6 ms·

The thing that’s usually on my mind when people are lamenting how the Web has evolved is that all the tools are still there to build websites however you want.

The thing that’s usually on my mind when people are lamenting how the Web has evolved is that all the tools are still there to build websites however you want. So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.” Which is this mix of… yeah I guess that’s true. I feel the same. But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not. But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up. Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. Maybe someone runs a search engine that only indexes crawled pages that have a X-Web-Classic header or whatever. If people actually want it enough to put the work in, can’t we make it? I guess corporations would come to capitalize on its success if it became successful. But I’d be willing to fight that battle if we got to that point (ie. curation or tech limitations or whatever…) I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources. Example.com doesn’t implement an X-Web-Classic header response? Give me a 404. Does it try to load cross origin resources that aren’t X-Web-Classic? 404. Straight to 404.

neonnoodle 1y ago
>Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. This is kind of like what the Gemini protocol is trying to do.
- adiabatty 1y ago
  Because it’s kind of hard to find the URL with the Google thing out there: https://geminiprotocol.net https://geminiprotocol.net
mxuribe 1y ago
While i am not aware of a browser that behaves like you described exactly, i vaguely recall that there is a browser plugin that is similar to what you described....but can't find it right now. That being said, there is a search engine named Wiby [https://wiby.me https://wiby.me] that focuses "...building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.", so maybe that be nice to check out?
zwnow 1y ago
> So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.” Well put. Personally I have zero issues with SPAs and the amount of Javascript we are facing in the web industry right now. And if you try to build some kind of business that wants to present itself successfully to potential customers, on the web, there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript. Most target demographics at this point and in the future have grown up with beautiful websites and the internet being really interactive. I highly doubt they'd be interested in what you have to say if you wrote your page in a way the web was supposed to be used.
- recursive 1y ago
  The whole idea of target demographics seems kind of antithetical to the premise here. Here's some information. Take it or leave it.
  - zwnow 1y ago
    This approach doesn't work nowadays. We have 3 apps for everything. If your app sucks people will go to one of the other 2.
    - recursive 1y ago
      It works as well as it ever did for its purposes. There's an implicit framing that we need to drive engagement and increase user base. Your comment is doing it too. In the old web, hobby sites existed on their own terms, and didn't have a prime directive of increasing metrics. If someone likes another site better, there's no problem for them to just use that instead.
- at-fates-hands 1y ago
  >> there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript. This has always made me wonder if anybody really builds anything from scratch any more. With so many frameworks, even for basic static sites, I wonder who's out there writing HTML, CSS and JS from scratch. Or is something that has been regulated to the dustbin of history?
ngriffiths 1y ago
> But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up. Perfectly said and I think this is applicable far beyond websites.
bowsamic 1y ago
What a load of rubbish. We absolutely can criticise other people's choices. It's insane to think you should only be allowed to choose your own
poszlem 1y ago
This is nostalgia for the world before a series of "Eternal September" events. In my opinion, it's essentially longing for an internet dominated by a different kind of user than today's majority and no amount of technical solutions will solve that.
- kkukshtel 1y ago
  spot on
- jraph 1y ago
  It's not necessarily nostalgia nor a feeling that the thing is mainstream so we are not special anymore. These heavy websites and apps have many consequences: - security: supply chain attacks. For the user, difficulties to check what runs in the browser (yeah, most users don't know how to do this and/or will not take the time - all the more reason, I'd say). - software freedom: you end up running a crazy amount of non-free software in your browser, or you are just barred from basic things - environment: it's a disaster: this stuff requires powerful devices, and probably leads to the disposal of many perfectly capable phones / computers. CIs are spending crazy CPU ticks building and building the app. Complex CDN-based setups to mitigate a bit the bloat. - cost for the users: after having to buy newer hardware better have a strong data plan for all these heavy wannabe app websites! - wait time for the users: it's awful the amount of time we collectively waste looking at loaders and slowly loading pages despite crazy bandwidths of today. - convenience: all this memory and cpu usage leads to worse battery time. If your network is spotty, you'll need to spend a lot of time retrying to load the thing - inclusion: if you happen to live in an area where you can only afford slow network access, things will be barely usable. Environmental costs and user costs for developer convenience. As usual, companies externalize costs. It's not only irrational feelings like nostalgia, it's solid reasons as well. I do have hope that we figure out at least more lightweight SPAs at some point though.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Nailed it. I find it pretty annoying that people mischaracterize the dislike of the modern web as nostalgia. The modern web is a big wasteful resource hog that expects users to just randomly download and run JavaScript programs. And another thing: A modern web browser has to be incredibly performant because of all the bloat, and also have a robust enough sandbox to just download JavaScript programs from the Internet and run them. So we’ve ended up in a situation where only Google can (plausibly pretend to) have a good enough sandbox for this use-case. This isn’t just nostalgic grumpiness, we’ve gone from a diverse ecosystem to a hugely fragile tech monoculture run by an ad company.
s_ting765 1y ago
Take this website for example. https://www.adaline.ai/ https://www.adaline.ai/ Some vibe coder saw nothing wrong with this. This is the future of the web.
- oc1 1y ago
  what's wrong with that?
  - s_ting765 1y ago
    Open the network tab on F12. Or for giggles try accessing that UI from mobile.
    - oc1 1y ago
      365 requests 77.2 MB transferred 79.8 MB resources Finish: 5.71 s I'm impressed it took only 6 seconds. Would hire.
  - Popeyes 1y ago
    I mean that's the kind of website I would have been done by Flash and I would played around for ages on. Now it's just stupid scroll jacking and poor HTML.
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  Frankly I think it's badass that people can author such incredibly rich and different websites. We truly are spoiled with choice.
  - s_ting765 1y ago
    I disagree. It's badass, revolutionary even, to communicate with simple html, javascript and css in 2025!
    - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
      Both is good. The linked page is a marketing page built to impress. The OP is an content page built to inform. Sometimes you want marketing pages built to inform [0]; sometimes you want content pages to impress [1]. It's always a tradeoff, but I can guarantee that your idealism doesn't correlate with harsh reality. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/ [1] https://ciechanow.ski/ https://ciechanow.ski/
philote 1y ago
I think the answer to "classic mode" browsing is at the bottom of the site: web rings.
- timeon 1y ago
  Even this article links to login-walled Twitter when talking about "1000 zines" instead of linking to web ring or some of those zines.
Tade0 1y ago
> Maybe someone runs a search engine that only indexes crawled pages that have a X-Web-Classic header or whatever. Well, not exactly, but this is the next best thing: https://www.marginalia.nu/ https://www.marginalia.nu/ The author is a HN regular.
exitb 1y ago
The neat part of the late 90s/early 2000s web was that, when you did something vaguely interesting, people actually came to see it and engaged with it. Obviously you can still create a weird webpage but it doesn’t matter if you publish it, as it will attract exactly zero traffic anyway.
reaperducer 1y ago
But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up. While I agree with everything you wrote, the nuance is that not everyone can make their own little oasis. That doesn't make a complaint about a lack of oasis invalid. And even for those who can, the vast majority of time spent on the internet is consuming content, not creating it, so it's perfectly logical to lament the lack of the little oasis that used to exist. I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources. Be the change you want: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox
bee_rider 1y ago
I don’t want to impose my preferences on other random people. I think sites loaded up with JavaScript are garbage and the people who make them are bad at their jobs, but whatever, that’s their business. I can hold negative opinions about things without suggesting we ban them. But I do think it should be considered totally unacceptable for things like government services to be gatekept by JavaScript. Same for entities that receive lots of public funds, like universities.
ravenstine 1y ago
I see there being two related but distinct issues: - The desire for a simpler, quaint looking Web - The desire for discoverability on the Web that isn't so driven by algorithms I love what the Web once was, aesthetically speaking, but to me the real problem is that of discoverability. There was a time where, if you built it, the audience would come. Today that is not so much the case, especially for written content which has become so heavily devalued. I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content. I don't want to churn anything out. One can churn out snippets, which is effectively what one does on sites like X, but then your writing has to either by pithy truisms or cringey drama. Besides, more and more people just want to consume content passively through audio and video. But then now I have to essentially put on a big production just to get my ideas out there, and for an audience that is probably less intellectually curious than those who would actually read an article. The classic Web isn't coming back until something changes about the way people discover new things. The web is no longer a place where one goes to seek information; it's where information comes to you through word-of-mouth and so-called algorithms putting content in front of you. Golden-era web was great. Now I'd just rather do my job, comment on HN, and go fishing. Actually trying to bring back the old web is like trying to bring back Jazz clubs hoping everyone will come to their senses and dance the Charleston again. No, it will always be a niche thing.
- krapp 1y ago
  I don't think that discovery without algorithms is possible, because the Web is essentially unstructured. Any means of discovery needs a way to organize all of that information, and then present it in a relevant way. People forget that Google was actually good at this. The problem isn't algorithms per se, but how those algorithms are implemented. Unfortunately, people coming up with alternatives tend to lean too far in the other direction - we have alternative search engines designed to exclude all sites using Javascript, for instance, which cater to people who don't want to interact with any part of the modern web, but we don't have an alternative that does what Google used to do before search became big business and simply attempt to catalog the entire web (including the parts that HN hates) and display relevant results to the end user.
BalinKing 1y ago
To be fair, they could be entirely disjoint sets of people, but I’m surprised by the simultaneous 1) hate for JavaScript[0] and the “modern web” and 2) praise for all the Flash-based websites from the ‘90s–‘00s. To be fair, my first interactions with the web were largely after the “Flash for everything” era, so I might be out-of-the-loop: Did corporate Flash-based homepages get the same reaction then that SPAs do now? [0] I do strongly dislike JavaScript myself, but specifically from the perspective of language design.
- reactordev 1y ago
  Flex was amazing. It was flash based app builder for enterprises with a robust ecosystem of “components”. It was the React of Flash.
  - githubholobeat 1y ago
    An alternative exists to Flex. It is called Apache Royale [https://royale.apache.org/ https://royale.apache.org/]. Here is a components showcase [https://royale.apache.org/tourdejewel/ https://royale.apache.org/tourdejewel/]
    - reactordev 1y ago
      Yeah, no, HTML won. Sorry.
- CM30 1y ago
  Oh, I remember a lot of developers hated Flash back in the olden days, especially those that focused their efforts on usability or who wanted to advance web standards. Case in point: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flash-99-percent-bad/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flash-99-percent-bad/ Heck, I'm sure at least some people celebrated when Adobe pulled support for Flash, just like some people probably would now if the likes of React went away forever.
Animats 1y ago
> All the tools are still there to build websites however you want. No, they're not. The good tools all died off. I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it. Mozilla Composer died long ago. Its spinoffs, Nvu, Kompozer, and Blue Griffon are all dead. You can still buy Dreamweaver, but Adobe wants $300 or so a year now, and they really want to sell you their whole "creative cloud". Brackets has been abandoned and converted to something called Phoenix, which now does more things less well. I don't want a whole "content management system" that assembles pages on the fly from a database. Just a decent WYSIWYG editor that can also manage uploads. I don't want something controlled by the hosting service. I'm using a Dreamhost account for this site, and its main purpose is to host some API endpoints implemented in Go. The human-readable web part is just the documentation. There are many images, so I need more layout than Markdown supports. It's not a blog, so Wordpress is the wrong tool for the job. You'd think there would be something good. As far as I can tell, no. Anybody know of anything?
- motorest 1y ago
  > I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it. What's wrong with launching a file watcher, opening the page in a browser, and editing away with any IDE of your choice?
  - Animats 1y ago
    That's writing HTML and CSS by hand, which is a pain.
  - azemetre 1y ago
    Not everyone makes websites by hand. I know people that strictly use WYSIWYG editors to make static content. My friend uses this very archaic looking program to make his static content. They all look like design straight taken from geocities but it's what they use. I doubt they're a small co-hort. They're probably larger in number than devs.
    - motorest 1y ago
jrm4 1y ago
What? We have zero right to externalize it? That's absolutely ridiculous and I'm surprised this is a thought taken seriously. The Web isn't some sort of optional little playground anymore; it's literally the "cyberspace" that affects us all, whether we like it or not. Going full Ted K. isn't an option for normal people. As such, not only isn't criticizing it allowed -- NOT criticizing it when you know about it is irresponsible. Please, everyone, continue to EXTERNALIZE THE HELL OUT OF THIS GRIEVANCE.
- antonvs 1y ago
  Ted K. externalized his grievances more than most, in the end.
eadmund 1y ago
> But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. I’m not so certain. It’s like if one bought a nice house in the country, and enjoyed listening to classical music and going to sleep early, and then someone a quarter mile down the road built a concert stadium, and hosted heavy metal concerts every single night. The mere existence of a heavy metal concert a quarter mile down the road interferes with listening to classical music and turning in early. Likewise, the mere existence of the ad-laden, Javascript-laden, MegaCorp™ Internet goes a long way to preventing one from experiencing the joy of ordinary life in the late 80s or early 90s when the Net was a haven for academics, technologists and hobbyists.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  If i listen to my favorite classical music radio channel, it doesn't matter what is on the other channels.
  - eadmund 1y ago
    It does if the other channels transmit so strongly that they drown out yours.
    - carlosjobim 1y ago
      And that never happens on the radio, and never happens with TCP/IP. It's your own choice what you listen to.
ilamont 1y ago
But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up. Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. Webrings! See "We need to bring back webrings", https://arne.me/blog/we-need-to-bring-back-webrings https://arne.me/blog/we-need-to-bring-back-webrings and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268706
BrenBarn 1y ago
> But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not. Hard disagree there. I mean, suspect even you wouldn't agree with that second sentence on its own, outside the context of building webpage. (Like, what if "whatever they want" is releasing a cloud of poison gas into the neighborhood?) But there's another dimension to it too, which is that in many cases my belief is not just "other people are doing something I don't want", it's "other people are doing something they don't actually want, they just don't realize it". The classic example is drugs. If someone spends their whole life drugged out of their mind, even if they have the money to do so, I think many onlookers would think, "You know, if a magic wand were waved and that person could somehow look at their life from the outside, from the perspective of a person who wasn't already locked into that druggie life, they themselves would not want to re-enter that life." It's just the tyranny of small decisions. We as humans are prone to painting ourselves into corners that we think we chose to be in, although if several choice-points before we had known where we would wind up, we likely would not have chosen to be there. This is doubly difficult to resolve because a sunk-cost fallacy often leads us to avoid admitting to ourselves that we actually made a mistake. And it's triply difficult because it often requires extra work to climb out of the hole we've gotten into. But it's still good to do this sometimes. It's possible for individuals to make mistakes, and for societies to make mistakes, and for both individuals and societies to make mistakes that they either don't notice or don't fully acknowledge. And it's good for individuals and societies to take stock of where they are and genuinely consider whether it's where they want to be. And it's even good for people to nudge, encourage, or exhort other individuals or society to do that kind of sanity check. To do otherwise is to accept the strange, fatalistic viewpoint that whatever did happen is what should have happened.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
There's a "classic web" search engine / indexer / randomiser at https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/; I put the 'surprise me' link on my bookmarks bar for a random peek into the classic web. I just hit it though, and some are... kinda sad. Ended up here [0] and the last post from '03 seemed like the author was the last person that still checked in, they seemed quite dejected and sad. Looking further, their about page mentions them going to Rochester Institute of Technology to become an animator, and them being referenced a few times online as someone that was inspiring but who left the community / communities a while ago. [0] http://aido.furvect.com/main.htm http://aido.furvect.com/main.htm

neonnoodle 1y ago

>Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. This is kind of like what the Gemini protocol is trying to do.

adiabatty 1y ago
Because it’s kind of hard to find the URL with the Google thing out there: https://geminiprotocol.net https://geminiprotocol.net

mxuribe 1y ago

While i am not aware of a browser that behaves like you described exactly, i vaguely recall that there is a browser plugin that is similar to what you described....but can't find it right now. That being said, there is a search engine named Wiby [https://wiby.me https://wiby.me] that focuses "...building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.", so maybe that be nice to check out?

zwnow 1y ago

> So the lamentation is really, “other people are doing things in a way I don’t like and that upsets my experience.” Well put. Personally I have zero issues with SPAs and the amount of Javascript we are facing in the web industry right now. And if you try to build some kind of business that wants to present itself successfully to potential customers, on the web, there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript. Most target demographics at this point and in the future have grown up with beautiful websites and the internet being really interactive. I highly doubt they'd be interested in what you have to say if you wrote your page in a way the web was supposed to be used.

recursive 1y ago
The whole idea of target demographics seems kind of antithetical to the premise here. Here's some information. Take it or leave it.
- zwnow 1y ago
  This approach doesn't work nowadays. We have 3 apps for everything. If your app sucks people will go to one of the other 2.
  - recursive 1y ago
    It works as well as it ever did for its purposes. There's an implicit framing that we need to drive engagement and increase user base. Your comment is doing it too. In the old web, hobby sites existed on their own terms, and didn't have a prime directive of increasing metrics. If someone likes another site better, there's no problem for them to just use that instead.
at-fates-hands 1y ago
>> there is no way to write a appealing website without Javascript. This has always made me wonder if anybody really builds anything from scratch any more. With so many frameworks, even for basic static sites, I wonder who's out there writing HTML, CSS and JS from scratch. Or is something that has been regulated to the dustbin of history?

ngriffiths 1y ago

> But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up. Perfectly said and I think this is applicable far beyond websites.

bowsamic 1y ago

What a load of rubbish. We absolutely can criticise other people's choices. It's insane to think you should only be allowed to choose your own

poszlem 1y ago

This is nostalgia for the world before a series of "Eternal September" events. In my opinion, it's essentially longing for an internet dominated by a different kind of user than today's majority and no amount of technical solutions will solve that.

kkukshtel 1y ago
spot on
jraph 1y ago
It's not necessarily nostalgia nor a feeling that the thing is mainstream so we are not special anymore. These heavy websites and apps have many consequences: - security: supply chain attacks. For the user, difficulties to check what runs in the browser (yeah, most users don't know how to do this and/or will not take the time - all the more reason, I'd say). - software freedom: you end up running a crazy amount of non-free software in your browser, or you are just barred from basic things - environment: it's a disaster: this stuff requires powerful devices, and probably leads to the disposal of many perfectly capable phones / computers. CIs are spending crazy CPU ticks building and building the app. Complex CDN-based setups to mitigate a bit the bloat. - cost for the users: after having to buy newer hardware better have a strong data plan for all these heavy wannabe app websites! - wait time for the users: it's awful the amount of time we collectively waste looking at loaders and slowly loading pages despite crazy bandwidths of today. - convenience: all this memory and cpu usage leads to worse battery time. If your network is spotty, you'll need to spend a lot of time retrying to load the thing - inclusion: if you happen to live in an area where you can only afford slow network access, things will be barely usable. Environmental costs and user costs for developer convenience. As usual, companies externalize costs. It's not only irrational feelings like nostalgia, it's solid reasons as well. I do have hope that we figure out at least more lightweight SPAs at some point though.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Nailed it. I find it pretty annoying that people mischaracterize the dislike of the modern web as nostalgia. The modern web is a big wasteful resource hog that expects users to just randomly download and run JavaScript programs. And another thing: A modern web browser has to be incredibly performant because of all the bloat, and also have a robust enough sandbox to just download JavaScript programs from the Internet and run them. So we’ve ended up in a situation where only Google can (plausibly pretend to) have a good enough sandbox for this use-case. This isn’t just nostalgic grumpiness, we’ve gone from a diverse ecosystem to a hugely fragile tech monoculture run by an ad company.

s_ting765 1y ago

Take this website for example. https://www.adaline.ai/ https://www.adaline.ai/ Some vibe coder saw nothing wrong with this. This is the future of the web.

oc1 1y ago
what's wrong with that?
- s_ting765 1y ago
  Open the network tab on F12. Or for giggles try accessing that UI from mobile.
  - oc1 1y ago
    365 requests 77.2 MB transferred 79.8 MB resources Finish: 5.71 s I'm impressed it took only 6 seconds. Would hire.
- Popeyes 1y ago
  I mean that's the kind of website I would have been done by Flash and I would played around for ages on. Now it's just stupid scroll jacking and poor HTML.
Waterluvian 1y ago
Frankly I think it's badass that people can author such incredibly rich and different websites. We truly are spoiled with choice.
- s_ting765 1y ago
  I disagree. It's badass, revolutionary even, to communicate with simple html, javascript and css in 2025!
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Both is good. The linked page is a marketing page built to impress. The OP is an content page built to inform. Sometimes you want marketing pages built to inform [0]; sometimes you want content pages to impress [1]. It's always a tradeoff, but I can guarantee that your idealism doesn't correlate with harsh reality. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/ [1] https://ciechanow.ski/ https://ciechanow.ski/

philote 1y ago

I think the answer to "classic mode" browsing is at the bottom of the site: web rings.

timeon 1y ago
Even this article links to login-walled Twitter when talking about "1000 zines" instead of linking to web ring or some of those zines.

Tade0 1y ago

> Maybe someone runs a search engine that only indexes crawled pages that have a X-Web-Classic header or whatever. Well, not exactly, but this is the next best thing: https://www.marginalia.nu/ https://www.marginalia.nu/ The author is a HN regular.

exitb 1y ago

The neat part of the late 90s/early 2000s web was that, when you did something vaguely interesting, people actually came to see it and engaged with it. Obviously you can still create a weird webpage but it doesn’t matter if you publish it, as it will attract exactly zero traffic anyway.

reaperducer 1y ago

But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up. While I agree with everything you wrote, the nuance is that not everyone can make their own little oasis. That doesn't make a complaint about a lack of oasis invalid. And even for those who can, the vast majority of time spent on the internet is consuming content, not creating it, so it's perfectly logical to lament the lack of the little oasis that used to exist. I’d love a browser that I switch into Web Classic Mode and it pretty much only reaches these resources. Be the change you want: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox

bee_rider 1y ago

I don’t want to impose my preferences on other random people. I think sites loaded up with JavaScript are garbage and the people who make them are bad at their jobs, but whatever, that’s their business. I can hold negative opinions about things without suggesting we ban them. But I do think it should be considered totally unacceptable for things like government services to be gatekept by JavaScript. Same for entities that receive lots of public funds, like universities.

ravenstine 1y ago

I see there being two related but distinct issues: - The desire for a simpler, quaint looking Web - The desire for discoverability on the Web that isn't so driven by algorithms I love what the Web once was, aesthetically speaking, but to me the real problem is that of discoverability. There was a time where, if you built it, the audience would come. Today that is not so much the case, especially for written content which has become so heavily devalued. I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content. I don't want to churn anything out. One can churn out snippets, which is effectively what one does on sites like X, but then your writing has to either by pithy truisms or cringey drama. Besides, more and more people just want to consume content passively through audio and video. But then now I have to essentially put on a big production just to get my ideas out there, and for an audience that is probably less intellectually curious than those who would actually read an article. The classic Web isn't coming back until something changes about the way people discover new things. The web is no longer a place where one goes to seek information; it's where information comes to you through word-of-mouth and so-called algorithms putting content in front of you. Golden-era web was great. Now I'd just rather do my job, comment on HN, and go fishing. Actually trying to bring back the old web is like trying to bring back Jazz clubs hoping everyone will come to their senses and dance the Charleston again. No, it will always be a niche thing.

krapp 1y ago
I don't think that discovery without algorithms is possible, because the Web is essentially unstructured. Any means of discovery needs a way to organize all of that information, and then present it in a relevant way. People forget that Google was actually good at this. The problem isn't algorithms per se, but how those algorithms are implemented. Unfortunately, people coming up with alternatives tend to lean too far in the other direction - we have alternative search engines designed to exclude all sites using Javascript, for instance, which cater to people who don't want to interact with any part of the modern web, but we don't have an alternative that does what Google used to do before search became big business and simply attempt to catalog the entire web (including the parts that HN hates) and display relevant results to the end user.

BalinKing 1y ago

To be fair, they could be entirely disjoint sets of people, but I’m surprised by the simultaneous 1) hate for JavaScript[0] and the “modern web” and 2) praise for all the Flash-based websites from the ‘90s–‘00s. To be fair, my first interactions with the web were largely after the “Flash for everything” era, so I might be out-of-the-loop: Did corporate Flash-based homepages get the same reaction then that SPAs do now? [0] I do strongly dislike JavaScript myself, but specifically from the perspective of language design.

reactordev 1y ago
Flex was amazing. It was flash based app builder for enterprises with a robust ecosystem of “components”. It was the React of Flash.
- githubholobeat 1y ago
  An alternative exists to Flex. It is called Apache Royale [https://royale.apache.org/ https://royale.apache.org/]. Here is a components showcase [https://royale.apache.org/tourdejewel/ https://royale.apache.org/tourdejewel/]
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Yeah, no, HTML won. Sorry.
CM30 1y ago
Oh, I remember a lot of developers hated Flash back in the olden days, especially those that focused their efforts on usability or who wanted to advance web standards. Case in point: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flash-99-percent-bad/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flash-99-percent-bad/ Heck, I'm sure at least some people celebrated when Adobe pulled support for Flash, just like some people probably would now if the likes of React went away forever.

Animats 1y ago

> All the tools are still there to build websites however you want. No, they're not. The good tools all died off. I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it. Mozilla Composer died long ago. Its spinoffs, Nvu, Kompozer, and Blue Griffon are all dead. You can still buy Dreamweaver, but Adobe wants $300 or so a year now, and they really want to sell you their whole "creative cloud". Brackets has been abandoned and converted to something called Phoenix, which now does more things less well. I don't want a whole "content management system" that assembles pages on the fly from a database. Just a decent WYSIWYG editor that can also manage uploads. I don't want something controlled by the hosting service. I'm using a Dreamhost account for this site, and its main purpose is to host some API endpoints implemented in Go. The human-readable web part is just the documentation. There are many images, so I need more layout than Markdown supports. It's not a blog, so Wordpress is the wrong tool for the job. You'd think there would be something good. As far as I can tell, no. Anybody know of anything?

motorest 1y ago
> I wish there was still something good that just edited HTML and CSS locally and uploaded it. What's wrong with launching a file watcher, opening the page in a browser, and editing away with any IDE of your choice?
- Animats 1y ago
  That's writing HTML and CSS by hand, which is a pain.
- azemetre 1y ago
  Not everyone makes websites by hand. I know people that strictly use WYSIWYG editors to make static content. My friend uses this very archaic looking program to make his static content. They all look like design straight taken from geocities but it's what they use. I doubt they're a small co-hort. They're probably larger in number than devs.
  - motorest 1y ago

jrm4 1y ago

What? We have zero right to externalize it? That's absolutely ridiculous and I'm surprised this is a thought taken seriously. The Web isn't some sort of optional little playground anymore; it's literally the "cyberspace" that affects us all, whether we like it or not. Going full Ted K. isn't an option for normal people. As such, not only isn't criticizing it allowed -- NOT criticizing it when you know about it is irresponsible. Please, everyone, continue to EXTERNALIZE THE HELL OUT OF THIS GRIEVANCE.

antonvs 1y ago
Ted K. externalized his grievances more than most, in the end.

eadmund 1y ago

> But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. I’m not so certain. It’s like if one bought a nice house in the country, and enjoyed listening to classical music and going to sleep early, and then someone a quarter mile down the road built a concert stadium, and hosted heavy metal concerts every single night. The mere existence of a heavy metal concert a quarter mile down the road interferes with listening to classical music and turning in early. Likewise, the mere existence of the ad-laden, Javascript-laden, MegaCorp™ Internet goes a long way to preventing one from experiencing the joy of ordinary life in the late 80s or early 90s when the Net was a haven for academics, technologists and hobbyists.

carlosjobim 1y ago
If i listen to my favorite classical music radio channel, it doesn't matter what is on the other channels.
- eadmund 1y ago
  It does if the other channels transmit so strongly that they drown out yours.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    And that never happens on the radio, and never happens with TCP/IP. It's your own choice what you listen to.

ilamont 1y ago

But what we can do is be the change we want. Just make my own little oasis. Find other oases and hook ‘em all up. Which then got me thinking about if there could be a special Web Classic experience we could voluntarily hook into. Webrings! See "We need to bring back webrings", https://arne.me/blog/we-need-to-bring-back-webrings https://arne.me/blog/we-need-to-bring-back-webrings and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268706

BrenBarn 1y ago

> But also, I have absolutely zero right to really externalize that grievance. People can do whatever they want for good or bad reasons, whether I’m equipped to understand those reasons or not. Hard disagree there. I mean, suspect even you wouldn't agree with that second sentence on its own, outside the context of building webpage. (Like, what if "whatever they want" is releasing a cloud of poison gas into the neighborhood?) But there's another dimension to it too, which is that in many cases my belief is not just "other people are doing something I don't want", it's "other people are doing something they don't actually want, they just don't realize it". The classic example is drugs. If someone spends their whole life drugged out of their mind, even if they have the money to do so, I think many onlookers would think, "You know, if a magic wand were waved and that person could somehow look at their life from the outside, from the perspective of a person who wasn't already locked into that druggie life, they themselves would not want to re-enter that life." It's just the tyranny of small decisions. We as humans are prone to painting ourselves into corners that we think we chose to be in, although if several choice-points before we had known where we would wind up, we likely would not have chosen to be there. This is doubly difficult to resolve because a sunk-cost fallacy often leads us to avoid admitting to ourselves that we actually made a mistake. And it's triply difficult because it often requires extra work to climb out of the hole we've gotten into. But it's still good to do this sometimes. It's possible for individuals to make mistakes, and for societies to make mistakes, and for both individuals and societies to make mistakes that they either don't notice or don't fully acknowledge. And it's good for individuals and societies to take stock of where they are and genuinely consider whether it's where they want to be. And it's even good for people to nudge, encourage, or exhort other individuals or society to do that kind of sanity check. To do otherwise is to accept the strange, fatalistic viewpoint that whatever did happen is what should have happened.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago

There's a "classic web" search engine / indexer / randomiser at https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/; I put the 'surprise me' link on my bookmarks bar for a random peek into the classic web. I just hit it though, and some are... kinda sad. Ended up here [0] and the last post from '03 seemed like the author was the last person that still checked in, they seemed quite dejected and sad. Looking further, their about page mentions them going to Rochester Institute of Technology to become an animator, and them being referenced a few times online as someone that was inspiring but who left the community / communities a while ago. [0] http://aido.furvect.com/main.htm http://aido.furvect.com/main.htm