6 ms·

Three above this story on the front page is an article called "The Web Is Fucked", complaining about how there's no character on the web any more, and lamenting

by dash2 5y ago

Three above this story on the front page is an article called "The Web Is Fucked", complaining about how there's no character on the web any more, and lamenting the 90s, Geocities etc. etc. I'd say this story refutes that one.

duxup 5y ago
We remember the fun stuff, but you had to look for it even back in the day.
- dylan604 5y ago
  "Back in my day," we had to look for fun compared to the expectation that fun will be delivered to you at your beck and call. How times have changed. When you grow up with something, it's just accepted as normal. You have to have known a time without it to truly get the difference.
  - duxup 5y ago
    “Facebook didn’t provide me what I wanted…THE WEB IS DEAD!”
pkdpic 5y ago
This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new things on the web back in middle school was just typing educated guess urls in until I found something. Makes me wonder how interesting the web might be if I just started doing that again, and how boring it might have been if I'd just had a working search engine back then. Then again I also seem to remember getting bored enough with the web to only spend an hour or two on it at a time. Also I was in middle / elementary school so that might have played a role too.
- MMS21 5y ago
  If you did that now you'll run into sites with no content but a banner at the top with contact details so you can buy the domain.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    Or a page full of ads.
  - bckr 5y ago
    Yep, I got it on the first try. personalrobotics dot com. Not a neat robot hacker website, not even a company selling robots. Just a $300k domain squat.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    or much much worse. NSFW klaxon alarms and visits from HR for viewing this content at work type situations.
  - pkdpic 5y ago
    Thats a good point, I remember a bit of this back in the day but not sure how common it was. One my best friend and I still joke about to this day was tree.com, I seem to remember it wasn't even for sale, just a squat for squats sake or something. Good times.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    Parking domains have been a staple of the internet since its inception.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      oh the days of the under construction animGifs
      - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
        I remember one such website that was nothing but a collection of every single under construction GIF they could find.
- daledavies 5y ago
  I once made a website called bobswhitetrousers.com, absolutely noone ever visited.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Google built their index by externalizing the human cost of curation, aka Webrings. Now all the webrings are dead, because humans are easily tempted by lazy search into not maintaining them. I wish they weren’t. They were a better form of curation than anything since.
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    I wonder how realistic a hybrid of human and algorithmic curation would be. Obviously the internet has an enormously long tail, but if a company could ‘curate’/rank the top 10,000 most popular sites, that might still be useful.
    - eashman 5y ago
      See if you can find a mirror of Yahoo from 1996.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new things on the web back in middle school was just typing educated guess urls in until I found something. It was nice back in the early days when you wanted U.S. state government information, you could almost always enter something like http://state.xx.us http://state.xx.us and get the state's home page, then explore from there. (Where xx was the state abbreviation.) Cities were very often http://city.state.xx.us http://city.state.xx.us. Now many (most?) states have vanity URLs, and the cities are worse. I think Chicago's changed its URL at least three times.
jaypeg25 5y ago
I wish Stumble Upon still existed just so I could find the weird corners of the web again. This site and Reddit sort of fill that but also don't quite fit it at all.
- MCneill27 5y ago
  It's so bizarre to me that StumbleUpon came from the same mind as Uber (well one of the minds). However true or untrue all of the political intrigue, journalistic threats, etc., it's just crazy to me that such an innocent corner of the web that I loved so much in the mid-late 2000s was sending death threats to journos in London not 8 years later.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  So much this! I don't really think it's that the niche stuff has moved away from the web - it's that nearly every functional discovery mechanism (that my now 30ish year old self knows about) has been captured by advertising or killed. When all you ever get served up is links to the same drivel promoted by folks who have no honest interest or curiosity, but are essentially mercenary marketing/sales (sorry - influencers blegh...), then the web starts to feel like a bland wasteland. Some of this is entirely related to being older - but I do genuinely think the current tech powerhouses on the web are trying their damn hardest to kill off any & all organic discovery mechanisms they can. Often through completely disingenuous means. If that fails, they buy them and shutter them, or roll them into the brand where it becomes the same drivel again.
- aniforprez 5y ago
  Not to be a downer again but reddit is pretty much dead for this. It's turning into FB more and more every day with a lot of young kids and teenagers filling it with memes and begging for engagement and such. It's not much of an aggregator anymore and is turning into more of an actual social network now except they still have "anonymous" profiles I guess it's what the people running it want but I find myself going there less and less every day and only look at a few curated subs
  - rkangel 5y ago
slingnow 5y ago
Yeah, you're right. One counterexample definitely invalidates the entire argument.
amelius 5y ago
Uh, this story uses GPT-3 to "improve" content based on a huge training set. Do you think that this will increase diversity and bring more character to the web?
- dash2 5y ago
  What? It uses GPT-3 to improve spelling.

by dash2 5y ago

duxup 5y ago

We remember the fun stuff, but you had to look for it even back in the day.

dylan604 5y ago
"Back in my day," we had to look for fun compared to the expectation that fun will be delivered to you at your beck and call. How times have changed. When you grow up with something, it's just accepted as normal. You have to have known a time without it to truly get the difference.
- duxup 5y ago
  “Facebook didn’t provide me what I wanted…THE WEB IS DEAD!”

pkdpic 5y ago

This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new things on the web back in middle school was just typing educated guess urls in until I found something. Makes me wonder how interesting the web might be if I just started doing that again, and how boring it might have been if I'd just had a working search engine back then. Then again I also seem to remember getting bored enough with the web to only spend an hour or two on it at a time. Also I was in middle / elementary school so that might have played a role too.

MMS21 5y ago
If you did that now you'll run into sites with no content but a banner at the top with contact details so you can buy the domain.
- dhosek 5y ago
  Or a page full of ads.
- bckr 5y ago
  Yep, I got it on the first try. personalrobotics dot com. Not a neat robot hacker website, not even a company selling robots. Just a $300k domain squat.
- dylan604 5y ago
  or much much worse. NSFW klaxon alarms and visits from HR for viewing this content at work type situations.
- pkdpic 5y ago
  Thats a good point, I remember a bit of this back in the day but not sure how common it was. One my best friend and I still joke about to this day was tree.com, I seem to remember it wasn't even for sale, just a squat for squats sake or something. Good times.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  Parking domains have been a staple of the internet since its inception.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    oh the days of the under construction animGifs
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      I remember one such website that was nothing but a collection of every single under construction GIF they could find.
daledavies 5y ago
I once made a website called bobswhitetrousers.com, absolutely noone ever visited.
floatingatoll 5y ago
Google built their index by externalizing the human cost of curation, aka Webrings. Now all the webrings are dead, because humans are easily tempted by lazy search into not maintaining them. I wish they weren’t. They were a better form of curation than anything since.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  I wonder how realistic a hybrid of human and algorithmic curation would be. Obviously the internet has an enormously long tail, but if a company could ‘curate’/rank the top 10,000 most popular sites, that might still be useful.
  - eashman 5y ago
    See if you can find a mirror of Yahoo from 1996.
reaperducer 5y ago
This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new things on the web back in middle school was just typing educated guess urls in until I found something. It was nice back in the early days when you wanted U.S. state government information, you could almost always enter something like http://state.xx.us http://state.xx.us and get the state's home page, then explore from there. (Where xx was the state abbreviation.) Cities were very often http://city.state.xx.us http://city.state.xx.us. Now many (most?) states have vanity URLs, and the cities are worse. I think Chicago's changed its URL at least three times.

jaypeg25 5y ago

I wish Stumble Upon still existed just so I could find the weird corners of the web again. This site and Reddit sort of fill that but also don't quite fit it at all.

MCneill27 5y ago
It's so bizarre to me that StumbleUpon came from the same mind as Uber (well one of the minds). However true or untrue all of the political intrigue, journalistic threats, etc., it's just crazy to me that such an innocent corner of the web that I loved so much in the mid-late 2000s was sending death threats to journos in London not 8 years later.
horsawlarway 5y ago
So much this! I don't really think it's that the niche stuff has moved away from the web - it's that nearly every functional discovery mechanism (that my now 30ish year old self knows about) has been captured by advertising or killed. When all you ever get served up is links to the same drivel promoted by folks who have no honest interest or curiosity, but are essentially mercenary marketing/sales (sorry - influencers blegh...), then the web starts to feel like a bland wasteland. Some of this is entirely related to being older - but I do genuinely think the current tech powerhouses on the web are trying their damn hardest to kill off any & all organic discovery mechanisms they can. Often through completely disingenuous means. If that fails, they buy them and shutter them, or roll them into the brand where it becomes the same drivel again.
aniforprez 5y ago
Not to be a downer again but reddit is pretty much dead for this. It's turning into FB more and more every day with a lot of young kids and teenagers filling it with memes and begging for engagement and such. It's not much of an aggregator anymore and is turning into more of an actual social network now except they still have "anonymous" profiles I guess it's what the people running it want but I find myself going there less and less every day and only look at a few curated subs
- rkangel 5y ago

slingnow 5y ago

Yeah, you're right. One counterexample definitely invalidates the entire argument.

amelius 5y ago

Uh, this story uses GPT-3 to "improve" content based on a huge training set. Do you think that this will increase diversity and bring more character to the web?

dash2 5y ago
What? It uses GPT-3 to improve spelling.