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.
Whoa, careful with your verb tenses! You just wrote a ghost story :)
its interesting because it sounds more correct to use have not yet because your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state. So you could say its not right, but the sentence sounds/feels more right to preserve that your life is still going on.
We like that you are still here with us.
Wouldn't the proper tense be "I won't have lived long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN" then?
> We like that you are still here with us.
Same here, and it feels like a very "old web" kind of feeling, as we're expressing this empathy towards an anonymous stranger with a very deemphasized username.
I find it surprising how much empathy has seemingly been on a decline as the Web went from anonymity to pseudonymity to everyone's full name and face being attached to their online presence.
This one is almost gone already.
But I understand the OP was talking about how HN is today.
It gradually became a comedy website and at that point I stopped visiting it.
But now I think that downvotes have just kinda become a sort of digital tomato for people to throw, a means of burying a post without putting any thought into an argument as to why the post is illegitimate.
And that's the best case. In the worst case it's a really easy system for bots to game. You don't even need AI. All it takes is a bunch of accounts "legitimate" enough to not get flagged by whatever botting heuristics the site implemented and you can produce a false consensus.
HN is a certainly a smaller but more targeted market but there's no reason to assume we're communicating with other humans here necessarily especially given HN demographics.
Basically every area that is either forgotten by the mainstream, or completely unknown, and make sure the author is a person and not a company and you'll be on your way to way more interesting discussions, texts, content and interaction, that the B.S. of facebook, twitter and commercial web sites.
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.
TBH I do recall a lot of gloating over how AOL was full of clueless lusers who were inferior to the Internet
BBS / FidoNet, Usenet, IRC, and MUCKs would like a word!
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.
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.
I don't think the old web was really a walled garden, though. It was just a sort of isolated garden that was harder to get to. There was nothing outside it threatening it. Now the garden needs walls because there are a lot of dangerous things outside.
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.
The new Web is for the median human. The median human is very ordinary.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
But..what says something like Diaryland can't be brought back now?
Back then there was a forcing factor to making your own website. Not just personal sites, but bands, artists, interest groups, etc. Now everyone just uses facebook because (or whatever) because it's easy and everyone is there. Even during the transition was better as myspace allowed you to customize the crap out of it with CSS and, as we were just discussing, DiaryLand gave you full access to do almost whatever you wanted (in the confines of static pages).
It has a LOT to do with billion dollar companies throwing their weight around and influencing politics. Tom never did that shit! (although given time, who knows... he did sell out).
Pre-Google, specifically, pre-PageRank, and even more specifically, pre-SEO.
Your post is oddly hyper-focused on pointing out the negatives, probably due to the asshole hat you put on. There were lots of good sites with tons of good, free information, and because the main way people searched was using directories, we weren't inundated with 1,000s of results on the same topic, vying for a top-placement. The writing itself was much more laid back because SEO-optimization didn't exist. Also, those "half-baked GeoCities sites" were awesome! Of course there were a lot of junk ones, but again, it was just a bunch of people writing about themselves, their interests, and generally being creative. And again, NO ONE WAS TRYING TO MAKE MONEY, they were just doing it. No "like and subscribe." No gaming an algorithm. I used to love finding guitar tabs on those sites and I had a couple of sites with lots of tabs I did on my own for two different bands.
> There's so much crap on the "old" and "middle age" internet: ads, scams, anal mods, trolls, low-effort content, that could be bypassed by just asking AI about something and make better use of your limited mortal lifetime.
I feel like this was GP's point, no? Because people are just using AI for search now (this is the main reason I use it) that there will be no point in making these spamming sites anymore, which "opens up" the internet a bit for those of us who enjoyed the old way. Yes, it's all still out there, but it's kind of hard to find, and it would be kinda neat if more people discovered making their websites outside of walled gardens.
because people are hyper-focused on the negatives of the "current" web, or acting like the sites they used to love can't be recreated anymore..
> it was just a bunch of people writing about themselves, their interests, and generally being creative.
There still are. on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, 5ch and other Japanese subcommunities.. the fact that they're all "silo'ed" into these less-than-benign corpoctopuses is another matter, but people are still people'ing
this comment brings up a good concrete example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293553
Basically: "everyone has a different idea about what the Old Web™ was depending on when they first started using the internet, and when the community they liked was discontinued or changed"
Fair!
> There still are. on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, 5ch and other Japanese subcommunities.. the fact that they're all "silo'ed" into these less-than-benign corpoctopuses is another matter, but people are still people'ing
I know there are, but as per my comment, it's just harder to find and you used to almost not be able to avoid it. I don't think platforms like YouTube and Instagram are great examples due to the monotization... everyone is trying to "make it." But ya, I mean, I do know it's out there. But I think the whole point wasn't that this stuff doesn't still exist, just that maybe it will become the more prevalent thing again. At least that's how I read GP's comment. But who knows.
Or: because people are just using AI for search now, the only websites left will be spamming sites trying to rank in/influence AI results.
Think about it: if human traffic is no longer optimized for, and the entire focus was catering to bot traffic, how amazing are you imagining that those bot-optimized sites will be?
On the old web, you would just stumble onto something deep but the barrier to get to it was fairly high. It could also just be total nonsense but at least you could see the passion behind it.
I agree with your general take. People talk about the old web as 'the good old days' but it really wasn't that great. I do have some fond memories of the mid 2000's when it was all starting to mature but also before corporate capture took hold. Even then, you would just end up stumbling around blindly most of the time.
There are so many piracy discords where you can't ask how to pirate something because that's against discord rules. I mean really? Why are you using it then?
Dont compare wanting a pro terrorism fourm with niche interests its so disingenuous.
and don't forget Big Billy's "no more tears" guarantee on all anal mods purchased from the official BBAM shop!
The old web culture can't exist because advertisers won't let it exist on modern platforms.
Additionally the spread of information is significantly less organic because of relentless pushes to use algorithmic feeds along with far worse distractions from content than there used to be.
Again, what's preventing you from buying a domain name and putting up your own website? bypass the advertisers?
"Not enough people will see it", you say? So you want the reach provided by "modern platforms" but you don't want their rules?
Yes you can still find roughly all the same stuff. No it's not the same.
No it's not the same.
You can still buy a domain name, host your website somewhere, and tell people about it, no?When was the last time you actually visited any of the Old Web websites? I just found that Diaryland and Halfbakery are still around, over 20 years old, but it's been years since I visited them
Even though there was a lot of forced enshittification, the tech did not really force people to change: it's that fewer people feel the need to be the way they used to be.
and that can change again