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Comment by beckingz | Hacker News Reader

This website is a blast from old web design. Nice!

I'm of mixed feelings on it. On the one hand, it sure is hard to read. On the other hand, in small doses I kind of enjoy it after the super sanitized corporate nothingness most of the web has become now. One glance at this page and there is zero doubt in my mind that it represents the genuine expression of an actual human without layers and layers of forced censorship and editing by some "platform." The web was never supposed to have "platforms" in the first place: Youtube/Facebook/Twitter etc are all fundamentally rent-seeking parasites in a way most people don't even appreciate today.

The web was supposed to just be a place anyone could put up a document with some links to other documents. Cheap, simple, easy, fast. Then some services cropped up to help make some of the frustrating parts easier and quicker, and eventually the "services" ended up eating the web alive.

The correlation between creation and consumption based on the device form factor is something to consider. A desktop computer often provided a good balance between the two.

Now with the corporate web, perhaps it’s no accident consumption devices have become so widespread.

> Cheap, simple, easy, fast

I mean, this page is not simple, easy, or fast to develop. Instead of just writing a simple article, the author had to source/create at least 2 dozen images with no value only to lay them out on the page in the middle of paragraphs, making the article as hard to read as they could muster.

Enjoy the nostalgia and break from modern clean websites, but anything else justifying the look of this page is just crazy. And connecting it to modern services and the downfall of the internet or whatever just sounds like you're trying to be edgy.

We are in a massively better place now than a decade or two ago as far as the internet being accessible to everyone, both on the publisher and consumer side, despite the hate for big corps.

This style should be called Ransom Note.

It just needs blink tags

... or Dancing Ants.

Back then, it was, if not the height of design, at least within the horizon.

Now, it just looks deranged and unreadable.

It's a shame Twitter Bootstrap wasn't around in 2007.

Design is both a linear progression and an infinitely looping circle/pendulum. Things were really free and organic at first. People got frustrated with this, and rising tech companies gave them "clean, modern" design instead. It was embraced because it was easier on the eyes, and faster to use in general. But now I think there's a growing resentment toward the "clean, modern" look, because it's simplified every drop of soul and humanity out of digital interfaces and expression. The pendulum will probably start to swing in the other direction soon.

This particular page design can be read as an intentional response to Web2.0, something the authors of this article considered to be part of a broader campaign to remove "amateur" production from the web. They published a book, Digital Folklore, expanding on this idea a few years later: https://digitalfolklore.org/

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