I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
misc-stuff.terraaeon.com
misc-stuff.terraaeon.com
Multimedia is also a shadow of what it once was. Twenty years ago it was common for material to be presented in a way that integrated text, sound, pictures, and video together in an easily navigable way. A page on, say, Lewis and Clark would offer you an audio introduction, an interactive map that brought up text journal entries for clickable points of interest, and relevant pictures. Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry, or a video that may or may not offer you any useful way to navigate it aside from jumping around at random and most certainly doesn't give you rich annotations throughout.
And this is the same for news sites, where there should be a 20+ year history of articles but I can't browse it. And obviously social media where information is ephemeral and you only need to see what's happening right now. Shopping is ok on smaller sites, where inventory is static and items are either in stock or not. But earlier this year I could have snapped my keyboard in half trying to find a specific piece of hardware on the Lowes/Home Depot/Amazon website. There's no clear answer like "we don't carry that item" instead the search box vomits back all kinds of misinformation. Web Search itself might be the worst, only giving the most shallow corporate results, I'm not surprised it feels like there are few personal website when our index to the internet is so polluted.
All their idiotic sponsored results make finding things impossible.
For example, if I try to search for x, maybe I want to only see x from brand y.
They have an option for only brand y, yet sponsored results are immune to this.
Worse, lately, they now show different options as individual search results.
So, looking for a shirt I want, from brand x, has 1/2 the page filled with sponsored garbage, and often the rest with 7 colours of the exact same shirt, individually show.
Add to this, that search terms seem to be mild suggestions?
Well, if I am in the shirt category, search as above, but with a unique thing like turtleneck, I get a boatload of responses without any turtlenecks.
Obviously, some sellers are motivated to lie with their tags, but this isn't the only reason this isn't happening.
Add to this that most listings have no size chart, no fabric info, no origin location, or even conflicting info, and holy pita.
EG, I am not polyester friendly, yet some listings say things like 100% polyester, then the very next line, 95% cotton, 5% spandex.
Just 100% crap amazon!
All of this could be improved with more standardized listings controls and forms for sellers, and amazon has the cash and has had years to do it, too.
And lately, 20% of the stuff I order comes opened, used, even dirty.
I'm not paying new pricing for dirty clothes, amazon!
Especally shoes, socks, underwear (wtf?!).
I swear, walmart must have amazon moles, or is getting paid off / bribed by amazon, because a clown could do better against them.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics—whenever a company relies too much on data to influences UX or content I feel like we end up with a bad UX and bad content that only superficially increases short-term engagement.
Sorry, but now you have a list of trending stuff, look at all this good stuff!
You want to watch some, right? Do it now or later, no pressure!
It also helps retain people who would otherwise leave in some cases.
Netflix GUI drives me up the wall
whereas this is a dark feature, only there to benefit the boardroom. It’s a tactic.
Easy navigation of hierarchical/structured links just encourages visitors to turn sideways away from the content they are being funnelled towards.
The cattle farmers that currently run the web only want you clicking away once you’ve had a couple of opportunities to see ads, and it will be via some highly tuned clickbait “related links”.
But why wouldn’t they want you to spend more time on their site, you ask? Because people who are conducting a structured search for information will focus on finding that information, not on clicking the adverts. They are bad customers. What the farmers want is people who are only casually looking for information, who will be easily diverted to click on something else.
Also: because if they can get you to spend only a few moments on their site, but do it every day, they're conditioning you into being a regular and loyal visitor. Intermittent rewards and all that. The person who spends more time and accomplishes all their goals will not come back until they actually need something from the site again.
Don't knock encyclopedias/dead tree layouts. It's been a hell of an information transmission medium for centuries, and comes loaded with haptic shortcuts to aid recall and indexing.
I often call UX people on this when they want to do away with pagination and go to search bars. Yes, Boolean search is cool and all. Most people don't think in query languages for getting them all the way to where they are looking. They usually just want a starting set, then let them flip pages, or refine their query. Generally, when searching an unknown datastore, I like unrefined queries and manually perusing the data to get the lay of it by landmarking pages.
Point being, I still remember my first media center 101 on boolean searching, and my early years with search engines. To be honest, I feel like I got way more out of search indexes that didn't have agendas (piracy site suppression, artificially propping up marketing efforts, etc), than I do today.
I agree that I can't find a recipe without an obnoxious amount of crap writing around it, at least it's there if I scroll far enough. Wikipedia, by the way, suffers almost none of the complaints I see here, loads extremely fast and is free (donate!).
So I guess what I'm saying is it could be better, but the Internet is pretty incredible still.
I don't think anyone with disagree with this. What really annoys people is the trend towards taking away more and more navigation power from the user and replacing it with "the algorithm". Everything is at the mercy of the algorithm and we (including its maintainers) are so ignorant about how it works that every advice I see out there is basically superstition.
Yes, I fondly remember the multimedia experience of Encarta and the likes.
Ableton's "Learning Music" is a pretty good modern example, though:
"Everybody's listening to podcasts! Quick, upload that 60+ minute Zoom call I had with that deeply inarticulate developer about the improvements in NodeJS!"
This is incorrect. If you open ‘All photos’ and click on the 3-dot menu indicator, you can choose ‘Your Photos Only’ as a base selection for your filter.
As an aside, I find it incredibly annoying when people rant that “x is not possible in y software” when in reality they simply haven’t explored the application sufficiently carefully (and it’s not just about discoverability - this menu item is one level deep).
tl;dr blame whatsapp
What alternatives or solutions do you envision for search? How would you build a content heavy site in a way that gives a user confidence when searching for something?
> Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry, or a video that may or may not offer you any useful way to navigate it aside from jumping around at random and most certainly doesn't give you rich annotations throughout.
Maybe I'm mentally blocked in thinking of the era of flash intros and marquee tags, but do you have any examples of sites that achieved what you're describing?
Were the annotations created by the site owner or by the community?
I think a big difference is the move away from folder-based organisational structures. Once upon a time, web sites were collections of HTML pages in a filesystem, and so a hierarchical organisation was natural; people started moving away from just a filesystem (or FTP server) into a CMS, but many older CMSes had a similar focus on folders as an organisational structure. It worked quite well in the hands of competent users, although there were always those people who didn't quite get it (or maybe just had poor attention to detail) and if left unsupervised they'd turn it into a big mess.
But then along came blogs, and suddenly there was a shift to posting content chronologically, with non-hierarchical tags; and as blog software (such as WordPress) came increasingly to be used as a CMS even for non-blog sites, that approach spread to CMSes as well. And I think it makes it harder to logically organise content, and it results in less focus and time spent on content organisation, and the end result is content becomes much harder to find. Blogging also encouraged an approach where people would create a new page rather than editing an existing one, resulting in an intermittent stream of disorganised piecemeal updates in response to new developments, rather than presenting all the information as a cohesive whole.
I think software (especially documentation) is one of the areas where we have this problem the least, because a lot of software people use tools (Git, Jekyll, etc) which still encourage hierarchical organisation. It is really non-software stuff, for example websites of government agencies, university administrations, corporations, etc, which have gone down-hill the most.
> Maybe I'm mentally blocked in thinking of the era of flash intros and marquee tags, but do you have any examples of sites that achieved what you're describing?
I don't remember many websites like that, but certainly a lot of multimedia CD-ROMs in the 1990s had that kind of design, and while there is no reason from a technological perspective why you couldn't replicate that style on the modern web, it just doesn't seem to be very popular.
It was a much more fluid experience on things like Encarta 97, where MS shelled out the money to license a lot of audio and video. It was completely offline, so there was no possibility of filling the article pages with iframes of content served by third party sites.
At the scale of Netflix? Start with a simple list of all titles in the catalog. One I can search with CTRL+F, or maybe narrow down with an incremental search, if you really have to do some fancy JavaScript in it.
It's not until we get into "Amazon scale" when the simple idea of giving people the whole dataset to look at breaks down.
The kind of operations done against most sites - whether it's a media streaming service or an on-line shop or an e-mail client or a planner - they all fall into a very common set of patterns. Filter by piece of information you know (like title, or genre; both "include matching" and "exclude matching"). Compare a bunch of candidates relative to a set of criteria (e.g. length, price, features X, Y, Z). Compare a candidate against a class in which it's in. Etc. Those are simple and universal patterns for dealing with data. Those are the interactions you want to expose if you actually care about your users achieving their goals.
The way I see it, most content services would've offered a much better UX if they just let you download the catalog as an Excel sheet, so that you can use a tool that actually tries to help you deal with data.
Use Good information architecture:
1. Have breadcrumb links at the top of the page so the user can find their bearings quickly.
2. Use categories and tags carefully. Don't add irrelevant or imprecise tags to articles.
3. If your site has over 100 pages of content across multiple categories, consider doing user research to better understand how site users navigate your site and think about categories. This can be done using an exercise called card sorting, where users look at a list of pages (shown as individual index cards), and then organize the cards into categories that make sense to them. This can be done with pens and a handful of index cards, but large sites would probably use an electronic solution like Optimal Workshop to generate tests that can be done online, and crunch the numbers.
Static, indexable pages. Don't ever, ever build your own search, just use a google query with a site: filter. If that doesn't work, redesign your site.
Examples:
Basically any static page. Yeah, flash and marquee were annoying but you could just turn them off.
"How the Blog Broke the Web" https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/
It was also a lot of work, and visions of “success” were different. On the work side, creators had to work to produce the content, but consumers had to work harder to find it. I had a physical “yellow pages of the internet” book in the mid 90s. You’d look up the subject then go to a site and surf around till you found what you were looking for (or not.)
The expectations were also different, especially for creators. If you put content up and got 100 page hits that was really cool. 10,000 was amazing. Reaching an audience that big would have required pre-internet would have required formally publishing something, which wasn’t easy. The sheer novelty of being a “normal” person and connecting with / influencing 100 or 10,000 strangers was a huge selling point.
I think the massive scale and reach of the biggest properties/stars has devalued the type of content creation the author talks about in the eyes of the creators. It’s just harder to get excited about 100 or even 1000 page views when you know people are getting millions or billions, and when your low quality Facebook post can get 100s of likes.
I really miss the old internet, but I also know I don’t have the time or capacity to consistently go back to the old “surfing” metaphor- search is too good and convenient, and I don’t think others are going to be willing to pour their time and souls into passion projects like they used to. Perhaps it’ll be a new frontier (VR?) that captures that sense of newness and whimsy next.
Assuming I'm not alone in witnessing this, I wonder two things: 1) what makes a forum environment different? and, 2) do people who react poorly to negative karma (or meager positive karma) ALSO expect high engagement IF they create on other platforms?
For example, I present a hypothetical person on reddit with accumulated "high" karma (say, high 8000s). This person also has 10k followers on TikTok, 3 YouTube videos with 6 digit views, and several viral tweets. They get -5 karma on a random reddit post and freak out. What makes the raw number differ between platforms? Is it raw number or a ratio of potential to actual?
(yes I know this is the epitome of a strawman, but I'm basing it off of a cohort of roughly similar real people)
To me getting a -5 downvoted post roughly feels like the inverse of making a 50 upvoted post. I don't care about either, but yes minus has a bigger emotional impact than positive.
Reddit used to have informal rules against downvoting those you disagree with because it lowers the caliber of participants on their forum. I guess they don't enforce it any more.
It's like having a group of people think up ideas for something and then you share yours and everyone tells you to shut the fuck up. That sort of feeling.
I never downvote. Either upvote or leave it, it achieves the same thing imo.
Fortunately I learned that any interaction on general social media is absolute garbage and not worth the emotional (and even intellectual/mental) investment.
I'm here because I'm a dumb addict. I am/was on small technical forums because that's where my interest lies and I can share and learn specific knowledge. Sadly it's all moving to Reddit nowadays, where you're one misclick away from drowning in shit.
When Flash was originally released (by Macromedia), there were so many unique sites with really great interfaces. Nowadays, everything seems to follow the long, scrolling mono design. I loved what people could create in those early days of Flash without the restrictions of html. There are some sites I wish I could go back and revisit because they would be impressive by today's standards.
Before MySpace, there was some personalization with Angelfire and Geocities. Every once in a while, you'd find a really interesting site that someone had created.
That era around '95, '96 is probably what I miss the most.
I still remember the first time I discovered http://eye4u.com and watched their incredible flash intro. At the time I thought it was one of, if not the best flash intro on the web, and it instilled a sense excitement for what was possible with Flash.
I agree it was refreshing and exciting to see all of the creative designs and ideas one could express using Flash. If only they hadn't added those pesky "skip intro" buttons!
>The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.
I have found some excellent websites using this which I would have never found via Google or elsewhere on the modern web. Very reminiscent of exploring the “Old Internet.”
My problem is not with information discovery but in finding the EXACT bit of information that I am interested in. The old Internet wasn't better in this regard. I've came around information that was of interest by lots of digging and sheer luck.
dual boot windows linux
git fixup
Warning: it seems to be a one person thing and my experience is that results might differ somewhat from week to week.
Edit: someone usually point out that SEO spammers will arrive shortly. I say that if SEO spammers start optimizing their pages by making them useful, lightweight, readable and without most tracking and ads I see that as a win.
> Warning: it seems to be a one person thing and my experience is that results might differ somewhat from week to week.
Yeah, it's still very much in development and I only have one server so unfortunately I have to do some of the develoment and testing in a way that is very visible. I can usually do preliminary tests off another computer, but it doesn't have nearly the same resources so it can only deal with a sample of about 2 million documents, makes the test results pretty hard to interpret sometimes.
> Someone usually point out that SEO spammers will arrive shortly. I say that if SEO spammers start optimizing their pages by making them useful, lightweight, readable and without most tracking and ads I see that as a win.
I'd also like to add to this that since some of the things I use as quality measures are opposite to the quaility measures used by Google, that means that any site that attempts to optimize for both metrics underperforms in both search engines.
Edit:
> I think it has to do with the fact that either there isn't content that match my criteria in some topics, or the spider is stuck in some local minimum and simply hasn't discovered it yet.
This is totally fine with me:
Telling me the search engine doesn't know of any good matches for my search is not only a valid answer but also a far better answer than a list of a billion pages that some dumb AI somehow can construe as being related.
In fact the list of non-matches has a negative value since I end up sifting through a hood bunch of them in a year hoping that this time there was something usable there.
To avoid being too brief:
• For entertainment: I have never cared for most television or movies. I've watched the entirety (or even majority) of fewer than ten series in my life, and movies in the low double digits.
• Video is a terrible medium for covering most kinds of information. Its speed is often fixed, and it's barely searchable! It is good for showing process or sequence (e.g. some kinds of how-to content), and for showing 3D perspective it's an acceptable substitute for a freely movable camera on a digital model, but for almost anything else informative, text can convey more, and more quickly, and more responsively.
Forgive my stackoverflow bodge job (this isn't my bread and butter) but this is what I came up with, when I had to speedrun a couple of courses.
I use the shift key to scroll the page sideways (which it can't) so that the script registers the event correctly without moving the page. I just scroll up to get through the sluggish parts and scroll down for the meaningless trivia that inevitably ends up being crucial insight when you least expect it. I would have attempted to implement acceleration with my limited skills, but my scroll wheel has mad detents so it wouldn't have helped. Not sure if it would work on youtube.
javascript:window.addEventListener('wheel', function(event){ if (event.deltaY < 0) { console.log('scrolling up');for (vid of document.querySelectorAll('video')) vid.playbackRate += 0.1 } else if (event.deltaY > 0) { console.log('scrolling down');for (vid of document.querySelectorAll('video')) vid.playbackRate -= 0.1 }});Most people are barely literate. Literacy figures are based upon grade 6 reading levels, and that's average reading levels. So when you see 99% literacy rate, yes, but that's for reading stop signs.
It also pains some to read. You are doing them a disservice, to ask them to read.
Most adults, pre-internet, never read books, and only some read newspapers. Of those newspapers, many only read tabloids (high school reading level, barely), or looked at magazines with large pictures, quizzes, and such.
The rest often watched 4 hours of TV a night, no reading required.
The modern internet does not want to exclude, profit is reduced if so.
So picture books for all!
If I do that with a YouTube video, I have to constantly fast-forward and pause, and it's much harder to pick up the thread again after you've jumped a few minutes. Also, YouTubes (and the same with online courses) tend to be really slow to make sure even the slowest viewer doesn't disengage. And tend to have cutesy 'funny' bits to keep people 'interested'.
I have nothing against people that enjoy those things. To each their own. But I really don't work that way myself and I hate it when people impose it on me.
I just started a new job and my boss gave me a whole load of YouTube links to study and also podcasts (which I hate even more).. I really struggle wading through that kind of content :( so I proposed he just give me the topics and I research them myself.
This! Especially when my reading speed far outpaces most Youtubers talking speeds even at 2x. It drives me up the wall.
A disturbing amount of the web is "How To Make A Made for Adsense Clickbait Page In 2021" containing lots and lots of pictures to pad out the ads and amazon referral links, but very little prose.
There's lots of good things about the media-heavy interactive websites of today, but sometimes it's nicer to just read what people wrote. As mentioned before, this site is a good example.
I had a discussion with a website developer recently asking why they insist on loading all these ads from external URLs. All the different loading times cause this. But he said the ad provider needs this in order to validate someone looked at the ads, they don't take the web owner's word for it.
So blame the ad industry, not the website :)
I can empathize with the developers, but I would prefer if they sized out those elements in advance so the page elements didn't get shifted all over the place once something loads.
Sites with it have a positive attitude towards literacy, and that often goes with other good things.
HEY GUYS WELCOME TO ANOTHER EPISODE OF $ASPIRING_INFLUENCER_BLOG
<60 second intro movie/theme song>
<2 minutes of content>
THANKS FOR WATCHING AND DONT FORGET TO HIT THAT SUBSCRIBE BUTTON
* image-heavy (with careful expressive intention! https://maya.land/latin/)
* I have javascript that, horror of horrors, is separated into multiple files (so I can manage it without a build step) for such malefic purposes as accessibility (https://maya.land/prefers-reduced-motion/) and displaying the current moon phase
But I think it's kind of good that there are different people pursuing different visions of The Good, even if many of us from different corners are all inept calling it nostalgia without better language to articulate our visions. This blogger is presenting cesspools like voat and raddle as a positive vision. Despite the fact that I think they're wrong about a lot, I think it's good that we're both out here on the web seeing and doing things differently. Maybe it takes some people to be obsessed with text-heavy content to act as a counterweight to FB misrepresenting video view counts. Maybe it takes some people like me going wild with GIFs to balance out Leo Babauta's web ethic (https://mnmlist.com/w/), and both of us to balance out the standard wordpressy norms.
ETA: I realized this looks like self-promo, so if you are suspicious of my using my own site as an example, https://sadgrl.online/ isn't me but illustrates a lot of the same thing I'm trying for
For what it's worth, while my marginalia /barely/ tolerates the technical aspects of maya.land, it's really teetering on the precipice of getting completely rejected, at the same time it ranked very highly in the search results due to its graph-adjacecy to the indieweb (it's domain #182 in that ranking).
The point is that it should be light on tracking, ads and unnecessary use of scripting. (I have earned good money writing client side code the last few years so I see there is a place for it, but most websites I look for information from should not need it.)
Text-heavy content isn't for everyone, and that is fine. The problem is that the modern Internet primarily caters to the lowest common denominator of viral mass appeal, which leaves the long tail, those who want more substance, yearning for more. That /more/ is out there, but it has massive discoverability issues.
Text is super easy to reuse, manipulate, cut, copy, paste...
I Miss the Old Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518 - Oct 2019 (306 comments)
Other missings:
I Miss the Old Internet (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27491537 - June 2021 (424 comments)
Tell HN: I miss the old internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552 - June 2018 (221 comments)
What we really need is more -server software- in the hands of every day people. The first web browser was also a web server - and today almost every human alive has a web-client in their pocket - but server software is for nerds, highly paid working at Facebook or Amazon.
Home hosting, self hosting, hobby sites - it’s not just some fond memory to me - it’s a legitimate possibility for human communication that was swept away by the vast monetary power of advertising. And it doesn’t have to be weird text only blogs about science fiction. It’s time to bring the internet back home!
This is now replaced by third parties with dependence.
I really do miss the obscure forums of the early 2000s though. The more intimate connections with an anon don’t happen as often (anecdotally, for me) in these subgroups of the big networks.
At this point communities sprung up, and were (if lucky) found and hand-indexed by Yahoo or they banded together via web-links.
We then got communities of communities beginning with GeoCities and then MySpace.
It wasn't until Facebook that everyone's personal page looked identical to everyone else's, and surprisingly everyone seemed to like that.
At some point, maybe we'll go back to rolling own own communities, but I doubt it. Security considerations and the constant attacks by scripts/botnets, not to mention data loss and privacy breach legislation, have made the Internet very unfriendly to non-corporates: Ttoo much work and stress.
As far as corporates railroading us: Government legislation is the biggest bar to entry and only necessary because corporates forced everyone to use real identities: where back in the good old days "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog".
Lots of sites began to encourage users to take the conversation to Facebook, which they felt would at least be free of "ChEap J0rdAn$, pr_ada bags" type comments.
Little did they know. The comments sections are why a lot of people visited the site in the first place. Once the comments migrated to Facebook, so did the site's audience.
Yes, it has been.
>Maybe there are a lot of them hiding and they fear eternal september?
They're mostly on centralized social media platforms like Reddit, and discovery of niche content is more difficult on the modern web, but that doesn't mean that content isn't out there. I'm using "community" here to refer to a group of people with common interests, not an individual website. So "Reddit" is not a community in and of itself, but /r/niche_subreddit_youve_never_heard_of is.
Over the years, the freer Discord communities I've been a part of have ended up having to close off to newcomers and wound up dying, because people have inevitably got upset and gone out of their own way to close down the community. And Discord seems to have many more people who get upset at things you ordinarily wouldn't ever conceive as being remotely abrasive.
I remember 'raids' on IRC and a lot of petty interpersonal drama, rumour mongering and community splits and feuds, but moderation was far more lax and I never had a single community I was on get falsely reported and taken down by the owners of the IRC server.
I don't feel it's a platform where people are allowed to truly speak their mind like the communities I was once a part of, because all it takes is a few upset people to mine for reportable posts and your community is gone. There's no alternative site, no way to self host and no other server to jump to. It's just not the same.
Persistence.
If you close your IRC client, you will miss anything that is sent while you're gone. You can't close it and come back to it later. That behavior is considered unacceptable today.
There's also the fact that people want and expect their communication platforms to support the posting of images and videos in-line. IRC doesn't have that.
Discord essentially is just IRC updated for the modern age.
But let's not pretend it was fun having a subpar experience in most areas.
For me I liked the 200X web because communities were flourish but was insulated and wasn't poisoned with nonsense (politics, extreme trolling, doxxing, and pseudosocial relationships).
Fortunately, some boards like the Rate Your Music one still mimic the feel of those times.
Reddit and Facebook however killed most forums and blog comments sections.
A: these communities never evolved with the times or tried to preserve it's relevancy to it's users - in other words don't touch if it ain't broke.
B: Because of how insular the communities were - I think the admin always either assumed it was a small-time gig or that the community will stay together forever and ever
C: These communities relied heavily on too specific fads (think Naruto fan sites or tumblr like quirk) - compared to start with a fad and then expand
Essentially when you look at successful communities say Newgrounds and compare it with Ebaums World, you'll notice that Newgrounds while being slow it has always tried to stay relevant and branching out while Ebaums world just stayed the same never changing or adjusting and today all but a joke compared to it's former self.
I think the fundamental flaw with (unchecked/nai cross-polination though is that while it is highly successful if done right, allowing unfeathered "all speech is free speech" MO that Twitter, reddit and even Facebook prided itself around 2010-2012 we know how poluted it can become with bad actors to the point it's a systemic problem / literally a threat to business model of said social media (for instance I know youtube's algorithm has been blamed for why extremist content garned such quick and effective attention).
Some forums got sold (Head-fi, AbsolutePunk), others simply died out if the forum owner was unable to keep paying the bills.
This is where the community would step in to provide support. I'm still on a soccer message board whose original owner unfortunately passed. It is still active because core members took the responsibility of keeping the site up and handling moderation.
I did forget about being sold.
That has always been something now that I think about is a sore problem with specialized platforms, if admin goes away so does the site, in a way kinda wish there could be a "fediverse" or collaborative effort in keeping the site alive.
On the other hand, he envisions the internet of 90s with Geocities and most websites being personal catering to a particular niche.
But if the Internet today was like the internet of the 90s, it would have been an empty place since the billions of today's users are not interested in what the few Internet users were interested in the 90s.
I too missed the early Internet (the first time I used Internet was at University in 1998 and by 2000 I had home Internet which was quite a thing in my poor country.) but I don't think is feasible to have it now.
I liked the early Internet because most users were literate both in the technical and classic ways, they were helpful and each one of that had a particular interest in something. Information sharing and communication was quite a thing.
Today most of the trouble is not that information is scarce, it is that you have to filter interesting information from junk and the signal to noise ratio is very poor. In the 90s the signal to noise ratio was quite good.
Many of them are created by teenagers and young adults which is nice to see. Web rings are making a comeback as an alternative to search.
Most people didn't remember that classic WoW was awful compared to modern WoW. It was ground-breaking for its time, for sure, but there were so many features added in later expansions that made major differences in quality of life.
One of the things that made WoW so great was how massive and open the world was. In 2004, it was incredibly impressive that you could travel across a continent and never have a single loading screen, and that you could have over 100 players all in one spot. But over 15 years later, those defining features were no longer defining. Everything that made WoW great in 2004 is now basically the baseline of expectations for any new game.
It reminds me of those online dating profiles where there's no description besides "I'll fill this out later".
It really was qualitatively different before and it’s impossible to explain to those who weren’t there in the before times.
There was so much more to the ‘net than the web.
"And every few days, I still get a hit with news.ycombinator.com (no subpages, just the front page) in the referer header. And my heart rate kicks up: what if I'm on the front page? And I go to the front page, and, much to my relief, I'm nowhere to be seen. I've dodged the Cathedral for another day."
And later a good credo for net users: (this site) "doesn't exist for you to debate over, or moral-grandstand about yourself. It doesn't exist to vindicate you, or validate your preconceived notions of who I am, of who I could become. It doesn't exist for you. It exists for me."
there's collaborative fiction and art all over the place, people easily talking and sharing their work and hobbies from homebrewing and math to the wookiepedia, gamejams, SCP, game mods, whatever is it kids do in minecraft and roblox even when it comes the mainstream there's stuff like (blockclub, the athletic ..etc ..etc ..etc)
If anything I think what all of these "old internet" articles illude to is the authors feeling nostalgic for when they were part of what they considered to be counter-culture or lost interests they want to burry themselves in
This could be in and of itself countercultural, and I think perhaps the walled gardens are our thing to rage against today.
I agree with this statement 100%. I miss the old internet too, not because of the simpler interaction specifically, but because the current state of availability of information is massively broken due to commercialization. The internet has been turned into a 5 store strip mall, everything has a rent seeker, a middleman or a gate keeper. It is increasingly difficult to find any information online that has not been created for the sake of commercialization and delivered to you for a price.
The problem is spammers, trolls, and opportunists ruined and squandered any good will and presumption of innocence, so everyone pays and is presumed guilty.
Forums have very strict registration and posting requirement, unlike 10- years ago.
Many sites req. phone number to do anything
Reddit subs have very high comment and post karma thresholds in order to post, tons of censorship and ghosting, especially for popular communities. And also arbitrary rules that get your posts auto-ghosted, sometimes without an explanation.
Twitter also ghosts posts and users too even though the liar CEO and said it doesn't.
Youtube allows blatant crypto scams to run, but bans accounts and removed vidoes for arbitrary and automated copyright claims or 'misinformation'.
Low trust=worse quality internet experience.
The internet I like to see is where you can follow someones work and ideas without being sidelined. If a person is active in a few different fields then two separate websites are in order. My feeling is that this has not changed between the "old internet" and the "new". There is a small fraction people producing content in this way. Maybe today its a bit easier to find them.
The difference is simple. Personal websites don't have "like/share/retweet" buttons that incentivize playing to the crowd instead of being true to oneself.
> You're seeing this page because you tried to access MayVaneDay with a referer of "misc-stuff.terraaeon.com". This probably means Hacker News is at it again. This article keeps getting published at least once a year, and every time it brings with it a wave of attention from "techbros". These are beyond irritating to deal with. I don't have the extra mental energy to deal with unironic Node.js developers.
I wouldn't think Node.js would be associated with HN, seeing the criticism it gets here.
I've spent countless days chatting with people over IRC.
Often when Firefox complains about a page with a security problem it can't resolve, I can just switch to http:// and ... yep, it's 'clearnet', problem solved.
- Watching a YT video? Buy this VPN/Wallet/Food service
- Reading this recipe? Click any of the 100 Amazon Affiliate links dotting this post
- Reading a good article? Sign up for my premium Substack!
I miss not having to install games on consoles, or patch them day 1.
I miss expansion packs that were basically a full length additional game with the same mechanics, as opposed to DLC which always feel short and underwhelming and still cost a lot.
I miss offline games. I mean games that never ever connect to the internet even once.
I miss unlocking stuff in-game with accomplishments in-game instead of microtransactions.
I miss dedicated servers for multiplayer instead of crappy peer to peer that we have in every game now.
Gaming really just isn't the same anymore. Once some company finally makes Cloud gaming work for everyone it will truly be dead.
It was good because it didn't boil down to a few utility sites. Everything was creative, not corporate.
It was bad.
Imagine writing a web browser when the only reference you have on the HTTP and HTML standards is a book.
Someone had to write the first TCP/IP implementation without the help of the Internet.
How was the first debugger written without a debugger?
But Indie games are a thing, and some of them are incredibly good. My favorites are Hades, Factorio, Undertale, Rimworld, and Oxygen Not Included. But also popular are Stardew Valley, A Hat in Time, Terraria, Hollow Knight...
I could go on. Look on the top rated games on Steam [0] and you'll find plenty of amazing games that aren't designed to extract as much money as possible from you via microtransactions.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&...
Similar to the internet, there is more of the content the OP post wants than ever before and there are whole communities like neocities dedicated to it. This is all just complaining that there is now other stuff to consume as well and that the majority prefers it over their nostalgic gif based sites.
Doesn't contradict the thrust of your comment, just an interesting thing to know.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
To perhaps have more of your future be before you rather than behind you.
Instead they put NATs even in IPv6 "for my security"
A great deal of the mainstream Internet was not anonymous/pseudonymous.
urbit is a megalomaniac deluge of madness with it's idea to start from scratch only to end up with the exact same things but now named differently.
1990s and 2000s internet were extension of the old world in which the people were voiceless takers who were labeled 'consumers' and whose job was to buy whatever the dominant corporate cartels were selling. So much that even a corporation asking rare feedback from its customers, or gasp responding to feedback or complaints, ever, was major and people would talk about it and spread it through word of mouth: "You hear, bigCorpX actually cares for its customers". Of course they didn't care a zit about the customers - its just that sometimes it was necessary to pretend to appease regulators.
In that corporate internet, the voice of the individual he speaks of was limited to the fringe corners of online forums. Launched by vbulletin, phpBB and the variety. You would find people there, do back and forth and actually be able to express your opinion which you could never express anywhere on internet, and you would feel like you were interacting with the internet.
Even Open Source was still a fringe world, living in the corners of Internet and tech which was still dominated by proprietary giants under the tradition that was inherited from early 1980s and 90s. You could never imagine that Open Source would be the basis of almost everything like it is now, if you were participating in it back in early 2000s. It was a fringe world, and we were fringe people, dabbling in our pursuits in the corners of the internet left to us by the gigantic, traditional corporations.
Today its the opposite.
People decide the agenda. If people think something about a corporation, the corporation ends up having to act, leave aside 'caring'. Even further, there's this new 'community' thing, in which corporations start describing themselves and their customers/users as an 'ecosystem', and start incorporating them into their processes. Its new, but it shows how much the internet has become.
Creating communities, making people talk to each other, something which required sufficient technical knowledge, patience, and sufficient monthly disposable income to dump on creating and maintaining an online forum with something like vbulletin or phpBB is done by just creating a Facebook group or any other social network group.
By publishing in places like Medium, Quora, even Facebook or Twitter, your voice can reach millions of people online, instead of reaching the few dozen people who were regulars of the particular subforum of that online forum you frequented.
People can just start any type of online business, and make a decent living, from writing in online publications to making videos to podcasts to creating and selling software, SaaS services, even just writing about technical matters. Back in the day he speaks of, internet was a hobby which you did after work hours at your home, for 1-2 hours.
...
So no. He is factually wrong, and his approach seems to be just based on nostalgia for a 'better' time, which was not 'better' at all.