Why there’s so little left of the early internet (2019)
bbc.com
bbc.com
The web was once anti-authoritarian and decentralized, it is now more authoritarian and centralized, and where it isn't authoritarian it is big fish corporate owned.
There is so much propaganda, marketing and astroturfing, even the places set aside for real people have been steamrolled. I don't know what the solution is, it was a nice Wild Wild West of the web from 1992-2012-ish.
Mobile/apps also did a number on the web in terms of viability and longevity. The sites that are successful are locked and walled gardens and highly centralized in moderation. Moderation is also something that has been abused, almost censorship level now, it has created shrouded content contained with moderation moats.
Ultimately I think it comes down to personal desire and long-term goals. It seems like a lot of great, ambitious ideas that could/should have stayed one-person or small team operations get looped into the VC/growth thing (effectively destroying their original intent).
1. How many unsuccessful reddit clones are out there already?
2. How much would regulations be a problem nowadays? You can be held liable for the content you host, and there's things like GPDR. Would that make it much harder to start a new social media platform?
I had another WordPress site that was hacked by prescription medicine scammers. I thank bots for ruining the early internet.
I apparently got into trouble here because I was tired of WordPress and decided to try something else... and look where it got me.
<scriptnotallowed>alert("hi");</scriptnotallowed>I can find a lot of web-1.0-style sites that are updated regularly, but few originally from that time.
Daniel J. Bernstein's site is one example I remembered off the top of my head: https://cr.yp.to/djb.html
I've stumbled upon some rare updates here and then for specific interests. For instance, an early '00s Gundam site on Angelfire that was updated in 2014:
And RMS's website.
Come to think of it, I vaguely remember using my web host’s built in editor to do that which felt like it dated back to the 90s as well.
The Usenet Poetry Groups "Rogues Gallery" - http://www.rikweb.co.uk/photos/rogues-gallery.html
Oh yeah, that vintage cynicism. Smells like a nice old book.
Sadly it's been recently made read-only, and development shifted to a convoluted "Web 2.0" JS app.
1) pretentious journalist wanting to link it to politics. Picks 2 or 3 "good" examples (like the MDH) to make their point
2) commentors on HN or elsewhere jumping on everything with a notion of nostalgia
3) smarter pundits trying to explain why the older "solutions" aren't "perfect"
My personal conclusion is that Google has been heavily down-scoring content which is more than a couple months old. Try installing a blacklist extension and blacklist all news sites and take a look at what remains. I have no doubt this is algorithmically driven. This is what's wrong with the Internet today. And Neocities or whatever else ain't gonna fix it.
Yes they downscore anything old. But sometimes they decide an old thing is the perfect answer for all time.
And so if you google 60*60 my article about newbie programming mistakes with time shows up above even the google calculator. It’s been unchanged for almost 5 years.
But when I press the button and the results from the web are shown, then your site with the article you mentioned is the first result indeed.
So contrary to what the sibling suggested, it’s not just you that it is showing this for. And I probably live in a different country than you even. I live in Norway.
Commenters anywhere are going to bring up “the good old days” in relation to anything. This is called “being human.”
Your personal conclusion doesn’t fit the facts presented in the article: stuff disappears because it is not maintained. Dead links are such an issue that there are businesses who are paid to watch out for dead links in websites and determine whether the target is actually gone, has moved to a new URL or is just temporarily missing.
Businesses like “Link Alarm” aren’t politics, they are just dealing with reality.
I think it depends. I have some technical posts that are ~3 years old and they're my most popular posts by orders of magnitude.
I'm not an SEO expert but if you're writing about topical things, then that could explain why you might be losing rankings / traffic after a few months.
Content business models are temporary. Why would anyone keep high-quality, non spammy knowledge freely available? Ad revenue is drying up more and more, there has to be another angle? And who's to say whatever business model they think of won't change in 5 years, the company acquired, or something else...
This is really the crux of the issue. To understand the original purpose of the internet, you have to look at it as a space devoid of any business model. It was primarily about sharing. Commercialization drove the current state of ad dollars and fake news.
There was a time, long ago, when it was just about community. And because you cared about your community, each member was an arbiter of truth of sorts. We lost that connection.
Facebook likes to call itself a community too, but the two are not very similar.
alt.tasteless, principa discordia, and I remember reading about was the 3rd (or 4th) burning man long before it was "a thing".
Back when "The New Hacker's Dictionary" used to provide a common lexicon and even people who didn't read 1960s Sci-Fi knew what "grok" meant.
It's all very boring and feels filtered.
If you read fast enough that was a legit thing that could happen.
I also remember how terrible forums were until a few generations of AJAX happened. Massive sites could afford beefy servers to make forums not suck, but everywhere else things were pretty bad.
Search engines were beyond bad, it was pretty much "I know this exact term exists on this site, so I'll put it in quotes and hit search."
Nah. But I really did dig WASTE !
It is weird how technological limitations forced tiny servers and users to talk in order to swap files.
IRC of course being the precursor to all this.
Bit torrent has everything, but I don't get to stumble on someones shared files know they like somethings I like, and then explore organically.
What I miss most from the earlier web is mp3.com. To this day I am angry at the founder for screwing over countless independent artists so he could try and prove a point against the RIAA. The market still hasn't consolidated on a similar product that does everything MP3.com used to do:
1. Bands Organized by Genre
2. Streaming of the band's songs
3. Ability to order a band's music
4. Social discovery of new music
If I cobble together Sound Cloud and Bandcamp I'm still stuck with a discovery problem that Spotify only kinda helps. Mp3.com was a directory like the old Yahoo, so browsing around was a great way to discover new music and then BUY it.
(I still haven't been able to find a replacement for an album I ordered off mp3.com, the band up and vanished as most bands do and I lost the CD.)
I feel you. There a tons of bands (and other works such as books) that aren't and likely won't ever be accessible. This grinds my gears when I read comments about how the Internet/Piracy has everything. It has everything that is mainstream enough and even then the ephemeral nature of some technology used to share it (torrent, emule, etc.) don't necessarily mean it's available years later. In the sense that torrent networks aren't for storage but for sharing.
It's an error to believe piracy makes everything available.
Email is still going somewhat strong, I guess.
I wanted to add some additional labeled data so I thought I would start out with an item like 'strawberry' and google image search the item. I realized it was nearly impossible to find an actual image of a strawberry. If you google search something as simple as strawberry, all you get is page after page of stock photos and images of strawberries on various forms of eCommerce sites.
No actual image of someone taking a picture of a strawberry.
Edit: I'm not asking to be doxxed. It wouldn't be that hard, but just having some sort of online pseudonym makes me feel better.