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A website to destroy all websites

• pwg 10mo ago
  And it fails to render anything with Javascript disabled.
  • renegat0x0 10mo ago
    I disagree with a notion that a page needs to work without javascript. It is only design choice of author.
    • basscomm 10mo ago
      > I disagree with a notion that a page needs to work without javascript. It is only design choice of author. Sure, I guess, but if a site that's primarily text doesn't work without Javascript then that's a design failure. I sometimes use a browser like links2 because eliminating everything but text can sometimes help me focus. If the site displays nothing, I'm probably not going to bother reloading it in a different browser just so I can render the text. (It's a nonissue for this site, which appears to render fine in links2.)
  • thih9 10mo ago
    It gets a pass from me. The JS content didn’t annoy me, e.g. it didn’t show me any off topic popups, so I didn’t feel the need to disable JS.
  • zzo38computer 10mo ago
    If you disable CSS as well then it works. (This is true of some web pages that allegedly require JavaScripts, while others will not work with JavaScripts disabled whether or not you disable CSS as well.)
• ggillas 10mo ago
  Bookmarked. Called me to get back to reading and writing again. A joy to read and loved the artwork on mobile.
  • foco_tubi 10mo ago
    Henry is one of the most cutting edge designers out there today in my opinion. Check out his other sites.
• killa_kyle 10mo ago
  I'm inspired to write more in 2026 and publish more of the things I just make for myself.
• sandeepkd 10mo ago
  Not sure if its by design/intent, the font is too small to skim through it
  • keepamovin 10mo ago
    Do you feel destroyed tho?
  • lucid-dev 10mo ago
    Pretty successful in terms of the content representing the intent. Which is in part, don't skim, don't scroll, read something if you want to actually read something, or go elsewhere for doom-scrolling and skimming. I also found half-skimming it worked pretty well, using the images as markers to find what I really wanted. Also it looks like it works pretty good on mobile, I thought it was small on my laptop too, but hey, thanks the heavens for built-in-browser zoom...
  • pvtmert 10mo ago
    I haven't tried on a laptop but on iOS (iPhone 13 Pro) and iPadOS (iPad Air) It is quite nice on iPhone, while I agree font is smaller in iPad for readability. Although, they didn't block zooming/pinching (I hate when they do) therefore I was satisfied with the overall design.
• GaryBluto 10mo ago
  > it wasn’t always like this. I agree. I remember when you could read pages without requiring JavaScript enabled, and when enabled it was enabled it wouldn't cause things to constantly float about as you scroll. One of the biggest reasons you'll never get the "old web" back, is because the culture of the "independent" world wide web morphed into something entirely different from what it was (or more aptly was outright replaced with general "weirdos" rather than model train hobbyists and the like[1]). Ironically all of the people complaining about "capitalism and corporations killing the internet" as they scroll their federated social media feeds and start their "indie" initiatives[2] don't realize that they are part of the problem. [1] https://www.girr.org/girr/ https://www.girr.org/girr/ [2] https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• abetusk 10mo ago
  From what I can tell, their solution is to personalize the web by creating personal websites. Here are the 5 steps at the end that they list to construct a personal website: 1. Start small 2. Reduce friction to publishing 3. Don't worry about design 4. Use the IndieWeb 5. Join us in sharing what you've made
  • jrecyclebin 10mo ago
    The weakest part is the last one - and it's a big one. Personalsit.es is just a flat single-page directory (of thumbnails, even, not content - so the emphasis is design.) To be part of the conversation, you'd list there and hope someone comes along. Compare with Reddit where you start commenting and you're close-to-an-equal with every other comment. Webmentions do get you there - because it's a commenting system. But for finding the center of a community, it seems like you're still reliant on Bluesky or Mastodon or something. (Which doesn't "destroy all websites.") Love the sentiment ofc.
  • strokirk 10mo ago
    Yet no mention of the real friction: buying a domain and getting hosting set up. There are a number of free alternatives out there but they are not well known by the public.
    • trinix912 10mo ago
      Neocities is fairly well known and often listed in present-day personal website tutorials. Wordpress.com is also still there. Even if you get your own domain & hosting you usually have a nice web interface to drop the htmls into unlike in the old days when you had to FTP into the server and all that. Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.
    • rchaud 10mo ago
      There's certain level of friction to everything; that acts as a filter to separate those who choose to proceed anyway and those who don't. If you want to start painting, you have to buy a canvas, an easel, brushes, paint and set aside time to actually do it. Some people will abandon it because they like the concept of being someone who paints more than actually doing it. Some will proceed because they want to paint. The same goes for website creation. You can post text, pictures and images on any social media site. The independent web is never going to be able to match that level of usability, and IMO it shouldn't try to. Part of the reason the indie web is interesting is because it's full of people who found their way towards wanting to build their own site.
• dinobones 10mo ago
  I used the early web. I miss forums, I miss the small webmaster, I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends. And while you could make the argument that these forms of media were superior to TikTok, I’d also argue that this is mostly just taste. While we have closed ecosystems now, they’re much easier to make and share content to than the web of the past. It’s much easier to get distribution and go viral. There’s also a well trodden path to monetization so that if you craft great content people love, you can make a living from it. Yeah quirky designs, guestbooks, affiliate badges, page counters, all that stuff. I miss it. But only ever a very small fraction of society was going to be able to make and consume that stuff. This new internet is much more accessible and it occasionally produces diamonds of culture, you just have to know where to look. So no, I don’t think any amount of decentralized protocols or tooling or any technology really can change this. I think this trend is set and will continue, and I’ve had to learn to be more open minded to how I perceive internet content. No one is going to make personal websites or change their behavior in a major way. Look, you can still sign up for free web hosting and make an HTML page and tell your friends. There are still people that do this. But it’s naturally eclipsed by these other methods of much easier content sharing. The point is the content itself, not the packaging. Just get over the shape of the packaging and enjoy.
  • basscomm 10mo ago
    > I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends. You can still do that right now. I highly recommend it.
    • rchaud 10mo ago
      Precisely. I have made my own e-cards to send to friends to commemorate holidays and outings. All HTML + CSS, responsive and looks fine on all devices.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
    > I used the early web. I miss forums, I miss the small webmaster, I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends. None of these things are gone. They're just not new anymore for a lot more people, and they probably have significantly less social impact and cachet. But that's all.
• doug_durham 10mo ago
  The open web needs to be preserved. And bespoke web pages are great. However it isn’t 1998 anymore. The second you expose anything to the public internet it is going to be flooded by malicious bots looking for things to exploit. Unless you are putting up static HTML the learning curve to have a website that runs will continue to run immediately slopes to the point where it is not worth it. Despite OP saying they aren’t invoking nostalgia, they are.
  • petermcneeley 10mo ago
    I mean didnt Geocities solve this and many other problems? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities
    • nativeit 10mo ago
      Where are my hypermart.net peeps at? Iconoclastic, even in 1995, represent.
    • nativeit 10mo ago
      I always thought MySpace was the natural evolution of this. Flame GIFs and all.
  • kortilla 10mo ago
    There are a myriad of ways to host small websites without dynamic code that are easy to secure. You’re also the one that is being a little nostalgic for the past. Even 15 years ago bots would immediately hit sites looking for vulnerabilities in things like phpmyadmin, Wordpress, etc
  • ghusto 10mo ago
    There's no reason _not_ to use static sites for types of sites he's talking about (learning sites for hobbies, blogs, general sharing of information), created with things like Hugo, or even a simple script to generate pages with your own templating. There's nothing to exploit, because it's just HTML. If you don't feel like keeping a server secure, there are free and easy hosting solutions (Cloudflare pages publishes at a press of a button, for example).
• kristianc 10mo ago
  Lovely design - but also shows the inherent problem. Not everyone can create a design like this. Medium and Substack mean that not everyone needs to. When everyone is able to publish, you invariably end up with a lot more crap, and it has to hosted by someone else.
  • youngtaff 10mo ago
    Text is way too small for me… can’t read it without reader mode being on
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  • apublicfrog 10mo ago
    People who were not technical then and are not now made it work with Myspace, Neopets and Geocities. There are a number of free microhosts out there. And the big social media sites also allow you to post a lot more crap. I think bringing back websites like hawkee etc and providing an easy way to host is the right way forward, but it needs a catalyst (like most things) to become a trend.
    • rchaud 10mo ago
      There's a line from a 2009 episode of The Office that sums it up: Jim: "Pam texted back saying we could give them all iPods". Phyllis: Oh, if they don't have an iPod by now they really don't want one." Website creation has reached its equilibrium rate of growth. Those who want a website will make one, and the rest won't. Personal websites are one of many media for public self-expression today; in 2004, the options were far more limited. Those who are on Neocities or mmmm.page or Bearblog etc., are the spiritual successors of that MySpace HTML template generation. They are a trickle relative to the number of people who'll start a Tiktok, Bluesky or Youtube account. It's not going to grow any faster than what it is, regardless of whichever points of friction in creating one can be eliminated.
      • 10mo ago
• markus_zhang 10mo ago
  I'll counter propose a website to destroy all websites: https://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/ That's all we need. Maybe throw in a few images: http://www.candlekeep.com/ http://www.candlekeep.com/
  • FeteCommuniste 10mo ago
    Back when I first got on the net I remember spending a lot more time on sites like Bellard's, where "like" means "no style (or would it be transparent style? brutalist style?) but tons of substance."
    • markus_zhang 10mo ago
      Yeah really love the density of information, and also love the discussion boards and irc. Back then we gathered together on those boards or in the channels to wait for the new year.
  • jimbokun 10mo ago
    Seeing bellard.org for the first time just warmed my heart.
    • markus_zhang 10mo ago
      Yeah agree. One interested in CS can literally stay there for years. This guy is so smart.
• johnfn 10mo ago
  I hear clamoring to go back to "the old web" frequently, I never really understood the perspective. The old web still exists. I use it every day. I'm a member of a number of tiny community websites with old web charm, and there are certainly millions more out there, for any random niche or interest. In fact, I almost consider Hacker News to be in that category (though it might be a tad too large these days; you can't really get to know everyone's name). > But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed. No one is making you do any of these things. If you don't like it... stop? And go use the sites that you do like instead? > Now, Learning On The Internet often means fighting ads and endless assaults on one’s attention — it means watching part-1-part-2-part-3 short-form video clips, taped together by action movie psychology hacks, narrated gracelessly by TTS AI voices. We’re down from a thousand and one websites to three, and each of those remaining monolith websites is just a soullessly-regurgitated, compression-down-scaled, AI-up-scaled version of the next. Not really? There is an absurd amount of high quality content on the Internet to learn from - now more than ever. Yes, there is also poor quality AI slop garbage. But, again, if you don't like it... stop? And go watch the good stuff instead?
  • krapp 10mo ago
    The "old web" people want to go back to is a web that wasn't mainstream and wasn't complex. This is why people created alternatives like the gemini protocol - explicitly designed to never grow and never become mainstream.
  • jfengel 10mo ago
    I don't get it either. It's all still there. There's just also a lot more. It always sounds to me like "life was great when it was just me and a few dozen people exactly like me". Now it's got stuff for other people, too, and people seem to resent that.
• mattsears 10mo ago
  This is one of the most difficult articles my eyes could read. The font is so small and my eyes jumped all over the place. The web I want: One that's easy to read.
  • Aardwolf 10mo ago
    Firefox's reader mode works on this one!
  • nofunsir 10mo ago
    Let me guess, you want a site that is just a singular column of text, plenty of space for ad breaks, and 3/4 of your monitor is just whitespace on the left and right?
    • throwie9371123 10mo ago
      [dead]
    • MattRix 10mo ago
      I read the article on mobile and I thought it was great. Then I looked at it on my desktop (in Chrome) and found it much harder to read. There are even images literally blocking off whole portions of certain paragraphs. It's not good.
      • nofunsir 10mo ago
        I just re-read the entire thing. It is good. You're misrepresenting or you need to check your browser settings. No image blocks any paragraph, which even if it had, would be far more forgivable than modern web design. Do you consider any of Apple's modern product pages -- which "block off whole portions of" the page itself by scrolljacking and Clockwork-Oranging you to force you to watch their hypnotic marketing animations -- bad?
        • MattRix 10mo ago
          Why are you trying to gaslight me? I know what I’m seeing. In my browser (Chrome with default settings), there are certain paragraphs where the first word of every line is partially obscured. There are others where the last word of every line is obscured. It is unreadable.
• Aurornis 10mo ago
  I think the comments here are a great example of why this idea always sounds better in nostalgic reminiscence than in practice: As I write this, nearly half of the comments here are complaining about this website. There are complaints about requiring JavaScript, the font size, the design, the color choices, the animations. Complaints about everything the designer did to make this site unique and personal, which was the entire point of the exercise. This is coming from a site that supposedly attracts the target audience for this type of page.
  • lazzlazzlazz 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    • onion2k 10mo ago
      Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place. No it hasn't.
      • tux3 10mo ago
        >No it hasn't. I'm sorry, is it a 5 minute argument, or the full half-hour?
    • Y_Y 10mo ago
      Is it "negative" to identify shitty things as being shitty? I wouldn't necessarily blame the commenters for that.
      • krapp 10mo ago
        Constantly? As if it were a psychological compulsion? So often that dang had to make a guideline about it, which no one even attempts to follow? Two actually - the guideline against being "curmudgeonly" is separate from the guideline against going on a tilt because you get triggered by any website that doesn't look and act as much like plaintext as possible. And yet if someone so much as cracks a joke they get rapped across the knuckles and lectured about a rule that doesn't actually exist (no humor allowed)? Yes, that's negative. That's a culture of performative misanthropy.
• ramon156 10mo ago
  First 80%: "le web is le better" (sure, ok, it's a statement that u can make) then it's an instant jump to "Let's write down what we want", which skips so many steps in between. why is the current internet bad, what are the reasons and causes that go along with it? I'm saying this because, if I add these steps, I always conclude that it's just the past talking to me. The old internet also sucked, but for different reasons. You were yearning for things you take for granted now.
  • heddycrow 10mo ago
    But I'm le tired... Okay, well have a nap and then fire ze missiles!
• ghusto 10mo ago
  At the risk of sounding trite; things that haven't hit the mainstream yet are good, until they hit the mainstream. Once there's money to be made (and the giants have finally started to slowly move in your direction) it's done for. Move on, and find the next thing before it hits mainstream.
  • meindnoch 10mo ago
    Related: https://img.ifunny.co/images/4664ef520c015b9017962facd18773055840b1d8f0a3a8f4e6597eeabfd390ec_1.jpg https://img.ifunny.co/images/4664ef520c015b9017962facd187730...
• talkingtab 10mo ago
  The issue is good, the thought is good. But things happen for reasons. Those reasons are often how systems work. Unless we understand how those complex systems work, we cannot change anything. We end up with cargo cult thinking. You need to understand the function that produces the result. Why does the internet function the way it does? It is really pretty simple. The internet is primarily characterized by very-high-volume-very-low-value transactions. How much does it cost to send an email? When I send a real letter, I buy a stamp $0.78. So if I can send an email instead, it will save me a lot of money. You can try to calculate how many email transactions you can provide on one VPS costing $5.00 per month. Here is a great business opportunity! You sell people email stamps at $0.01 per letter for 10k bytes. Cool. And 1,000,000 people each buy 10 stamps. Wow. That is a lot of money for your $5/month VPS, right? But how do you get the money? You need to find a way for the one million people to each send you a dime. You cannot do it. If they put a dime in envelope and mail it to you, it will cost them $0.78. Etc. So you have another idea. Why not let scammers include details of their scam in all emails send and they pay for the email. Oops, I should have used the term "advertisers". Now the people who email pay nothing and the scamm.... oops advertisers pay for the cost. And you surprisingly find many, many people and corporations from all over the world are eager to exploit, oops target with advertising users. Especially if you can identify what kind of target they are.
  • btbuildem 10mo ago
    Yes, the core issue underlying the rot as described in TFA is the funding model for the internet. But that cancerous idea is older than the internet -- adversing, hawkers and scammers, they've been around since forever. It's an unfortunate side effect of "business" and if you turn the sanitation dial far enough, you'll get professions like Sales and Marketing. So to fix the internet, you'd have to decouple the content from the toll to access it.
• yakattak 10mo ago
  These are some ways I’ve been using the web in a way that keeps me free. - Run my own site (not much there yet) - Use RSS Feeds instead of Reddit - If a YouTube creator you like has a newsletter, SIGN UP! - If a short form content creator makes long form content, watch that instead - Post on forums, instead of their subreddit/Discord (lots of Linux distros have all three) - Invest in my cozy web communities[1] Speaking of the last one there, newsletters, RSS feeds and forums are the best way to be in control of the hose of content. Will these ever be as “big” as the monolithic platforms? No. That’s okay. 1: https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest
  • tracker1 10mo ago
    On the newsletter front, I really don't keep up with them and have thought about reducing the number I have showing up every week. I mostly just mass delete a lot of the mail in my personal inbox a couple times a week. I wouldn't mind getting back to reading more from RSS over aggregators, even though I often appreciate the comments on HN. Aside: it's a shame that so many sites removed comment sections, and any attempt to create a comment extension for any site turns into a cesspool.
    • nicbou 10mo ago
      Treat it as something you can pick from, like a pile of books, not something you have to finish, like a pile of books.
  • nativeit 10mo ago
    I'm quite enthusiastic about my FreshRSS instance. I got to this article/these comments from there, and I've even worked out how to add YouTube subscription feeds, and comics. Just a straightforward, chronological list of the things I've chosen to follow--no ads, no BS. It's quite refreshing, I think it's had a material impact to improve my mental health. Of course, the things that the people I follow create, and the timing of their publications is inherently influenced by algorithms, removing my direct exposure to algorithmically-defined infinite feeds has been significant.
• SonnyTark 10mo ago
  IMO things never go back to what they used to be, but they will certainly never stop changing. I do not for a second believe that the doom-scrolling brain-rot phase will not pass. It will pass like the many before it, the important question is what will replace it.. Effort should not be put into pulling us backwards as that's a fools errand. Instead it should be invested in asserting some control over current trajectories so we get something closer to what we like and further from what we hate during the next cycles. As far as web is concerned, I would really like to see more decentralized services in every facet of our online usage. Mastodon to me is exactly what I wished things become.
  • horacemorace 10mo ago
    That’s literally what TFA is about: how to proceed.
• IvanK_net 10mo ago
  Internet is amazing, it is the best invention of humanity, and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone. Those who enjoy saying "I do not learn enough, I do not improve myself enough, I do not work hard enough" (but you say "the humanity" instead of "I"), that is just your own fault. Let people use the internet the way they want to use it.
  • palata 10mo ago
    > each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone. How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?
    • privacy2 10mo ago
      Each year, I spend more time in my car during my commute (on average) than a year before, which shows that being stuck in traffic is getting more and more useful to me.
      • IvanK_net 10mo ago
        You chose to do it, so it means it was better to you than all other choices. Why would you still do it otherwise? If your goal is to suffer as much as possible, it does not matter. You are still making choices that lead you to your goal as fast as possible.
        • xboxnolifes 10mo ago
          It doesnt mean that it getting more and more useful though. The alternatives could be getting worse and worse. Or there just aren't alternatives. Maybe this is just a disagreement of what it means for something to "become more useful"? As an example, If I need a bank account and every bank goes online only and shutters their physical locations, that is not online banking becoming more useful to me. I was perfectly happy going to the physical location, but i am now spending more time doing banking on the internet.
• ltbarcly3 10mo ago
  The internet was never good. The feeling that it used to be good is just the creation of a golden age myth, it's just nostalgia. It was exciting because you were young and it was new, but the reality is the internet was almost useless. If you had to log into the internet circa 1997 or even 2002 right now you would have fun for about 2 hours, but it would be the "hey remember this?" kind of fun, then you would realize there was nothing worth doing and go do something else.
• dwa3592 10mo ago
  Wait, this was a nice article. why are people complaining?
  • snek_case 10mo ago
    Without wanting to sound overly pessimistic, I subjectively feel like comments on Hacker News have become more negative and cynical over the last 10 years. It often seems like the prevailing attitude is "let me try and point to a perceived flaw" or "here is why this is not good enough" rather than being helpful or supportive... We're staying away from the hacker ethos IMO. It's by no means a perfect article, but the general message seems to be that we're not powerless to build the web we want, and you can host your own website, which is still true.
    • GaryBluto 10mo ago
      Whenever I see something I like, I vote it. It feels awkward to me to type a bland show of praise when many other users have already done (and will continue to do) the same*. When I see something I dislike or disagree with, I feel it easier to go into more detail as to why, as I rarely see people sharing similar criticisms. * As a sidenote, people who just say "This." and "Cool." irk me, and I don't want to elicit the same annoyed reaction in others.
    • rglynn 10mo ago
      Assuming that your observation is true, I would guess the average age of HNers has increased YoY, which is likely to have something to do with it.
  • 65 10mo ago
    It says the same few things that always get hive mind upvoted on Hacker News. There is nothing new about this information. Social media bad, Javascript bad, cars bad, old internet good, RSS good, personal websites good, HTML good. If you want to farm upvotes on Hacker News, write about these topics. This content is like crack to developers.
    • 10mo ago
• theturtletalks 10mo ago
  >> The advent and development of tools & methodologies like POSSE (Publish On your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), ActivityPub, microformats, and ATProto, it’s becoming quite achievable to generate your own social network, interoperable with other networks like Bluesky or Mastodon. That network, designed for ownership and decentralization, is durable, designed around storytelling instead of engagement, and free of the whims of weird tech billionaires. Don’t just stop at social networks, this paradigm can be used to disrupt every marketplace! In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace. Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
• econ 10mo ago
  The only issue I have is that there are only 6 parts to this. I've installed the homepage on my telephone just to be sure.
• panny 10mo ago
  >JavaScript is more progressively-ehanceable than ever, and enables interfacing with a rapidly-growing number of exciting browser APIs (still fuck Brendan Eich though). I think the author should take a step back. He's complaining about politicized brain rot while engaging in politicized brain rot. He ruined his entire plea in one sentence. I was skimming to see if I could find anything useful in his words before reading, saw this, and closed the page.
  • docmars 10mo ago
    Agreed. The very end of the article also names off all the usual cookie cutter nonsense as well. These people just can't help themselves to inject activism in everything they do, and this is why so many people are turned off by otherwise great projects. Tech as a whole needs to take a step back and stop preaching to people about things they probably don't agree with.
• lisbbb 10mo ago
  Delusion. The only thing that will make dead Internet come back alive is another technological leap forward. Big Tech has total control.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• Robin_Patterson 10mo ago
  [dead]
  • FeteCommuniste 10mo ago
    It's a great hub, and it's quite easy to fall down a rabbithole there!
  • kryptoncalm 10mo ago
    While I agree it’s a good resource, please note there’s quite a few controversies[1] with the site, e.g. “The excessive monetization model of user-generated content has been criticized by several newspaper outlets, such as the British newspaper The Guardian” [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)
    • rcxdude 10mo ago
      Yeah, Fandom definitely went through a dark patch where they essentially killed a lot of very good niche wikis in the name of monetisation, and some other fraction migrated away as well as they could. Apparently it's changed owner and might be getting better, but I haven't had reason to go back and check.
• Levitz 10mo ago
  This felt so detached from reality to me that I attempted to check if the author was even old enough to have experienced the old web. The current state of things is not something that spawned out of nowhere. It's not some random trend. 2008 happened and normal people got online. That is basically the whole story. It is not coming back because people are not going to log off, as a matter of fact it's only going to get worse and worse as people from worse-off countries progressively get online.(Don't take that to mean that I think that's bad) You can tell people to build personal sites and such, sure, go at it, I'm all for personal expression. Where are they going to find them? Whoops, back to social networks. But that wasn't the case before I hear you say? Yes, because we didn't have colossal enterprises which entire purpose is to vacuum as much data as they could, you see, those didn't make sense before, but they do now since normal people use the internet. Google is dead and the only old-school forums still running generally either have political inclinations that would induce a heart attack to someone that still thinks Brendan Eich resigning over a thousand bucks was good or are established niche places in their communities. >With some basic HTML knowledge and getting-stuff-online knowledge, a handful of scrappy protocols, and a free afternoon or two, one can build their own home to post bangers for the tight homies, make friends, and snipe those new friends with those hits of dopamine they so fiendishly rely on. My brother in Christ people today are not even trusted to choose their font when messaging their friends, what in the world makes one think that there's a desire to build whole websites? Like who is this for? It's definitely not for laymen, it's not for the majority of web developers, it's not for programmers either, is it for the fraction of designers who are also developers? Does that really make sense?
  • PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
    > This felt so detached from reality to me that I attempted to check if the author was even old enough to have experienced the old web [ ... ] 2008 happened and normal people got online. Some of us remember Eternal September, roughly 15 years early than 2008.
• eleventen 10mo ago
  Webmentions in particular are a totally unserious hobbiest technology that will never reach anything like mass adoption. That the author was willing to offer this as any kind of solution really colored my view of the rest of piece. It’s like suggesting that everyone become HAM radio operators or join Gemini (the protocol).
• zerocool86 10mo ago
  The article mentions IndieWeb/POSSE but discoverability remains unsolved. I'm working on a pledge system for local-first projects - a /.well-known/freehold.json that crawlers can verify. Projects that break the pledge get delisted publicly. More at localghost.ai/manifesto
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• skeltoac 10mo ago
  Writer assumes reader is as cranky as writer. Reader loses interest.
• bbor 10mo ago
  I love the design and the underlying message, but I just have to engage on the three examples of "radical monopolies". Most pressingly, I don't think any of the three show an example like that of the automobile, whose ubiquity is mandatory! 1. Describing "proponents [of the industrial revolution]" as some external group seems pretty absurd, and gives the rest of the piece an unsettling Kazinsky vibe. Yes, of course there are a variety of problems in the world related to the textile industry, that's obvious. But blaming "wage theft" and "over consumption" on the technology itself just seems absurd. You can still buy handmade clothes, and due to transportation-enabled specialization, they'd almost definitely be much cheaper and higher quality than they would've been in 1725! 2. Citing a 256 page report on antibiotic resistance[1] with no page number for the vague claim that they were overprescribed to some extent in the 1950s-70s is just plain rude! Regardless, there's no economic system forcing antibiotics on you; if you really wanted to for some reason, you could even save money by refusing them. Rather, the basic realities of human health are what makes them so ubiquitous, in the same way that they make food or hand washing ubiquitous. 3. This summary of the issues with LEO internet satellites is just way, way oversimplified -- the most egregious part being the implication that it is now "impossible to use earth-based sensors... to learn about space"! More fundamentally, equating LEO telecommunications with astrophysics research because they both involve things above our heads is goofy and misleading. Even more fundamentally--and to return to my overall point--there's no attempt to even vaguely gesture at a "radical monopoly" here! It's fair to say that the vast, vast majority of people only interact with LEO satellites when using GPS, which, again, is absolutely not mandatory. And, finally, the web: The web is no exception to this pattern. A vision of interoperability, accessibility, and usability, the World Wide Web was first conceived in 1989... But the proliferation of access and ultimate social requirement of access has spawned countless troubles for human society... I hope it's clear how "technologies come with downsides" is a much more vague, obvious, and less-useful point than the Radical Monopoly thesis. It’s an industrial, production-minded way of approaching a discipline that has all the hallmarks of being a great craft I feel like the word "craft" is pretty telling here, as it strongly implies a break from the marketplace. If you don't like "industrial" websites, maybe take up issue with the concept of industry instead? Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary I love personal websites, as do we all. The idea that more than, say, 5% of the population would be interested in them without radical changes to our work-life schedules is a tad absurd tho, is it not? You really think the millions of people who are happily sharing AI-generated images of Jesus statues made out of plastic bottles on Facebook could be tempted away to learn HTML and build their website from scratch? Overwhelming https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/ vibes from this section! And, finally, my thesis: The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons. No. It can feel awful for one primary reason that dwarfs all others: advertising, which is of course just a wrapper over capitalism. If you want the internet to meaningfully change, no amount of artsy blogs will do the trick: you need to change the economic forces that drive people to contribute non-trivial intellectual products. I, for one, see a world without advertising within our grasp -- still-capitalist or otherwise. We can do this. The Free and Open internet can exist once again. [1] https://iris.who.int/server/api/core/bitstreams/a04b4607-0445-4aed-975b-6c31c8a3077e/content https://iris.who.int/server/api/core/bitstreams/a04b4607-044...
• orliesaurus 10mo ago
  Web 1.0 nostalgia always skips the part where nobody read your painstakingly hand‑crafted blog. TikTok didn’t ‘kill’ personal sites, it just finally gave normies hosting, discovery, and an audience without making them learn how to center divs.
  • williamtrask 10mo ago
    ...with a price :)
• jeffbee 10mo ago
  A lot to unpack here, but the article fails to tackle the question of distribution. Creators put their videos on YouTube because that is the way to reach a nearly global audience at zero cost. I can assure you that although you can probably figure out how to host videos that nobody sees, you cannot afford to host a popular video. The author clearly spent a lot of time writing and presenting this, but the facts and conclusions don't seem to warrant the presentation. In particular the (useless, in the narrative) section about antibiotics shows that the author is a deeply unserious person suffering from some pretty severe fallacies. Nobody can have seen a chart of childhood mortality over the 20th century and still believe such things.
  • rchaud 10mo ago
    > Creators put their videos on YouTube because that is the way to reach a nearly global audience at zero cost. If a tree fell and there was no one around, did it make a sound? A cursory look through r/newtubers would show you that there are a lot of people who get no views on their videos. Youtube's distribution mattered when it was looking for user-generated content to splice ads into. Today, it is filled with that content, and no longer has to encourage people to post by giving them thousands of views overnight. Besides that, people starting Youtube channels are looking for fame, which is why they unquestioningly follow all the usual tricks for "going viral": inane thumbnails, one-minute preambles before the "like and subscribe" beg, engagement bait content to draw in comments, etc. This kills whatever original voice the uploader may have had, before their first video is even posted.
    • jeffbee 10mo ago
      This just sounds like a you problem. Don't watch those channels. Don't upload those videos.
• iamwil 10mo ago
  The solution offered is pretty weak. I don't think it addresses why the internet took the shape that it did. Publishing without centralized services is too much work for people. And even if you publish, it's not the whole solution. People want distribution with their publication. Centralized services offer ease of publication and ease of distribution. So unless the decentralized internet can offer a better solution to both, this story will play out again and again.
• 65 10mo ago
  Oh great, another one of these dumb posts about how social media is so terrible and RSS, blogs, and HTML are so awesome. I'm getting sick of Hacker News people upvoting stuff like this all the time since it's just the same damn idea presented over and over again. Perhaps this site has grown too large and is attracting the Reddit hive mind crowd.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• micimize 10mo ago
  The title is all bluster. Nothing wrong with going off to play in your own corner but I don't think it does this movement any good to play-act at some grand conflict. Personally, I believe it would be better if we had more technological self-direction and sovereignty, but this kind of essay, which downplays and denigrates the progress and value of our modern systems, is a perspective from which the insights necessary for such a transformation cannot possibly take root. When asking such questions seriously, we must look at youtube, not twitter. Mountains of innovations in media publishing, delivery, curation, navigation, supplementation via auto-generated captions and dubbing, all accreted over 20 years, enabling a density and breadth of open-ended human communication that is to me truly staggering. I'm not saying we should view centralized control over human comms infra as positive, or that we'll be "stuck" with it (I don't think we will be), just that we need to appreciate the nature and scale of the "internet" properly if we're to stand a chance of seeing some way through to a future of decentralized information technology
  • moshun 10mo ago
    Agree with a lot that you’re saying here but with a rather large asterisk (*). I think that ecosystems like YT are useless to the wider web and collective tech stack unless those innovations become open (which Alphabet has a vested interest in preventing). If YT shut down tomorrow morning, we’d see in a heartbeat why considering them a net benefit in their current form is folly. It is inherently transitory if one group controls it. The OP article is correct about the problem, but is proposing throwing mugs of coffee on a forest fire.
    • micimize 10mo ago
      Mmm yeah I think I know what you mean. IDK if "If they stopped existing, we'd realize we shouldn't have relied on their existence" is plausible, but we have plenty of bitter lessons in centralized comms being acquired and reworked towards... particular ends, and will see more. Also the collective capability of our IT is inhibited in some ways by the silo-ing of particular content and domain knowledge+tech, no question
    • twitchisntgood 10mo ago
• garganzol 10mo ago
  To give it a different light: by using an indie web approach (i.e. self host), there is an intrinsic guarantee that a publisher has put at least some effort and resources to make their materials public. This ensures that the published materials have certain authenticity and inherent amount of quality. Publishing them "the indie way" functions as a kind of proof of work: not a guarantee of excellence, but evidence that something meaningful was at stake in producing and sharing it. By contrast, the corporate web has driven the cost of publishing effectively to 0. This single fact opens the floodgates to noise, spam, and irrelevance at an unprecedented scale. The core problem is that the average consumer cannot easily distinguish between these two fundamentally different universes. Loud, low-effort content often masquerades as significance, while quiet, honest, and carefully produced work is overlooked. As a result, authenticity is drowned out by volume, and signal is mistaken for noise. To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
  • CGamesPlay 10mo ago
    > To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users. This is very true. I've found that there's more good content than there ever was before, but that there's also much more bad content, too, so the good is harder to find. RSS helps me, curated newsletters help me. What else helps build this discernment?
    • nicbou 10mo ago
      Hacker News, plus a few specific authors who link to others. Human curation is still where it’s at.
    • Kovah 10mo ago
      Sorry for the shameless plug, but I built [Cloudhiker](https://cloudhiker.net https://cloudhiker.net) exactly for this: exploring great websites.
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
• jppope 10mo ago
  Pandora's box has been opened, per the story all that remains is hope. You can't go back in time and change history. If you want to make a better world from a better internet you need to save people from the tyranny of the marginal user (https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). It's not the web, its the people. Those people incentivize enshittification. People will need to change, not the companies, the government, or the creators... the supply is purely filling this demand. The indie web isn't going to help a grandma see photos of her grand kids as easily as facebook will. And the indie web won't help you find a used guitar as well as craigslist will.
  • heddycrow 10mo ago
    I'm with you. Thanks for the link.
• mmaunder 10mo ago
  Ad driven centralization bad. Go make independent websites using open standards. I just saved you 5 mins. This spends a lot of time on mood setting and analogy and doesn’t address: network effects, discovery economics, hosting and maintenance costs, security, spam and abuse mitigation, user incentives. It’s aspirational rather than operational.
• camgunz 10mo ago
  These are collective action problems. The number of people who would have to maintain personal websites full time in order to replace Reddit is boggling and unachievable. These articles all reduce down to "I don't love ads". Call your congressperson.
• performative 10mo ago
  first off: this is a beautiful article! but, it got me thinking about how many times i found an interest that would then become a core part of my identity by having a really cool piece of media relating to said interest essentially force-fed to me by algorithmic feeds. i got into rhythm games by seeing a livestream of osu! pop up on twitch, got into archival fashion by seeing a really incredible outfit on reddit, got into experimental pop by having clarence clarity's "no now" come across my spotify feed. as someone who grew up in a fairly insulated & isolated suburb, i think those types of experiences were really important in turning me from an unconfident, kinda angry kid into the aesthetically-engaged, witty, openly-gay man w/ a pretty big breadth of creative interests i ended up being. i'm truly not sure if i would've turned out this way if most of the internet remained as undiscoverable as it was ~20 years ago. though i have more appreciation for the slow web nowadays, where my identity is a bit more solidified, i still feel a pretty strong pull towards "the platform", and my visions for a healthier internet include it. but, that's about as far as i've gotten.
• agnosticmantis 10mo ago
  I’ve started experimenting with Quarto[0] for scientific/technical publishing on a personal website, and it’s been quite easy to use so far. I especially like that it has builtin support for LaTeX, markdown, code blocks and Jupyter notebooks. Only thing is I wish there were more templates ready to use. [0] https://quarto.org https://quarto.org
• amatecha 10mo ago
  Ah hell yeah that was great. Thank you for such an awesome post/site!
• topspin 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • froggertoaster 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    • rexpop 10mo ago
      It's annoying that you guys clutch your pearls over an imaginary gulag while actual people are being actually rounded up and sent to camps.
    • rglynn 10mo ago
      Oh my god, I didn't even get to the bottom, I thought you were being hyperbolic with that quote. Insane.
  • slybot 10mo ago
    Cannot agree more... Tired of flags being waved at the wrong places and times.
• noduerme 10mo ago
  Something that scares the shit out of me is the new American tourist visa requirement that you disclose your social media accounts over the last 5 years. This seems an ultimate example of the exclusion or people who refuse to participate in a technology. I'm not on social media. If more countries begin adopting this, what am I supposed to show the immigration authorities? Am I supposed to create a wholly fake set of accounts in order to prove I'm not a threat to them? Is telling them that I'm not on social media a red flag in itself?
  • OGEnthusiast 10mo ago
    That's by design. Many people in America today (including many in the federal administration) want to transition to a world with much less immigration and foreigners (including less foreign tourism) than the levels of the past several decades.
    • noduerme 10mo ago
      I understand that, but that's not really my point. Yes, they have an isolationist and xenophobic bent. But while it's understandable that having a social media presence full of sketchy / terrorist / trafficking / whatever might now be a reason for a country to deny a visa, it creates the question of what they do with innocent people who simply refuse to participate. My question is what happens if you don't have any social media or smartphone at all? Will we be completely excluded from being allowed to travel freely unless we post our thoughts on a daily basis?
      • OGEnthusiast 10mo ago
        > Will we be completely excluded from being allowed to travel freely unless we post our thoughts on a daily basis? Yes, because even if you do, they will find other ways to exclude you. Their stated goal is to exclude as many non-Americans from the USA as possible, regardless of whether they consider you "innocent" or not.
        • noduerme 10mo ago
• blobbers 10mo ago
  I liked this article, and I had a website back in the days of having an html directory in my university unix account. So what stops me today? I don't have hosting. Eventually livejournal, blogspot, etc. came around and provided a decent approximation of what people wanted to do, for free. Yes there might be a little ad on the side but it was basically 'okay'. Eventually FB etc. came along and provided a decent approximation of a blog and allowed easy readership. Friendfeed got bought and soon enough everyone was in everyone's business. The problem is facebook, linkedin etc. are too easy to propogate information. My ramblings shouldn't show up on everyone's feed. They should show up to people who inbound come want to actively seek them out; those are the people for whom they might be interesting. It's kind of like talking to your neighbor. You find out what's going on in their life, but maybe you don't want everyone on the street to know, but you're fine if they happened to ask you about it. Chances are if someone is genuinely interested in you, they'd come to your website... but do you want your boss to come? I don't know maybe the internet was a little safer when it was not anonymous, but at least somewhat selective as to who would access it.
• Atlas667 10mo ago
  These types of cultural analysis always fails to be substantial because they rely on "losing our way" argument consciously or even on a subliminal moral level. I think this one is kind of better because it tries to place social transformations on a material base, but it still fails to do that properly with tech. Tech or the internet isnt a freeform thing that just exists and obeys everyones psyches and wants. Tech is something made in factories from specific industries by specific companies and organizations to fit within certain monetizeable bounds. The early internet obeys the grasp of the early industry. Very little was monetized then. The development of the internet follows the development of the monetization of the internet, it follows the rules of capital.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• m-hodges 10mo ago
  I've come to think something is deeply wrong with the assumption that digital participation must mean audience acquisition. Whenever people talk about leaving platforms, the immediate rebuttal is "discoverability" or "reach" as if it's self-evident that pursuing an audience is inherently good. It's rarely defended; it's just presumed. This is often smuggled in under the language of "network effects," as though the relationship were mutual. But "audience" is fundamentally one-directional. It turns participation into performance. I think a lot of internet nostalgia is really grief for a time when you could participate without being on stage. Sure, you wanted lots of people to read your blog, but we did have an era when posting didn't implicitly ask: how big is your following, how well did this travel, did it work. Today, the "successful" participants (the successful audience-builders) are called "creators", while everyone else (who is also creating, just without large-scale traction) is categorized as lesser or invisible. You can write a blog post, a tweet, a Reddit thread; you have undeniably created something. Yet without an audience, you haven't achieved the status that now defines digital legitimacy. What I miss is a participation model that didn't say: audience or perish.
  • rustystump 10mo ago
    Sadly, attention is all you need these days. If you get attention, you will be “set” in part because ads=money but mainly because human attention really is that valuable outside of advertising. Survival is still what matters and so most people judge “creatives” by big number because that means status. I think people see the very western culture of haves and have nots where all that matters is big number dominating the digital landscape the way it does in the physical world. It is gross but not remotely new. You put the audience or perish pressure on yourself when you value big number go up opinions. Dont be friends with those opinions. They change nothing and have no real power if you dont depend on them for survival.
• vjay15 10mo ago
  Incredible website, and I started my own blog just because of this, maybe ill try integrating in the indieweb and webmentions to join the community ^_^
• nathias 10mo ago
  It's good to have private websites and keep them weird, but this will and can in no way change the internet in general, centralization of content is a very good feature, at least functionally it is necessary.
• cadamsdotcom 10mo ago
  Love the idea but it still isn’t easy enough for normies to host a blog or a website. I think there’s a way though. Modern self-hosted open source is easy to run for semi-experts, so what if communities banded together to host stuff at the local library? A bunch of enthusiastic teens could form a volunteer core that runs a bunch of services for their community and teaches anyone interested, giving kids a chance to learn how to host stuff online. There’d be high trust if it’s all locals providing services to locals. Host it on a cheap VPS so the library doesn’t even need infra; just a very small budget for the initiative. It’d be super decentralized. And the teams running these services would provide high quality feedback to the developers on features & operating of their services. Seems win-win.
  • pmdr 10mo ago
    > Love the idea but it still isn’t easy enough for normies to host a blog or a website. I have a hunch that normies are increasingly unaware of what a website is. Newer generations are growing up with apps, on their phone/tablet, some being basically "illiterate" when it comes to using a laptop/desktop beyond the top 10 webites corresponding to the apps on their phone.
• lasgawe 10mo ago
  The idea behind the article is great. and I really like the UI design of that page btw.
• scotty79 10mo ago
  If only we could separate out social network from content. I think chat apps are a good place to start. It's a place where contents of your friends list matters. Where the only way to have something recommended to you is asking someone for it or someone close to you coming to the conclusion that you, personally might enjoy it. What's left to figure out is how to connect these systems that have strong identity and viciously curated friends lists to recommendation engines and content mills in a way that's opt-in. That lets users control the content that lands in their lap. That let's them decide where they land between "I'm gonna ask a friend about what's cool" and "just plug me to firehose" spectrum. The connection should let users make available many freshly generated pseudonymous identities so that content mills can only create ephemeral profiles of you. I imagine chat systems should let you tag your contacts and expose only a part of your social network when you ask content mill for recommend content. There's so much more to discover beyond the modern status quo where we basically surrendered everything.
• karol 10mo ago
  Open source values blah blah and still a personal dig at Brendan Eich.
  • rglynn 10mo ago
    Yeah that really put me off the whole article. No problem with them having that sentiment, but keep it out of this topic.
• npodbielski 10mo ago
  > The most self-evident, convivial answer is an old one: blogs. HTML is free to access by default, RSS has worked for about 130 years What the... How RSS which is an XML can predates internet and computers and even transistors?
• _egtx 10mo ago
  We call this the alivenet - https://vvesh.de https://vvesh.de
• sylware 10mo ago
  classic web? noscript/basic (x)html? no whatng cartel web engine required?
• coldblues 10mo ago
  The website to destroy all websites is https://gwern.net https://gwern.net For however much I can respect individuals for showing their creativity, the novelty of it wears off. The majority of people in the Indie Web scene all blend together. The presentation might be different, but the essence is mostly the same. Not everyone needs to express themselves and voice their opinions. "Lurk five more years before posting" as people used to say. The article is also laden with a certain kind of politics. You can infer the philosophical premises that led to some of these conclusions.
  • PufPufPuf 10mo ago
    I opened that webpage and the first thing I saw was a sidebar covering the text...
    • gwern 10mo ago
      I am guessing you are on mobile and are referring to the togglebar 'demo mode', illustrating its existence. I wish we didn't have that, but we have to. That demo of the theme togglebar exists to educate users, because we found that a lot of complaints came from people who were blind to the gear icon and were unaware that the control they wanted already existed. (Which is regrettable but understandable, because almost all websites provide useless controls or visual spam, in an example of 'why we can't have nice things'.) Obviously, it's disabled on subsequent page loads. (One of a number of parts of the UI/UX we streamline using 'demo-mode', as we try to thread the Scylla & Charybdis of a cluttered but explicit UI vs a clean newbie-unfriendly UI.)
  • user24 10mo ago
    I thought it was https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/ https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
    • NoGravitas 10mo ago
      No, it was https://zombo.com/ https://zombo.com/. You can do anything there.
• constantcrying 10mo ago
  The revealed preferences of the general population shows that the only way to accomplish this, is by banning the alternatives. All indication point to the fact that the general population really, really likes getting angry at fake slop videos, endless discussion about the most inane over discussed topics and today's celebrity gossip. Great educational content exists on the internet, social media could easily be about close connection to people around the world, but people evidently do not care about that.
• taneq 10mo ago
  The internet is fine. The Web is bad.
  • pmdr 10mo ago
    Widespread outages whenever AWS or Cloudflare experience a hiccup points to the contrary.
• crassus_ed 10mo ago
  This was a great read, very refreshing. I like the idea of just starting a website and writing articles on it. It is interesting that my first thought when considering doing so is: "How will I get any traffic?", but that's beside the point. I think I should just share it with friends and see how it goes.
• ungreased0675 10mo ago
  What are some best practices for consuming indie web content? Is there a great RSS reader/app? How do I discover content I’d like but don’t already know about?
• npilk 10mo ago
  The page is called "a website to destroy all websites", and their goal is to...get everyone to make their own personal websites? I agree with that goal, but then I might change the title. Maybe that's part of the problem - "website" sounds like something a big corporation makes.
• docmars 10mo ago
  Ah yes, signed at the bottom with all the cookie cutter political takes of a mentally insane progressive still clinging to the culture war they just lost. I wish I could downvote this post harder.
• gordian-mind 10mo ago
  Reading this, I kept wondering whether it would stay on the technical level or whether it would immediately start broadcasting the author’s cultural politics. It does, and the first giveaway is the kind of sentence you’ve seen a thousand times: “These days, however, we write increasing amounts of complicated, unsecure code to express less and less meaning, in order to infinitely generate shareholder value.” That line signals a tribe: “infinitely generate shareholder value” is the ritual incantation that turns every topic into the same morality play, with the same stock villain. It’s the worldview of someone who wants to live in a small enchanted technical garden, treating the economic world as a gross external thing, that you can blame whenever you need a cause. And “unsecure code” in that context is part of the aesthetic: modernity is decadent, business is corrupting, therefore the code is “unsecure” and “meaningless.” The Brendan Eich stuff is the same genre: petty culture-war residue kept alive long after normal people moved on. So yeah, the internet continues, and until such artistic types learn to tamp down their own biases and refrain from injecting those into every word they write, I will keep away from their walled gardens.
  • scroot 10mo ago
    > treating the economic world as a gross external thing Well, a _specific_ kind of economic world in this case. Is it not a matter of fact that big tech companies largely guide how computing is used a developed, and that they are beholden to ever-expected increases in value to their shareholders? You have still have an "economic world" that doesn't operate that way.
    • gordian-mind 10mo ago
      What specific kind? The "economic world" exists in that you can work for companies with shareholders, you can work for other companies, you can work for NGOs and whatever other structures. What OP's whiney comment does is complain about the ones people like to work at because the pay is good. And his comment doesn't come from being an expert in economics (he's a programmer), it comes from vibes. Well what about aligning the vibes with the salary? Oh, no...
• annexrichmond 10mo ago
  From the homepage: The author’s position is that one must adhere to their politics or be killed.
• alanh 10mo ago
  "Cars now provide zero benefit..." "Gender-based discrimination..." "Fuck Brendan Eich [for opposing gay marriage at a time that Obama did as well]..." "As ever, unionize, free Palestine, trans rights are human rights, fix your heart or die." Ugh. What if you could possibly focus on technology instead of woke virtue-signaling (and threatening to kill those who disagree)? Anyway, 'write ur website by hand' is absolute garbage advice, sorry. No, you are not going to effortlessly syndicate it elsewhere when you are manually updating your index.html to point to your latest hand-coded plain html file. Surely you won't even have a sitemap.xml. Will you write the sharing-friendly meta tags by hand every time too? No.
• johnnyfived 10mo ago
  Damn this was quite annoying
• padzochambers 10mo ago
  Really enjoyed reading this. Thank you - very inspiring.
• GTP 10mo ago
  This isn't the first post I read on HN about this topic. While the content differs, the core ideas tend to be similar. The problem isn't about knowing that we can do it, the problem is actually getting around doing it. I have two blogs, one with a specific topic [1], another I created to share everything else that I feel like writing about [2]. Plus a personal "profile" page [3]. Both blogs only have one post, the first one perhaps a couple of drafts I never got around polishing to publish them. The personal page I still have to update after quitting a PhD months ago. Why is this? Is it due to some lack of self discipline? Is it because, if I write why I quit a PhD, I would end up complaining about the current status of academia, and this could be at odds with my current employer's guidelines about posting on social media? Or is it because, if I stop and list all the things I have in the back of my mind that would require "just half an hour a day", I would end up filling a whole day? What are your thoughts on this? [1] https://crypto.gtpware.eu/ https://crypto.gtpware.eu/ [2] https://ramblings.gtpware.eu/ https://ramblings.gtpware.eu/ [3] https://gtpware.eu/ https://gtpware.eu/
  • rdiddly 10mo ago
    Yeah, a blog isn't just a place to quickly jot things down, it's actually work. And because it's work, and it's optional, you sort of have to feel like it's "the work you should be doing," or at least part of or ancillary to, "the work you should be doing," or else it will just feel like busywork, and/or get postponed indefinitely. Posting on an existing platform is lower-stakes. But then again, if you end up putting lots of effort into posts on an existing platform, you're still doing most of the work, and one could infer that you care about it at least that much. In those cases I would recommend doing the initial setup of an actual blog etc., which is just a one-time operation pretty much.
    • GTP 10mo ago
      Just out of curiosity, do you happen to have or have had a blog? Also, I think part of the problem for me is that I think no-one would would read it anyway, which, depending on how you look at it, can both be an incentive or a disincentive. But sometimes I also think about it as some sort of conversation starter or tool to help me foster conversations. The idea would be to write about some things I happen to talk about with different people every now and then, so that when I happen to talk about it again, I can point them to what I wrote as a summary of my opinions as some sort of starting point for the discussion.
• ninalanyon 10mo ago
  Why, and when, did the word destroy get this meaning?
• drumttocs8 10mo ago
  I liked House of Leaves in high school
• dkbrk 10mo ago
  https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
• elendee 10mo ago
  crux: "the internet feels bad". But, most of the internet is still there, so how could that be. I think more specifically, the current mode of attention capture feels bad - what the majority of people are interacting with feels bad. But those are not "the internet". A resurgence of people learning LAMP stack is not going to address the Big Problem. I think we should be asking why algo-driven social media roflstomps the indie web, not how to get more web hosters into the indie web.
• arendtio 10mo ago
  If the internet is so awful, why don't we abandon it? I mean, nobody forces us to use it. Well, sometimes people do. But I think that's precisely the moment when we have to push back and tell them that we are not okay with using some WhatsApp group. And if they ask why, ask them if they know what Cambridge Analytica was, and if they like it when the political system is being manipulated.
• 0xedd 10mo ago
  [dead]
• greendestiny_re 10mo ago
  I find the lack of respect for accessibility considerations on that website disturbing. For instance, I wish I could see the provided paintings in all their glory instead of as miniscule thumbnails with text plastered over them. I'm not sure why the author even bothered putting the paintings in there in the first place; was it to annoy visitors and create a discussion?
• ttm1504 10mo ago
  [dead]
• mathewar 10mo ago
  What happens when you die? Your personal websites disappear along with you too? It seems like there should be a way to have a platform take on a custodian role, but under your direction.
• lunias 10mo ago
  Back in the day, you made some website on GeoCities or Angelfire and no one visited your site. Today, you post to Medium or Bear Blog and no one visits your site. The difference is that back in the day people couldn't find your site, whereas today they don't even look. Everyone self-censoring on a social media platform (disturbingly common) should have long-ago moved to something self-hosted, but the integrity of the message is less important than its reach. Consumers of these censored feeds should have long-ago moved back to RSS or created an open alternative method of providing independent, algorithmically curated streams.