I have never understood people who mourn the death of the "old" internet because I do not feel I have lost it. Particular communities come and go, as they always have, but I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers too.
The thing that has changed is that a huge swath of new people have come online and, though some of what brought them online is wider access to connectivity, a lot of what brought them online are new kinds of communities. They showed up for social media and most of them just aren't that interested in the things that made up the "old" internet.
I put "old" in quotes because people have kept and maintained the parts they love. You can still play MUDs, you can still visit BBSes, people still run Hotline servers[1]! Many of these communities have changed because the world has changed: lots of people who played MUDs in 1990 have moved on to other online games, but lots have not! Critically - tools have continued to be developed. You can use IRCCloud (and be told it makes you a bad IRC'er), you can play MUDs on your phone, etc. These communities have changed with the times and improved for it.
My sense is that the absolute number of people who are involved in these communities has dropped, but not actually by that much? Maybe half as many people play MUDs now as they did at the peak - but it's a steady half. I think of it like the communities around vinyl or around film photography: less central than they once were, but healthy and vital.
I am really glad that people who were not online at all during their peak are discovering these older forms. We have kept them for good reasons. But don't call it a comeback, they have been here for years.
I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine. I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely freedom to do whatever I wanted with it.
That's what I want the Internet to look like for my younger family and friends. It'll probably never happen exactly this way, but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends. I know what their smile would look like because that was once my smile, too.
The barrier of entry was actually lower than that. We didn't need to stand up an Apache server. We could just sign up for a Geocities/Xoom/Tripod account and upload HTML or use the built in site editor to create content.
Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. These chronologically organized articles and content have dominated web content and social media ever since.
> The barrier of entry was actually lower than that. We didn't need to stand up an Apache server. We could just sign up for a Geocities/Xoom/Tripod account and upload HTML or use the built in site editor to create content.
Reading this thread feels like everyone is anchored to whatever methods were popular at the time they entered the internet as being the peak. The BBS people think it was all downhill after BBS declined. The self-hosting people think it was all downhill after sites like Geocities/Tripod/Xoom became popular. The Geocities people think it was all downhill after blogging platforms became popular. The blogging people think it was all downhill when social media became popular.
I think there's a heavy dose of nostalgia coloring the opinions in this thread. What people really yearn for isn't Geocities or Usenet or whatever. It's the feeling of excitement that came from first getting immersed in the internet when it was all new to you.
> Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. These chronologically organized articles and content have dominated web content and social media ever since.
I don't see the problem with chronological ordering. Most of those platforms and sites make it easy to search for related posts. Worst case, the author can just drop some hyperlinks into the posts to tie them together.
Curated and organized websites tend to fall out relevancy and decay very rapidly. Might as well just let people post as they see fit and then we can find it by searching.
Nah, I'm a BBS person and I think it's been all downhill since social media.
(Specifically, Livejournal was the tipping-point between blogging platforms and social media, Myspace was unquestionably downward, Facebook is the antichrist pure and simple.)
I have no problem with chronological or hierarchical content. Whatever the author wants to put out, is their prerogative.
What I have a problem with is walled gardens, stalking-as-a-business-model, and arbitrary automated deplatforming with no recourse.
Ban algorithmic recommendation. It's the only way people actually start organizing and curating content. You know, like libraries do.
"I think there's a heavy dose of nostalgia coloring the opinions in this thread. What people really yearn for isn't Geocities or Usenet or whatever. It's the feeling of excitement that came from first getting immersed in the internet when it was all new to you."
Certainly there is nostalgia.
But back then the web was not controlled by add financed mega companies - and the dreams of the teens using it, were not mainly to become a influencer. Meaning getting somehow famous and then sell that attention for - advertisement.
> Curated and organized websites tend to fall out relevancy and decay very rapidly. Might as well just let people post as they see fit and then we can find it by searching.
Your points about nostalgia I sort of agree with but this part I take issue with. Many sites use blog software which does the whole chronological ordering. Unless the site's particular blog theme exposes archives, a sitemap, or the author meticulously tags (and the theme shows tags) it can be stupid hard to navigate around blog-like sites.
Blog-like sites also tend to have a partial chronological list of posts at the root of the site. If you're writing some personal journal or topical things that makes sense. For someone writing about some particular topic(s) this is a navigation anti-pattern. It doesn't matter if the latest post on Topic A was posted on Monday. As a reader interested in Topic A you want all of the posts on it. Most blog-like sites make this challenging to find or don't expose it.
I don't really like "just search" as a replacement for categorical organization because most search sucks anymore. That might have been ok for Old Google, before the DoubleClicking, but now it's just another navigation anti-pattern.
Interestingly, had Web 2.0 concepts been implemented a bit better by CMSes, navigation of sites could be ably handled by user agents. A site with an OPML/Sitemap XML pointed to with an "alternative" meta tag could let a user agent (or service) build nice navigation for sites automatically no matter how the blog-like CMS organized the HTML.
I agree with this. You can still do all those things! And there are still people doing all those things. It's just not novel or exciting to us anymore. And I might be more disappointed now that my Geocities about a comic book never gets any hits, while there are influencers on Instagram and TikTok making $$$$, than I was in 1999 when that wasn't really conceivable. (And then there are the neat things that weren't even possible back then - Roblox gets a lot of shit for its financial model these days, but 1999 me would've eaten up an easy-to-use game programming interface to show off cool shit to my friends back then.)
However, I do think there is a lot of lost value due to today's "search for it" attitude replacing curation. Yes, curation takes a lot of work, but that also makes it more robust against SEO spam and such. But I also don't think it added enough value that people would pay for it - original web companies were benefiting from wildly optimistic funding numbers for "eyeballs" and display ad rates that are never coming back.
> But I also don't think it added enough value that people would pay for it
There was non-commercial curation back in the day, DMOZ was the most prominent example. In general, commercialism was very rare on the early Internet. "Business" sites were thought of as somewhat exceptional, not the norm.
I agree that nostalgia plays a part, but one could argue that it was at its "peak" in the "early days" and "declining" since (quoted words by whatever definitions as it is all quite subjective). Such that chronologically no matter what time a given person first experienced the Internet, they established the peak at that point since they didn't experience what was before, but they could universally agree that it became worst since their own relative point, and that can be true agnostic of nostalgia. If a given system is reliably getting worse over time for any attribute, the relative peak for a given observer will always be when their first measurement is taken.
You could also work backwards from what you stated. For someone who first experienced digital connectivity via BBSes, would they also state the Geocities "era" was better than the blogging platforms era? Perhaps?
It's all been downhill ever since the eternal September started.
Yeah, I found it weird that the article called blogs "Web 1.0", I'm pretty sure that it was them that were first hailed as the new "Web 2.0" ?
Agree.
As far as I remember web 2.0 was all about user generated content spruced up with Ajax experiences:
Blogs (chronological as opposed to more freeform web sites) were arguably the first.
The comments, follows ("blog rolls"), tagging, ratings and third party sites providing the same like del.ico.us and digg.
RSS also was a web 2.0 thing in my mind at least.
I think most people classify Facebook as web 2.0 as well but in my mind they aren't as much web as a silo built on web technology.
> Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content.
For news or personal diary-format blogs, it makes sense, but I agree. Why did the blog become the default way to present a page on the internet? Aside from serving as an indicator of 'freshness,' publication date usually has no relation to the content I read. It's weird that most content is organized around publication date by default.
I like reading old bike websites with stories about touring and such published around the 90s [1][2][3]. Most sites back then had a small section called "News" with short blurbs letting readers know about the status of the author, or new content added to the site, but it was not the main content itself. Content was usually organized in a way that makes sense to humans, rather than feed aggregators and content recommender systems.
It's so much better to explore a site by navigation through a few index pages. Ken's site [1] is especially a pleasure to browse. Right on the home page he lists his directories along with straightforward descriptions of what you'll find in them. On a directory page will be a list of pages organized under subheadings, and each one has a brief description. To me, this may be peak internet. It's easy to get a sense of what's there, how to get to the part of it that interests me, and doesn't keep me on a treadmill searching for something I want to read co-mingled with everything else.
I can't help but think that if WordPress was the default when Ken decided to make a website, it would be much worse. Each page does have a tiny 'last updated' date at the bottom, but as a reader 30 years later, the publication date has no relevancy to me any of the content here. It would be a pity to center everything on the site around that minor detail. And adding tags or category labels to blog pages usually doesn't help. It still squishes is all into a feed, just a subset feed.
[1]: https://www.phred.org/~alex/kenkifer/www.kenkifer.com/bikepa...
Almost everything I read on the internet is informed by the publish date. One of my biggest frustrations is sites that don't include publish dates because it makes the content 'evergreen'. Really frustrating.
You got my point. I do appreciate the created/modified date on pages, I just prefer content to be organize by something pertinent to the content itself. Sometimes that is the publication date, sometimes it’s something else.
The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines has reduced the value of "well organized".
Consider that one of the premier features of the Jetbrains IDE is "search everywhere" which will search command help text for you as well and then return the command as a possible result - much easier to describe what you're trying to do and be led to the exact command, then try to understand the mind of the person who did the categorization.
> The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines has reduced the value of "well organized".
I wonder how much of this is still true.
Google results from a few years ago were much better than they are now. That's a combination of SEO ruining the results by Google assuming anything not hosted on a megaplatform is suspect and not showing it plus SEO ruining results by still being there in them despite that, but it happened.
If someone made a curated list of interesting small sites by category, it would be a lot more useful now than it was before that happened.
I have to wonder if the degrading of search results came solely from SEO dark patterns that do more harm than good, or if Google actively believed that small sites were becoming less relevant as social took off. Objectively, looking at PageRank might convince them that Facebook and Twitter were where people were spending time, but that particular firehose is so big it can - and eventually did - dilute nearly all the other relevant results.
Pipe dream: If someone wishes hard enough, maybe we can convince the Apollo guys to leave Yahoo alone so it can return to its roots as (surprise!) a directory.
It was the rise of tagging and folksonomies (now known as #hashtags) which made the blogs halfway usable. Because they allow you to search within the archived posts for the sub-topic you're interested in.
But wasn't the raison d'etre of Google links to other sites, thereby giving some sense of how popular a given page was?
This helps individual sites, but says little about why the overall quality of links has nosedived. Who they link to continues to matter, except that now there is so much noise this is very difficult to get right unless you are extremely clever, lucky, or probably both.
The barrier to entry may have been lower if you were willing to host on someone else's hardware, but from my reading that's not truly decentralized or owned by the user such as in the spirit of the parent comment.
What stops you signing up for a boring webhosting package and uploading HTML today?
You can still make a Neocities account and upload HTML.
Works well with static generators.
I still run a half dozen VMs with genuinely ancient LAMP stacks and CGI code on a 5 year old desktop in my basement. People use those sites. Really the only thing that changed in last couple decades is that Docker makes admining those servers 1000x easier.
The old web never went away, and the "new old web" will either fail to become popular or well become the "new new web". Eternal September is a social phenomenon and can't be solved with technology.
Who is your ISP?
Verizon FIOS residential fiber.
(I've never had an ISP that allowed hosting HTTP servers in its TOS. But I've always hosted HTTP servers, and I've never had any issues. FWIW Gemini servers are also servers.)
since they want to sell the more expensive business plan. And forbidding something in the terms makes it easy for them to cancel your account in case they have a different reason.
Yeah. That sense of ownership has been lost. Now corporations own everything. Nobody wants a domain, they want a @name on some social media platform. Nobody wants their own website, they want to post on social media. ISPs have cgNAT now, nobody is directly connected to the internet. Everything is just so boring.
> That sense of ownership has been lost. Now corporations own everything. Nobody wants a domain, they want a @name on some social media platform. Nobody wants their own website, they want to post on social media.
I don't think the self-hosting people with their own domains ever went away. They're all still out there.
The difference is that the internet isn't just for those people any more. Everyone is online, and the average person has no intention of learning how to host and maintain and design their own website when they can just as easily post the same content on an easy to use platform.
A lot of the nostalgia in this thread isn't so much for the technologies of years past. It's for an internet that was just for us nerds, without the regular people participating.
> A lot of the nostalgia in this thread isn't so much for the technologies of years past. It's for an internet that was just for us nerds, without the regular people participating.
Pretty much. It’s painful to watch the mass commodification of a technology you love, but that’s how the world advances.
A lot of what used to happen was a form of altruism. You had to be willing to give up time, money, and hardware to dedicate running many of these tings. That works if you are getting along with everyone. But once you get a 'troll', or some demanding person, or need money because lost job, etc that altruism wears extremely thin. So outsourcing it to some other company to pay, for and keep the software up to date is extremely alluring. There are still people willing to do it. But they will come and go but mostly 'go'. But if you think about it, it makes sense. Someone new coming in is not going to pick up 20+ year old BBS software unless they really want that. They are going to rock onto existing platform and start there. Then in 10 years their members will realize 'if you dont own it you are renting it, if you are renting it you are at the whim of the owner'.
A mix of both. When I see a Medium post by a programmer I feel sad.
I am pretty sure a lot of people want their own website and domain.
It's just that a lot more inconvenient to have and manage one for most people.
The subjective reward has gone down though: back in the days of webrings and the visit counter gif cgi, writing some content and then maybe fill in one or two "under construction" placeholders some months later you could easily delude yourself that you were on track to an amazing future. Perhaps not altavista.digital.com amazing, but maybe becoming something like a respected resource in your niche of a niche. Today there are so many lower hanging fruits luring from inside the walled gardens...
cgNAT is going to go away, even for the rare ISPs that use it, as more connections become IPv6-only.
I'm sympathetic. My first personal website (after a couple of, ahem, not personal ones) was about the film "The English Patient", and yes, I know that smile.
However, I think you're making a mistake that I also make quite often, of conflating the use and mastery of the technology required with the actual end goal.
Lots of people might like to create their own dedicated websites focused on some particular interest of their own. Very few of them have any interest in Apache, Amigas, FreeBSD, servers, operating systems, bandwidth, IPv6 or any of the technology that would underpin them doing this.
Hence ... Squarespace ;)
We (computer technologists in general, and web folk in specific) failed to make running servers a trivial matter, and as a result in 2022, the honest truth is that running your own website no longer has much to do with any of the skills we might have smiled about back in the day. At least not for 99% of the people who don't already do it but might somehow have an interest in the idea.
Elaine Benes : [quietly] No. I can't do this any more. I can't. It's too long.
Elaine Benes : [yells] Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert, and just die already! DIE!
J. Peterman : [surprised] Elaine, you don't like the movie?
Elaine Benes : [shouts] I hate it!
[the audience shushes Elaine]
Elaine Benes : [shouts back] Oh, go to hell!
The thing that is missing in the DIY website space is discoverability.
Fix that, and you might have a chance of competing with big corporations.
(In the old days we had "web rings", but I'm afraid that's not going to work today)
We also had curated directories, DMOZ being the most common. Starting a bunch of DMOZ-like, federating (i.e. sharing and trusting one another to provide high-quality links, semi-comprehensive directories might be the quickest and most effective way of bringing "the old Internet" back to life. This might even become an acknowledged part of the Fediverse, if it leveraged the existing Web standards wrt. structured "third-party annotation" of outside Web resources, as issued e.g. by the W3C WebAnnotation Working Group. https://www.w3.org/annotation
Why not, with web-rings?
I don't mean that snarkily: I have at least 2-3 webrings on my personal link page, and neocities is home to literally hundreds more.
Web-rings are linked lists, slow to navigate. Google gives you hashtable access to the web.
Slow to navigate, but far less vulnerable to corruption. Each link was intentionally made by a human, vouching for its integrity and usefulness. Each link is followed only if I trust a site enough to believe its recommendation.
Maybe being slow to navigate is actually a feature, standing against the endless algorithmic torrent of 5 second tiktok videos and meme doomscrolling.
You're supposed to take your time checking out cool shit people make for the love of it.
Slow to navigate, but amenable to “browsing” and finding related pages and sites. Think of it as a built-in recommendation engine.
Which is why I wish the webmention had taken off more than it did
I think it’s all missing forums, places (both public and private) where people from different “home servers” can communicate.
> I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends. I know what their smile would look like because that was once my smile, too.
Wow. Do you know if there's any enthusiasts out there doing this? A phone would actually be a great hosting device for tinkerers. It's always on, always connected, and supports IPv6.
A phone is a poor hosting device in a conventional sense, because it's battery powered and keeping the connection up will drain the battery. If you want to P2P-host something via your phone, it should be a service that can somehow piggyback on the ephemeral network connection strategy that mobile devices are already using. The closest thing I've seen to that might be SecureScuttlebutt, but even then it's not ideal. IPFS hosting might also work, but again only on a highly ephemeral basis.
I tested this with my old phone and it certainly worked even on non rooted android but I do not deployed it full time.
There is however this starlink dashboard hosted by awlnx on starlink and its IPv6 only. https://starlink.awlnx.space
sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine. I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely freedom to do whatever I wanted with it.
Isn't this easier to this than it ever was?
Granted, my 'server' is a VM in a server farm thousands of kilometres away, but I installed the server and wrote the HTML. What's even better is that he server was caddy and the html is html5 - both a marked improvement!
I think there's some kind of fallacy there.
Nothing's really changed, in the sense that there's nothing stopping you (or anybody else) from running your own server that serves up simplehand-written HTML, if that's what you want to do.
You can probably even do it on your phone, but I wouldn't hold my breath for the app to get accepted to any official app stores.
Personally, I think the UI on phones is atrocious, and would never want to use one for any kind of development work, but to each their own.
> Personally, I think the UI on phones is atrocious, and would never want to use one for any kind of development work, but to each their own.
When the OP said
> but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends
I think he meant actually running the serving of the content from the phone's hardware, not actually doing the development itself on the phone.
>"It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine. I made that."
I know the feeling. Even though I use Hetzner and OVH I also host stuff in my home office. Ordered business 1gbps fiber line with static IP for $120 CDN per month for that.
I want my BBS!
<blink>This text could blink</blink>
I remember some boards where you had to wait for what seemed like ages to get to the actual main page because you had to wait for some fancy ANSI art to do its thing.
> I sure hope that's right.
Yeah it's nostalgia speaking here, there's always gonna be hobbyists but the internet is now gonna be what it is today, massive conglomerates fighting for attention/eyeballs and monetizing it either through ads or pay services.
(blockchain, smart contracts, people are experiencing this same feeling again there, many for the first time. they release something on a public utility that others can interact with, and a GUI behind a domain name)
It's just that there is nothing of value in regards to blockchain or smart contracts. They are a solution in search for a nonexistent problem, while heating up the planet.
Very few blockchains cause carbon emissions more than say browsers. A smart contract deployed on one that uses a proof of work system with a lot of competition can be deployed on another that does not, vote with your code
How can a small website cope with GDPR compliance though? The rules that sprang up to constrain the social-media behemoths seem onerous for anyone but them to comply with.
By not collecting data it has no need for, and not passing that data on to third parties? By providing an ability to delete any user account, and for editing any personal information? By not using EBCDIC to store said information?
Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?
> Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?
I'm not sure. I guess if one trusts the default logging settings on the server software to be compliant, and only uses static HTML, maybe that's adequate? But as soon as any third-party code or data provided by some other server gets involved, it's hard to know what might be logged elsewhere as a result of visiting your site.
I mean, would an old-fashioned web visitor counter be compliant? It's tracking something in order to provide that number.
You tell us you have no idea what third-party code you add might be tracking from users. And say this is a reason why you/they should be allowed to do it? (With "it" being... anything the third-party sites want to at all?)
I mean, most "unique view counters" store the users IP address, so that would be right out. I'm fairly sure even being aware of what complying with a complex legal documents implies constitutes enough of a complication that it's worth mentioning.
It is a complication, but I believe it's worded so that small companies and individuals are immune from its consequences.
> Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?
A large proportion of folks on HN seem to think GDPR is "out to get" everyone rather than a set of common sense regulations that should not at all be a concern for an individual who's serving a blog or personal site and doing nothing to collect PII/track their visitors.
I don't understand why this view is so prevalent.
> I don't understand why this view is so prevalent.
Fearmongering from those actually affected by these common sense regulations.
I don't think "parroting" is very charitable. What I think is going on is that we have a bunch of people who are seeing the internet driven by ads that are only a synthesis of print ads and TV commercials. The fact that the medium of advertising (and business itself, evidenced by all the people who say that's the only way businesses can be run anymore) resembles the past so much means the value of participating in it at all for Computer Science and nerdly interests in general is contained on the backend, in the surveillance. I think the resistance to this (not to mention the suit against Google to prevent them from eliminating third-party cookies from Chrome) is because advertising becomes boring without the PII shenanigans. If you can't slice and dice people's activities into predictions about what they're going to click on if not buy, then what did I acquire these student loans for, to write HTML and JavaScript like a schmoe?
Of course reality is more particularized and varied, but in the big picture I think GDPR and other threats to surveillance advertising is treated as an existential threat to an entire class of skills, skills that can buy houses.
Days late and this will probably go unread by anyone, but further evidence that GDPR compliance is complicated, and it's difficult to avoid fines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135264 "GDPR penalty for passing on of IP address to Google by using Google Fonts"
It's absolutely true that using Google Fonts will cause a user's IP to be shared with Google, and that this is a violation of the GDPR. But having to review content at this level of detail is burdensome for individuals or small organizations putting anything onto the internet.
All you have to do is not collect any data. Don't set any cookies.
Setting cookies is fine. If they are needed.
You need a session cookie for the login function the user uses? - Use a cookie. No banner needed.
The user puts something in their shopping basket? - Use a session cookie. No banner needed.
You want to store information, not required, in order to identify the user again even though they didn't login, maybe to share the identity with an ad network? - You need a cookie banner where the user can opt out easily.
Yes. If your users create an account with name and address data they need to agree to that data storage.
If your shop just sells them a virtual thing there is no need to collect personal information.
If you ask for the address and more or less directly print it on the label and then delete again it is a bit of an edge case where no explicit confirmation might be needed, however having a good data policy is good practice anyways and then having the extra checkbox in the order flow is not a big deal.
As a practical matter, GDPR doesn't apply to personal sites outside of EU. They're not going to go after some personal site in Iowa, and if they did, so what? After the massive PR debacle that would ensue, the EU regulators wouldn't actually be able to do anything about it.
The CCPA doesn't apply to personal, not-for-profit sites.
Yeah no, I wish we don't go back to that. It doesn't scale at all.
Why does it need to?
You are not Amazon. In the unlikely event you become Amazon, you will be able to rearchitect. Trust me, Amazon did.
Never worry too much about problems you want to have.
LOL If anything, a more barebones internet scales better. The less data you're sending, the more connections you can handle simultaneously, and the less code you'll need. When communication is more decentralized, there's not much of a need for most sites to need to think that much about scaling. We don't need the next Facebook or the next Reddit. I'd love to go back to more independent forums. Maybe with something better than vBulletin, at least.
Who the fuck cares if it scales? It's better if it doesn't scale. Scale is what brought us Facebook and monopolies like Google.
nimforum*, which powers the official Nim forums, doesn't scale for shit, yet totally works for the scale of that community. not everything needs to massively scale, and, in fact, I think the mistaken belief that everything has to scale has led to many people being dissuaded from building smaller communities like back in The Old Days.
True, but I think the point was to be original and random and perhaps be popular as a result, rather than tailor everything for popularity.
HTML scales exceptionally well
Not everything needs to scale.
I feel like this article doesn't address the reason why people moved away from the "old" Internet --- most people only care about their _content_ not the particular technology that backs it.
In the old times, you could only host content if you were really good with the technology. The people who had websites were people who knew how to set up and run a web server, and to compose the HTML content that was being served. Similarly, communities who ran BBS forums, mailing lists, IRC, etc. all needed at least some people who could set up and manage the technology for them.
Centralized services (Web 2.0) changed that. Now all of a sudden you didn't need to run your server --- you could just type some text and click some buttons to put up a blog on a shared service (myspace? blogger? wordpress.com?). You didn't need to run your own forum or mailing list or chat rooms, you could just put your community on an existing service that provided that (Google groups, FB/Whatsapp/<insert your IM> Chat). Need a forum? You have reddit. What is Twitter if not just a collection of mailing lists that you can openly subscribe to but not post on? Centralization allowed the vast majority of people to do what they wanted to do while "outsourcing" the technology part to somebody else, because most people don't care about the technology they care about their content.
The problem with the modern decentralized web (3.0?) is that we haven't focused on solving the real problem --- making it easy to manipulate _content_. If anything, setting up a Web 3.0 presence is _harder_ than it was on a centralized service, and as long as it remains harder, the new "old" Internet will always be a niche.
I fully agree. Technical people often get lost in the weeds. I recall someone trying to extoll the virtues of a self-hosted YouTube alternative (the name escapes me). To him it was clearly superior to YouTube. So I installed the solution, and spent an hour trying to set up and subscribe to the required indexing services. I gave up and went back to this person and explained that no one is going to spend even 10 minutes messing around if they just want to see funny cat videos.
I've built my career on trying to explain this human element to technical people, and if anything, my job security only improves year over year. I see this same attitude in the Linux community: a willingness to work around UX issues because of perceived benefits in other areas. This is why Linux remains such a niche OS for consumers. No user should ever, for any reason ever, have to open a CLI to install a program. But try arguing that on any distro forum and expect a world of hurt.
Whilst we can debate whether open source is better or worse code, noone debates whether open source has better or worse ux/ui. Clunky UI is what we expect from open source projects...if web 3.0 could create incentives for this phenomena to change.. It would be a lot more interesting
This is not true at all in all areas, especially not for tools aimed at devs. PostgreSQL has way better UX than any commercial database I have used.
Today I see some people spend more effort tailoring their content to a specific platform than I spent inside FrontPage (yes, I know) and uploading the files to my ISP-hosted website. Which, unlike some of these platforms is still up, despite me not having touched it for two decades and having changed ISPs like a dozen times since. (But maybe I just got lucky with that ISP ?)
Its the data centers that are going to be responsible for end of web2, when they figure out they can undercut web2 and offer a continuous federated open data storage system and virtual machine. Advertisers will pay them for access directly. Google, Meta, would just be third party indexing services.
At best that could be only marginally profitable. Such a service would have to be a commodity in order to be interoperable. If it could have high margins the index owners such as Meta would keep it in-house. As long as they control the services users want, they control the market.
Your prediction could come to pass only in the case of the open backend being tied to a massively popular service that could compete with those giants
> In the old times, you could only host content if you were really good with the technology. The people who had websites were people who knew how to set up and run a web server, and to compose the HTML content that was being served.
I don't see what's particularly difficult with hosting a static or mostly-static site, and why you'd have to be really good with it (many early content creators weren't). With Apache shared hosting (where your domain, certificates/acme, and basic htaccess are setup for you), this is a matter of putting a couple of HTML and optional CSS files into your document root via ftp/sftp back in the day, or scp, or WebDAV. And HTML is really not that complex a format (or at least used to be before responsive/mobile web), being based on SGML which was designed as structured text format that can be created with a plain text editor in a way that's being taught in secondary school for decades now, and tips available in magazines etc.
I think you're still missing OP's point. Sure, using ftp/sftp or scp is pretty easy for a software engineer, or technology enthusiast. However, that doesn't mean a content creator is happy to learn it, since as OP said, they care about the content not the actual tech. If they have a choice between using something that requires scp and writing HTML versus a graphic environment that is WYSIWYG, then the choice will very likely be the latter.
I think spam, random DoS attacks, and hackers killed the old intenet. Not many people want to keep up with moderation and software security updates.
And I think the heart of it is that most people working in this space want that. They want the niche back.
For now. My company kubelt.com is fixing this.
Your white paper isn't loading for me. Is there somewhere else I can read it?
404 Not Found - That repo doesn't exist, or maybe is private
The Internet today feels like a big box strip mall in suburbia. While visiting my home town, I looked for a local, independent hardware store. There was only Home Depot and Lowe's. Then I realize how few independent businesses were left.
On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit).
Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without needing to do anything special.
> Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without needing to do anything special.
Discoverability is a big part of why the independent web is struggling. And it's not just big tech's fault, people are really bad at linking to each other. I've been trying to raise awareness about this[1] and it has made a bit of a difference and a couple of dozen sites have taken me up on my call to action, but people are still really shy about linking to pages they like even though I'm sure nobody minds getting linked to.
Overall I feel classic search as well as community aggregation (like reddit) suffers from being too manipulable. You just can't find good content produced by humans over there anymore.
I've been experimenting with various alternative paradigms. I think there probably is a better way, but I honestly don't quite know what the answer is just yet. You've got to contend with link rot as well, which is the bane of manual curation.
[1] https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/19-website-discoverability-c...
I definitely agree with this point. Discovery in the long-tail of content (without resorting to sort by new which is a nightmare) is a must solve problem in a independent/decentralized web.
I have a feeling the "answer" is "all of the above" options; the ability to choose what discovery/recommendation mechanisms to use. Being intentional about which lens your viewing your recommendations through. Being able to easily swap between lens. Allowing for corporation owned lens and community owned lens. Allowing yourself to look at an issue through the lens of an individual or institution that you trust.
> people are really bad at linking to each other I wonder if the underlying point here is that the initial set of recommendations comes from small "communities". The readers of a certain blog suggest similar content to others in a non-spammy way. An independent music label links to artists that they enjoy listening to. I think there's missing infrastructure that makes it hard to form these communities though; any barrier to entry makes it less useful. I could see the "web3 ownership economy" thing helping here if it ever becomes a thing; creating this infrastructure as a side effect of the other stuff they want to accomplish. It'd be like if a subreddit was automatically created for every content creator, which could then be used to find recommendations of similar content.
I was reading a security paper today that made a killer observation about trust infrastructure: public trust systems will always succumb to problems of informational asymmetry (moral hazard, adverse selection) so responsible users must always rely on private trust assessments first.
Same problem with information discovery—trust, reputation, it’s all the same social mechanism. Any public signaling will be degraded by information asymmetry. My point is that content discovery is a hard problem.
I think I'm misunderstanding. Wouldn't this just make us trust the people with the most money?
Discovery is an existential issue for the net now, it wasn't back when it started, because there are 100000x more places to go these days.
The old web was simple, but it was also small.
Yeah a lot of the aggregating effects start from search engines, which is why SEO rankings are such a big deal.
The problem is, a lot of the content quality is pretty bad. I remember being a kid in the '90s and viewing page after Geocities page on "Pokemon hacks" which were collections of hearsay versions of what is now known as MissingNo hack, many of which were just plain incorrect. Some of these sites would ask people to send in $5 to get access to the hacks (which was obviously a scam.) The reason the SNR of independent sites is so high these days is because independent sites aren't under any competitive pressure; they're often made specifically to avoid dealing with the corporate web. A world made up of independent websites would suffer the same incentive and spam problems that today's walled gardens face, with none of the walled garden protections.
Incentivizing good behavior and disincentivizing bad behavior has _always_ been the challenge on the net. People are getting emotional about SNR on the Web these days because it's much more ubiquitous in our lives, but Usenet and Email suffered from the same spam problems the web faces. Usenet faded away but Email also became, in practice, highly centralized the way the Web became, because the problem of spam (whether commercial or by crazies) is so hard to fight.
We're human beings. For the best of us, 90% of the conversations and thoughts we have are junk and most of us are worse than that.
Always has been. Probably always will be.
Expecting any internet community to put out more than 10% of good content is an exercise in futility. The only reason why it seemed so much more engrossing and interesting when you arrived on the scene is that you had not acclimated to the room yet, and you were consuming the best, easiest to acquire thought morsels that the community had scrounged out of the trough and recycled until it could stand the test of time within that community.
Then, once you have consumed that bit of the best, you think the rest would be like that as well but instead you find yourself in a room full of people who all know the same things and think similar thoughts, and you season along with them, getting the better secondary and tertiary thought morsels, and maybe contributing some yourself. And then, finally, you see bright fresh faces coming in, following the same trail you followed, coming to the same wrong conclusions you came to, and you think, "There goes the neighborhood" and tell yourself how good it used to be when you were ignorant and didn't know any better.
Eventually you reach the next point, which is realizing that it was always like this. You just didn't know any better. Now you know better, and you also know there is nothing you can do about it. You can stay and help others enjoy their Halcyon days, or you can flee in search of greener pastures.
Suffice it to say, the internet has always been terrible and it has always been great, because it's full of people.
We can try to be better. DAOs or some form of self-governing community are a strong option.
If done correctly, they can provide the 'manual moderation' needed for these smaller communities.
I think this is exactly the wrong way around. Discoverability is the cause of the destruction of original content on the internet, because as soon as something is discoverable it turns commercial and mainstream and gets blown up.
Niche internet communities could exist when they weren't discoverable because that was the only reason people who mess them up stayed out of them. Keyword 'Eternal September'.
The internet is now almost entirely transparent and everything that is transparent is uninteresting, because the eyes of everyone are on it, and nothing that's actually fun ever happens in public.
I used a "high street filled with shops" vs "public library filled with books" analogy for the current internet vs old internet a year or so back:
" ...imagine you live in a town which has a high street filled with shops trying to sell you things, and a public library filled with books trying to tell you things. If you want to buy something you go down the high street to look at the shops, and if you want to read something you go into the library to look for a book. Both activities can co-exist - good libraries do not put shops out of business or vice versa. But you don't want both activities to happen at the same time - you don't want a library filled with salespeople trying to get between you and your books, because that would be distinctly unhelpful at best and downright annoying at worst. The problem is that the internet has turned into a city that is all shops and no libraries. Not even local independent shops at that, just giant out-of-town retail malls... "[0]
Discovery really is hands down the biggest issue. I follow a lot of cool blogs and read a lot of neat stuff from them, but I found them mostly by stumbling upon them on Mastodon.
Actually side note one of my favorite ways to kill time is by going to https://wiby.me and hitting "Surprise me" and reading whatever comes up. I've really discovered some quirky but extremely fun spots on the web with it.
> On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit).
Is it really? I think that was true for a period of time, but that period had come and gone for the most part.
Google searches are pretty bad, and it's only a matter of time before it even loses its remaining relevance with normies.
Amazon, I can't really find much wrong with to be honest.
Reddit hung itself by its own rope with its redesign that turned it into yet another infinite scroll content site, taking the focus away from conversations and to memes and gifs. The site is a garbage can, and it's mostly crazies who are left. Reddit will remain relevant until people no longer use it as an alternative for finding real opinions that they can't find using Google. Its days are definitely numbered in terms of relevancy. You know it's bad when you're on your home feed and they shove in a live cam of a girl jiggling her rear end that you never subscribed to.
Facebook? I know almost no one under 60 who actually uses it or makes posts. Everyone's moved on to Instagram. I have 20 cousins and we communicate through Messenger (not my idea, I'd prefer Signal at least), but even a handful of them aren't even on Messenger anymore. Most of the groups are crap, though the Marketplace is halfway decent, which isn't hard to do when your only competition is Craigslist.
Twitter has remained relevant because of celebrities and journalists, and fewer and fewer people care about either of those groups anymore. More alternatives for different niches are going to pop up and while Twitter will never go away, it's well on its way to being nothing more than a sad joke.
> Discovery needs to be reimagined.
Right-o. As someone pointed out the other day, I think big search engines in their current form are on the way out. Hopefully we can move on to something that can rely on independent niche search engines instead of allowing megacorporations to be the gateway to the web. At this point I'm either using `site:` syntax with DDG or using the search features directly on certain sites. The only search terms I seem to get much useful for with DDG or Google is coding documentation. Anything else seems rigged and controlled.
A big problem today is that platforms only highlight only popular/trendy or paid content. What I would like to see are platforms that give regular people a chance either through chronological or random discovery. There is so much great content out there that doesn't make it into the limelight because of algorithm bias or because creators don't have the money/resources to boost their content.
Yeah I think the long tail really suffers with a lot of popularity algorithms. Instead of a mixed bag with a bit for everyone you get the absolute lowest common denominator.
The long tail isn't in unalloyed good for producers of long tail content/products. While some sales/views are better than no sales/views no individual site is making bank on sales.
It's great if you're Amazon or Google Ads which basically serve the long tail. They benefit from the entire tail.
That's assuming there is something to sell.
A page like this is absolutely fascinating, but not something you'd ever find on the major platforms, and also isn't helped at all by Google Ads: http://www.jamesriser.com/Machinery/Machinery.html
Such a good way to put it. I couldn't agree more.
> Just as radio stations, newspapers, and television networks were the communications gatekeepers of earlier generations, we now have Internet gatekeepers keeping us in line, on line--preventing our voices from being heard by too widely
I am about the same age as the author of this piece. I think they are making a fundamental error with his comparison.
"Back in the day", radio stations, newspapers and television networks were the only actual public media (we could include zines perhaps, but they rarely had the printing capacity to reach a large audience). Their status was conferred by their capital requirements, legal status and in some cases, physical properties.
Today's internet gatekeepers only have the role they do because of network effects, and because people implicitly grant them that role. None of them have licenses from any government to do what they do (business license, sure; not a license to serve specific kinds of content the way that TV stations do).
The only thing preventing my voice from being heard more widely is that most people are watching/listening/reading in places I don't have the desire or capacity to conquer. But there are no hypothetical barriers to me becoming a wildly adored prophet, I just have to do the work.
I think it is both dangerous and misleading to make this comparison, but more significantly, it is also misdirecting. It leads us away from what we would need to do if we actually want to build alternatives, and instead draws comparison with utterly different media and legal frameworks.
> The only thing preventing my voice from being heard more widely is that most people are watching/listening/reading in places I don't have the desire or capacity to conquer. But there are no hypothetical barriers to me becoming a wildly adored prophet, I just have to do the work.
I agree with this comment so much. I have zero desire to participate in most social media and I think it's giving them too much power to suggest they are limiting your speech, etc. The media has done a truly horrendous job by using tweets and social media as news. As if 100 people chiming in with an opinion on something has much relevance in a world of billions.
I prefer my own space online and don't need it to scale, or be seen by thousands, or even be liked. Hell, I don't even run analytics on my site so I might be the sole visitor and I'm fine with that.
I think it is a fair comparison they just did not state it fairly well.
Back in the day you could create your own radio station too or make your own TV content and do it relatively affordably. But reaching a massive audience was multiple times more difficult and required help of one of the gatekeepers.
With the internet you can be heard more widely and cheaper yet (comparatively) but again if you want to really reliably reach a giant audience you again need the permission of the gatekeepers.
If modern politics have proven anything it is that you are not gonna become a wildly adored prophet without using a lot of different mega huge social media platforms no matter how hard you try.
> again if you want to really reliably reach a giant audience you again need the permission of the gatekeepers.
This is not true.
I suspect it is far more so than you're giving credit.
An entity which raises the ire of Facebook, Google (Web search, YouTube, and/or the Android marketplace), Apple (iOS marketplace), Amazon (AWS, publishing, retail), Cloudflare, other major hosting and service providers, etc., will have a hard time or high costs reaching an extensive audience.
Gatekeeping isn't specific to a single role or function, it's a property which emerges through cost structures, network effects, access to capital or talent, regulatory and political sway or vulnerability, and numerous other factors.
In an age of print, presses, paper, and distribution were limiting factors. Where these were controlled, fixed costs of production (writers, illustrators, editors) were amortised over the large number of copies which could be produced of a single issue or publication, and advertising attracted on that basis. Today, technical expertise in building infrastructure and support systems similarly is difficult to attain, but amortises technical staff and paid content (if any) across not and audience of merely thousands or millions, but of billions in the case of Google and Facebook.
It's possible for the equivalent of a zine to be produced and served to a much smaller audience (though one which would have made publishers of the 1860s, or 1960s, salivate), and at comparatively high per-member cost, though the absolute costs could still be low in most cases.
(Static sites and intelligent caching strategies can still make very-large-scale services on a shoestring budget viable.)
Discovery, promotion, engagement, and visitor insights / metrics are other areas in which today's media monopolies also acquire gatekeeper status.
How many of you mourning the old internet frequent neocities or have their own personal website ? I don't think the the answer is 'a lot'.
Everyone on HN complains about everything being turned into a business but everyone also wants to create their own start up and turn it into a unicorn.
Anecdatum: I have maintained my web site since 1995 and have my own domain since 1999 (http://t3x.org). I have never had a "business" nor have I dreamt about big money. Give me back the old internet anytime!
"who am I" is fantastic. Thank you.
I like your 'Who am I page'.
I have started an 'old internet' like website about 3 years ago and I love working on it. It is my space of creativity and freedom. If you want to check it out it is in my bio.
I think the reality is that no one really want these websites anymore.
1995 webmasters unite!
... well there goes my weekend. Great looking site!
Love your book covers and your book Lisp From Nothing was a fun read. Thank you.
I've been running my own self-hosted blog server, IRC server, git server and (more recently) Nextcloud server for almost two decades. And I definitely have no interest in turning them into unicorns: they're just my space on the Internet, and not everyone is willing to turn their houses into party mansions. Most importantly, nobody but myself (or maybe a massive DNS/BGP outage) can take these spaces down, which is a pretty big pro in today's centralized world.
But I'm also aware of being an exception. I'm aware that people, on average, don't like to run their own servers. So just let people be people. I don't like all this nostalgia about how good the times of BBS, IRC, RSS feeds or self-hosted websites were, because these things still represent they way I consume the Internet in 2022. People have changed all around, sure, hype mounts and dies, but I don't care. People are people, let them put all of their pictures and sensitive information on a computer run by a creep like Zuckerberg if they like. But I'm unwilling to compromise and follow this craze.
No.
I have several personal websites, the oldest contains some fun and personal stuff since 1997 (https://web.archive.org/web/*/cobbaut.be) that is still found. One other contains books that I write and give as pdf for free (linux-training.be).
> How many of you mourning the old internet frequent neocities or have their own personal website ? I don't think the the answer is 'a lot'.
I don't, but I've been meaning to have one for a long time now. I even started and got a vps from hetzner but they blocked me. I can't really decide where or how I want to host it.
> Everyone on HN complains about everything being turned into a business but everyone also wants to create their own start up and turn it into a unicorn.
That's not true at all. Today I want creative communities and community-built software & hardware projects more than ever. I wouldn't mind having my own business that is beneficial to a community (same way e.g. how Olimex or Raspberry and PCB manufacturers are beneficial to people building open source hardware and don't have the means to fabricate circuit boards at home) but I don't think everything should be monetized and turned into business.
Just for anecdotical purposes, I do have/host a few of my personal projects on a dedicated Linode which I've had since the summer of 2011, that's more than 10 years now (wow! times does fly).
Never ever have I thought of "monetising" them, I mean, even if I wanted that I don't see there being that big of a market for people interested in the location of Medieval villages in Walachia (even though some of them had first been mentioned in documents written during Vlad the Impaler's reign, maybe I could market that) nor for knowing where exactly were the locations and houses that used to belong to former Bucharest Jewish residents (that is until they were nationalised post-WW2), as I also have an interactive map for that.
I've worked for most of my career (~15 years now) in start-ups and small companies (that's what I think actually made me pursue those personal projects, I think working in a big company/corporation would have numbed me down) and I don't personally find unicorns that interesting, there's one located just down the street where I daily walk my dog and I don't feel any need to stand behind a big thing like that, I would have way less time to walk my dog plus I'd feel that experience would also numb me down, in a different way from working in a corporation, but numb me down nevertheless.
I'm at http://erik.itland.no and also my old blog is available online at https://techinorg.blogspot.com
I also have a mastodon account.
I'll happily make money from my efforts, but my thoughts goes in direction of creating something useful and offer hosting for it, not ads. So far I have created "nothing" (at most something I created was used by up to maybe a couple of hundred happy souls for some years to simplify the life of a local community, and I didn't make any money from it).
I simultaneously want to downvote you for your dismissive attitude towards everyone here while I also want to upvote you to bring all examples provided to the front. I chose to upvote but now you know the reason.
Also remember: many people here are shy and won't post so I think there is probably a lot more going on.
Best analysis I've read on HN in a long while. Straight to the point. My generation (the people between 35 and 50) is the most nostalgic about the good ole Web of yore, yet we are the generation that turned it into the ad-ridden cesspool we currently complain about. What we're missing is not the Internet-that-was, rather our ability to spend time on useless projects in a wilder environment without thinking about the economic implication. In a way we just miss being young. Our only advantage was that our parents' generation mostly didn't know what we were doing (especially here in Europe), so they certainly didn't expect for us to get a dime out of that blipety-bloop computers or whatever-they're-doing-in-their-room. The good news is that a big part of that Web is still alive, in different ways, in small secluded forums and communities, inside multiplayer gaming platforms, and so on. The problem is that today EVERYTHING can be monetized, and everyone is sort of expected to do that. Just remove the layer that tech capitalism has ingrained in our brain, and you'll see the old internet is still here. We just changed, and capitalism adapted is all. Do something for the sake of doing it. On the Internet or otherwise, and you'll magically get back at least a sliver of that feeling you're missing.
Well said too.
Those NOT doing what is "expected" of "big money" need to a better ways to connect, support each other and work togther against those expectations.
I have have a couple sites that I have both hosted locally, cloud, static, WordPress.
I think the future is modern tools + old school feel
This is wishful thinking. The demographics of the internet have changed so much that you will NEVER get that 'old' back. You may get an imitation or evolution of it, but it will never return in full.
The size of social media now is so gargantuan that almost every single member you get in an independent community will have been molded by it in some way, which is very different to how the webcultures of the day functioned.
My experience running a small community post social media explosion, is that most newcomers want to treat it like Twitter - Personal Edition. They want to engage in recreational outrage. They want to be obsessed with America-centered identity politics and put down other people for not joining 'their' side.
It's a far cry from the types of people I once met online. There is no sense of "The internet is not real life.", because, for so many of them, their internet handle is their real life identity, and any joke against it is a strike against their moral fabric and an attack on their very being.
>their internet handle is their real life identity
I feel like the west forgot how to be pseudo-anonymous on the internet. If you take a look at Chinese or Japanese internet users they still mostly prefer distancing their meatspace self from their virtual identity.
Content focus certainly changed as barriers for entry got lower. In classical TV there was certainly a degradation towards low production costs and simple content in the last decade. But it is still profitable even with a shrinking pool of viewers. I expect the fate of some mass social media platforms to be that same. Some people will always remain there.
I don't know when we started to take internet comments seriously, I only know that I don't like that at all.
I don't think Web 3.0 is going to be the kind of decentralization people are all hyping up now - we are still too close to Web 2.0 and the innovations are nebulous at best.
However I do think there will be a Web 3.0 and it is going to come about when processing power, battery life, efficiency, global internet, and easy power generation all start reaching a critical point. Combine that with a general psychological backlash toward mega surveillance, concentration of power in massive corporate entities, and mass automation and we will be ripe for a world where low tech becomes stylistically cool again but with just the best of the tech world when wanted.
If you plucked someone out of ancient Rome and brought them to this society a lot of the technology might really seem like magic. I am imagining independent adhoc networks that can be easily setup to servicing a small remote village completely disconnected from the outside world and just as easily instantly connect that village to a high speed global network. And it all runs off a few solar panels or some other source of cheap power.
The decentralization of Web 3.0 will come about when we have the hardware to actually do things like that. When the ratio of cheap power generation to power use blows away what we have now. Who knows what crazy stuff people will come up with!
Or we could go the Wall-E route and it all goes to shit
Lets face it though - version point 0 is often a buggy mess. Bring on Web 3.1 !
What does the cheapness of power generation have anything to do with web3? If power was 1/10 the price, Proof of work blockchains would use 10X as much.
But there is web3 and blockchains without proof of work
I think he means web 3.0 as a semantic followup to web 2.0, and not the useless crap that cryptobros want to push as "web3".
When Walmart started taking over consumer goods, everyone thought small business was dead. All that was really died was the general store, and we saw a rise in boutique storefronts. Depending on their niche, people craved more than the lowest common denominator that Walmart provided, and these small businesses filled a need. I've long held that social media is following a similar trend. Much like Shopify, the next wave of businesses will enable companies to run communities that feel, as the article puts it, "smol." Discord is a great example of this.
I don't think this is correct. For somewhere in the range of 3 decades, companies like Walmart have decimated small businesses. "Boutique storefronts" have not replaced the stores that Walmart et al. helped to shutter all through the late 80s until today. They exist (mostly in large cities), but the reality is that small business, compared to the way it was in, say, 1974, did die.
It might be true that things like Shopify help to resucitate it, but I'm skeptical. I also don't care about things "feeling" small when they actually vast: this is nothing more than a marketing (de|il)lusion, and does nothing to promote the kind of diversified, distributed form of a resilient, vibrant, equitable and opportunity-filled economy.
Yea I agree - Walmart and Amazon and all the giant corps have destroyed small businesses. We may be exposed to it less becuase like you said - the audience here lives in large cities where the population is diverse and wealthy enough for them to survive.
We have seen tons of boutique online vendors pop-up however. I wonder how the total diversity compares?
A new age "general store" that was a group of small online vendors getting together (shared ownership) might be an interesting way to resurge local business - imagine like a co-op but for small businesses all under shared physical locations. Products and vendors could even rotate out depending on the season and local population.
small shops are dead in small towns though. Only big cities can support the diversity now. And online giants have decimated the book shops, even more so, just because online book sales are so efficient.
> All that was really died was the general store, and we saw a rise in boutique storefronts.
Ouch, head outside a major metro area sometime. There's small towns all over the country with a Walmart on one side of town and a Dollar General on the other with nothing but shuttered buildings in between save for the occasional fast food joint.
Walmart destroyed businesses in small towns. They bought up cheap land on the outskirts of town and leveraged their huge infrastructure to undercut all local retailers. The local retailers would be paying Main Street rents with little to no economies of scale. There's just no competing with Walmart in many small towns.
Yep, humanity and its demands are multifaceted. We want good stuff cheap and affordable as the rise of Walmart and Amazon goes to show. But we also want to feel unique and support recognizably human businesses. I don't see any reason why they both shouldn't exist.
This post is from yesterday. Why the Internet Archive link?
Because sometimes HN hugs things to death. I went straight to the comments for the alternate link when the site was still loading after 10 seconds.
Site was down when I attempted to read the post.
Makes sense, especially in the context of The Old Internet. Thanks.
Cheapskate's got a pretty low-end server, doesn't want a lot of traffic.
"technology is cyclical" -Dennis Duffy, 30 Rock.
Jokes aside, I do not know if this is me getting older and becoming more grouchy and/or some of the tools (Gmail, Google Search, macOS/MacBook <whichever>) we've been using for a while are becoming more obtuse and less user (or power user) friendly in name of <some product goal>
many tools are attempting becoming (and often failing) to become more beginner user friendly. And while that implies dumbing down the tools at times, they still have advance features which are either progressively shown in context, or hidden behind additional advanced user menus or modes. Thus it makes it harder to reason about (as a power user does) and you are reduced to incantations rather than deduction. On top of that there is an increase of change, which prevents one from better learning the system. In effect, to a first approximation, the systems are now non-deterministic. For a causal user, they never care about that anyway and for the best systems, the UX improvements work. But for power-users, the non-determinism is going to drive one crazy.
Agreed. Another negative side effect is that power users cannot help casual users anymore. They become dependent on the developer of the software in question and won't learn about the pipeline of how things are created.
A beverage dispenser has a good UX, but its usage is fairly restricted.
as late as 2015, 2.1 million people were somehow still using its dial-up service
That number is how many AOL Dial Up customers there were in 2015. It's from this article - https://www.cnet.com/news/more-than-2-million-people-still-p...
Paying for the service is not the same as using the service. There are many reasons to pay for a redundant dial-up connection in case of an outage with your main internet provider. There are probably lots of people who had a dial-up account but forgot to close it. Some people probably did still use it, but for things they don't need broadband for (email, IRC, etc).
You can't use the existence of a handful of dial-up connections to claim we should be building web software for people on dial-up. That just shows you haven't thought about things enough.
> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently decentralized. Unfortunately, despite common goals, some on today's old Internet are hostile to blockchain technology. I am not sure why.'
What goals does today's crypto-token-powered "web 3" vision share with the old Internet? It's not enough to say "well it's decentralized" and do a handwave.
Consider the NFT exploration Moxie Marlinspike did recently:
https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
This is essentially a system that lets you buy DRM'd metadata that points to servers owned by a corporation funded by billions of VC dollars, and transactions are recorded on a ledger that spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these make-believe digital assets.
None of these things have anything to with the old Internet: cargo cult DRM, billion-dollar VC funding, enormous energy waste, artificial scarcity where none is needed.
That website on dial-up was slow because of real physical constraints, not artificial constraints erected to make VCs richer at the expense of the planet's ecosystem.
It's worth noting that there is a core of people doing real work in crypto who are not trying to peddle NFTs or other sleight of hand rungpulls designed to separate the gullible from their money.
Ethereum, for example, is full of people building interesting things like off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs and actively working to make crypto less energy intensive and more useful. They don't want to sell you an NFT and it's not part of some elaborate rugpull- There are plenty of examples of people doing this important work because they legitimately believe that a world where fiat control is divorced from the levers of governmental power is a positive change.
There are also, of course, people trying to use those achievements as part of a weird shell game where the end result is giving gullible strangers nothing in exchange for something. That's sort of the human condition.
Yes there are people with 100% good intentions working in this space. There were also people with 100% good intentions working at Theranos.
You're proving his point, there are also people with good/bad intentions working in "web2" and everywhere for that matter.
Don't criticize the tech, criticize the individual bad actors, like you did with Theranos.
One of the main talking points "web3" critics yell is "scams!", like they don't exist elsewhere.
If you do want to criticize the tech, leave the moral crusade out of it and say technically what is wrong with it, so we can have a technical debate about the feature in question.
'blockchain' doesn't have any point of view on whether something should be 'NFT'-ized or not - it's just a technology. That's like saying FTP encourages child pornography because it can be used to transfer files.
As in most things, the culprit is not technology, it's people. It's entirely possible to ignore the clear rugpulls and scams and just focus on the technically interesting parts. Quite a lot of people are quietly doing just that while everyone else is busy trying to scam each other and/or be religiously opposed to what amounts to a distributed database synchronization mechanism.
The tech is great. I'm a huge fan of all crypto use cases that actually exist today and are actually used by people and don't involve money laundering or accidental Ponzi schemes.
With the obvious exception that...it's impossible to fork an entity like Theranos when they become sufficiently evil such that the community no longer believes in their direction.
"www companies are just a way for VCs to make money faster. "
You can't trust Ethereum at all. When it comes to picking between their principles, and money, they'll always pick money. This is all shown by the hard fork when the DAO was was "hacked". The code was supposed to be law, until it meant they lost some money.
Ok... I'm just pointing out interesting developments in the space and not interested in a tribal crypto slapfight of the kind that is beneath the typical level of HN decorum so I'll just ask when you say 'they' reverted the network who do you suppose you're talking about?
It was the people participating in the network.
'They' decided on a course of action by doing what most of the people in the system thought was correct. That sounds to me like a feature rather than a bug. At the time the consensus was that the network was young and brittle and breaking things was expected and an 'undo' was appropriate, as evidenced by the fact that a small number of people didn't think it was a good idea, tried to fork the chain to test that sentiment, and pretty quickly faded into obscurity.
Any distributed system that relies on trusting a consensus of individuals will be vulnerable to the majority of those individuals deciding something you don't want them to decide. That's how consensus works (in Ethereum as well as any other crypto BTW) The reason crypto works is that once you hit a certain scale most of the users are interested in keeping the network working. The ETH DAO was an interesting time when ETH was enough of a 'toy' that dev environment stuff like the community agreeing to undo 'oopsies' was conceivable. For better or worse (probably better) ETH is no longer a 'toy' and those mechanisms for undos don't really work anymore.
Yep. That fork was a big fat juicy dead canary. Absolutely infinitely worse.
So long as fraud and theft remain crimes, then Governments will still exert control over currency; fiat or not.
> There are plenty of examples of people doing this important work because they legitimately believe that a world where fiat control is divorced from the levers of governmental power is a positive change.
Regardless of their intentions this is a bad idea and deserves every line of criticism it receives.
Governance, law, and financial regulation exist for reasons that programmers have no place or reason to replace.
Wether they wish it or not there is a centralization of authority that will happen. In Ethereum’s case either the oligarchs with the most money will set the rules, or more likely, actual governments with armies and the ability to enforce laws will.
>Regardless of their intentions this is a bad idea and deserves every line of criticism it receives.
That's a fair criticism, even if I don't agree with it. I don't think it's possible to imagine a world where consensus is shared widely enough that 'mutually assured destruction' of the financial network prevents transaction censorship, particularly when zero knowledge based networks allow validation of network transactions without knowledge of who is transacting, what transaction is taking place, or when it might occur.
>Governance, law, and financial regulation exist for reasons that programmers have no place or reason to replace.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that governance, law, or financial regulation should go away. Those things seem important. The governments of the world can enforce those things like they always have. They just lose the ability to manufacture more money when it's time to fight a new war or pay off one special interest or another (but only if most of the people participating in that society buy into the idea that the government is not a good steward of that power)
Imagine a world where the people ruled by a government have some say in whether they're doing a good job with monetary policy or not. I certainly don't have that today - I get to punch the 'RED GUY' or 'BLUE GUY' button on my voting ticket but neither of them are particularly interested in changing something that fundamental.
>But giving power to a handful of rich people and asking them to make monetary policy is an oligarchy and it's not a good idea.
Oh geez, we should probably stop doing that then.
> off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs
As a layman, I’m not touching crypto until I know what this means.
Seems a little silly since one wouldn't expect most laymen to understand how TLS works, but enjoy: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-nutshell/
https://www.reddit.com/r/loopringorg/comments/qz3bj5/zk_proo...
Yes, it's too complicated right now (so was https://www.!).
1) "knowledge proof" : proving that you have some information . E.g. suppose I claim that a graph can be colored with only 3 colors. I can prove that I know a coloring for the graph with 3 colors, by presenting you with that graph.
2) "zero knowledge" : Suppose I want to prove to you (or at least, give you very strong evidence) that I know a 3-coloring for the graph, but I don't want to give you any information about how to color the graph with 3 colors.
This can be done in a way where I first randomly permute the 3 colors, and then commit to a particular coloring without showing you anything about it (e.g. I give each node on the graph a random salt, and show you the hash of (the color and the salt appended) for each node ), and ask you to pick any two nodes of the graph. I reveal the color and salt for those two nodes, and you can check that they make the hash I said they did. If the two nodes are connected by an edge, then the colors I give have to be different (if they are the same then my proof is invalid and you shouldn't believe my claim that I have a coloring of the graph with 3 colors.)
By repeating this process many times (each time I randomly permute the colors/names-of-the-colors, and make a new commitment about each node), and each time you choose a random pair of (adjacent) vertices, then, if I didn't actually have a coloring of it with 3 colors, there's a high chance you would eventually find that the pairs you asked me to reveal, have the same color. So, if we keep doing this, and I'm telling the truth, eventually you should have strong evidence that I have a coloring for it, but without you getting any information about that coloring (other than that it is one) (because by permuting the colors each time, the only info you get about the nodes you asked about, is that the colors are different, which is already implied by it being a coloring.)
So, that would be a zero knowledge proof that I know how to color that graph using only 3 colors, with no 2 nodes having the same color.
(of course, the thing with coloring graphs is just an example, one which is relatively easy to give a protocol for.)
3) "non-interactive" : accomplishing the same sort of thing, except instead of us sending many messages back and forth like in what I described above, instead, I just do one computation (using the knowledge I have), and then I give you the output of that computation, and you can check that with some algorithm, and the algorithm says "yep" if I gave you a good output, and "nope" if I gave you a bad output, and, if I had the info I claim to have and used it for the input to my computation, then you will always get the result "yep", while if I don't have the info I claim to have, then the probability that I succeed in giving you a good output, one which would make your program say "yep", is negligible.
__
Hopefully that helps make the idea more clear?
You might be wondering why this idea is applicable to cryptocurrency stuff?
A number of reasons. Being able to prove that you have some information that satisfies a given property, without revealing the information, is fairly powerful.
This. IMHO, those who criticize crypto tend to experience the fallacy of incomplete evidence (aka "cherry picking" [0]).
I got bored the other day and thought it would be funny to make a copy of the most expensive NFT and set that as my Twitter profile picture because they added that silly feature.
So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the image and got a big scary warning:
> (paraphrased; I don't have a screenshot) This image was found too many times on the internet. If this image is not yours, this is ILLEGAL AND A VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT LAW, and may result in your NFT being removed from the marketplace.
How on earth is this decentralized? Like yeah, I get wanting to protect your "asset" from "theft," but what central authority gets to decide what copyright law we abide by- further, what happens when an NFT marketplace removes your NFT? Does it get removed from the blockchain? I legitimately don't know how this works.
The user experience is also TERRIBLE. I am rather technical (hell, I used to do Bitcoin back in like 2015, or whenever it was about $4k/coin) and still don't really know how the hell MetaMask works. I imported the wallet on my phone... maybe? The randomart image it showed initially was different, but apparently the iOS app just defaults to a different kind of randomart.
You also have to use the MetaMask browser on iOS. It sucks.
Also the MetaMask connect buttons barely work across different sites. It had a _really_ hard time telling if I had a wallet. Not sure if this is an implementation issue on the dev end but as a user it was super confusing.
Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it stands.
Obfuscation is the point.
None of it designed to make it easy or to make sense. Because if people realized they are being taken for a ride, no one will show up and empty their wallets. It's what corrupt businesses and dictatorships do. Confuse and conquer.
This is Moxie's point. Web 1.0 is actually decentralized and permissionless. You can actually host that image on your own Web 1.0 without any gatekeepers being involved.
Not strictly speaking true. Your local government can raid your servers for serving content that violates local laws, or in cooperation with a foreign one.
> So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the image and got a big scary warning:
One NFT marketplace shows you an error message and therefore the technology is not decentralized? That's a bit of a stretch. That NFT marketplace might have restrictions in place for their own legal reasons, but using that as an excuse to say that the technology isn't decentralized is unjustifiable.
Don’t know if you read moxie’s article linked in root, but OpenSea is actually where almost all sites get their NFT information from (even metamask iirc). That’s not the site where I got the error, granted, but what happens when OpenSea (a central marketplace) removes your NFT?
> Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it stands.
We already have this with SSO though - what would be the difference? Decentralization? Though it should be possible to host your own SSO.
Right, and if you don't want a single trackable identity, which lots of people don't, a nice modern phone can also WebAuthn using say a fingerprint reader† and so you can have one step sign in (tap sensor, sign in) that way with the resulting "identity" living only on that one site.
† You might be thinking wait, we don't want to be trackable. WebAuthn doesn't have any way of sending fingerprints to anywhere, the phone is using the biometrics to make this not work for bag snatcher, or for the guy snooping your desk while you go get a coffee.
> Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go.
I agree. The only thing missing is a way to recover your account (wallet) if you lose or forget your password.
I think NFT's are just the equivelent of those that use the fine art world for tax avoidance.
Web 3.1 is probably coming but it is going to be something we have not fully figured out yet
We better figure it out before we hit Web 3.11 for Workgroups !
I follow the NFT thing, at least in its metaverse incarnation, and it looks like it's about over. None of the 3D worlds that have NFTs have significant usage. The reaction of game companies is mostly "do not need or want". The reaction of gamers is "hell, no". Nobody is doing much with their overpriced "virtual land". Where it even exists. There are many wannabe virtual worlds that never actually launched a 3D world.
There isn't much of an NFT resale market. There are minters, and there are suckers. Any chance to make money flipping NFTs was used up last year. NFTs may stay around as collectables, but to make money that way, you must have fans who buy your merch. You need to own an NBA franchise, be a famous performer, or have a major collectable brand.
NFT sentiment on Reddit has gone from positive to very negative in the last three months. The hype isn't working any more. Without hype, it dies.
Then there's enforcement. About twice a month, the US SEC brings the hammer down on some crypto-related crook.[1] They're still working through the Initial Coin Offering scam backlog. They'll get to NFTs as the complaints start coming in.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
The thing that is telling to me about all of these "revolutions" is WHO is doing the hype and to what end.
Web 1.0 it was the nerds saying it was going to change the world and the people with no knowledge of how the internet worked saying it was BS.
Web 2.0 for the most part just seemed to naturally happen without a ton of specific hype and was what finally got all the naysayers of Web 1.0 on board.
Web 3.0 is all the OG naysayers saying it is going to change the world while the nerds roll their eyes.
Personally I am looking forward to Web 3.1 :-D
I'm waiting for Web 3.11 for Workgroups. At least it will be useful for something.
Vitalik's response to Moxie is worth a read:
https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_im...
Buterin: "Moxie's critiques in the second half of the post strike me as having a correct criticism of the current state of the ecosystem (where (1), (2), (7) and (8) are the only things that we have working code for), but they are missing where the blockchain ecosystem is going."
Right. In other words, what we have now sucks, but you shouldn't criticize it because we have this proposed scheme which might be better.
I'm no fan of NFT (non-fungible tokens) crypto and do not now, never have, never intend to own any, but, and maybe part of Web3, am guessing at some useful purpose -- a convenient, low overhead, way to move many small amounts of money to pay for Internet usage.
E.g., Sam runs a Web site and wants to charge each user some small amount, say, $0.001 up to $0.10, including users in foreign countries, for each visit. Sam is eager to let his users pay with some major NFT.
Joe wants to use Sam's site and other sites with such a charging technique so buys in whatever fiat currency his country uses, say, $10.00 worth of some NFT. Then Joe uses Sam's site and pays with some NFT money. That NFT tokens can be divided into many parts is crucial here.
Once a day Sam converts all his NFT revenue to dollars (or whatever fiat currency is used in his country).
So, net, the money flow is from Joe's fiat money to $10.00 WORTH of some NFT to Sam's revenue in NFT to Sam's revenue in his fiat money.
Point 1: The NFT is held by Joe and Sam for only a short time and is used only as a convenient way to move many small amounts of money.
Point 2: Neither Joe nor Sam cares what each whole token of the NFT is worth.
Point 3: Investors who want to speculate on the long term value of a NFT tokens have risks from "unknown unknowns".
Point 4: If each of 1 billion people do what Joe does, hold nearly all that NFT, and on average hold only $10.00 worth, then we have an estimate of the maximum the investors can make.
This seems to be, disregarding the entire meaning of "non-fungible" ?
NFT doesn't mean "token". If you just mean "token", say "token"?
Unless you mean like, "tokens which represent a fractional share of a particular NFT" ? But why would you use this as the thing to denominate payment in?
If Joe has $5 worth of something, and Carl has another $5 worth of the same thing, and outcomes are equivalent if they swap what they have, then, the thing they have is fungible.
Thanks for the lessons!
I'm a total novice in the world of NFT (Google says that abbreviates "non-fungible token"). You are way ahead of me. I'm such a novice that I don't yet even know how to use the words!
I don't yet fully understand your lessons!
Maybe roughly I have the scenario of Joe, Sam, and the long term investors correct.
>a convenient, low overhead, way to move many small amounts of money to pay for Internet usage.
AKA digital currency. For this we can simply use a digital currency (crypto or otherwise). NFT is irrelevant here, an extra unnecessary complication when the same thing could have done with the ETH chain it's already based on, or a new side-chain or many other methods.
Thanks!
And! The ledger isn't used by the main marketplaces or wallets (eg OpenSea & MetaMask) when you're trying to look at your assets. You can be deplatformed from those places, unable to trade your assets with anyone on those sites/using those wallets.
From that Moxie Marlinspike article:
> A crypto wallet like MetaMask, Rainbow, etc is “non-custodial” (the keys are kept client side), but it has the same problem as my dApps above: a wallet has to run on a mobile device or in your browser. Meanwhile, ethereum and other blockchains have been designed with the idea that it’s a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers.
> A wallet like MetaMask needs to do basic things like display your balance, your recent transactions, and your NFTs, as well as more complex things like constructing transactions, interacting with smart contracts, etc. In short, MetaMask needs to interact with the blockchain, but the blockchain has been built such that clients like MetaMask can’t interact with it. So like my dApp, MetaMask accomplishes this by making API calls to three companies that have consolidated in this space.
> For instance, MetaMask displays your recent transactions by making an API call to etherscan > …displays your account balance by making an API call to Infura > …displays your NFTs by making an API call to OpenSea
> Again, like with my dApp, these responses are not authenticated in some way. They’re not even signed so that you could later prove they were lying. It reuses the same connections, TLS session tickets, etc for all the accounts in your wallet, so if you’re managing multiple accounts in your wallet to maintain some identity separation, these companies know they’re linked.
> MetaMask doesn’t actually do much, it’s just a view onto data provided by these centralized APIs. This isn’t a problem specific to MetaMask – what other option do they have? Rainbow, etc are set up in exactly the same way. (Interestingly, Rainbow has their own data for the social features they’re building into their wallet – social graph, showcases, etc – and have chosen to build all of that on top of Firebase instead of the blockchain.)
> All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet. It doesn’t functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which began returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!
> spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these make-believe digital assets
This'll get almost as much traction as activists decrying HTTPS/SSL because it took more compute, and therefore obviously more pollution!
To me the biggest difference between the "old" internet and current web is the advertising. It is not just the adds that are so much more prevalent, the web sites are designed to be visually appealing and that detracts from any content that might be there. "Old" internet had information and links to other information. "New" internet is all about facade with little content, just a title here, picture there, short video to grab attention and then hopefully serve as many adds as possible without (or before) turning you away.
I want a search engine that penalizes results by the amount of advertising on the page. :)
I think, something which is missed, is what I'd call the "mediametic horizon". In the "old days", people weren't just "doing their thing", there was more to it. Even, if you entertained just a small site, you were somewhat playing big media (compare the vintage radio allusions or the ubiquitous news signations that popped up about 1997.) Small websites were pulling for reach, dreaming of a mention on "What's cool" lists. (Besides other functions, HN may be the last true what's-cool list today.) Even those building professional sites were driven by this "mediametic horizon": you wouldn't build the same website twice, not even the same concept. Adding to and enriching what was the known standard, the known functionality, the known capabilities of the Web was the raison d'être of any new site. Becoming known and mentioned for such a feat was a major incentive, both for the designer-developers and for the clients (again, for reach and prestige). The truth being, the "old web" essentially required and depended on brokers of reach and prestige to develop this drive, and I do not see any candidates for fulfilling this function. (Apart from HN, that is.)
P.S./Edit: This was still true for the early 2000s: back then, I was involved in a major relaunch of the site of a telephone carrier and the clients were scanning relevant Usenet groups for critiques in order to evaluate their success. (Surely, this wasn't the norm, but it still did happen.)
I think the reason the old internet was what it was was because the barrier to entry was much higher (computers cost a lot of money in the 90s/ early 00s, you needed to learn HTML (at a minimum) to put a website together, and you had to have a phone line available for dial up, you had to be curious or have curious friends to learn about the cool websites out there, etc.).
All of those filters meant a narrow spectrum of the population participated on the internet. It also meant the ratio of creator to consumer was much smaller. The market sold to itself (other creators), not just consumers; or in other words, the community existed to serve itself.
I think the same idea can be applied to any creative outlet (music, art..). As soon as everyone has access, and the old filters (e.g. the RIAA, publishers) are torn down, it loses its uniqueness and glamor and the culture collapses, morals aside.
The next "big thing" will have a high barrier to entry, whether it be costing a lot of money, or requiring a specific skillset that takes time to learn. It will attract driven people who live to create and build. And like everything else, the barrier will eventually be torn down leaving mediocracy in its place.
I started an open, special-interest community based around a mailing list (SMTP) around ~30 years ago, pre-Web 2.0, in a time when a lot of folks were glad to just be able to send email on the Internet, let alone browse it with some fancy browser thingy.
Its still running and still functioning as a social network.
The Internet is only as strong as its protocols, which is to say it is extremely strong because there are more than one protocol to use for the purposes of communication.
The crazy thing is, the cyclomatic complexity of dealing with communication over email versus through some web-based interface, is pretty much not comparable. Email is much easier to use - if you treat email with the respect it deserves. But I think so many generations of Internet users were taught to use email derisively, or non-productively, so it 'feels' like a downgrade to go back to text-based email. Top-quoting vs. bottom-quoting, rich text versus plain, X-headers versus custom .sigs, there is a huge list of things that can go wrong with email-based social networking, but ultimately the proof is in the pudding: we're still running. We still have occasional flame wars and the odd exodus of favourite members, but we also have regular returns of long-lost members who make their way back to the mailing list after a few years of hell on the other networks.
So, for 30 years, we've been doing the social networking thing just fine.. Functionally, we have the same degree of internal communication in our group as any Facebook groups - only, we're 100% in control of our own data and no third party can (easily) shut down the discourse. I consider this one of the factors for why we've survived 30 years as a group without implosion - there is no control point besides the mailserver itself, and that is protected by an admin whose understanding of human interaction precludes interfering when things get toasty ... so when people leave, they leave. We don't care, its not part of our business model to capture eyeballs, etc.
That said, we are pretty small and don't get many new members popping in, although we welcome it. Perhaps thats a blessing, maybe its a curse. We'll see in another 30 years, I'm guessing ...
I don't know about web3, but somehow github is quite similar to what we had in the olden days; just search for 'awesome any-topic' in github search, and you will get a curated list of interesting links on nearly any-topic. Also github pages lets you do your own homepage in a git repository, so it's a bit like geocities ;-) I mean our benevolent owners at microsoft give us a free space for self expression, which isn't a facebook/google style walled garden and targeted add pusher, or medium like subscription extractor. It's even better than geocities, they don't put up any adds at all!
You even have the 'The definitive list of lists (of lists)' https://github.com/jnv/lists - looks like the same old culture that moved over to a new home in the sun. (now this spaceship is very fragile, and might disappear upon any minor change of the EULA on github, matters as usual ;-)
cough Look at the forest you're in.
Everybody mourning the "old" internet while posting on a text only news board with a great community of people, constant traffic, new inspiring stuff daily and best of all without ads or pervasive trackers.
Also the top link right now is pointing to a forum : https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/2022-01-25-issue-with-tl...
Slightly related: I may want to contribute to the cause by building a very small personal site on a broadband connection (unfiltered public dynamic IP plus DuckDns) after I solve some health problems and relocate, hopefully within a few months. If I'm lucky I should get a better connection than the roughly 60down/22up I have now, which would seem ridiculous for that use, but I'd make a strictly static site, no Javascript, small images and no or extremely small downloads (torrent might help for bigger ones, if any). I don't plan to build any community around it, just to document projects I would discuss on newsgroups and possibly here, so no user input would be involved. Anyone here who had a similar experience can share more information, caveats, suggest tools, etc? Thanks.
Apache with server side includes (SSI) will allow you to quickly and easily template websites without adding new tools or processes. I find this to be a decent balance between a static site and DRY. I don't care for most static site generators since I prefer to write my site content in HTML as much as possible.
For example, your index.html may look like:
<!-- #include virtual="/top.html" -->
<h1>My Website</h1>
<p>A bunch of content</p>
<!-- #include virtual="/bottom.html" -->
<html>
<head>
<title>My Website</title>
<!--other header info -->
</head>
<body>
<footer>
<!-- footer stuff -->
</footer>
</body>
</html>Are you saying 22Mbps upload is ridiculous for hosting a website? I may be parsing your comment wrong...
Anyways if it's a static site with little JS and not too many smallish images, that'll be plenty of bandwidth for a personal site. If a page load is 1MB (that's a lot for this sort of website!) that'll let you serve up to ~2.75 requests per second/86.4k requests per day which is a lot of traffic! And if the burst is double that, then your page load will merely take twice as long.
Off topic rant on the date "1-24-22": Please just use YYYY-mm-dd, for the sake of future generations so that they don't have to check if it's 2022 or 2122.
We're definitely heading for a Y2.1K problem and we've learned nothing.
> And, a high percentage of websites load as slowly as a sick turtle awaking from a long slumber.
I love that the full page makes just 2 requests (1 html file and one favicon). 20KB transferred. 1 second to load. No JavaScript, no cookies, no dependencies at all. This, to me, is the essence of 'respect your visitor'. Kudos.
When talking about online communities and gathering places I think people make an incredible mistake: they consider relative values instead of absolute ones.
Sure in many cases one has to look at how much something is popular relative to the general population, but do you really need to think like that when talking about websites and forums? I mean, from an absolute point of view there are many more forums, personal blogs, rss feeds and independent projects than ever before, even if their relative popularity has declined. But what do you care? A forum hosting 300 active users is already incredibly crowded, it's very difficult you will get to know even half of all them in your own lifetime, why do you need everything to turn virally popular?
Would you want your local NIX club to suddenly jump from a few tens of members to thousands? No, because the point is to create a community. Who cares if some NIX club residing on Facebook has 100.000 members, ultimately what you care about is the one you go to every week/month and in which you see real people and talk real talk. We are not talking here about an industrial endeavor where if not enough users partake then production crawls to a halt worldwide, we are talking about buying a crappy computer, coding a few pages in simple HTML and buying a funky domain name for pennies. It will always be cheap and simple to host your own stuff, you don't need self hosting to become the next big thing to enjoy your life.
A four-fold increase in Gemini usage doesn't tell me much. Even a 100x increase wouldn't be surprising or meaningful for something that started at zero usage just 13 months ago. We're talking about a total of 2000 capsules, which is cool, but just not enough of a signal to make predictions off of. I already knew there were at least 2000 highly technical people in the world willing to experiment with a new protocol: if Gemini crosses over to moderately technical, moderately motivated people, that will be more interesting.
"Back in the early 1990's, the spirit of the Internet was the pursuit of knowledge, exploration, innovation, fun, and community."
Yes! I couldn't have put it better. Great article.
I discovered a Dave Gahan fan site [1] last year that looked like it was a holdover from "the old internet". I loved it and was even more delighted when I discovered it was created in 2021 [2]:
> I realize that static websites like this were more popular in the internet's early days, long before the rise of social media and the emergence of user-created Wikis, and have now somewhat fallen out of fashion. However, there were a lot of static websites like this dedicated to Dave Gahan and Depeche Mode back then that had a level of quality that I just don't see nowadays. Sadly, many of them have disappeared or have been abandoned. There is something to be missed about websites like those, though, with their eye-catching graphics and pile of links that took you on a journey as if you were walking through a museum, and I want to bring that experience back through this website, as outdated as that experience may very well be.
Beautiful. Bring back the old internet.
The old culture, social and technical, will never come back.
In the mid 90s the Internet was a medium that only around 1% of the world population had access to [0].
Getting online wasn't just some casual thing, people had to invest, money, time and effort to get online, so the whole "online experience" used to be treated very differently.
As everybody had to jump trough these hoops to get online, there was usually at least some shared interests about people that managed to find each other online.
Contrast that with today, where thanks to smartphones the majority of the world (65%) have access to the Internet like the most normal thing in the world, in most cases no special knowledge or major effort required anymore to "get in".
That Eternal September-esque [1] change in culture can't be reversed. Maybe it could be emulated on way smaller scales, with a lot of effort and segregation, but that would defeat the whole spirit and purpose of it.
After layering abstractions on top of abstractions, and centralizing onto a few providers it makes sense to simplify and diversify again.
I miss things being presented via their own unique web sites as opposed to “pages” within the current top social network.
I have maintained my blog (http://www.hashin.me) for the last 8 years without ever trying to monetize it (I am 28 now). I have written hundreds of articles there, about a lot of topics that have caught my attention. I have perhaps written hundreds of thousands of words on the internet and never earned a rupee (dollar) from them in all these years. But that's what made me who I am. I would still keep doing that. What I make at work and at business is the product of the great education that internet gave me. I live a life where I am always online, but the ads simply fail to influence my decisions. And I spend most of my time on places like HN, which is representative of the good ole internet. As someone has already mentioned in this thread, the internet hasn't changed much. It is us; but if we know what we are doing, we can definitely choose the reality we are living in.
My two cents.
Thanks! I'm probably not going to be a regular reader but sites like what yours seems to be brings me happiness.
It is the kind of content I enjoy finding in a search or with marginalia explore.
Edit: I too have one of these sites were I write about things that interest me, technical and political. I also have no ads but I enjoy the writing (and don't write when I don't enjoy it, since luckily it doesn't matter) and I enjoy it when people get something useful out of it.
Good to hear -- my startup wants to be one more example.
Irony: The opportunity, goal, purpose of my startup is to help people find such Web sites, especially little or focused ones, that they will like. Or the short description of my startup is to help people find Internet content they will like, say, via, roughly search, discovery, recommendation.
A novel part is that the site gets some new data via a likely so far unique iterative, interactive dialog, specific to each use, and then manipulates that data with some math I derived, likely new. A classic, but mostly neglected, advanced pure math result says that, in principle, the iterations should converge to what can be regarded as the right results!
For more, no key words are involved. Can argue that the results give the user the results, content, with the meaning they will like best, i.e., make some progress on working with meaning. So, the problem, the challenge is to respond to the explosion of Internet content, now often from specialized, focused, small Web sites.
For one more -- there are no user IDs, logins, or use of HTTP cookies. In particular, two users who execute the same dialog on the same day (i.e., before I add to the database) get the same results. I.e., for the users there is some relatively good privacy.
Here I'm just taking the opportunity of this OP to describe my solution.
I wrote the Web site code, in .NET, and as far as I can tell the code is ready for significant production. As in the OP and some of the comments already in this thread, my plan is, indeed, to run my own server, using Windows Server, SQL Server, and, for hardware, an AMD FX-8350 at 4.0 GHz. I'm adding data, am not live yet, and have not settled in a domain name yet.
What'd you think?
That's an interesting take.
Just curious how you plan to make money off this. I think profitability is what has killed most recommendation ventures. It's easy enough to find something that's fun (like StumbleUpon). But they usually eventually self-cannibalize by inserting ads in the recommendations.
On the flip side, if you attempt to do some sort of gated boutique thing where you need a subscription to see the results, you may encounter resistance when you attempt to discover recommendations (assuming you're crawling by yourself, which you'd almost have to I think).
Don't mean to be a downer, but profitability is arguably the hard problem to solve in this space.
Thanks!
Yes, I saw StumbleUpon early on. I just intend and hope to do better pleasing the users.
So, it's recommendation -- maybe the user has heard of the content but wants the quality of the curated results.
Uh, now the Internet has a lot of specialized content (e.g., as in this OP) and, presto, bingo, that means that there are also some specialized AUDIENCES, e.g., audiences the mainstream media (MSM), back to TV, radio, and all the larger newspapers worked hard to ignore -- instead, they went for the mass audience. One general result is, even now, floods of URLs where less than 1% are of interest to any one person. Early on a solution is to pick an audience (of course, one with good demographics), and more generally just to have better means of helping, pleasing users.
It's discovery -- the user has never heard of the content but the dialog is good evidence that they will like the results.
It's search -- the user knows about the content, it's likely famous, will recognize it once can find, see it, but doesn't know where to find it, and it's not easy to find keywords that (accurately) characterize it. Can get some examples out of the fine arts.
The "interactive, iterative dialog", particular to each use, is supposed to be a more powerful, effective way to find, get to, have URLs for content the user will like. Here like is intended to be basically, short for, like the meaning of the content. The user may like the content for entertainment, information, curiosity, etc.
It appears that now both Google and YouTube have seen the basic problem and have their versions of solutions. I'm hoping that my techniques do better where their solutions work poorly or not at all. I'm not trying to replace or compete with where Google, YouTube, Bing, ..., StumbleUpon work well. I'm a sole, solo founder and don't have to be worth billions to be successful.
Yes, my plans are for my site to be ad supported. But I intend actually strongly to follow, say, the old newspaper standard of a wall between (a) the URL results for the users and (b) the ads. E.g., as in this thread of "old Internet", at least early on, the ad targeting is supposed to be maybe from only broadly the demographics or some such of my intended audience, essentially independent of the user or the data from their dialog, or hardly targeted at all.
Right, better ad targeting could yield more revenue, and maybe the dialog data could permit some especially good ad targeting, but NO WAY do I want to have even a hint of giving users URLs that help advertisers. Some such used to be called payola and was made actually illegal.
Or, so far, the code I've written to find the URLs to report to the users has nothing about ads.
Maybe the long term situation would be that for some use instances the dialog data and the reported content URLs would do well at suggesting what ads would be especially effective but no way would ads influence what URLs are reported. Or, the connection between URLs and ads is a one way street: URLs can be used to pick ads, but ads can never pick URLs.
It is very interesting that you describe a system which points people to web content they would like and yet you do not intend to collect data on these visitors. Or did I misunderstand? Wouldn't you need to "get to know" your visitors / customers / users before you are able to show them sites they will like?
Also- I applaud you on the way you plan on serving ads. I do know that there are mechanism by which one can serve relevant ads with high likelihood of these being useful hence clicked and yet without the need to build user profiles.
This sounds extremely interesting and something I personally would love to try! Keep us posted on the progress of this project!
I don't think the old internet ever went away, instead the commercial internet exploded, in some ways good in some ways bad.
If you want to create and showcase your own stuff you have a ton more options than you used to, it could be nostalgic HTML pages with blinking colors or some slick thing on a prefab site builder, up to you.
In general I've begun to think of the whole small internet movement as a countrerculture phenomenon. It's got a lot of touching stones with the bohemians, the beats, the hippies, etc. What they've all got in common is a search for independence, authenticity and community.
I do think the retro-aesthetic is more of a statement than anything else. It's like the long hair of a hippie. Like there's no reason a hippie couldn't have a crew cut and think like a hippie and live like a hippie. Yet almost none of them did. For the same reason almost no small website has a bootstrap template.
Eh, I'm with you on your general sentiment, and I definitely think websites can still embody the "old web" spirit while using HTML/CSS to stand out in a way that's different from "old web" aesthetics.
The problem with the Bootstrap example is that Bootstrap is exactly the kind of overly-bloated, JS-heavy (depending on use) Web 2.0 tool that the "old web" spirit is firmly against. A hippie can live like a hippie and still have a crew cut, but using Bootstrap on an "old web" website would be like a hippie heading to a board meeting wearing a polo and khakis bought brand new at Banana Republic as they yell, "Fuck the man!" from their sports car.
There is js-heavy pages in the independent web space as well. There are certainly some that wouldn't touch it with a 60 ft pole, but it's a very heterogenous group, and I wouldn't put it past someone to do it ironically, as an art project (like that random startup generator[1]). Which is really my point. The common denominator is independence, authenticity, community, not some particular aesthetic.
> I don't think the old internet ever went away,
Most of it did. It was dropped from search engine indexes and died from starvation.
Now that we've found that the Internet is fraught with bots and scams, and that social media was all a ruse to lure us into marketing funnels, we're trying to go back to the happier and less ad-infused independent web...
But finding out that the death grip that major corps have on hosting costs, IP lawyers, data accessibility, regulators, search results, and on audiences will be the biggest obstacle to overcome.
I'm stoked to see what happens with the rebellion, even though I, like many other independents are a bit jaded about ranting that this was gonna happen years ago when nobody listened... hah.
Our best tools at this point are probably to bring back RSS and to re-establish more cost-effective independent hosting alternatives.
Corporate interest in the internet is going to shrink when people stop wanting data silos, and instead want open data storage with some programmable layer on top and nothing else. Corporate interest is high now only because of the exploitable future, but when it's found that the future is a bunch of open generic data tables and virtual machine on top, it's going to have a hard time competing with that. If Facebook, Google, and Amazon were all forced to use an open data storage system to house all their user data or become obsolete they would quickly become obsolete because advertisers would access it directly instead of paying them.
The problem is that there is no real definition of the old Internet. All we know is what it isn't. It isn't facebook, it isn't twitter, it isn't tiktok. Also, it isn't decentralized in the new sense of the word.
The old Internet is not a page with flashing colors and dancing babies, you can still create those today. It isn't geocities, or its newer counterpart neocities either.
The old internet is people making their own website. It's old because people surfing on the web today think that having a website is a business decision. Before it was just cool to own one.
Today's internet is largely dominated by topics and people who maximize for marginal superficial engagement. You probably won't ever have the experience of a MajorBBS sysop breaking into your session when you're in the middle of mass downloading their mounted CD content (because the disc in the drive 2 feet away from them hasn't stopped spinning for hours), trying to exploit a bug in a door game, or bruteforcing their membership payment system. That's the meaningfully deep intimacy that's missing today.
This is part of why I've loved running my .com webserver from my home desktop for the last 20+ years. I can see the blinking (and hear, and feel the vibration of) what's going on and insert in custom messages to the directory listing or other pages to talk to visitors. They can talk back by appending "/@say/Their message here." to any URL.
I do miss the old days when you could run an open netcat on a popular port and every now and then get actual messages from people exploring the internet (burried under automated scanner attempts to collect banner version strings of course).
Your comment method is so nice. Is there a reason you don't use a textarea for visitors to enter the text? Is your current method better against spambots?
It is a bit atypical because I wanted a purely static comment system for my static site. Using nginx to just log certain matching URL types to a custom log file was way safer and easier to maintain than anything written in a dynamic language accepting arbitrary internet input. I eventually adapted this approach to receiving webmentions as well and in that context I provide textarea input for webmention response URLs.
My method is not better against spam bots but it does suffer from a different type of them. For example, if a spider follows a link it sees of an existing comment, "...com/something.jpg/@say/..." then my system will interpret that as a comment. So... spam bots don't see it, but normal spiders can cause spam.
Thanks for explaining. I'm in the process of collecting interesting websites, either as a bookmark, but better yet, as an RSS feed. I can't seem to find any feed on your website!?
I remember the glory days of UNIX/Usenet/etc. in the 80s at college too. I had an email address at Compuserve in the mid-80s, though I mainly used it for talking to other Compuserve members (when we weren't using 'CB channels', for those that remember). I remember all the various things like Usenet before the 'Internet' too; I don't recall anybody in my group ever calling it the Internet until after the WWW came along.
Typically when people were using Usenet and email, they weren't on the Internet proper but rather connecting to a node (often via a terminal emulator over dialup) that often itself got batch updates via dialup using UUCP etc. Even when people started using their dialup services (AOL, Compuserve etc) as web gateways they often weren't technically on the Internet but rather just the WWW subset of it. When people started dialing in to ISPs and getting cable/DSL modems then they were on the Internet as they technically had access to all of its facilities and could connect to any other node on it. So there was a legitimate reason for not calling most of the earlier commercial/hobbyist services the Internet as they were just giving you glimpses at parts of it often without technically being on it.
> I don't recall anybody in my group ever calling it the Internet until after the WWW came along.
Really? I do. I spent the early years of the web trying to get all the new people who had suddenly joined the net to understand that the web and the internet were two very different things. I gave up after a while.
Everybody was 'new' to the web. I've noticed the same confusion, and finally gave up trying to explain. Today, it seems people say 'Internet' for everything and 'web' has become passe.
I don't particularly like the current Internet. A lot of traffic is captured by social with the intention promote oneself. Yes, I am part of the problem as well. Yet, the current version of the Internet values outrage over quality trending towards the lowest common denominator. I, in my own personal opinion, have high hopes for a crypto based new new social which distributes the economic value to the content originators and not the meta-middlemen.
/rant
I've been collecting some remnants of what the author calls the "old web" at https://github.com/ldorigo/awesome-list-of-specialist-websit... . Would love for more people to contribute. These passion websites give me a genuine feeling of nostalgia and happiness.
Site seems to be down. Archived: https://archive.is/zIBTV
These niche groups for enthusiasts, tilde club or mastodon or neocities or aral balkan or whatever can't ever bring the old internet back. It's not coming back, it's really not, you just have to accept that the world you used to love is gone and find some new way to do things. Why make a dollhouse of your past. You must move on!
Dollhouse, fine. Why not then, when I switch browsers and doom scroll on Gemini I read different crap that the crap I read here.
I’m still frying my body and rotting my brain but at least it’s different content.
Yes that won’t solve anything, but does it have to?
Because some of us enjoy the “dollhouses”…?
it would be nice if it were true but it s probably wishful thinking
The only "nice" trend that is happening is that PC and laptop sales are slightly up. That and higher reliable network speeds might facilitate bringing back 'the old internet'. But as long as the web is still made for smartphones it will remain bland and boring.
Stumbled upon this site recently, https://funwhileitlasted.net/. It made me nostalgic for the days where there were sites dedicated to one fairly narrow subject. I this case it was defunct sports leagues and teams.
A slightly dissonant title on the article, as the premise of the article is that the Old Internet never went away. Rather, more people are beginning to discover that the Old still exists as they reach the limits of the New and start looking for alternatives. Welcome to October! :)
> By the way, I think it is sad that I can't even make a comment on Hacker News about this article, because I've been banned. When someone else posts my articles there, many people want to read them, but when I post them, they are blog spam.
Might be worth an unban, admin.
I so wish these articles would give a 101 on how to make an old-school, decentralized website. So many of us want that, but just have no idea where to begin anymore (and I made websites in the late 90s....) Love these articles, tho. The more the better.
Is it really that obscure these days?
1. Have a computer in your house open exposed to the internet on port 80- port forward on your router.
2. Run an http server on that box. Apache is a reasonable choice but there are probably easier pieces of software out there to set up.
2a. Create an index.html or equivalent default page name and put some html in it even if it's just hello world- it can even be in plain text.
3. Technically you are now self hosted on the internet! Figure out your external IP from your router and point a browser to http://$YOURIP/ and you should see your page.
The next steps are optional but kind of required to have a "real" site.
4. Set up dns. Since you won't have a static IP from your ISP almost certainly, you will need to use a dynamic dns provider. Noip.com is a popular choice. Once this is working you can register a domain name with GoDaddy or whoever and then point that name to your dynamic dns provider. Now you can load up http://www.yourdomain.com (or whatever tld you choose)
5. Set up https. For some reason beyond my comprehension google is forcing everyone to use https if they want to really exist on the internet in any real way even if they are just serving static pages. Let's encrypt can you there for free. Now you can go to https://www.yourdomain.com and your page will show up and Google et al might even consider you to be a real presence on the internet and index you one day.
To be fair, this is not a 101. Exposing port 80, figuring out a static external IP, or setting up DDNS, and https all need more hand-holding I think.
If I was talking to my mom sure. But were talking on HN here, clicking around your routers web UI shouldn't be too difficult for anyone here to figure out. And honestly if you can't figure that out you shouldn't be exposing your stuff to the internet anyway, you will become a part of a botnet in short order.
Setting up Apache properly is a much bigger PITA for anything other than a static html use IMHO.
Let me just warn you- running a webserver requires technical skill- you will be providing an open door into your computer and network if you go down this path. But its not so hard if you google each of those sections, at least to get something basic going.
I don't think anyone was lamenting that its not super duper easy to create a freestanding website these days, just that its becoming increasingly difficult to without requiring centralized services- most notably ssl.
web2 also generally refers to web2.0 where we moved from static webpages and webpages that could only really change in significant ways if you hit refresh, to dynamically updated webpages, initially using AJAX, but there are now a myriad of ways to do so- but this allowed clunky web pages to have capabilities that are more or less at parity with desktop applications. Then again with all this web3 talk, what "web2" refers to may get distorted over time.
But yeah- running your own web infrastructure is work and hence why wordpress and other blog service providers, as well as even things like Geocities were/are so popular. While it is a lot more common these days, but even having a computer that was on 24/7/365 was not common and this was reason enough to use a hosted solution. Most of my friends have some sort of media server setup that is on 24/7 these days, but we are admittedly likely still outliers on this, compared to entirely non-technical people.
I get the nostalgia but not the sentiment. You can still set up a website, you can still post content on it, you can still link to that content on social media to get viewers, if you attach Google Analytics to your site, that traffic then improves your search rankings which brings you more traffic.
Hundreds of people a day read my rantings (and I probably owe most of them an apology for that) but the point is you can still make a 'personal' website and grow an audience even now, you don't need an 'alternative' web to do that, you just need to put in the effort.
I don't think it matters what any of us (HN) want or think is best.
The generation born after social media began their socialization and individuation journey in life on snapchat/tiktok/instagram. This generation doesn't give a shit about google.
I think the "web" is dying, paradigm of using a browser to access websites is almost gone by comparison to a decade ago. The internet is mobile-centric. All this metaverse shit is trying to get ahead of the platform curve. The success there depends on if it gets traction with 16-24 year olds.
Have the definitions of web 1.0 and 2.0 authoritatively been decided? The general idea I've seen has been that web 1.0 was decentralized and web 2.0 is centralized, but it seems kind of odd to separate the generations of something as impactful as the internet the same way you would separate generations of the iphone. It almost seems like it would make more sense to define generations at the same scale as the internet itself which is communication.
(full disclosure zero research has gone into this, I didn't live through web 1.0, and I know nothing about how the web works).
In my head, web 1.0 was the automation of one-way communication. You could request a site and the equivalent of a newspaper was sent to you; and anyone else who requested the same site was sent the same newspaper. If you wanted to order something you had to call the phone-number listed on that website, same as if you had seen an ad in a newspaper. Two-way communication existed but it was the equivalent of a really fast mail and was for the most part was between people over the internet rather than with the internet.
Web 2.0, suddenly if you requested a site you get a different version with different ads than someone else making the same request; without a person choosing for you to see those different ads. You can place an order and human doesn't get involved until that item needs to be picked off the shelf to be transported in meat space. Now the internet is 2-way communication, you make a request and it responds to you in seemingly unique ways. The internet itself is replacing some of the human effort that goes into communication. Before it was just transporting human information, now it's responding.
So what's left now that the internet has conquered communicating in two-directions through space? Time. If you want information (ideas, values, whatever) to transmit through time you create institutions. Something that is resilient so that it survives mostly intact and that is enforced to ensure compliance. Web 3.0 seems to fit that. Immutable (if desired), enforcement is achieved from the immutable code itself, and it runs on belief (the more people that are part of it the stronger its self-sustaining characteristics). It might also explain why all the big blockchain uses have been activities traditionally controlled by institutions (money, property, contracts).
How I've seen it:
Web 1.0: Let's serve web pages
Web 2.0: Let's serve REST APIs, and have Javascript to all the formatting
Web 3.0: Let's get rid of DNS and have GUIDs/Crypto/something
I’ve always thought of it as being about the technology:
Web0: universities and TCP
Web1: data centers and HTTP
Web2: cloud and JavaScript
Web3: blockchain and JavaScript
There really isn’t a name for home hosting. That has never really been the status quo. At any rate, home hosting needs some augmented infrastructure (like backups, DDNS, etc). So possibly:
Web4: homes and CDNs
Is there a search engine which will only return pages that don’t have advertisements on them? I feel like that would be a way to find a lot of independent content.
What's pushing people back towards having their own web sites is the increasing obnoxiousness of the dominant players. It's just too much hassle to deal with Google and their semi-random censorship, Medium and their paywall, Twitter and their demands that people sign in, and Facebook looking as ad-heavy as Myspace in its declining years. It's quite cheap to bring up a basic web site, a blog, or a forum on shared hosting.
The "old internet" never went anywhere. I've been running my own websites since the 90s. My oldest website is now 20 years old as of today. People still use it. It doesn't get enormous amounts of traffic but it's built for a very specific community.
I keep it going to keep myself sharp on how the underlying plumbing of the internet works. I definitely don't think it will scale well, but that isn't the point.
I'm suprised none of this article mentions Starlink. It's the most dangerous development of our generation. Since it is so technologically advanced, no one will be able to compete.
Additionally, since Elon is the dictator of spaceX and has a long history of bowing to oppresive regimes demands (See his China factory/ Data rights promised on cars produced), Elon will sell the internet to the highest bidder.
I hope it is true. I have been nostalgic about old school forums and during covid lock down built a platform for anyone to host one (and hopefully make meaningful revenue). However, I'm finding it really difficult to get traction. I hope it is because of my poor marketing skills and not because no one really cares for the old internet beyond some fond memories.
It has the "Share on ... [Facebook] [Twitter] [Reddit] [Linkedin] [Hacker News]" in the right upper corner. Funny ?
It'd be amazing if some HNers who vibe with this article would teach online courses that teach people who have no idea how to "decentralized" their web life by running servers and their own sites (not nec on the blockchain). There's a lot of us out there who need the very basics, and would love to participate!
I remember the old internet (pre-1993) before the WWW. It was pretty fun. No one was trying to make any money off of it then. It was more like a great conversation than anything else.
Interesting read. I made a similar point some time ago im "Return of the 90s web": https://mxb.dev/blog/the-return-of-the-90s-web/
I think it's more rotten than ever. Almost every video or article I see is possessed by the evil SEO devil. Sometimes I think I finally found a norm al one to only find out later that I was too dumb to recognise some new tricks.
I don't see any comments on the pink background.. Which pretty much burned into my retinas while reading. HN looked blueish to my eyes when I came back to it! Unsure if this was a high-level intentional play by the author!
"The Internet itself seems to many to have degenerated into a giant advertising tool. And, a high percentage of websites load as slowly as a sick turtle awaking from a long slumber."
Is there a connection between these two statements?
Maybe he is alluding to the fact that adding megabytes of shit JavaScript to profile and serve ads is what is making the pages load so slow.
The only thing we kept from the old internet was the page load times.
Well he's not wrong.
Although it's not the whole picture
Serious conflicts may rise due to critical web sites (banks, administration related services) got their noscript/basic (x)html compatibility broken during this very latest years.
Why is it always these brutalist websites that are nostalgic about this?
Like its either someone that was actually around then or a Gen Z strange reimagining of it, both are strange imo
Gopher use is slowly increasing over time :)
I'm glad the article hits the central point that what is valuable about this change is the rise of the non-corporate internet. And fundamentally, what is valuable about non-corporate spaces (in my view) is that we have social ownership of them. A poster on MetaFilter has a very different relationship to their site from what a Reddit user might have to theirs.
At the same time, the corporate internet means high investment in useful centralized platforms that reduce the expertise required to publish and share something to near zero. It's not clear to me that such platforms could survive in a non-corporate setting. Maybe if they were user-owned in some material way.
This is why I am building a fun mobile browser: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/wapps-fun-private-browsing/id1...
Would love anyones feedback!
Thanks to the hard work of the W3C, soon we may come full circle: https://www.w3.org/2021/04/pressrelease-blink.html.en
I am extremely happy to be a part of this new Web3 movement. To me, it's a movement to return to smaller communities and more personable online experiences. DeFi is just one aspect.
Hug of Death.
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> I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers too.
My personal experience does not match that. There was a time (2010-2012 or so where I used to live) when communities were migrating from older "forums" to new and shiny "social networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be communities.
One of these communities was niche enough (and I was involved enough) for me to personally knew all the regulars - they are mostly still online and still care about that thing which brought us together, but there's no meeting place for us online anymore. Facebook groups and Twitter wars do not facilitate meaningful discussion, and the old forum... "Who uses forums nowadays anyway? We have FB and Instagram and stuff", I hear from them, but I believe they're deeply mistaken and it's the other way around. FB has them, and it kinda took them away from me.
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I think while tech is always known to be in constant change, a lot of the things have settled down since it started I guess. The practices, protocols, the conventions, browsers etc.
For all the communities that we have lost, there are still a ton of IRC servers. I came back to IRC a few months ago after like 10ish years or so. There are new platforms like Activity Pub platforms, Matrix and others.
> when communities were migrating from older "forums" to new and shiny "social networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be communities.
I forgot who wrote the post. But I read this tweet or blog post long ago that people who are using social media to create communities will eventually grow out of it. This has been a accurate remark by her who wrote the post. I recall some communities who have started off in social media but eventually created their own website/platform to create unique experiences that are needed for that particular community.
Forums are making a come back. Manjaro Linux's forums was my social media for like 5ish years. Discourse has been dominant in this area but I like Flarum which is promising - https://flarum.org/.
Social media can cater to a large array of communities but if the community needs to grow, they will have to create their own platform. Cos social media platforms are general. Many will be happy with it. But indie folks, self hosting folks, power users and tinkerers will always be there to shuffle things up. ;)
There are more to be hopeful than there is for not to be as messed up as things might seem. :)
The SomethingAwful forum somehow survived the migration and keeps going strong. Goons do populate Twitter and Discord, but it did not empty the forums.
I think that the strong moderation has helped to make the forums offer something you cannot easily find on the newer social platforms.
I find that community groups that started before Facebook, or have avoid Facebook, have done better/do better. With Facebook you get locked into using the platform and the group doesn't grow. In fact the group just get worse over time as original member leave. Content and group information is locked into the platform.
Even if a group just sticks to using email, it is better over the long term. People in the group are forced to take on responsibilities of maintaining the email list and content. Passing that information on as they leave. You can also scale up the organization, make it more formal. Start collecting dues, and paying for server space. People take pride in their roles, and the organization.
Is there any reason a subreddit wouldn't work for that community? Or is that not "forumy" enough?
I'm genuinely curious.
Apart from privacy concerns like Twitter and Reddit sharing your data with FB (Maybe they share with Google too, not entirely sure), you create a healthier community in a forum than Reddit, Twitter etc.
This would be different if you are in a subreddit for a niche topic, sure. But there are higher chances of creating healthy online interactions in Forums than a subreddit. You meet with regulars more often. Knowledge transfer is better cos you know the skill levels of different people based on your interactions and experiences. This is opposite cos in a subreddit depending on the topic. There is a high amount of irregular folks. This means you have no idea how to rate the interactions than to take them on face value. These are all small but important things that are important when it comes to a community.
Think of forums like your neighborhood. You participate and nurture it. You know most of them and the rate of new people are less than you can catch up with the pace among other things.
PS: These are some of my thoughts, people have different ideas and opinions on forums.
I agree a lot with this. I'm in a lot of niche groups of my hobbies and of those most are really quite trash (usually pedantic ideological battles) even if they claim to be otherwise. There's however one that has such a strong moderation team that it's become a kind of meme, BUT the discussions if they do happen are always strong and factual by a weird mix of industry professionals and hobbyists alike, with a good focus on citation and cross referencing.
I think parts of your comment and your parent's comment are correct.
IMO a lot of it isn't about technology, but the size of the community, the people within it, and the norms of that community.
For me, the biggest heuristic on whether a subreddit/forum/Discord has the potential to feel like a community is the size. For various reasons, subreddits tend to be larger than a forum. The larger the subreddit, the more it feels like yelling into the void of Twitter. It's hard to "know the regulars" when there are thousands of people talking in the same place at the same time.
Smaller subreddits have no guarantee to feel like a community, but they have the potential. If there are regulars that show up and moderators that fairly moderate[0], subreddits basically "fall back" into being a forum.
Of course, there is the elephant in the room of Advance Publications, Inc. [1] wanting to make economic profit and, therefore, push for Reddit to grow and overcome the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Most forums never really had/have the same dreams of world domination.
Overall, as someone who has been a moderator on a larger forum (about 10-15 years ago) and seen tight-knit subreddits and Discords, my advice is:
Regardless of the wallpaper, pay attention to the people and the customs of your community and strive to improve those. There's no guarantee it will flourish, but it cannot if enough people don't act similarly.
[0] e.g. delete spam, lock flame wars, and generally contribute to the well-being of the community. [1] The effective owners of Reddit.
> I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.
The medium is different could be one of the reasons.
> My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in.
But that can be reddit as well. :)
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But you should also define what "nice" is to make sure we are on the same page. Arch linux forum is notorious for being known as hostile and rude. But they are just direct. They are damn helpful and cares a lot on helping. They expect you to do your due diligence before asking help is all. This is 100% direct towards help vampires which are bad for any community. But help vampires are going to rant on twitter and other places how horrible Arch folks are. Which is not true.
Subreddits don't work well for long form stuff.
Like for example a project log where you are restoring some old car, solving problems and sourcing parts. In a forum it is cleanly self contained. On a subreddit it would be a bunch of scattered posts you would have to take the care to link to.
Discussions would last days on the old phpBB boards. There wasn't that same pressure to spend all day on the same website. You'd make your post and visit every few days. This encouraged effort and reflection.
With reddit and other modern platforms, if it doesn't happen in the same 12 hours then it's old news.
In theory it would, but the practical answer is that for non-English-language community in 2010 migration to Reddit could not have happened.
The community in question was Russian, so it migrated not to FB, but to VK, which is essentially the same. It did not migrate there because members found VK to be a better platform for their community though - they just started using VK to communicate with their peers, were spending their time there and gradually stopped visiting forums.
Reddit never gained much traction in Russia, and in 2010-2012 it was for the nerdiest of nerds. One was way more likely to frequently visit some forum than Reddit back then.
I do agree that the "old" internet is not totally dead, but in my case communities I used to be in and even a couple I had direct involvement in were gutted because people left in favor of participating in communities via websites like Twitter. IRC channels I was in dwindled in numbers, draining instead to massive Discord servers.
The thing is, the "old" Internet was always somewhat anemic compared to the "new" Internet. It was never all that big. IRC channels I was in that felt like communities would stay dead for hours at a time, and sometimes topped out at under 100 members. Yet, they had a feeling of community that I rarely experience much on today's internet.
With how many people are on the Internet today, you'd expect that this standard could be upheld even with minimal participation, but I find that not only are there less people participating in the "old" internet, but also in addition to that, the people still participating have far less of their attention and time dedicated to it. As it was, the "old" Internet was, as many things are, powered by the unpaid time and effort of a relatively small number of people. Those people still exist, but their attention is far more divided. There's just more stuff going on overall. The "new" internet allures people with more "passive" participation vs the active participation that was often demanded by forums and IRC channels.
As an icing on the shit cake, you link to Fandom/Wikia as a community hub. Fandom and its behavior has torn apart a lot of smaller communities with its practices. See, for example, what happened when the Touhou wiki's community collectively decided they no longer wanted to be on Wikia: old administrators were banned, new ones were appointed by staff, and now the site is effectively forked. Apparently, if a wiki is too important for ad revenue, the admins will literally just fork your site. Of course, I'm not saying they did anything illegal, but what they did is a major fuck you to the community that poured hours of work into the site. It would be like a forum host that decides to ban all of the admins and appoint its own in their place. Maybe a bit like Reddit...
While I don't know exactly how much and why the "old" internet is dead, I do have my suspicions that it has a lot to do with the evolution of monetization on the internet. My hope is that the patron model can help here...
Hmm. I have pretty much the same kinds of interactions on private Discord servers which I had on IRC 20 years ago.
It's harder to find particularly skilled or like minded people in some niche areas or fields, but with simply more people online, this seems inevitable - more haystack to sift through. Of course there are worrying corporatization or centralization arguments vs. IRC, but ultimately the end result doesn't feel that different to me in terms of community.
I'm not really involved in any fan communities or anything a Wikia would involve, so I can't comment on that facet.
I suppose for what I do (reverse engineering hobby stuff, mostly), what would have been a "team" or "group" blog site, possibly with some useful collaboration plugins or the like, is now a GitHub repo, but that's more of a convenience than a drawback compared to the "old" Internet to me.
Overall, it does seem like things are more centralized and therefore a bit less unique, but at the same time, I have to spend less time securing bespoke web servers, buying crappy VPS hosting, and dealing with routine maintenance and setup to collaborate with like-minded people on projects.
Yeah, IMO Discord (putting aside the whole open/closed software thing) is a pretty good upgrade on IRC. My problem is when a community that either used to have or would have had a forum 10 years ago is now using Discord as the primary communication hub. Discord's ephemeral by design, well suited for engaging in on-going conversation, but goddawful for finding past information, or longer ongoing conversations.
Yah - there was a "collective social moment" that was how people came together around exciting new (at the times) forms. That's a kind of irreplaceable moment that is always happening for some community somewhere, but it never lasts forever and it always moves around with the times.
I know what you mean and I am also nostalgic about it - but my life has also changed and I suspect that my nostalgia for times gone by involves nostolgia for that moment in my life. Even if there was the same energy around the places I hung out in the late-90s and early-2000s, I would not be there as much or with the same aims.
> you link to Fandom/Wikia as a community hub.
Oh man, I was not intending to link to them as a community hub. It was the first source I found that indexed some current Hotline trackers and clients. But I think the Fandom treatment of communities is informative of how the times have changed.
I think, 20 years ago, this information would have been stored on a server maintained with the sweat and love of a single individual. Sometimes real collectives existed, but I found them to be rare. Often, if that person got distracted, or found new interests, we could lose a useful source (and for people in the community enough - a friend). Now there are commercial entities that will "preserve" that information while cutting the community out entirely. Like you I am not sure that is "better" - but it did allow me to find a list of Hotline clients in ~10 minutes of searching, and I suspect the "real" Hotline community is still on hotline as it was before.
So...I do think it depends on where you see the old internet. People do different things as passion projects now. I have found that I can go back and find many of the things I see other people mourn as lost, and I am sorry to hear that you have not had the same experience.
Writing my first post made me go find this - it's a web player that collects thousands of keygen MIDIs: https://keygenmusic.tk/# (using the hard work of the good people at http://www.keygenmusic.net/?lang=en - donate if you like the music!)
What's the deal with these wiki sites that seem to consist entirely of user generated content, but absolutely bury it under mountains of ads? How do these places exist, and why do people continue to contribute to them?
One reason they continue to exist is because Google will often rank the add-laden Wikia site higher than the respective community-organized wiki.
Wikia started out very differently. It became what it was slowly, over a long period of time.
Miraheze is now the preferred wiki host of community-driven sites, I hope that it will not eventually transform into Wikia/Fandom.
Many of the other “wiki” sites on the net are just rehosting GFDL content and slapping ads on them, then trying to SEO to get ahead of real wikis. Blame Google for not coming up with a good solution on that one, IMO.
Websites with mountains of ads have simply become normal and accepted. It's sad, but it happened.
I agree with you in that there are still any number of small communities pretty comparable to what was on the "old" internet, including as you say, on the servers still running on the old applications.
The main difference would be on accessibility, where the "old" internet were mainstream services that people just flocked to almost by default, while now you have to do your homework to join communities that will match the same criteria.
It is not old at all, but to me Reddit is a good representation of that: at some point it was small enough you'd just go there and find something interesting. From there the communities stayed, but you had to heavily filter what you wanted to see. And now you'll be using specific clients, disable the crap in your settings, force the old interface, or any of the trick du jour to keep having a sane experience.
That's a very charitable assessment. The problem is the oversaturation of everything with politics (politics is the lowest-common-denominator subject that everyone can argue about). The loud politics minorities are so numerous now that they can easily sway the attention of even niche communities. You can see that most glaringly on reddit where pretty much all important conversations are destroyed by becoming the same old politics debates, like how /r/technology is politics or r/coronavirus is politics . Lots of people stay in HN exactly because it moderates against politics but HN exists because YC doesn't mind running an unprofitable site.
Most forums shut down because they are unsustainable, and the reason they are unsustainable is that the current mobile/social media vortex is hoovering all the attention. This leads to a negative spiral where people don't make good self-hosted forum software / community software anymore and so on.
I do think that the way politics interacts with communities has changed over time, though I think that has been driven by how the US and Europe (where most community members live) political climates have changed?
> The loud politics minorities are so numerous now that they can easily sway the attention of even niche communities.
I kinda know what you mean, but my memory of the 90s / early 2000s is that loud political minorities were everywhere and commonly created a lot of drama in communities. It was just rare-er for...the moderators to step in? Often because they were the loud political minority who had opinions that people felt were divisive.
> HN moderates against politics
I would push back on this quite a bit. Many of the posts and discussions on HN are political masquerading as science.
Well, the old internet was much about communities and enthusiasm. And these communities were diverse. It was feasible to operate your own blog server, where original content was published.
You either knew your communities through hear-say or search engines (read "The" search engine) found them. For a long time advertisement or the "attention economy" was not a thing.
Nowadays original content is hard to find and very much concentrated: Reddit, Stackoverflow. As search engines no longer seem to find relevant content from sites which do not pay add fees, there is no traffic to these sites.
In a sense money made the internet thrive and ruined a lot at the same time.
Old internet is where entering the name of a product would yield reviews or discussions about the product.
New internet is where any useful information about said product gets buried in marketplaces and producer pages, following half a dozen paid-for ads.
Old Internet was where the primary content was content.
Ads appeared as a curiosity in 1994 but didn't start taking over until around '96, which is when the ad networks started to become more industrialised with tracking and ROI metrics (of a sort).
New Internet is where the primary content is ads and behaviour mod. Virtually all big-reach content is only there to make the ads and behaviour mod work.
And of course the goal of Meta is to personalise ad delivery even further and make it even more intrusive and impossible to ignore.
This isn't just a technical difference. There's a huge difference in culture and motivation. Old Internet was about exploration, play, and sometimes debate. New Internet is about exploitation, driven by psychological and emotional manipulation.
For me the enthusiasm part was very important in car DIY forums, communities of which nowadays moved not even to facebook groups but to messengers. Which in a first glance sounds great, since you can be assisted in real time. But in reality what was created in messengers remains there never being indexed by search engines so the knowledge cannot be shared with non-members.
I do not miss the old internet per se, but I do feel sad that in 1997 I had a 56K dial in modem on a Pentium II running Internet Explorer and today I have a 1Gbps connection on a M1 MacBook running a modern browser, and web performance is still more or less the same.
Instead of spending our extra processing power and bandwith on useful stuff, we spent it on tracking and JS frameworks and other bullshit.
> sad that in 1997 I had a 56K dial in modem on a Pentium II running Internet Explorer and today I have a 1Gbps connection on a M1
Images took ages to download on 56k. Performance today is vastly better.
There are cases where progress has moved backwards eg. new buggy JS Reddit, but I by no means have rose tinted spectacles for the past.
There was a period between 1996-2000 where we had broadband and the old web and it was faster than today. But I remember an article in Wired around 2000 about two guys that owned a diamond business in Canada who moved to L.A. to start a dotcom for their business. They moved back to Canada after a year and their assessment was the web was nothing more than a massive direct marketing platform. I wish I can find that article because it was quite prophetic.
I'd say, with a very exaggerated tone :), it would be like saying you can still find trees in New York, so really nothing has changed since settlers came.
I don't think this is an apt analogy because trees were bulldozed to build the city, not true of the internet which has essentially infinite real-estate. Nothing was bulldozed to create the "new" internet, the new internet was created and new people joined it, the old internet just never achieved "web scale" and never could because it isn't a corporate product being driven by growth hacking and marketing spend.
An analogy that works here is "used all the oxygen in the room".
> I don't think this is an apt analogy either because it still suggests that something was lost
Here we disagree and you are wrong ;-)
Of all the old forum lore most of it is lost for the overwhelming majority of internet users.
Some copies exist on old drives here and there, some exist in the internet archive but nothing has been migrated to newer platforms.
Mailing lists were for a long time conserved by Google but forums just disappeared.
Pedantic aside: trees weren't bulldozed to build NYC, they were used for lumber and firewood far before the invention of the bulldozer.
A worthy pedantic aside. Thanks.
fair enough, but even on the infinite web, i have a limited scope, and it's now filled with lots of annoyances, whereas in the past it was effortlessly chill all around
that's not true, even if I prune it's still leaking and i'm never far from a 'web 2.5' revamp ala reddit
The moment you are forced to install WhatsApp because it is the way the community decided to communicate about the topic for which the group was created, instead of just signing up to a site self-hosted by a member via phpBB or some other forum software, you'll know what this is about.
Now I'm granting information (IP-Address, rough location with it, content of the group) to Facebook without having the slightest desire to do this.
To me, when communities choose a managed platform that didn't exist on the old internet, I assume that community would have just died if the managed platform didn't exist. It has never been easier or cheaper to run a phpBB instance than it is right now.
That is what I mean when I say we did not lose the old internet - it's more available to us than ever, but people choose not to use it. Like...it is not "lost," it's unpopular. I agree with you about all the drawbacks of WhatsApp, but it sounds like your community doesn't.
Ah, I love that the top voted comment is someone mentioning Hotline. I'm logged into my friend's server - one I've been frequenting regularly since it was started in 2001 - at this very moment! I also ran my own server for years, of course. I really want to build "IRCCloud but for Hotline" sometime. I mean, just a basic self-hosted thing to start with. One of these days... haha
Recently I've started noticing people hosting gopher sites and I've actually noticed two different people specifically mentioning they have finger support on their servers! This was especially surprising since I haven't heard someone mention finger since the 90's. Very cool.
Shameless plug: I recently wrote a gopher client library for Deno, just for fun. https://github.com/matt1/deno-gopher
I also cleaned-up the weird formatting of the Gopher+ protocol and put it on github as a formatted markdown file since it was never and official RFC so trawling through an unstructured txt file when trying to implement the protocol was a pain: https://github.com/gopher-protocol/gopher-plus
Hope it is useful for someone implementing new gopher code like I was! :)
When I was a freshman in college I ran into an elder geek who was dating one of the dorm RAs. They were super cool, had neat hobbies, seemed much smarter than me and I was desperate to impress them. The only thing I mentioned that made them seem to re-evaluate me was when I mentioned spending time on hotline. It was a fascinating place around the year 2000!
Which Hotline client are you using out of interest? I have nostalgic memories of using Hotline as a teenager and just assumed all clients are now dead in the water.
Usually Hotline 1.8.5 on Windows, Nostalgia or Frogblast on OSX. 1.2.3 on OS9 or earlier. hx on bsd/linux CLI :) I usually point people here to find a Hotline client to use: https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php
I do feel nostalgic about old days (I got on Internet in mid 90s) but as Internet has grown and matured so have I. I've never played MUD but I've used IRC a lot :)
Internet is now so much more than it used to be. Before you had to have much more knowledge to accomplish some things. It was not hard to learn but it was not accessible to everyone.
I see it like fetching a water from the creek or turning on the tap in your kitchen. You will get water in both cases. The first one requires more effort.
You’re describing the internet 15 years ago. Today you come to the kitchen, and it is full of people between you and the tap. Walls are littered with advertisements, and all those people ask you if you want to try their water. Look, my water has no asbestos, only 2.79$/lbs. Wait, wait, I know everything about water, it consists of hydroxidegenium atoms, which Archimedes invented 3570BC, so…. Wait, did you know you can make water yourself? I’ll show you but you must subscribe for great watering courses. No, stop all of that. iWater. Just water. A golden touch-tap that can only be on and off, that simple (30% of your pie is ours).
When you’re away in the creek, they are discussing whether using creek water and locking them in the kitchen is at all legal or moral. Do you even have any idea how much all that costs to them, freepourer?
I was referring to the fact is that Internet has become a basic infrastructure this days and people just use it. They don't ask or understand "where does it come from". They just use it. When you are born into something ("digital natives" as some call them) you don't even consider how it used to be. Current state is normal for you. This is your starting point and you build upon it. Same as electricity, you turn the switch and the light is on.
I had a black and white TV with no remote for most of my child hood. I remember it with nostalgy but I don't miss it. I had a TV with cathode tube until some 4 years ago. Then I switched to LCD TV but I had LCD monitor for some 16-17 years at the same time.
We didnt have giant tech companies saving every search, every click you do, selling/giving your personal and private information to advertising and intelligence agencies.
We also didn't have this kind of massive centralization where most of the global internet traffic goes to Google, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc.
Sure you can find tiny spots on the Internet with 10 people. It's still not the same at all as to what is used to be.
I do understand such people. A lot of forums died, they were moved to Facebook groups, since this is so simple to create a group. As a result some communities are not accessible or annoying to use for those without Facebook.
In Europe GDPR was the last strike, nobody is going to maintain forum while being forced to be responsible for "Integrity and confidentiality" of registered user's data. Who will risk huge fines because phpBB has some bug and "precious" user data like first and last name were leaked? Who will deal with "right to be forgotten" requests, who will respond with requests to download user data and so on - even if software has such capabilities, responding to user requests is time consuming and big no-no for hobbyists.
End result is that everything that is happening, is happening on Facebook, maybe Reddit, obviously there are niches, like HN, but there is less and less of them.
None of what you mentioned sounds particularly onerous. Just don't ask for personal data and advise users not to post it. Let people delete their own posts and have a way for an administrator to delete a post if it might in some way be illegal (probably nothing to do with GDPR), and if people want to download stuff, tell them to use "wget --mirror". On othe other hand, dealing with spammers and eccentric/mad troublemakers could be a real headache. The frequency of such people probably depends on the topic of your forum.
The data protection requirements themselves are not onerous at all. But the path to compliance is scary and complicated to anyone who isn’t a lawyer or is retaining one.
What’s needed is a “fast track” compliance package for individuals, small businesses and online communities. Something like a cookie cutter privacy policy along with a rule book for simple applications without trackers and where all PII is personally and transparently entered, edited and extracted by the data subjects themselves, like in your example.
That’s good enough for most applications, and great for entrepreneurs to not have to think about GDPR until they have enough momentum to warrant getting lawyers.
Sorry if I’m interpreting inaccurately, but this seems nostalgic, anecdotal and ignorant of the gravity of social network effects. Certainly, communities are more online and connected than ever, but the claim from the article of “old internet” coming back don’t seem substantiated here.
> I have never understood people . . . because I do not feel . . .
I think I've spotted the problem!
You caught me! I am actually a terminator. :)
I mostly agree with your points, but I click upvote for your last sentence.
i think they are referring what we use to be allowed to say in chat channels and on forums. it was a lot more raw, a lot of offended people starting getting online and treating the internet like it was real life, part of the beauty of the internet was how non-regulated it was, granted the quality has gotten better, safer spaces for things like business, finance and other sensitive information but we also lost the jokes that the internet use to have, on the main channels at least. back in the day you could get kicked from a mainstream irc channel but it too a lottttt to get banned from an irc network or even an online forum. which granted you can still find sub communities like you mention that still cater to hacking, off jokes and crazy information but it’s not tolerated on the main channels of communication like before, which is fine for people who weren’t into that stuff because it didn’t change for them. but overall there has been changes, not terrible but def not the same as irc/usenet/bbs’s during their hayday. information was widely accessible but a lot of it is a paywall these days, also torrenting was a lot more common and i could call someone a moron without getting flagged. but yeah we still got some freedom and there are better quality services in some ways, i guess it just depends on your personality and how much it has limited expressing ones self authentically.