14 ms·

The web is fucked

205 points by decrypt 5y ago

foobarian 5y ago
This is kind of beating a dead horse. Of course the web was better when only the intellectual elite were on it. Of course it turned into a cesspool when the other 99% joined, including the 1% who are prolific destructive trolls.
- asmos7 5y ago
  ha oddly enough in AltSpace I've actually had a number of great engaging conversations.
- pram 5y ago
  A lot of those intellectual elite are in fact the trolls.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    Arguably the history of trolling goes back to the ancient Greeks. Eris for example clearly became the godess of trolling when she threw a golden apple marked 'for the fairest' into a party she was rejected from, causing the other godesses to fight over it until the Trojan War happened.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > Of course the web was better when only the intellectual elite were on it. Well, people who thought of themselves as the intellectual elite anyway.
- flyinghamster 5y ago
  Trolls and kooks were around on Usenet even in the UUCP days, and on dialup bulletin boards as well. They've become far more visible and destructive, and manipulation has become far easier, as it got easier to go online. I hate thinking that the Eternal September meme should be anything but an oldtimer in-joke, but looking at what social media has done to society makes me shudder. Making the grapevine worldwide and instantaneous, which I once thought was a Good Thing, is now looking more to me like a mistake, but that genie is long out of the bottle now. I'm glad to see old-school forums soldier on, at least. For specialized information and advice, they tend to be a lot more reliable than social media - mostly because they're communities that have no patience for trolls. That doesn't stop them (and spammers) from trying to cause trouble, though. Once you let the general public in, it's inevitable that some will be jerks. Just a look through the "New" queue on HN with "show dead posts" shows it vividly. :)
madeofpalk 5y ago
The thing that I just keep coming back to with all this Web 1.0 rose tinted glasses is that "no one" used the web back then. Many people _did not_ have personal web pages. Only a few individuals did, if you were lucky/smart enough. It's fair bemoan about the state of the web now - there's many faults, but it's considerably more accessible than it was before. There is more information available that's, and more opportunities for people on this new web, and its all (ultimately) easier to access
- Aeolun 5y ago
  There is a sweet spot. Between around 2000-2005 ish the internet was available to a lot of people, and not yet fucked. Until the MSN messenger rebrand in 2005 sounds like a good rule of thumb.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    At the risk of splitting hairs, even 2008-2010 was still decent. But I agree with the core of your idea.
  - treacle 5y ago
    Yeah, you used to get web space and email thrown in with your ISP, in the UK. Snobbery hadn't taken hold, you could just upload a few pages from File Explorer, via FTP. Yeah sure it was rough around the edges, but in many ways far more accessible or rather, less confusing. Not as much a big pile of mud than it is now.
    - madeofpalk 5y ago
      That does not sound in any way more accessible than the current situation. HTML? FTP? People just want an online presence.
      - treacle 5y ago
        Well you didn't even have to write HTML back then. You could author it in whatever program and FTP it. Which to be fair was still a stumbling block for some, but out of all the hurdles and hoops you have to jump over and through to put something on-line anyway, it wasn't that difficult.
delgaudm 5y ago
I mean, I get it, and I agree. But to rail against Social Media and SEO in one breath, and then to have Twitter optimized headers and SEO stuff right at the top of the code seems a wee bit hypocritical. <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" /> <meta property="twitter:image" content="https://thewebisfucked.com/assets/images/feature.webp" /> <meta property="twitter:title" content="The Web Is Fucked" /> <script type="application/ld+json"> {"headline":"The Web Is Fucked","description":"The web is fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it. This is a manifesto by Kev Quirk looking back t Web 1.0 and why it was better.","@type":"WebSite","image":"https://thewebisfucked.com/assets/images/feature.webp","url":"https://thewebisfucked.com/","@context":"https://schema.org"}. </script> 
- fairytale 5y ago
  Lmao.
- ivve 5y ago
  Feels like this is not really a constructive critique of OPS argument. Indeed, it is merely them ensuring they can gain reach on the platforms they are critiquing, as opposed to screaming into the void as a Web 1.0 holdout. See: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    > it is merely them ensuring they can gain reach on the platforms they are critiquing Indeed. But how does that differ from the motivation of any other Web 2.0 site?
    - BizarroLand 5y ago
      This is probably generated from his POSSE plugin. https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE He mentioned this in the article.
    - sophacles 5y ago
      Look, I don't like mowing the lawn. I think long grass looks nice. It isn't hypocritical of me to mow my lawn to avoid fines while still advocating for elimination of the grass ordinances in my city. To directly address your point: the motivation of web 2.0 sites is to get a bunch of money by making the content hard to read without first looking at a bunch of ads, and futher to disallow a reading experience uninterrupted by adds every 30-60s. The web page in question did not show me any ads. My question to you is: how do you not see the difference?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tailspin2019 5y ago
I thoroughly enjoyed this. I kind of agree. Of course it's not quite as binary as 1990s = good / 2020s = bad, but this article does resonate fully with my most cynical side. I'm surprised there was no mention of cookie banners (unless I missed it). > Although Zuckerberg and his merry band of wankers have a lot to answer for, the death of web 1.0 and the humble personal blog is not their fault alone. Search plays a huge part in this shit show too. I like this guy.
- kevq 5y ago
  There was SO MUCH more I wanted to mention. Cookie banners being one of them, but I figured it was long enough as it was. I will likely add more to it in the future though.
  - tailspin2019 5y ago
    Understood. Where do you stop! BTW your personal site is superb. A really impressive balance of design and usability.
    - kevq 5y ago
      Thank you. That’s so kind.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  >Search plays a huge part in this shit show too. Is this not something we (ie 'people on HN with the appropriate skill sets who are miffed at the state of the web') are actually in a position to do something about? Maybe we need a search engine that's specifically there to index sites that aren't aggressively monetised, or even excludes commercial web content altogether. We'd need some heuristics to figure out how heavily monetised a site is and obviously we'd want to favour self-hosted sites and forums rather than centralised blogging platforms and things like Reddit. This wouldn't be aimed at replacing DDG or other generalised search engines, it'd just scratch that itch of 'where do I find web 1.0 style content that's not endless ad-ridden cruft and SEO spam?'.
dsco 5y ago
Web 3 has components of what he’s nostalgic about. Especially when you start using products such as Spooky Swap and Trader Joe. There’s no cookie notices, no ads, no dark patterns. Too bad HN absolutely loathes crypto in general, because I do see a glimmer of hope in the wild wild West that is web 3
- no_time 5y ago
  I'd love to expand my horizons but apart from peertube I have yet to see a web 3.0 project that's not some thinly veiled pump and dump coin shilling operation. The disguise may be novel, but the underlying motive is always the same.
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  Sounds what you're complementing is not technologies, but rather just niche communities. There's plenty of "no cookie notices, no ads, no dark patterns" on the normal web. My guess (from zero experience) is that there's more of it on the "web 2.0". There's just lots of other junk also.
- arcatech 5y ago
  Web3 is even more money driven than web2.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  If I wanted to see a capitalist hellscape, I'd just play The Outer Worlds instead of spending money on NFTs.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > Web 3.0 is basically putting all the things on blockchain. > Yeah, fuck that. Fuck blockchain. Fuck Meta. Fuck Zuck the schmuck. That’s all I have to say about that. To expand upon this, I have yet to see a single thing a blockchain solves other than moving money around (usually from the scammed to the scammer). Web 3.0 is doubling down on what made Web 2.0 so shit.
no_time 5y ago
You will NEVER get that experience back. Everything changed. The tech, the people, the culture. If you care about having quality conversations and non monetary value, you can cultivate it yourself. You can still hang out on topic specific forums, participate in webrings, make friends through shared interests.
- kevq 5y ago
  You're absolutely, 100% right...unfortunately.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  I don't even know where to find people with shared interests anymore who are actually willing to deal with other people as something other than a potential customer, victim, or at best a single-serving friend for the duration of exactly one interaction. Hell, I'm guilty of it a lot of the time too when I'm not paying attention to it. I think I originally enjoyed the internet because it allowed me to find communities of people who shared my interests that no one in real life did. Nowadays I've gravitated back to real life because while no one really shares my interests I at least can, rarely, find people who treat me like a person instead of an NPC, at least when they aren't looking at their phone.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Discord is the new IRC, in my experience. I was sceptical, but there are servers for some pretty niche stuff out there. The key here is that each Discord server is walled off from everyone else, and that some servers are invite-only to limit the influx of outsiders. Take note though, it definitely doesn't replace in person interaction - it's almost social junk food.
    - orangepurple 5y ago
      This mirrors my experience. Many Discord servers have strong anti spam measures too.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
protonimitate 5y ago
Yawn. Another "hot take" article that's really just pandering to the HN/"true hacker" crowd that romanticizes anything pre-Google. It's a pretty shallow article that just regurgitates the same old "money makes things evil" rhetoric and slams the big Z cause it's low hanging fruit. I'd be much more interested in something that highlights or talks about what _is_ better about web 2.0 than meme-ing about "old web good, new web bad". This is just click bait dressed up as anti-establishment / edge-lord blog spam.
ivoras 5y ago
In my younger days I was a loud crusader for keeping the web (and Internet in general) as free as possible both in the "free speech" and "free beer" sense of the word, but now I see that I was wrong. What's now going on is that the huge mess of SEO techniques and ad tracking is solving one particular problem: monetisation. I don't know exactly how would the web have spread if the early HTTP monetisation codes, headers and efforts were actually continued (like the "402 Payment Required" response), but I do believe now that not having monetisation built in to the new medium has caused the majority of freedom and surveillance issues today. The web is not just fucked up. We fucked it up by not planning far enough.
- carapace 5y ago
  That's a very interesting perspective, and one you don't hear a lot. For at least a small subset of early Internet and computer pioneers there was a sense that technology would usher in a new post-scarcity or even post-money era. The "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" gives a torrid and breathy example of the kind of thought and rhetoric floating around: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence In hindsight it seems so naive to me. I don't wonder that we got blindsided.
  - ivoras 5y ago
    Right. I remember the Declaration, for us growing up at the time, it was an era all filled up with bringing to life what Neuromancer and Snow Crash talked about. Maybe we'll get another chance with the metaverse thing.
- flyinghamster 5y ago
  There is Xanadu [0], which features a royalty mechanism and authentication. Early planning began in 1960, but it didn't help that Xanadu became one of the world's longest-running vaporware efforts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
echelon 5y ago
Dear author, "Web 3.0" isn't the metaverse. It was the Semantic Web. Web 3.0 was designed to give individual web publishers and consumers the capabilities that giants like Facebook and Google have. Documents had structured data, marked up in rich RDF or Owl ontologies that could expose APIs for your data. You're probably familiar with RSS and Atom and the wonderful ecosystem of tools they had, but there were hundreds of RDF schemas. FOAF, for example, would let you publish and consume contact info, and even encode friends lists if you were interested. There were lots of these. This was also at the time of peak Bittorrent/P2P, and we were really close to having schemas for sharing news and commentary in a P2P swarm. Imagine fully decentralized Reddit and Twitter (not federated!), where identities were anonymous by default, comments and upvotes were cryptographically signed and published, and you could curate your own peer group, interest graph, attention algorithm, and filtering. We were almost there. Clients that operated on RDF schemas were also faster and less cludgy than HTML. We could write native code and GUIs to consume and publish this data, and we were close to evolving the HTML soup into something better. Unfortunately, this is right at the time Google and Facebook had grown immensely from VC and ad money jet fuel. Academics and builders were distracted. People flocked to centralized platforms because it was easy and our tools were immature. We were really close, but the tech cos got there first, got lock in, and then started messing with the commons. Please don't forget that "web 3.0" wasn't crypto. It was more than about payment. It was a stack that gave you and I capabilities and potential that the giants have. It was a distributed knowledge graph that would have been a nirvana of innovation and sharing. But we got sidetracked, out engineered, and roadblocked. Web 3.0 = Semantic Web. We can still remember what it aspired to be, and we can still build it. Never forget.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Let's face it. The term "Web 3" has been hijacked by cryptobros, as has been the very term "crypto".
- chaganated 5y ago
  the semantic web is philosophically bankrupt. schemas and curation lost to the algorithm, by a wide margin, and for a good reason. ontologies are infinite.
dangus 5y ago
Another old man shouting at the clouds, I guess. - The web was much smaller back then. Of course it's difficult for your personal blog to gain traction now, there are so many alternative content producers (most of them are better than you), and alternate content medium like video and audio. A lot of people who would have started a blog in 1999 probably have a podcast, video channel, or do live streaming instead. All these things were not really possible in 1999. Or, maybe they blogged because that was their only technological choice, maybe they actually just prefer posting content on social media only for their friends now that the technology exists (LiveJournal and Xanga were basically social media blog platforms, supplanted by the posting capabilities of Facebook and others). - And, speaking of that, blogging is not at all dead, it's just that the people making a living doing it are much more sophisticated than they used to be, and use their blog as a complement to other methods of reaching their audience. For example, a food blogger will have social media images and videos of their food/recipes, and then host the recipes on their blog/website. But here we've got the other author who is probably mad that they can't get some solid views and ad revenue from putting out a low-effort blog with 20 minutes of spare effort every month. - The Internet used to be "whoever is wealthy enough to own a $2000 computer and has Internet infrastructure available in their wealthy country" and now it's available to the entire world. So, sorry it isn't your own personal gated community for your rich nerd friends anymore. - The big corporations on the Internet are only part of the Internet, perhaps even the minority of it. Shaking a fist at Google or Facebook is tired and played out, as is complaining about hamburger menus. - The article is mad at easily-blockable ads in search engines. How do you expect them to make any money if you aren't willing to pay for it? - The reason there's white space in websites now is because the Internet is big and important enough to justify hiring graphic designers and UX designers who know a lot more about what they're doing than the author would ever be willing to give them credit for. News flash: UX/UI people work off of real usage data and know what designs customers like better based on actual hard data. - Web directories sucked hardcore compared to modern search engines. You'd never be able to find specific things that have just escaped your mind. Try searching for "modernist movie comedy office building" in 1999 (this is what I searched when I tried to remember the title of Playtime (1967)).
city41 5y ago
I agree with a lot of what the author is saying. But they are missing a really important point. The number of people willing to make blogs or static websites versus the number of people now on the internet is staggeringly small. My Mom will gladly converse with people on Facebook. She'd never in a million years make a blog or personal website. This holds true for most people. So wishing it all went back to "1.0" has a gatekeeping and elitist undertone in my opinion. Back then most people had personal sites because most people on the web were the type that found html interesting. Early adopters tend to be more savvy on what they are adopting. I also think there's plenty of "1.0" content still out there. Yeah, you gotta look for it, but it didn't all go away.
- kevq 5y ago
  (author here) I agree - there's definitely a technical ransom to pay for hosting your own site, even with managed solutions, there's still domain names, hosting etc. to work though - it's not for everyone and I'm not claiming it is. Maybe I wasn't clear on that point, apologies if that's the case. I spoke about POSSE and using more decentralised platforms, like Mastodon. Again, they're not for everyone either, and I don't expect them to be. It would just be nice if we got a little more of web 1.0 back. :-)
eloeffler 5y ago
In some version of the game "Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle", there was a easter egg that allowed you to play the first version of the game if you interacted with a computer stacked away in the back of the scene. The game was difficult and looked old to me as a kid. But I somehow thought that this must have been the way people knew games before DOTT. You could run out of time, die, choose the wrong set of characters in the beginning of the game, making it impossible to win. I never finished it. On the web today I find echoes of the "Web 1.0" on Tor-.onion-Websites (including the uncontrolled cesspool that it was in the 90s when people bought illegal guns on the "Clearweb" as we call it today). And Neocities, that is mentioned in the article as well, provides something that takes the best from the past web. The gemini protocol brings back very simple websites and SpaceHey brings back the feeling of the early "Web 2.0" when user profiles could still be heavily modified using html. While much of what the author rightfully hates on is true, and it is the main characteristic of what the web is today, these developments also show that the web diversifies in niche corners. Whenever I discover them, it's really cool :) SpaceHey was developed by teenagers who might be young enough not to bother creating a Facebook account for themselves anymore [1]. And yet, they came up with the idea of recreating a piece of Web history. And if the worst becomes true and the Metaverse takes off, maybe there will be a computer stacked away somewhere in the back where you can access good old BBS boards, at least. [1] Okay, I checked their site again and they might be a little older than teenagers, but still :)
numlock86 5y ago
> everything was better back in the days Sigh. As with everything in this regard: If it was better, how come we "advanced" to something else then?
- Aeolun 5y ago
  It was better for us. As with all good things that can be exploited to make money, so with the internet.
- thewakalix 5y ago
  That argument works well against generic RETVRN sentiments, but I don't know if it applies to regretting how a subculture changed when acted upon by the outside world. Is "I wish we hadn't been invaded and conquered by people with very different values" incoherent?
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    They weren't people with very different values. In general, they were our friends and neighbors who hadn't figured out how to use a web browser yet. The apart-ness that some original netizens imagined for themselves was always fantasy and, I would argue, destructive fantasy when it crossed over to belief in personal elitism. Is being online to the exclusion of real world relationships with those physically adjacent to us building a new, better culture, or the digital equivalent of hiding out in the woods?
    - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
      Early adopters and enthusiasts always have different values. That's why we act differently toward technology in the first place.
- orangepurple 5y ago
  Read the actual Unabomber Manifesto: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab... I will address the problem of technological advancements using only a small subsection of the overall argument linked above. Please read the entire manifesto to understand the context. 127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)
hpen 5y ago
Back in my day! ....
strict9 5y ago
How many of these "X sucks" articles with an attention-grabbing headline can make it to the top of HN in a week? While these articles lament the state of technology today and wish it were better like back in the good old days, there are never solutions put forward. Only negativity. Why do they gain so much traction on HN, one of the few remaining outposts of thought-provoking articles and discussion? What do we get from these endless articles about why some product or technology sucks?
- marttt 5y ago
  +1. All these "fucks" and "shits" felt pointless, tiresome, not convincing. Overuse of this kind of language often results in a more superficial text imo.
  - treacle 5y ago
    Well it was hardly a manifesto!
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  Quite simple, it's a real problem but without a realistic solution short of burning everything to the ground. Once the bean counters had discovered and invaded the paradise there was no way to kick them out again. Maybe the only solution is to build a new paradise and hope that it never gains enough traction to attract the vultures.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    I think that's a large part of the appeal of overlay networks like Tor, GNUnet, I2P, IPFS, etc. All of them are niche and not supported by any notable ad networks, many of them heavily discourage JavaScript and tracking, and with the networks often being either slow or high latency (or both) websites are forced to be fairly lean.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    The cool thing is that you can do that on the existing system. Make a new service. Make it username / password authenticated. Don't give out the usernames and passwords to everyone that comes in. Have some kind of gating function (BBS's were all about who you knew, somethingawful.com made you pay twenty bucks one time, some old systems were gated on something no more complex than single-administrator bandwidth). You won't grow at a rate that any VC will care about, but that kind of capitalism-feeding growth isn't your goal if you're trying to cultivate a "web 1.0 experience:" web 1.0 didn't support most people's capitalist ventures. What you may find (what I've found participating in these experiments) is that the resulting space is a whole lot quieter than the rest of the web. And if you're replicating the web 1.0 experience, that's the goal. The site administrator will also spend a lot more time glad-handing individual users who have individual issues. That's fine; if you're going for a web 1.0 experience, authentication management isn't automated beyond a few simple config scripts. And if that's what a person wants, nothing about the modern web stops them from doing it, except that very few people will care they're doing it because (unlike the web 1.0 days) there are alternatives that accept all comers with functionally infinite capacity now.
flyinghamster 5y ago
If I felt that I had to write a rant, it would read a lot like this. Well said. I'd also add that smartphones and tablets have done much to mess up the Web. The "all white space" site design trend is one of the results. The old version of the NHL stats page was chock full of information; now it's chock full of white space and requires a lot of extra scrolling, all so it's usable on a touchscreen.
jdauriemma 5y ago
"Web 1.0" being billed as "glorious" is a stretch, to say the least. There was a lot to dislike about the early web but the glow of nostalgia covers up those blemishes. "Web 1.0" was great for some people and not-so-great for others. There are good reasons why "Web 2.0" happened, and to truly understand it we need to separate the corporatization of the internet from the actual human needs that were and are being addressed by social media, et al.
koffiezet 5y ago
Sounds like he remembers an over romanticised version of the web. if you would really remember how the old web worked or ever used Altavista or other early search-engines to look for stuff, you'd realise the web is a LOT more accessible today, with a lot more information available. Yes I met new, and kept in touch with people through forums and IRC, but that has just shifted to other places online. Maybe less accessible to people from my generation or older, but this is still there. Now it's Discord, Slack, Tik-Tok, Instagram, Twitch, Snapchat, ... all run by companies, but offering services that are WAY more accessible. I remember explaining non-techie friends how to get on IRC in the late mid/late '90s and early 2000's, which was a mess. Yes it's all commercialised, but that's a 2-way street. It costs money to run infrastructure, the web has boomed. You're not talking about a couple hundred users on a forum, or a few thousand IRC users on an irc node ran by some volunteer who in exchange for being an ircop or forum admin was prepared to swallow the cost, or was ran by some guy working at or owning a small ISP. With scale comes money. Even late-stage forums were full of ads, just to cover the hosting cost. And this was not a sudden change, this was an evolution, driven by demand.
- authed 5y ago
  > Sounds like he remembers an over romanticized version of the web. Nowadays, anything that is gaining enough popularity to eventually possibly compete with the mega-corps gets purchased and often shutdown.
- deltarholamda 5y ago
  Part of the "new Web" that that I'm not a fan of is, with the massive reach of the modern Internet, some person's infelicitous comment or ribald joke can permanently end a career. The force multiplier of these corporate silos of information make this situation worse. I would like to return to a more HTML-ified Web, with less reliance on JS frameworks that scatter spinny loading icons all over, but IMO the worst aspect is a social and cultural problem, not a technical one.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Yes, this is definitely a concern: while the public nature of most content hasn't changed (even in the 1.0 days, your blog could be read by anyone who could access the URL), what public means has changed as the userbase has grown from several hundred thousand or a few million to billions of people. I don't have a great solution for this other than for people to remember / realize that everything they put online is that visible (including this comment. ;) ).
cvhashim 5y ago
Is this satire?
shadowgovt 5y ago
> Google et al where supposed to make content discovery easier. What the fuck happened? Content explosion. It turns out that when everybody is putting everything online, a vast tract of the human condition is redundant signal. And because Google's search results are based on click-through satisfaction, and click-through satisfaction on redundant content is a positive feedback loop (i.e. if two sources are almost identical, the one that happens to sort to the top of Google results first will get more clicks than the second, which will cause it to sort closer to the top, which will cause it to get more clicks, which...), a few content sources end up being winners and the ones that are very similar in that search space rapidly become also-ran. Imagine trying to start a Wikipedia competitor today. How would you pull it off? 95% of the search results for anything that look like Wikipedia could satisfy them are going to go to Wikipedia.
chaganated 5y ago
plenty of fucks, no solutions. should probably lay off the porn/television/alcohol.
verisimi 5y ago
I absolutely get the sentiment behind Kev's post. I don't disagree. Where it takes me, is that I think how weak minded we are - how the web was destroyed is just one example in (some of) our lifetimes. All it takes is throwing money at whatever-it-is and you can get it. Buy design, metrics, adverts, promotions, etc and you will get what you want. Better still, be the market (appstore), the access (google), etc and you're set for life. Content is not king.
woah 5y ago
Old man creates website to yell at clouds
gonehome 5y ago
I think Urbit + Web3 (and yes some blockchain tech) is a pretty cool frontier that has the chance to fix a lot of incentives that lead to megacorp centralization and SaaS for Web2. I don't get the dismissal. Running linux servers is too hard for people - that (and spam) is why the promise of the decentralized web (Web1) failed - and why federated systems built on this stack like Mastodon are dead on arrival. We won't get out of the local maximum we're trapped in without the new tech. Until recently I thought we may never get out, but now I have some hope.
rglover 5y ago
The only way to unfuck the web is to do it yourself. Have some self control, be disciplined about how and what you build, and don't just drop your trousers for the first investor that gives you the time of day. Have some principles. That's the difference between then and now (perhaps in the past it was by accident). There are scant principles anymore, just a whole lot of people looking for their "out," blind to their contribution to the downfall. Read: be the change you want to see, not a dime-a-dozen snarker who smugly contributes dick all to the world.
npteljes 5y ago
Eternal September, web edition. Or maybe I joined late when it was already fucked? Near 2000 we had to deal with all kinds of shenanigans, browsers having no standards, outright freezing when you did some thing with your webpage, obnoxious banners, popups, popunders, a lot of games on the web already had micro-transactions in the form of high price SMSs (which silently subscribed you to things, only for you to find out later in your monthly bill). When was it better, in the BBS era? Except not, because I watched a documentary and even then, people complained about the same thing. Older internet had nice things and shit things and the same can be said about the modern internet, except now I can install a proper ad blocker.
pictur 5y ago
disgusting romance. meaningless, useless and empty
shadowgovt 5y ago
When considering someone's claim the web is fucked, it's always worthwhile to ask "For whom?" I can tell you who didn't enjoy web 1.0: most people I knew. The infrastructure was too complicated to use, and if they even owned a computer, they didn't have network access independent of their voice phone line, and even if they logged on, there wasn't much content they'd care to see anyway. The web we have now is ubiquitously accessible, content-rich, and hosts billions of users. Of course it's different than the web of a few million users spread across tens of thousands of sites with little way to discover others.
tabtab 5y ago
It reflects human nature: turbulent and chaotic.
timeon 5y ago
Web2.0 was scam. Basically catching and selling people and communities. Web1 ... I had GeoCities page as well. But it was crap with frames, tables and injected ad banners provided by hosting. Then there were more banners. Maybe not tracking as much. And pop-ups and pop-up blockers. (Pop-ups are back on the menu with 'subscribe!' and 'let as track you'.) Java applets. Not sure what they were all about - never really loaded. Then Flash - sometimes fun sometimes pain. Then there was phpBB where post signatures were bigger then actual content of the post. Reading it was mess. What I actually liked were local custom servers inspired by BBS. Like cyberspace.cz, nyx.cz, kyberia.sk ... But even there people complained about 'lost spirit' with more and more users coming. It was interesting exploring niche topics, meeting new people (and some of the even later IRL). I could join the Mastodon and maybe try it again. But I'm older, grumpier, not really motivated. Just scrolling to death.
streamofdigits 5y ago
the web would unfuck itself in, like, a few mouse clicks if you could unfuck its economics and its politics
corwinstephen 5y ago
I learned about https://www.are.na/ https://www.are.na/ at a meetup a couple years ago. IMO they're doing a solid job of bringing 1.0 wonder to the 2.0 world.
icecap12 5y ago
At a minimum, I got a good solid laugh out of this, and enjoyed the read. That helped distract me from the log4shell life.
esics6A 5y ago
Like every tool and technology it's how you use it that counts. My memories of Web 1.0 were not so fond. It was a rogue's gallery of low quality websites that lacked any sense of security and much harder to tell if something was official and legitimate. People who never used the web before were easily scammed. That's why most people stayed within the AOL walled garden. Remember most of my friends used the open web to download warez (games/apps) which was usually loaded with viruses and we were on Windows and not on MacOS/Linux yet so it was easy to get pwned. The progression to Web 2.0 brought about social media but it also brought about web apps. We could now build really useful websites that actually helped users do things they could never do before. Even look at GitHub something we take for granted but is made possible by Web 2.0. The tech industry has built an incredible amount of utility and value using Web 2.0 that does not include social media or invasive tracking. Social Media like Facebook is regressive because it uses Web 2.0 technology but using the walled garden paradigm that AOL used in the past. So it effectively is a misuse of the technology originally designed for the open web. Jack Dorsey mentioned that the future of social media is federated and decentralized using blockchain so efforts like Blue Sky will make Facebook and the centralized walled garden obsolete.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  Blockchain is the future of nothing...
jfrunyon 5y ago
> Yeah, fuck that. Fuck blockchain. Fuck Meta. Fuck Zuck the schmuck. That’s all I have to say about that. I like this guy.
xtracto 5y ago
That's why I believe we should bring back WebRings or something similar: Get a curated list of websites that have content for the sake of sharing. That do not have any SEO crap, ads or any "ulterior motive" rather than sharing knowledge. That's how I host my blog: A small Ghost instance with snippets of stuff I want to "talk loud" about. Some personal projects and whatnot. No ads, no crazy javascript, no SEO. Just share for the sake of community.
tmaly 5y ago
I liked Matt’s Script Archive. I had some with my homepage at the university at the time
nunez 5y ago
This reads like "Old man yells at cloud" satire, but he's not wrong on calling out that internet has become heavily commercialized. I think we'd be much worse off if that hadn't happened though. Imagine if you still needed $xx,000 to get a production-ready website off the ground instead of, say, $5 and an AWS account. Imagine if users couldn't rate the places they favorite and had to rely on biased reviews from newspapers or TV shows to tell us where to eat Imagine if you had to buy a piece of overpriced and under-engineered hardware to watch TV instead of buying an overpriced and satsifactorily-engineered router/internet gateway/wireless access point and stream literally everything through it Imagine if we had to print maps instead of using Google Maps on our phones that can give us mostly-accurate departure notifications before we head out Imagine if we still needed to use ActiveX/DCOM for websites to do anything meaningful with our machines instead of using web workers, websockets, XHRs, and all of the awesome async client-server abstractions that we have today Personally, I'm excited for Web 3.0, as from my understanding, it will make it much easier for people to use their machine's spare CPU cycles to pay for services they actually use and get paid to host services they like. This way we don't have to rely on so much of the web being powered by advertisers and tracking.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
ha, this week in angry web heads. On board with the rage post but it's hard to distill what was all going on during '1.0' and what was going on during '2.0' when so much was changing and there were little developments in corners. And then as is often the case end up with some the pushing for Mastodon or TOR or some paranoid thing no one is going to use on a larger scale. But whatever, fight on my dude.
alphabet9000 5y ago
the website would be better without curse words

205 points by decrypt 5y ago

This is kind of beating a dead horse. Of course the web was better when only the intellectual elite were on it. Of course it turned into a cesspool when the other 99% joined, including the 1% who are prolific destructive trolls.

asmos7 5y ago
ha oddly enough in AltSpace I've actually had a number of great engaging conversations.
pram 5y ago
A lot of those intellectual elite are in fact the trolls.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  Arguably the history of trolling goes back to the ancient Greeks. Eris for example clearly became the godess of trolling when she threw a golden apple marked 'for the fairest' into a party she was rejected from, causing the other godesses to fight over it until the Trojan War happened.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> Of course the web was better when only the intellectual elite were on it. Well, people who thought of themselves as the intellectual elite anyway.
flyinghamster 5y ago
Trolls and kooks were around on Usenet even in the UUCP days, and on dialup bulletin boards as well. They've become far more visible and destructive, and manipulation has become far easier, as it got easier to go online. I hate thinking that the Eternal September meme should be anything but an oldtimer in-joke, but looking at what social media has done to society makes me shudder. Making the grapevine worldwide and instantaneous, which I once thought was a Good Thing, is now looking more to me like a mistake, but that genie is long out of the bottle now. I'm glad to see old-school forums soldier on, at least. For specialized information and advice, they tend to be a lot more reliable than social media - mostly because they're communities that have no patience for trolls. That doesn't stop them (and spammers) from trying to cause trouble, though. Once you let the general public in, it's inevitable that some will be jerks. Just a look through the "New" queue on HN with "show dead posts" shows it vividly. :)

madeofpalk 5y ago

The thing that I just keep coming back to with all this Web 1.0 rose tinted glasses is that "no one" used the web back then. Many people _did not_ have personal web pages. Only a few individuals did, if you were lucky/smart enough. It's fair bemoan about the state of the web now - there's many faults, but it's considerably more accessible than it was before. There is more information available that's, and more opportunities for people on this new web, and its all (ultimately) easier to access

Aeolun 5y ago
There is a sweet spot. Between around 2000-2005 ish the internet was available to a lot of people, and not yet fucked. Until the MSN messenger rebrand in 2005 sounds like a good rule of thumb.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  At the risk of splitting hairs, even 2008-2010 was still decent. But I agree with the core of your idea.
- treacle 5y ago
  Yeah, you used to get web space and email thrown in with your ISP, in the UK. Snobbery hadn't taken hold, you could just upload a few pages from File Explorer, via FTP. Yeah sure it was rough around the edges, but in many ways far more accessible or rather, less confusing. Not as much a big pile of mud than it is now.
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    That does not sound in any way more accessible than the current situation. HTML? FTP? People just want an online presence.
    - treacle 5y ago
      Well you didn't even have to write HTML back then. You could author it in whatever program and FTP it. Which to be fair was still a stumbling block for some, but out of all the hurdles and hoops you have to jump over and through to put something on-line anyway, it wasn't that difficult.

delgaudm 5y ago

I mean, I get it, and I agree. But to rail against Social Media and SEO in one breath, and then to have Twitter optimized headers and SEO stuff right at the top of the code seems a wee bit hypocritical. <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" /> <meta property="twitter:image" content="https://thewebisfucked.com/assets/images/feature.webp" /> <meta property="twitter:title" content="The Web Is Fucked" /> <script type="application/ld+json"> {"headline":"The Web Is Fucked","description":"The web is fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it. This is a manifesto by Kev Quirk looking back t Web 1.0 and why it was better.","@type":"WebSite","image":"https://thewebisfucked.com/assets/images/feature.webp","url":"https://thewebisfucked.com/","@context":"https://schema.org"}. </script>

fairytale 5y ago
Lmao.
ivve 5y ago
Feels like this is not really a constructive critique of OPS argument. Indeed, it is merely them ensuring they can gain reach on the platforms they are critiquing, as opposed to screaming into the void as a Web 1.0 holdout. See: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > it is merely them ensuring they can gain reach on the platforms they are critiquing Indeed. But how does that differ from the motivation of any other Web 2.0 site?
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    This is probably generated from his POSSE plugin. https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE He mentioned this in the article.
  - sophacles 5y ago
    Look, I don't like mowing the lawn. I think long grass looks nice. It isn't hypocritical of me to mow my lawn to avoid fines while still advocating for elimination of the grass ordinances in my city. To directly address your point: the motivation of web 2.0 sites is to get a bunch of money by making the content hard to read without first looking at a bunch of ads, and futher to disallow a reading experience uninterrupted by adds every 30-60s. The web page in question did not show me any ads. My question to you is: how do you not see the difference?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tailspin2019 5y ago

I thoroughly enjoyed this. I kind of agree. Of course it's not quite as binary as 1990s = good / 2020s = bad, but this article does resonate fully with my most cynical side. I'm surprised there was no mention of cookie banners (unless I missed it). > Although Zuckerberg and his merry band of wankers have a lot to answer for, the death of web 1.0 and the humble personal blog is not their fault alone. Search plays a huge part in this shit show too. I like this guy.

kevq 5y ago
There was SO MUCH more I wanted to mention. Cookie banners being one of them, but I figured it was long enough as it was. I will likely add more to it in the future though.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  Understood. Where do you stop! BTW your personal site is superb. A really impressive balance of design and usability.
  - kevq 5y ago
    Thank you. That’s so kind.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
>Search plays a huge part in this shit show too. Is this not something we (ie 'people on HN with the appropriate skill sets who are miffed at the state of the web') are actually in a position to do something about? Maybe we need a search engine that's specifically there to index sites that aren't aggressively monetised, or even excludes commercial web content altogether. We'd need some heuristics to figure out how heavily monetised a site is and obviously we'd want to favour self-hosted sites and forums rather than centralised blogging platforms and things like Reddit. This wouldn't be aimed at replacing DDG or other generalised search engines, it'd just scratch that itch of 'where do I find web 1.0 style content that's not endless ad-ridden cruft and SEO spam?'.

dsco 5y ago

Web 3 has components of what he’s nostalgic about. Especially when you start using products such as Spooky Swap and Trader Joe. There’s no cookie notices, no ads, no dark patterns. Too bad HN absolutely loathes crypto in general, because I do see a glimmer of hope in the wild wild West that is web 3

no_time 5y ago
I'd love to expand my horizons but apart from peertube I have yet to see a web 3.0 project that's not some thinly veiled pump and dump coin shilling operation. The disguise may be novel, but the underlying motive is always the same.
madeofpalk 5y ago
Sounds what you're complementing is not technologies, but rather just niche communities. There's plenty of "no cookie notices, no ads, no dark patterns" on the normal web. My guess (from zero experience) is that there's more of it on the "web 2.0". There's just lots of other junk also.
arcatech 5y ago
Web3 is even more money driven than web2.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
selfhoster11 5y ago
If I wanted to see a capitalist hellscape, I'd just play The Outer Worlds instead of spending money on NFTs.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> Web 3.0 is basically putting all the things on blockchain. > Yeah, fuck that. Fuck blockchain. Fuck Meta. Fuck Zuck the schmuck. That’s all I have to say about that. To expand upon this, I have yet to see a single thing a blockchain solves other than moving money around (usually from the scammed to the scammer). Web 3.0 is doubling down on what made Web 2.0 so shit.

no_time 5y ago

You will NEVER get that experience back. Everything changed. The tech, the people, the culture. If you care about having quality conversations and non monetary value, you can cultivate it yourself. You can still hang out on topic specific forums, participate in webrings, make friends through shared interests.

kevq 5y ago
You're absolutely, 100% right...unfortunately.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I don't even know where to find people with shared interests anymore who are actually willing to deal with other people as something other than a potential customer, victim, or at best a single-serving friend for the duration of exactly one interaction. Hell, I'm guilty of it a lot of the time too when I'm not paying attention to it. I think I originally enjoyed the internet because it allowed me to find communities of people who shared my interests that no one in real life did. Nowadays I've gravitated back to real life because while no one really shares my interests I at least can, rarely, find people who treat me like a person instead of an NPC, at least when they aren't looking at their phone.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Discord is the new IRC, in my experience. I was sceptical, but there are servers for some pretty niche stuff out there. The key here is that each Discord server is walled off from everyone else, and that some servers are invite-only to limit the influx of outsiders. Take note though, it definitely doesn't replace in person interaction - it's almost social junk food.
  - orangepurple 5y ago
    This mirrors my experience. Many Discord servers have strong anti spam measures too.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

protonimitate 5y ago

Yawn. Another "hot take" article that's really just pandering to the HN/"true hacker" crowd that romanticizes anything pre-Google. It's a pretty shallow article that just regurgitates the same old "money makes things evil" rhetoric and slams the big Z cause it's low hanging fruit. I'd be much more interested in something that highlights or talks about what _is_ better about web 2.0 than meme-ing about "old web good, new web bad". This is just click bait dressed up as anti-establishment / edge-lord blog spam.

ivoras 5y ago

In my younger days I was a loud crusader for keeping the web (and Internet in general) as free as possible both in the "free speech" and "free beer" sense of the word, but now I see that I was wrong. What's now going on is that the huge mess of SEO techniques and ad tracking is solving one particular problem: monetisation. I don't know exactly how would the web have spread if the early HTTP monetisation codes, headers and efforts were actually continued (like the "402 Payment Required" response), but I do believe now that not having monetisation built in to the new medium has caused the majority of freedom and surveillance issues today. The web is not just fucked up. We fucked it up by not planning far enough.

carapace 5y ago
That's a very interesting perspective, and one you don't hear a lot. For at least a small subset of early Internet and computer pioneers there was a sense that technology would usher in a new post-scarcity or even post-money era. The "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" gives a torrid and breathy example of the kind of thought and rhetoric floating around: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence In hindsight it seems so naive to me. I don't wonder that we got blindsided.
- ivoras 5y ago
  Right. I remember the Declaration, for us growing up at the time, it was an era all filled up with bringing to life what Neuromancer and Snow Crash talked about. Maybe we'll get another chance with the metaverse thing.
flyinghamster 5y ago
There is Xanadu [0], which features a royalty mechanism and authentication. Early planning began in 1960, but it didn't help that Xanadu became one of the world's longest-running vaporware efforts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

echelon 5y ago

Dear author, "Web 3.0" isn't the metaverse. It was the Semantic Web. Web 3.0 was designed to give individual web publishers and consumers the capabilities that giants like Facebook and Google have. Documents had structured data, marked up in rich RDF or Owl ontologies that could expose APIs for your data. You're probably familiar with RSS and Atom and the wonderful ecosystem of tools they had, but there were hundreds of RDF schemas. FOAF, for example, would let you publish and consume contact info, and even encode friends lists if you were interested. There were lots of these. This was also at the time of peak Bittorrent/P2P, and we were really close to having schemas for sharing news and commentary in a P2P swarm. Imagine fully decentralized Reddit and Twitter (not federated!), where identities were anonymous by default, comments and upvotes were cryptographically signed and published, and you could curate your own peer group, interest graph, attention algorithm, and filtering. We were almost there. Clients that operated on RDF schemas were also faster and less cludgy than HTML. We could write native code and GUIs to consume and publish this data, and we were close to evolving the HTML soup into something better. Unfortunately, this is right at the time Google and Facebook had grown immensely from VC and ad money jet fuel. Academics and builders were distracted. People flocked to centralized platforms because it was easy and our tools were immature. We were really close, but the tech cos got there first, got lock in, and then started messing with the commons. Please don't forget that "web 3.0" wasn't crypto. It was more than about payment. It was a stack that gave you and I capabilities and potential that the giants have. It was a distributed knowledge graph that would have been a nirvana of innovation and sharing. But we got sidetracked, out engineered, and roadblocked. Web 3.0 = Semantic Web. We can still remember what it aspired to be, and we can still build it. Never forget.

selfhoster11 5y ago
Let's face it. The term "Web 3" has been hijacked by cryptobros, as has been the very term "crypto".
chaganated 5y ago
the semantic web is philosophically bankrupt. schemas and curation lost to the algorithm, by a wide margin, and for a good reason. ontologies are infinite.

dangus 5y ago

Another old man shouting at the clouds, I guess. - The web was much smaller back then. Of course it's difficult for your personal blog to gain traction now, there are so many alternative content producers (most of them are better than you), and alternate content medium like video and audio. A lot of people who would have started a blog in 1999 probably have a podcast, video channel, or do live streaming instead. All these things were not really possible in 1999. Or, maybe they blogged because that was their only technological choice, maybe they actually just prefer posting content on social media only for their friends now that the technology exists (LiveJournal and Xanga were basically social media blog platforms, supplanted by the posting capabilities of Facebook and others). - And, speaking of that, blogging is not at all dead, it's just that the people making a living doing it are much more sophisticated than they used to be, and use their blog as a complement to other methods of reaching their audience. For example, a food blogger will have social media images and videos of their food/recipes, and then host the recipes on their blog/website. But here we've got the other author who is probably mad that they can't get some solid views and ad revenue from putting out a low-effort blog with 20 minutes of spare effort every month. - The Internet used to be "whoever is wealthy enough to own a $2000 computer and has Internet infrastructure available in their wealthy country" and now it's available to the entire world. So, sorry it isn't your own personal gated community for your rich nerd friends anymore. - The big corporations on the Internet are only part of the Internet, perhaps even the minority of it. Shaking a fist at Google or Facebook is tired and played out, as is complaining about hamburger menus. - The article is mad at easily-blockable ads in search engines. How do you expect them to make any money if you aren't willing to pay for it? - The reason there's white space in websites now is because the Internet is big and important enough to justify hiring graphic designers and UX designers who know a lot more about what they're doing than the author would ever be willing to give them credit for. News flash: UX/UI people work off of real usage data and know what designs customers like better based on actual hard data. - Web directories sucked hardcore compared to modern search engines. You'd never be able to find specific things that have just escaped your mind. Try searching for "modernist movie comedy office building" in 1999 (this is what I searched when I tried to remember the title of Playtime (1967)).

city41 5y ago

I agree with a lot of what the author is saying. But they are missing a really important point. The number of people willing to make blogs or static websites versus the number of people now on the internet is staggeringly small. My Mom will gladly converse with people on Facebook. She'd never in a million years make a blog or personal website. This holds true for most people. So wishing it all went back to "1.0" has a gatekeeping and elitist undertone in my opinion. Back then most people had personal sites because most people on the web were the type that found html interesting. Early adopters tend to be more savvy on what they are adopting. I also think there's plenty of "1.0" content still out there. Yeah, you gotta look for it, but it didn't all go away.

kevq 5y ago
(author here) I agree - there's definitely a technical ransom to pay for hosting your own site, even with managed solutions, there's still domain names, hosting etc. to work though - it's not for everyone and I'm not claiming it is. Maybe I wasn't clear on that point, apologies if that's the case. I spoke about POSSE and using more decentralised platforms, like Mastodon. Again, they're not for everyone either, and I don't expect them to be. It would just be nice if we got a little more of web 1.0 back. :-)

eloeffler 5y ago

In some version of the game "Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle", there was a easter egg that allowed you to play the first version of the game if you interacted with a computer stacked away in the back of the scene. The game was difficult and looked old to me as a kid. But I somehow thought that this must have been the way people knew games before DOTT. You could run out of time, die, choose the wrong set of characters in the beginning of the game, making it impossible to win. I never finished it. On the web today I find echoes of the "Web 1.0" on Tor-.onion-Websites (including the uncontrolled cesspool that it was in the 90s when people bought illegal guns on the "Clearweb" as we call it today). And Neocities, that is mentioned in the article as well, provides something that takes the best from the past web. The gemini protocol brings back very simple websites and SpaceHey brings back the feeling of the early "Web 2.0" when user profiles could still be heavily modified using html. While much of what the author rightfully hates on is true, and it is the main characteristic of what the web is today, these developments also show that the web diversifies in niche corners. Whenever I discover them, it's really cool :) SpaceHey was developed by teenagers who might be young enough not to bother creating a Facebook account for themselves anymore [1]. And yet, they came up with the idea of recreating a piece of Web history. And if the worst becomes true and the Metaverse takes off, maybe there will be a computer stacked away somewhere in the back where you can access good old BBS boards, at least. [1] Okay, I checked their site again and they might be a little older than teenagers, but still :)

numlock86 5y ago

> everything was better back in the days Sigh. As with everything in this regard: If it was better, how come we "advanced" to something else then?

Aeolun 5y ago
It was better for us. As with all good things that can be exploited to make money, so with the internet.
thewakalix 5y ago
That argument works well against generic RETVRN sentiments, but I don't know if it applies to regretting how a subculture changed when acted upon by the outside world. Is "I wish we hadn't been invaded and conquered by people with very different values" incoherent?
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  They weren't people with very different values. In general, they were our friends and neighbors who hadn't figured out how to use a web browser yet. The apart-ness that some original netizens imagined for themselves was always fantasy and, I would argue, destructive fantasy when it crossed over to belief in personal elitism. Is being online to the exclusion of real world relationships with those physically adjacent to us building a new, better culture, or the digital equivalent of hiding out in the woods?
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    Early adopters and enthusiasts always have different values. That's why we act differently toward technology in the first place.
orangepurple 5y ago
Read the actual Unabomber Manifesto: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab... I will address the problem of technological advancements using only a small subsection of the overall argument linked above. Please read the entire manifesto to understand the context. 127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)

hpen 5y ago

Back in my day! ....

strict9 5y ago

How many of these "X sucks" articles with an attention-grabbing headline can make it to the top of HN in a week? While these articles lament the state of technology today and wish it were better like back in the good old days, there are never solutions put forward. Only negativity. Why do they gain so much traction on HN, one of the few remaining outposts of thought-provoking articles and discussion? What do we get from these endless articles about why some product or technology sucks?

marttt 5y ago
+1. All these "fucks" and "shits" felt pointless, tiresome, not convincing. Overuse of this kind of language often results in a more superficial text imo.
- treacle 5y ago
  Well it was hardly a manifesto!
flohofwoe 5y ago
Quite simple, it's a real problem but without a realistic solution short of burning everything to the ground. Once the bean counters had discovered and invaded the paradise there was no way to kick them out again. Maybe the only solution is to build a new paradise and hope that it never gains enough traction to attract the vultures.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  I think that's a large part of the appeal of overlay networks like Tor, GNUnet, I2P, IPFS, etc. All of them are niche and not supported by any notable ad networks, many of them heavily discourage JavaScript and tracking, and with the networks often being either slow or high latency (or both) websites are forced to be fairly lean.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  The cool thing is that you can do that on the existing system. Make a new service. Make it username / password authenticated. Don't give out the usernames and passwords to everyone that comes in. Have some kind of gating function (BBS's were all about who you knew, somethingawful.com made you pay twenty bucks one time, some old systems were gated on something no more complex than single-administrator bandwidth). You won't grow at a rate that any VC will care about, but that kind of capitalism-feeding growth isn't your goal if you're trying to cultivate a "web 1.0 experience:" web 1.0 didn't support most people's capitalist ventures. What you may find (what I've found participating in these experiments) is that the resulting space is a whole lot quieter than the rest of the web. And if you're replicating the web 1.0 experience, that's the goal. The site administrator will also spend a lot more time glad-handing individual users who have individual issues. That's fine; if you're going for a web 1.0 experience, authentication management isn't automated beyond a few simple config scripts. And if that's what a person wants, nothing about the modern web stops them from doing it, except that very few people will care they're doing it because (unlike the web 1.0 days) there are alternatives that accept all comers with functionally infinite capacity now.

flyinghamster 5y ago

If I felt that I had to write a rant, it would read a lot like this. Well said. I'd also add that smartphones and tablets have done much to mess up the Web. The "all white space" site design trend is one of the results. The old version of the NHL stats page was chock full of information; now it's chock full of white space and requires a lot of extra scrolling, all so it's usable on a touchscreen.

jdauriemma 5y ago

"Web 1.0" being billed as "glorious" is a stretch, to say the least. There was a lot to dislike about the early web but the glow of nostalgia covers up those blemishes. "Web 1.0" was great for some people and not-so-great for others. There are good reasons why "Web 2.0" happened, and to truly understand it we need to separate the corporatization of the internet from the actual human needs that were and are being addressed by social media, et al.

koffiezet 5y ago

Sounds like he remembers an over romanticised version of the web. if you would really remember how the old web worked or ever used Altavista or other early search-engines to look for stuff, you'd realise the web is a LOT more accessible today, with a lot more information available. Yes I met new, and kept in touch with people through forums and IRC, but that has just shifted to other places online. Maybe less accessible to people from my generation or older, but this is still there. Now it's Discord, Slack, Tik-Tok, Instagram, Twitch, Snapchat, ... all run by companies, but offering services that are WAY more accessible. I remember explaining non-techie friends how to get on IRC in the late mid/late '90s and early 2000's, which was a mess. Yes it's all commercialised, but that's a 2-way street. It costs money to run infrastructure, the web has boomed. You're not talking about a couple hundred users on a forum, or a few thousand IRC users on an irc node ran by some volunteer who in exchange for being an ircop or forum admin was prepared to swallow the cost, or was ran by some guy working at or owning a small ISP. With scale comes money. Even late-stage forums were full of ads, just to cover the hosting cost. And this was not a sudden change, this was an evolution, driven by demand.

authed 5y ago
> Sounds like he remembers an over romanticized version of the web. Nowadays, anything that is gaining enough popularity to eventually possibly compete with the mega-corps gets purchased and often shutdown.
deltarholamda 5y ago
Part of the "new Web" that that I'm not a fan of is, with the massive reach of the modern Internet, some person's infelicitous comment or ribald joke can permanently end a career. The force multiplier of these corporate silos of information make this situation worse. I would like to return to a more HTML-ified Web, with less reliance on JS frameworks that scatter spinny loading icons all over, but IMO the worst aspect is a social and cultural problem, not a technical one.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Yes, this is definitely a concern: while the public nature of most content hasn't changed (even in the 1.0 days, your blog could be read by anyone who could access the URL), what public means has changed as the userbase has grown from several hundred thousand or a few million to billions of people. I don't have a great solution for this other than for people to remember / realize that everything they put online is that visible (including this comment. ;) ).

cvhashim 5y ago

Is this satire?

shadowgovt 5y ago

> Google et al where supposed to make content discovery easier. What the fuck happened? Content explosion. It turns out that when everybody is putting everything online, a vast tract of the human condition is redundant signal. And because Google's search results are based on click-through satisfaction, and click-through satisfaction on redundant content is a positive feedback loop (i.e. if two sources are almost identical, the one that happens to sort to the top of Google results first will get more clicks than the second, which will cause it to sort closer to the top, which will cause it to get more clicks, which...), a few content sources end up being winners and the ones that are very similar in that search space rapidly become also-ran. Imagine trying to start a Wikipedia competitor today. How would you pull it off? 95% of the search results for anything that look like Wikipedia could satisfy them are going to go to Wikipedia.

chaganated 5y ago

plenty of fucks, no solutions. should probably lay off the porn/television/alcohol.

verisimi 5y ago

I absolutely get the sentiment behind Kev's post. I don't disagree. Where it takes me, is that I think how weak minded we are - how the web was destroyed is just one example in (some of) our lifetimes. All it takes is throwing money at whatever-it-is and you can get it. Buy design, metrics, adverts, promotions, etc and you will get what you want. Better still, be the market (appstore), the access (google), etc and you're set for life. Content is not king.

woah 5y ago

Old man creates website to yell at clouds

gonehome 5y ago

I think Urbit + Web3 (and yes some blockchain tech) is a pretty cool frontier that has the chance to fix a lot of incentives that lead to megacorp centralization and SaaS for Web2. I don't get the dismissal. Running linux servers is too hard for people - that (and spam) is why the promise of the decentralized web (Web1) failed - and why federated systems built on this stack like Mastodon are dead on arrival. We won't get out of the local maximum we're trapped in without the new tech. Until recently I thought we may never get out, but now I have some hope.

rglover 5y ago

The only way to unfuck the web is to do it yourself. Have some self control, be disciplined about how and what you build, and don't just drop your trousers for the first investor that gives you the time of day. Have some principles. That's the difference between then and now (perhaps in the past it was by accident). There are scant principles anymore, just a whole lot of people looking for their "out," blind to their contribution to the downfall. Read: be the change you want to see, not a dime-a-dozen snarker who smugly contributes dick all to the world.

npteljes 5y ago

Eternal September, web edition. Or maybe I joined late when it was already fucked? Near 2000 we had to deal with all kinds of shenanigans, browsers having no standards, outright freezing when you did some thing with your webpage, obnoxious banners, popups, popunders, a lot of games on the web already had micro-transactions in the form of high price SMSs (which silently subscribed you to things, only for you to find out later in your monthly bill). When was it better, in the BBS era? Except not, because I watched a documentary and even then, people complained about the same thing. Older internet had nice things and shit things and the same can be said about the modern internet, except now I can install a proper ad blocker.

pictur 5y ago

disgusting romance. meaningless, useless and empty

shadowgovt 5y ago

When considering someone's claim the web is fucked, it's always worthwhile to ask "For whom?" I can tell you who didn't enjoy web 1.0: most people I knew. The infrastructure was too complicated to use, and if they even owned a computer, they didn't have network access independent of their voice phone line, and even if they logged on, there wasn't much content they'd care to see anyway. The web we have now is ubiquitously accessible, content-rich, and hosts billions of users. Of course it's different than the web of a few million users spread across tens of thousands of sites with little way to discover others.

tabtab 5y ago

It reflects human nature: turbulent and chaotic.

timeon 5y ago

Web2.0 was scam. Basically catching and selling people and communities. Web1 ... I had GeoCities page as well. But it was crap with frames, tables and injected ad banners provided by hosting. Then there were more banners. Maybe not tracking as much. And pop-ups and pop-up blockers. (Pop-ups are back on the menu with 'subscribe!' and 'let as track you'.) Java applets. Not sure what they were all about - never really loaded. Then Flash - sometimes fun sometimes pain. Then there was phpBB where post signatures were bigger then actual content of the post. Reading it was mess. What I actually liked were local custom servers inspired by BBS. Like cyberspace.cz, nyx.cz, kyberia.sk ... But even there people complained about 'lost spirit' with more and more users coming. It was interesting exploring niche topics, meeting new people (and some of the even later IRL). I could join the Mastodon and maybe try it again. But I'm older, grumpier, not really motivated. Just scrolling to death.

streamofdigits 5y ago

the web would unfuck itself in, like, a few mouse clicks if you could unfuck its economics and its politics

corwinstephen 5y ago

I learned about https://www.are.na/ https://www.are.na/ at a meetup a couple years ago. IMO they're doing a solid job of bringing 1.0 wonder to the 2.0 world.

icecap12 5y ago

At a minimum, I got a good solid laugh out of this, and enjoyed the read. That helped distract me from the log4shell life.

esics6A 5y ago

Like every tool and technology it's how you use it that counts. My memories of Web 1.0 were not so fond. It was a rogue's gallery of low quality websites that lacked any sense of security and much harder to tell if something was official and legitimate. People who never used the web before were easily scammed. That's why most people stayed within the AOL walled garden. Remember most of my friends used the open web to download warez (games/apps) which was usually loaded with viruses and we were on Windows and not on MacOS/Linux yet so it was easy to get pwned. The progression to Web 2.0 brought about social media but it also brought about web apps. We could now build really useful websites that actually helped users do things they could never do before. Even look at GitHub something we take for granted but is made possible by Web 2.0. The tech industry has built an incredible amount of utility and value using Web 2.0 that does not include social media or invasive tracking. Social Media like Facebook is regressive because it uses Web 2.0 technology but using the walled garden paradigm that AOL used in the past. So it effectively is a misuse of the technology originally designed for the open web. Jack Dorsey mentioned that the future of social media is federated and decentralized using blockchain so efforts like Blue Sky will make Facebook and the centralized walled garden obsolete.

jfrunyon 5y ago
Blockchain is the future of nothing...

jfrunyon 5y ago

> Yeah, fuck that. Fuck blockchain. Fuck Meta. Fuck Zuck the schmuck. That’s all I have to say about that. I like this guy.

xtracto 5y ago

That's why I believe we should bring back WebRings or something similar: Get a curated list of websites that have content for the sake of sharing. That do not have any SEO crap, ads or any "ulterior motive" rather than sharing knowledge. That's how I host my blog: A small Ghost instance with snippets of stuff I want to "talk loud" about. Some personal projects and whatnot. No ads, no crazy javascript, no SEO. Just share for the sake of community.

tmaly 5y ago

I liked Matt’s Script Archive. I had some with my homepage at the university at the time

nunez 5y ago

This reads like "Old man yells at cloud" satire, but he's not wrong on calling out that internet has become heavily commercialized. I think we'd be much worse off if that hadn't happened though. Imagine if you still needed $xx,000 to get a production-ready website off the ground instead of, say, $5 and an AWS account. Imagine if users couldn't rate the places they favorite and had to rely on biased reviews from newspapers or TV shows to tell us where to eat Imagine if you had to buy a piece of overpriced and under-engineered hardware to watch TV instead of buying an overpriced and satsifactorily-engineered router/internet gateway/wireless access point and stream literally everything through it Imagine if we had to print maps instead of using Google Maps on our phones that can give us mostly-accurate departure notifications before we head out Imagine if we still needed to use ActiveX/DCOM for websites to do anything meaningful with our machines instead of using web workers, websockets, XHRs, and all of the awesome async client-server abstractions that we have today Personally, I'm excited for Web 3.0, as from my understanding, it will make it much easier for people to use their machine's spare CPU cycles to pay for services they actually use and get paid to host services they like. This way we don't have to rely on so much of the web being powered by advertisers and tracking.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

ha, this week in angry web heads. On board with the rage post but it's hard to distill what was all going on during '1.0' and what was going on during '2.0' when so much was changing and there were little developments in corners. And then as is often the case end up with some the pushing for Mastodon or TOR or some paranoid thing no one is going to use on a larger scale. But whatever, fight on my dude.

alphabet9000 5y ago

the website would be better without curse words