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Some things I miss: - A webring at the bottom of every website - Websites having "awards" pages, full of random little picture awards given out by other rando

Some things I miss: - A webring at the bottom of every website - Websites having "awards" pages, full of random little picture awards given out by other random websites - Hand-curated directories of everything imagineable - When internet ads were just static 468x60 banners placed on individual sites by individual advertisers - "Guided tours" in AOL chat rooms, where a host guided everyone in a live chat on a split-screen tour of their favorite websites - MUDs - Stumbleupon's stumble toolbar

handrous 5y ago
- Google (and other search engines) trying to fight and downrank or de-list, rather than giving up and embracing, webspam sites. That's what's made what remains of, and the continuations of, the old Web, practically invisible. It's all top sites and blogspam or domain-name-spam sites on the first couple pages, now. Even those "skip the first hundred" or whatever sites don't really fix it.
- api 5y ago
  I think spam just won the war of attrition. The search engines finally gave up. Any open system that becomes sufficiently large to be worth attacking will be destroyed by spam, malware, scams, and other types of exploitation. The Internet is a dark forest. When GPT type systems really get figured out by the spammers it will be game over. No open forums will remain. I don’t even think open but regulated social networks like Twitter or Facebook will survive. They won’t be able to distinguish spam at all anymore so the whole platform will become bots trying to sell or propagandize bots. The future is closed enclaves and walled gardens that cost something or require that you know someone to enter.
  - echelon 5y ago
    > I don’t even think open but regulated social networks like Twitter or Facebook will survive. They won’t be able to distinguish spam at all anymore so the whole platform will become bots trying to sell or propagandize bots. Beautiful. I want to go back to 1995-2005s Internet. Small communities like HN, not Reddit monoliths. Did you pick your Snoovatar and switch to the mobile app? No? Well, have eight thousand reminders of it.
    - api 5y ago
      I think it’s a mixed bag too. The enclave style network could be more interesting and less toxic and full of stupid crap, but it will be much less discoverable. The golden age was after search but before spammers got really smart, and also before algorithmic timelines turned social media to shit. I’d say 1998 to 2012 roughly. Things went to total shit after that, largely due to algorithmic timelines prioritizing engagement (which means triggering crap and trolls) and the emergence of industrial scale web spam. Cryptocurrency didn’t help either as a lot of today’s spam is linked to crypto scams.
jl6 5y ago
- people doing things for non-commercial reasons - people trying brand new formats instead of filling in templates - curated hierarchy, rather than every site feeling like querying a database - weird people doing weird stuff - visitor counters
- dangrossman 5y ago
  > - visitor counters I've kept those alive at w3counter.com since 2004 (before Google acquired Urchin and turned it into Google Analytics). It's not exactly an in-demand feature so I don't think it's even mentioned on the homepage, but after signing up, you can choose from a couple dozen counter styles, or the standard invisible tracking tag. Been working on redoing that site to re-launch it as a cookieless, zero-personal-data tracker later this year. Actually I still host https://www.websitegoodies.com/ https://www.websitegoodies.com/ which I originally made in 1999, and that has a simple hit counter service too. So there are some counters I've been hosting for over 20 years.
  - cdjk 5y ago
    Wow, I haven’t heard the name urchin in a long time. For the longest time my favorite coffee shop had an urchin sticker on their tip jar. I wonder if it’s still there.
  - grp000 5y ago
    I loved watching those numbers go up between visits! As a kid, I would naively think: "This many new people experienced this as well". Of course thinking back, many of those could have been repeat visitors, but it's still so cool to think about.
    - sen 5y ago
      I remember being so ridiculously proud of myself when I realised I could make a cgi script to write each visitors IP to a text file then on each new visit collate that text file to display a counter of “unique visitors”, then display it next to a normal “hit counter”.. I thought I’d invented the idea of tracking unique-vs-visits. Then I got a job as a web dev for a big(ish) local company and realised every major website was already doing this and just not displaying it.
stevesearer 5y ago
I’m actually building a website where you can navigate/explore my local national forest with the camps and trailheads are organized like rooms in a MUD. I have it set up so you can navigate and traverse it using the numpad keys for the directions of a compass.
Natsu 5y ago
There are MUDs still around last I knew, but I think that Eternal September was the harbinger of the end. I think we need to look at more P2P communication to make the web smaller again. Share things with only your connections again, not FAANG & the entire world. If your friends want to signal boost something, sure they can to their connections, but the default should be that you get stuff from someone directly connected to you, not via systems run by giant companies trying to learn how best to sell things to & manipulate the world.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  Plug for my favorite: https://alteraeon.com/ https://alteraeon.com/
- depingus 5y ago
  > I think we need to look at more P2P communication to make the web smaller again. Share things with only your connections again, not FAANG & the entire world. There's stuff like that out there now. Secure Scuttlebutt comes to mind.
  - Natsu 5y ago
    Yeah, I've heard of a few such things. The trick is to get more users onto them instead of FAANG products.
dirtyid 5y ago
A useful sitemap.
FranksTV 5y ago
RIP Stumble Upon. I miss its random weirdness.
hopesthoughts 5y ago
Personal directories still exist. https://indieseek.xyz/ https://indieseek.xyz/ That's an example of one of those. Webrings are still kind of with us, some people tried to revive them. https://indieweb.org/webring https://indieweb.org/webring Believe it or not, MUDs are still around too. https://www.aardwolf.com/ https://www.aardwolf.com/

handrous 5y ago

- Google (and other search engines) trying to fight and downrank or de-list, rather than giving up and embracing, webspam sites. That's what's made what remains of, and the continuations of, the old Web, practically invisible. It's all top sites and blogspam or domain-name-spam sites on the first couple pages, now. Even those "skip the first hundred" or whatever sites don't really fix it.

api 5y ago
I think spam just won the war of attrition. The search engines finally gave up. Any open system that becomes sufficiently large to be worth attacking will be destroyed by spam, malware, scams, and other types of exploitation. The Internet is a dark forest. When GPT type systems really get figured out by the spammers it will be game over. No open forums will remain. I don’t even think open but regulated social networks like Twitter or Facebook will survive. They won’t be able to distinguish spam at all anymore so the whole platform will become bots trying to sell or propagandize bots. The future is closed enclaves and walled gardens that cost something or require that you know someone to enter.
- echelon 5y ago
  > I don’t even think open but regulated social networks like Twitter or Facebook will survive. They won’t be able to distinguish spam at all anymore so the whole platform will become bots trying to sell or propagandize bots. Beautiful. I want to go back to 1995-2005s Internet. Small communities like HN, not Reddit monoliths. Did you pick your Snoovatar and switch to the mobile app? No? Well, have eight thousand reminders of it.
  - api 5y ago
    I think it’s a mixed bag too. The enclave style network could be more interesting and less toxic and full of stupid crap, but it will be much less discoverable. The golden age was after search but before spammers got really smart, and also before algorithmic timelines turned social media to shit. I’d say 1998 to 2012 roughly. Things went to total shit after that, largely due to algorithmic timelines prioritizing engagement (which means triggering crap and trolls) and the emergence of industrial scale web spam. Cryptocurrency didn’t help either as a lot of today’s spam is linked to crypto scams.

jl6 5y ago

- people doing things for non-commercial reasons - people trying brand new formats instead of filling in templates - curated hierarchy, rather than every site feeling like querying a database - weird people doing weird stuff - visitor counters

dangrossman 5y ago
> - visitor counters I've kept those alive at w3counter.com since 2004 (before Google acquired Urchin and turned it into Google Analytics). It's not exactly an in-demand feature so I don't think it's even mentioned on the homepage, but after signing up, you can choose from a couple dozen counter styles, or the standard invisible tracking tag. Been working on redoing that site to re-launch it as a cookieless, zero-personal-data tracker later this year. Actually I still host https://www.websitegoodies.com/ https://www.websitegoodies.com/ which I originally made in 1999, and that has a simple hit counter service too. So there are some counters I've been hosting for over 20 years.
- cdjk 5y ago
  Wow, I haven’t heard the name urchin in a long time. For the longest time my favorite coffee shop had an urchin sticker on their tip jar. I wonder if it’s still there.
- grp000 5y ago
  I loved watching those numbers go up between visits! As a kid, I would naively think: "This many new people experienced this as well". Of course thinking back, many of those could have been repeat visitors, but it's still so cool to think about.
  - sen 5y ago
    I remember being so ridiculously proud of myself when I realised I could make a cgi script to write each visitors IP to a text file then on each new visit collate that text file to display a counter of “unique visitors”, then display it next to a normal “hit counter”.. I thought I’d invented the idea of tracking unique-vs-visits. Then I got a job as a web dev for a big(ish) local company and realised every major website was already doing this and just not displaying it.

stevesearer 5y ago

I’m actually building a website where you can navigate/explore my local national forest with the camps and trailheads are organized like rooms in a MUD. I have it set up so you can navigate and traverse it using the numpad keys for the directions of a compass.

Natsu 5y ago

There are MUDs still around last I knew, but I think that Eternal September was the harbinger of the end. I think we need to look at more P2P communication to make the web smaller again. Share things with only your connections again, not FAANG & the entire world. If your friends want to signal boost something, sure they can to their connections, but the default should be that you get stuff from someone directly connected to you, not via systems run by giant companies trying to learn how best to sell things to & manipulate the world.

birdyrooster 5y ago
Plug for my favorite: https://alteraeon.com/ https://alteraeon.com/
depingus 5y ago
> I think we need to look at more P2P communication to make the web smaller again. Share things with only your connections again, not FAANG & the entire world. There's stuff like that out there now. Secure Scuttlebutt comes to mind.
- Natsu 5y ago
  Yeah, I've heard of a few such things. The trick is to get more users onto them instead of FAANG products.

dirtyid 5y ago

A useful sitemap.

FranksTV 5y ago

RIP Stumble Upon. I miss its random weirdness.

hopesthoughts 5y ago

Personal directories still exist. https://indieseek.xyz/ https://indieseek.xyz/ That's an example of one of those. Webrings are still kind of with us, some people tried to revive them. https://indieweb.org/webring https://indieweb.org/webring Believe it or not, MUDs are still around too. https://www.aardwolf.com/ https://www.aardwolf.com/