7 ms·

Here's a contrarian timeline: maybe the old web will return? My reasoning: when the "old web" was great, most people thought the internet was for nerds. Sure ev

Here's a contrarian timeline: maybe the old web will return? My reasoning: when the "old web" was great, most people thought the internet was for nerds. Sure even casual users would forward funny emails to their friends, but when it came time for news most people would read the paper or watch the nightly broadcast. When they paid for their Big Mac they'd lay down cash. There were plenty of people using the internet, but again, they were nerds or nerd-adjacent. So, maybe the LLM-ification of everything could end up being like a huge filter, where all the non-nerds no longer see the point of anything and move on to gardens with even higher walls. And then what you have left will be a small subset of people who know how to reach their desired corners of the internet, just like before.

goodmythical 2mo ago
I haven't checked it out personally, but this is my impression of all of the webs that aren't the world wide web. Like the meshtastics, the new freenet, some web 3.0 It being harder to join has the effect of their being a smaller more engaged user base. Less likely that there will be pressure from corporate interests, more likely that every user has a vested interest in both production and consumption. edit: And of course, you'll see the same in dedicated niche forms and spaces like HAM radio. I imagine the folks TXing EME have a particular flavor that is well maintained.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
Razengan 2mo ago
Allow me to switch to asshole mode for a minute: "Things used to be so good" is mostly rose-tinted glasses: What exactly WAS the "old web" anyway? 100s of half-baked sites hosted on Geocities, Yahoo, about pointless stuff? Epilepsy simulator websites splattered with gif-vomit? Everyone and their grandmother asking you to install their 10 toolbars? Honest, serious question: What actually was of objective substance on the old internet that's nowhere to be found now? You can find random pointless stuff now too, just that except Geocities/Yahoo it's Intsagram/TikTok/Twitter etc. If you mean self-hosted websites, they're still here, and nothing's stopping you from creating your own. If you loved all the Flash toons on Newgrounds etc there's unironically a lot more shorts and animations on YouTube or even Vimeo now, if you but search for them (the old gods like Weebl, David Firth are still there, and I suggest Sechi, DoodletmeGo, Nondescript Video Club, and からめる to start with then let the algorithm soak up the weirdness) Just as the "internet" supplanted newspapers, magazines, and broadcast television for many people, and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them, why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium? There's so much crap on the "old" and "middle age" internet: ads, scams, anal mods, trolls, bandwagons, vote wars, low-effort content and other repetitive noise that could be bypassed by just asking AI about something and make better use of your limited mortal lifetime, like watching that anime you've been putting off for years.
- greazy 2mo ago
  For me that's not the old web. The old web was local forum created by gamers for gamers who hosted real life events. You could post asking for super specific advice to your locale. It was eaten by reddit. There were cool IRC servers for all sorts of niche projects and topics. This still exists of course but a lot of it was eaten by Discord or Slack. While I never participated, sites like LiveJournal provided both a unique outlet and view into other people's lives. I think a lot of social media like Instagram and Facebook eat this up. I'm sure everyone has their own versions. And this is the old web that was gobbled up by mega sites which aim to commericalise the crap out of everything. Btw I consider HN part of the old web.
  - sodapopcan 2mo ago
    I loved Diaryland since it was fully customizable. It was my intro into templating! It was very crude, but it worked.
    - Razengan 2mo ago
      Oh my gosh I loved Diaryland, and how you could customize your shit with some simple HTML, but I think they went through enshittification while they were still around anyway But..what says something like Diaryland can't be brought back now?
      - sodapopcan 2mo ago
        Did they? I think it was LiveJournal that enshittified. Diaryland is actually still around. I just checked it out and it now "Diaryland v2!" I actually last checked it out in the past year and it still looked exactly like it did back then!
        Razengan 2mo ago
        Well there you go: The "old web" is still here or can be, but most of the people complaining about the "new web" don't really care about it anymore, they just pretend to
monk_grilla 2mo ago
We're participating in it right now. HN is a living example of a simple website facilitating discussion between humans with a shared interest. That's why I come here more than any other news/social site now.
- sieabahlpark 2mo ago
  [dead]
- Xorakios 2mo ago
  agreed
- zem 2mo ago
  what would be amazing would be a resurgence of the old style forums, but where users could choose to see a flat or tree view of a discussion (and even customize those views, e.g. the tree could be reddit style without subject lines, or slashdot style with them)
  - spockz 2mo ago
    SwedeSpeed has this. It is a forum, posts have threads. It isn’t always nice because the threading/three view also breaks the sense of time and makes it harder to see new posts. I actually prefer a linear view with posts that quote what they want to reply to. This also allows a single post to reply and combine multiple remarks. So it allows more for convergence instead of divergence as with a tree.
    - zem 2mo ago
      right, i agree with you - there's no one size fits all. that's why the best thing would be to let the reader toggle views on any given post/thread. one could even experiment with fancier views like a flat layout but with a git tree like sidebar that shows the perhaps multiple parents for any post and support for clicking on a post and popping up a mini thread with just the posts it's replying to.
- tavavex 2mo ago
zem 2mo ago
the article already lists one positive - the LLM assistance made the engineering effort to keep their site up and running feasible again. insofar as spam killed the remnants of old web, that is a promising sign.
doright 2mo ago
I don't believe the old web was filled with people pining about how the current web is awful and them participating in recreating the web they inhabit is better. People on the old web just posted things, because before that there was no non-old web to compare to. But that in itself is what makes the old web so appealing to people wanting it to return. Back then there was no other web necessary to escape from. So when people construct versions of the old web today, they make a conscious decision to do something most people would not, and by doing so it sometimes comes off as indicating what they think of the other design decisions they chose not to make. It's not a bad thing, but it's not quite the same as it was anymore. That is why some of the spark is gone, in my eyes. It's kind of like counterculture being mistaken as the opposite of culture. It is even more pronounced when people talk about "the old web" on old web websites all day.
- kalleboo 2mo ago
  > I don't believe the old web was filled with people pining about how the current web is awful and them participating in recreating the web they inhabit is better TBH I do recall a lot of gloating over how AOL was full of clueless lusers who were inferior to the Internet
- StableAlkyne 2mo ago
  > before that there was no non-old web to compare to. BBS / FidoNet, Usenet, IRC, and MUCKs would like a word!
cookiengineer 2mo ago
Your misjudgement comes from not seeing the economic incentive here. The web as a surveillance mechanism is just way too juicy to let go. As of now, pretty much all economies depend on it, just from an economic numbers calculation. Mind you, 200 years later, we still live in cities built for cars, not people. Rockefeller, Shell, BP and the like are still not dead, and still use everything they got to not go extinct while corrupting every politician that will accept their money. Just for a couple more years at a time, and a couple more, and a couple more...while destroying our planet like a cancer. In 200 years we'll still have the web built for surveillance capitalism, not people. There is no old web to go back to. Meanwhile state surveillance depends on its existence. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, three letter agencies, Palantir, and now the AI companies depend on it, and they're selling to nation states at a time. Again, it's just too juicy not to. Back then we called them trusts, but now those big tech companies are seemingly worth more than actual countries. That's too much power without legislation, as they can effectively abandon the rule of law. Remember what happened with the Enron scandal? That was about billions, not trillions. If we want a human web again, we need to build a new one, with privacy and secrecy first and not as an afterthought. No CA, and with mutual cryptography that acts like both a ledger and as a privacy shield for the users. No cookies, no tracking, no degenerate google controlling it all through owning the source code.
ErigmolCt 2mo ago
I think the audience could absolutely shrink back to something resembling the old web. I'm less sure the old web itself comes back
x______________ 2mo ago
> And then what you have left will be a small subset of people who know how to reach their desired corners of the internet, just like before. Blue skies mentality. The old web was good because it wasn't crowded or accessible to most, and everything was new. That, great filter, was unique and will never happen again; Pandora's box is open and cannot be shut. Pretty much akin to one's childhood being yearned at old age...
- dsego 2mo ago
  Just connecting to other people all over the globe was novel. At least for me as a kid, my window to the world in the 90s was TV and a satellite dish, and maybe a local library. Speaking to relatives in other european countries meant a long distance phone call over a landline and it was expensive. My view of the world was shaped by physical books like encyclopedias or comic books, magazines, TV shows and documentaries. But everything was filtered through translations and choices made by local editors (a famous example is a local TV editor who spent decades at the national broadcasting service selecting foreign documentaries for broadcast, so his name in the credits meant a quality choice). A similar shift happened when we got the satellite dish and could get hundreds of new programs (mostly german, but some english) after having only a handful on terrestrial channels. And then suddenly with dial up, I could connect to the internet and find various web pages from all over the world and join forums and download images and later on videos, join discussions on forums. I would say this lasted from the late 90s to maybe 2010s or even before, things changed with wider facebook adoption and when youtube started streaming high definition videos and you could just watch it like it was TV.
BrenBarn 2mo ago
> There were plenty of people using the internet, but again, they were nerds or nerd-adjacent. So, maybe the LLM-ification of everything could end up being like a huge filter, where all the non-nerds no longer see the point of anything and move on to gardens with even higher walls. One difference I see is that in the (so-called) "old web" era, if you were not nerdy enough to navigate certain technical issues, the path of least resistance was to not participate. As you say, those people stuck to phone books and newspapers and TV. That meant that entering the world of the internet was adding something; you could still read the newspaper and watch TV (and most people did), but you had the internet also. The insidious achievement of the Facebooks and TikToks of the world is to make things smooth enough and make participation widespread enough that nowadays its harder to not participate, somehow, in some facet of online interaction, than it is to participate. By doing that they created a flood of junky stuff, and now AI has come along to amplify that approach many times. This means that now, what the nerds are trying to do is not to add, but to subtract. In the old web, you went to the web to get something you couldn't get from traditional media or communications. But now, if a "new old web" is created, it will largely be to not get things you are effectively being forced to get from the flood of social media and AI content. That doesn't mean it can't be done, and in a way I hope it is done, but it means it's going to have to be qualitatively different. Before, the walls kept you in and you hopped over to get out, but now we're all out in the wilderness, and if people build walls, it will be to keep the wild world out and keep yourself safe inside.
- friendzis 2mo ago
  As far as I remember, huge portion of the "old web" web was self-curated list of human-to-human channels: be it blogs, BBs, rss, news/usenet, heck even irc, or whatever personal oddities. I will never forgive Google for killing Reader to promote g+. The facebooks of today make it effectively impossible to self-curate attention. Social media is the publishers early internauts tried to get away from. I disagree with your last paragraph, though. The "old web" was a small walled garden. The "post slop" web is going to be very similar small walled garden, that is chased to get away from uninspiring everyday. Here's a free idea for anyone hoping to launch anything like this: implement a MLM style transitive web of trust. The forum is invite-only. x strikes - you are out, but the strikes on invitees transitively decay over the invitation chain. If you invite someone who then invites all the normies who get striked out - eventually that strikes you out too. Invite yourself to shitpost - eventually you will get punished for that. Yes, it's bad as it can exacerbate bubbles as much as the current facebooks do. Simple updoot mechanism suffers from brigading, but something can be worked out.
Cthulhu_ 2mo ago
The old web relies on people thinking "I'm going to make a website about X" and following through, not relying on visitors, income, validation, etc.
- deltarholamda 2mo ago
  Old Web was extremely self-selecting. If you were in that group or adjacent to that group, it was for you. The sort of person that would read about that crazy guy making Unix from scratch and then download a bunch of floppy disk images. The new Web is for the median human. The median human is very ordinary.

goodmythical 2mo ago

I haven't checked it out personally, but this is my impression of all of the webs that aren't the world wide web. Like the meshtastics, the new freenet, some web 3.0 It being harder to join has the effect of their being a smaller more engaged user base. Less likely that there will be pressure from corporate interests, more likely that every user has a vested interest in both production and consumption. edit: And of course, you'll see the same in dedicated niche forms and spaces like HAM radio. I imagine the folks TXing EME have a particular flavor that is well maintained.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

Razengan 2mo ago

Allow me to switch to asshole mode for a minute: "Things used to be so good" is mostly rose-tinted glasses: What exactly WAS the "old web" anyway? 100s of half-baked sites hosted on Geocities, Yahoo, about pointless stuff? Epilepsy simulator websites splattered with gif-vomit? Everyone and their grandmother asking you to install their 10 toolbars? Honest, serious question: What actually was of objective substance on the old internet that's nowhere to be found now? You can find random pointless stuff now too, just that except Geocities/Yahoo it's Intsagram/TikTok/Twitter etc. If you mean self-hosted websites, they're still here, and nothing's stopping you from creating your own. If you loved all the Flash toons on Newgrounds etc there's unironically a lot more shorts and animations on YouTube or even Vimeo now, if you but search for them (the old gods like Weebl, David Firth are still there, and I suggest Sechi, DoodletmeGo, Nondescript Video Club, and からめる to start with then let the algorithm soak up the weirdness) Just as the "internet" supplanted newspapers, magazines, and broadcast television for many people, and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them, why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium? There's so much crap on the "old" and "middle age" internet: ads, scams, anal mods, trolls, bandwagons, vote wars, low-effort content and other repetitive noise that could be bypassed by just asking AI about something and make better use of your limited mortal lifetime, like watching that anime you've been putting off for years.

greazy 2mo ago
For me that's not the old web. The old web was local forum created by gamers for gamers who hosted real life events. You could post asking for super specific advice to your locale. It was eaten by reddit. There were cool IRC servers for all sorts of niche projects and topics. This still exists of course but a lot of it was eaten by Discord or Slack. While I never participated, sites like LiveJournal provided both a unique outlet and view into other people's lives. I think a lot of social media like Instagram and Facebook eat this up. I'm sure everyone has their own versions. And this is the old web that was gobbled up by mega sites which aim to commericalise the crap out of everything. Btw I consider HN part of the old web.
- sodapopcan 2mo ago
  I loved Diaryland since it was fully customizable. It was my intro into templating! It was very crude, but it worked.
  - Razengan 2mo ago
    Oh my gosh I loved Diaryland, and how you could customize your shit with some simple HTML, but I think they went through enshittification while they were still around anyway But..what says something like Diaryland can't be brought back now?
    - sodapopcan 2mo ago
      Did they? I think it was LiveJournal that enshittified. Diaryland is actually still around. I just checked it out and it now "Diaryland v2!" I actually last checked it out in the past year and it still looked exactly like it did back then!
      - Razengan 2mo ago
        Well there you go: The "old web" is still here or can be, but most of the people complaining about the "new web" don't really care about it anymore, they just pretend to

monk_grilla 2mo ago

We're participating in it right now. HN is a living example of a simple website facilitating discussion between humans with a shared interest. That's why I come here more than any other news/social site now.

sieabahlpark 2mo ago
[dead]
Xorakios 2mo ago
agreed
zem 2mo ago
what would be amazing would be a resurgence of the old style forums, but where users could choose to see a flat or tree view of a discussion (and even customize those views, e.g. the tree could be reddit style without subject lines, or slashdot style with them)
- spockz 2mo ago
  SwedeSpeed has this. It is a forum, posts have threads. It isn’t always nice because the threading/three view also breaks the sense of time and makes it harder to see new posts. I actually prefer a linear view with posts that quote what they want to reply to. This also allows a single post to reply and combine multiple remarks. So it allows more for convergence instead of divergence as with a tree.
  - zem 2mo ago
    right, i agree with you - there's no one size fits all. that's why the best thing would be to let the reader toggle views on any given post/thread. one could even experiment with fancier views like a flat layout but with a git tree like sidebar that shows the perhaps multiple parents for any post and support for clicking on a post and popping up a mini thread with just the posts it's replying to.
tavavex 2mo ago

zem 2mo ago

the article already lists one positive - the LLM assistance made the engineering effort to keep their site up and running feasible again. insofar as spam killed the remnants of old web, that is a promising sign.

doright 2mo ago

I don't believe the old web was filled with people pining about how the current web is awful and them participating in recreating the web they inhabit is better. People on the old web just posted things, because before that there was no non-old web to compare to. But that in itself is what makes the old web so appealing to people wanting it to return. Back then there was no other web necessary to escape from. So when people construct versions of the old web today, they make a conscious decision to do something most people would not, and by doing so it sometimes comes off as indicating what they think of the other design decisions they chose not to make. It's not a bad thing, but it's not quite the same as it was anymore. That is why some of the spark is gone, in my eyes. It's kind of like counterculture being mistaken as the opposite of culture. It is even more pronounced when people talk about "the old web" on old web websites all day.

kalleboo 2mo ago
> I don't believe the old web was filled with people pining about how the current web is awful and them participating in recreating the web they inhabit is better TBH I do recall a lot of gloating over how AOL was full of clueless lusers who were inferior to the Internet
StableAlkyne 2mo ago
> before that there was no non-old web to compare to. BBS / FidoNet, Usenet, IRC, and MUCKs would like a word!

cookiengineer 2mo ago

Your misjudgement comes from not seeing the economic incentive here. The web as a surveillance mechanism is just way too juicy to let go. As of now, pretty much all economies depend on it, just from an economic numbers calculation. Mind you, 200 years later, we still live in cities built for cars, not people. Rockefeller, Shell, BP and the like are still not dead, and still use everything they got to not go extinct while corrupting every politician that will accept their money. Just for a couple more years at a time, and a couple more, and a couple more...while destroying our planet like a cancer. In 200 years we'll still have the web built for surveillance capitalism, not people. There is no old web to go back to. Meanwhile state surveillance depends on its existence. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, three letter agencies, Palantir, and now the AI companies depend on it, and they're selling to nation states at a time. Again, it's just too juicy not to. Back then we called them trusts, but now those big tech companies are seemingly worth more than actual countries. That's too much power without legislation, as they can effectively abandon the rule of law. Remember what happened with the Enron scandal? That was about billions, not trillions. If we want a human web again, we need to build a new one, with privacy and secrecy first and not as an afterthought. No CA, and with mutual cryptography that acts like both a ledger and as a privacy shield for the users. No cookies, no tracking, no degenerate google controlling it all through owning the source code.

ErigmolCt 2mo ago

I think the audience could absolutely shrink back to something resembling the old web. I'm less sure the old web itself comes back

x______________ 2mo ago

> And then what you have left will be a small subset of people who know how to reach their desired corners of the internet, just like before. Blue skies mentality. The old web was good because it wasn't crowded or accessible to most, and everything was new. That, great filter, was unique and will never happen again; Pandora's box is open and cannot be shut. Pretty much akin to one's childhood being yearned at old age...

dsego 2mo ago
Just connecting to other people all over the globe was novel. At least for me as a kid, my window to the world in the 90s was TV and a satellite dish, and maybe a local library. Speaking to relatives in other european countries meant a long distance phone call over a landline and it was expensive. My view of the world was shaped by physical books like encyclopedias or comic books, magazines, TV shows and documentaries. But everything was filtered through translations and choices made by local editors (a famous example is a local TV editor who spent decades at the national broadcasting service selecting foreign documentaries for broadcast, so his name in the credits meant a quality choice). A similar shift happened when we got the satellite dish and could get hundreds of new programs (mostly german, but some english) after having only a handful on terrestrial channels. And then suddenly with dial up, I could connect to the internet and find various web pages from all over the world and join forums and download images and later on videos, join discussions on forums. I would say this lasted from the late 90s to maybe 2010s or even before, things changed with wider facebook adoption and when youtube started streaming high definition videos and you could just watch it like it was TV.

BrenBarn 2mo ago

> There were plenty of people using the internet, but again, they were nerds or nerd-adjacent. So, maybe the LLM-ification of everything could end up being like a huge filter, where all the non-nerds no longer see the point of anything and move on to gardens with even higher walls. One difference I see is that in the (so-called) "old web" era, if you were not nerdy enough to navigate certain technical issues, the path of least resistance was to not participate. As you say, those people stuck to phone books and newspapers and TV. That meant that entering the world of the internet was adding something; you could still read the newspaper and watch TV (and most people did), but you had the internet also. The insidious achievement of the Facebooks and TikToks of the world is to make things smooth enough and make participation widespread enough that nowadays its harder to not participate, somehow, in some facet of online interaction, than it is to participate. By doing that they created a flood of junky stuff, and now AI has come along to amplify that approach many times. This means that now, what the nerds are trying to do is not to add, but to subtract. In the old web, you went to the web to get something you couldn't get from traditional media or communications. But now, if a "new old web" is created, it will largely be to not get things you are effectively being forced to get from the flood of social media and AI content. That doesn't mean it can't be done, and in a way I hope it is done, but it means it's going to have to be qualitatively different. Before, the walls kept you in and you hopped over to get out, but now we're all out in the wilderness, and if people build walls, it will be to keep the wild world out and keep yourself safe inside.

friendzis 2mo ago
As far as I remember, huge portion of the "old web" web was self-curated list of human-to-human channels: be it blogs, BBs, rss, news/usenet, heck even irc, or whatever personal oddities. I will never forgive Google for killing Reader to promote g+. The facebooks of today make it effectively impossible to self-curate attention. Social media is the publishers early internauts tried to get away from. I disagree with your last paragraph, though. The "old web" was a small walled garden. The "post slop" web is going to be very similar small walled garden, that is chased to get away from uninspiring everyday. Here's a free idea for anyone hoping to launch anything like this: implement a MLM style transitive web of trust. The forum is invite-only. x strikes - you are out, but the strikes on invitees transitively decay over the invitation chain. If you invite someone who then invites all the normies who get striked out - eventually that strikes you out too. Invite yourself to shitpost - eventually you will get punished for that. Yes, it's bad as it can exacerbate bubbles as much as the current facebooks do. Simple updoot mechanism suffers from brigading, but something can be worked out.

Cthulhu_ 2mo ago

The old web relies on people thinking "I'm going to make a website about X" and following through, not relying on visitors, income, validation, etc.

deltarholamda 2mo ago
Old Web was extremely self-selecting. If you were in that group or adjacent to that group, it was for you. The sort of person that would read about that crazy guy making Unix from scratch and then download a bunch of floppy disk images. The new Web is for the median human. The median human is very ordinary.