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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

I'm tolerant of ads[1] but I remember an Internet before ads; a WWW where most pages were not ad-driven, and it was amazing.

A lot of content now is not ad supported but ad driven - they meed the clicks to get views for ads. But ad views pay so little they need people to click the ads. So ads become manipulative and scummy ("HELLO!" Punch the monkey, mosquito, you won't believe, etc) and also content becomes dumb to drag in people who can't tell the difference between links to other content and ads.

I miss the WWW we used to have.

[1] although i strongly feel that I should be allowed to opt out of gambling and alcohol ads - not being able to do so pushes me towards ad blockers

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You may be recalling "the web we used to have" with nostalgia. The web we have is MUCH better and Google does it share of paying for it.

Speak for yourself. As a Microsoft fan, I am considering switching to GNU/Linux as all commercial operating systems seem to be moving towards the model of "don't pay us with money, pay us with data". A lot of this is driven by the trend to make web applications out of web pages when there is no need.

Better is obviously subjective, but I tend not to agree with you. The modern web is a great place to buy things, but buying things is boring. I have a hard time finding anything worthwhile to read or participate in on the web that hasn't already been around for years. Personal web pages are a thing of the past and even blogs seem to have had their day. The "web we have" appears to be largely drained of vitality, as a small handful of commercial walled-garden sites have successfully diverted most available time and attention.

what is the determining factor for "better"? if the web is for transmitting information, I'd say it is significantly fatter, slower, and more difficult to parse in that regard.

is it shinier? yes, it is much shinier.

Do you remember when the only way to make your site discoverable was to 1) get yahoo to add you to their hand-curated list of sites or 2) trade banners with a super scummy link exchange? If we still had that internet, the only sites that would get any traffic at all would be the ones that could justify their existence with traffic, i.e. these[1]. How do you get traffic if you can't get listed? You can't unless you advertise through other media.

Is everything better? No. Privacy's worse, signal to noise is worse (that's a natural consequence of availability, anyway). Are a lot of things better? Yep. Niche sites can get traffic in a way they never could before. That's the natural consequence of taking humans out of the loop- instead of having to interest Jerry or David, now your only requirement for indexing is to interest anyone who is also interesting.

Let's keep working to make things better, but let's also not forget the improvements that have already been made.

1. https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites

I never did either of those but more commonly one could:

3) Join a web-ring

4) Add a link in Usenet signatures

5) Ask to be included in the WWW Links section of your interest group's magazine

6) Not worry about discoverability at all because the Web wasn't about growth and profit

My preference as a publisher and reader was for web-rings, they exemplified the attitude of sharing and mutual assistance on the early Web that has been largely lost nowadays.

You forgot to mention the blog, which stands for "web log", that is, a log of an individual's experiences on the web.

In particular, one way to make your site discoverable was to write to bloggers that might be interested in it.

I remember when websites were discoverable because they were good. People would link to good content.

That's how pagerank worked. Ads destroyed that.

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