29 ms·

The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

• ceocoder 5y ago
  "technology is cyclical" -Dennis Duffy, 30 Rock. Jokes aside, I do not know if this is me getting older and becoming more grouchy and/or some of the tools (Gmail, Google Search, macOS/MacBook <whichever>) we've been using for a while are becoming more obtuse and less user (or power user) friendly in name of <some product goal>
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • jacobr1 5y ago
    many tools are attempting becoming (and often failing) to become more beginner user friendly. And while that implies dumbing down the tools at times, they still have advance features which are either progressively shown in context, or hidden behind additional advanced user menus or modes. Thus it makes it harder to reason about (as a power user does) and you are reduced to incantations rather than deduction. On top of that there is an increase of change, which prevents one from better learning the system. In effect, to a first approximation, the systems are now non-deterministic. For a causal user, they never care about that anyway and for the best systems, the UX improvements work. But for power-users, the non-determinism is going to drive one crazy.
    • raxxorrax 5y ago
      Agreed. Another negative side effect is that power users cannot help casual users anymore. They become dependent on the developer of the software in question and won't learn about the pipeline of how things are created. A beverage dispenser has a good UX, but its usage is fairly restricted.
• chomp 5y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20220125222736/https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/old-internet-coming-back.html http://web.archive.org/web/20220125222736/https://cheapskate...
  • alamortsubite 5y ago
    This post is from yesterday. Why the Internet Archive link?
    • post_below 5y ago
      Because sometimes HN hugs things to death. I went straight to the comments for the alternate link when the site was still loading after 10 seconds.
    • chomp 5y ago
      Site was down when I attempted to read the post.
      • alamortsubite 5y ago
        Makes sense, especially in the context of The Old Internet. Thanks.
    • marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Cheapskate's got a pretty low-end server, doesn't want a lot of traffic.
• kstrauser 5y ago
  I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine. I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely freedom to do whatever I wanted with it. That's what I want the Internet to look like for my younger family and friends. It'll probably never happen exactly this way, but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends. I know what their smile would look like because that was once my smile, too.
  • pratnala 5y ago
    Yeah no, I wish we don't go back to that. It doesn't scale at all.
    • coldtea 5y ago
      Who the fuck cares if it scales? It's better if it doesn't scale. Scale is what brought us Facebook and monopolies like Google.
    • _jal 5y ago
      Why does it need to? You are not Amazon. In the unlikely event you become Amazon, you will be able to rearchitect. Trust me, Amazon did.
      • gary_0 5y ago
        Never worry too much about problems you want to have.
    • Guest42 5y ago
      True, but I think the point was to be original and random and perhaps be popular as a result, rather than tailor everything for popularity.
    • mdoms 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• emptybottle 5y ago
  After layering abstractions on top of abstractions, and centralizing onto a few providers it makes sense to simplify and diversify again. I miss things being presented via their own unique web sites as opposed to “pages” within the current top social network.
• samwillis 5y ago
  Site seems to be down. Archived: https://archive.is/zIBTV https://archive.is/zIBTV
• madrox 5y ago
  When Walmart started taking over consumer goods, everyone thought small business was dead. All that was really died was the general store, and we saw a rise in boutique storefronts. Depending on their niche, people craved more than the lowest common denominator that Walmart provided, and these small businesses filled a need. I've long held that social media is following a similar trend. Much like Shopify, the next wave of businesses will enable companies to run communities that feel, as the article puts it, "smol." Discord is a great example of this.
  • savanaly 5y ago
    Yep, humanity and its demands are multifaceted. We want good stuff cheap and affordable as the rise of Walmart and Amazon goes to show. But we also want to feel unique and support recognizably human businesses. I don't see any reason why they both shouldn't exist.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    I don't think this is correct. For somewhere in the range of 3 decades, companies like Walmart have decimated small businesses. "Boutique storefronts" have not replaced the stores that Walmart et al. helped to shutter all through the late 80s until today. They exist (mostly in large cities), but the reality is that small business, compared to the way it was in, say, 1974, did die. It might be true that things like Shopify help to resucitate it, but I'm skeptical. I also don't care about things "feeling" small when they actually vast: this is nothing more than a marketing (de|il)lusion, and does nothing to promote the kind of diversified, distributed form of a resilient, vibrant, equitable and opportunity-filled economy.
    • Melatonic 5y ago
      Yea I agree - Walmart and Amazon and all the giant corps have destroyed small businesses. We may be exposed to it less becuase like you said - the audience here lives in large cities where the population is diverse and wealthy enough for them to survive. We have seen tons of boutique online vendors pop-up however. I wonder how the total diversity compares? A new age "general store" that was a group of small online vendors getting together (shared ownership) might be an interesting way to resurge local business - imagine like a co-op but for small businesses all under shared physical locations. Products and vendors could even rotate out depending on the season and local population.
• PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > Just as radio stations, newspapers, and television networks were the communications gatekeepers of earlier generations, we now have Internet gatekeepers keeping us in line, on line--preventing our voices from being heard by too widely I am about the same age as the author of this piece. I think they are making a fundamental error with his comparison. "Back in the day", radio stations, newspapers and television networks were the only actual public media (we could include zines perhaps, but they rarely had the printing capacity to reach a large audience). Their status was conferred by their capital requirements, legal status and in some cases, physical properties. Today's internet gatekeepers only have the role they do because of network effects, and because people implicitly grant them that role. None of them have licenses from any government to do what they do (business license, sure; not a license to serve specific kinds of content the way that TV stations do). The only thing preventing my voice from being heard more widely is that most people are watching/listening/reading in places I don't have the desire or capacity to conquer. But there are no hypothetical barriers to me becoming a wildly adored prophet, I just have to do the work. I think it is both dangerous and misleading to make this comparison, but more significantly, it is also misdirecting. It leads us away from what we would need to do if we actually want to build alternatives, and instead draws comparison with utterly different media and legal frameworks.
  • lancesells 5y ago
    > The only thing preventing my voice from being heard more widely is that most people are watching/listening/reading in places I don't have the desire or capacity to conquer. But there are no hypothetical barriers to me becoming a wildly adored prophet, I just have to do the work. I agree with this comment so much. I have zero desire to participate in most social media and I think it's giving them too much power to suggest they are limiting your speech, etc. The media has done a truly horrendous job by using tweets and social media as news. As if 100 people chiming in with an opinion on something has much relevance in a world of billions. I prefer my own space online and don't need it to scale, or be seen by thousands, or even be liked. Hell, I don't even run analytics on my site so I might be the sole visitor and I'm fine with that.
  • Melatonic 5y ago
    I think it is a fair comparison they just did not state it fairly well. Back in the day you could create your own radio station too or make your own TV content and do it relatively affordably. But reaching a massive audience was multiple times more difficult and required help of one of the gatekeepers. With the internet you can be heard more widely and cheaper yet (comparatively) but again if you want to really reliably reach a giant audience you again need the permission of the gatekeepers. If modern politics have proven anything it is that you are not gonna become a wildly adored prophet without using a lot of different mega huge social media platforms no matter how hard you try.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  A four-fold increase in Gemini usage doesn't tell me much. Even a 100x increase wouldn't be surprising or meaningful for something that started at zero usage just 13 months ago. We're talking about a total of 2000 capsules, which is cool, but just not enough of a signal to make predictions off of. I already knew there were at least 2000 highly technical people in the world willing to experiment with a new protocol: if Gemini crosses over to moderately technical, moderately motivated people, that will be more interesting.
• softwarebeware 5y ago
  "Back in the early 1990's, the spirit of the Internet was the pursuit of knowledge, exploration, innovation, fun, and community." Yes! I couldn't have put it better. Great article.
• pavlov 5y ago
  > 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently decentralized. Unfortunately, despite common goals, some on today's old Internet are hostile to blockchain technology. I am not sure why.' What goals does today's crypto-token-powered "web 3" vision share with the old Internet? It's not enough to say "well it's decentralized" and do a handwave. Consider the NFT exploration Moxie Marlinspike did recently: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html This is essentially a system that lets you buy DRM'd metadata that points to servers owned by a corporation funded by billions of VC dollars, and transactions are recorded on a ledger that spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these make-believe digital assets. None of these things have anything to with the old Internet: cargo cult DRM, billion-dollar VC funding, enormous energy waste, artificial scarcity where none is needed. That website on dial-up was slow because of real physical constraints, not artificial constraints erected to make VCs richer at the expense of the planet's ecosystem.
  • jackson1442 5y ago
    I got bored the other day and thought it would be funny to make a copy of the most expensive NFT and set that as my Twitter profile picture because they added that silly feature. So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the image and got a big scary warning: > (paraphrased; I don't have a screenshot) This image was found too many times on the internet. If this image is not yours, this is ILLEGAL AND A VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT LAW, and may result in your NFT being removed from the marketplace. How on earth is this decentralized? Like yeah, I get wanting to protect your "asset" from "theft," but what central authority gets to decide what copyright law we abide by- further, what happens when an NFT marketplace removes your NFT? Does it get removed from the blockchain? I legitimately don't know how this works. The user experience is also TERRIBLE. I am rather technical (hell, I used to do Bitcoin back in like 2015, or whenever it was about $4k/coin) and still don't really know how the hell MetaMask works. I imported the wallet on my phone... maybe? The randomart image it showed initially was different, but apparently the iOS app just defaults to a different kind of randomart. You also have to use the MetaMask browser on iOS. It sucks. Also the MetaMask connect buttons barely work across different sites. It had a _really_ hard time telling if I had a wallet. Not sure if this is an implementation issue on the dev end but as a user it was super confusing. Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it stands.
• aluminussoma 5y ago
  The Internet today feels like a big box strip mall in suburbia. While visiting my home town, I looked for a local, independent hardware store. There was only Home Depot and Lowe's. Then I realize how few independent businesses were left. On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit). Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without needing to do anything special.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • kilroy123 5y ago
    Such a good way to put it. I couldn't agree more.
  • marginalia_nu 5y ago
    > Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without needing to do anything special. Discoverability is a big part of why the independent web is struggling. And it's not just big tech's fault, people are really bad at linking to each other. I've been trying to raise awareness about this[1] and it has made a bit of a difference and a couple of dozen sites have taken me up on my call to action, but people are still really shy about linking to pages they like even though I'm sure nobody minds getting linked to. Overall I feel classic search as well as community aggregation (like reddit) suffers from being too manipulable. You just can't find good content produced by humans over there anymore. I've been experimenting with various alternative paradigms. I think there probably is a better way, but I honestly don't quite know what the answer is just yet. You've got to contend with link rot as well, which is the bane of manual curation. [1] https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/19-website-discoverability-crisis.gmi https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/19-website-discoverability-c...
• jabbany 5y ago
  I feel like this article doesn't address the reason why people moved away from the "old" Internet --- most people only care about their _content_ not the particular technology that backs it. In the old times, you could only host content if you were really good with the technology. The people who had websites were people who knew how to set up and run a web server, and to compose the HTML content that was being served. Similarly, communities who ran BBS forums, mailing lists, IRC, etc. all needed at least some people who could set up and manage the technology for them. Centralized services (Web 2.0) changed that. Now all of a sudden you didn't need to run your server --- you could just type some text and click some buttons to put up a blog on a shared service (myspace? blogger? wordpress.com?). You didn't need to run your own forum or mailing list or chat rooms, you could just put your community on an existing service that provided that (Google groups, FB/Whatsapp/<insert your IM> Chat). Need a forum? You have reddit. What is Twitter if not just a collection of mailing lists that you can openly subscribe to but not post on? Centralization allowed the vast majority of people to do what they wanted to do while "outsourcing" the technology part to somebody else, because most people don't care about the technology they care about their content. The problem with the modern decentralized web (3.0?) is that we haven't focused on solving the real problem --- making it easy to manipulate _content_. If anything, setting up a Web 3.0 presence is _harder_ than it was on a centralized service, and as long as it remains harder, the new "old" Internet will always be a niche.
  • largely_sitting 5y ago
    Its the data centers that are going to be responsible for end of web2, when they figure out they can undercut web2 and offer a continuous federated open data storage system and virtual machine. Advertisers will pay them for access directly. Google, Meta, would just be third party indexing services.
    • lovemenot 5y ago
      At best that could be only marginally profitable. Such a service would have to be a commodity in order to be interoperable. If it could have high margins the index owners such as Meta would keep it in-house. As long as they control the services users want, they control the market. Your prediction could come to pass only in the case of the open backend being tied to a massively popular service that could compete with those giants
• femto 5y ago
  A slightly dissonant title on the article, as the premise of the article is that the Old Internet never went away. Rather, more people are beginning to discover that the Old still exists as they reach the limits of the New and start looking for alternatives. Welcome to October! :)
• alamortsubite 5y ago
  Thanks to the hard work of the W3C, soon we may come full circle: https://www.w3.org/2021/04/pressrelease-blink.html.en https://www.w3.org/2021/04/pressrelease-blink.html.en
• Animats 5y ago
  What's pushing people back towards having their own web sites is the increasing obnoxiousness of the dominant players. It's just too much hassle to deal with Google and their semi-random censorship, Medium and their paywall, Twitter and their demands that people sign in, and Facebook looking as ad-heavy as Myspace in its declining years. It's quite cheap to bring up a basic web site, a blog, or a forum on shared hosting.
• empressplay 5y ago
  I get the nostalgia but not the sentiment. You can still set up a website, you can still post content on it, you can still link to that content on social media to get viewers, if you attach Google Analytics to your site, that traffic then improves your search rankings which brings you more traffic. Hundreds of people a day read my rantings (and I probably owe most of them an apology for that) but the point is you can still make a 'personal' website and grow an audience even now, you don't need an 'alternative' web to do that, you just need to put in the effort.
• stakkur 5y ago
  I remember the glory days of UNIX/Usenet/etc. in the 80s at college too. I had an email address at Compuserve in the mid-80s, though I mainly used it for talking to other Compuserve members (when we weren't using 'CB channels', for those that remember). I remember all the various things like Usenet before the 'Internet' too; I don't recall anybody in my group ever calling it the Internet until after the WWW came along.
  • technothrasher 5y ago
    > I don't recall anybody in my group ever calling it the Internet until after the WWW came along. Really? I do. I spent the early years of the web trying to get all the new people who had suddenly joined the net to understand that the web and the internet were two very different things. I gave up after a while.
    • stakkur 5y ago
      Everybody was 'new' to the web. I've noticed the same confusion, and finally gave up trying to explain. Today, it seems people say 'Internet' for everything and 'web' has become passe.
  • blihp 5y ago
    Typically when people were using Usenet and email, they weren't on the Internet proper but rather connecting to a node (often via a terminal emulator over dialup) that often itself got batch updates via dialup using UUCP etc. Even when people started using their dialup services (AOL, Compuserve etc) as web gateways they often weren't technically on the Internet but rather just the WWW subset of it. When people started dialing in to ISPs and getting cable/DSL modems then they were on the Internet as they technically had access to all of its facilities and could connect to any other node on it. So there was a legitimate reason for not calling most of the earlier commercial/hobbyist services the Internet as they were just giving you glimpses at parts of it often without technically being on it.
• egberts1 5y ago
  Hug of Death.
• zwieback 5y ago
  I don't think the old internet ever went away, instead the commercial internet exploded, in some ways good in some ways bad. If you want to create and showcase your own stuff you have a ton more options than you used to, it could be nostalgic HTML pages with blinking colors or some slick thing on a prefab site builder, up to you.
  • marginalia_nu 5y ago
    In general I've begun to think of the whole small internet movement as a countrerculture phenomenon. It's got a lot of touching stones with the bohemians, the beats, the hippies, etc. What they've all got in common is a search for independence, authenticity and community. I do think the retro-aesthetic is more of a statement than anything else. It's like the long hair of a hippie. Like there's no reason a hippie couldn't have a crew cut and think like a hippie and live like a hippie. Yet almost none of them did. For the same reason almost no small website has a bootstrap template.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • jjulius 5y ago
      Eh, I'm with you on your general sentiment, and I definitely think websites can still embody the "old web" spirit while using HTML/CSS to stand out in a way that's different from "old web" aesthetics. The problem with the Bootstrap example is that Bootstrap is exactly the kind of overly-bloated, JS-heavy (depending on use) Web 2.0 tool that the "old web" spirit is firmly against. A hippie can live like a hippie and still have a crew cut, but using Bootstrap on an "old web" website would be like a hippie heading to a board meeting wearing a polo and khakis bought brand new at Banana Republic as they yell, "Fuck the man!" from their sports car.
      • marginalia_nu 5y ago
        There is js-heavy pages in the independent web space as well. There are certainly some that wouldn't touch it with a 60 ft pole, but it's a very heterogenous group, and I wouldn't put it past someone to do it ironically, as an art project (like that random startup generator[1]). Which is really my point. The common denominator is independence, authenticity, community, not some particular aesthetic. [1] http://tiffzhang.com/startup/ http://tiffzhang.com/startup/
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  "The Internet itself seems to many to have degenerated into a giant advertising tool. And, a high percentage of websites load as slowly as a sick turtle awaking from a long slumber." Is there a connection between these two statements?
  • ThalesX 5y ago
    Maybe he is alluding to the fact that adding megabytes of shit JavaScript to profile and serve ads is what is making the pages load so slow.
    • moffkalast 5y ago
      Well he's not wrong.
      • Jorengarenar 5y ago
        Although it's not the whole picture
    • pessimizer 5y ago
      The only thing we kept from the old internet was the page load times.
• daltont 5y ago
  Stumbled upon this site recently, https://funwhileitlasted.net/ https://funwhileitlasted.net/. It made me nostalgic for the days where there were sites dedicated to one fairly narrow subject. I this case it was defunct sports leagues and teams.
• winternett 5y ago
  Now that we've found that the Internet is fraught with bots and scams, and that social media was all a ruse to lure us into marketing funnels, we're trying to go back to the happier and less ad-infused independent web... But finding out that the death grip that major corps have on hosting costs, IP lawyers, data accessibility, regulators, search results, and on audiences will be the biggest obstacle to overcome. I'm stoked to see what happens with the rebellion, even though I, like many other independents are a bit jaded about ranting that this was gonna happen years ago when nobody listened... hah. Our best tools at this point are probably to bring back RSS and to re-establish more cost-effective independent hosting alternatives.
• deleted 5y ago
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• mikotodomo 5y ago
• Melatonic 5y ago
  I don't think Web 3.0 is going to be the kind of decentralization people are all hyping up now - we are still too close to Web 2.0 and the innovations are nebulous at best. However I do think there will be a Web 3.0 and it is going to come about when processing power, battery life, efficiency, global internet, and easy power generation all start reaching a critical point. Combine that with a general psychological backlash toward mega surveillance, concentration of power in massive corporate entities, and mass automation and we will be ripe for a world where low tech becomes stylistically cool again but with just the best of the tech world when wanted. If you plucked someone out of ancient Rome and brought them to this society a lot of the technology might really seem like magic. I am imagining independent adhoc networks that can be easily setup to servicing a small remote village completely disconnected from the outside world and just as easily instantly connect that village to a high speed global network. And it all runs off a few solar panels or some other source of cheap power. The decentralization of Web 3.0 will come about when we have the hardware to actually do things like that. When the ratio of cheap power generation to power use blows away what we have now. Who knows what crazy stuff people will come up with! Or we could go the Wall-E route and it all goes to shit Lets face it though - version point 0 is often a buggy mess. Bring on Web 3.1 !
  • pcthrowaway 5y ago
    What does the cheapness of power generation have anything to do with web3? If power was 1/10 the price, Proof of work blockchains would use 10X as much. But there is web3 and blockchains without proof of work
    • lpcvoid 5y ago
      I think he means web 3.0 as a semantic followup to web 2.0, and not the useless crap that cryptobros want to push as "web3".
• mxbck 5y ago
  Interesting read. I made a similar point some time ago im "Return of the 90s web": https://mxb.dev/blog/the-return-of-the-90s-web/ https://mxb.dev/blog/the-return-of-the-90s-web/
• graycat 5y ago
  Good to hear -- my startup wants to be one more example. Irony: The opportunity, goal, purpose of my startup is to help people find such Web sites, especially little or focused ones, that they will like. Or the short description of my startup is to help people find Internet content they will like, say, via, roughly search, discovery, recommendation. A novel part is that the site gets some new data via a likely so far unique iterative, interactive dialog, specific to each use, and then manipulates that data with some math I derived, likely new. A classic, but mostly neglected, advanced pure math result says that, in principle, the iterations should converge to what can be regarded as the right results! For more, no key words are involved. Can argue that the results give the user the results, content, with the meaning they will like best, i.e., make some progress on working with meaning. So, the problem, the challenge is to respond to the explosion of Internet content, now often from specialized, focused, small Web sites. For one more -- there are no user IDs, logins, or use of HTTP cookies. In particular, two users who execute the same dialog on the same day (i.e., before I add to the database) get the same results. I.e., for the users there is some relatively good privacy. Here I'm just taking the opportunity of this OP to describe my solution. I wrote the Web site code, in .NET, and as far as I can tell the code is ready for significant production. As in the OP and some of the comments already in this thread, my plan is, indeed, to run my own server, using Windows Server, SQL Server, and, for hardware, an AMD FX-8350 at 4.0 GHz. I'm adding data, am not live yet, and have not settled in a domain name yet. What'd you think?
  • marginalia_nu 5y ago
    That's an interesting take. Just curious how you plan to make money off this. I think profitability is what has killed most recommendation ventures. It's easy enough to find something that's fun (like StumbleUpon). But they usually eventually self-cannibalize by inserting ads in the recommendations. On the flip side, if you attempt to do some sort of gated boutique thing where you need a subscription to see the results, you may encounter resistance when you attempt to discover recommendations (assuming you're crawling by yourself, which you'd almost have to I think). Don't mean to be a downer, but profitability is arguably the hard problem to solve in this space.
    • 5y ago
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  it would be nice if it were true but it s probably wishful thinking The only "nice" trend that is happening is that PC and laptop sales are slightly up. That and higher reliable network speeds might facilitate bringing back 'the old internet'. But as long as the web is still made for smartphones it will remain bland and boring.
• deleted 5y ago
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• largely_sitting 5y ago
  Corporate interest in the internet is going to shrink when people stop wanting data silos, and instead want open data storage with some programmable layer on top and nothing else. Corporate interest is high now only because of the exploitable future, but when it's found that the future is a bunch of open generic data tables and virtual machine on top, it's going to have a hard time competing with that. If Facebook, Google, and Amazon were all forced to use an open data storage system to house all their user data or become obsolete they would quickly become obsolete because advertisers would access it directly instead of paying them.
• masswerk 5y ago
  I think, something which is missed, is what I'd call the "mediametic horizon". In the "old days", people weren't just "doing their thing", there was more to it. Even, if you entertained just a small site, you were somewhat playing big media (compare the vintage radio allusions or the ubiquitous news signations that popped up about 1997.) Small websites were pulling for reach, dreaming of a mention on "What's cool" lists. (Besides other functions, HN may be the last true what's-cool list today.) Even those building professional sites were driven by this "mediametic horizon": you wouldn't build the same website twice, not even the same concept. Adding to and enriching what was the known standard, the known functionality, the known capabilities of the Web was the raison d'être of any new site. Becoming known and mentioned for such a feat was a major incentive, both for the designer-developers and for the clients (again, for reach and prestige). The truth being, the "old web" essentially required and depended on brokers of reach and prestige to develop this drive, and I do not see any candidates for fulfilling this function. (Apart from HN, that is.) P.S./Edit: This was still true for the early 2000s: back then, I was involved in a major relaunch of the site of a telephone carrier and the clients were scanning relevant Usenet groups for critiques in order to evaluate their success. (Surely, this wasn't the norm, but it still did happen.)
• taurusnoises 5y ago
  I so wish these articles would give a 101 on how to make an old-school, decentralized website. So many of us want that, but just have no idea where to begin anymore (and I made websites in the late 90s....) Love these articles, tho. The more the better.
  • kevstev 5y ago
    Is it really that obscure these days? 1. Have a computer in your house open exposed to the internet on port 80- port forward on your router. 2. Run an http server on that box. Apache is a reasonable choice but there are probably easier pieces of software out there to set up. 2a. Create an index.html or equivalent default page name and put some html in it even if it's just hello world- it can even be in plain text. 3. Technically you are now self hosted on the internet! Figure out your external IP from your router and point a browser to http://$YOURIP/ http://$YOURIP/ and you should see your page. The next steps are optional but kind of required to have a "real" site. 4. Set up dns. Since you won't have a static IP from your ISP almost certainly, you will need to use a dynamic dns provider. Noip.com is a popular choice. Once this is working you can register a domain name with GoDaddy or whoever and then point that name to your dynamic dns provider. Now you can load up http://www.yourdomain.com http://www.yourdomain.com (or whatever tld you choose) 5. Set up https. For some reason beyond my comprehension google is forcing everyone to use https if they want to really exist on the internet in any real way even if they are just serving static pages. Let's encrypt can you there for free. Now you can go to https://www.yourdomain.com https://www.yourdomain.com and your page will show up and Google et al might even consider you to be a real presence on the internet and index you one day.
    • alphachloride 5y ago
      To be fair, this is not a 101. Exposing port 80, figuring out a static external IP, or setting up DDNS, and https all need more hand-holding I think.
      • kevstev 5y ago
        If I was talking to my mom sure. But were talking on HN here, clicking around your routers web UI shouldn't be too difficult for anyone here to figure out. And honestly if you can't figure that out you shouldn't be exposing your stuff to the internet anyway, you will become a part of a botnet in short order. Setting up Apache properly is a much bigger PITA for anything other than a static html use IMHO.
• letsburnthis 5y ago
  Have the definitions of web 1.0 and 2.0 authoritatively been decided? The general idea I've seen has been that web 1.0 was decentralized and web 2.0 is centralized, but it seems kind of odd to separate the generations of something as impactful as the internet the same way you would separate generations of the iphone. It almost seems like it would make more sense to define generations at the same scale as the internet itself which is communication. (full disclosure zero research has gone into this, I didn't live through web 1.0, and I know nothing about how the web works). In my head, web 1.0 was the automation of one-way communication. You could request a site and the equivalent of a newspaper was sent to you; and anyone else who requested the same site was sent the same newspaper. If you wanted to order something you had to call the phone-number listed on that website, same as if you had seen an ad in a newspaper. Two-way communication existed but it was the equivalent of a really fast mail and was for the most part was between people over the internet rather than with the internet. Web 2.0, suddenly if you requested a site you get a different version with different ads than someone else making the same request; without a person choosing for you to see those different ads. You can place an order and human doesn't get involved until that item needs to be picked off the shelf to be transported in meat space. Now the internet is 2-way communication, you make a request and it responds to you in seemingly unique ways. The internet itself is replacing some of the human effort that goes into communication. Before it was just transporting human information, now it's responding. So what's left now that the internet has conquered communicating in two-directions through space? Time. If you want information (ideas, values, whatever) to transmit through time you create institutions. Something that is resilient so that it survives mostly intact and that is enforced to ensure compliance. Web 3.0 seems to fit that. Immutable (if desired), enforcement is achieved from the immutable code itself, and it runs on belief (the more people that are part of it the stronger its self-sustaining characteristics). It might also explain why all the big blockchain uses have been activities traditionally controlled by institutions (money, property, contracts).
  • dogline 5y ago
    How I've seen it: Web 1.0: Let's serve web pages Web 2.0: Let's serve REST APIs, and have Javascript to all the formatting Web 3.0: Let's get rid of DNS and have GUIDs/Crypto/something
• gompertz 5y ago
  I don't see any comments on the pink background.. Which pretty much burned into my retinas while reading. HN looked blueish to my eyes when I came back to it! Unsure if this was a high-level intentional play by the author!
• achillean 5y ago
  Gopher use is slowly increasing over time :) https://imgur.com/gallery/mKvUyJL https://imgur.com/gallery/mKvUyJL
• pvpatel1001 5y ago
  trial
• taylorbuley 5y ago
  > By the way, I think it is sad that I can't even make a comment on Hacker News about this article, because I've been banned. When someone else posts my articles there, many people want to read them, but when I post them, they are blog spam. Might be worth an unban, admin.
• kxrm 5y ago
  The "old internet" never went anywhere. I've been running my own websites since the 90s. My oldest website is now 20 years old as of today. People still use it. It doesn't get enormous amounts of traffic but it's built for a very specific community. I keep it going to keep myself sharp on how the underlying plumbing of the internet works. I definitely don't think it will scale well, but that isn't the point.
• yazboo 5y ago
  These niche groups for enthusiasts, tilde club or mastodon or neocities or aral balkan or whatever can't ever bring the old internet back. It's not coming back, it's really not, you just have to accept that the world you used to love is gone and find some new way to do things. Why make a dollhouse of your past. You must move on!
  • gnubison 5y ago
    Because some of us enjoy the “dollhouses”…?
  • dopidopHN 5y ago
    Dollhouse, fine. Why not then, when I switch browsers and doom scroll on Gemini I read different crap that the crap I read here. I’m still frying my body and rotting my brain but at least it’s different content. Yes that won’t solve anything, but does it have to?
• aeturnum 5y ago
  I have never understood people who mourn the death of the "old" internet because I do not feel I have lost it. Particular communities come and go, as they always have, but I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers too. The thing that has changed is that a huge swath of new people have come online and, though some of what brought them online is wider access to connectivity, a lot of what brought them online are new kinds of communities. They showed up for social media and most of them just aren't that interested in the things that made up the "old" internet. I put "old" in quotes because people have kept and maintained the parts they love. You can still play MUDs, you can still visit BBSes, people still run Hotline servers[1]! Many of these communities have changed because the world has changed: lots of people who played MUDs in 1990 have moved on to other online games, but lots have not! Critically - tools have continued to be developed. You can use IRCCloud (and be told it makes you a bad IRC'er), you can play MUDs on your phone, etc. These communities have changed with the times and improved for it. My sense is that the absolute number of people who are involved in these communities has dropped, but not actually by that much? Maybe half as many people play MUDs now as they did at the peak - but it's a steady half. I think of it like the communities around vinyl or around film photography: less central than they once were, but healthy and vital. I am really glad that people who were not online at all during their peak are discovering these older forms. We have kept them for good reasons. But don't call it a comeback, they have been here for years. [1] https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Clients https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Clients
  • jchw 5y ago
    I do agree that the "old" internet is not totally dead, but in my case communities I used to be in and even a couple I had direct involvement in were gutted because people left in favor of participating in communities via websites like Twitter. IRC channels I was in dwindled in numbers, draining instead to massive Discord servers. The thing is, the "old" Internet was always somewhat anemic compared to the "new" Internet. It was never all that big. IRC channels I was in that felt like communities would stay dead for hours at a time, and sometimes topped out at under 100 members. Yet, they had a feeling of community that I rarely experience much on today's internet. With how many people are on the Internet today, you'd expect that this standard could be upheld even with minimal participation, but I find that not only are there less people participating in the "old" internet, but also in addition to that, the people still participating have far less of their attention and time dedicated to it. As it was, the "old" Internet was, as many things are, powered by the unpaid time and effort of a relatively small number of people. Those people still exist, but their attention is far more divided. There's just more stuff going on overall. The "new" internet allures people with more "passive" participation vs the active participation that was often demanded by forums and IRC channels. As an icing on the shit cake, you link to Fandom/Wikia as a community hub. Fandom and its behavior has torn apart a lot of smaller communities with its practices. See, for example, what happened when the Touhou wiki's community collectively decided they no longer wanted to be on Wikia: old administrators were banned, new ones were appointed by staff, and now the site is effectively forked. Apparently, if a wiki is too important for ad revenue, the admins will literally just fork your site. Of course, I'm not saying they did anything illegal, but what they did is a major fuck you to the community that poured hours of work into the site. It would be like a forum host that decides to ban all of the admins and appoint its own in their place. Maybe a bit like Reddit... While I don't know exactly how much and why the "old" internet is dead, I do have my suspicions that it has a lot to do with the evolution of monetization on the internet. My hope is that the patron model can help here...
• sitta 5y ago
  I discovered a Dave Gahan fan site [1] last year that looked like it was a holdover from "the old internet". I loved it and was even more delighted when I discovered it was created in 2021 [2]: > I realize that static websites like this were more popular in the internet's early days, long before the rise of social media and the emergence of user-created Wikis, and have now somewhat fallen out of fashion. However, there were a lot of static websites like this dedicated to Dave Gahan and Depeche Mode back then that had a level of quality that I just don't see nowadays. Sadly, many of them have disappeared or have been abandoned. There is something to be missed about websites like those, though, with their eye-catching graphics and pile of links that took you on a journey as if you were walking through a museum, and I want to bring that experience back through this website, as outdated as that experience may very well be. Beautiful. Bring back the old internet. [1] https://www.davegahandevotion.com/ https://www.davegahandevotion.com/ [2] https://www.davegahandevotion.com/site/about.php https://www.davegahandevotion.com/site/about.php
• riantogo 5y ago
  I hope it is true. I have been nostalgic about old school forums and during covid lock down built a platform for anyone to host one (and hopefully make meaningful revenue). However, I'm finding it really difficult to get traction. I hope it is because of my poor marketing skills and not because no one really cares for the old internet beyond some fond memories.
• PostThisTooFast 5y ago
• akprasad 5y ago
  I'm glad the article hits the central point that what is valuable about this change is the rise of the non-corporate internet. And fundamentally, what is valuable about non-corporate spaces (in my view) is that we have social ownership of them. A poster on MetaFilter has a very different relationship to their site from what a Reddit user might have to theirs. At the same time, the corporate internet means high investment in useful centralized platforms that reduce the expertise required to publish and share something to near zero. It's not clear to me that such platforms could survive in a non-corporate setting. Maybe if they were user-owned in some material way.
• MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  I don't know about web3, but somehow github is quite similar to what we had in the olden days; just search for 'awesome any-topic' in github search, and you will get a curated list of interesting links on nearly any-topic. Also github pages lets you do your own homepage in a git repository, so it's a bit like geocities ;-) I mean our benevolent owners at microsoft give us a free space for self expression, which isn't a facebook/google style walled garden and targeted add pusher, or medium like subscription extractor. It's even better than geocities, they don't put up any adds at all! You even have the 'The definitive list of lists (of lists)' https://github.com/jnv/lists https://github.com/jnv/lists - looks like the same old culture that moved over to a new home in the sun. (now this spaceship is very fragile, and might disappear upon any minor change of the EULA on github, matters as usual ;-)
• Jonovono 5y ago
  This is why I am building a fun mobile browser: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/wapps-fun-private-browsing/id1597325145 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/wapps-fun-private-browsing/id1... Would love anyones feedback!
• dmz73 5y ago
  To me the biggest difference between the "old" internet and current web is the advertising. It is not just the adds that are so much more prevalent, the web sites are designed to be visually appealing and that detracts from any content that might be there. "Old" internet had information and links to other information. "New" internet is all about facade with little content, just a title here, picture there, short video to grab attention and then hopefully serve as many adds as possible without (or before) turning you away.
  • beej71 5y ago
    I want a search engine that penalizes results by the amount of advertising on the page. :)
• freeflight 5y ago
  The old culture, social and technical, will never come back. In the mid 90s the Internet was a medium that only around 1% of the world population had access to [0]. Getting online wasn't just some casual thing, people had to invest, money, time and effort to get online, so the whole "online experience" used to be treated very differently. As everybody had to jump trough these hoops to get online, there was usually at least some shared interests about people that managed to find each other online. Contrast that with today, where thanks to smartphones the majority of the world (65%) have access to the Internet like the most normal thing in the world, in most cases no special knowledge or major effort required anymore to "get in". That Eternal September-esque [1] change in culture can't be reversed. Maybe it could be emulated on way smaller scales, with a lot of effort and segregation, but that would defeat the whole spirit and purpose of it. [0] https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
• eezurr 5y ago
  I think the reason the old internet was what it was was because the barrier to entry was much higher (computers cost a lot of money in the 90s/ early 00s, you needed to learn HTML (at a minimum) to put a website together, and you had to have a phone line available for dial up, you had to be curious or have curious friends to learn about the cool websites out there, etc.). All of those filters meant a narrow spectrum of the population participated on the internet. It also meant the ratio of creator to consumer was much smaller. The market sold to itself (other creators), not just consumers; or in other words, the community existed to serve itself. I think the same idea can be applied to any creative outlet (music, art..). As soon as everyone has access, and the old filters (e.g. the RIAA, publishers) are torn down, it loses its uniqueness and glamor and the culture collapses, morals aside. The next "big thing" will have a high barrier to entry, whether it be costing a lot of money, or requiring a specific skillset that takes time to learn. It will attract driven people who live to create and build. And like everything else, the barrier will eventually be torn down leaving mediocracy in its place.
• foxfired 5y ago
  The problem is that there is no real definition of the old Internet. All we know is what it isn't. It isn't facebook, it isn't twitter, it isn't tiktok. Also, it isn't decentralized in the new sense of the word. The old Internet is not a page with flashing colors and dancing babies, you can still create those today. It isn't geocities, or its newer counterpart neocities either. The old internet is people making their own website. It's old because people surfing on the web today think that having a website is a business decision. Before it was just cool to own one.
• jsemrau 5y ago
  I don't particularly like the current Internet. A lot of traffic is captured by social with the intention promote oneself. Yes, I am part of the problem as well. Yet, the current version of the Internet values outrage over quality trending towards the lowest common denominator. I, in my own personal opinion, have high hopes for a crypto based new new social which distributes the economic value to the content originators and not the meta-middlemen. /rant
• kradroy 5y ago
  Today's internet is largely dominated by topics and people who maximize for marginal superficial engagement. You probably won't ever have the experience of a MajorBBS sysop breaking into your session when you're in the middle of mass downloading their mounted CD content (because the disc in the drive 2 feet away from them hasn't stopped spinning for hours), trying to exploit a bug in a door game, or bruteforcing their membership payment system. That's the meaningfully deep intimacy that's missing today.
  • superkuh 5y ago
    This is part of why I've loved running my .com webserver from my home desktop for the last 20+ years. I can see the blinking (and hear, and feel the vibration of) what's going on and insert in custom messages to the directory listing or other pages to talk to visitors. They can talk back by appending "/@say/Their message here." to any URL. I do miss the old days when you could run an open netcat on a popular port and every now and then get actual messages from people exploring the internet (burried under automated scanner attempts to collect banner version strings of course).
    • rambambram 5y ago
      Your comment method is so nice. Is there a reason you don't use a textarea for visitors to enter the text? Is your current method better against spambots?
      • superkuh 5y ago
        It is a bit atypical because I wanted a purely static comment system for my static site. Using nginx to just log certain matching URL types to a custom log file was way safer and easier to maintain than anything written in a dynamic language accepting arbitrary internet input. I eventually adapted this approach to receiving webmentions as well and in that context I provide textarea input for webmention response URLs. My method is not better against spam bots but it does suffer from a different type of them. For example, if a spider follows a link it sees of an existing comment, "...com/something.jpg/@say/..." then my system will interpret that as a comment. So... spam bots don't see it, but normal spiders can cause spam.
• DoItToMe81 5y ago
  This is wishful thinking. The demographics of the internet have changed so much that you will NEVER get that 'old' back. You may get an imitation or evolution of it, but it will never return in full. The size of social media now is so gargantuan that almost every single member you get in an independent community will have been molded by it in some way, which is very different to how the webcultures of the day functioned. My experience running a small community post social media explosion, is that most newcomers want to treat it like Twitter - Personal Edition. They want to engage in recreational outrage. They want to be obsessed with America-centered identity politics and put down other people for not joining 'their' side. It's a far cry from the types of people I once met online. There is no sense of "The internet is not real life.", because, for so many of them, their internet handle is their real life identity, and any joke against it is a strike against their moral fabric and an attack on their very being.
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    Content focus certainly changed as barriers for entry got lower. In classical TV there was certainly a degradation towards low production costs and simple content in the last decade. But it is still profitable even with a shrinking pool of viewers. I expect the fate of some mass social media platforms to be that same. Some people will always remain there. I don't know when we started to take internet comments seriously, I only know that I don't like that at all.
  • no_time 5y ago
    >their internet handle is their real life identity I feel like the west forgot how to be pseudo-anonymous on the internet. If you take a look at Chinese or Japanese internet users they still mostly prefer distancing their meatspace self from their virtual identity.
• metabagel 5y ago
  Is there a search engine which will only return pages that don’t have advertisements on them? I feel like that would be a way to find a lot of independent content.
• wnolens 5y ago
  I don't think it matters what any of us (HN) want or think is best. The generation born after social media began their socialization and individuation journey in life on snapchat/tiktok/instagram. This generation doesn't give a shit about google. I think the "web" is dying, paradigm of using a browser to access websites is almost gone by comparison to a decade ago. The internet is mobile-centric. All this metaverse shit is trying to get ahead of the platform curve. The success there depends on if it gets traction with 16-24 year olds.
• vmception 5y ago
  Why is it always these brutalist websites that are nostalgic about this? Like its either someone that was actually around then or a Gen Z strange reimagining of it, both are strange imo
• aunty_helen 5y ago
  cough Look at the forest you're in. Everybody mourning the "old" internet while posting on a text only news board with a great community of people, constant traffic, new inspiring stuff daily and best of all without ads or pervasive trackers.
  • toto444 5y ago
    Also the top link right now is pointing to a forum : https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/2022-01-25-issue-with-tls-alpn-01-validation-method/170450 https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/2022-01-25-issue-with-tl...
• squarefoot 5y ago
  Slightly related: I may want to contribute to the cause by building a very small personal site on a broadband connection (unfiltered public dynamic IP plus DuckDns) after I solve some health problems and relocate, hopefully within a few months. If I'm lucky I should get a better connection than the roughly 60down/22up I have now, which would seem ridiculous for that use, but I'd make a strictly static site, no Javascript, small images and no or extremely small downloads (torrent might help for bigger ones, if any). I don't plan to build any community around it, just to document projects I would discuss on newsgroups and possibly here, so no user input would be involved. Anyone here who had a similar experience can share more information, caveats, suggest tools, etc? Thanks.
  • mrlemke 5y ago
    Apache with server side includes (SSI) will allow you to quickly and easily template websites without adding new tools or processes. I find this to be a decent balance between a static site and DRY. I don't care for most static site generators since I prefer to write my site content in HTML as much as possible. For example, your index.html may look like: <!-- #include virtual="/top.html" --> <h1>My Website</h1> <p>A bunch of content</p> <!-- #include virtual="/bottom.html" --> top.html could be something like: <html> <head> <title>My Website</title> <!--other header info --> </head> <body> And for bottom.html: <footer> <!-- footer stuff --> </footer> </body> </html>
  • BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    Are you saying 22Mbps upload is ridiculous for hosting a website? I may be parsing your comment wrong... Anyways if it's a static site with little JS and not too many smallish images, that'll be plenty of bandwidth for a personal site. If a page load is 1MB (that's a lot for this sort of website!) that'll let you serve up to ~2.75 requests per second/86.4k requests per day which is a lot of traffic! And if the burst is double that, then your page load will merely take twice as long.
• chj 5y ago
  Off topic rant on the date "1-24-22": Please just use YYYY-mm-dd, for the sake of future generations so that they don't have to check if it's 2022 or 2122.
  • lopis 5y ago
    We're definitely heading for a Y2.1K problem and we've learned nothing.
• onion2k 5y ago
  as late as 2015, 2.1 million people were somehow still using its dial-up service That number is how many AOL Dial Up customers there were in 2015. It's from this article - https://www.cnet.com/news/more-than-2-million-people-still-pay-for-aol-dialup/ https://www.cnet.com/news/more-than-2-million-people-still-p... Paying for the service is not the same as using the service. There are many reasons to pay for a redundant dial-up connection in case of an outage with your main internet provider. There are probably lots of people who had a dial-up account but forgot to close it. Some people probably did still use it, but for things they don't need broadband for (email, IRC, etc). You can't use the existence of a handful of dial-up connections to claim we should be building web software for people on dial-up. That just shows you haven't thought about things enough.
• grodes 5y ago
  horrible bg color and content width annoying to read
• toto444 5y ago
  How many of you mourning the old internet frequent neocities or have their own personal website ? I don't think the the answer is 'a lot'. Everyone on HN complains about everything being turned into a business but everyone also wants to create their own start up and turn it into a unicorn.
  • nils-m-holm 5y ago
    Anecdatum: I have maintained my web site since 1995 and have my own domain since 1999 (http://t3x.org http://t3x.org). I have never had a "business" nor have I dreamt about big money. Give me back the old internet anytime!
    • toto444 5y ago
      I like your 'Who am I page'. I have started an 'old internet' like website about 3 years ago and I love working on it. It is my space of creativity and freedom. If you want to check it out it is in my bio. I think the reality is that no one really want these websites anymore.
    • verytrivial 5y ago
      ... well there goes my weekend. Great looking site!
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • galoisgirl 5y ago
      1995 webmasters unite!
    • tmalsburg2 5y ago
      Love your book covers and your book Lisp From Nothing was a fun read. Thank you.
    • ekanes 5y ago
      "who am I" is fantastic. Thank you. http://t3x.org/whoami.html http://t3x.org/whoami.html
• boffinAudio 5y ago
  I started an open, special-interest community based around a mailing list (SMTP) around ~30 years ago, pre-Web 2.0, in a time when a lot of folks were glad to just be able to send email on the Internet, let alone browse it with some fancy browser thingy. Its still running and still functioning as a social network. The Internet is only as strong as its protocols, which is to say it is extremely strong because there are more than one protocol to use for the purposes of communication. The crazy thing is, the cyclomatic complexity of dealing with communication over email versus through some web-based interface, is pretty much not comparable. Email is much easier to use - if you treat email with the respect it deserves. But I think so many generations of Internet users were taught to use email derisively, or non-productively, so it 'feels' like a downgrade to go back to text-based email. Top-quoting vs. bottom-quoting, rich text versus plain, X-headers versus custom .sigs, there is a huge list of things that can go wrong with email-based social networking, but ultimately the proof is in the pudding: we're still running. We still have occasional flame wars and the odd exodus of favourite members, but we also have regular returns of long-lost members who make their way back to the mailing list after a few years of hell on the other networks. So, for 30 years, we've been doing the social networking thing just fine.. Functionally, we have the same degree of internal communication in our group as any Facebook groups - only, we're 100% in control of our own data and no third party can (easily) shut down the discourse. I consider this one of the factors for why we've survived 30 years as a group without implosion - there is no control point besides the mailserver itself, and that is protected by an admin whose understanding of human interaction precludes interfering when things get toasty ... so when people leave, they leave. We don't care, its not part of our business model to capture eyeballs, etc. That said, we are pretty small and don't get many new members popping in, although we welcome it. Perhaps thats a blessing, maybe its a curse. We'll see in another 30 years, I'm guessing ...
• hashin 5y ago
  I have maintained my blog (http://www.hashin.me http://www.hashin.me) for the last 8 years without ever trying to monetize it (I am 28 now). I have written hundreds of articles there, about a lot of topics that have caught my attention. I have perhaps written hundreds of thousands of words on the internet and never earned a rupee (dollar) from them in all these years. But that's what made me who I am. I would still keep doing that. What I make at work and at business is the product of the great education that internet gave me. I live a life where I am always online, but the ads simply fail to influence my decisions. And I spend most of my time on places like HN, which is representative of the good ole internet. As someone has already mentioned in this thread, the internet hasn't changed much. It is us; but if we know what we are doing, we can definitely choose the reality we are living in. My two cents.
  • skinkestek 5y ago
    Thanks! I'm probably not going to be a regular reader but sites like what yours seems to be brings me happiness. It is the kind of content I enjoy finding in a search or with marginalia explore. Edit: I too have one of these sites were I write about things that interest me, technical and political. I also have no ads but I enjoy the writing (and don't write when I don't enjoy it, since luckily it doesn't matter) and I enjoy it when people get something useful out of it.
• chrischapman 5y ago
  > And, a high percentage of websites load as slowly as a sick turtle awaking from a long slumber. I love that the full page makes just 2 requests (1 html file and one favicon). 20KB transferred. 1 second to load. No JavaScript, no cookies, no dependencies at all. This, to me, is the essence of 'respect your visitor'. Kudos.
• heldtec 5y ago
  It has the "Share on ... [Facebook] [Twitter] [Reddit] [Linkedin] [Hacker News]" in the right upper corner. Funny ?
• AsgridLong 5y ago
  When talking about online communities and gathering places I think people make an incredible mistake: they consider relative values instead of absolute ones. Sure in many cases one has to look at how much something is popular relative to the general population, but do you really need to think like that when talking about websites and forums? I mean, from an absolute point of view there are many more forums, personal blogs, rss feeds and independent projects than ever before, even if their relative popularity has declined. But what do you care? A forum hosting 300 active users is already incredibly crowded, it's very difficult you will get to know even half of all them in your own lifetime, why do you need everything to turn virally popular? Would you want your local NIX club to suddenly jump from a few tens of members to thousands? No, because the point is to create a community. Who cares if some NIX club residing on Facebook has 100.000 members, ultimately what you care about is the one you go to every week/month and in which you see real people and talk real talk. We are not talking here about an industrial endeavor where if not enough users partake then production crawls to a halt worldwide, we are talking about buying a crappy computer, coding a few pages in simple HTML and buying a funky domain name for pennies. It will always be cheap and simple to host your own stuff, you don't need self hosting to become the next big thing to enjoy your life.
• holoduke 5y ago
  I think it's more rotten than ever. Almost every video or article I see is possessed by the evil SEO devil. Sometimes I think I finally found a norm al one to only find out later that I was too dumb to recognise some new tricks.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• taurusnoises 5y ago
  It'd be amazing if some HNers who vibe with this article would teach online courses that teach people who have no idea how to "decentralized" their web life by running servers and their own sites (not nec on the blockchain). There's a lot of us out there who need the very basics, and would love to participate!
• Ldorigo 5y ago
  I've been collecting some remnants of what the author calls the "old web" at https://github.com/ldorigo/awesome-list-of-specialist-websites https://github.com/ldorigo/awesome-list-of-specialist-websit... . Would love for more people to contribute. These passion websites give me a genuine feeling of nostalgia and happiness.
• FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago
  I remember the old internet (pre-1993) before the WWW. It was pretty fun. No one was trying to make any money off of it then. It was more like a great conversation than anything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
• spicy_tendies 5y ago
  I am extremely happy to be a part of this new Web3 movement. To me, it's a movement to return to smaller communities and more personable online experiences. DeFi is just one aspect.
• sylware 5y ago
  Serious conflicts may rise due to critical web sites (banks, administration related services) got their noscript/basic (x)html compatibility broken during this very latest years.
• TrapLord_Rhodo 5y ago
  I'm suprised none of this article mentions Starlink. It's the most dangerous development of our generation. Since it is so technologically advanced, no one will be able to compete. Additionally, since Elon is the dictator of spaceX and has a long history of bowing to oppresive regimes demands (See his China factory/ Data rights promised on cars produced), Elon will sell the internet to the highest bidder.