5 ms·
The web may never be better than it was about 5 years ago, and that makes me very sad
by anderspitman 3y ago
The web may never be better than it was about 5 years ago, and that makes me very sad
- randcraw 3y agoMake that 25 years ago, before the FAANGs came out.
- shadowgovt 3y agoN'ah, I remember that era. Search engines were basically worthless. Google was the first one to get the formula right. Before Google, search engines were basically just doing keyword matching and so you'd have the issue that every search for a programming topic landed you on expertsexchange. Google was the first to start leveraging click-away signal, and they were able to successfully down-sample keyword-farmers like that one and their ilk.
- chongli 3y agoSearch engines were bad in the 90's, but the web was much smaller and community-driven. Most of the websites people visited were created by individuals and people linked to each other to form web rings.
- shadowgovt 3y agoI remember. It was the worst. Crawling a ring all day to find useful content was incredibly inconvenient.
- tenebrisalietum 3y agoExpertsexchange was one of the main reasons I began contributing to Stack Overflow in 2010-ish.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoI'm not going back to using Alta Vista, no thanks.
- randcraw 3y agoThe early Yahoo was pretty great. I discovered a lot of cool creative sites there, none of whom tracked me or abused my email address.
- jewelry 3y agostill like the new internet to be honest.
- timbit42 3y agoGoogle came out in 1998, 25 years ago.
- pavon 3y agoI wouldn't consider 1998 a peak. There was a local maxima in 1993, before the September that never ended. Then the rest of the 90's were exciting because of the rapid growth, but the actual state of things at the time was pretty messy. I'd personally put the next peak around 2007. Broadband was widespread but smartphones were not. Google existed but hadn't yet purchased DoubleClick. IE6, while not quite dead, no longer had a stranglehold on web development. Independent blogs and forums and RSS were still big, and hadn't yet consolidated with social media.
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoTotally disagree, LLMs are so much better than search engines ever were.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- okdood64 3y agoLLMs are a complement to search, not a replacement.
- bboygravity 3y agoThat kind of proves the point: the internet is more than LLMs and search engines.
- glonq 3y agoYeah, it's also cryptocurrency and NFT's /s
- opportune 3y agoTo me the inflection point was the 2016 US election (which also coincided with Brexit). Independent of the elections I think social media websites had by this time “perfected” engagement-driven algorithmic feeds and online news had started getting good at optimizing their content for those purposes. And around this time, anecdotally, is when I think a lot of older people started taking the internet more seriously, as real-world services like Airbnb/Uber/Amazon prime (to be fair, started earlier) became popular and middle aged people started using social media more. This, in combination with the polarizing content of the elections, made the internet into the hostile and echo-chambery place it is today. And it also attracted a lot more Government attention leading to things like GDPR (good in theory, bad inasmuch as it led to the current cookie banner bullshit) and link taxes.
- pessimizer 3y ago> To me the inflection point was the 2016 US election (which also coincided with Brexit.) And with the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict.
- metabagel 3y agoDo you mean the Russian invasion of sovereign Ukraine territory?
- pessimizer 3y agoI mean what the hell I said.
- AlexandrB 3y agoRussian annexed Crimea in 2014. Or are we talking about "2016-ish"?
- pessimizer 3y agoWhen do you think the 2016 election was held, and when did the participants in it campaign?
- ruuda 3y agoI think the cookiewalls are older than 5 years, no?
- cypress66 3y agoPeak web was probably around 2010