6 ms·

Reference sites still exist, Wikipedia isn't organized by reverse-chronological and MediaWiki is a far more formidable CMS than MT ever was. Same goes for Read

Reference sites still exist, Wikipedia isn't organized by reverse-chronological and MediaWiki is a far more formidable CMS than MT ever was. Same goes for ReadTheDocs, Sphinx, Jekyll, Hugo, or any number of static site generators that power the infinite libraries of documentation, reference material, and personal sites on the web. What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content. What the author fails to consider is that this diminished position has nothing to do with the tools, and everything to do with the population of people who were coming online in the early 2000s. The strangeness and lovable oddities of the early web were a function of the people who populated it. The generic, least common denominator status quo of the now is similarly defined because everyone is online, and so the content distribution reflects that. Everyone's Eternal September comes at some point, for the author it was October 2001. Internet is full, AOL users go home.

orthoxerox 4y ago
> What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content. When I stumble upon a Web 1.0 living fossil, it's a delight every time. Someone felt an overpowering need to say something, they made a website about their favorite topic (be that shoelace knots, unsolved mysteries of Ancient Mediterranean literature, their train trip from Europe to North Korea or the CUBIC NATURE OF TIME), wrote everything they wanted to say and mostly stopped. They didn't enter into a parasocial relationship with millions of people, they didn't try to get rich by producing content, they didn't become slaves to The Algorithm, they didn't ruin the brilliance of their first LPs by producing a dozen more.
- syntaxfree 4y ago
  I’m not fond of people who take ratheism as a major inteeest or even component of their identity, but pocm.info is just lovely.
  - balfirevic 4y ago
    > ratheism Is that a misspelling or is there something called "ratheism"?
    - sph 4y ago
      I think they meant /r/atheism, the infamous subreddit?
    - syntaxfree 4y ago
      That’s a particular social phenomenon, as linked to atheism as gospel music is Baptist churches.
- mansoon 4y ago
  All relationships are parasocial.
  - orthoxerox 4y ago
    But some are more parasocial than others.
  - thewakalix 4y ago
    No, some are simply social.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    I don't think your wife would appreciate that. (joking, but the point is that non-para-social relationships, "real" ones, exist and can usefully be distinguished)
    - mansoon 4y ago
      Not sure I agree with this. Once you look closely enough, the distinction collapses. I used to think otherwise, but that was largely based on a refusal to look, knowing that if I did, the perceived reality would fall apart, and the naked nothing would be revealed.
      - maxbond 4y ago
        What do you mean by parasocial here?
        mansoon 4y ago
        Bidirectional channel. TCP. But with respect to the shared net. The experience that makes a dent in the fabric of reality as shared or known by all, personalizes the universe to a subdomain. Once I had the words. Now that’s gone too.
        maxbond 4y ago
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  Call me crazy, but bear in mind I love a lot of modern web development marvels (no more tables everywhere) but I kind of miss when a lot of websites copied each other, and they had... tables everywhere, but the reason I miss it was because navigation was insanely consistent! It was also insanely easy to figure out. One old as heck website that comes to mind for me is 1337.net which I think is more early to mid 2000s I'm not sure if it went back further or not. It's a joke site with l33t speak and what have you, but the fact it's still around is pure entertainment. They have not touched anything about it. I don't even think it has ads? Kudos for keeping it like the Spacejam website.
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
As I say in a sister thread, I transitioned from handmade websites to blogs as the author describes, and then from blogs to social media. The reason was also what the author describes: convenience. I am the same person. I don't think I was more of a nerd when I wrote personal websites in 1998 than when I wrote blogs in 2002 or social media posts later. So I do think the tools have a lot to do with the changes described in the post. It is true that non-chronological CMSs exist today, and they may be formidable in many respects, but I don't think they're better than MT in terms of ease of use. And also, the competition has gotten easier and easier: MT was just the beginning, now the real "trap" (as the author of the post would describe it) is social networks. The site generators you mention don't remotely compete in ease of use with social networks. The only attempt I have seen of making publication of "permanent", non-timestamped content as easy as that of chronological content was Opera Unite. It didn't last for long. Obviously the title and text are hyperbolic (personal websites still exist, there are just fewer of them) but the gist of what it says rings true to me, and I'm not an Eternal September curmudgeon.
- nickelpro 4y ago
  > personal websites still exist, there are just fewer of them And my point is that this isn't true. There are more weird, wonderful, random single-purpose and eclectic websites today than ever before in the history of the Internet. It's just that they are suspended in an ocean of so much more Internet than existed before that they feel absent compared to the halcyon days. I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's personal experience, obviously there exists a population that moved away from hand-crafted HTML to blogs and social media, but that movement is trivial compared innumerable, inconceivable, content dilution of the net that happened over the course of the 2000s. Most people on social media would never have created those hand-crafted sites to begin with, they weren't members of that self-selected group of early web pioneers. They were only ever going to engage with easy to use systems. We didn't miss out on a similarly sized web of artisanal websites, that future was never in the cards.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah people forget that we went from an internet where ANYTHING you wanted, if it was there, would be on a university site or some personal site by someone slightly obsessed with the topic (otherwise why would they have build a website about it by hand or in Dreamweaver and bothers to host it?) - Wikipedia didn’t exist so even relatively simple searches would bring up these little almost “fan” sites. This was the era of massive FAQ posts that were just becoming webpages in some cars - an example being the Doom FAQ: that would never be written as a single document today. (Even the modern linked copies are “new”: https://www.gamers.org/docs/FAQ/doomfaq/index.html https://www.gamers.org/docs/FAQ/doomfaq/index.html ). A game like Factorio or Dwarf Fortress certainly has similar or greater depth; but a single massive ascii text file will never be written for them, as there are more modern ways to transmit the information
giancarlostoro 4y ago
Yeah, I agree, I think the "next" major 'Eternal September' if you will was around the 2010's give or take after Smartphones became far more common and everyone had insanely easy access to the web. A lot of web traffic is insanely on mobile, whereas before it was not, and it was a mess (remember those awful .mobi domains that you would be redirected to, BUT only the home page, so whatever content you wanted was gone, good luck finding it now since you just hopped off Google!).
- ghaff 4y ago
  The 'Eternal September' was actually pretty early on--basically pre-Web to Web 1.0. I had a Unix workstation with a Mosaic homepage which basically had links to all the sites I found interesting. I agree that something happened with mobile/social. This post is more about the Read-Write Web (I think that was O'Reilly's term)/Web 2.0 era--which was between the two.
pantulis 4y ago
Someone, some day, will write an elegy of how TikTok broke social networks.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  And they won't be wrong.
  - pantulis 4y ago
    Sure!
ryukafalz 4y ago
> What the author fails to consider is that this diminished position has nothing to do with the tools, and everything to do with the population of people who were coming online in the early 2000s. I think it does have something to do with the tools, but not in the way the author is describing. Rather, the need for personal homepages was diminished because search engines replaced them! When I came online, around that time, I was introduced right away to search engines as the way to find things online. This of course was always an incomplete replacement. Search engines provided a window into a much larger set of content than any one curated website, but they were more easily manipulated, so smaller and more niche content would be comparatively harder to discover. The popular sites, and the sites whose ranking was manipulated, rose to the top. I've started to wonder lately if it would be beneficial to revive personal, curated homepages for this reason. They can't replace search engines entirely of course, but the breadth of information you can discover on rabbit holes from older sites is mind-boggling and I feel like there's something there.
jaredhallen 4y ago
I see quite a few posts on HN that are nostalgic about the early web. But I would say that there's an interesting take here about the shift to a preference for newer content. No doubt SEO has a lot tondo with it.

orthoxerox 4y ago

> What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content. When I stumble upon a Web 1.0 living fossil, it's a delight every time. Someone felt an overpowering need to say something, they made a website about their favorite topic (be that shoelace knots, unsolved mysteries of Ancient Mediterranean literature, their train trip from Europe to North Korea or the CUBIC NATURE OF TIME), wrote everything they wanted to say and mostly stopped. They didn't enter into a parasocial relationship with millions of people, they didn't try to get rich by producing content, they didn't become slaves to The Algorithm, they didn't ruin the brilliance of their first LPs by producing a dozen more.

syntaxfree 4y ago
I’m not fond of people who take ratheism as a major inteeest or even component of their identity, but pocm.info is just lovely.
- balfirevic 4y ago
  > ratheism Is that a misspelling or is there something called "ratheism"?
  - sph 4y ago
    I think they meant /r/atheism, the infamous subreddit?
  - syntaxfree 4y ago
    That’s a particular social phenomenon, as linked to atheism as gospel music is Baptist churches.
mansoon 4y ago
All relationships are parasocial.
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  But some are more parasocial than others.
- thewakalix 4y ago
  No, some are simply social.
- pjc50 4y ago
  I don't think your wife would appreciate that. (joking, but the point is that non-para-social relationships, "real" ones, exist and can usefully be distinguished)
  - mansoon 4y ago
    Not sure I agree with this. Once you look closely enough, the distinction collapses. I used to think otherwise, but that was largely based on a refusal to look, knowing that if I did, the perceived reality would fall apart, and the naked nothing would be revealed.
    - maxbond 4y ago
      What do you mean by parasocial here?
      - mansoon 4y ago
        Bidirectional channel. TCP. But with respect to the shared net. The experience that makes a dent in the fabric of reality as shared or known by all, personalizes the universe to a subdomain. Once I had the words. Now that’s gone too.
        maxbond 4y ago
giancarlostoro 4y ago
Call me crazy, but bear in mind I love a lot of modern web development marvels (no more tables everywhere) but I kind of miss when a lot of websites copied each other, and they had... tables everywhere, but the reason I miss it was because navigation was insanely consistent! It was also insanely easy to figure out. One old as heck website that comes to mind for me is 1337.net which I think is more early to mid 2000s I'm not sure if it went back further or not. It's a joke site with l33t speak and what have you, but the fact it's still around is pure entertainment. They have not touched anything about it. I don't even think it has ads? Kudos for keeping it like the Spacejam website.

Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago

As I say in a sister thread, I transitioned from handmade websites to blogs as the author describes, and then from blogs to social media. The reason was also what the author describes: convenience. I am the same person. I don't think I was more of a nerd when I wrote personal websites in 1998 than when I wrote blogs in 2002 or social media posts later. So I do think the tools have a lot to do with the changes described in the post. It is true that non-chronological CMSs exist today, and they may be formidable in many respects, but I don't think they're better than MT in terms of ease of use. And also, the competition has gotten easier and easier: MT was just the beginning, now the real "trap" (as the author of the post would describe it) is social networks. The site generators you mention don't remotely compete in ease of use with social networks. The only attempt I have seen of making publication of "permanent", non-timestamped content as easy as that of chronological content was Opera Unite. It didn't last for long. Obviously the title and text are hyperbolic (personal websites still exist, there are just fewer of them) but the gist of what it says rings true to me, and I'm not an Eternal September curmudgeon.

nickelpro 4y ago
> personal websites still exist, there are just fewer of them And my point is that this isn't true. There are more weird, wonderful, random single-purpose and eclectic websites today than ever before in the history of the Internet. It's just that they are suspended in an ocean of so much more Internet than existed before that they feel absent compared to the halcyon days. I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's personal experience, obviously there exists a population that moved away from hand-crafted HTML to blogs and social media, but that movement is trivial compared innumerable, inconceivable, content dilution of the net that happened over the course of the 2000s. Most people on social media would never have created those hand-crafted sites to begin with, they weren't members of that self-selected group of early web pioneers. They were only ever going to engage with easy to use systems. We didn't miss out on a similarly sized web of artisanal websites, that future was never in the cards.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Yeah people forget that we went from an internet where ANYTHING you wanted, if it was there, would be on a university site or some personal site by someone slightly obsessed with the topic (otherwise why would they have build a website about it by hand or in Dreamweaver and bothers to host it?) - Wikipedia didn’t exist so even relatively simple searches would bring up these little almost “fan” sites. This was the era of massive FAQ posts that were just becoming webpages in some cars - an example being the Doom FAQ: that would never be written as a single document today. (Even the modern linked copies are “new”: https://www.gamers.org/docs/FAQ/doomfaq/index.html https://www.gamers.org/docs/FAQ/doomfaq/index.html ). A game like Factorio or Dwarf Fortress certainly has similar or greater depth; but a single massive ascii text file will never be written for them, as there are more modern ways to transmit the information

giancarlostoro 4y ago

Yeah, I agree, I think the "next" major 'Eternal September' if you will was around the 2010's give or take after Smartphones became far more common and everyone had insanely easy access to the web. A lot of web traffic is insanely on mobile, whereas before it was not, and it was a mess (remember those awful .mobi domains that you would be redirected to, BUT only the home page, so whatever content you wanted was gone, good luck finding it now since you just hopped off Google!).

ghaff 4y ago
The 'Eternal September' was actually pretty early on--basically pre-Web to Web 1.0. I had a Unix workstation with a Mosaic homepage which basically had links to all the sites I found interesting. I agree that something happened with mobile/social. This post is more about the Read-Write Web (I think that was O'Reilly's term)/Web 2.0 era--which was between the two.

pantulis 4y ago

Someone, some day, will write an elegy of how TikTok broke social networks.

jollyllama 4y ago
And they won't be wrong.
- pantulis 4y ago
  Sure!

ryukafalz 4y ago

> What the author fails to consider is that this diminished position has nothing to do with the tools, and everything to do with the population of people who were coming online in the early 2000s. I think it does have something to do with the tools, but not in the way the author is describing. Rather, the need for personal homepages was diminished because search engines replaced them! When I came online, around that time, I was introduced right away to search engines as the way to find things online. This of course was always an incomplete replacement. Search engines provided a window into a much larger set of content than any one curated website, but they were more easily manipulated, so smaller and more niche content would be comparatively harder to discover. The popular sites, and the sites whose ranking was manipulated, rose to the top. I've started to wonder lately if it would be beneficial to revive personal, curated homepages for this reason. They can't replace search engines entirely of course, but the breadth of information you can discover on rabbit holes from older sites is mind-boggling and I feel like there's something there.

jaredhallen 4y ago

I see quite a few posts on HN that are nostalgic about the early web. But I would say that there's an interesting take here about the shift to a preference for newer content. No doubt SEO has a lot tondo with it.