Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

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Like a lot of people on HN, you appear to be conflating "download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article" with the concept of a web application, and implying that embedded applications are somehow a violation of the web's intended purpose.

But hypertext is an application, and the web was always about hyperlinked text as well as embedded content. The <script> and <applet> tags and now defunct concepts like VRML demonstrate that the "only static, only hypertext" version of the web you miss were more due to the primitive nature of an undeveloped platform than a state of grace and purity which has since been defiled by the ability to do computation on the web... the intent for the web to host both static and interactive content was there practically from the beginning.

>Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.

I don't. I like being able to watch videos and play games on the web, and buy things, and so on.

And webrings were fun, but modern social media offers a much bigger and more varied set of communities than the old web ever had. I know that's an unpopular sentiment to voice on HN, but as far as most end users are concerned, Reddit and Twitter and even Facebook are useful in ways that IRC and web chatrooms never were.

I don't know, the older days also had IRC, messaging apps, internet forums and BBS systems too, and my experience is that the people on the last two tended to be more... mature than the kinds on social media sites. Even today the slower and more thoughtful pace of a traditional forum is more conductive to decent discussions than the obsessively upvote/view focused world of social media sites.

How much of that is the eternal September of going from something where a tiny niche of the population using a thing to the vast majority?

I don't think there's much structural about Yahoo Answers being what it is. I think it's mostly the population.

>I don't know, the older days also had IRC, messaging apps, internet forums and BBS systems too, and my experience is that the people on the last two tended to be more... mature than the kinds on social media sites.

Social media is just about as mainstream as the telephone now. Everyone who was on those forums and BBS systems and IRC is probably also on social media.. along with their parents and kids. The web long ago got too big to draw narrow demographic conclusions about. And everything you mentioned apart from BBS is still around.

I mean, my elderly mother uses Facebook and I wouldn't call her "obsessively upvote/view focused." She is obsessed with sharing pictures of her grandkids doing everything, though...

irc still exists and I usei t every day. The same jerks that you see on "social media" exist all over IRC as well.

> And webrings were fun, but modern social media offers a much bigger and more varied set of communities than the old web ever had

Most of it is undiscoverable, private, or short form. There are very few people putting up public multi page tutorials or project summaries in the way that they used to.

I feel like that's not all that rare—you just do it as a series of blog posts these days. You could make a strong case that a set of independent pages that freely interlink is a better format, but still, the impulse is there, so people have found a way to make that kind of content.

I don't see many independent bloggers these days. Especially outside of the tech community. Most of it feels like it's becoming hidden behind monetized walled gardens.

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