kind of exciting and unexpected.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  If DMOZ could have held on for a few more years...
  - kickscondor 6y ago
    I'm not certain DMOZ is the way to go. The big centralized directories are too hard to keep current. They get slammed with submission. And you end up with so many editors that no one has a sense of ownership. I mean - maybe it's possible. Perhaps a really focused team could figure it out. (The 'awesome' directories have kind of figured that out, by having specialized directory.) But these personal directories are really sweet because they don't have to cover a topic. They can just be a collection of good stuff, who knows what.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      A solution would need crowdsourced collective vetting of sites along with a reputation system to keep out spam and bad actors without devolving into Wikipedia style personal fiefdoms.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
julianeon 6y ago
I had just started college and I remember going to the computer lab and clicking around for hours at a time, at night. Just going from blog to blog, reading interesting stuff. You didn't have to have a particular goal in mind - one blog would lead to another interesting blog would lead to another one, endlessly. They would all be engagingly written, to a high standard of quality. Like you, I know things have changed, but I still can't imagine I could do that today, going from blog to blog, without running low on material within ~60 minutes. EDIT: I see the webring links here now, I may try them.
- gen220 6y ago
  I came of age in the early 2000s, and Wikipedia was this for me. Eventually, it ran out of meaningful depth to me and in college I hopped to surfing books. You can surf on books til the end of time. I think hypertext as a medium has a lot going for it that books don’t, but I don’t think we’ve figured out distribution, quality control, and discovery sufficiently to make the internet so stimulatingly surfable. There was a period of time a few centuries ago when adults looked at kids reading romance novels the way that adults today look at kids scrolling through TikTok. I think all mediums go through cycles. On the other side (when the wild internet’s commercial viability wanes, and people can no longer make easy money hosting mediocre terrible, SEO-driven drivel), I think a lot of the good content will survive the great filter, and that’s when we’ll be able to appreciate it for what it is/was. The next 20 years might be rough, but the work of this generations’ Dickenses and Pushkins and Gogols will survive.
beamatronic 6y ago
There was less copyright concern back then too. Remember “Make James Earl Jones speak”? Or the Hamster Dance?
inimino 6y ago
My only correction is that there was a lot of content out there! We didn't call it that, of course, because we're people and not corporations, so we just called it articles, blogs, rants and musings. A lot of it is still out there and a lot more is on the wayback machine!
krapp 6y ago
>My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. The barrier wasn't that high. Making a site on Geocities, Tripod or Angelfire wasn't that difficult. Writing 90's style HTML wasn't exactly writing a kernel in C, and most of those services had WYSIWYG editors and templates anyway. Few of the people publishing to the web in the 90s were programmers, so the technical knowledge required was minimal. And plenty of people are publishing high quality content on the modern web, even on blogs and centralized platforms. I follow writers, scientists and game developers on Twitter, watch a lot of good content on Youtube, read a lot of interesting conversations on Reddit. The fact that people publishing content nowadays don't have to write an entire website from scratch has little to do with their personal passions (or lack thereof), whether they're interesting or (and ye gods how I've come to hate this) "quirky." That's like saying writers can't write anything worth reading unless they also understand mechanical typesetting. As far as the old content goes, of course most of it was crap. Sturgeon's Law applies to every creative medium. Most blogs were uninteresting, many personal sites were just boring pages full of links or stuff no one but the author and maybe their few friends cared about. In both cases, between the old and new web, a bias for the past (as HN tends to have) leads people to only remember the best of the former and correlate it with the worst of the latter.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> content for content's sake I think there's some truth to this. Some junior developers make it a goal to be seen as a respected blogger, so they feel the need to write something, even if they have nothing to say.
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
i remember that most of the early internet was under construction. The noise to signal ratio wasn't very high - but that might have been due to some universal constant of physics.
vb6sp6 6y ago
> My theory is that the high barrier to entry I have the same feelings about social media. It used to be that you only had to listen to your stupid Uncle at Thanksgiving. Now he constantly spews his garbage on Facebook
blackrock 6y ago
I miss the lack of ads. But they had all those annoying pop ups and pop unders. Nowadays, Google just tracks you everywhere you go. Even when you’re browsing incognito.
- pull_my_finger 6y ago
  Well you can do your part by not using google analytics/captcha/amp or other google spy services on your own sites.
JKCalhoun 6y ago
My theory is that there was no "money in it" back then. ;-)
swader999 6y ago
Like this site, I learned how to build a strong bike rim from Sheldon. https://sheldonbrown.com/ https://sheldonbrown.com/
- hedora 6y ago
  I used Sheldon Brown’s site when I rebuilt my first decent roadbike (well, it was $100, including the parts I put into it; “decent” is relative).
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
We are asked to believe that advertising is required for there to be any content on the Web. However, comments like this seem to be proof that is not true. I have personal memories of what the Web was like in 1993 but there are so many people today who are feeding off the advertiser bosom what are the chances anyone will listen. No one wants to hear about what the network was like before it was sold it off as ad space. Young people are told "there is no other way. We must have a funding model". Even his article is rambling about "the problem of monetization". No ads and "poof", the Web will disappear. Yeah, right. More like the BS jobs will go away. This network started off as non-commercial. There was plenty of high quality content on the 90's Web. Even more on the 90's Internet. That is because there were plenty of high quality people using it, well before there was a single ad. Academics, military, etc. It all faded into obscurity so fast. Overshadowed by crap. The Web has become the intellectual equivalent of a billboard or newspaper. The gateway to today's Web is through an online advertising services company. They will do whatever they have to do in order to protect their gatekeeper position.
tech-historian 6y ago
If you want the 90s web.. you can find it here: https://www.versionmuseum.com/websites https://www.versionmuseum.com/websites
pentae 6y ago
This. Often you'll find this low quality SEO content is just a result of people hiring low-cost copywriters often from developing countries, the 'uncanny valley' of written content
moksly 6y ago
People are still creating massive amounts of cool content, it’s just really hard to find. I play blood bowl, I care a lot about the statistics, and I’ve searched a lot on the topic over the past few years. The best result I could find concerning some official data from FUMBBL (a place you can play blood bowl) was a blog entry from 2013.[1] My circle of friends and the different leagues I play in have been using that as reference for years. We’ve searched and searched to find the data source to no avail. The other day I’m randomly site: searching for some thing completely unrelated and find a source for live FUMBBL data[2]. You’d think that was the first search engine result related to blood bowl statistics on any search engine, as it’s really the best damn source I’ve ever seen, but it’s not. I know you were probably referring to something a little more interest based. Well I once sat next to a retired biology professor at a wedding, and it turned out he ran an interest site, detailing all the plants specific to the danish island Bornholm. I don’t care much about plants, but it was exactly a 90ies styles page. Unfortunately I didn’t save the link (I don’t care much about plants), because I haven’t been able to find it since, despite searching for his name. So I think it’s still there, it’s just not easy to find it. [1] http://ziggyny.blogspot.com/2013/04/fumbbl-high-tv-blackbox-team-stats.html?m=1 http://ziggyny.blogspot.com/2013/04/fumbbl-high-tv-blackbox-... [2] http://fumbbldata.azurewebsites.net/stats.html http://fumbbldata.azurewebsites.net/stats.html
eloisant 6y ago
I feel like you can find better quality today. Sure you have to dig a little more. But at the time it was so magical compared to pre-web where the only content you could find was professionally published magazines or books, and suddenly you had all this niche content about stuff that wasn't worth publishing, all in a few clicks.
rawoke083600 6y ago
I think you are right about the "high barrier" being a filter for good work yes ! Also I miss the wide and wonderful design and color scheme of the 90's :) Long before bootstrap or "material design" !
- dsparkman 6y ago
  I so agree. I miss good old fashion text based content. Simple, readable, and fast. There was a reason that the default links blue and underlined. Visited links were purple. You could scan an site and quickly determine where you had been before.
nicbou 6y ago
I think we have far more quality content than ever before. YouTube is a goldmine of high quality content, and so are the other publishing platforms. The signal to noise ratio might have gotten worse, and discovery might be flawed, but the absolute quantity of quality content has never been higher.
fit2rule 6y ago
>monetized blogs I believe that we have the 'web' today because big decisions were made about how little control the end-user (i.e., consumer) should have over the content made by producers, and that the #1 priority for all technology involved in the web has been to separate producer from consumer as stringently as possible. If we had the ability to safely and easily share a file that we create on our own local computer, using our own local computer, to any other computer in the world - we would have a nice balancing act of user-create content and world-wide consumption. Instead, we have walled gardens, and the very first part of the wall is the operating system running on the users computer - it is being twisted and contorted in such ways as to make it absolutely impossible for the average user (i.e. the computer owner/user) to easily share information. Instead, we have web clients and servers, and endless, endless 'services' that are all solving the same thing for their customers: organising documents in a way people can read them. And all the other things. And its all so commercial, because there is a huge gate in the way, and it is the OS Vendors. They are intentionally stratifying the market by making the barrier to entry - i.e. ones own computing device - untenable to serve the purpose. Imagine a universe where OS vendors didn't just give up to the web hackers, in the early days, and instead of making advertising platforms, pushed their OS to allow anyone, anywhere, to serve their documents to other people, easily, directly from their own system. I.e. we didn't have a client-/server age, but rather leaped immediately to peer-to-peer, because in this alternative universe, there were managers at places like Microsoft that could keep the old guard and the new young punks from battling with each other .. which is how we get this mess, incidentally. There really isn't any reason why we all have to meet at a single website and give our content away. We could each be sharing our own data directly from our own devices, if the OS were being designed in a way to allow it. We have the ability to make this happen - it has been intentionally thwarted in order to create crops. Give me a way to turn my own computer, whether it is a laptop or a server or my phone, into a safe and easy to use communications platform, and we'll get that content, created with love, back again. Its sort of happening, with things like IPFS, but you do have to go looking for the good stuff .. just like the good ol' days ..
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  The operating system isn't needed for that at all and blaming the vendors is fundamentally misplaced. That directly sending to other computers via direct IP connections is technically possible if you don't operate any firewalls or similiar to block it. And of course non-fixed and shared IP addresses would complicate the system. You would find out quickly why you don't actually want that when your own "unisystem" designated port server/client gets hammered with unsolicited requests and exploit attempts. Easy is a matter of interfaces although other design choices would come with costs. Safe however would be far harder. If you set it to a whitelist well you lose discoverability instantly.
foolmeonce 6y ago
I think the problem is that hiring practices across the entire "intellectual worker" market is a market for lemons that specifically ruins anything of quality. Some blogs were great (i.e. created to solve the problem of too much interest in what one is up to even to answer internal questions individually) and signaled a few great minds that can be hired at a discount.. Those engineers told also pretty good co-workers in stage 1, by stage ~3, managers tell their underperforming direct reports to blog whatever they understand about what their group is doing in the hopes that they (either improve or better yet:) become a burden somewhere else.
TheMightyLlama 6y ago
The whole idea of SEO in order to get clicks for your advertising based revenue model feels “bad” to me. Content is created which is controversial because that will get the most eyeballs on page. The side effect is that we veer towards a broken society the moment we go down that route. I had an idea of a search engine that allowed you to permanently remove domains or pages with certain keywords as a paid service.
tikiman163 6y ago
I think you have good points, but I would also add to it that the high barrier to entry also prevented people from being copy cats. A simple messenger was a major accomplishment, so when something worked there weren't 10,000 copies of it by the end of the week, so nearly all content you found was actually the original and not just some repost or copy paste job.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
netcan 6y ago
My favourite spot was a little later, early & mid 2000s. The barriers had been lowered, but publishing still required some motivation. There was a ton of content to discover, a lot of discovery channels and "information wants to be free" still felt like a prevailing wind. I think part of the reason was, as you say, lower standards. We were being exposed to content that didn't have an outlet before that. The music was new, black, polished chrome... to borrow a Jim Morrison line. A bigger part is discovery though. Blogrolls & link pages were a thing. One good blog usually lead you to 3 or 4 others. These days, most content is pushed, often by recommendation engines. Social media content is dominated by quick reaction posts, encouraged by "optimization." The medium is the message. In 98, the medium was html pages FTPed to some shoddy shared host to be read by geeks with PCs. In 2003, it was blog posts. In 2020 it's facebook & twitter.

mtgp1000 6y ago

I think what you're saying about reduced barriers to entry has lowered the standard of all popular media. It used to be expensive to publish anything - especially the further back in time you go. So classics for example typically represent particularly bright writers, as having something published before the printing press, and widely disseminated, was simply unlikely to happen. But today anyone can create an account on YouTube or stream on twitch and it doesn't matter if the content is of any particular quality or veracity, so long as the common man sees what he wants to see. I think there's a major secondary effect, in that now that we are surrounded by low quality media, the average person's ability to recognize merit in general is lessened.

chrisjarvis 6y ago
The secondary effect you mention is absolutely the case. There is unlimited media and unlimited platforms on which to consume it. "Content" is truly a commodity now. I would like to try to make watching movies/tv a special thing again for myself, as opposed to little more than background noise. I think this will require careful curation and research, rather than just trusting an algorithm.
- dragandj 6y ago
  Yes, there is unlimited media and content, but the thing is that most of this content is either total crap, or polished content that was too much optimized for the median viewer. There is great, non-polished but authentic content for every niche, but it is very, very difficult to find it. Such content is not a commodity, but unfortunately, it seems that the average content is good enough for the average viewer...
kickscondor 6y ago
I don't quite follow - if low quality media is everywhere, doesn't high quality media stand out? Perhaps you're saying that so much low quality media drowns out the high quality media - such that it can't be found. The ratio is off, right?
- worble 6y ago
  >if low quality media is everywhere, doesn't high quality media stand out? You would think so, but more often than not, most people don't want high quality. What happens is that the media that panders to the lowest common denominator stands out the most, since that what the majority focus on.
  - curiouser2 6y ago
    The psychology of the "hot take" on twitter is a prime example of this. Is it less friction to read a 3 page blog post that critically analyzes a subject and takes into account different viewpoints that all have merit, or to read someone's 280 character reaction? I am guilty myself, I often find myself jumping to the comments section even here on HN to understand what people are taking away from an article without even finishing it.
    - sacado2 6y ago
      And that's where we need more journalitic (does that word exist?) writing. Even by non-journalists, I mean. Make a long form content, start with the most important information in the first paragraph, and give more and more developments in the following paragraphs. Someone who thrives for short content will be happy with the first paragraph. Someone who want to delve into the details will ready each and every word. Heck, your first paragraph could even be a tweet containing a link to the long form. This is clickbait taken backwards. You will get very few clicks as you already delivered the main information for free, but those who clicked will be there for a good reason.
- dragandj 6y ago
  It stands out, but it's so far away from you when you search for it, that it's below the horizon...
reaperducer 6y ago
I think what you're saying about reduced barriers to entry has lowered the standard of all popular media. You're more right than you know. When there were only a handful of television channels, the content was higher quality than what we have now. When there were only a couple of dozen cable channels, the content was higher quality than the endless reruns we have now. When publishing a book went through the big publishing houses, the quality of what was available was higher than it is now where anyone can self-publish and pretend to be an expert. See also: radio. Content can only be created so fast. There are only so many talented content creators out there. While the number of media channels has exploded, the number of good content creators has not kept pace. Keep adding paint thinner, and eventually you can see through the paint. The internet was supposed to give everyone an equal voice. All it ended up doing is elevating the drek and nutjobs to have equal footing with people who know what they're doing and what they're talking about. The quality is drowned out by the tidal wave of low-grade content.
- koreth1 6y ago
  > When there were only a handful of television channels, the content was higher quality than what we have now. As someone who watched TV in the 1970s, before cable was a thing, I have to disagree here. I think we look back today and see "MASH" and "Columbo" still holding up great after 40+ years and think of it as representative. But nearly all TV was formulaic dreck back then, just like it is now. And even if the average quality level is worse now (which I'm not convinced is the case, but let's assume) the quantity is much higher and there's a large amount of really good stuff to choose from on the right side of the bell curve. It's true that content can only be created so fast, but it can also only be consumed so fast. Once you have access to enough high-quality content to fill all the spare time you want to spend watching TV or reading or gaming or whatever, having more of it to choose from doesn't improve your experience much.
- Tiltowait-- 6y ago
  It's more like the powers that be were very badly jolted to see that the people, at last, had a voice to speak back with, and we could show that they were lying to us. They then had a reaction and attempted to silence us again, which is still playing out today.

izietto 6y ago

My theory is that the more companies you throw in the less humanity you can find

duxup 6y ago

I remember visiting big corporate websites and there was always a little corner for the 'webmaster' often with a photo of the server the site was running on... or a cat... or something like that. Geocities was a beautiful mess as ... it was just folks trying to figure out HTML and post silly stuff, but it was genuine.

kickscondor 6y ago

People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track. This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out: * https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/ https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/ * https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/ https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/ * https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/ (which led me to this gem: https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/ https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/) Competing with Google in search has become an insurmountable task. Personal directories attack from the opposite direction (human curation, no algorithm) in a way that actually puts Google far behind. It's kind of exciting and unexpected.

tomc1985 6y ago
If DMOZ could have held on for a few more years...
- kickscondor 6y ago
  I'm not certain DMOZ is the way to go. The big centralized directories are too hard to keep current. They get slammed with submission. And you end up with so many editors that no one has a sense of ownership. I mean - maybe it's possible. Perhaps a really focused team could figure it out. (The 'awesome' directories have kind of figured that out, by having specialized directory.) But these personal directories are really sweet because they don't have to cover a topic. They can just be a collection of good stuff, who knows what.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    A solution would need crowdsourced collective vetting of sites along with a reputation system to keep out spam and bad actors without devolving into Wikipedia style personal fiefdoms.
  - zozbot234 6y ago

julianeon 6y ago

I had just started college and I remember going to the computer lab and clicking around for hours at a time, at night. Just going from blog to blog, reading interesting stuff. You didn't have to have a particular goal in mind - one blog would lead to another interesting blog would lead to another one, endlessly. They would all be engagingly written, to a high standard of quality. Like you, I know things have changed, but I still can't imagine I could do that today, going from blog to blog, without running low on material within ~60 minutes. EDIT: I see the webring links here now, I may try them.

gen220 6y ago
I came of age in the early 2000s, and Wikipedia was this for me. Eventually, it ran out of meaningful depth to me and in college I hopped to surfing books. You can surf on books til the end of time. I think hypertext as a medium has a lot going for it that books don’t, but I don’t think we’ve figured out distribution, quality control, and discovery sufficiently to make the internet so stimulatingly surfable. There was a period of time a few centuries ago when adults looked at kids reading romance novels the way that adults today look at kids scrolling through TikTok. I think all mediums go through cycles. On the other side (when the wild internet’s commercial viability wanes, and people can no longer make easy money hosting mediocre terrible, SEO-driven drivel), I think a lot of the good content will survive the great filter, and that’s when we’ll be able to appreciate it for what it is/was. The next 20 years might be rough, but the work of this generations’ Dickenses and Pushkins and Gogols will survive.

beamatronic 6y ago

There was less copyright concern back then too. Remember “Make James Earl Jones speak”? Or the Hamster Dance?

inimino 6y ago

My only correction is that there was a lot of content out there! We didn't call it that, of course, because we're people and not corporations, so we just called it articles, blogs, rants and musings. A lot of it is still out there and a lot more is on the wayback machine!

krapp 6y ago

>My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. The barrier wasn't that high. Making a site on Geocities, Tripod or Angelfire wasn't that difficult. Writing 90's style HTML wasn't exactly writing a kernel in C, and most of those services had WYSIWYG editors and templates anyway. Few of the people publishing to the web in the 90s were programmers, so the technical knowledge required was minimal. And plenty of people are publishing high quality content on the modern web, even on blogs and centralized platforms. I follow writers, scientists and game developers on Twitter, watch a lot of good content on Youtube, read a lot of interesting conversations on Reddit. The fact that people publishing content nowadays don't have to write an entire website from scratch has little to do with their personal passions (or lack thereof), whether they're interesting or (and ye gods how I've come to hate this) "quirky." That's like saying writers can't write anything worth reading unless they also understand mechanical typesetting. As far as the old content goes, of course most of it was crap. Sturgeon's Law applies to every creative medium. Most blogs were uninteresting, many personal sites were just boring pages full of links or stuff no one but the author and maybe their few friends cared about. In both cases, between the old and new web, a bias for the past (as HN tends to have) leads people to only remember the best of the former and correlate it with the worst of the latter.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

> content for content's sake I think there's some truth to this. Some junior developers make it a goal to be seen as a respected blogger, so they feel the need to write something, even if they have nothing to say.

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

i remember that most of the early internet was under construction. The noise to signal ratio wasn't very high - but that might have been due to some universal constant of physics.

vb6sp6 6y ago

> My theory is that the high barrier to entry I have the same feelings about social media. It used to be that you only had to listen to your stupid Uncle at Thanksgiving. Now he constantly spews his garbage on Facebook

blackrock 6y ago

I miss the lack of ads. But they had all those annoying pop ups and pop unders. Nowadays, Google just tracks you everywhere you go. Even when you’re browsing incognito.

pull_my_finger 6y ago
Well you can do your part by not using google analytics/captcha/amp or other google spy services on your own sites.

JKCalhoun 6y ago

My theory is that there was no "money in it" back then. ;-)

swader999 6y ago

Like this site, I learned how to build a strong bike rim from Sheldon. https://sheldonbrown.com/ https://sheldonbrown.com/

hedora 6y ago
I used Sheldon Brown’s site when I rebuilt my first decent roadbike (well, it was $100, including the parts I put into it; “decent” is relative).

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

We are asked to believe that advertising is required for there to be any content on the Web. However, comments like this seem to be proof that is not true. I have personal memories of what the Web was like in 1993 but there are so many people today who are feeding off the advertiser bosom what are the chances anyone will listen. No one wants to hear about what the network was like before it was sold it off as ad space. Young people are told "there is no other way. We must have a funding model". Even his article is rambling about "the problem of monetization". No ads and "poof", the Web will disappear. Yeah, right. More like the BS jobs will go away. This network started off as non-commercial. There was plenty of high quality content on the 90's Web. Even more on the 90's Internet. That is because there were plenty of high quality people using it, well before there was a single ad. Academics, military, etc. It all faded into obscurity so fast. Overshadowed by crap. The Web has become the intellectual equivalent of a billboard or newspaper. The gateway to today's Web is through an online advertising services company. They will do whatever they have to do in order to protect their gatekeeper position.

tech-historian 6y ago

If you want the 90s web.. you can find it here: https://www.versionmuseum.com/websites https://www.versionmuseum.com/websites

pentae 6y ago

This. Often you'll find this low quality SEO content is just a result of people hiring low-cost copywriters often from developing countries, the 'uncanny valley' of written content

moksly 6y ago

People are still creating massive amounts of cool content, it’s just really hard to find. I play blood bowl, I care a lot about the statistics, and I’ve searched a lot on the topic over the past few years. The best result I could find concerning some official data from FUMBBL (a place you can play blood bowl) was a blog entry from 2013.[1] My circle of friends and the different leagues I play in have been using that as reference for years. We’ve searched and searched to find the data source to no avail. The other day I’m randomly site: searching for some thing completely unrelated and find a source for live FUMBBL data[2]. You’d think that was the first search engine result related to blood bowl statistics on any search engine, as it’s really the best damn source I’ve ever seen, but it’s not. I know you were probably referring to something a little more interest based. Well I once sat next to a retired biology professor at a wedding, and it turned out he ran an interest site, detailing all the plants specific to the danish island Bornholm. I don’t care much about plants, but it was exactly a 90ies styles page. Unfortunately I didn’t save the link (I don’t care much about plants), because I haven’t been able to find it since, despite searching for his name. So I think it’s still there, it’s just not easy to find it. [1] http://ziggyny.blogspot.com/2013/04/fumbbl-high-tv-blackbox-team-stats.html?m=1 http://ziggyny.blogspot.com/2013/04/fumbbl-high-tv-blackbox-... [2] http://fumbbldata.azurewebsites.net/stats.html http://fumbbldata.azurewebsites.net/stats.html

eloisant 6y ago

I feel like you can find better quality today. Sure you have to dig a little more. But at the time it was so magical compared to pre-web where the only content you could find was professionally published magazines or books, and suddenly you had all this niche content about stuff that wasn't worth publishing, all in a few clicks.

rawoke083600 6y ago

I think you are right about the "high barrier" being a filter for good work yes ! Also I miss the wide and wonderful design and color scheme of the 90's :) Long before bootstrap or "material design" !

dsparkman 6y ago
I so agree. I miss good old fashion text based content. Simple, readable, and fast. There was a reason that the default links blue and underlined. Visited links were purple. You could scan an site and quickly determine where you had been before.

nicbou 6y ago

I think we have far more quality content than ever before. YouTube is a goldmine of high quality content, and so are the other publishing platforms. The signal to noise ratio might have gotten worse, and discovery might be flawed, but the absolute quantity of quality content has never been higher.

fit2rule 6y ago

>monetized blogs I believe that we have the 'web' today because big decisions were made about how little control the end-user (i.e., consumer) should have over the content made by producers, and that the #1 priority for all technology involved in the web has been to separate producer from consumer as stringently as possible. If we had the ability to safely and easily share a file that we create on our own local computer, using our own local computer, to any other computer in the world - we would have a nice balancing act of user-create content and world-wide consumption. Instead, we have walled gardens, and the very first part of the wall is the operating system running on the users computer - it is being twisted and contorted in such ways as to make it absolutely impossible for the average user (i.e. the computer owner/user) to easily share information. Instead, we have web clients and servers, and endless, endless 'services' that are all solving the same thing for their customers: organising documents in a way people can read them. And all the other things. And its all so commercial, because there is a huge gate in the way, and it is the OS Vendors. They are intentionally stratifying the market by making the barrier to entry - i.e. ones own computing device - untenable to serve the purpose. Imagine a universe where OS vendors didn't just give up to the web hackers, in the early days, and instead of making advertising platforms, pushed their OS to allow anyone, anywhere, to serve their documents to other people, easily, directly from their own system. I.e. we didn't have a client-/server age, but rather leaped immediately to peer-to-peer, because in this alternative universe, there were managers at places like Microsoft that could keep the old guard and the new young punks from battling with each other .. which is how we get this mess, incidentally. There really isn't any reason why we all have to meet at a single website and give our content away. We could each be sharing our own data directly from our own devices, if the OS were being designed in a way to allow it. We have the ability to make this happen - it has been intentionally thwarted in order to create crops. Give me a way to turn my own computer, whether it is a laptop or a server or my phone, into a safe and easy to use communications platform, and we'll get that content, created with love, back again. Its sort of happening, with things like IPFS, but you do have to go looking for the good stuff .. just like the good ol' days ..

Nasrudith 6y ago
The operating system isn't needed for that at all and blaming the vendors is fundamentally misplaced. That directly sending to other computers via direct IP connections is technically possible if you don't operate any firewalls or similiar to block it. And of course non-fixed and shared IP addresses would complicate the system. You would find out quickly why you don't actually want that when your own "unisystem" designated port server/client gets hammered with unsolicited requests and exploit attempts. Easy is a matter of interfaces although other design choices would come with costs. Safe however would be far harder. If you set it to a whitelist well you lose discoverability instantly.

foolmeonce 6y ago

I think the problem is that hiring practices across the entire "intellectual worker" market is a market for lemons that specifically ruins anything of quality. Some blogs were great (i.e. created to solve the problem of too much interest in what one is up to even to answer internal questions individually) and signaled a few great minds that can be hired at a discount.. Those engineers told also pretty good co-workers in stage 1, by stage ~3, managers tell their underperforming direct reports to blog whatever they understand about what their group is doing in the hopes that they (either improve or better yet:) become a burden somewhere else.

TheMightyLlama 6y ago

The whole idea of SEO in order to get clicks for your advertising based revenue model feels “bad” to me. Content is created which is controversial because that will get the most eyeballs on page. The side effect is that we veer towards a broken society the moment we go down that route. I had an idea of a search engine that allowed you to permanently remove domains or pages with certain keywords as a paid service.

tikiman163 6y ago

I think you have good points, but I would also add to it that the high barrier to entry also prevented people from being copy cats. A simple messenger was a major accomplishment, so when something worked there weren't 10,000 copies of it by the end of the week, so nearly all content you found was actually the original and not just some repost or copy paste job.

deleted 6y ago

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netcan 6y ago

My favourite spot was a little later, early & mid 2000s. The barriers had been lowered, but publishing still required some motivation. There was a ton of content to discover, a lot of discovery channels and "information wants to be free" still felt like a prevailing wind. I think part of the reason was, as you say, lower standards. We were being exposed to content that didn't have an outlet before that. The music was new, black, polished chrome... to borrow a Jim Morrison line. A bigger part is discovery though. Blogrolls & link pages were a thing. One good blog usually lead you to 3 or 4 others. These days, most content is pushed, often by recommendation engines. Social media content is dominated by quick reaction posts, encouraged by "optimization." The medium is the message. In 98, the medium was html pages FTPed to some shoddy shared host to be read by geeks with PCs. In 2003, it was blog posts. In 2020 it's facebook & twitter.