6 ms·

- people doing things for non-commercial reasons - people trying brand new formats instead of filling in templates - curated hierarchy, rather than every site

by 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 Actually I still host https://www.websitegoodies.com/ https://www.websitegoodies.com/ which I originally made in 1999, and that has a simple hit counter service too.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.
krapp 5y ago
> - people doing things for non-commercial reasons > - weird people doing weird stuff There is more of both of these now than there ever was back in the 1990s. The modern internet is a utopia of interesting people doing interesting things for passion (even among people who also get paid - those things aren't mutually exclusive.) The problem is too many people have become jaded hipsters who dismiss anything not in hand-written HTML on a personal domain as 'inauthentic.' Like, your old Metallica fanpage with the flame gifs and badly tiled background image wasn't exactly the pinnacle of art and expression.
- spkm 5y ago
  Yeah, everybody does it with wordpress now.
- ari__ 5y ago
  Hacker News is a phenomenal source of hatred for using modern browser features and standards. Any amount of javascript is defined as bloat and should be strictly optional eye candy - completely disregarding the fact that UI and state management frameworks like React have made developing the sort of advanced applications we demand exceptionally easy. Does a personal blog need React or Vue? No, and my blog is made by a static site generator (Hugo, specifically). Do most web applications built nowadays need them? Almost 100% of the time for non-trivial applications, yes. You can do it without any JS, but with that same ideology you can also write your desktop applications in x86 assembly.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    > Hacker News is a phenomenal source of hatred for using modern browser features and standards. Complaining about JavaScript is mere table stakes! The true path of "the modern web is ruined" discourse on HN starts with complaining about webfonts, and progresses to laments about any styling whatsoever and "why should designers have any say in how a web page on my computer looks." It's pretty hard to top "images were a mistake," but you get extra points in the lightning round if you work in a reference to Ted Nelson.
bittercynic 5y ago
I think there is an enormous opportunity here. If there were a web search service that prioritized your first four points I would use it, and I suspect a very large number of others would as well. It's going to be a little more tricky to turn this into a business, because you'll be selecting for users who are allergic to websites doing things for commercial reasons, but perhaps there is a way. One can dream.
- varelse 5y ago
  I agree that the opportunity is there, but it doesn't seem like the VC wants to fund efforts in that direction. There are all sorts of ways to make social media better as well, but the VC doesn't want to fund that either. Perhaps because in both cases, after some immediate improvement, the jobs get a lot harder as people fight back to bring their crap back to the top of the heap, but it sure would be nice if they had a corporate motto like "Cut the crap!" IMO...
- unishark 5y ago
  While we're dreaming, the ultimate solution is an artificially intelligent agent that stands between you and the internet and can be instructed to pick out what you like and show it to you. It would ideally serve a variety of different types of users. The current system basically amounts to loading code from remote servers and running it on your device in a leaky little sandbox, so it's a natural next layer of protection.
  - 6510 5y ago
    Maxthon2 could open search results in tabs. Like an upscaled version of the dial up days, one would open a bunch of tabs and let them load. I had it configured to open the first 100 results. It would somewhat prioritize the first page so that you could look at it while page 2 loaded. Eventually it was far ahead loading pages and one could tab though them (mouse gestures) and they would pop up as fast as desktop applications [use to be] There was a different gesture for next page and for close current + next page. I wrote a bunch of plugins [they were called] that are like browser extensions (without any security) They allowed selecting a sniplet of text on a page before making the next gesture. After eliminating the uninteresting pages I could export the remaining tabs (in that window) as a html sniplet with titles as links and the sniplets under them. It upgraded blog posts into pages people could spend hours or even days on. I remember spending the better part of 15 min making a huge posts about UFO's (by repeating above process with various search queries) without reading much of anything and got comments from people who wondered why I spend so much time gathering all that "information". If I had to make that post using today's tools it would indeed take weeks.
Causality1 5y ago
Oh damn, you just made me realize how much I miss hierarchies. When I used to go to a site everything was organized by topic instead of being a chronological stream of consciousness. You could open a gadget review site and see every review they did of a Sony product or a Palm product and know you hadn't missed anything. Now you have to type a word into their search bar and sort through a giant list of both relevant and irrelevant pages.
toto444 5y ago
You can find this on neocities https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse There are still some webrings out there. You can find them in the link section of some neocities websites. There is a link to one of them on my old-internet-style website (see my HN profile). I love the old internet but this is not what people want anymore. I have to admit I rarely spend time on neocities despite my initial enthusiasm.

by jl6 5y ago

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.

krapp 5y ago

> - people doing things for non-commercial reasons > - weird people doing weird stuff There is more of both of these now than there ever was back in the 1990s. The modern internet is a utopia of interesting people doing interesting things for passion (even among people who also get paid - those things aren't mutually exclusive.) The problem is too many people have become jaded hipsters who dismiss anything not in hand-written HTML on a personal domain as 'inauthentic.' Like, your old Metallica fanpage with the flame gifs and badly tiled background image wasn't exactly the pinnacle of art and expression.

spkm 5y ago
Yeah, everybody does it with wordpress now.
ari__ 5y ago
Hacker News is a phenomenal source of hatred for using modern browser features and standards. Any amount of javascript is defined as bloat and should be strictly optional eye candy - completely disregarding the fact that UI and state management frameworks like React have made developing the sort of advanced applications we demand exceptionally easy. Does a personal blog need React or Vue? No, and my blog is made by a static site generator (Hugo, specifically). Do most web applications built nowadays need them? Almost 100% of the time for non-trivial applications, yes. You can do it without any JS, but with that same ideology you can also write your desktop applications in x86 assembly.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  > Hacker News is a phenomenal source of hatred for using modern browser features and standards. Complaining about JavaScript is mere table stakes! The true path of "the modern web is ruined" discourse on HN starts with complaining about webfonts, and progresses to laments about any styling whatsoever and "why should designers have any say in how a web page on my computer looks." It's pretty hard to top "images were a mistake," but you get extra points in the lightning round if you work in a reference to Ted Nelson.

bittercynic 5y ago

I think there is an enormous opportunity here. If there were a web search service that prioritized your first four points I would use it, and I suspect a very large number of others would as well. It's going to be a little more tricky to turn this into a business, because you'll be selecting for users who are allergic to websites doing things for commercial reasons, but perhaps there is a way. One can dream.

varelse 5y ago
I agree that the opportunity is there, but it doesn't seem like the VC wants to fund efforts in that direction. There are all sorts of ways to make social media better as well, but the VC doesn't want to fund that either. Perhaps because in both cases, after some immediate improvement, the jobs get a lot harder as people fight back to bring their crap back to the top of the heap, but it sure would be nice if they had a corporate motto like "Cut the crap!" IMO...
unishark 5y ago
While we're dreaming, the ultimate solution is an artificially intelligent agent that stands between you and the internet and can be instructed to pick out what you like and show it to you. It would ideally serve a variety of different types of users. The current system basically amounts to loading code from remote servers and running it on your device in a leaky little sandbox, so it's a natural next layer of protection.
- 6510 5y ago
  Maxthon2 could open search results in tabs. Like an upscaled version of the dial up days, one would open a bunch of tabs and let them load. I had it configured to open the first 100 results. It would somewhat prioritize the first page so that you could look at it while page 2 loaded. Eventually it was far ahead loading pages and one could tab though them (mouse gestures) and they would pop up as fast as desktop applications [use to be] There was a different gesture for next page and for close current + next page. I wrote a bunch of plugins [they were called] that are like browser extensions (without any security) They allowed selecting a sniplet of text on a page before making the next gesture. After eliminating the uninteresting pages I could export the remaining tabs (in that window) as a html sniplet with titles as links and the sniplets under them. It upgraded blog posts into pages people could spend hours or even days on. I remember spending the better part of 15 min making a huge posts about UFO's (by repeating above process with various search queries) without reading much of anything and got comments from people who wondered why I spend so much time gathering all that "information". If I had to make that post using today's tools it would indeed take weeks.

Causality1 5y ago

Oh damn, you just made me realize how much I miss hierarchies. When I used to go to a site everything was organized by topic instead of being a chronological stream of consciousness. You could open a gadget review site and see every review they did of a Sony product or a Palm product and know you hadn't missed anything. Now you have to type a word into their search bar and sort through a giant list of both relevant and irrelevant pages.

toto444 5y ago

You can find this on neocities https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse There are still some webrings out there. You can find them in the link section of some neocities websites. There is a link to one of them on my old-internet-style website (see my HN profile). I love the old internet but this is not what people want anymore. I have to admit I rarely spend time on neocities despite my initial enthusiasm.