Useful? I would argue that it's actually a lot less useful today.
To me, the modern web today is better in virtually every way compared to 1990s web surfing.
+ Google search engine is better than Alta Vista and Excite.
+ Google Maps with smooth scroll, 3D streetview, and satellite view is better than the clunky 1990s MapQuest without AJAX. Google Maps also uses colors to highlight traffic congestion.
+ Wikipedia is better than the non-existent online encylopedias of 1990s
+ airline websites now bring up a graphical map of the airplane and let you click on the actual seat you want. When I booked etickets from airline websites in 1998, it was just rudimentary ticket purchase.
+ youtube obviously has videos but it also has virtually every song. If some music forum mentions an obscure song, I think to myself that someone else may have already uploaded it to youtube. Sure enough, 99% of the time, it's there. It's even better than Spotify in that respect.
+ discussion websites like reddit/HN are better than Usenet. The better replies are voted and sorted at the top. I learned a lot of C Language from USENET "comp.lang.c" in the 1980s and I'm jealous that today's programmers have StackOverflow which is better. Again, the superior answers are voted to the top.
+ Amazon.com also made the UI better. In 1990s, they didn't have "Look Inside" feature to see sample pages of books. I use that all the time. One thing they did make worse is you now have to manually click "see all 50 reviews" to read all reviews; I assume they did that to prevent web scrapers. In any case, Amazon is good enough that I stopped wasting gas driving to Barnes & Noble.
I'm having a hard time thinking of a 1990s web experience that's superior to now.
I can only assume that a big part of why some think that today's web is worse has to do with Facebook and its walled garden. To those people, the web feels "less open". Well, I don't have a Facebook account and none of my longtime friends do either. Therefore, it doesn't feel like the web is any less open to me.
The web is more useful now in 2017 than 2007. And back in 2007, it was more useful than 1997.
While HN has some measures to reduce hivemind voting, it's quite rampant on the default subreddits.
I've actually changed the topcolor to #222222 in my settings so I don't see what my account's karma is. It completely ruins the ability to see the "new" "threads" etc links without a truly irritating amount of eyestrain but it's worth it - I recently asked genuine question about something I wanted clarification on and the comment ended up being downvoted to -4. Now I can't see my karma score I don't care about this, whereas before when my karma was shown on almost every single page throughout the site I'd obsess over making my comments universally good.
Comments are manipulated by teams of paid "trolls", including in English, and including Hacker News (when the article is of interest to a particular corp or gov -- like the Tesla mass firing article on Hacker News recently, just to give an example I know of).
I strongly disagree with this, as Usenet and even mailing lists offer many advantages over web forums. With web forums, I can't natively...
- Store, read, search content offline
- Read only new messages
- View thread context
- Access information redundantly (no SPOF)
- Killfile senders
- Integrate viewing and composing with local tools
While a particular site mitigates its disadvantages, perhaps via a better UI or via information not available elsewhere, the medium as a whole cannot. A website might be a fine view of information, but it should not be the only interface to that information. Doing so prevents all of the above uses and makes it much harder to reuse content in ways unforeseen by the original site. I suspect this is the root of the problem -- such reuse is not desirable for most sites, as it conflcts with their business model.
It's interesting you didn't list any disadvantages of Usenet. NNTP protocol doesn't have identity authentication. Therefore, you get spam and forged headers. This isn't any fault of NNTP; it was built for a different era. From a content standpoint and not a technical one, USENET was at its peak, before 1990s, when it was primarily universities and governments. The smallness of the tech community and the inherent collegial atmosphere didn't exploit the vulnerabilities in NNTP. I'll agree with others that it all rapidly declined after AOL opened it up to the masses. To regain the "reading pleasure" I got from USENET in the 1980s, I have to use Reddit/HN/Stackoverflow.
You listed the following technical advantages:
>- Store, read, search content offline
>- Access information redundantly (no SPOF)
>- Integrate viewing and composing with local tools
I'll group those 3 bullet points together since they are related to each other. I agree that those technical advantages are true for USENET. Your comment spurred me to revisit my USENET usage history and attempt to articulate why it's no longer relevant to how I use the web.
I participated in USENET from ~1988 to 2006 -- so about 18 years worth activity. The last years of downloading and reading messages was a tedious chore. With Usenet messages having no voting system, I had to slog through a sea of bad replies to get to the good comments. It was a horrible waste of limited reading time.
Once I got hooked into Reddit in 2006, reading crowdsourced comments became more of a pleasure again. Yes, I 100% agree that voting leads to "groupthink" and "hivemind". But even with those problems, catching up on 500 unread messages ranked by votes instead of 500 messages in pure chronological order is easier. I already suffered through unvoted messages for 18 years. I don't want to go back to that. Experiencing Reddit made me realize that the "terrible voting system" is the unofficial way we combat the "Eternal September"[1]. (Also, the Google search engine was better than anything else because it weighed the "unoffical votes" of links in the PageRank algorithm.)
Forum voting is like that saying about Capitalism -- "it's the worst forum system, except for all the others".
Usenet was like doing homework. Reddit is like a quick dopamine rush.
It's good that both Reddit and Usenet can coexist. A subreddit like "reddit.com/r/cpp/"[2] can coexist with USENET "comp.lang.c++"[3]. Although I have almost 2 decades of training to compose offline messages for "comp.lang.c++", I have no urge to do so. The technical advantages for Usenet you listed doesn't offset its flaws in content. These days, I just go to the C++ subreddit to get my daily fix on what's new because the content is better presented for limited reading time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
On the other hand, during that time the technology became immeasurably better - my first dial-up connection was 9.600 kbps if I remember correctly, now I have 4 Mbps; I didn't have a math co-processor back then and now we have multicore monsters of CPUs - and so on.
The question (to me) is not if the current Web is more useful, but if the increase in usefulness is anywhere near the technological progress?
At some point, the technological limits - like no YouTube because both the necessary download speeds and compression algorithms were not there - were replaced by something else. Back then we could believe that, in time, seeing the rate of progress, we'll get everything we ever wanted. The tech advanced and now we could have all these things we dreamed about, but don't - because of political and economic factors.
Yes, the Web improved drastically, despite a couple missteps (like IE6) along the way. But I believe the improvement is much lesser than the current technology would enable were it not for non-technological factors.
On the brighter side, once developed, technology is here to stay, so if we deal with all the current problems we'll be free to advance the Web further. But that's a pretty big "if"...
- excite chat was better than anything we have today, irc chat remains awesome.
- on social networks of yore, you could actually meet new people. you could search for new people and expand your circle to people completely outside it. I believe its against facebooks TOS to try and connect to someone you dont know. i know my account was banned for 3 days because someone declined with 'they dont know me'.
- youtube sucks for viewing songs. like really sucks. you have commercials MID SONG. one time I had a playlist play a 15 minute long commercial. FIFTEEN MINUTES. half the songs in my playlist end up getting removed, and It doesnt tell me the song it use to be. so if i find a song i really like, add it to a play list and it gets removed, i completely forget about it. song lost. if you are going to compare songs, youtube losses hands down. napster / audogalaxy / was far superior. youtube is still great for watching a cat jump in a box, after watching a minute long commercial of course.
- google search is great, its superior to alt vista, which is why i switched from alt vista to google when it came out. but google gets stuck, if it cant give you want you want in the first 5 hits, it basically cant do it ever. you have to change search strategies. alt vista was bad, but the content was diverse. you could still find gems 5 'nexts' in. google also gets locked in on what it knows about me. sometimes i have to search in incognito mode to find what i want.
the 1990s web experiences was not just about how well content was delivered to you. you could chat a person you never met with a simple ASL. maybe you continued talking after the first day, maybe you didnt, but it was fun and you met new people all the time. people dont want to meet new people anymore.
people dont email or contact eachother anymore. before people would put effort into staying in touch. i remember checking emails with excitement. now even though you can talk to your network at any day, because you are always connected people dont. and its just a 'hey whats up'. people dont write long responses saying how their day was, and how their cat got locked int a closet, etc.
edit: i forgot to say the original digg was awesome, and in may ways better. also, I think most of us are comparing the web from 1998 - 2006, not the late 90s.
YouTube is insanely useful for learning how to do basic household stuff, minor car repairs, that kind of thing. Insane.
Mundane? Yeah, but life is like at least 50% handling mundane shit like that. Maybe 90%. Maybe 95%?
Want to know how to repair some brick stairs in front of your house? Sharpen a lawnmower blade? Mulch a garden? Seal a driveway? Change the cabin air filter on a 2008 Mazda 3? Make pancakes using campsite cooking tools? Multiple videos for each. Perhaps even dozens.
Phenomenal stuff, but it seems like the things that most places (universities in particular) are still holding out on are things like problem sets. Hard to know how little you know until you have materials challenging your depth of understanding. Watching a lecture without doing associated problems is like trying to learn to play basketball without touching a basketball.
I guess it forces the presenter's personality into the spotlight a bit more than pure text and images. Probably attracts a slightly different kind of person. But I think the same spirit is there.
okay yes the web is more "useful" to most people, and maybe only slightly more useful to me, but that usefulness is significantly offset by some majorly-serious concerns about privacy, performance, and reliability.
I'll have a better reply later :)
+ Google Search is about as good now as it was back in 2007. I like that its interface has (largely) changed.
+ Google Maps with smooth scroll is nice, and its integration to 3d street view is nice too.
+ 1990s MapQuest without AJAX was nice though, in its own way. Even with Google's smooth scrolling, the only real thing Google Maps has going for it is IMO a cleaner display.
+ Wikipedia's generally better today than 10 years ago, yes.
+ Airline websites are a nightmare to use. Try getting an optimal route that doesn't use a single airline; and try getting that optimal route without ended up getting spammed or surcharged.
+ Youtube having virtually every song is nice for some people. It's not so nice for me. The songs on there are usually pretty boring or low quality audio or video or both. I pay for a music service (di.fm) for a reason.
+ Reddit/HN are pretty neat.
Okay, that's about where we agree (along with your comment on Facebook).
Let's look at some of the downsides.
- Personally, I find Reddit's method of linking to articles vs loading comments to be counter intuitive and confusing.
- Ebay is still about as trustworthy as you can spit.
- Amazon.com is among the crappiest web interfaces I've seen, and that's ignoring the company's history of abusing compensation and livelihoods of their employees and contractors. It's slow, extremely noisy (which contributes it to being slow), difficult to navigate, and I definitely never intend to buy from the marketplace specifically because I might as well have bought stuff from ebay.
- Just about every website has tracking up the wazoo. That contributes to a slower web experience both in bandwidth cost as well as hardware performance. Not everyone has a wonderfully new computer to handle all that. And if you're in America, chances are pretty good that your bandwidth is sub-par as well.
- Email. Why do we still have to deal with phishing and tracking? This is something that has been around pretty much since HTML was introduced to email.
- Instant Messaging. Slack and Discord are the newcomers but they're also somehow the best. They're popular because they get it "right"; it's super easy to text, talk, video, share files, share screens, etc. But they also get it wrong. That Electron UI has got to be the one of the biggest memory behemoths I've ever seen. Both are yet more walled gardens.
- The newer versions of Skype are absolutely dysfunctional compared to the older versions, MSN was better, AIM is (was) better, even IRC does file transfer better more reliably (although optional and clunkier).
- Mobile Apps. JFC banks going to mobile apps when the marketplaces are full of fake apps. This is absolutely not user friendly. Build on top of that the fact that phone numbers are super easy to fake or steal and you've got a clusterf!@# personal security nightmare just waiting to happen.
- Phones, operating systems, applications which track absolutely everything you do. It eats up my bandwidth, my system resources, and provides no visible benefit to me whatsoever. What happens when someone figures out how to track what I say to whom and when, and use that to "guide" me to buy things?
I could go on and on about more stuff but I don't care to at the moment.