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Comment by Sendotsh | Hacker News Reader

I’m sure it’s just the age I’ve hit, but I have been overwhelmingly nostalgic for those days lately. The internet was FUN, while still being ridiculously useful and efficient. The information of the entire planet was at our fingertips and available instantly (well, at ~2Kb/s).

The web was minimal and slick and information-dense. Content owned the day, whether it was super-active IRC channels or news groups or websites with a 728x90 banner at the top and the rest was content (most of which fit “above the fold”!).

Now.. holy shit the web is a mess.

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Despite all its problems, this is one thing I like about 4chan. Minimal banner ads, large images are auto-collapsed (so they don't overwhelm the text), and menus/settings that do exist are almost entirely auto-hidden. Also no mid-post image embedding, emotes, or 90s-era forum signatures. Every post is just text, with an optional image attachment.

EDIT: Are these downvotes about the content on 4chan, which indeed is generally terrible, or my thoughts on its UI design?

4chan derives its design from Japanese forums, and the Japanese web for had a very minimalistic design to a huge part of it, even up to today, due to C-HTML and use from flip phones.

> The internet was FUN, while still being ridiculously useful and efficient. The information of the entire planet was at our fingertips and available instantly

It was more efficient than the library, but finding something that takes seconds today could have taken hours. There were lots of dead ends.

Sometimes you just had to try searching for the same thing next month.

Google's fuzzy search and prioritization of "now" results and results that other people are looking for means that not much has changed.

We didn't have search engines in the earliest days, but we still found what we needed rather quickly. Gopher was pretty slick. I still have occasion to use it. IMO gopher is better than even the current web for certain things.

Remember before search engines, there were this lists, sure, but more interesting were the Web Rings. (Yea, even that far back, everything about hypertext was one mixed metaphor after another.)

Now I'm wondering if the archie (and veronica) search engines that had their brief moment are still operational. So much info with so little overhead and spam!

Regarding, veronica, Floodgap host a version that was still up and running the last time I checked (a few months back):

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/v2

(Browser I'm using atm can't handle gopher URLs so I haven't been able to check again.)

EDIT: Checked - it's still working.

So much this!!!! Every time I open a browser I think the same thing. Even tech articles were way higher quality back then. https://www.flipcode.com/archives/ for example.

You should try I2P, it is very similar to the old Internet.

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