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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 sear

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. ;) ).
  - throw10920 5y ago
    Well, part of the solution is to enable anonymity, on the legal, technical, and platform levels. Just reminding everyone that "everything you say online can be publicly tied to your real identity" causes a chilling effect when you have opinions on anything remotely controversial.
  - deltarholamda 5y ago
    Very true, and I simply don't believe that humans are wired to deal with what is, essentially, a permanent Panopticon. Most people understand on some level that gossip is destructive, but also a lot of fun. Now that gossip can circle the globe twice in seconds, and combine that velocity with the fact that nearly everything online is gossip, it's like some kind of destructive psyop that nobody could have ever imagined. Even if you could have some flavor of anonymity, the cozy relationship that the big tech corporations have with national governments around the world means that only the most paranoid and OpSec-savvy can avoid having that anonymity pierced. We just quietly slid from "you shouldn't say that," to "you can't say that" in less than a generation.
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  When I started using the web back in the 90's, everyone used to use a handle/nickname and so it was never easy to link an online person to a reallife individual. These days everyone is encouraged to enter their real name, DOB and telephone number (see Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) which then creates a link to a real person. I think the web was better because it was anonymous, rather than anything else really. If you had "SuperHardLord" posting abuse at you on IRC, it didn't really matter. However if you have a Twitter user with full photo and details doing the same, it feels much more personal.
cbtacy 5y ago
> 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. I would dispute this. At that time, search was not gamed the way it is now, you didn't have to wade through millions of terrible low quality SEO bs to find the nuggets you're looking for.
- flyinghamster 5y ago
  It was early SEO that helped to do in AltaVista. When spammy, irrelevant search results started plaguing it, and AV's pages began to be crammed with ads, a neat little upstart came along with a very simple search page and a clean user interface, that returned better search results. This, of course, was Google, and guess what's happened to Google in the meantime? We've come full circle. The SEO gaming, of course, continues unabated, and will continue as long as search engines exist.
- lhorie 5y ago
  Back in the day, a lot of content that we take for granted today didn't even exist online (e.g. wikipedia, webmd, heck even mundane things like maps) As someone who got into the web industry through discovering content for a niche topic, search engines have always been only a superficial helper in finding content, with most content discovery happening through finding niche, relevant, obscure long tail keywords via deep diving, then unearthing more content via deep diving into searches based on these new keywords, rinse and repeat.
  - layer8 5y ago
    Right, though back then the search engines at least honored the exact search terms you entered and provided useful operators.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  It was so easy to game Altavista you didn't even have to try. I was gaming the search engines starting in 1996. I was #1 for whatever term I wanted. It was a lot harder once PageRank came along and required you to have external parties essentially vouch for you.
bmitc 5y ago
From the article: > Look, we will never get the web of old back. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t perfect either. The web of today is more accessible, more dynamic and pretty much a cornerstone of our society.
throw10920 5y ago
I agree with almost everything that you said, and would bring it even further. I wouldn't even say that "Yes it's all commercialised". If anything, I bet you there are multiple orders of magnitude more fun, silly, webring-like content than there were before the web exploded in popularity - they're just not visible to the average person, and are outnumbered by orders of magnitude more junk and commercial content. And you know what? That's totally expected. The web was great originally because only a small cadre of people of above-average and technical skill used it. When all of the rest of the humans joined, the usual stuff that you would expect happened - commercialization, low-quality content, passive consumption instead of active participation, etc. But that's what happens when everyone joins. There's also nothing preventing you from siloing off your own section of the internet where you only let certain people in! Hacker News already heavily curates content, and there are places like Lobste.rs where you can only be invited by an existing member. Don't complain that "the internet" has gotten worse, because "the internet" is just a communication technology, and it's gone from "limited access to a few elite" to "almost unlimited access to almost all humans"...and humans are kind of bad. Also, now that everyone's on the internet, the best content has also gotten significantly better. So there's that. If you're not liking the state of the web, you're either not looking in the right places (stop browsing YouTube and start looking for webrings and joining IRC channels), or you're complaining that the average internet user isn't as good as they used to be, which is dumb.
mech422 5y ago
Just a personnel nit: I actually found altavista to be better then any current search engine in terms of query power - what it was missing was the huge index.. Things like the 'near' keyword were awesome: john near doe matched 'john doe', 'doe, john', etc. It REALLY let you craft a query to return just the results you wanted. Unfortunately, that probably made it harder for the hordes of new users getting on-line. I'm soo tired of search engines just returning whatever they want, instead of what I asked for.
kingcharles 5y ago
Altavista was great. I was #1 for Beanie Babies. All I had to do was put "Beanie Babies" 20,000 times on my front page in white-on-white text and Altavista would automatically know I was the #1 authority on small beanbag plushies.

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. ;) ).
- throw10920 5y ago
  Well, part of the solution is to enable anonymity, on the legal, technical, and platform levels. Just reminding everyone that "everything you say online can be publicly tied to your real identity" causes a chilling effect when you have opinions on anything remotely controversial.
- deltarholamda 5y ago
  Very true, and I simply don't believe that humans are wired to deal with what is, essentially, a permanent Panopticon. Most people understand on some level that gossip is destructive, but also a lot of fun. Now that gossip can circle the globe twice in seconds, and combine that velocity with the fact that nearly everything online is gossip, it's like some kind of destructive psyop that nobody could have ever imagined. Even if you could have some flavor of anonymity, the cozy relationship that the big tech corporations have with national governments around the world means that only the most paranoid and OpSec-savvy can avoid having that anonymity pierced. We just quietly slid from "you shouldn't say that," to "you can't say that" in less than a generation.
CodeGlitch 5y ago
When I started using the web back in the 90's, everyone used to use a handle/nickname and so it was never easy to link an online person to a reallife individual. These days everyone is encouraged to enter their real name, DOB and telephone number (see Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) which then creates a link to a real person. I think the web was better because it was anonymous, rather than anything else really. If you had "SuperHardLord" posting abuse at you on IRC, it didn't really matter. However if you have a Twitter user with full photo and details doing the same, it feels much more personal.

cbtacy 5y ago

> 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. I would dispute this. At that time, search was not gamed the way it is now, you didn't have to wade through millions of terrible low quality SEO bs to find the nuggets you're looking for.

flyinghamster 5y ago
It was early SEO that helped to do in AltaVista. When spammy, irrelevant search results started plaguing it, and AV's pages began to be crammed with ads, a neat little upstart came along with a very simple search page and a clean user interface, that returned better search results. This, of course, was Google, and guess what's happened to Google in the meantime? We've come full circle. The SEO gaming, of course, continues unabated, and will continue as long as search engines exist.
lhorie 5y ago
Back in the day, a lot of content that we take for granted today didn't even exist online (e.g. wikipedia, webmd, heck even mundane things like maps) As someone who got into the web industry through discovering content for a niche topic, search engines have always been only a superficial helper in finding content, with most content discovery happening through finding niche, relevant, obscure long tail keywords via deep diving, then unearthing more content via deep diving into searches based on these new keywords, rinse and repeat.
- layer8 5y ago
  Right, though back then the search engines at least honored the exact search terms you entered and provided useful operators.
kingcharles 5y ago
It was so easy to game Altavista you didn't even have to try. I was gaming the search engines starting in 1996. I was #1 for whatever term I wanted. It was a lot harder once PageRank came along and required you to have external parties essentially vouch for you.

bmitc 5y ago

From the article: > Look, we will never get the web of old back. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t perfect either. The web of today is more accessible, more dynamic and pretty much a cornerstone of our society.

throw10920 5y ago

I agree with almost everything that you said, and would bring it even further. I wouldn't even say that "Yes it's all commercialised". If anything, I bet you there are multiple orders of magnitude more fun, silly, webring-like content than there were before the web exploded in popularity - they're just not visible to the average person, and are outnumbered by orders of magnitude more junk and commercial content. And you know what? That's totally expected. The web was great originally because only a small cadre of people of above-average and technical skill used it. When all of the rest of the humans joined, the usual stuff that you would expect happened - commercialization, low-quality content, passive consumption instead of active participation, etc. But that's what happens when everyone joins. There's also nothing preventing you from siloing off your own section of the internet where you only let certain people in! Hacker News already heavily curates content, and there are places like Lobste.rs where you can only be invited by an existing member. Don't complain that "the internet" has gotten worse, because "the internet" is just a communication technology, and it's gone from "limited access to a few elite" to "almost unlimited access to almost all humans"...and humans are kind of bad. Also, now that everyone's on the internet, the best content has also gotten significantly better. So there's that. If you're not liking the state of the web, you're either not looking in the right places (stop browsing YouTube and start looking for webrings and joining IRC channels), or you're complaining that the average internet user isn't as good as they used to be, which is dumb.

mech422 5y ago

Just a personnel nit: I actually found altavista to be better then any current search engine in terms of query power - what it was missing was the huge index.. Things like the 'near' keyword were awesome: john near doe matched 'john doe', 'doe, john', etc. It REALLY let you craft a query to return just the results you wanted. Unfortunately, that probably made it harder for the hordes of new users getting on-line. I'm soo tired of search engines just returning whatever they want, instead of what I asked for.

kingcharles 5y ago

Altavista was great. I was #1 for Beanie Babies. All I had to do was put "Beanie Babies" 20,000 times on my front page in white-on-white text and Altavista would automatically know I was the #1 authority on small beanbag plushies.