14 ms·

An argument for a return to Web 1.0

206 points by pmlnr 5y ago

Bancakes 5y ago
Not just HTML. If we want a static web, we could write the whole thing out in stack automata like PostScript. Very simple.
- ryanbrunner 5y ago
  The big thing HTML brought over literal static documents is easy and pervasive hyperlinking. Without that, I'm not even sure if you can call whatever's left "the web".
Deukhoofd 5y ago
The argument basically boils down to "everything used to be better, and the general populace shouldn't be able to use the internet". While I have good nostalgic feelings about the way the internet used to be, this misses a lot of things the modern internet offers our society, and only focuses on the negatives.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Couldn't there, technically speaking, be a technology that offered the things the Internet used to offer, in parallel with the technology that offers the things the modern offers our society?
  - Deukhoofd 5y ago
    There could be, and there are, but the article focuses a lot on the negative effects the modern web (and especially social media) had on society. These effects would not change with parallel systems.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Perhaps it sounds cynical, but can't we just let things burn instead of spending all this time and energy attempting to put out the eternal dumpster fire that is the 2020s web-scape? Perhaps it isn't possible. Instead, maybe we build the replacements that we want, invite those who want a piece, sure, even put up a few signs pointing the way; but for the rest, you really can't save those who aren't looking for salvation, so let them have their technological dystopia if they can't see it for what it is.
      - Deukhoofd 5y ago
        Sure, there's systems for that, such as Gemini. If you don't want to use the modern web alongside the rest of society, it's fairly easy to just... not. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
  - ryanbrunner 5y ago
    Yes, but that seems like something new we want to strive for. Going back to Web 1.0 is basically saying that 90% of people shouldn't really be able to interact with the internet in a meaningful way beyond consumption. It's not all that different than the argument that things were better when newspapers were the only ones participating in the news. The original promise of the Internet was heavily tied to democratization of publishing media. In many ways, the internet of today is far closer to that goal than the internet of the late 90s, just with a lot of backsteps and additional problems created along the way. We ought to solve those problems, but just resetting the clock back 20 years isn't a step forward.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      If the technological "improvements" over the last 20 years have largely had negative effects, wouldn't it at be possible that going forward toward something new will have even more destructive effects?
      - notriddle 5y ago
        If. Where would you even start to determine if that was true or not?
        marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Well the point is you we can't. It's every bit as baseless to assume continuing on this path will have beneficial effects as it is to assume they will have negative effects. Change may be discovering a hundred dollars in the pocket of your old jacket, or it may be discovering an ominous lump on your neck. You really don't know what it brings.
jameshart 5y ago
“And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.” Douglas Adams
- Trouble_007 5y ago
  Quote: “The best laid Plans of Mice and Men often go Awry.” ― Robert Burns
  - MrVandemar 5y ago
    That's not how it goes. Not if you're attributing it to Robert Burns, anyway, "The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!"
    - Trouble_007 5y ago
      True! - I did used a rough English translation, My sincere apologizes to any and all Scots I may have offended! Please see the full Poem 'To a Mouse' : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_A_Mouse,_on_Turning_Her_Up_in_Her_Nest,_With_The_Plough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_A_Mouse,_on_Turning_Her_Up_... - Edit: OT: To add the context to my reply to the quote from jameshart, who quoted; Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galaxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galax... - https://www.quotes.net/mquote/901391 https://www.quotes.net/mquote/901391 The Script states: Frankie Mouse: Still, the best laid plans of mice. Arthur Dent: And men. Frankie Mouse: What? Arthur Dent: And men... The best laid plans of mice and men. Frankie Mouse: What have men got to do with it?
aslilac 5y ago
Haven’t actual read it yet, but I was writing something last night about how I miss the early days of Web 2.0, which I refer to as “the teenage web”
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ryandrake 5y ago
Web 1.0 didn't tend to use: width: 600px to artificially constrain content to a tiny horizontal sliver. Some sites did it with tables, but most didn't bother to try to dictate so much style. Part of the wonderfulness of web 1.0 was taking advantage of browser defaults: Background colors, default text fonts, and not doing so much specifying exact style. The site is pleasantly readable and "responsive" to different browser sizes when you turn Style Sheets off!
- ryanbrunner 5y ago
  1.0 is a bit of an arbitrary distinction (especially since it's a term only applied in retrospect, no one called anything "Web 1.0" at the time). But there's definitely two distinct periods - one of which is what you're describing where styling was pretty minimal and many sites looked more or less like the browser defaults, but also a distinct period prior to "Web 2.0" where styling was overused even compared to today, and stuff like flash, image maps, frames, etc were fairly common.
  - calvinmorrison 5y ago
    yep, nobody is bringing up marquees, horrible gradient background, unreadable bright blue text on yellow backgrounds, flashing GIFs and all the other atrocities. Plus the endless "coming soon" and "under construction" pages
    - BeefWellington 5y ago
      I mean, those distractions haven't really gone away, they've just been replaced with advertising.
    - navjack27 5y ago
      That's aesthetic and not defined rules
- bpicolo 5y ago
  To be fair monitors were only about that size in total at the time
flyingfences 5y ago
I agree with the overall sentiment, but it seems a little ironic that this author is pining for a return to the simple old days of hand-written HTML but has written a site that doesn't even show links to its own pages with JS disabled.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  "learning to hand code HTML" doesn't exclude using Javascript or CSS, or anything else for that matter.
  - flyingfences 5y ago
    No, it doesn't, but the general idea is that scripts are supposed to supplement the base page, not needlessly replace effectively static pieces of it.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    I wrote a ton of CSS and early JS in Windows Notepad. Or ON PAPER if the computer(s) I had access to were in use.
- pgcj_poster 5y ago
  The options available to the author are: 1. Manually add a link to every page on the site each time a new one is added. 2. Give up on hand-writing HTML and use a server-side templating system 3. Give up on having navigation on each page 4. Load the navigation through JavaScript Given that they want to hand-write HTML, and they (presumably) want it to be easy enough for everyone to do, the JS options seems like a reasonable choice.
  - flyingfences 5y ago
    3 seems like the sane option to me... That's what I remember most sites doing back in the day if they weren't going for 2. Have a top-level "directory" page with individual pages linking back up to it and to the homepage, rather than having pages that link to literally nothing at all.
justaman 5y ago
I just want a web where everyone has their own space. Not renting a space from Facebook, Google, or XYZ. A space that can be ad free. One where people can choose what data is released and how; where deny all is default for any information gathering. If we want to socialize with someone, couldn't we just go to that person instead of a social media broker? The tech of web 1.0 is limiting and less approachable for the average person. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. We went down the rabbit hole of web 2.0 and it doesn't look like we will come back out. Web 3.0 feels dystopian.
- jaltekruse 5y ago
  Social media has it's drawbacks, but large hosted services exist for good reasons and have spawned entire new industries. An independent artist couldn't host a server to share their work (especially if they want to share content like video widely), or run a store capable of handling a spike of traffic if they became popular. Also the network effects of the platforms give huge benefits allowing at least a portion of promising diamonds in the rough to be found and shared (even if they are mixed in with a bunch of dumb clickbait and cheap knockoffs of products as discussed in the recent Etsy boycott thread). It's definitely not all roses, but I don't really see a clear path out of this. Because for whatever feelings people have about big tech, YouTube, Facebook, Etsy, Instagram have all driven billions in business for non-tech companies. And they've done it by creating experiences that are engaging to end consumers. Sure we might see traffic exchange hands among the big players, and there will be other successful new networks like we have seen with TikTok. But I think people don't want to self host for good reasons.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
The core argument is the same as a recent post here [1] about using older computers - that it reduces distractions and that older technology was better in its simplicity. Today's we are teetering on the brink of complexity breakdown. These are good arguments that stand alone. The counter-arguments are always the same "Hey, that's a problem with people - just exercise willpower and don't get distracted". Or "Hey, modern electronics and software is more 'efficient', just throw more cycles at it (silicon and cognitive) and get with the programme" But these only serve to minimise and deny real sentiments that smart software developers would pay close attention to. There's lot's of sentiment out there that is being mistaken for 'nostalgia', which is genuine dissatisfaction with modern tools. That's why projects like suckless.org [2] seem more relevant every day. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001296 [2] https://suckless.org/ https://suckless.org/
- sanderjd 5y ago
  I am sympathetic to the argument here, but I think this misrepresents the counterargument. I think the argument against this is simply that it's not what people actually want, it's what people like us want them to want. It sort of reminds me of that series where an architect makes fun of mcmansion monstrosities. The architect is right - those mcmansions suck - and we're right - simplicity in computing is better - but I think people want the mcmansions and I think people want the flashier more interactive software.
  - krapp 5y ago
    >but I think people want the mcmansions and I think people want the flashier more interactive software I think that's a bit too condescending. People don't want mcmansions and flash, they want to publish to the internet quickly and efficiently. The web is a tool for them, a means to an end. The HN set might prefer to live in a world where computers only shipped with Emacs and the web was just a raw JSON API and you had to write your own software for everything from scratch, but no one else does. And that's perfectly legitimate. Why should someone making music, or art, or who wants to set up a business or network with people have to hand-code their own HTML or write their own backend just because some self-appointed gatekeepers decided that using a service ruins the artisinal quirkiness of the web? That's like saying authors should have to hand-write their manuscripts or set their own type. The web is a tool that's supposed to serve everyone.
louissan 5y ago
Back to tables and shim.gif and Mosaic? No thanks. :-) However I think the "how it was / how it is /where to now?" postulate is right. Especially the "immediate dopamine injection via Tweet" versus "build on your own independent site". It could actually make for far less concentrated content and so data and so power (in a way). Twitter: "give hime a fish a eat". Independent Web: "Give him a fishing pole so he can learn how to catch them himself".
- unnouinceput 5y ago
  What's wrong with tables? They draw faster than a crapload of chained DIV's just to show you a shitty "Press here to allow all cookies" info.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    CSS grid has finally made it unnecessary to abuse tables for layout.
    - IYasha 5y ago
      Call me when something "finally makes it unnecessary" to update browser or throw away perfectly usable devices. Tables work with IE6 and NetFront, so they rule. :P
  - louissan 5y ago
    Oh sure. Tabular data is still tabular data. But it has always been semantically wrong to use tables for layout.
cletus 5y ago
Many years ago I had a job to add some features to an existing PHP site. The code base was a mess. I think there were 7 copies of the code in production that were copied and modified slightly to some specific purpose. It was like 300,000 lines of code (IIRC, it's been awhile). This forced me to do what I always try and avoid doing (because no one will thank you for it) and that is to clean it up. Some of it was necessary (eg it was open to SQL injection). In doing so I reduced it down to <20,000 including the new features required. This was a fairly stock standard database driven website but in just doing things the right way the page load times got to under 50ms (from 500-1000ms). This wasn't an SPA (of course) but I remember thinking how refreshing it was. You could link to any page. Those links loaded superfast (this is the bane of SPAs when they support deep-linking at all) and ran on everything just fine. This is actually one of the best featurs about PHP too: a static functional core so there's basically no bootstrapping. This means you can tear down all the resources of rendering a page. Performance becomes way more predictable and you're way less prone to resource leaks. There is magic in fast loading pages and I miss that about good Web 1.0 sites. This is actually the biggest problem with all the ad and tracking JS packages: the load times go to shit. This becomes a justification for SPAs As for Web 3.0... ugh. Why? Just... why? I guess that's a whole separate topic.
- ryanbrunner 5y ago
  This is still 100% possible, and many frameworks support it. SPAs are not the only way to build things, and frankly aren't even the most popular way to build things outside of tech startups.
- rambambram 5y ago
  What you describe matches exactly my view on webdevelopment. Every click is a new request (with some exceptions, which prove the rule). Instead of jumping from document to document by clicking a link, it becomes one big flow with fast page loads. If you have fast page loads (easily done with PHP), it feels and behaves like any other application.
falcolas 5y ago
I love the simple and honest idealism that drives this message. I think it’s completely unrealistic, and goes against human nature, but I still appreciate the vision.
Trouble_007 5y ago
https://vhsoverdrive.neocities.org/essays/oldweb.html https://vhsoverdrive.neocities.org/essays/oldweb.html stated; >The web was established with the best of intentions. The basic idea was that if everyone could share their thoughts and ideas with the world, the best ones would be vetted and float to the top. The bad ones would be ignored and pushed to the bottom. But human nature has a tendency to corrupt the best of intentions.< - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot... stated; > Microsoft shuts down AI chatbot after it turned into a Nazi - By Amy Kraft Updated on: March 25, 2016<
DrSiemer 5y ago
Sure, the web used to be a fun place for tinkerers in the beginning. But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back inside. Going luddite is never a good solution. We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new development has brought us and learn how to live with it, not suppress all recent development in the hopes of recreating an environment that only really worked for a small subsection of humanity. Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 2.0."
- shockeychap 5y ago
  > Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 3.0." This. 100%.
  - jordz 5y ago
    Also agree. However, I do yearn to relive the days where one can load up a web page and start reading content, without being jarred by pop-ups and ads that inadvertently move the content post load (which of course happens 3 seconds later..).
    - todd3834 5y ago
      Ad blockers are so good that I nearly forgot about this experience.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      I know a site, it's on mobile. You use it by entering a location in a search bar. You select the search bar, the keyboard takes a second to appear. You start typing, nothing happens because they've reimplemented the text box in javascript, and the script hasn't fully loaded yet. The script loads and the second half of the letters you typed appears in a letter by letter fashion. The page freezes and a suggestion box appears, every second or so the suggestions change to reflect the letters you typed earlier. You erase what you've typed. With every letter that changes, the page freezes a second as a new suggestion loads. When it freezes, it stops accepting letters, so there's a lot of erasing and re-typing. Alright, you're almost done typing... then the page freezes and the page turns grey, and a pop over loads. They want you to load fill out a satisfaction survey. You try to close it to continue, but the script handling the close button hasn't loaded yet so it doesn't work for a good 20 seconds. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a javascript stomping on a human face -- for ever.
luckystarr 5y ago
Sticking to their own principles I see. It's even written in HTML4.01.
sriku 5y ago
I hope in vain for a return to pre-web 1.0 -- when we were able to read without being watched. Many a revolution probably happened due to that "feature" of paper books ... which we lost when we went online with words.
ravenstine 5y ago
There's nothing holding people back from returning to Web 1.0. HTTP 1.1 is still a thing. Static webpages are still a thing. IRC is still a thing. Even better, host it on a P2P network like I2P where those on the network have to get over the hurdle of knowing about it in the first place and being able to set it up, just as early web users had to know how to plug in a modem, install a browser, and use those "URL" things. If your pages provide value, people will still find them in any case. Oh... but you wanted Web 1.0 content with Web 3.0 levels of traffic. Well, you're not gonna get that. Pick your poison.
onion2k 5y ago
I don't understand the rational behind throwing away one of the most useful, most brilliant, and most valuable resource humans have created just because it has a few major problems. There's a strong argument in favor of fixing the problems, sure, but the world without the modern web would be significantly worse, not least because 90% of HN users wouldn't have jobs.
- jonassalen 5y ago
  What resource are you talking about? Social media, or the internet? Because the author clearly states that corporate social media are the problem, which I - and a lot of psychologists and sociologists - agree with.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    What resource are you talking about? The modern web (eg Web 2.0) is an open software distribution platform that forms the basis of hundreds of thousands of company's products. Social media is a part of that, and it needs fixing, but a return to Web 1.0 is not the solution.
gz5 5y ago
Many of us share this nostalgia for the early-day, long-tail pioneer phase. I feel business model innovation is the key to moving the pendulum back towards that landscape - that the ad model will also result in centralization in which we are the product?
thomassmith65 5y ago
I love this essay, but this claim is false: On most large sites this can be mitigated by blocking of toxic users Given the design of the internet, it cannot. Large sites have the ability to block usernames, IPs, etc... not actual users. I realize this is hardly earth-shattering news to the HN audience, but it's meaningful.
cies 5y ago
I found the dark web full of web1.0 vibes. no-JS. sometimes no-cookies. pretty oldskool.
snshn 5y ago
Most people like being ruled. That's why it's one person performing and thousands sitting and watching, not the other way around. Once early adopters are gone from something, it's usually all spectators what's left, and that's when things turn for the worse. The only thing that can bring back web 1.0 is good dictatorship of sorts, where one person with strong beliefs and good moral character takes control over something big. E.g. somebody wealthy purchasing large social media platform. But we can only hope for that to happen, it's very unlikely there's a person crazy enough to do such a thing today.
- kornhole 5y ago
  I do remind myself that most people are followers. The leaders among us need to help lead others. I would like people to stop berating 'Social Media' because that is a general category and instead berate the specific corporate, AI, state affiliated social media platforms where the problems lie. Free social media such as those in the fediverse do not have the same problems and don't deserve to be lumped in with them. They have their own problems but much fewer.
bearjaws 5y ago
HN every week: Old thing good, new thing bad. Do you believe we should also go back to not having search engines? BBS as primary information sharing? Email & IRC as pretty much the only way to communicate? Web 1.0 was riddled with scalability problems, you are free to take what you consider the best parts of it and simplify your Web 2.0 site.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Web 1.0 had search engines, message boards and instant messaging. Most of what you are describing is things that dominated before the web.
  - bearjaws 5y ago
    No disagreement on having message boards and instant messaging or search engines, I am saying that they are an actual step backwards when it comes to making lay people productive when using the web. Not everyone is a HN alum ready to write a boolean query to find the most relevant post on a forum.
HidyBush 5y ago
If a "return to web 1.0" means going back to baroque and quirky websites on which I have to constantly fight to find information and not carve my eyes out out of digust then no, thanks. The Web was meant as a means to publish hyperlinked text documents, nothing more, nothing less. I don't want to read an entire book on a web page, just let me download an .epub file. I don't want to read your poorly formatted artsy manifesto in my browser, just let me download a PDF. I don't want to read your blogpost which is just a presentation in disguise filled with inline images, just let me download a powerpoint file. I'm glad that if I want to search for some information Wikipedia presents me a consistent interface and gives me a brief overview of a subject and presents me with further hyperlinked content both pointing to IRL and web-hosted documents. Wikipedia to me perfectly represents the spirit of true Web 1.0 even if the content is Web 2.0 in nature.
- navjack27 5y ago
  It seems like you are conflating simple websites with the aesthetic of websites of web 1.0. these things are mutually exclusive and going back to web 1.0 will allow you to just download an epub of a very very simple text heavy website.
  - HidyBush 5y ago
    It's a matter of principles. If you give people javascript and css they will use it, full stop. The reason why the web has evolved this way is because the people back then were responsible for it. You have to cut the hydra's head and simply remove everything that is graphic and only keep basic text formatting.
dpweb 5y ago
There needs to always be a place for anonymity, but I’d argue not in all forums. Words have impact. I’d love to see some foundation or something to work on the problem of toxicity/hate. Develop technologies to allow sites to better police against it, detect bots trying to incite, etc.. Of course, you have to draw a line between free speech and hate speech but we already do that.
mynameishere 5y ago
Everyone should wear masks because science is settled therefore we should go back to 1995 technologies. Something like that. Great argument.
IYasha 5y ago
Web 1.5 is fine too :) I can live with some minor XHTML and few optional lines of JS.
skadamat 5y ago
Bring back Doug Engelbart's web vision! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
lobsang 5y ago
Not quite web 1.0 but I do wonder if there's a market for services that are closer to early web 2.0 products. For example something closer to Facebook circa 2006. No infinite scroll, a simple timeline, basic media sharing. Would it be possible to make a reasonable profit by offering simpler versions of existing services just without the engagement dark-patterns we currently have. And if so, could you create enough disruption to move the needle back slightly?
- cxr 5y ago
  > Not quite web 1.0 but I do wonder if there's a market for services that are closer to early web 2.0 products. It has for a long time been my position that technical people who are aspiring entrepreneurs (esp. those itching to practice building something) should just clone an existing product and wait for the original to change or shut down. Whenever I say "clone", I really do mean that, and not "our own take on solving the same problem". Gmail's interface changes for the worse, or Vine gets bought and shut down? Boom, there you are on day 1 of the backlash, ready to capture anyone looking to (or forced to) jump ship. This worked so well by accident with Reddit being able to acquire the exodus of the Digg userbase that I don't understand why people don't try to do it deliberately. And in cases like Vine, due to the nature of abandoned trademarks, you could (eventually) even legally "relaunch" it under the the same brand. This is something that pizza shops do all the time, but it doesn't really happen in SV.
Zeff84 5y ago
I feel like the biggest issue with Web 2.0 is the economic model. Most people probably still don't understand the amount of data collected and sold that funds a lot of social media. I often wonder what the internet would be like if data collection and advertising were gone and people had to pay for services they used.
raspyberr 5y ago
I have yet to read the full article but the first thing I noticed was that the plaintext links in the navigation pane and the small picture links in the links pane didn't appear until I turned Javascript on. I found this amusing. No comments on the article yet though.
intrasight 5y ago
> Now the web has become a cesspool of toxic content. I strongly disagree. The web not only achieve but greatly exceeded it's potential. But the web has transitioned from being a destination to being a tool. Like all tools, it can be misused.
eljimmy 5y ago
The golden age of the Internet was also distinctly different because I'd wager that the majority of people online back in those days had some technical know-how. You knew you were interacting with people who could operate a computer well enough to dial-up to an ISP so generally they were fairly intelligent. As nostalgic as it is, I think if you were to really strive for that type of world again you need to move forward with building a new network - something that requires some measure of intelligence in order to gain access to it. Of course, what's then stopping someone from automating that and repeating the cycle all over again? Better off just carving out your little piece in this new massive online world and building a community - or - just join one that already exists. There's millions of forums and "hand-made" websites out there, you just need to dig a little deeper these days.
duxup 5y ago
Web applications are awesome. I don't have to buy hundred dollar licenses / pirate left and right to try and use things. So much more information, media, entertainment is now available. I have a lot of nostalgia about the past, but I'm not interested in going back.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  Instead of hundred dollar licenses, you have to pay hundred dollar subscription fees. I don’t see it as improvement.
  - duxup 5y ago
    I don’t find that to be the case.
- navjack27 5y ago
  You mean like photopia and office live or docs or whatever? I still pirate tons of other stuff to use and try and eventually buy. I can't buy Photoshop so that is a perma steal until they go back to $800 boxes of software. Media is available but just this year I bought three CDs and one cassette tape. I love moving backwards
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  You also have less control over the application. It can spy on you and change out from under you. Information, media, and entertainment were always available, but in a form where you actually own it, not pay for N subscription services before their license runs out. That said: best of both worlds imo is fat client, traditional applications that run in a web runtime (e.g., Electron) since you can run 'em on any OS. ;p
ComradePhil 5y ago
It's a bit annoying that this kind of idiocy is upvoted to the front page very often. The web is the way it is becuase the forces which are seeking profit and power get their way in any new system that emerges. There is a new system which is truly designed from the ground up to serve the masses and is immune to the tactics used to control Web 2.0. The decentralized web is the internet run for the people by the people... and even if you rely on service providers to host your data or do your computation, they can't see what you want them to see or take your content down. It is called Web 3.0 (there are two Web 3.0s, unfortunately... one is the Google's version where web is organized auch that you don't have to leave Google to browse it... think amp but for everything else... and then there is the blockchain version, which is what I am referring to). Here's Gavin Wood's TED talk on the topic: https://youtu.be/UIBR99gOLOQ https://youtu.be/UIBR99gOLOQ
- cam0 5y ago
  I can't tell if you're being serious? There is nothing about 'Web 3.0', at the least the current implementation, that is designed to serve the masses. The "new system" is purely theoretical and all of the blockchain-based products are expensive, user hostile, and generally just poor pieces of technology considering the state of software engineering in 2022.
CaptArmchair 5y ago
Eternal September is a thing. Over the past 15 years, billions of people became online. I use that number casual, but it's nothing short of a shift on par with the impact Gutenberg had with his printing press. Humanity's barely out of the gates in terms of assessing how this will play out in the long term. The bar to publishing your thoughts, having an online presence,... is stupidly low. That's what big platforms and centralization have achieved. The vast majority of people who make a living online don't care about the details. They simply want to express a thought, share what they see, etc. And the proverbial smartphone and Instagram account are all you need to do exactly that. Wishing to go back to Web 1.0 is a non sequitur because it would mean raising that same bar again. It would also run counter to the billion dollar cottage industries that have sprung up in the wake of the emergence of these platforms. That doesn't mean using the core technologies that make up the Web and leveraging platforms are mutually exclusive. They aren't. Nothing stops you from breaking away with like minded people and building your own community. The openness and standardization of the specifications that define the technology allow you to do exactly that.
- shuntress 5y ago
  Low barrier-to-entry to share inane thoughts is not the problem. The problem is centralized systems attempting to maximize acquisition of attention by baiting for that attention with outrage and controversy.
- pmlnr 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect sometimes things that need some effort end up with more value in the eyes of their makers. That higher barrier might not be that bad, because I firmly believe one of the reasons what got us to the modern web is people not valuing what they had put into it.
joaomeloplus 5y ago
I am in the web since 1999. I loved it then and also love it now. It has popularized access do knowledge, opened a channel to all forms of expression for millions around the world and continously lower the barrier to more innovation. Friction is present in all social activities: politics, families, friendships. This kind of tought seems to me more as failure to cope with human nature than rational legitime analisys.
wink 5y ago
Site uses CSS for columns and not tables. No dogfooding. /s
timcavel 5y ago
[dead]
shuntress 5y ago
The thing is though, I want what Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok have. I want to see what my friends, family, and acquaintances are doing and how their lives are going. To know what is "trending" and be able to look at the same thing everyone else is looking at. The crowd-sourced news and immediate updates from people who are on the ground where things are happening. This article spends a lot of words on "us vs them" and pining for the "good old days" without seeming to consider what the faster-more-intense version of "geocities neighborhoods" would be like.
- kkfx 5y ago
  Can you try do detail what exactly you want about modern web? I'm asking because to many have forgotten, teaches included, that the web and internet are two distinct things or to be more precise one is the platform that run also the other, but not only the other. Long story short: if you want VoIP that's not necessarily a web thing, it's an internet thing. Public users DB again that's can be a web thing, in the sense a site a person, but can also be a Wikidata-like services without any web frontend, something that just offer an open API and anyone who want implement a local client for it, with relevant download/sync of information, caching etc. Internet banking? The same: a simple local desktop application that talk on an open protocols to your banks/peers, store copy of any transaction digitally signed by both parts AND by a State-run official public service as a guarantee for both etc all those things are not necessarily web and actually can be far superior in a classic networked desktop version. About crowdsourced news and aggregators: did you try to consider a classic personal one? I mean RSS feeds of a set of sites you like to follow with local scoring and peer recommendation service built-in? It can be far powerful than Google News or FB user homepage. It does not exists simply because no one actually have written it since most of the development is pushed toward web for economical reasons, but not because the web is better. It does not exists because most people fails to imaging a different world in terms of different tools and lifestyles so fails to see the enormous advantages for us users of that classic model witch actually was and still is the base of the entire IT and still the most advanced tech we have... Did you remember Popcorn Time? Well who impede to build a FacebookTime for instance over ZeroNet? Why do most people not ask nor look for a homeserver and ISPs that offer static IPv6 global addresses to run their own personal infra so for instance just sharing photos does not means passing through Google Drive or iCloud? Why we do not push classic distributed iNUM/VoIP so we can make call with a very big number of participants and not much bandwidth issues? Those are not technical stuff but just human habits. We all se the modern web and most of us fail to imaging a different world.
olah_1 5y ago
So everyone makes custom websites, but 90% of them are hosted on the same service because nobody likes managing a VPS. This isn’t any better than current social media imo.
- ozim 5y ago
  It is better in a way that only people who can write HTML by hand are supposed to publish on the internet. While it is questionable if they are any better than general population, they probably have the same traits and common way of thinking. So they would like the same people to be on the internet. Web 2.0 allows anyone to post anything so eternal September is here alive and we are living it. But closing possibility to post stuff on the internet is not the way to go.
  - olah_1 5y ago
    Non-techy “annoying” people can and have learned to code HTML. It just takes proper motivation. When the only game in town was Myspace, many people learned just so they could have an awesome page. Knowing HTML / CSS gave you more street cred, so to speak. Now that incentive doesn’t exist. But the same people that would have learned are still posting online. Being open to the general public isn’t a problem to me because sub-cultures naturally spring up. Hacker News is like a safe space for people that would have made these manual websites 15 years ago lol.
jdrc 5y ago
This is going to happen , and it will be driven by the availability of high-speed home connections. More and more users will start self-hosting things they outsource not simply becuase they have control, but it's also better.
ozim 5y ago
*Hidden behind a veil of anonymity, users are emboldened to spew all manner of truly vile comments without fear of consequence.* Author would be surprised if he would see what stuff people can post under their real legal names. I assume author is not on FB/TT and is not following shitstorms there. We are way past veil of anonymity. For the rest I like quite from Stanislaw Lem: *Until I starded using interned, I was not aware there are so many idiots in the world.*
randcraw 5y ago
I like the idea of establishing a persistent presence on the net that you manage yourself, where you plant your flag with a hand-built simple static web page, add a few essays, reading lists, pointers to other cool sites, etc, then invite others with like interests to link up. Connecting multiple 'flag' sites like these was one of my favorite ways to discover worthwhile creative content in the early days (as opposed to Web 2.0's automated firehose of spam). That model of web presence also does a nice job of excluding the www's multitude of trash that's otherwise inescapable these days. Playing once more in sandboxes where assholes are not invited does have a certain appeal.
the_gipsy 5y ago
My argument: just let the fucking back-button work
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  "CONFIRM FORM RESUBMISSION? The page that you're looking for used information that you entered. Returning to that page might cause any action you took to be repeated. Do you want to continue?"
ok_coo 5y ago
Yes, but also, we used to have to develop around IE6. StackOverflow wasn't a thing. I recall debugging IE6 display issues for days as a junior. It was horrible. That's not to say the web doesn't currently have issues, it does. I just think it's healthy to be careful of embracing the past too hard.
layer8 5y ago
I’m all for Web 1.0, but please use proportional fonts (even Web 1.0 did).
MarcoZavala 5y ago
darepublic 5y ago
I would rather try to create more compelling web apps that do respect privacy, and try to popularize those, then convince everyone to disable JavaScript for all their web browsing
Vox_Leone 5y ago
Re the OP Absolutely magisterial! I feel represented in each and every word of yours. I [hardcore anti-algorithm, anti-collection, anti-surveillance activist] would not say it better myself. Consider opening the licence for this post apropriately so the word can be translated and spread. Thank you.
dharma1 5y ago
I also hand-coded my GeoCities site in 1995 and have good memories of those nostalgic times - but that’s what it is - nostalgia. People still have the choice and freedom to build websites that that way - just like you might still want to record to multitrack tape instead of a DAW or shoot film instead of digital. In terms of data collection and privacy - I think these things are important and we are thankfully nearly there in tech maturity for local-first encrypted p2p apps becoming feasible. These technologies will enable rich collaborative user experiences without giving away your data unless you want to.
Animats 5y ago
Web 1.0 is now called Markdown.
TheRealNGenius 5y ago
Case in point, that website looks ugly as shit

206 points by pmlnr 5y ago

Not just HTML. If we want a static web, we could write the whole thing out in stack automata like PostScript. Very simple.

ryanbrunner 5y ago
The big thing HTML brought over literal static documents is easy and pervasive hyperlinking. Without that, I'm not even sure if you can call whatever's left "the web".

Deukhoofd 5y ago

The argument basically boils down to "everything used to be better, and the general populace shouldn't be able to use the internet". While I have good nostalgic feelings about the way the internet used to be, this misses a lot of things the modern internet offers our society, and only focuses on the negatives.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Couldn't there, technically speaking, be a technology that offered the things the Internet used to offer, in parallel with the technology that offers the things the modern offers our society?
- Deukhoofd 5y ago
  There could be, and there are, but the article focuses a lot on the negative effects the modern web (and especially social media) had on society. These effects would not change with parallel systems.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Perhaps it sounds cynical, but can't we just let things burn instead of spending all this time and energy attempting to put out the eternal dumpster fire that is the 2020s web-scape? Perhaps it isn't possible. Instead, maybe we build the replacements that we want, invite those who want a piece, sure, even put up a few signs pointing the way; but for the rest, you really can't save those who aren't looking for salvation, so let them have their technological dystopia if they can't see it for what it is.
    - Deukhoofd 5y ago
      Sure, there's systems for that, such as Gemini. If you don't want to use the modern web alongside the rest of society, it's fairly easy to just... not. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- ryanbrunner 5y ago
  Yes, but that seems like something new we want to strive for. Going back to Web 1.0 is basically saying that 90% of people shouldn't really be able to interact with the internet in a meaningful way beyond consumption. It's not all that different than the argument that things were better when newspapers were the only ones participating in the news. The original promise of the Internet was heavily tied to democratization of publishing media. In many ways, the internet of today is far closer to that goal than the internet of the late 90s, just with a lot of backsteps and additional problems created along the way. We ought to solve those problems, but just resetting the clock back 20 years isn't a step forward.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    If the technological "improvements" over the last 20 years have largely had negative effects, wouldn't it at be possible that going forward toward something new will have even more destructive effects?
    - notriddle 5y ago
      If. Where would you even start to determine if that was true or not?
      - marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Well the point is you we can't. It's every bit as baseless to assume continuing on this path will have beneficial effects as it is to assume they will have negative effects. Change may be discovering a hundred dollars in the pocket of your old jacket, or it may be discovering an ominous lump on your neck. You really don't know what it brings.

jameshart 5y ago

“And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.” Douglas Adams

Trouble_007 5y ago
Quote: “The best laid Plans of Mice and Men often go Awry.” ― Robert Burns
- MrVandemar 5y ago
  That's not how it goes. Not if you're attributing it to Robert Burns, anyway, "The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!"
  - Trouble_007 5y ago
    True! - I did used a rough English translation, My sincere apologizes to any and all Scots I may have offended! Please see the full Poem 'To a Mouse' : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_A_Mouse,_on_Turning_Her_Up_in_Her_Nest,_With_The_Plough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_A_Mouse,_on_Turning_Her_Up_... - Edit: OT: To add the context to my reply to the quote from jameshart, who quoted; Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galaxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galax... - https://www.quotes.net/mquote/901391 https://www.quotes.net/mquote/901391 The Script states: Frankie Mouse: Still, the best laid plans of mice. Arthur Dent: And men. Frankie Mouse: What? Arthur Dent: And men... The best laid plans of mice and men. Frankie Mouse: What have men got to do with it?

aslilac 5y ago

Haven’t actual read it yet, but I was writing something last night about how I miss the early days of Web 2.0, which I refer to as “the teenage web”

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ryandrake 5y ago

Web 1.0 didn't tend to use: width: 600px to artificially constrain content to a tiny horizontal sliver. Some sites did it with tables, but most didn't bother to try to dictate so much style. Part of the wonderfulness of web 1.0 was taking advantage of browser defaults: Background colors, default text fonts, and not doing so much specifying exact style. The site is pleasantly readable and "responsive" to different browser sizes when you turn Style Sheets off!

ryanbrunner 5y ago
1.0 is a bit of an arbitrary distinction (especially since it's a term only applied in retrospect, no one called anything "Web 1.0" at the time). But there's definitely two distinct periods - one of which is what you're describing where styling was pretty minimal and many sites looked more or less like the browser defaults, but also a distinct period prior to "Web 2.0" where styling was overused even compared to today, and stuff like flash, image maps, frames, etc were fairly common.
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  yep, nobody is bringing up marquees, horrible gradient background, unreadable bright blue text on yellow backgrounds, flashing GIFs and all the other atrocities. Plus the endless "coming soon" and "under construction" pages
  - BeefWellington 5y ago
    I mean, those distractions haven't really gone away, they've just been replaced with advertising.
  - navjack27 5y ago
    That's aesthetic and not defined rules
bpicolo 5y ago
To be fair monitors were only about that size in total at the time

flyingfences 5y ago

I agree with the overall sentiment, but it seems a little ironic that this author is pining for a return to the simple old days of hand-written HTML but has written a site that doesn't even show links to its own pages with JS disabled.

usrbinbash 5y ago
"learning to hand code HTML" doesn't exclude using Javascript or CSS, or anything else for that matter.
- flyingfences 5y ago
  No, it doesn't, but the general idea is that scripts are supposed to supplement the base page, not needlessly replace effectively static pieces of it.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  I wrote a ton of CSS and early JS in Windows Notepad. Or ON PAPER if the computer(s) I had access to were in use.
pgcj_poster 5y ago
The options available to the author are: 1. Manually add a link to every page on the site each time a new one is added. 2. Give up on hand-writing HTML and use a server-side templating system 3. Give up on having navigation on each page 4. Load the navigation through JavaScript Given that they want to hand-write HTML, and they (presumably) want it to be easy enough for everyone to do, the JS options seems like a reasonable choice.
- flyingfences 5y ago
  3 seems like the sane option to me... That's what I remember most sites doing back in the day if they weren't going for 2. Have a top-level "directory" page with individual pages linking back up to it and to the homepage, rather than having pages that link to literally nothing at all.

justaman 5y ago

I just want a web where everyone has their own space. Not renting a space from Facebook, Google, or XYZ. A space that can be ad free. One where people can choose what data is released and how; where deny all is default for any information gathering. If we want to socialize with someone, couldn't we just go to that person instead of a social media broker? The tech of web 1.0 is limiting and less approachable for the average person. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. We went down the rabbit hole of web 2.0 and it doesn't look like we will come back out. Web 3.0 feels dystopian.

jaltekruse 5y ago
Social media has it's drawbacks, but large hosted services exist for good reasons and have spawned entire new industries. An independent artist couldn't host a server to share their work (especially if they want to share content like video widely), or run a store capable of handling a spike of traffic if they became popular. Also the network effects of the platforms give huge benefits allowing at least a portion of promising diamonds in the rough to be found and shared (even if they are mixed in with a bunch of dumb clickbait and cheap knockoffs of products as discussed in the recent Etsy boycott thread). It's definitely not all roses, but I don't really see a clear path out of this. Because for whatever feelings people have about big tech, YouTube, Facebook, Etsy, Instagram have all driven billions in business for non-tech companies. And they've done it by creating experiences that are engaging to end consumers. Sure we might see traffic exchange hands among the big players, and there will be other successful new networks like we have seen with TikTok. But I think people don't want to self host for good reasons.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

The core argument is the same as a recent post here [1] about using older computers - that it reduces distractions and that older technology was better in its simplicity. Today's we are teetering on the brink of complexity breakdown. These are good arguments that stand alone. The counter-arguments are always the same "Hey, that's a problem with people - just exercise willpower and don't get distracted". Or "Hey, modern electronics and software is more 'efficient', just throw more cycles at it (silicon and cognitive) and get with the programme" But these only serve to minimise and deny real sentiments that smart software developers would pay close attention to. There's lot's of sentiment out there that is being mistaken for 'nostalgia', which is genuine dissatisfaction with modern tools. That's why projects like suckless.org [2] seem more relevant every day. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001296 [2] https://suckless.org/ https://suckless.org/

sanderjd 5y ago
I am sympathetic to the argument here, but I think this misrepresents the counterargument. I think the argument against this is simply that it's not what people actually want, it's what people like us want them to want. It sort of reminds me of that series where an architect makes fun of mcmansion monstrosities. The architect is right - those mcmansions suck - and we're right - simplicity in computing is better - but I think people want the mcmansions and I think people want the flashier more interactive software.
- krapp 5y ago
  >but I think people want the mcmansions and I think people want the flashier more interactive software I think that's a bit too condescending. People don't want mcmansions and flash, they want to publish to the internet quickly and efficiently. The web is a tool for them, a means to an end. The HN set might prefer to live in a world where computers only shipped with Emacs and the web was just a raw JSON API and you had to write your own software for everything from scratch, but no one else does. And that's perfectly legitimate. Why should someone making music, or art, or who wants to set up a business or network with people have to hand-code their own HTML or write their own backend just because some self-appointed gatekeepers decided that using a service ruins the artisinal quirkiness of the web? That's like saying authors should have to hand-write their manuscripts or set their own type. The web is a tool that's supposed to serve everyone.

louissan 5y ago

Back to tables and shim.gif and Mosaic? No thanks. :-) However I think the "how it was / how it is /where to now?" postulate is right. Especially the "immediate dopamine injection via Tweet" versus "build on your own independent site". It could actually make for far less concentrated content and so data and so power (in a way). Twitter: "give hime a fish a eat". Independent Web: "Give him a fishing pole so he can learn how to catch them himself".

unnouinceput 5y ago
What's wrong with tables? They draw faster than a crapload of chained DIV's just to show you a shitty "Press here to allow all cookies" info.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  CSS grid has finally made it unnecessary to abuse tables for layout.
  - IYasha 5y ago
    Call me when something "finally makes it unnecessary" to update browser or throw away perfectly usable devices. Tables work with IE6 and NetFront, so they rule. :P
- louissan 5y ago
  Oh sure. Tabular data is still tabular data. But it has always been semantically wrong to use tables for layout.

cletus 5y ago

Many years ago I had a job to add some features to an existing PHP site. The code base was a mess. I think there were 7 copies of the code in production that were copied and modified slightly to some specific purpose. It was like 300,000 lines of code (IIRC, it's been awhile). This forced me to do what I always try and avoid doing (because no one will thank you for it) and that is to clean it up. Some of it was necessary (eg it was open to SQL injection). In doing so I reduced it down to <20,000 including the new features required. This was a fairly stock standard database driven website but in just doing things the right way the page load times got to under 50ms (from 500-1000ms). This wasn't an SPA (of course) but I remember thinking how refreshing it was. You could link to any page. Those links loaded superfast (this is the bane of SPAs when they support deep-linking at all) and ran on everything just fine. This is actually one of the best featurs about PHP too: a static functional core so there's basically no bootstrapping. This means you can tear down all the resources of rendering a page. Performance becomes way more predictable and you're way less prone to resource leaks. There is magic in fast loading pages and I miss that about good Web 1.0 sites. This is actually the biggest problem with all the ad and tracking JS packages: the load times go to shit. This becomes a justification for SPAs As for Web 3.0... ugh. Why? Just... why? I guess that's a whole separate topic.

ryanbrunner 5y ago
This is still 100% possible, and many frameworks support it. SPAs are not the only way to build things, and frankly aren't even the most popular way to build things outside of tech startups.
rambambram 5y ago
What you describe matches exactly my view on webdevelopment. Every click is a new request (with some exceptions, which prove the rule). Instead of jumping from document to document by clicking a link, it becomes one big flow with fast page loads. If you have fast page loads (easily done with PHP), it feels and behaves like any other application.

falcolas 5y ago

I love the simple and honest idealism that drives this message. I think it’s completely unrealistic, and goes against human nature, but I still appreciate the vision.

Trouble_007 5y ago

https://vhsoverdrive.neocities.org/essays/oldweb.html https://vhsoverdrive.neocities.org/essays/oldweb.html stated; >The web was established with the best of intentions. The basic idea was that if everyone could share their thoughts and ideas with the world, the best ones would be vetted and float to the top. The bad ones would be ignored and pushed to the bottom. But human nature has a tendency to corrupt the best of intentions.< - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot... stated; > Microsoft shuts down AI chatbot after it turned into a Nazi - By Amy Kraft Updated on: March 25, 2016<

DrSiemer 5y ago

Sure, the web used to be a fun place for tinkerers in the beginning. But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back inside. Going luddite is never a good solution. We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new development has brought us and learn how to live with it, not suppress all recent development in the hopes of recreating an environment that only really worked for a small subsection of humanity. Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 2.0."

shockeychap 5y ago
> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 3.0." This. 100%.
- jordz 5y ago
  Also agree. However, I do yearn to relive the days where one can load up a web page and start reading content, without being jarred by pop-ups and ads that inadvertently move the content post load (which of course happens 3 seconds later..).
  - todd3834 5y ago
    Ad blockers are so good that I nearly forgot about this experience.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    I know a site, it's on mobile. You use it by entering a location in a search bar. You select the search bar, the keyboard takes a second to appear. You start typing, nothing happens because they've reimplemented the text box in javascript, and the script hasn't fully loaded yet. The script loads and the second half of the letters you typed appears in a letter by letter fashion. The page freezes and a suggestion box appears, every second or so the suggestions change to reflect the letters you typed earlier. You erase what you've typed. With every letter that changes, the page freezes a second as a new suggestion loads. When it freezes, it stops accepting letters, so there's a lot of erasing and re-typing. Alright, you're almost done typing... then the page freezes and the page turns grey, and a pop over loads. They want you to load fill out a satisfaction survey. You try to close it to continue, but the script handling the close button hasn't loaded yet so it doesn't work for a good 20 seconds. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a javascript stomping on a human face -- for ever.

luckystarr 5y ago

Sticking to their own principles I see. It's even written in HTML4.01.

sriku 5y ago

I hope in vain for a return to pre-web 1.0 -- when we were able to read without being watched. Many a revolution probably happened due to that "feature" of paper books ... which we lost when we went online with words.

ravenstine 5y ago

There's nothing holding people back from returning to Web 1.0. HTTP 1.1 is still a thing. Static webpages are still a thing. IRC is still a thing. Even better, host it on a P2P network like I2P where those on the network have to get over the hurdle of knowing about it in the first place and being able to set it up, just as early web users had to know how to plug in a modem, install a browser, and use those "URL" things. If your pages provide value, people will still find them in any case. Oh... but you wanted Web 1.0 content with Web 3.0 levels of traffic. Well, you're not gonna get that. Pick your poison.

onion2k 5y ago

I don't understand the rational behind throwing away one of the most useful, most brilliant, and most valuable resource humans have created just because it has a few major problems. There's a strong argument in favor of fixing the problems, sure, but the world without the modern web would be significantly worse, not least because 90% of HN users wouldn't have jobs.

jonassalen 5y ago
What resource are you talking about? Social media, or the internet? Because the author clearly states that corporate social media are the problem, which I - and a lot of psychologists and sociologists - agree with.
- onion2k 5y ago
  What resource are you talking about? The modern web (eg Web 2.0) is an open software distribution platform that forms the basis of hundreds of thousands of company's products. Social media is a part of that, and it needs fixing, but a return to Web 1.0 is not the solution.

gz5 5y ago

Many of us share this nostalgia for the early-day, long-tail pioneer phase. I feel business model innovation is the key to moving the pendulum back towards that landscape - that the ad model will also result in centralization in which we are the product?

thomassmith65 5y ago

I love this essay, but this claim is false: On most large sites this can be mitigated by blocking of toxic users Given the design of the internet, it cannot. Large sites have the ability to block usernames, IPs, etc... not actual users. I realize this is hardly earth-shattering news to the HN audience, but it's meaningful.

cies 5y ago

I found the dark web full of web1.0 vibes. no-JS. sometimes no-cookies. pretty oldskool.

snshn 5y ago

Most people like being ruled. That's why it's one person performing and thousands sitting and watching, not the other way around. Once early adopters are gone from something, it's usually all spectators what's left, and that's when things turn for the worse. The only thing that can bring back web 1.0 is good dictatorship of sorts, where one person with strong beliefs and good moral character takes control over something big. E.g. somebody wealthy purchasing large social media platform. But we can only hope for that to happen, it's very unlikely there's a person crazy enough to do such a thing today.

kornhole 5y ago
I do remind myself that most people are followers. The leaders among us need to help lead others. I would like people to stop berating 'Social Media' because that is a general category and instead berate the specific corporate, AI, state affiliated social media platforms where the problems lie. Free social media such as those in the fediverse do not have the same problems and don't deserve to be lumped in with them. They have their own problems but much fewer.

bearjaws 5y ago

HN every week: Old thing good, new thing bad. Do you believe we should also go back to not having search engines? BBS as primary information sharing? Email & IRC as pretty much the only way to communicate? Web 1.0 was riddled with scalability problems, you are free to take what you consider the best parts of it and simplify your Web 2.0 site.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Web 1.0 had search engines, message boards and instant messaging. Most of what you are describing is things that dominated before the web.
- bearjaws 5y ago
  No disagreement on having message boards and instant messaging or search engines, I am saying that they are an actual step backwards when it comes to making lay people productive when using the web. Not everyone is a HN alum ready to write a boolean query to find the most relevant post on a forum.

HidyBush 5y ago

If a "return to web 1.0" means going back to baroque and quirky websites on which I have to constantly fight to find information and not carve my eyes out out of digust then no, thanks. The Web was meant as a means to publish hyperlinked text documents, nothing more, nothing less. I don't want to read an entire book on a web page, just let me download an .epub file. I don't want to read your poorly formatted artsy manifesto in my browser, just let me download a PDF. I don't want to read your blogpost which is just a presentation in disguise filled with inline images, just let me download a powerpoint file. I'm glad that if I want to search for some information Wikipedia presents me a consistent interface and gives me a brief overview of a subject and presents me with further hyperlinked content both pointing to IRL and web-hosted documents. Wikipedia to me perfectly represents the spirit of true Web 1.0 even if the content is Web 2.0 in nature.

navjack27 5y ago
It seems like you are conflating simple websites with the aesthetic of websites of web 1.0. these things are mutually exclusive and going back to web 1.0 will allow you to just download an epub of a very very simple text heavy website.
- HidyBush 5y ago
  It's a matter of principles. If you give people javascript and css they will use it, full stop. The reason why the web has evolved this way is because the people back then were responsible for it. You have to cut the hydra's head and simply remove everything that is graphic and only keep basic text formatting.

dpweb 5y ago

There needs to always be a place for anonymity, but I’d argue not in all forums. Words have impact. I’d love to see some foundation or something to work on the problem of toxicity/hate. Develop technologies to allow sites to better police against it, detect bots trying to incite, etc.. Of course, you have to draw a line between free speech and hate speech but we already do that.

mynameishere 5y ago

Everyone should wear masks because science is settled therefore we should go back to 1995 technologies. Something like that. Great argument.

IYasha 5y ago

Web 1.5 is fine too :) I can live with some minor XHTML and few optional lines of JS.

skadamat 5y ago

Bring back Doug Engelbart's web vision! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

lobsang 5y ago

Not quite web 1.0 but I do wonder if there's a market for services that are closer to early web 2.0 products. For example something closer to Facebook circa 2006. No infinite scroll, a simple timeline, basic media sharing. Would it be possible to make a reasonable profit by offering simpler versions of existing services just without the engagement dark-patterns we currently have. And if so, could you create enough disruption to move the needle back slightly?

cxr 5y ago
> Not quite web 1.0 but I do wonder if there's a market for services that are closer to early web 2.0 products. It has for a long time been my position that technical people who are aspiring entrepreneurs (esp. those itching to practice building something) should just clone an existing product and wait for the original to change or shut down. Whenever I say "clone", I really do mean that, and not "our own take on solving the same problem". Gmail's interface changes for the worse, or Vine gets bought and shut down? Boom, there you are on day 1 of the backlash, ready to capture anyone looking to (or forced to) jump ship. This worked so well by accident with Reddit being able to acquire the exodus of the Digg userbase that I don't understand why people don't try to do it deliberately. And in cases like Vine, due to the nature of abandoned trademarks, you could (eventually) even legally "relaunch" it under the the same brand. This is something that pizza shops do all the time, but it doesn't really happen in SV.

Zeff84 5y ago

I feel like the biggest issue with Web 2.0 is the economic model. Most people probably still don't understand the amount of data collected and sold that funds a lot of social media. I often wonder what the internet would be like if data collection and advertising were gone and people had to pay for services they used.

raspyberr 5y ago

I have yet to read the full article but the first thing I noticed was that the plaintext links in the navigation pane and the small picture links in the links pane didn't appear until I turned Javascript on. I found this amusing. No comments on the article yet though.

intrasight 5y ago

> Now the web has become a cesspool of toxic content. I strongly disagree. The web not only achieve but greatly exceeded it's potential. But the web has transitioned from being a destination to being a tool. Like all tools, it can be misused.

eljimmy 5y ago

The golden age of the Internet was also distinctly different because I'd wager that the majority of people online back in those days had some technical know-how. You knew you were interacting with people who could operate a computer well enough to dial-up to an ISP so generally they were fairly intelligent. As nostalgic as it is, I think if you were to really strive for that type of world again you need to move forward with building a new network - something that requires some measure of intelligence in order to gain access to it. Of course, what's then stopping someone from automating that and repeating the cycle all over again? Better off just carving out your little piece in this new massive online world and building a community - or - just join one that already exists. There's millions of forums and "hand-made" websites out there, you just need to dig a little deeper these days.

duxup 5y ago

Web applications are awesome. I don't have to buy hundred dollar licenses / pirate left and right to try and use things. So much more information, media, entertainment is now available. I have a lot of nostalgia about the past, but I'm not interested in going back.

xyzzyz 5y ago
Instead of hundred dollar licenses, you have to pay hundred dollar subscription fees. I don’t see it as improvement.
- duxup 5y ago
  I don’t find that to be the case.
navjack27 5y ago
You mean like photopia and office live or docs or whatever? I still pirate tons of other stuff to use and try and eventually buy. I can't buy Photoshop so that is a perma steal until they go back to $800 boxes of software. Media is available but just this year I bought three CDs and one cassette tape. I love moving backwards
shrimp_emoji 5y ago
You also have less control over the application. It can spy on you and change out from under you. Information, media, and entertainment were always available, but in a form where you actually own it, not pay for N subscription services before their license runs out. That said: best of both worlds imo is fat client, traditional applications that run in a web runtime (e.g., Electron) since you can run 'em on any OS. ;p

ComradePhil 5y ago

It's a bit annoying that this kind of idiocy is upvoted to the front page very often. The web is the way it is becuase the forces which are seeking profit and power get their way in any new system that emerges. There is a new system which is truly designed from the ground up to serve the masses and is immune to the tactics used to control Web 2.0. The decentralized web is the internet run for the people by the people... and even if you rely on service providers to host your data or do your computation, they can't see what you want them to see or take your content down. It is called Web 3.0 (there are two Web 3.0s, unfortunately... one is the Google's version where web is organized auch that you don't have to leave Google to browse it... think amp but for everything else... and then there is the blockchain version, which is what I am referring to). Here's Gavin Wood's TED talk on the topic: https://youtu.be/UIBR99gOLOQ https://youtu.be/UIBR99gOLOQ

cam0 5y ago
I can't tell if you're being serious? There is nothing about 'Web 3.0', at the least the current implementation, that is designed to serve the masses. The "new system" is purely theoretical and all of the blockchain-based products are expensive, user hostile, and generally just poor pieces of technology considering the state of software engineering in 2022.

CaptArmchair 5y ago

Eternal September is a thing. Over the past 15 years, billions of people became online. I use that number casual, but it's nothing short of a shift on par with the impact Gutenberg had with his printing press. Humanity's barely out of the gates in terms of assessing how this will play out in the long term. The bar to publishing your thoughts, having an online presence,... is stupidly low. That's what big platforms and centralization have achieved. The vast majority of people who make a living online don't care about the details. They simply want to express a thought, share what they see, etc. And the proverbial smartphone and Instagram account are all you need to do exactly that. Wishing to go back to Web 1.0 is a non sequitur because it would mean raising that same bar again. It would also run counter to the billion dollar cottage industries that have sprung up in the wake of the emergence of these platforms. That doesn't mean using the core technologies that make up the Web and leveraging platforms are mutually exclusive. They aren't. Nothing stops you from breaking away with like minded people and building your own community. The openness and standardization of the specifications that define the technology allow you to do exactly that.

shuntress 5y ago
Low barrier-to-entry to share inane thoughts is not the problem. The problem is centralized systems attempting to maximize acquisition of attention by baiting for that attention with outrage and controversy.
pmlnr 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect sometimes things that need some effort end up with more value in the eyes of their makers. That higher barrier might not be that bad, because I firmly believe one of the reasons what got us to the modern web is people not valuing what they had put into it.

joaomeloplus 5y ago

I am in the web since 1999. I loved it then and also love it now. It has popularized access do knowledge, opened a channel to all forms of expression for millions around the world and continously lower the barrier to more innovation. Friction is present in all social activities: politics, families, friendships. This kind of tought seems to me more as failure to cope with human nature than rational legitime analisys.

wink 5y ago

Site uses CSS for columns and not tables. No dogfooding. /s

timcavel 5y ago

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shuntress 5y ago

The thing is though, I want what Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok have. I want to see what my friends, family, and acquaintances are doing and how their lives are going. To know what is "trending" and be able to look at the same thing everyone else is looking at. The crowd-sourced news and immediate updates from people who are on the ground where things are happening. This article spends a lot of words on "us vs them" and pining for the "good old days" without seeming to consider what the faster-more-intense version of "geocities neighborhoods" would be like.

kkfx 5y ago
Can you try do detail what exactly you want about modern web? I'm asking because to many have forgotten, teaches included, that the web and internet are two distinct things or to be more precise one is the platform that run also the other, but not only the other. Long story short: if you want VoIP that's not necessarily a web thing, it's an internet thing. Public users DB again that's can be a web thing, in the sense a site a person, but can also be a Wikidata-like services without any web frontend, something that just offer an open API and anyone who want implement a local client for it, with relevant download/sync of information, caching etc. Internet banking? The same: a simple local desktop application that talk on an open protocols to your banks/peers, store copy of any transaction digitally signed by both parts AND by a State-run official public service as a guarantee for both etc all those things are not necessarily web and actually can be far superior in a classic networked desktop version. About crowdsourced news and aggregators: did you try to consider a classic personal one? I mean RSS feeds of a set of sites you like to follow with local scoring and peer recommendation service built-in? It can be far powerful than Google News or FB user homepage. It does not exists simply because no one actually have written it since most of the development is pushed toward web for economical reasons, but not because the web is better. It does not exists because most people fails to imaging a different world in terms of different tools and lifestyles so fails to see the enormous advantages for us users of that classic model witch actually was and still is the base of the entire IT and still the most advanced tech we have... Did you remember Popcorn Time? Well who impede to build a FacebookTime for instance over ZeroNet? Why do most people not ask nor look for a homeserver and ISPs that offer static IPv6 global addresses to run their own personal infra so for instance just sharing photos does not means passing through Google Drive or iCloud? Why we do not push classic distributed iNUM/VoIP so we can make call with a very big number of participants and not much bandwidth issues? Those are not technical stuff but just human habits. We all se the modern web and most of us fail to imaging a different world.

olah_1 5y ago

So everyone makes custom websites, but 90% of them are hosted on the same service because nobody likes managing a VPS. This isn’t any better than current social media imo.

ozim 5y ago
It is better in a way that only people who can write HTML by hand are supposed to publish on the internet. While it is questionable if they are any better than general population, they probably have the same traits and common way of thinking. So they would like the same people to be on the internet. Web 2.0 allows anyone to post anything so eternal September is here alive and we are living it. But closing possibility to post stuff on the internet is not the way to go.
- olah_1 5y ago
  Non-techy “annoying” people can and have learned to code HTML. It just takes proper motivation. When the only game in town was Myspace, many people learned just so they could have an awesome page. Knowing HTML / CSS gave you more street cred, so to speak. Now that incentive doesn’t exist. But the same people that would have learned are still posting online. Being open to the general public isn’t a problem to me because sub-cultures naturally spring up. Hacker News is like a safe space for people that would have made these manual websites 15 years ago lol.

jdrc 5y ago

This is going to happen , and it will be driven by the availability of high-speed home connections. More and more users will start self-hosting things they outsource not simply becuase they have control, but it's also better.

ozim 5y ago

*Hidden behind a veil of anonymity, users are emboldened to spew all manner of truly vile comments without fear of consequence.* Author would be surprised if he would see what stuff people can post under their real legal names. I assume author is not on FB/TT and is not following shitstorms there. We are way past veil of anonymity. For the rest I like quite from Stanislaw Lem: *Until I starded using interned, I was not aware there are so many idiots in the world.*

randcraw 5y ago

I like the idea of establishing a persistent presence on the net that you manage yourself, where you plant your flag with a hand-built simple static web page, add a few essays, reading lists, pointers to other cool sites, etc, then invite others with like interests to link up. Connecting multiple 'flag' sites like these was one of my favorite ways to discover worthwhile creative content in the early days (as opposed to Web 2.0's automated firehose of spam). That model of web presence also does a nice job of excluding the www's multitude of trash that's otherwise inescapable these days. Playing once more in sandboxes where assholes are not invited does have a certain appeal.

the_gipsy 5y ago

My argument: just let the fucking back-button work

shadowgovt 5y ago
"CONFIRM FORM RESUBMISSION? The page that you're looking for used information that you entered. Returning to that page might cause any action you took to be repeated. Do you want to continue?"

ok_coo 5y ago

Yes, but also, we used to have to develop around IE6. StackOverflow wasn't a thing. I recall debugging IE6 display issues for days as a junior. It was horrible. That's not to say the web doesn't currently have issues, it does. I just think it's healthy to be careful of embracing the past too hard.

layer8 5y ago

I’m all for Web 1.0, but please use proportional fonts (even Web 1.0 did).

MarcoZavala 5y ago

darepublic 5y ago

I would rather try to create more compelling web apps that do respect privacy, and try to popularize those, then convince everyone to disable JavaScript for all their web browsing

Vox_Leone 5y ago

Re the OP Absolutely magisterial! I feel represented in each and every word of yours. I [hardcore anti-algorithm, anti-collection, anti-surveillance activist] would not say it better myself. Consider opening the licence for this post apropriately so the word can be translated and spread. Thank you.

dharma1 5y ago

I also hand-coded my GeoCities site in 1995 and have good memories of those nostalgic times - but that’s what it is - nostalgia. People still have the choice and freedom to build websites that that way - just like you might still want to record to multitrack tape instead of a DAW or shoot film instead of digital. In terms of data collection and privacy - I think these things are important and we are thankfully nearly there in tech maturity for local-first encrypted p2p apps becoming feasible. These technologies will enable rich collaborative user experiences without giving away your data unless you want to.

Animats 5y ago

Web 1.0 is now called Markdown.

TheRealNGenius 5y ago

Case in point, that website looks ugly as shit