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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the algorithmic nature is necessarily the problem. The monetization is. We used to make websites for fun. We could host them for free on platforms like Geocities. The only cost to us, the webmasters, was our time. We weren't out to make money.

Then came ubiquitous advertising. And affiliate links. And paid content. Suddenly every website was a potential moneymaker. SEO became a thing, so we could drive more traffic and increase ad revenue. Back in the early 2000s, I got weekly emails from ad companies offering money to inject banners on my websites.

Free web hosting that's as easy as Geocities was is hard to find these days. But web hosting has become dirt cheap (so cheap that I shut down my hosting business, as I can't compete on price, and no one cares about service).

I wish websites could go back to being labours of love, rather than being side hustles.

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> I don't think the algorithmic nature is necessarily the problem. The monetization is.

IMO, monetization was never the real problem. Everybody online was interested in making money even back in the early 2000s: there were ads, spam, commerce, and get-rich-quick schemes and everything way back then too.

I think the main issue is that average IQs online have gone down dramatically.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, using a computer to participate in some online community took the slightest bit of intellect: you had to build or setup a computer and access the Internet, which was a bit harder back then. This filter ensured that a far greater percentage of everybody online was at least of average or higher intelligence. That's it. That's the simple explanation.

Today, every idiot out there has a phone in their pocket to mess up everything joyful. Everything good has to cater to this least common denominator: this is why everything sucks.

Consider the reason that HackerNews is a pleasant community to use: IMO it isn't because it lacks extreme monetization, it's because the average person here is smarter than what you'd see on other websites.

The reason you could host them for free is because geocities, anglefire, etc monetized it. Banner ads existed in those days too. It was just the early days of internet advertising so ads where less targeted.

It's been said ad nauseam but the sort of things that people would put on a geocities page (pictures, political diatribes, even things like fan pages) has moved to social media. But even that is not a problem in and of itself. The early days of social media were fun as well.

The thing that killed the internet IMO is smartphones. The internet was better when it was a "place" (cyberspace!) that you consciously had to take time to visit. You sat down, you "got on the internet" and then you "left" when you got up. The ubiquitous internet that you carry around at all times, being constantly connected is what created the pervasive advertising that you're talking about because the internet captured more of people's attention which made advertising much, much more lucrative.

Not to mention the fact that it's a content creation device as well. You couldn't take a picture and instantly post it to your geocities page or bang out 288 character brain farts on a whim. Everything was much more deliberate.

The cracks were already showing by 1994.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

The dominant culture up until around 96 or so was fun, with a special kind of psychedelic digital weirdness. Then the corporates took over and everything turned beige - as it has been ever since.

But it wasn't just the algorithm. Web 1.0 was ridiculously easy to use. Basic web hosting and email were included in many internet access plans, and almost anyone could put together a site with a text editor.

Now HTML/CSS/JS are a sprawling, impossible monster - way out of the direct reach of most people. The easy site builder apps/payment are too expensive, fees on Etsy etc are extortionate, markets are full of cynically sourced crap, and playing social media games for marketing is a huge time sink.

So the cost of entry is far, far higher than it used to be, and the rewards of do-it-for-fun are basically zero in terms of connecting with others.

HTML/JS/CSS are extremely backwards compatible.

They are to a large extent, but the learning resources, and those who use it professionally, have moved on, so you’re a bit on your own and don’t receive the simpler view of the HTML 4 that everyone was using and referencing twenty years ago.

Some people still do blogs, youtube channels, or website for fun. It's just increasingly difficult to find them. Bypassing the algorithmic feeds is hard. Youtube has made it even harder for people to share their assessment of videos by suppressing the dislike count.

It would be great if they exposed their various metrics so third-parties could design their own feed algorithm.

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