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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

The "old" internet was all static or lightly server-rendered pages, that can be developed and hosted at minimal cost today. Back in the day we didn't expect that "everyone" would sign up for whatever niche forum you were hosting, it was enough to have "everyone who's into that niche".

These services don't need "monetization", they can be kept up with minimal amounts of crowdfunding, while federating through well-known standards (ActivityPub, etc.) can help them achieve a network effect that might ultimately rival the big walled gardens and incent them to open up in turn.

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The problem isn’t hosting, it’s discovery. Discovery was easy on the old internet because we weren’t yet drowning in spam, link farms, and cloned/scraped pages. To bring the old internet back we need search that filters out all that commercial noise and we can’t rely on Google et al to build it. Why not? Because those companies have a conflict of interest due to their ad-driven business model.

A new “Old Internet” needs to be non commercial. I don’t know how we do that.

Bring back webrings, "favorite links" pages and the ODP/DMOZ. Good niche forums (both on Usenet and elsewhere) tended to gather FAQs and information pages that would ultimately aid discovery. That whole dynamic is quite dead these days.

Webrings were great but you still need search as a starting point. Now we've got all this spam out there which essentially creates fake webrings (private blog networks [1]) as a form of black hat SEO.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm

I feel like content discovery in those days didn't primarily happen via search so much as word-of-mouth though. Blogs kept a blogroll on the side which had an overlapping network of other bloggers, people in IRC channels or BBSes would recommend other places for you to check out if you were interested in something, webcomics would host guest strips so other artists could cross-promote each other, etc.

In that respect, I feel like Reddit and Instagram are much bigger culprit than Google for sucking up all of the space for socializing and referrals. At one point several of the forums I was on all basically just focused on linking to or talking about Reddit posts, which is when I realized those forums were not long for this world.

There was a Golden Age when Google would actually return results for interesting small sites on a regular basis. This was before they declared defeat in the Great Webspam War and (apparently) just upranked major sites and downranked minor ones ('08 or '09?), giving up on usefully indexing the "lesser" parts of the web. Also back when content that wasn't frequently updated didn't suffer badly in search results, so niche "evergreen" content on small sites could actually be found by search pretty often.

> a Golden Age when Google would actually return results for interesting small sites on a regular basis

Yes, I miss the days when Google search was actually useful.

08, 09 that was the time they introduced service to figure out typos in queries. That was the time that I noticed drastic reduction of usefulness of their search. When the team responsible for it visited my university, I asked about this. Their response was: we don't show results that you asked for, but the results you want.

I goddamn know what I want, and it is so annoying that Google returns sites that don't contain keyword that I explicitly want, doesn't matter that I put + in front or write it in quotes.

>There was a Golden Age when Google would actually return results for interesting small sites on a regular basis. This was before they declared defeat in the Great Webspam War and (apparently) just upranked major sites and downranked minor ones ('08 or '09?), giving up on usefully indexing the "lesser" parts of the web. Also back when content that wasn't frequently updated didn't suffer badly in search results, so niche "evergreen" content on small sites could actually be found by search pretty often.

This is useful for things like research or product reviews, but less of a thing for the sorts of current events and opinion pieces that blogging was used for (and then got moved to "social media").

But yeah, prioritizing stuff that's updated often has really killed the ability of sites to actually be useful repositories of knowledge and has probably intensified the trend towards opinion, editorial, and hot-takes of everything rather than well-researched articles about how to do useful/practical stuff.

Sure, and those old sorts of forums still exist (well, the ones that didn't get eaten by Reddit and Facebook—OK, so I guess they kinda don't) but if you want the Web as it exists for most people to go back to standards and competing paid & free+libre solutions, I'm pretty sure banning spyvertising is gonna be a necessary, since those are the two main "services" most people use online, other than email (the rest is mostly shopping and reading news-type sites, both of which would also be improved by banning spyvertising).

The actual "old" Internet is the stuff that predated the web: Gopher, IRC, Usenet, MUDs, Public Access Unix systems, telnet...

I agree with this. It was when we designed protocols with consensus thru RFC, and apps communicating with those protocols.

And companies started dropping that when it became very important to their business model that they maximize the amount of data they can collect about a user. 3rd party clients for my service? Unacceptable, can't spy on the user as much there, and can't advertise at them. Communicating with users on other services? Unacceptable, I need those users on my service so I can spy on them too, and besides those other services won't talk to mine for the same reasons.

Don't know why you're being downvoted when this is exactly the case in my experience. They never said "spying" outright but it's definitely why walled gardens like AOL popped up like wildfire in the 90s and why stuff like AIM was the exception and not the rule.

AOL was not about spying on you, it was about collecting that sweet monthly fee.

And anyone who lauds Apple for bringing tech to the masses should consider that AOL did the exact same thing for the Internet and really brought a glimpse of the Internet (not just the web!) to the people. Yes, real techies might want to install their IRC client of choice and fine tune settings and all that, but Grandma just wanted to click on Chat from her home screen, go to the "Recipes Room" and talk about cookies.

It was the same "less choice/more consistency" of technology that let Apple get so big, with the same huge mass appeal (but with less panache).

AOL was more 'spatial' vs. the netnerds obsession with everything has to be (ASCII)-text delivered by simple but sometimes obscure to the average user, means.

I sometimes think one could easily replicate large parts of that with

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel/UX

which evolved out of

{2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_(software)

but then it lacks mastodon/matrix like federation, i guess.

Sigh. Maybe this year i get to try it out... ;-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_silo

also called 'siloing'

All of those things are still in use, although perhaps not as much as before. I suggest to continue to use it.

(Do you know my first post on Usenet (using a NNTP client program I wrote myself, actually) was in 2019? I still use it, although there aren't a lot of messages on there, but there still are some.)

I suggest if you wanted to make up a web forum or mailing list, to set up a NNTP instead please. I also invented Unusenet which is a way to form newsgroup names which are not part of Usenet (you can have both on the same server; the names never interfere). You could also have multiple interfaces to the same messages if wanted, making more use better.

With other protocols too (such as IRC), a bridge can be done. For many kind of text-basedinteractive uses, telnet (or SSH) is much better than using a web page.

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