9 ms·

Bring Back Web1

71 points by jbegley 5y ago

tim333 5y ago
I was around for Web1 and remember it being kind of awful beyond giving great hope for what it would be like in the future when the sorted it out. Pages taking minutes to load, almost no decent content. Most of that stuff seems better now. Web3 seems a bit like that now in that the payment and distributed bits don't work very well but may in the future.
afavour 5y ago
This article spoke to me. I do find the technical underpinnings of crypto (I refuse to ever use "web3") fascinating and I'm sure there are some valid applications. But everything I see right now is empty hype and usually just an open invitation to land grab in the promise of future profit. The spirit couldn't feel any more different than the original web.
- tlackemann 5y ago
  The original web was building something because you wanted to. It was about staking claim in a space online, your own space, where people could visit (or not) and it was all yours. Geocities and YTMND taught so many kids HTML where they could build wacky sites just because. There was no monetization driver. Web3 feels like a by-product of being taught to monetize every hobby we have. Nothing can exist for free anymore. There is no more web to stake without some ad or product being shoved down your throat. I do hope it's only a trend. I've been itching to create silly sites again, just because.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    There is absolutely nothing stopping you from creating those, with the added benefit that "web3" will allow you to host and distribute your content without ever worrying about Geocities going down. Don't believe me? Make your silly site and put it on IPFS, or host it on the beaker browser. That is "web3" already.
    - afavour 5y ago
      This isn't really about what is technically possible but rather where the critical mass of thought/discussion is. There are a whole bunch of things you can do with crypto but the majority of what is being done, talked about and hyped up is a money grab.
      - rglullis 5y ago
        How is that different from "web1"? Do you think that the internet became a mainstream thing just because the suits looked at what the nerds were doing and thought "oh, this is cool!" or do you think that they were attracted to it when they saw the chance of making big money? How is that different from "web2.0"? Do you think that "the web as an application platform" and "freemium SaaS" because of the technical superiority of the web, or because all the money in Silicon Valley needed a place to go, and it ended going to repackage every already-existing utility as a web application, and later on as a mobile app? Yeah, so a bunch of people now are hyping "web3" and quite likely they are doing it as an attempt to make money out of it. Just like every other industry from our modern globalized society.
    - tlackemann 5y ago
      You missed the point tremendously. I didn't/shouldn't care that Geocities went down. Who would? Back in the day I had a page on my site dedicated to how much I loved the Mets. Putting anything like that on IPFS or whatever is so overkill and for what? So it's always online? Good luck with web3 or whatever, I'll gladly and kindly stay behind.
      - rglullis 5y ago
        You still don't need to put it on IPFS. You have your own website? Great! I am glad it works for you. But for the absolute majority of people, they don't know or care about "having their own website". Early in the century, those people would go to Geocities/Yahoo. Later on with "web2.0" the mainstream went on to have their blogs and their social media presence, which made it easier for the mainstream, but not without its problems - e.g, people getting into walled gardens, surveillance capitalism, tragedy of the commons due to the eyeball-chasing nature of web content producers, etc... Now with "web3" the idea is that the individual nodes can be in control of their data, and that the tech is (slowly) becoming easy enough to be adopted by the masses. That's all there is to it. You can say "I could do that with web1!" Yes, it is true. But it is also largely missing the point. The fact that you (and I) could do these things with "web1" does not satisfy the mainstream that does not know or care about setting up their own pages and setting up a server. Dissing "web3"on the grounds of "it doesn't give me anything new" is the nerd's version of "I was a fan of the band before they were mainstream".
  - laserbrain 5y ago
    Welcome to Late-Stage Capitalism.
  - dorkwood 5y ago
    How did YTMND teach kids html? I thought it was just a site that hosted a soundbite from 'Finding Forrester' and had a wacky colored background.
    - jdougan 5y ago
      YTMND is a whole family of sites/pages with the same basic approach of the original but different messages. ytmnd.com appears to still index them.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  While I am somewhat engaged in crypto, this is so true. After listening to Kevin Rose's crypto podcast and hear his excitement about some NFT projects I yesterday took another dive into that world to see if I find something I like. Almost everything that's there is a devirative money grab. The few things that don't are spoiled by association. I really liked one video. Turned out that the creator had just taken someone else's images and turned them into video that chained them by morphing them into each other. [Edit: autocorrect error]
chippy 5y ago
I got a warning that this page was slowing down my computer on Firefox. Possibly the recaptca web workers?
uniqueuid 5y ago
I'll admit to being extremely annoyed by web3 (due to javascript massively disempowering users, taking away things we used to be able to do). But, I don't buy the gemini thing at all. Come on, gopher? That's not at all what the web was about. It's a false flag and the wrong ideal to look towards. Even if you go back to Bush's "As We May Think", the focus was on making information accessible and editable using automation. There. That's the magic. Let's bring that back instead of a mere aesthetic.
- krisrm 5y ago
  Genuinely curious, what has JavaScript taken away that you used to be able to do with the web? (other than use sites with JS turned off :)
  - uniqueuid 5y ago
    I'll bite - this is an incomplete list: - Save web pages to disk (in an usable form, i.e. usable by scripts etc., offline) - curl + script to handle content - now you need puppeteer etc. - Easy automation of web pages (same as above) - can't just do POST (yes some pages have APIs. Most are different and require effort) - Custom CSS that works universally - Do powerful stuff with proxies (i.e. rewrite requests, responses) - Link to individual documents or even anchors by default - Pages are the same for everyone, you can send people a link and expect they see it, and see it the way you do ... the list goes on, but these cover some of the most important points.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      You can still do all of these things. JavaScript isn’t the problem. Your issue is more that there’s no longer any standardization of the web and the surface area to which sites are designed have increased drastically. One could still make a site today that can do everything you’re describing
      - uniqueuid 5y ago
        I invite you to try and do any of these things and discover how hard, prohibitively hard they are.
nicbou 5y ago
On my phone, about 70% of the screen is a newsletter popup and a cookie banner. The title is the only part of the content that's visible. The cookie banner isn't GDPR compliant. This might not be the best platform to complain about the state of things.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Tedium.co is apparently primarily a newsletter and not a website. Doesn't address the GDPR bit, but explains the dominance of the "subscribe" stuff.
- hulitu 5y ago
  I stopped after i have seen: By using the Revue Service, you agree to our cookie use in our Website Privacy Policy or Platform Privacy Policy. We use cookies for purposes, including analytics and personalization. When you talk about web1 do it in a web1 way.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Who is the author talking to? The people writing the tech would prefer to make a straight html page, it's the Powers That Be that pay them well to do more. Nobody's being stopped from making "web 1" webpages. Making a call to action like this isn't going to make big companies suddenly change their mind.
marban 5y ago
The thing with W3 is that it's mostly driven by either bored tech bros who cashed out during W1/2 or a generation of young hustlers who were born with phones in their hands and never experienced the bliss of a non-commercial Web. Pair that with little to no physical desires, no traditional economic/educational perspective and it's no longer a surprise that making money from nothing is so attractive among these peers. The good thing is that the entire ecosystem is still so clunky* that even old blokes like us can help steering the ship into more meaningful territory. It's fine to get jealous when selling a rock is making more money than your startup in its lifespan but on the other hand, let's enjoy that the Web is now an instrument to reward individuals for their creativity and not just the most sophisticated tech stack or pay to play game. Overall, I miss Web 1.0 as much as Retro games. And that means looking at screenshots brings me more joy than actually using/playing it. Because let's be honest, it mostly sucked in comparison. * https://paulstamatiou.com/crypto-design-challenges/ https://paulstamatiou.com/crypto-design-challenges/
slmjkdbtl 5y ago
Personal websites, guestbooks, web rings, funky visuals, midis and personalities, people were never as connected ever and after.
nathell 5y ago
Related: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/ https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
rbanffy 5y ago
I for one miss the Web Zero - the page-oriented terminals such as the 3270s and the Uniscopes connected terminal controllers and then to mainframes...
- RegW 5y ago
  Paah! I once had a job programming Computer Automation kit using a 120 column teleprinter - you're not even back as far as web0.5
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    I would say stream-oriented devices, like the VT-52 or the ASR-33 would be Web -1. Block-oriented devices have a lot in common with the way HTML specifies forms and requests. BTW, I love the way the ASR-33 sounds.
hluska 5y ago
The web was arguably more punk when I was young, but the corporations were all still there. Most of them were really bad at it, but they sure tried. As an example, my parents subscribed to Time Magazine in the 1980s and 90s. They devoted a lot of pages to cybersex, games (Megawars got an entire page) and porn on networks like AOL and Compuserve. If this was Shadowrun, my character would find an ic reason to say “same corpies, different corps.”
TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
Given how each Web n.0 is met with fizzling hype, it's kinda surprising to see some of the people hyping Web 3.0. I agree that decentralization will be important going forward. There are some specs starting to emerge that give me hope that a decentralized, open, and free web is still possible. For example: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ Maybe we should call it Web 3.1 or something. The typical bug fix point release.
brightstep 5y ago
Web3 is an attempt to solve a political problem with technology. The issue facing us is corporate power. Rather than engage in a political fight to change either the way corporations are policed or the incentives that produced our situation (i.e. capitalism), they are desperately trying to build a wall around themselves with "trustless", "decentralized" technology. What they're missing is, the centralized powers they're trying to defeat will never permit a technology to succeed if it removes their power. That being the case, we may end up with a version of "web3", but it will be one that either supports the powers we'd hoped to defeat or creates a new class of powers we'll be trying to combat with web4.

71 points by jbegley 5y ago

I was around for Web1 and remember it being kind of awful beyond giving great hope for what it would be like in the future when the sorted it out. Pages taking minutes to load, almost no decent content. Most of that stuff seems better now. Web3 seems a bit like that now in that the payment and distributed bits don't work very well but may in the future.

afavour 5y ago

This article spoke to me. I do find the technical underpinnings of crypto (I refuse to ever use "web3") fascinating and I'm sure there are some valid applications. But everything I see right now is empty hype and usually just an open invitation to land grab in the promise of future profit. The spirit couldn't feel any more different than the original web.

tlackemann 5y ago
The original web was building something because you wanted to. It was about staking claim in a space online, your own space, where people could visit (or not) and it was all yours. Geocities and YTMND taught so many kids HTML where they could build wacky sites just because. There was no monetization driver. Web3 feels like a by-product of being taught to monetize every hobby we have. Nothing can exist for free anymore. There is no more web to stake without some ad or product being shoved down your throat. I do hope it's only a trend. I've been itching to create silly sites again, just because.
- rglullis 5y ago
  There is absolutely nothing stopping you from creating those, with the added benefit that "web3" will allow you to host and distribute your content without ever worrying about Geocities going down. Don't believe me? Make your silly site and put it on IPFS, or host it on the beaker browser. That is "web3" already.
  - afavour 5y ago
    This isn't really about what is technically possible but rather where the critical mass of thought/discussion is. There are a whole bunch of things you can do with crypto but the majority of what is being done, talked about and hyped up is a money grab.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      How is that different from "web1"? Do you think that the internet became a mainstream thing just because the suits looked at what the nerds were doing and thought "oh, this is cool!" or do you think that they were attracted to it when they saw the chance of making big money? How is that different from "web2.0"? Do you think that "the web as an application platform" and "freemium SaaS" because of the technical superiority of the web, or because all the money in Silicon Valley needed a place to go, and it ended going to repackage every already-existing utility as a web application, and later on as a mobile app? Yeah, so a bunch of people now are hyping "web3" and quite likely they are doing it as an attempt to make money out of it. Just like every other industry from our modern globalized society.
  - tlackemann 5y ago
    You missed the point tremendously. I didn't/shouldn't care that Geocities went down. Who would? Back in the day I had a page on my site dedicated to how much I loved the Mets. Putting anything like that on IPFS or whatever is so overkill and for what? So it's always online? Good luck with web3 or whatever, I'll gladly and kindly stay behind.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      You still don't need to put it on IPFS. You have your own website? Great! I am glad it works for you. But for the absolute majority of people, they don't know or care about "having their own website". Early in the century, those people would go to Geocities/Yahoo. Later on with "web2.0" the mainstream went on to have their blogs and their social media presence, which made it easier for the mainstream, but not without its problems - e.g, people getting into walled gardens, surveillance capitalism, tragedy of the commons due to the eyeball-chasing nature of web content producers, etc... Now with "web3" the idea is that the individual nodes can be in control of their data, and that the tech is (slowly) becoming easy enough to be adopted by the masses. That's all there is to it. You can say "I could do that with web1!" Yes, it is true. But it is also largely missing the point. The fact that you (and I) could do these things with "web1" does not satisfy the mainstream that does not know or care about setting up their own pages and setting up a server. Dissing "web3"on the grounds of "it doesn't give me anything new" is the nerd's version of "I was a fan of the band before they were mainstream".
- laserbrain 5y ago
  Welcome to Late-Stage Capitalism.
- dorkwood 5y ago
  How did YTMND teach kids html? I thought it was just a site that hosted a soundbite from 'Finding Forrester' and had a wacky colored background.
  - jdougan 5y ago
    YTMND is a whole family of sites/pages with the same basic approach of the original but different messages. ytmnd.com appears to still index them.
ajmurmann 5y ago
While I am somewhat engaged in crypto, this is so true. After listening to Kevin Rose's crypto podcast and hear his excitement about some NFT projects I yesterday took another dive into that world to see if I find something I like. Almost everything that's there is a devirative money grab. The few things that don't are spoiled by association. I really liked one video. Turned out that the creator had just taken someone else's images and turned them into video that chained them by morphing them into each other. [Edit: autocorrect error]

chippy 5y ago

I got a warning that this page was slowing down my computer on Firefox. Possibly the recaptca web workers?

uniqueuid 5y ago

I'll admit to being extremely annoyed by web3 (due to javascript massively disempowering users, taking away things we used to be able to do). But, I don't buy the gemini thing at all. Come on, gopher? That's not at all what the web was about. It's a false flag and the wrong ideal to look towards. Even if you go back to Bush's "As We May Think", the focus was on making information accessible and editable using automation. There. That's the magic. Let's bring that back instead of a mere aesthetic.

krisrm 5y ago
Genuinely curious, what has JavaScript taken away that you used to be able to do with the web? (other than use sites with JS turned off :)
- uniqueuid 5y ago
  I'll bite - this is an incomplete list: - Save web pages to disk (in an usable form, i.e. usable by scripts etc., offline) - curl + script to handle content - now you need puppeteer etc. - Easy automation of web pages (same as above) - can't just do POST (yes some pages have APIs. Most are different and require effort) - Custom CSS that works universally - Do powerful stuff with proxies (i.e. rewrite requests, responses) - Link to individual documents or even anchors by default - Pages are the same for everyone, you can send people a link and expect they see it, and see it the way you do ... the list goes on, but these cover some of the most important points.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    You can still do all of these things. JavaScript isn’t the problem. Your issue is more that there’s no longer any standardization of the web and the surface area to which sites are designed have increased drastically. One could still make a site today that can do everything you’re describing
    - uniqueuid 5y ago
      I invite you to try and do any of these things and discover how hard, prohibitively hard they are.

nicbou 5y ago

On my phone, about 70% of the screen is a newsletter popup and a cookie banner. The title is the only part of the content that's visible. The cookie banner isn't GDPR compliant. This might not be the best platform to complain about the state of things.

tyingq 5y ago
Tedium.co is apparently primarily a newsletter and not a website. Doesn't address the GDPR bit, but explains the dominance of the "subscribe" stuff.
hulitu 5y ago
I stopped after i have seen: By using the Revue Service, you agree to our cookie use in our Website Privacy Policy or Platform Privacy Policy. We use cookies for purposes, including analytics and personalization. When you talk about web1 do it in a web1 way.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

Who is the author talking to? The people writing the tech would prefer to make a straight html page, it's the Powers That Be that pay them well to do more. Nobody's being stopped from making "web 1" webpages. Making a call to action like this isn't going to make big companies suddenly change their mind.

marban 5y ago

The thing with W3 is that it's mostly driven by either bored tech bros who cashed out during W1/2 or a generation of young hustlers who were born with phones in their hands and never experienced the bliss of a non-commercial Web. Pair that with little to no physical desires, no traditional economic/educational perspective and it's no longer a surprise that making money from nothing is so attractive among these peers. The good thing is that the entire ecosystem is still so clunky* that even old blokes like us can help steering the ship into more meaningful territory. It's fine to get jealous when selling a rock is making more money than your startup in its lifespan but on the other hand, let's enjoy that the Web is now an instrument to reward individuals for their creativity and not just the most sophisticated tech stack or pay to play game. Overall, I miss Web 1.0 as much as Retro games. And that means looking at screenshots brings me more joy than actually using/playing it. Because let's be honest, it mostly sucked in comparison. * https://paulstamatiou.com/crypto-design-challenges/ https://paulstamatiou.com/crypto-design-challenges/

slmjkdbtl 5y ago

Personal websites, guestbooks, web rings, funky visuals, midis and personalities, people were never as connected ever and after.

nathell 5y ago

Related: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/ https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/

rbanffy 5y ago

I for one miss the Web Zero - the page-oriented terminals such as the 3270s and the Uniscopes connected terminal controllers and then to mainframes...

RegW 5y ago
Paah! I once had a job programming Computer Automation kit using a 120 column teleprinter - you're not even back as far as web0.5
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I would say stream-oriented devices, like the VT-52 or the ASR-33 would be Web -1. Block-oriented devices have a lot in common with the way HTML specifies forms and requests. BTW, I love the way the ASR-33 sounds.

hluska 5y ago

The web was arguably more punk when I was young, but the corporations were all still there. Most of them were really bad at it, but they sure tried. As an example, my parents subscribed to Time Magazine in the 1980s and 90s. They devoted a lot of pages to cybersex, games (Megawars got an entire page) and porn on networks like AOL and Compuserve. If this was Shadowrun, my character would find an ic reason to say “same corpies, different corps.”

TYPE_FASTER 5y ago

Given how each Web n.0 is met with fizzling hype, it's kinda surprising to see some of the people hyping Web 3.0. I agree that decentralization will be important going forward. There are some specs starting to emerge that give me hope that a decentralized, open, and free web is still possible. For example: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ Maybe we should call it Web 3.1 or something. The typical bug fix point release.

brightstep 5y ago

Web3 is an attempt to solve a political problem with technology. The issue facing us is corporate power. Rather than engage in a political fight to change either the way corporations are policed or the incentives that produced our situation (i.e. capitalism), they are desperately trying to build a wall around themselves with "trustless", "decentralized" technology. What they're missing is, the centralized powers they're trying to defeat will never permit a technology to succeed if it removes their power. That being the case, we may end up with a version of "web3", but it will be one that either supports the powers we'd hoped to defeat or creates a new class of powers we'll be trying to combat with web4.