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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

Actually, the web began dying in the late 90s.

The eternal September was 1993. I remember that change well and the earlier flavour I remember nostalgically. And it was tied to the rise of the web. There's a good argument to say the web killed the internet.

But all things change. Every phase has good and bad points. IMHO

I'll take 2000-on to the 1993 web/net any day.

I get:

* an up-to-date encyclopedia

* all the music referred to by said encyclopedia (Napster)

* an impressive number of books referred to by said encyclopedia (Demonoid)

* 2010s bonus-- a lot of the scientific articles cited by said encyclopedia (Scihub)

* 2010s bonus-- a searchable cache of stupid questions to do an end-run around the pain of interacting with the asocial gate-keepers who wish the internet wasn't so full of people (StackOverflow)

* an archive of all the stuff you're nostalgic for (archive.org and Google's copy/paste of usenet junk)

My internet is like O'Brien to your Winston from 1984-- its mind includes yours.

Edit: clarification

OK. But most of that stuff is noncommercial, and not part of the neo-AOL/Prodigy thing that the Web has become.

In my alternate history, the Web would have all that. And so much more like that.

Yes right after Mosaic 1.0 was released. RIP

Hard to tell if you’re joking. If you do actually believe this, I assume you also believe that e-commerce broke everything?

No, I'm not joking.

It's not so much e-commerce that broke everything. Although there were many who did argue that.

For me, it's been the shift from self-published (and indeed, self-hosted) to Google, Facebook and cloud services. And the tide turned in the late 90s.

Edit: When I first got online, it was AOL, CompuServe, EcoNet and The Well. I was on all of them except AOL. And then we had Usenet and websites. And networks of websites. The prospect of citizen-based journalism. But now we're back to something a lot more like AOL.

or something a lot like Prodigy...

Damn, forgot Prodigy.

I was mainly a CompuServe geek.

It has never been more easy to self publish ... via Twitter and Instagram. But the real problem is that you only have 1 hour of free time, spread out in five minute intervals during the day. Being an adult sux.

Those are all centralized. And trivially censored.

I'd rather have stuff like Aether, NotABug, Tor onion sites, and so on.

This is NOT self-publishing.

When making home made food, do I also need go grow the wheat myself? eg. do I need to run the server at my house, or can I use a service? Where do you draw the line?

How easy is it to move your profile from Twitter/Instagram to another host ?

If by the web you mean booting up an entire JVM to enable drag and drop

I mean static HTML.

Why that is the web anymore than a javascript enabled version makes no sense.

It's arguably rude to be running code on someone else's machine without explicit permission. Except for websites, indeed, it's generally illegal.

That's why prudent folk use tools like NoScript.

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