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Why there’s so little left of the early internet (2019)
- autokad 6y agoI was doing an ml thing trying to teach the algorithm how to sort trash: recycling, compost, trash. I wanted to add some additional labeled data so I thought I would start out with an item like 'strawberry' and google image search the item. I realized it was nearly impossible to find an actual image of a strawberry. If you google search something as simple as strawberry, all you get is page after page of stock photos and images of strawberries on various forms of eCommerce sites. No actual image of someone taking a picture of a strawberry.
- loraa 6y agoIt's because gen z kids are sick of their dad's pulling up shit from the 90s like here, check out this ace of base midi file and zine txt files in l33t speak... No dad.. It's ok..
- TwoBit 6y agoTitle says "internet" when it should say "world wide web."
- doersino 6y agoSynonymous for the intended audience, and close enough for anyone else.
- Shared404 6y agoTrue, but that makes it a good place to raise technical literacy a little bit.
- com2kid 6y agoI also miss the old FTPs, and the days when you could list all website directory contents. I miss the early days when BBSes tried to migrate to telnet online. I miss P2P sharing apps that had chat rooms and communities build around them (anyone reading this remember VNN2000?). alt.tasteless, principa discordia, and I remember reading about was the 3rd (or 4th) burning man long before it was "a thing". Back when "The New Hacker's Dictionary" used to provide a common lexicon and even people who didn't read 1960s Sci-Fi knew what "grok" meant.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 6y agoGood times. Exciting, explorative and adventure. Having multiple favorites search engines.. wild. It's all very boring and feels filtered.
- com2kid 6y agoI remember literally running out of websites to visit in 1996 or so. If you read fast enough that was a legit thing that could happen. I also remember how terrible forums were until a few generations of AJAX happened. Massive sites could afford beefy servers to make forums not suck, but everywhere else things were pretty bad. Search engines were beyond bad, it was pretty much "I know this exact term exists on this site, so I'll put it in quotes and hit search."
- johnchristopher 6y ago> I miss P2P sharing apps that had chat rooms and communities build around them (anyone reading this remember VNN2000?). Nah. But I really did dig WASTE !
- com2kid 6y agoI never used WASTE, I was a fan of Direct Connect though. It is weird how technological limitations forced tiny servers and users to talk in order to swap files. IRC of course being the precursor to all this. Bit torrent has everything, but I don't get to stumble on someones shared files know they like somethings I like, and then explore organically. What I miss most from the earlier web is mp3.com. To this day I am angry at the founder for screwing over countless independent artists so he could try and prove a point against the RIAA. The market still hasn't consolidated on a similar product that does everything MP3.com used to do: 1. Bands Organized by Genre 2. Streaming of the band's songs 3. Ability to order a band's music 4. Social discovery of new music If I cobble together Sound Cloud and Bandcamp I'm still stuck with a discovery problem that Spotify only kinda helps. Mp3.com was a directory like the old Yahoo, so browsing around was a great way to discover new music and then BUY it. (I still haven't been able to find a replacement for an album I ordered off mp3.com, the band up and vanished as most bands do and I lost the CD.)
- pwinnski 6y agoAre there a lot of gopher and ftp sites around that I'm missing? Email is still going somewhat strong, I guess.
- peter303 6y agoGood! I made more troll posts in usenet days.
- PhantomGremlin 6y agoMe too. And under my real name. Edit: I'm not asking to be doxxed. It wouldn't be that hard, but just having some sort of online pseudonym makes me feel better.
- kwijibob 6y agoMe too. I really hope they are lost to time.
- Macuyiko 6y agoTypical article of the sort these days: 1) pretentious journalist wanting to link it to politics. Picks 2 or 3 "good" examples (like the MDH) to make their point 2) commentors on HN or elsewhere jumping on everything with a notion of nostalgia 3) smarter pundits trying to explain why the older "solutions" aren't "perfect" My personal conclusion is that Google has been heavily down-scoring content which is more than a couple months old. Try installing a blacklist extension and blacklist all news sites and take a look at what remains. I have no doubt this is algorithmically driven. This is what's wrong with the Internet today. And Neocities or whatever else ain't gonna fix it.
- Swizec 6y agoGoogle’s algorithm is weird when it comes to this. Yes they downscore anything old. But sometimes they decide an old thing is the perfect answer for all time. And so if you google 60*60 my article about newbie programming mistakes with time shows up above even the google calculator. It’s been unchanged for almost 5 years.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- codetrotter 6y agoOn mobile I get only the calculator in the result, and a button with “more results”. But when I press the button and the results from the web are shown, then your site with the article you mentioned is the first result indeed. So contrary to what the sibling suggested, it’s not just you that it is showing this for. And I probably live in a different country than you even. I live in Norway.
- manicdee 6y agoFunding for archival services is hardly politics. Commenters anywhere are going to bring up “the good old days” in relation to anything. This is called “being human.” Your personal conclusion doesn’t fit the facts presented in the article: stuff disappears because it is not maintained. Dead links are such an issue that there are businesses who are paid to watch out for dead links in websites and determine whether the target is actually gone, has moved to a new URL or is just temporarily missing. Businesses like “Link Alarm” aren’t politics, they are just dealing with reality.
- dexen 6y agoA good example of a website that stood the test of time: the C2 Wiki, aka Portland Pattern Repository: https://wiki.c2.com/ https://wiki.c2.com/ Sadly it's been recently made read-only, and development shifted to a convoluted "Web 2.0" JS app.
- garbagetime 6y agoIs there any benefit to having the content stick to the left side of the screen and not sit in the middle?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rpeden 6y agoI'm fighting the good fight by keeping my thoroughly embarrassing personal website from the 90s online. Neither the URL nor the pages have changed since 1999! http://boglin.iwarp.com/ http://boglin.iwarp.com/
- skellera 6y agoAre there really bots going around filling out random guestbooks on the Internet in 2020?
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoYep. You put a form on the Internet that might show a URL to the general public, a bot will fill it out endlessly in the hopes of spewing malware links.
- tornato7 6y agoI had a personal website from 2007 that ran for maybe 10 years. Unfortunately I had an open comments section and it was not paginated. Once bots made a half-million comments the site wouldn't load anymore. Decided to just shut it down for good. I had another WordPress site that was hacked by prescription medicine scammers. I thank bots for ruining the early internet.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoLast year I briefly erected a CMS that I imagined had no abuse potential. I got asked by my host to fix it (I nuked it too), because spammers were registering accounts with it... setting the email address as the target of their spam. I apparently got into trouble here because I was tired of WordPress and decided to try something else... and look where it got me.
- beervirus 6y agoSolid guest book.
- 6y ago
- drawkbox 6y agoThe best thing left on the internet is Wikipedia and archive.org, and they nearly got that with the .ORG takeover attempt which they would take down those sites with excessive fees, cuts and slashes from copyright/corporate attacks veiling the authoritarian aims. The web was once anti-authoritarian and decentralized, it is now more authoritarian and centralized, and where it isn't authoritarian it is big fish corporate owned. There is so much propaganda, marketing and astroturfing, even the places set aside for real people have been steamrolled. I don't know what the solution is, it was a nice Wild Wild West of the web from 1992-2012-ish. Mobile/apps also did a number on the web in terms of viability and longevity. The sites that are successful are locked and walled gardens and highly centralized in moderation. Moderation is also something that has been abused, almost censorship level now, it has created shrouded content contained with moderation moats.
- rglover 6y agoThe solution as I see it is to encourage independent creators who want things that represent that 1992-2012 spirit to create them. The cost and time required to do that now is really cheap and seeing as how a lot of people lament their absence, some level of success is guaranteed. Ultimately I think it comes down to personal desire and long-term goals. It seems like a lot of great, ambitious ideas that could/should have stayed one-person or small team operations get looped into the VC/growth thing (effectively destroying their original intent).
- tachyonbeam 6y agoI'd be tempted to create something like a reddit clone with less moderation, but I'm wondering: 1. How many unsuccessful reddit clones are out there already? 2. How much would regulations be a problem nowadays? You can be held liable for the content you host, and there's things like GPDR. Would that make it much harder to start a new social media platform?
- rglover 6y ago1. Several, I'd imagine. But is the quality any good? Probably not. 2. I'm sure some weasel would find a way to cause trouble if it got popular enough, but it may be an opportune time to do it as a DAO or some other decentralized app so you can circumvent that stuff.
- linsomniac 6y ago... you mean besides our iron-fisted grip on IPv4?
- softwaredoug 6y agoThere's a good argument to be made for the Internet as not the sum total of human knowledge. But rather a very temporal view influenced by search engines and social media. Content business models are temporary. Why would anyone keep high-quality, non spammy knowledge freely available? Ad revenue is drying up more and more, there has to be another angle? And who's to say whatever business model they think of won't change in 5 years, the company acquired, or something else...
- Threeve303 6y ago> Why would anyone keep high-quality, non spammy knowledge freely available? This is really the crux of the issue. To understand the original purpose of the internet, you have to look at it as a space devoid of any business model. It was primarily about sharing. Commercialization drove the current state of ad dollars and fake news. There was a time, long ago, when it was just about community. And because you cared about your community, each member was an arbiter of truth of sorts. We lost that connection. Facebook likes to call itself a community too, but the two are not very similar.
- bfuclusion 6y agoIf you compute storage cost vs content creation rate, you would expect that not much would get saved.
- dang 6y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19562650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19562650
- CarbyAu 6y agoI find it hard to believe that Reddit effectively replaced BBS. The Reddit interface is woeful for exploring the comments on any given thread. I don't know how Reddit so popular...
- xtiansimon 6y agoSuperbad.com