I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event.
It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.
Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook.
When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about. Today it's basically Wikipedia at the top, with results from the same list of about 3-4 sites depending on the topic of what I searched for.
I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or data extraction operations. Just pages put there by people that want to share knowledge and ideas. I mostly find it on pages that lack ads and often are pure HTML - no CSS and no JS. At least in areas that interest me.
Maybe there is a place for a search engine that would index only pages like that? It certainly would be easier than competing with Google on indexing whole of the attention-whoring Internet.
http://ciphermachines.com/index.html http://enigma.louisedade.co.uk/howitworks.html
Probably not, actually; the kind of pages you describe would almost always be leaf nodes on the web graph, so your spider would need to walk "through" the attention-whoring parts to get to them, whether you kept records of doing so or not. (And it'd be very inefficient to not.)
The breadth and depth of information on the web now vastly surpasses what was available in 1994. Youtube and other video and music streaming sites have provided a media revolution to compare with the transition from radio to television. Social media, whatever its drawbacks are, allows people to communicate and collaborate far more personally than email or basic chatrooms would have.
And let's not even get into the ways that Javascript, HTML5 and Webassembly have and will transform the web into a platform in which virtual machines will converge to becoming just another content type. I know people here like to rend their garments and scream Javascript Delenda Est[0] into the void and just hope everything that happened to the web in the last 20 years just goes away, but the day is coming where all archived and obsolete code will have a URL endpoint that bootstraps a VM and runs it. The best the web of 1994 could do is file downloads, maybe Java applets and flash.
Sometimes the way people here seem to dismiss the modern web is baffling. I get it, but look at it from the point of view of the mainstream web user. The web offers access to so much more than would even have been possible in 1994, and lets people interact with one another on a much more direct and complex level.
Yes, the added richness and depth comes with a lot of baggage, but its undeniably there.
...and if you actually try to search for more obscure/"fringe" subjects/phrases with Google, you either get no results (despite knowing that there are still active sites with those phrases), or it starts thinking you're a bot sending "automated queries" and blocking you for a while (not even giving you the option of completing a CAPTCHA.)
The first time that happened to me, which was within this year, was my realisation that Google had truly changed, and not in a good way.
But the difference with Wikipedia was that people would maintain a Links section full of interesting stuff and people would join web rings for various subjects, interlinking vastly different sites. Finding information often happened through Yahoo! (AltaVista was there too but it was lacking the quality of handpicked results) through a tree based discovery system, to continue through whatever you could find through links on an interesting page. Exchanging links was something that really frequently happened.
It resulted in an internet where you just kept clicking and discovering and digging. Sometimes also frustrating as browsers lacked tabs and I would navigate all links one by one by loading it and going back. I would forget how I arrived at a certain page sometimes because it was so deep and I never found the breadcrumbs again.
Um excuse me what do you call this masterpiece https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Ellipses...
I would have said TVTropes, but the core point is the same.
I remember having to restart my computer, because IE lacked tabs and Windows would let you open so many instances of it that the whole OS ground to a halt.
It's weird to think that now, in the absence of Google, I couldn't find my way from anything to anything else.
For a close look at the earlier era, see this very long essay I wrote in 2006 (which was popular back in 2006) in which I summarized the tech world's blog debate about RSS:
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
"RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it"
More content density, better S/N ratio.
I wish everyone who pined for the 25-years-ago days of mostly text pages would, instead of pining, just go out there and produce that content they want to see.
Instead of pining, start writing. Hosting is cheap or free, browsers still parse simple HTML, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a return to that simpler form.
# I Bought a Book About the Internet From 1994 and None of the Links Worked - Motherboard
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[p?c1=2&c2=8568956&cv=2.0&cj=1]That's what you are suggesting.
No need to spend any money.
For one, it was largely un-monetised. There were no banner ads, no ad trackers, no giant shopping sites, no market-driven content design.
But many ISPs offered free web space, and HTML 1.0 was so simple almost anyone could hack together a basic site with a plain vanilla text editor.
So people did. For fun. Lots and lots of them.
It looked like crap, but it was weird/hilarious/insane/inspiring in equal measures in a way that's impossible to reproduce today.
What? It's not at all impossible. Get a server, put whatever you want on it. No one is going to force you to monetize or market anything, or use a Node.js backend with AWS and React, or whatever the kids are doing these days. Basic HTML in a plain text editor still works just fine.
Not in Germany. There is a set of laws called "Impressumspflicht" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht) which forces you to add a mandatory imprint on your website. If you do something wrong or forget to include some mandatory information (what is mandatory also depends on the kind of website), you can easily get sued (and this has often happened). In other words: It is not easy for a layperson to set up a website in a way that will not easily become a risk of becoming sued.
It just happens that people add unnecessary complexity to their projects nowadays because 1) they use frameworks and tools that facilitate it and 2) it looks better on their resumes.
The laws introduce lots of complexity, which leads to lots of requirements in the code. So this is no contradiction.
> It just happens that people add unnecessary complexity to their projects nowadays because 1) they use frameworks and tools that facilitate it and 2) it looks better on their resumes.
And 3) because the law requires such complications (in my personal perspective the largest problem that causes the most headaches). Just to give another, "more EU/less German" example:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Electronic_Communi...
which requires that the user has to explicitly opt-in before a cookie is set. This of course has to be coded - otherwise risk being sued.
There were, however, tons of animated 'under construction' banners, which gave the same 'visual noise' problem.
If you very badly want to rip off the theme, it's stealable from my GitHub copy of my site: https://github.com/KeenRivals/brashear.me/tree/master/themes...
All the HTML takes 2-4 kB on average, but you might not get much use from the site in a terminal :)
But if the next site went down or didn't link to the next site correctly, you couldn't proceed. That was always my problem with webrings. They depended on each site to embed the ring code properly, and usually they didn't, so you were stuck trying to find a working one. It was a pretty lousy UX overall.
Maybe a modern equivalent would redirect downed sites to the IPFS archive.
I get this request a lot actually. The reason I decided to not do it was because webrings, though nice, had a lot of problems. The main issue was that people's sites would go away, and then the ring would break. I also didn't want to introduce any functionality that would make sites depend on Neocities backend APIs to function. Web sites are more long-term and durable if they remain (mostly) static.
I tried using "tags" that could bind sites together on Neocities, but to be honest the idea has largely been a failure. People will tag their site "anime" and their site will have nothing to do with anime... but it's a popular tag so they add it in just so they're on a popular tag. Geocities had this problem to a certain extent too (a tech site being in the non-tech neighborhood). You can get a flavor of the problem here: https://neocities.org/browse?tag=anime
One idea I'm considering is to only allow a site to have one tag, rather than 3 like I do right now. Maybe that will stop people from adding tags that are irrelevant to the content of their site. Or it may compound this problem. I'm on the fence about it.
Another idea I'm considering is allowing people to create curated lists of their favorite sites on Neocities, similar to playlists on Youtube. The "follow site" functionality kindof does this, but in a generic way, and it tends to be a bit... I guess nepotistic (hey you're popular, follow me so my site can get more popular too!)
I'm always happy to hear ideas on how to improve this. I do like the idea of related sites being able to clump together, but in practice it doesn't work as well as I would like it to. But maybe it works well enough and I'm overthinking it.
I just discovered Neocities BTW, it sounds very interesting!