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> "© J H Irvine 2002" Yes. This is a taste of what the web was like before it became shit. And it's the way it should be again. Weird, quirky, fun, no ad-tech
by PaulRobinson 3y ago
> "© J H Irvine 2002"
Yes. This is a taste of what the web was like before it became shit. And it's the way it should be again.
Weird, quirky, fun, no ad-tech, no trying to hard sell anything.
God, I miss this era.
- bowsamic 3y agoIt still exists you’re just missing it
- benj111 3y agoRight... But how does one find it. Does one have to tilt their trolley at every pillar on every train platform. Or find a friendly worm type thing to show them hidden entrances?
- bowsamic 3y agoThe latter
- mglz 3y agoIt's work and we need to re-establish a true net of websites, webrings and all the other forgotten stuff that was made obsolete by search engines. Here's my contribution: https://mglz.de/links.html https://mglz.de/links.html
- bowsamic 3y agoI'm not sure, I think it's better to keep it private and dispense it through closed communities. These things don't work unless there is a lot of personal interest between each website creator, so just dumping them into a big list isn't great. I think the best modern approaches I've seen have forums/Discord servers organised around a topic, such as making demos or sizecoding, and then people sharing their sites and projects within those spaces.
- mglz 3y agoDiscord is a walled garden and is not searchable, so knowledge posted there is lost very quickly and is super hard to discover. Static HTML has its limits, but has much better longevity.
- rpastuszak 3y agoI put together a list of sites/catalogues you might find interesting: https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content
- HeckFeck 3y agoI've a site like that too, we would appreciate a link: http://wmw.thran.uk http://wmw.thran.uk
- nathell 3y agoThat web still exists. Even though it has been eclipsed by the siloized monstrous goos, those independent, quirky, greenfield sites are still very much alive.
- yard2010 3y agoMuch like saying ancient Rome still exist, you just can see it through all the gentrification
- brudgers 3y agoThe empire never ended. —PK Dick.
- wkjagt 3y agoI love the comparison with gentrification. It’s not the same though. You can still see the old web untouched, it’s just almost impossible to find. But if you do find it, you don’t see the gentrification. Maybe it’s more like Rome being surrounded by hundreds of miles of malls, and parking lots, and highways, and those highways (and Google Maps) only leading you to those parking lots and malls. You’d have to stumble upon a backroad that’s not on the map to find the old Rome.
- darkwater 3y ago> it’s just almost impossible to find. Just like it was back then... There was a very steep path for the entrance to he^W the Internet, and then it was easy to find those places. Now you can access the Internet easily but it's harder to find those places. EDIT: typo
- b112 3y agoPart of it is, SSL certs. Google downranks, heavily, websites without SSL. Some of these sites will never see SSL, and so they are indeed as roads not on a map. (It isn't relevant how easy or hard ssl and obtaining certs are. The reality is, these older, static html sires sometimes don't have ssl, and will never have ssl.)
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago> no trying to hard sell anything Apparently not even the coffee mug now, which is bitterly disappointing.
- shever73 3y agoTrue, although the official safety posters[0] still seem to be available: https://www.cafepress.com/e2hp.34051572 https://www.cafepress.com/e2hp.34051572 [0] https://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/pagesafety.html https://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/pagesafety.html
- fipar 3y ago"Don't shout at the devil (not even with good news)." This is just amazing, thank you (and OP) for the link!
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoAhhh now I want one.
- witcH 3y agoinstantly ordered one for my office. Incredible.
- wkjagt 3y agoI wonder if it would be possible to filter out the noise of the “modern web” by black listing big tech the same way we block ads. Might be an interesting project.
- saiya-jin 3y agoI mean put adblocks into crazy mode, blacklist anything related to Google and Meta-crap by default, turn off JS and probably CSS too and you are almost there, maybe apart from blinking text and weirdly stretched bitmap backgrounds
- jonpurdy 3y agoKagi (the search engine) has Small Web※, which (I assume) shows only results from the long tail and excludes popular sites (they use TinyGem search index for this). ※https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
- wkjagt 3y agoOh this looks really nice. Thanks for sharing!
- martinpw 3y agoWasn't there a site that showed search results but skipped the top N results, so you ended up seeing a lot more interesting smaller sites? Can't remember details and a quick search (hah) didn't find it. Pretty sure it was linked on HN a year or two ago... Edit - I think this was it, but looks like it needs an account: https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
- 15457345234 3y ago> so you ended up seeing a lot more interesting smaller sites? A lot of smaller sites just aren't indexed any more, it's a common complaint you read here... "Smaller site, we don't use adwords, we're getting crawled 500x/day which is 40% of our bandwidth, still not indexed after 6 months"
- 3y ago
- RobotToaster 3y agoThe commercialisation of the internet was a mistake.
- TomMasz 3y agoI was wondering why the photos looked like so poorly compressed.
- ricardo81 3y agoPart of the problem is information discovery is dominated by big tech, between Google and social platforms. Mojeek is an alt search engine with an independent index that returns this site so obv indexed. https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=uk+entrances+to+hell https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=uk+entrances+to+hell I see another one there for Dutch locations http://pkazil.free.fr/e2hnl.html http://pkazil.free.fr/e2hnl.html disclaimer, I used to work at Mojeek.
- bragr 3y agoI'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the search results as compared to Google? https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+entrances+to+hell https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+entrances+to+hell
- ricardo81 3y ago90+% of people would use Google to find stuff via search, it's useful to have other means. As you can see by their results they tend to favour 'fresh' (nee recycled content) pages rather than older and original sources. //added which is often the case as per comments in this thread with people generally feeling the commercial web has gobbled up original and niche content. Surely it can only be that way because the gateways to the web have made it so.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI found a bookmarklet (on HN) that will take you to a random "old internet" webpage: https://wiby.me/surprise/ https://wiby.me/surprise/ Just pressed it, it sent me to https://holyjoe.net/ https://holyjoe.net/, a personal website of a reverend from 1995, last updated in 2020 based on its 'poetry' page.
- npteljes 3y agoNo ad-tech, and 2002? What web were you on? 2002 had popups, pop-unders, frantically blinking banners, pages opening many other pages when you click on them, search results poisoned with transparent or small text, and barely any tech in the user's hand to fight these. The web is, I think, friendlier now than it was in 2000-2005. And much, much more useful in general.
- nottorp 3y ago> The web is, I think, friendlier now than it was in 2000-2005 I'd replace "is" with "looks".
- _joel 3y agoThe era of ratemypoo . com (I've not checked if this site still exists or what, ymmv).
- dajt 3y agoAnd web rings to proudly be part of :)