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Bookmarked. Will revisit. Anyone else notice everything old is new again? Neocities[0], Marginalia Search[1], Project Gemini[2], etc There's many others I'm f

Bookmarked. Will revisit. Anyone else notice everything old is new again? Neocities[0], Marginalia Search[1], Project Gemini[2], etc There's many others I'm forgetting, and new ones popup on Hackernews each week. Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days? [0] https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ [1] https://www.marginalia.nu/ https://www.marginalia.nu/ [2] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

webscout 4y ago
BirAdam 4y ago
I believe that much of it is, indeed, basic nostalgia. Some of this, however, is also the recognition that not all of the early web was bad. Much of the early internet is viewed through rose-tinted glasses, but some of it was really good. For example, the ability to use a directory to find _exactly_ what you're looking for while search just feeds you two pages of paid result listings. Likewise, gopher made information available on even the most modest of machines (gemini trying to recreate something somewhat better) while modern web can spin up cooling fans on high-end laptop from 2019.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  I recently procured the highest specced out XPS 15 Dell offers, and some modern websites manage to spin the fans to an insane degree.
partyguy 4y ago
You're right! Even MySpace is back [0] [0] https://spacehey.com/ https://spacehey.com/
marginalia_nu 4y ago
> Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days? That's certainly not why I created my search engine. Old isn't an end, its a means to cut the bullshit. Like I read a lot of old books, not because I'm nostalgic for yellowed paper, but because they consistently have much better signal to noise ratio than most of what you'll find on a screen or printed past 1990 or so. (When people bought books in physical book stores and weren't primarily ordering books online, books weren't judged by their page count as a proxy for how much content they contained, and thus had a lot less filler and anecdotes.) If you gave me a method of selection that was as reliable for identifying good books among contemporary books, I'd probably read more contemporary books as a result.

webscout 4y ago

BirAdam 4y ago

I believe that much of it is, indeed, basic nostalgia. Some of this, however, is also the recognition that not all of the early web was bad. Much of the early internet is viewed through rose-tinted glasses, but some of it was really good. For example, the ability to use a directory to find _exactly_ what you're looking for while search just feeds you two pages of paid result listings. Likewise, gopher made information available on even the most modest of machines (gemini trying to recreate something somewhat better) while modern web can spin up cooling fans on high-end laptop from 2019.

nibbleshifter 4y ago
I recently procured the highest specced out XPS 15 Dell offers, and some modern websites manage to spin the fans to an insane degree.

partyguy 4y ago

You're right! Even MySpace is back [0] [0] https://spacehey.com/ https://spacehey.com/

marginalia_nu 4y ago

> Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days? That's certainly not why I created my search engine. Old isn't an end, its a means to cut the bullshit. Like I read a lot of old books, not because I'm nostalgic for yellowed paper, but because they consistently have much better signal to noise ratio than most of what you'll find on a screen or printed past 1990 or so. (When people bought books in physical book stores and weren't primarily ordering books online, books weren't judged by their page count as a proxy for how much content they contained, and thus had a lot less filler and anecdotes.) If you gave me a method of selection that was as reliable for identifying good books among contemporary books, I'd probably read more contemporary books as a result.