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Part of the "new Web" that that I'm not a fan of is, with the massive reach of the modern Internet, some person's infelicitous comment or ribald joke can permanently end a career. The force multiplier of these corporate silos of information make this situation worse.

I would like to return to a more HTML-ified Web, with less reliance on JS frameworks that scatter spinny loading icons all over, but IMO the worst aspect is a social and cultural problem, not a technical one.

Yes, this is definitely a concern: while the public nature of most content hasn't changed (even in the 1.0 days, your blog could be read by anyone who could access the URL), what public means has changed as the userbase has grown from several hundred thousand or a few million to billions of people.

I don't have a great solution for this other than for people to remember / realize that everything they put online is that visible (including this comment. ;) ).

Well, part of the solution is to enable anonymity, on the legal, technical, and platform levels. Just reminding everyone that "everything you say online can be publicly tied to your real identity" causes a chilling effect when you have opinions on anything remotely controversial.

Very true, and I simply don't believe that humans are wired to deal with what is, essentially, a permanent Panopticon. Most people understand on some level that gossip is destructive, but also a lot of fun. Now that gossip can circle the globe twice in seconds, and combine that velocity with the fact that nearly everything online is gossip, it's like some kind of destructive psyop that nobody could have ever imagined.

Even if you could have some flavor of anonymity, the cozy relationship that the big tech corporations have with national governments around the world means that only the most paranoid and OpSec-savvy can avoid having that anonymity pierced.

We just quietly slid from "you shouldn't say that," to "you can't say that" in less than a generation.

When I started using the web back in the 90's, everyone used to use a handle/nickname and so it was never easy to link an online person to a reallife individual.

These days everyone is encouraged to enter their real name, DOB and telephone number (see Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) which then creates a link to a real person.

I think the web was better because it was anonymous, rather than anything else really. If you had "SuperHardLord" posting abuse at you on IRC, it didn't really matter. However if you have a Twitter user with full photo and details doing the same, it feels much more personal.

People say this, but before the web, on USENET in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was standard protocol (at least on serious newsgroups dealing with science and technology) to not only use your real name but even include a signature explaining where you worked and what your job was or if you were a student studying something or whatever. It was helpful in evaluating the responses -- a university professor, a professional in industry, and a student in a field each would have different viewpoints on a new technology or method, for example.

Still is this way. Just because 1 billion people jump off a bridge, are you going to do the same? There are many of us online who have never used Facebook, Twitter, etc and never signed up with real names. The only thing that gets me is I submit to using a credit card and online purchases. The express reason the web __is__ going to such lengths to become advert-laden trash is that too many common users all agree to these traps. It's ruining the entire world, I for one am eagerly awaiting most of these "constant growth" web plagues to tank and dotcom bubble 2.0 and won't miss these tyrants.

I'm not on Facebook or Twitter and know very well not to post my real name or other information if I can help it... Mainly to reduce the chance of fraud.

While yes, social media encourages identity ownership for obvious reasons, in modern forums like discord, reddit, and hn, most people use anonymous aliases like you describe. That hasn’t changed. I decided to not use social media and have no problem engaging with the world on the modern web.

But no one is complaining about discord or Reddit, it's all about Facebook and Twitter.

Discord and Reddit are just modern incarnations of USENET and forums.

People that only have an artificial online presence can evade these negatives while not missing much in my opinion.

Facebook, Instragram and Twitter have all a specialized demographic and all these platforms are orientated around people instead of topics. This is why I would not compare them to irc, reddit, 4chan and similar consorts as the parent did. Given, that probably does have much to do with a difference in audiences.

Problem with Discord is that it swallows content. Nothing is searchable (cannot crawl discord, only relies on internal search), I believe that will cost many communities in the long run. It is convenient for small indie developers, but discoverability is extremely inhibited.

But the major difference is personalization. Now everyone gets their own search results. In favor of advertising against general education. This is a huge factor why the net is worse. Also, if you look up any term that is part of the news cycle, you only find shitty news rags that pushed their presence with nepotism and have a direct business relationship to search engine providers.

> if you would really remember how the old web worked or ever used Altavista or other early search-engines to look for stuff, you'd realise the web is a LOT more accessible today, with a lot more information available.

I would dispute this. At that time, search was not gamed the way it is now, you didn't have to wade through millions of terrible low quality SEO bs to find the nuggets you're looking for.

It was early SEO that helped to do in AltaVista. When spammy, irrelevant search results started plaguing it, and AV's pages began to be crammed with ads, a neat little upstart came along with a very simple search page and a clean user interface, that returned better search results. This, of course, was Google, and guess what's happened to Google in the meantime? We've come full circle.

The SEO gaming, of course, continues unabated, and will continue as long as search engines exist.

Back in the day, a lot of content that we take for granted today didn't even exist online (e.g. wikipedia, webmd, heck even mundane things like maps)

As someone who got into the web industry through discovering content for a niche topic, search engines have always been only a superficial helper in finding content, with most content discovery happening through finding niche, relevant, obscure long tail keywords via deep diving, then unearthing more content via deep diving into searches based on these new keywords, rinse and repeat.

Right, though back then the search engines at least honored the exact search terms you entered and provided useful operators.

It was so easy to game Altavista you didn't even have to try. I was gaming the search engines starting in 1996. I was #1 for whatever term I wanted.

It was a lot harder once PageRank came along and required you to have external parties essentially vouch for you.

From the article:

> Look, we will never get the web of old back. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t perfect either. The web of today is more accessible, more dynamic and pretty much a cornerstone of our society.

Just a personnel nit: I actually found altavista to be better then any current search engine in terms of query power - what it was missing was the huge index..

Things like the 'near' keyword were awesome: john near doe matched 'john doe', 'doe, john', etc. It REALLY let you craft a query to return just the results you wanted. Unfortunately, that probably made it harder for the hordes of new users getting on-line.

I'm soo tired of search engines just returning whatever they want, instead of what I asked for.

Altavista was great. I was #1 for Beanie Babies. All I had to do was put "Beanie Babies" 20,000 times on my front page in white-on-white text and Altavista would automatically know I was the #1 authority on small beanbag plushies.

> Sounds like he remembers an over romanticized version of the web.

Nowadays, anything that is gaining enough popularity to eventually possibly compete with the mega-corps gets purchased and often shutdown.

I agree with almost everything that you said, and would bring it even further.

I wouldn't even say that "Yes it's all commercialised". If anything, I bet you there are multiple orders of magnitude more fun, silly, webring-like content than there were before the web exploded in popularity - they're just not visible to the average person, and are outnumbered by orders of magnitude more junk and commercial content.

And you know what? That's totally expected. The web was great originally because only a small cadre of people of above-average and technical skill used it. When all of the rest of the humans joined, the usual stuff that you would expect happened - commercialization, low-quality content, passive consumption instead of active participation, etc. But that's what happens when everyone joins.

There's also nothing preventing you from siloing off your own section of the internet where you only let certain people in! Hacker News already heavily curates content, and there are places like Lobste.rs where you can only be invited by an existing member. Don't complain that "the internet" has gotten worse, because "the internet" is just a communication technology, and it's gone from "limited access to a few elite" to "almost unlimited access to almost all humans"...and humans are kind of bad.

Also, now that everyone's on the internet, the best content has also gotten significantly better. So there's that.

If you're not liking the state of the web, you're either not looking in the right places (stop browsing YouTube and start looking for webrings and joining IRC channels), or you're complaining that the average internet user isn't as good as they used to be, which is dumb.