Hacker News Reader

I remember back in 1995 getting on Yahoo one day and going through every single category and clicking every website link in the entire directory (I was in college and bored). I like to tell my kids that at one point it was possible to visit every singe website on the WWW ;-)

View on HN

There was a brief period of time where visiting a link felt like a new adventure. We take the simplicity of a "link" for granted today, probably because most links are just clickbait now.

Eventually links turned into time-consuming traps of "under construction" animations and icons and popup advertising hell. But even then, the Internet truly felt like the wild west.

I miss the diversity in web design back in the day. From blinking, colorful and seizure-inducing to very dark pages with little torch gifs. Weirdly enough every website now looks the same (ok maybe we have 3 archetypes of web design) even though the number of sites has grown exponentially for decades.

I remember web rings. There were some nice rabbit holes to get lost.

I remember when I was first told that there was such a thing as a search engine, when they were new. And I thought, "how could any one, free site index every site on the WWW?"

Every 1995 site... a tally of which was hardly statistical noise compared to today's numbers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com