The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back
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The thing that has changed is that a huge swath of new people have come online and, though some of what brought them online is wider access to connectivity, a lot of what brought them online are new kinds of communities. They showed up for social media and most of them just aren't that interested in the things that made up the "old" internet.
I put "old" in quotes because people have kept and maintained the parts they love. You can still play MUDs, you can still visit BBSes, people still run Hotline servers[1]! Many of these communities have changed because the world has changed: lots of people who played MUDs in 1990 have moved on to other online games, but lots have not! Critically - tools have continued to be developed. You can use IRCCloud (and be told it makes you a bad IRC'er), you can play MUDs on your phone, etc. These communities have changed with the times and improved for it.
My sense is that the absolute number of people who are involved in these communities has dropped, but not actually by that much? Maybe half as many people play MUDs now as they did at the peak - but it's a steady half. I think of it like the communities around vinyl or around film photography: less central than they once were, but healthy and vital.
I am really glad that people who were not online at all during their peak are discovering these older forms. We have kept them for good reasons. But don't call it a comeback, they have been here for years.
The thing is, the "old" Internet was always somewhat anemic compared to the "new" Internet. It was never all that big. IRC channels I was in that felt like communities would stay dead for hours at a time, and sometimes topped out at under 100 members. Yet, they had a feeling of community that I rarely experience much on today's internet.
With how many people are on the Internet today, you'd expect that this standard could be upheld even with minimal participation, but I find that not only are there less people participating in the "old" internet, but also in addition to that, the people still participating have far less of their attention and time dedicated to it. As it was, the "old" Internet was, as many things are, powered by the unpaid time and effort of a relatively small number of people. Those people still exist, but their attention is far more divided. There's just more stuff going on overall. The "new" internet allures people with more "passive" participation vs the active participation that was often demanded by forums and IRC channels.
As an icing on the shit cake, you link to Fandom/Wikia as a community hub. Fandom and its behavior has torn apart a lot of smaller communities with its practices. See, for example, what happened when the Touhou wiki's community collectively decided they no longer wanted to be on Wikia: old administrators were banned, new ones were appointed by staff, and now the site is effectively forked. Apparently, if a wiki is too important for ad revenue, the admins will literally just fork your site. Of course, I'm not saying they did anything illegal, but what they did is a major fuck you to the community that poured hours of work into the site. It would be like a forum host that decides to ban all of the admins and appoint its own in their place. Maybe a bit like Reddit...
While I don't know exactly how much and why the "old" internet is dead, I do have my suspicions that it has a lot to do with the evolution of monetization on the internet. My hope is that the patron model can help here...
It's harder to find particularly skilled or like minded people in some niche areas or fields, but with simply more people online, this seems inevitable - more haystack to sift through. Of course there are worrying corporatization or centralization arguments vs. IRC, but ultimately the end result doesn't feel that different to me in terms of community.
I'm not really involved in any fan communities or anything a Wikia would involve, so I can't comment on that facet.
I suppose for what I do (reverse engineering hobby stuff, mostly), what would have been a "team" or "group" blog site, possibly with some useful collaboration plugins or the like, is now a GitHub repo, but that's more of a convenience than a drawback compared to the "old" Internet to me.
Overall, it does seem like things are more centralized and therefore a bit less unique, but at the same time, I have to spend less time securing bespoke web servers, buying crappy VPS hosting, and dealing with routine maintenance and setup to collaborate with like-minded people on projects.
I know what you mean and I am also nostalgic about it - but my life has also changed and I suspect that my nostalgia for times gone by involves nostolgia for that moment in my life. Even if there was the same energy around the places I hung out in the late-90s and early-2000s, I would not be there as much or with the same aims.
> you link to Fandom/Wikia as a community hub.
Oh man, I was not intending to link to them as a community hub. It was the first source I found that indexed some current Hotline trackers and clients. But I think the Fandom treatment of communities is informative of how the times have changed.
I think, 20 years ago, this information would have been stored on a server maintained with the sweat and love of a single individual. Sometimes real collectives existed, but I found them to be rare. Often, if that person got distracted, or found new interests, we could lose a useful source (and for people in the community enough - a friend). Now there are commercial entities that will "preserve" that information while cutting the community out entirely. Like you I am not sure that is "better" - but it did allow me to find a list of Hotline clients in ~10 minutes of searching, and I suspect the "real" Hotline community is still on hotline as it was before.
So...I do think it depends on where you see the old internet. People do different things as passion projects now. I have found that I can go back and find many of the things I see other people mourn as lost, and I am sorry to hear that you have not had the same experience.
Writing my first post made me go find this - it's a web player that collects thousands of keygen MIDIs: https://keygenmusic.tk/# (using the hard work of the good people at http://www.keygenmusic.net/?lang=en - donate if you like the music!)
Miraheze is now the preferred wiki host of community-driven sites, I hope that it will not eventually transform into Wikia/Fandom.
Many of the other “wiki” sites on the net are just rehosting GFDL content and slapping ads on them, then trying to SEO to get ahead of real wikis. Blame Google for not coming up with a good solution on that one, IMO.
The main difference would be on accessibility, where the "old" internet were mainstream services that people just flocked to almost by default, while now you have to do your homework to join communities that will match the same criteria.
It is not old at all, but to me Reddit is a good representation of that: at some point it was small enough you'd just go there and find something interesting. From there the communities stayed, but you had to heavily filter what you wanted to see. And now you'll be using specific clients, disable the crap in your settings, force the old interface, or any of the trick du jour to keep having a sane experience.
My personal experience does not match that. There was a time (2010-2012 or so where I used to live) when communities were migrating from older "forums" to new and shiny "social networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be communities.
One of these communities was niche enough (and I was involved enough) for me to personally knew all the regulars - they are mostly still online and still care about that thing which brought us together, but there's no meeting place for us online anymore. Facebook groups and Twitter wars do not facilitate meaningful discussion, and the old forum... "Who uses forums nowadays anyway? We have FB and Instagram and stuff", I hear from them, but I believe they're deeply mistaken and it's the other way around. FB has them, and it kinda took them away from me.
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For all the communities that we have lost, there are still a ton of IRC servers. I came back to IRC a few months ago after like 10ish years or so. There are new platforms like Activity Pub platforms, Matrix and others.
> when communities were migrating from older "forums" to new and shiny "social networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be communities.
I forgot who wrote the post. But I read this tweet or blog post long ago that people who are using social media to create communities will eventually grow out of it. This has been a accurate remark by her who wrote the post. I recall some communities who have started off in social media but eventually created their own website/platform to create unique experiences that are needed for that particular community.
Forums are making a come back. Manjaro Linux's forums was my social media for like 5ish years. Discourse has been dominant in this area but I like Flarum which is promising - https://flarum.org/.
Social media can cater to a large array of communities but if the community needs to grow, they will have to create their own platform. Cos social media platforms are general. Many will be happy with it. But indie folks, self hosting folks, power users and tinkerers will always be there to shuffle things up. ;)
There are more to be hopeful than there is for not to be as messed up as things might seem. :)
I think that the strong moderation has helped to make the forums offer something you cannot easily find on the newer social platforms.
I'm genuinely curious.
This would be different if you are in a subreddit for a niche topic, sure. But there are higher chances of creating healthy online interactions in Forums than a subreddit. You meet with regulars more often. Knowledge transfer is better cos you know the skill levels of different people based on your interactions and experiences. This is opposite cos in a subreddit depending on the topic. There is a high amount of irregular folks. This means you have no idea how to rate the interactions than to take them on face value. These are all small but important things that are important when it comes to a community.
Think of forums like your neighborhood. You participate and nurture it. You know most of them and the rate of new people are less than you can catch up with the pace among other things.
PS: These are some of my thoughts, people have different ideas and opinions on forums.
I think any successful forum depends heavily on its mods (notably like this one) to maintain community and civility, to remove spam, abuse, brigading, and astroturfing. This works despite the corporation trying to monetize with both hands. Reddit still has some subs with good mod teams where kind, productive communities are carrying on. This could happen on any decent forum software.
And yeah the rest is commercialized filth.
I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.
My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in. The fact that this kind of thing gets quarantined to a downvoted sub-tree (on Reddit) or just scrolls into the past, accessible only by search (on Discord) helps keep these new community platforms a lot less toxic.
And yeah, the newer platforms (especially Discord) are maybe a little less valuable as pure stores of knowledge, but I think the structural resistance to domination by assholes is very valuable.
IMO a lot of it isn't about technology, but the size of the community, the people within it, and the norms of that community.
For me, the biggest heuristic on whether a subreddit/forum/Discord has the potential to feel like a community is the size. For various reasons, subreddits tend to be larger than a forum. The larger the subreddit, the more it feels like yelling into the void of Twitter. It's hard to "know the regulars" when there are thousands of people talking in the same place at the same time.
Smaller subreddits have no guarantee to feel like a community, but they have the potential. If there are regulars that show up and moderators that fairly moderate[0], subreddits basically "fall back" into being a forum.
Of course, there is the elephant in the room of Advance Publications, Inc. [1] wanting to make economic profit and, therefore, push for Reddit to grow and overcome the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Most forums never really had/have the same dreams of world domination.
Overall, as someone who has been a moderator on a larger forum (about 10-15 years ago) and seen tight-knit subreddits and Discords, my advice is:
Regardless of the wallpaper, pay attention to the people and the customs of your community and strive to improve those. There's no guarantee it will flourish, but it cannot if enough people don't act similarly.
[0] e.g. delete spam, lock flame wars, and generally contribute to the well-being of the community. [1] The effective owners of Reddit.
The medium is different could be one of the reasons.
> My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in.
But that can be reddit as well. :)
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But you should also define what "nice" is to make sure we are on the same page. Arch linux forum is notorious for being known as hostile and rude. But they are just direct. They are damn helpful and cares a lot on helping. They expect you to do your due diligence before asking help is all. This is 100% direct towards help vampires which are bad for any community. But help vampires are going to rant on twitter and other places how horrible Arch folks are. Which is not true.
Like for example a project log where you are restoring some old car, solving problems and sourcing parts. In a forum it is cleanly self contained. On a subreddit it would be a bunch of scattered posts you would have to take the care to link to.
Reddit follows this infinite scroll idea, that everyone now seems to follow, that I absolutely hate. You can search for a particular topic but you can't see what topics were around it. But I guess it encourages quick one-off posts which increases engagement or whatever.
With reddit and other modern platforms, if it doesn't happen in the same 12 hours then it's old news.
There were certainly conflicts and power-tripping moderators on those boards, but on balance I don't think the downsides outweighed the upsides. If anything, the conflict just made the sense of community more real. Being a regular carried with it a sense of obligation.
I have revisited the surviving boards from my past, most are limping on, but none of the regulars I remembered were to be found.
I still hold a vague hope that the old threaded bulletin boards might be revived some day.
The community in question was Russian, so it migrated not to FB, but to VK, which is essentially the same. It did not migrate there because members found VK to be a better platform for their community though - they just started using VK to communicate with their peers, were spending their time there and gradually stopped visiting forums.
Reddit never gained much traction in Russia, and in 2010-2012 it was for the nerdiest of nerds. One was way more likely to frequently visit some forum than Reddit back then.
Even if a group just sticks to using email, it is better over the long term. People in the group are forced to take on responsibilities of maintaining the email list and content. Passing that information on as they leave. You can also scale up the organization, make it more formal. Start collecting dues, and paying for server space. People take pride in their roles, and the organization.
Here we disagree and you are wrong ;-)
Of all the old forum lore most of it is lost for the overwhelming majority of internet users.
Some copies exist on old drives here and there, some exist in the internet archive but nothing has been migrated to newer platforms.
Mailing lists were for a long time conserved by Google but forums just disappeared.
If you think about it with an archivist mindset there are definitely plenty that was lost to time. But that will happen just from natural churn, even if the total is still healthy. And in this case as far as I can tell it is healthy. People talk about all kinds of things in hosted forums of various kinds. I'd be very surprised if the total forum traffic on the internet hasn't been on a steady rise forever, it just rises slower than the total.
Like...if IRC was still the height of community, many of the IRC communities that were the most popular in 1998 would still be dead and gone now. Their archives would probably still be lost (it's not like we were better at archiving then). Like for any particular community that you can look back on and see people moving away from it into something else, I suspect people would still have moved away - they just would have moved away to a new IRC instead of...twitter or github or discord or whatever.
It just seems, to me, that people see normal cyclical community transition and blame the fact that it happened at a time when new kinds of communities were rising. I am not convinced that the two have much to do with each other.
We also didn't have this kind of massive centralization where most of the global internet traffic goes to Google, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc.
Sure you can find tiny spots on the Internet with 10 people. It's still not the same at all as to what is used to be.
Internet is now so much more than it used to be. Before you had to have much more knowledge to accomplish some things. It was not hard to learn but it was not accessible to everyone.
I see it like fetching a water from the creek or turning on the tap in your kitchen. You will get water in both cases. The first one requires more effort.
When you’re away in the creek, they are discussing whether using creek water and locking them in the kitchen is at all legal or moral. Do you even have any idea how much all that costs to them, freepourer?
I had a black and white TV with no remote for most of my child hood. I remember it with nostalgy but I don't miss it. I had a TV with cathode tube until some 4 years ago. Then I switched to LCD TV but I had LCD monitor for some 16-17 years at the same time.
You either knew your communities through hear-say or search engines (read "The" search engine) found them. For a long time advertisement or the "attention economy" was not a thing.
Nowadays original content is hard to find and very much concentrated: Reddit, Stackoverflow. As search engines no longer seem to find relevant content from sites which do not pay add fees, there is no traffic to these sites.
In a sense money made the internet thrive and ruined a lot at the same time.
New internet is where any useful information about said product gets buried in marketplaces and producer pages, following half a dozen paid-for ads.
Ads appeared as a curiosity in 1994 but didn't start taking over until around '96, which is when the ad networks started to become more industrialised with tracking and ROI metrics (of a sort).
New Internet is where the primary content is ads and behaviour mod. Virtually all big-reach content is only there to make the ads and behaviour mod work.
And of course the goal of Meta is to personalise ad delivery even further and make it even more intrusive and impossible to ignore.
This isn't just a technical difference. There's a huge difference in culture and motivation. Old Internet was about exploration, play, and sometimes debate. New Internet is about exploitation, driven by psychological and emotional manipulation.
In Europe GDPR was the last strike, nobody is going to maintain forum while being forced to be responsible for "Integrity and confidentiality" of registered user's data. Who will risk huge fines because phpBB has some bug and "precious" user data like first and last name were leaked? Who will deal with "right to be forgotten" requests, who will respond with requests to download user data and so on - even if software has such capabilities, responding to user requests is time consuming and big no-no for hobbyists.
End result is that everything that is happening, is happening on Facebook, maybe Reddit, obviously there are niches, like HN, but there is less and less of them.
What’s needed is a “fast track” compliance package for individuals, small businesses and online communities. Something like a cookie cutter privacy policy along with a rule book for simple applications without trackers and where all PII is personally and transparently entered, edited and extracted by the data subjects themselves, like in your example.
That’s good enough for most applications, and great for entrepreneurs to not have to think about GDPR until they have enough momentum to warrant getting lawyers.
Recently I've started noticing people hosting gopher sites and I've actually noticed two different people specifically mentioning they have finger support on their servers! This was especially surprising since I haven't heard someone mention finger since the 90's. Very cool.
I also cleaned-up the weird formatting of the Gopher+ protocol and put it on github as a formatted markdown file since it was never and official RFC so trawling through an unstructured txt file when trying to implement the protocol was a pain: https://github.com/gopher-protocol/gopher-plus
Hope it is useful for someone implementing new gopher code like I was! :)
Now I'm granting information (IP-Address, rough location with it, content of the group) to Facebook without having the slightest desire to do this.
That is what I mean when I say we did not lose the old internet - it's more available to us than ever, but people choose not to use it. Like...it is not "lost," it's unpopular. I agree with you about all the drawbacks of WhatsApp, but it sounds like your community doesn't.
Instead of spending our extra processing power and bandwith on useful stuff, we spent it on tracking and JS frameworks and other bullshit.
Images took ages to download on 56k. Performance today is vastly better.
There are cases where progress has moved backwards eg. new buggy JS Reddit, but I by no means have rose tinted spectacles for the past.
Most forums shut down because they are unsustainable, and the reason they are unsustainable is that the current mobile/social media vortex is hoovering all the attention. This leads to a negative spiral where people don't make good self-hosted forum software / community software anymore and so on.
I would push back on this quite a bit. Many of the posts and discussions on HN are political masquerading as science.
> The loud politics minorities are so numerous now that they can easily sway the attention of even niche communities.
I kinda know what you mean, but my memory of the 90s / early 2000s is that loud political minorities were everywhere and commonly created a lot of drama in communities. It was just rare-er for...the moderators to step in? Often because they were the loud political minority who had opinions that people felt were divisive.
I think I've spotted the problem!
That's what I want the Internet to look like for my younger family and friends. It'll probably never happen exactly this way, but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends. I know what their smile would look like because that was once my smile, too.
You are not Amazon. In the unlikely event you become Amazon, you will be able to rearchitect. Trust me, Amazon did.
The old web never went away, and the "new old web" will either fail to become popular or well become the "new new web". Eternal September is a social phenomenon and can't be solved with technology.
(I've never had an ISP that allowed hosting HTTP servers in its TOS. But I've always hosted HTTP servers, and I've never had any issues. FWIW Gemini servers are also servers.)
The people that actually know what they are doing have to pay more but I never hear from them.
Except, because I came with my own modem, they won't let me get the static IP. They would need to come back to my place and replace my modem with their own version of that same modem, they tell me, before they will be willing to take my $50/month to give me a static IP.
I told them I would agree to this if they would at least not charge me for the modem, but apparently this is not possible. I might try again one day, but really am just waiting until my area gets the local electric company's fiber connection they'll be rolling out in a couple of years.
Yeah it's nostalgia speaking here, there's always gonna be hobbyists but the internet is now gonna be what it is today, massive conglomerates fighting for attention/eyeballs and monetizing it either through ads or pay services.
However, I think you're making a mistake that I also make quite often, of conflating the use and mastery of the technology required with the actual end goal.
Lots of people might like to create their own dedicated websites focused on some particular interest of their own. Very few of them have any interest in Apache, Amigas, FreeBSD, servers, operating systems, bandwidth, IPv6 or any of the technology that would underpin them doing this.
Hence ... Squarespace ;)
We (computer technologists in general, and web folk in specific) failed to make running servers a trivial matter, and as a result in 2022, the honest truth is that running your own website no longer has much to do with any of the skills we might have smiled about back in the day. At least not for 99% of the people who don't already do it but might somehow have an interest in the idea.
Elaine Benes : [yells] Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert, and just die already! DIE!
J. Peterman : [surprised] Elaine, you don't like the movie?
Elaine Benes : [shouts] I hate it!
[the audience shushes Elaine]
Elaine Benes : [shouts back] Oh, go to hell!
You need a session cookie for the login function the user uses? - Use a cookie. No banner needed.
The user puts something in their shopping basket? - Use a session cookie. No banner needed.
You want to store information, not required, in order to identify the user again even though they didn't login, maybe to share the identity with an ad network? - You need a cookie banner where the user can opt out easily.
If your shop just sells them a virtual thing there is no need to collect personal information.
If you ask for the address and more or less directly print it on the label and then delete again it is a bit of an edge case where no explicit confirmation might be needed, however having a good data policy is good practice anyways and then having the extra checkbox in the order flow is not a big deal.
Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?
I'm not sure. I guess if one trusts the default logging settings on the server software to be compliant, and only uses static HTML, maybe that's adequate? But as soon as any third-party code or data provided by some other server gets involved, it's hard to know what might be logged elsewhere as a result of visiting your site.
I mean, would an old-fashioned web visitor counter be compliant? It's tracking something in order to provide that number.
It is a complication, but I believe it's worded so that small companies and individuals are immune from its consequences.
That said, an IP address is a shitty device to detect unique visitors. Session cookies, as long as you aren't trying to correlate them to usage patterns and such, are more reliable (you can tell that this is the same phone jumping networks, or you can tell apart users coming from behind multiple layers of NAT) and anonymous.
A large proportion of folks on HN seem to think GDPR is "out to get" everyone rather than a set of common sense regulations that should not at all be a concern for an individual who's serving a blog or personal site and doing nothing to collect PII/track their visitors.
I don't understand why this view is so prevalent.
Fearmongering from those actually affected by these common sense regulations.
I think we underestimate the power of PR way too often.
Last I've read GDPR itself it's been way clearer than any of the Terms of Service written by the very same companies who complain that GDPR is too incomprehensible.
Of course reality is more particularized and varied, but in the big picture I think GDPR and other threats to surveillance advertising is treated as an existential threat to an entire class of skills, skills that can buy houses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135264 "GDPR penalty for passing on of IP address to Google by using Google Fonts"
It's absolutely true that using Google Fonts will cause a user's IP to be shared with Google, and that this is a violation of the GDPR. But having to review content at this level of detail is burdensome for individuals or small organizations putting anything onto the internet.
The CCPA doesn't apply to personal, not-for-profit sites.
I don't think the self-hosting people with their own domains ever went away. They're all still out there.
The difference is that the internet isn't just for those people any more. Everyone is online, and the average person has no intention of learning how to host and maintain and design their own website when they can just as easily post the same content on an easy to use platform.
A lot of the nostalgia in this thread isn't so much for the technologies of years past. It's for an internet that was just for us nerds, without the regular people participating.
Pretty much. It’s painful to watch the mass commodification of a technology you love, but that’s how the world advances.
It's just that a lot more inconvenient to have and manage one for most people.
Fix that, and you might have a chance of competing with big corporations.
(In the old days we had "web rings", but I'm afraid that's not going to work today)
I don't mean that snarkily: I have at least 2-3 webrings on my personal link page, and neocities is home to literally hundreds more.
You're supposed to take your time checking out cool shit people make for the love of it.
Nothing's really changed, in the sense that there's nothing stopping you (or anybody else) from running your own server that serves up simplehand-written HTML, if that's what you want to do.
You can probably even do it on your phone, but I wouldn't hold my breath for the app to get accepted to any official app stores.
Personally, I think the UI on phones is atrocious, and would never want to use one for any kind of development work, but to each their own.
When the OP said
> but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends
I think he meant actually running the serving of the content from the phone's hardware, not actually doing the development itself on the phone.
Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. These chronologically organized articles and content have dominated web content and social media ever since.
As far as I remember web 2.0 was all about user generated content spruced up with Ajax experiences:
Blogs (chronological as opposed to more freeform web sites) were arguably the first.
The comments, follows ("blog rolls"), tagging, ratings and third party sites providing the same like del.ico.us and digg.
RSS also was a web 2.0 thing in my mind at least.
I think most people classify Facebook as web 2.0 as well but in my mind they aren't as much web as a silo built on web technology.
Reading this thread feels like everyone is anchored to whatever methods were popular at the time they entered the internet as being the peak. The BBS people think it was all downhill after BBS declined. The self-hosting people think it was all downhill after sites like Geocities/Tripod/Xoom became popular. The Geocities people think it was all downhill after blogging platforms became popular. The blogging people think it was all downhill when social media became popular.
I think there's a heavy dose of nostalgia coloring the opinions in this thread. What people really yearn for isn't Geocities or Usenet or whatever. It's the feeling of excitement that came from first getting immersed in the internet when it was all new to you.
> Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. These chronologically organized articles and content have dominated web content and social media ever since.
I don't see the problem with chronological ordering. Most of those platforms and sites make it easy to search for related posts. Worst case, the author can just drop some hyperlinks into the posts to tie them together.
Curated and organized websites tend to fall out relevancy and decay very rapidly. Might as well just let people post as they see fit and then we can find it by searching.
Certainly there is nostalgia.
But back then the web was not controlled by add financed mega companies - and the dreams of the teens using it, were not mainly to become a influencer. Meaning getting somehow famous and then sell that attention for - advertisement.
However, I do think there is a lot of lost value due to today's "search for it" attitude replacing curation. Yes, curation takes a lot of work, but that also makes it more robust against SEO spam and such. But I also don't think it added enough value that people would pay for it - original web companies were benefiting from wildly optimistic funding numbers for "eyeballs" and display ad rates that are never coming back.
There was non-commercial curation back in the day, DMOZ was the most prominent example. In general, commercialism was very rare on the early Internet. "Business" sites were thought of as somewhat exceptional, not the norm.
(Specifically, Livejournal was the tipping-point between blogging platforms and social media, Myspace was unquestionably downward, Facebook is the antichrist pure and simple.)
I have no problem with chronological or hierarchical content. Whatever the author wants to put out, is their prerogative.
What I have a problem with is walled gardens, stalking-as-a-business-model, and arbitrary automated deplatforming with no recourse.
Big social media and especially recommendation algorithms have ruined much of what made the old Internet fun.
There's no longer the discovery or organic sharing; everything is just shoved down your throat by a soulless algorithm.
Sometimes that's a good and useful thing, like with search engines. Clearly not always though.
Also there was a lot of pushback and poo-pooing the human element; lots of well-regarded (at the time) people saying that there was no future in human-curated content, and I know that I (as a young person) believed them. Look at the cool stuff they were making; they have to be right! They're smart adults, they would know, right?
It just stopped being fun to curate.
You could also work backwards from what you stated. For someone who first experienced digital connectivity via BBSes, would they also state the Geocities "era" was better than the blogging platforms era? Perhaps?
Your points about nostalgia I sort of agree with but this part I take issue with. Many sites use blog software which does the whole chronological ordering. Unless the site's particular blog theme exposes archives, a sitemap, or the author meticulously tags (and the theme shows tags) it can be stupid hard to navigate around blog-like sites.
Blog-like sites also tend to have a partial chronological list of posts at the root of the site. If you're writing some personal journal or topical things that makes sense. For someone writing about some particular topic(s) this is a navigation anti-pattern. It doesn't matter if the latest post on Topic A was posted on Monday. As a reader interested in Topic A you want all of the posts on it. Most blog-like sites make this challenging to find or don't expose it.
I don't really like "just search" as a replacement for categorical organization because most search sucks anymore. That might have been ok for Old Google, before the DoubleClicking, but now it's just another navigation anti-pattern.
Interestingly, had Web 2.0 concepts been implemented a bit better by CMSes, navigation of sites could be ably handled by user agents. A site with an OPML/Sitemap XML pointed to with an "alternative" meta tag could let a user agent (or service) build nice navigation for sites automatically no matter how the blog-like CMS organized the HTML.
Consider that one of the premier features of the Jetbrains IDE is "search everywhere" which will search command help text for you as well and then return the command as a possible result - much easier to describe what you're trying to do and be led to the exact command, then try to understand the mind of the person who did the categorization.
I wonder how much of this is still true.
Google results from a few years ago were much better than they are now. That's a combination of SEO ruining the results by Google assuming anything not hosted on a megaplatform is suspect and not showing it plus SEO ruining results by still being there in them despite that, but it happened.
If someone made a curated list of interesting small sites by category, it would be a lot more useful now than it was before that happened.
Pipe dream: If someone wishes hard enough, maybe we can convince the Apollo guys to leave Yahoo alone so it can return to its roots as (surprise!) a directory.
This helps individual sites, but says little about why the overall quality of links has nosedived. Who they link to continues to matter, except that now there is so much noise this is very difficult to get right unless you are extremely clever, lucky, or probably both.
For news or personal diary-format blogs, it makes sense, but I agree. Why did the blog become the default way to present a page on the internet? Aside from serving as an indicator of 'freshness,' publication date usually has no relation to the content I read. It's weird that most content is organized around publication date by default.
I like reading old bike websites with stories about touring and such published around the 90s [1][2][3]. Most sites back then had a small section called "News" with short blurbs letting readers know about the status of the author, or new content added to the site, but it was not the main content itself. Content was usually organized in a way that makes sense to humans, rather than feed aggregators and content recommender systems.
It's so much better to explore a site by navigation through a few index pages. Ken's site [1] is especially a pleasure to browse. Right on the home page he lists his directories along with straightforward descriptions of what you'll find in them. On a directory page will be a list of pages organized under subheadings, and each one has a brief description. To me, this may be peak internet. It's easy to get a sense of what's there, how to get to the part of it that interests me, and doesn't keep me on a treadmill searching for something I want to read co-mingled with everything else.
I can't help but think that if WordPress was the default when Ken decided to make a website, it would be much worse. Each page does have a tiny 'last updated' date at the bottom, but as a reader 30 years later, the publication date has no relevancy to me any of the content here. It would be a pity to center everything on the site around that minor detail. And adding tags or category labels to blog pages usually doesn't help. It still squishes is all into a feed, just a subset feed.
[1]: https://www.phred.org/~alex/kenkifer/www.kenkifer.com/bikepa...
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I know the feeling. Even though I use Hetzner and OVH I also host stuff in my home office. Ordered business 1gbps fiber line with static IP for $120 CDN per month for that.
Wow. Do you know if there's any enthusiasts out there doing this? A phone would actually be a great hosting device for tinkerers. It's always on, always connected, and supports IPv6.
There is however this starlink dashboard hosted by awlnx on starlink and its IPv6 only. https://starlink.awlnx.space
Isn't this easier to this than it ever was?
Granted, my 'server' is a VM in a server farm thousands of kilometres away, but I installed the server and wrote the HTML. What's even better is that he server was caddy and the html is html5 - both a marked improvement!
In the old times, you could only host content if you were really good with the technology. The people who had websites were people who knew how to set up and run a web server, and to compose the HTML content that was being served. Similarly, communities who ran BBS forums, mailing lists, IRC, etc. all needed at least some people who could set up and manage the technology for them.
Centralized services (Web 2.0) changed that. Now all of a sudden you didn't need to run your server --- you could just type some text and click some buttons to put up a blog on a shared service (myspace? blogger? wordpress.com?). You didn't need to run your own forum or mailing list or chat rooms, you could just put your community on an existing service that provided that (Google groups, FB/Whatsapp/<insert your IM> Chat). Need a forum? You have reddit. What is Twitter if not just a collection of mailing lists that you can openly subscribe to but not post on? Centralization allowed the vast majority of people to do what they wanted to do while "outsourcing" the technology part to somebody else, because most people don't care about the technology they care about their content.
The problem with the modern decentralized web (3.0?) is that we haven't focused on solving the real problem --- making it easy to manipulate _content_. If anything, setting up a Web 3.0 presence is _harder_ than it was on a centralized service, and as long as it remains harder, the new "old" Internet will always be a niche.
Your prediction could come to pass only in the case of the open backend being tied to a massively popular service that could compete with those giants
I've built my career on trying to explain this human element to technical people, and if anything, my job security only improves year over year. I see this same attitude in the Linux community: a willingness to work around UX issues because of perceived benefits in other areas. This is why Linux remains such a niche OS for consumers. No user should ever, for any reason ever, have to open a CLI to install a program. But try arguing that on any distro forum and expect a world of hurt.
I don't see what's particularly difficult with hosting a static or mostly-static site, and why you'd have to be really good with it (many early content creators weren't). With Apache shared hosting (where your domain, certificates/acme, and basic htaccess are setup for you), this is a matter of putting a couple of HTML and optional CSS files into your document root via ftp/sftp back in the day, or scp, or WebDAV. And HTML is really not that complex a format (or at least used to be before responsive/mobile web), being based on SGML which was designed as structured text format that can be created with a plain text editor in a way that's being taught in secondary school for decades now, and tips available in magazines etc.
On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit).
Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without needing to do anything special.
Discoverability is a big part of why the independent web is struggling. And it's not just big tech's fault, people are really bad at linking to each other. I've been trying to raise awareness about this[1] and it has made a bit of a difference and a couple of dozen sites have taken me up on my call to action, but people are still really shy about linking to pages they like even though I'm sure nobody minds getting linked to.
Overall I feel classic search as well as community aggregation (like reddit) suffers from being too manipulable. You just can't find good content produced by humans over there anymore.
I've been experimenting with various alternative paradigms. I think there probably is a better way, but I honestly don't quite know what the answer is just yet. You've got to contend with link rot as well, which is the bane of manual curation.
[1] https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/19-website-discoverability-c...
I have a feeling the "answer" is "all of the above" options; the ability to choose what discovery/recommendation mechanisms to use. Being intentional about which lens your viewing your recommendations through. Being able to easily swap between lens. Allowing for corporation owned lens and community owned lens. Allowing yourself to look at an issue through the lens of an individual or institution that you trust.
> people are really bad at linking to each other I wonder if the underlying point here is that the initial set of recommendations comes from small "communities". The readers of a certain blog suggest similar content to others in a non-spammy way. An independent music label links to artists that they enjoy listening to. I think there's missing infrastructure that makes it hard to form these communities though; any barrier to entry makes it less useful. I could see the "web3 ownership economy" thing helping here if it ever becomes a thing; creating this infrastructure as a side effect of the other stuff they want to accomplish. It'd be like if a subreddit was automatically created for every content creator, which could then be used to find recommendations of similar content.
Same problem with information discovery—trust, reputation, it’s all the same social mechanism. Any public signaling will be degraded by information asymmetry. My point is that content discovery is a hard problem.
Ironically, this is something that the "smart contracts" powering some future development of Web 3.0 might eventually solve. By making it possible to verifiably put real-world money behind one's assertions and trust assessments, these problems are significantly reduced.
The idea of merely trusting people because they’ve spent money is hilarious in the face of propaganda and advertising.
They're called prediction markets, and they already exist!
The old web was simple, but it was also small.
It's great if you're Amazon or Google Ads which basically serve the long tail. They benefit from the entire tail.
A page like this is absolutely fascinating, but not something you'd ever find on the major platforms, and also isn't helped at all by Google Ads: http://www.jamesriser.com/Machinery/Machinery.html
Incentivizing good behavior and disincentivizing bad behavior has _always_ been the challenge on the net. People are getting emotional about SNR on the Web these days because it's much more ubiquitous in our lives, but Usenet and Email suffered from the same spam problems the web faces. Usenet faded away but Email also became, in practice, highly centralized the way the Web became, because the problem of spam (whether commercial or by crazies) is so hard to fight.
Always has been. Probably always will be.
Expecting any internet community to put out more than 10% of good content is an exercise in futility. The only reason why it seemed so much more engrossing and interesting when you arrived on the scene is that you had not acclimated to the room yet, and you were consuming the best, easiest to acquire thought morsels that the community had scrounged out of the trough and recycled until it could stand the test of time within that community.
Then, once you have consumed that bit of the best, you think the rest would be like that as well but instead you find yourself in a room full of people who all know the same things and think similar thoughts, and you season along with them, getting the better secondary and tertiary thought morsels, and maybe contributing some yourself. And then, finally, you see bright fresh faces coming in, following the same trail you followed, coming to the same wrong conclusions you came to, and you think, "There goes the neighborhood" and tell yourself how good it used to be when you were ignorant and didn't know any better.
Eventually you reach the next point, which is realizing that it was always like this. You just didn't know any better. Now you know better, and you also know there is nothing you can do about it. You can stay and help others enjoy their Halcyon days, or you can flee in search of greener pastures.
Suffice it to say, the internet has always been terrible and it has always been great, because it's full of people.
If done correctly, they can provide the 'manual moderation' needed for these smaller communities.
Actually side note one of my favorite ways to kill time is by going to https://wiby.me and hitting "Surprise me" and reading whatever comes up. I've really discovered some quirky but extremely fun spots on the web with it.
Is it really? I think that was true for a period of time, but that period had come and gone for the most part.
Google searches are pretty bad, and it's only a matter of time before it even loses its remaining relevance with normies.
Amazon, I can't really find much wrong with to be honest.
Reddit hung itself by its own rope with its redesign that turned it into yet another infinite scroll content site, taking the focus away from conversations and to memes and gifs. The site is a garbage can, and it's mostly crazies who are left. Reddit will remain relevant until people no longer use it as an alternative for finding real opinions that they can't find using Google. Its days are definitely numbered in terms of relevancy. You know it's bad when you're on your home feed and they shove in a live cam of a girl jiggling her rear end that you never subscribed to.
Facebook? I know almost no one under 60 who actually uses it or makes posts. Everyone's moved on to Instagram. I have 20 cousins and we communicate through Messenger (not my idea, I'd prefer Signal at least), but even a handful of them aren't even on Messenger anymore. Most of the groups are crap, though the Marketplace is halfway decent, which isn't hard to do when your only competition is Craigslist.
Twitter has remained relevant because of celebrities and journalists, and fewer and fewer people care about either of those groups anymore. More alternatives for different niches are going to pop up and while Twitter will never go away, it's well on its way to being nothing more than a sad joke.
> Discovery needs to be reimagined.
Right-o. As someone pointed out the other day, I think big search engines in their current form are on the way out. Hopefully we can move on to something that can rely on independent niche search engines instead of allowing megacorporations to be the gateway to the web. At this point I'm either using `site:` syntax with DDG or using the search features directly on certain sites. The only search terms I seem to get much useful for with DDG or Google is coding documentation. Anything else seems rigged and controlled.
Niche internet communities could exist when they weren't discoverable because that was the only reason people who mess them up stayed out of them. Keyword 'Eternal September'.
The internet is now almost entirely transparent and everything that is transparent is uninteresting, because the eyes of everyone are on it, and nothing that's actually fun ever happens in public.
" ...imagine you live in a town which has a high street filled with shops trying to sell you things, and a public library filled with books trying to tell you things. If you want to buy something you go down the high street to look at the shops, and if you want to read something you go into the library to look for a book. Both activities can co-exist - good libraries do not put shops out of business or vice versa. But you don't want both activities to happen at the same time - you don't want a library filled with salespeople trying to get between you and your books, because that would be distinctly unhelpful at best and downright annoying at worst. The problem is that the internet has turned into a city that is all shops and no libraries. Not even local independent shops at that, just giant out-of-town retail malls... "[0]
I am about the same age as the author of this piece. I think they are making a fundamental error with his comparison.
"Back in the day", radio stations, newspapers and television networks were the only actual public media (we could include zines perhaps, but they rarely had the printing capacity to reach a large audience). Their status was conferred by their capital requirements, legal status and in some cases, physical properties.
Today's internet gatekeepers only have the role they do because of network effects, and because people implicitly grant them that role. None of them have licenses from any government to do what they do (business license, sure; not a license to serve specific kinds of content the way that TV stations do).
The only thing preventing my voice from being heard more widely is that most people are watching/listening/reading in places I don't have the desire or capacity to conquer. But there are no hypothetical barriers to me becoming a wildly adored prophet, I just have to do the work.
I think it is both dangerous and misleading to make this comparison, but more significantly, it is also misdirecting. It leads us away from what we would need to do if we actually want to build alternatives, and instead draws comparison with utterly different media and legal frameworks.
I agree with this comment so much. I have zero desire to participate in most social media and I think it's giving them too much power to suggest they are limiting your speech, etc. The media has done a truly horrendous job by using tweets and social media as news. As if 100 people chiming in with an opinion on something has much relevance in a world of billions.
I prefer my own space online and don't need it to scale, or be seen by thousands, or even be liked. Hell, I don't even run analytics on my site so I might be the sole visitor and I'm fine with that.
Back in the day you could create your own radio station too or make your own TV content and do it relatively affordably. But reaching a massive audience was multiple times more difficult and required help of one of the gatekeepers.
With the internet you can be heard more widely and cheaper yet (comparatively) but again if you want to really reliably reach a giant audience you again need the permission of the gatekeepers.
If modern politics have proven anything it is that you are not gonna become a wildly adored prophet without using a lot of different mega huge social media platforms no matter how hard you try.
This is not true.
An entity which raises the ire of Facebook, Google (Web search, YouTube, and/or the Android marketplace), Apple (iOS marketplace), Amazon (AWS, publishing, retail), Cloudflare, other major hosting and service providers, etc., will have a hard time or high costs reaching an extensive audience.
Gatekeeping isn't specific to a single role or function, it's a property which emerges through cost structures, network effects, access to capital or talent, regulatory and political sway or vulnerability, and numerous other factors.
In an age of print, presses, paper, and distribution were limiting factors. Where these were controlled, fixed costs of production (writers, illustrators, editors) were amortised over the large number of copies which could be produced of a single issue or publication, and advertising attracted on that basis. Today, technical expertise in building infrastructure and support systems similarly is difficult to attain, but amortises technical staff and paid content (if any) across not and audience of merely thousands or millions, but of billions in the case of Google and Facebook.
It's possible for the equivalent of a zine to be produced and served to a much smaller audience (though one which would have made publishers of the 1860s, or 1960s, salivate), and at comparatively high per-member cost, though the absolute costs could still be low in most cases.
(Static sites and intelligent caching strategies can still make very-large-scale services on a shoestring budget viable.)
Discovery, promotion, engagement, and visitor insights / metrics are other areas in which today's media monopolies also acquire gatekeeper status.
Everyone on HN complains about everything being turned into a business but everyone also wants to create their own start up and turn it into a unicorn.
I have started an 'old internet' like website about 3 years ago and I love working on it. It is my space of creativity and freedom. If you want to check it out it is in my bio.
I think the reality is that no one really want these websites anymore.
Those NOT doing what is "expected" of "big money" need to a better ways to connect, support each other and work togther against those expectations.
But I'm also aware of being an exception. I'm aware that people, on average, don't like to run their own servers. So just let people be people. I don't like all this nostalgia about how good the times of BBS, IRC, RSS feeds or self-hosted websites were, because these things still represent they way I consume the Internet in 2022. People have changed all around, sure, hype mounts and dies, but I don't care. People are people, let them put all of their pictures and sensitive information on a computer run by a creep like Zuckerberg if they like. But I'm unwilling to compromise and follow this craze.
I have several personal websites, the oldest contains some fun and personal stuff since 1997 (https://web.archive.org/web/*/cobbaut.be) that is still found. One other contains books that I write and give as pdf for free (linux-training.be).
I also have a mastodon account.
I'll happily make money from my efforts, but my thoughts goes in direction of creating something useful and offer hosting for it, not ads. So far I have created "nothing" (at most something I created was used by up to maybe a couple of hundred happy souls for some years to simplify the life of a local community, and I didn't make any money from it).
I simultaneously want to downvote you for your dismissive attitude towards everyone here while I also want to upvote you to bring all examples provided to the front. I chose to upvote but now you know the reason.
Also remember: many people here are shy and won't post so I think there is probably a lot more going on.
Never ever have I thought of "monetising" them, I mean, even if I wanted that I don't see there being that big of a market for people interested in the location of Medieval villages in Walachia (even though some of them had first been mentioned in documents written during Vlad the Impaler's reign, maybe I could market that) nor for knowing where exactly were the locations and houses that used to belong to former Bucharest Jewish residents (that is until they were nationalised post-WW2), as I also have an interactive map for that.
I've worked for most of my career (~15 years now) in start-ups and small companies (that's what I think actually made me pursue those personal projects, I think working in a big company/corporation would have numbed me down) and I don't personally find unicorns that interesting, there's one located just down the street where I daily walk my dog and I don't feel any need to stand behind a big thing like that, I would have way less time to walk my dog plus I'd feel that experience would also numb me down, in a different way from working in a corporation, but numb me down nevertheless.
I don't, but I've been meaning to have one for a long time now. I even started and got a vps from hetzner but they blocked me. I can't really decide where or how I want to host it.
> Everyone on HN complains about everything being turned into a business but everyone also wants to create their own start up and turn it into a unicorn.
That's not true at all. Today I want creative communities and community-built software & hardware projects more than ever. I wouldn't mind having my own business that is beneficial to a community (same way e.g. how Olimex or Raspberry and PCB manufacturers are beneficial to people building open source hardware and don't have the means to fabricate circuit boards at home) but I don't think everything should be monetized and turned into business.
I think the future is modern tools + old school feel
The size of social media now is so gargantuan that almost every single member you get in an independent community will have been molded by it in some way, which is very different to how the webcultures of the day functioned.
My experience running a small community post social media explosion, is that most newcomers want to treat it like Twitter - Personal Edition. They want to engage in recreational outrage. They want to be obsessed with America-centered identity politics and put down other people for not joining 'their' side.
It's a far cry from the types of people I once met online. There is no sense of "The internet is not real life.", because, for so many of them, their internet handle is their real life identity, and any joke against it is a strike against their moral fabric and an attack on their very being.
I don't know when we started to take internet comments seriously, I only know that I don't like that at all.
I feel like the west forgot how to be pseudo-anonymous on the internet. If you take a look at Chinese or Japanese internet users they still mostly prefer distancing their meatspace self from their virtual identity.
However I do think there will be a Web 3.0 and it is going to come about when processing power, battery life, efficiency, global internet, and easy power generation all start reaching a critical point. Combine that with a general psychological backlash toward mega surveillance, concentration of power in massive corporate entities, and mass automation and we will be ripe for a world where low tech becomes stylistically cool again but with just the best of the tech world when wanted.
If you plucked someone out of ancient Rome and brought them to this society a lot of the technology might really seem like magic. I am imagining independent adhoc networks that can be easily setup to servicing a small remote village completely disconnected from the outside world and just as easily instantly connect that village to a high speed global network. And it all runs off a few solar panels or some other source of cheap power.
The decentralization of Web 3.0 will come about when we have the hardware to actually do things like that. When the ratio of cheap power generation to power use blows away what we have now. Who knows what crazy stuff people will come up with!
Or we could go the Wall-E route and it all goes to shit
Lets face it though - version point 0 is often a buggy mess. Bring on Web 3.1 !
But there is web3 and blockchains without proof of work
It might be true that things like Shopify help to resucitate it, but I'm skeptical. I also don't care about things "feeling" small when they actually vast: this is nothing more than a marketing (de|il)lusion, and does nothing to promote the kind of diversified, distributed form of a resilient, vibrant, equitable and opportunity-filled economy.
We have seen tons of boutique online vendors pop-up however. I wonder how the total diversity compares?
A new age "general store" that was a group of small online vendors getting together (shared ownership) might be an interesting way to resurge local business - imagine like a co-op but for small businesses all under shared physical locations. Products and vendors could even rotate out depending on the season and local population.
Ouch, head outside a major metro area sometime. There's small towns all over the country with a Walmart on one side of town and a Dollar General on the other with nothing but shuttered buildings in between save for the occasional fast food joint.
Walmart destroyed businesses in small towns. They bought up cheap land on the outskirts of town and leveraged their huge infrastructure to undercut all local retailers. The local retailers would be paying Main Street rents with little to no economies of scale. There's just no competing with Walmart in many small towns.
Jokes aside, I do not know if this is me getting older and becoming more grouchy and/or some of the tools (Gmail, Google Search, macOS/MacBook <whichever>) we've been using for a while are becoming more obtuse and less user (or power user) friendly in name of <some product goal>
A beverage dispenser has a good UX, but its usage is fairly restricted.
That number is how many AOL Dial Up customers there were in 2015. It's from this article - https://www.cnet.com/news/more-than-2-million-people-still-p...
Paying for the service is not the same as using the service. There are many reasons to pay for a redundant dial-up connection in case of an outage with your main internet provider. There are probably lots of people who had a dial-up account but forgot to close it. Some people probably did still use it, but for things they don't need broadband for (email, IRC, etc).
You can't use the existence of a handful of dial-up connections to claim we should be building web software for people on dial-up. That just shows you haven't thought about things enough.
What goals does today's crypto-token-powered "web 3" vision share with the old Internet? It's not enough to say "well it's decentralized" and do a handwave.
Consider the NFT exploration Moxie Marlinspike did recently:
https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
This is essentially a system that lets you buy DRM'd metadata that points to servers owned by a corporation funded by billions of VC dollars, and transactions are recorded on a ledger that spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these make-believe digital assets.
None of these things have anything to with the old Internet: cargo cult DRM, billion-dollar VC funding, enormous energy waste, artificial scarcity where none is needed.
That website on dial-up was slow because of real physical constraints, not artificial constraints erected to make VCs richer at the expense of the planet's ecosystem.
So I downloaded MetaMask, got everything set up, and went to one of the NFT marketplaces to try to make one. Uploaded the image and got a big scary warning:
> (paraphrased; I don't have a screenshot) This image was found too many times on the internet. If this image is not yours, this is ILLEGAL AND A VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT LAW, and may result in your NFT being removed from the marketplace.
How on earth is this decentralized? Like yeah, I get wanting to protect your "asset" from "theft," but what central authority gets to decide what copyright law we abide by- further, what happens when an NFT marketplace removes your NFT? Does it get removed from the blockchain? I legitimately don't know how this works.
The user experience is also TERRIBLE. I am rather technical (hell, I used to do Bitcoin back in like 2015, or whenever it was about $4k/coin) and still don't really know how the hell MetaMask works. I imported the wallet on my phone... maybe? The randomart image it showed initially was different, but apparently the iOS app just defaults to a different kind of randomart.
You also have to use the MetaMask browser on iOS. It sucks.
Also the MetaMask connect buttons barely work across different sites. It had a _really_ hard time telling if I had a wallet. Not sure if this is an implementation issue on the dev end but as a user it was super confusing.
Using crypto to sign transactions to verify my identity is actually a very interesting idea, I like it a lot. Much easier than creating a user/pass for every site- just click Sign and go. That's basically the only good UX of web3 as it stands.
We already have this with SSO though - what would be the difference? Decentralization? Though it should be possible to host your own SSO.
† You might be thinking wait, we don't want to be trackable. WebAuthn doesn't have any way of sending fingerprints to anywhere, the phone is using the biometrics to make this not work for bag snatcher, or for the guy snooping your desk while you go get a coffee.
Web 3.1 is probably coming but it is going to be something we have not fully figured out yet
None of it designed to make it easy or to make sense. Because if people realized they are being taken for a ride, no one will show up and empty their wallets. It's what corrupt businesses and dictatorships do. Confuse and conquer.
One NFT marketplace shows you an error message and therefore the technology is not decentralized? That's a bit of a stretch. That NFT marketplace might have restrictions in place for their own legal reasons, but using that as an excuse to say that the technology isn't decentralized is unjustifiable.
I agree. The only thing missing is a way to recover your account (wallet) if you lose or forget your password.
Ethereum, for example, is full of people building interesting things like off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs and actively working to make crypto less energy intensive and more useful. They don't want to sell you an NFT and it's not part of some elaborate rugpull- There are plenty of examples of people doing this important work because they legitimately believe that a world where fiat control is divorced from the levers of governmental power is a positive change.
There are also, of course, people trying to use those achievements as part of a weird shell game where the end result is giving gullible strangers nothing in exchange for something. That's sort of the human condition.
Exactly like crypto often is.
Don't criticize the tech, criticize the individual bad actors, like you did with Theranos.
One of the main talking points "web3" critics yell is "scams!", like they don't exist elsewhere.
If you do want to criticize the tech, leave the moral crusade out of it and say technically what is wrong with it, so we can have a technical debate about the feature in question.
It's the purest distillation of the "greater fool theory" in human history.
I'd rebuke your framing of leaving the morality of it aside. The more valid framing of a debate for new technology should be to prove that there are non scam-like applications of the technology that are superior to currently existing ones.
As in most things, the culprit is not technology, it's people. It's entirely possible to ignore the clear rugpulls and scams and just focus on the technically interesting parts. Quite a lot of people are quietly doing just that while everyone else is busy trying to scam each other and/or be religiously opposed to what amounts to a distributed database synchronization mechanism.
As a layman, I’m not touching crypto until I know what this means.
Yes, it's too complicated right now (so was https://www.!).
2) "zero knowledge" : Suppose I want to prove to you (or at least, give you very strong evidence) that I know a 3-coloring for the graph, but I don't want to give you any information about how to color the graph with 3 colors.
This can be done in a way where I first randomly permute the 3 colors, and then commit to a particular coloring without showing you anything about it (e.g. I give each node on the graph a random salt, and show you the hash of (the color and the salt appended) for each node ), and ask you to pick any two nodes of the graph. I reveal the color and salt for those two nodes, and you can check that they make the hash I said they did. If the two nodes are connected by an edge, then the colors I give have to be different (if they are the same then my proof is invalid and you shouldn't believe my claim that I have a coloring of the graph with 3 colors.)
By repeating this process many times (each time I randomly permute the colors/names-of-the-colors, and make a new commitment about each node), and each time you choose a random pair of (adjacent) vertices, then, if I didn't actually have a coloring of it with 3 colors, there's a high chance you would eventually find that the pairs you asked me to reveal, have the same color. So, if we keep doing this, and I'm telling the truth, eventually you should have strong evidence that I have a coloring for it, but without you getting any information about that coloring (other than that it is one) (because by permuting the colors each time, the only info you get about the nodes you asked about, is that the colors are different, which is already implied by it being a coloring.)
So, that would be a zero knowledge proof that I know how to color that graph using only 3 colors, with no 2 nodes having the same color.
(of course, the thing with coloring graphs is just an example, one which is relatively easy to give a protocol for.)
3) "non-interactive" : accomplishing the same sort of thing, except instead of us sending many messages back and forth like in what I described above, instead, I just do one computation (using the knowledge I have), and then I give you the output of that computation, and you can check that with some algorithm, and the algorithm says "yep" if I gave you a good output, and "nope" if I gave you a bad output, and, if I had the info I claim to have and used it for the input to my computation, then you will always get the result "yep", while if I don't have the info I claim to have, then the probability that I succeed in giving you a good output, one which would make your program say "yep", is negligible.
__
Hopefully that helps make the idea more clear?
You might be wondering why this idea is applicable to cryptocurrency stuff?
A number of reasons. Being able to prove that you have some information that satisfies a given property, without revealing the information, is fairly powerful.
It was the people participating in the network.
'They' decided on a course of action by doing what most of the people in the system thought was correct. That sounds to me like a feature rather than a bug. At the time the consensus was that the network was young and brittle and breaking things was expected and an 'undo' was appropriate, as evidenced by the fact that a small number of people didn't think it was a good idea, tried to fork the chain to test that sentiment, and pretty quickly faded into obscurity.
Any distributed system that relies on trusting a consensus of individuals will be vulnerable to the majority of those individuals deciding something you don't want them to decide. That's how consensus works (in Ethereum as well as any other crypto BTW) The reason crypto works is that once you hit a certain scale most of the users are interested in keeping the network working. The ETH DAO was an interesting time when ETH was enough of a 'toy' that dev environment stuff like the community agreeing to undo 'oopsies' was conceivable. For better or worse (probably better) ETH is no longer a 'toy' and those mechanisms for undos don't really work anymore.
Regardless of their intentions this is a bad idea and deserves every line of criticism it receives.
Governance, law, and financial regulation exist for reasons that programmers have no place or reason to replace.
Wether they wish it or not there is a centralization of authority that will happen. In Ethereum’s case either the oligarchs with the most money will set the rules, or more likely, actual governments with armies and the ability to enforce laws will.
That's a fair criticism, even if I don't agree with it. I don't think it's possible to imagine a world where consensus is shared widely enough that 'mutually assured destruction' of the financial network prevents transaction censorship, particularly when zero knowledge based networks allow validation of network transactions without knowledge of who is transacting, what transaction is taking place, or when it might occur.
>Governance, law, and financial regulation exist for reasons that programmers have no place or reason to replace.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that governance, law, or financial regulation should go away. Those things seem important. The governments of the world can enforce those things like they always have. They just lose the ability to manufacture more money when it's time to fight a new war or pay off one special interest or another (but only if most of the people participating in that society buy into the idea that the government is not a good steward of that power)
Imagine a world where the people ruled by a government have some say in whether they're doing a good job with monetary policy or not. I certainly don't have that today - I get to punch the 'RED GUY' or 'BLUE GUY' button on my voting ticket but neither of them are particularly interested in changing something that fundamental.
Sounds great if you want to buy things law enforcement would be interested in tracking down.
> Those things seem important.
Understatement of the year.
> Imagine a world where the people ruled by a government have some say in whether they're doing a good job with monetary policy or not.
Assuming you live in the US, then you do -- it's called democracy.
But giving power to a handful of rich people and asking them to make monetary policy is an oligarchy and it's not a good idea.
Oh geez, we should probably stop doing that then.
This is what I mean about giving a bunch of programmers/developers the power to choose new forms of governance/financial infrastructure.
These are social structures that affect everyone and shouldn't be given to developers no matter how well-meaning they are.
From that Moxie Marlinspike article:
> A crypto wallet like MetaMask, Rainbow, etc is “non-custodial” (the keys are kept client side), but it has the same problem as my dApps above: a wallet has to run on a mobile device or in your browser. Meanwhile, ethereum and other blockchains have been designed with the idea that it’s a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers.
> A wallet like MetaMask needs to do basic things like display your balance, your recent transactions, and your NFTs, as well as more complex things like constructing transactions, interacting with smart contracts, etc. In short, MetaMask needs to interact with the blockchain, but the blockchain has been built such that clients like MetaMask can’t interact with it. So like my dApp, MetaMask accomplishes this by making API calls to three companies that have consolidated in this space.
> For instance, MetaMask displays your recent transactions by making an API call to etherscan > …displays your account balance by making an API call to Infura > …displays your NFTs by making an API call to OpenSea
> Again, like with my dApp, these responses are not authenticated in some way. They’re not even signed so that you could later prove they were lying. It reuses the same connections, TLS session tickets, etc for all the accounts in your wallet, so if you’re managing multiple accounts in your wallet to maintain some identity separation, these companies know they’re linked.
> MetaMask doesn’t actually do much, it’s just a view onto data provided by these centralized APIs. This isn’t a problem specific to MetaMask – what other option do they have? Rainbow, etc are set up in exactly the same way. (Interestingly, Rainbow has their own data for the social features they’re building into their wallet – social graph, showcases, etc – and have chosen to build all of that on top of Firebase instead of the blockchain.)
> All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet. It doesn’t functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which began returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!
https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_im...
Right. In other words, what we have now sucks, but you shouldn't criticize it because we have this proposed scheme which might be better.
Web 1.0 it was the nerds saying it was going to change the world and the people with no knowledge of how the internet worked saying it was BS.
Web 2.0 for the most part just seemed to naturally happen without a ton of specific hype and was what finally got all the naysayers of Web 1.0 on board.
Web 3.0 is all the OG naysayers saying it is going to change the world while the nerds roll their eyes.
Personally I am looking forward to Web 3.1 :-D
There isn't much of an NFT resale market. There are minters, and there are suckers. Any chance to make money flipping NFTs was used up last year. NFTs may stay around as collectables, but to make money that way, you must have fans who buy your merch. You need to own an NBA franchise, be a famous performer, or have a major collectable brand.
NFT sentiment on Reddit has gone from positive to very negative in the last three months. The hype isn't working any more. Without hype, it dies.
Then there's enforcement. About twice a month, the US SEC brings the hammer down on some crypto-related crook.[1] They're still working through the Initial Coin Offering scam backlog. They'll get to NFTs as the complaints start coming in.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
This'll get almost as much traction as activists decrying HTTPS/SSL because it took more compute, and therefore obviously more pollution!
E.g., Sam runs a Web site and wants to charge each user some small amount, say, $0.001 up to $0.10, including users in foreign countries, for each visit. Sam is eager to let his users pay with some major NFT.
Joe wants to use Sam's site and other sites with such a charging technique so buys in whatever fiat currency his country uses, say, $10.00 worth of some NFT. Then Joe uses Sam's site and pays with some NFT money. That NFT tokens can be divided into many parts is crucial here.
Once a day Sam converts all his NFT revenue to dollars (or whatever fiat currency is used in his country).
So, net, the money flow is from Joe's fiat money to $10.00 WORTH of some NFT to Sam's revenue in NFT to Sam's revenue in his fiat money.
Point 1: The NFT is held by Joe and Sam for only a short time and is used only as a convenient way to move many small amounts of money.
Point 2: Neither Joe nor Sam cares what each whole token of the NFT is worth.
Point 3: Investors who want to speculate on the long term value of a NFT tokens have risks from "unknown unknowns".
Point 4: If each of 1 billion people do what Joe does, hold nearly all that NFT, and on average hold only $10.00 worth, then we have an estimate of the maximum the investors can make.
NFT doesn't mean "token". If you just mean "token", say "token"?
Unless you mean like, "tokens which represent a fractional share of a particular NFT" ? But why would you use this as the thing to denominate payment in?
If Joe has $5 worth of something, and Carl has another $5 worth of the same thing, and outcomes are equivalent if they swap what they have, then, the thing they have is fungible.
I'm a total novice in the world of NFT (Google says that abbreviates "non-fungible token"). You are way ahead of me. I'm such a novice that I don't yet even know how to use the words!
I don't yet fully understand your lessons!
Maybe roughly I have the scenario of Joe, Sam, and the long term investors correct.
AKA digital currency. For this we can simply use a digital currency (crypto or otherwise). NFT is irrelevant here, an extra unnecessary complication when the same thing could have done with the ETH chain it's already based on, or a new side-chain or many other methods.
P.S./Edit: This was still true for the early 2000s: back then, I was involved in a major relaunch of the site of a telephone carrier and the clients were scanning relevant Usenet groups for critiques in order to evaluate their success. (Surely, this wasn't the norm, but it still did happen.)
All of those filters meant a narrow spectrum of the population participated on the internet. It also meant the ratio of creator to consumer was much smaller. The market sold to itself (other creators), not just consumers; or in other words, the community existed to serve itself.
I think the same idea can be applied to any creative outlet (music, art..). As soon as everyone has access, and the old filters (e.g. the RIAA, publishers) are torn down, it loses its uniqueness and glamor and the culture collapses, morals aside.
The next "big thing" will have a high barrier to entry, whether it be costing a lot of money, or requiring a specific skillset that takes time to learn. It will attract driven people who live to create and build. And like everything else, the barrier will eventually be torn down leaving mediocracy in its place.
Its still running and still functioning as a social network.
The Internet is only as strong as its protocols, which is to say it is extremely strong because there are more than one protocol to use for the purposes of communication.
The crazy thing is, the cyclomatic complexity of dealing with communication over email versus through some web-based interface, is pretty much not comparable. Email is much easier to use - if you treat email with the respect it deserves. But I think so many generations of Internet users were taught to use email derisively, or non-productively, so it 'feels' like a downgrade to go back to text-based email. Top-quoting vs. bottom-quoting, rich text versus plain, X-headers versus custom .sigs, there is a huge list of things that can go wrong with email-based social networking, but ultimately the proof is in the pudding: we're still running. We still have occasional flame wars and the odd exodus of favourite members, but we also have regular returns of long-lost members who make their way back to the mailing list after a few years of hell on the other networks.
So, for 30 years, we've been doing the social networking thing just fine.. Functionally, we have the same degree of internal communication in our group as any Facebook groups - only, we're 100% in control of our own data and no third party can (easily) shut down the discourse. I consider this one of the factors for why we've survived 30 years as a group without implosion - there is no control point besides the mailserver itself, and that is protected by an admin whose understanding of human interaction precludes interfering when things get toasty ... so when people leave, they leave. We don't care, its not part of our business model to capture eyeballs, etc.
That said, we are pretty small and don't get many new members popping in, although we welcome it. Perhaps thats a blessing, maybe its a curse. We'll see in another 30 years, I'm guessing ...
You even have the 'The definitive list of lists (of lists)' https://github.com/jnv/lists - looks like the same old culture that moved over to a new home in the sun. (now this spaceship is very fragile, and might disappear upon any minor change of the EULA on github, matters as usual ;-)
Everybody mourning the "old" internet while posting on a text only news board with a great community of people, constant traffic, new inspiring stuff daily and best of all without ads or pervasive trackers.
For example, your index.html may look like:
<!-- #include virtual="/top.html" -->
<h1>My Website</h1>
<p>A bunch of content</p>
<!-- #include virtual="/bottom.html" -->
<html>
<head>
<title>My Website</title>
<!--other header info -->
</head>
<body>
<footer>
<!-- footer stuff -->
</footer>
</body>
</html>Anyways if it's a static site with little JS and not too many smallish images, that'll be plenty of bandwidth for a personal site. If a page load is 1MB (that's a lot for this sort of website!) that'll let you serve up to ~2.75 requests per second/86.4k requests per day which is a lot of traffic! And if the burst is double that, then your page load will merely take twice as long.
I love that the full page makes just 2 requests (1 html file and one favicon). 20KB transferred. 1 second to load. No JavaScript, no cookies, no dependencies at all. This, to me, is the essence of 'respect your visitor'. Kudos.
Sure in many cases one has to look at how much something is popular relative to the general population, but do you really need to think like that when talking about websites and forums? I mean, from an absolute point of view there are many more forums, personal blogs, rss feeds and independent projects than ever before, even if their relative popularity has declined. But what do you care? A forum hosting 300 active users is already incredibly crowded, it's very difficult you will get to know even half of all them in your own lifetime, why do you need everything to turn virally popular?
Would you want your local NIX club to suddenly jump from a few tens of members to thousands? No, because the point is to create a community. Who cares if some NIX club residing on Facebook has 100.000 members, ultimately what you care about is the one you go to every week/month and in which you see real people and talk real talk. We are not talking here about an industrial endeavor where if not enough users partake then production crawls to a halt worldwide, we are talking about buying a crappy computer, coding a few pages in simple HTML and buying a funky domain name for pennies. It will always be cheap and simple to host your own stuff, you don't need self hosting to become the next big thing to enjoy your life.
Yes! I couldn't have put it better. Great article.
> I realize that static websites like this were more popular in the internet's early days, long before the rise of social media and the emergence of user-created Wikis, and have now somewhat fallen out of fashion. However, there were a lot of static websites like this dedicated to Dave Gahan and Depeche Mode back then that had a level of quality that I just don't see nowadays. Sadly, many of them have disappeared or have been abandoned. There is something to be missed about websites like those, though, with their eye-catching graphics and pile of links that took you on a journey as if you were walking through a museum, and I want to bring that experience back through this website, as outdated as that experience may very well be.
Beautiful. Bring back the old internet.
In the mid 90s the Internet was a medium that only around 1% of the world population had access to [0].
Getting online wasn't just some casual thing, people had to invest, money, time and effort to get online, so the whole "online experience" used to be treated very differently.
As everybody had to jump trough these hoops to get online, there was usually at least some shared interests about people that managed to find each other online.
Contrast that with today, where thanks to smartphones the majority of the world (65%) have access to the Internet like the most normal thing in the world, in most cases no special knowledge or major effort required anymore to "get in".
That Eternal September-esque [1] change in culture can't be reversed. Maybe it could be emulated on way smaller scales, with a lot of effort and segregation, but that would defeat the whole spirit and purpose of it.
I miss things being presented via their own unique web sites as opposed to “pages” within the current top social network.
My two cents.
It is the kind of content I enjoy finding in a search or with marginalia explore.
Edit: I too have one of these sites were I write about things that interest me, technical and political. I also have no ads but I enjoy the writing (and don't write when I don't enjoy it, since luckily it doesn't matter) and I enjoy it when people get something useful out of it.
Irony: The opportunity, goal, purpose of my startup is to help people find such Web sites, especially little or focused ones, that they will like. Or the short description of my startup is to help people find Internet content they will like, say, via, roughly search, discovery, recommendation.
A novel part is that the site gets some new data via a likely so far unique iterative, interactive dialog, specific to each use, and then manipulates that data with some math I derived, likely new. A classic, but mostly neglected, advanced pure math result says that, in principle, the iterations should converge to what can be regarded as the right results!
For more, no key words are involved. Can argue that the results give the user the results, content, with the meaning they will like best, i.e., make some progress on working with meaning. So, the problem, the challenge is to respond to the explosion of Internet content, now often from specialized, focused, small Web sites.
For one more -- there are no user IDs, logins, or use of HTTP cookies. In particular, two users who execute the same dialog on the same day (i.e., before I add to the database) get the same results. I.e., for the users there is some relatively good privacy.
Here I'm just taking the opportunity of this OP to describe my solution.
I wrote the Web site code, in .NET, and as far as I can tell the code is ready for significant production. As in the OP and some of the comments already in this thread, my plan is, indeed, to run my own server, using Windows Server, SQL Server, and, for hardware, an AMD FX-8350 at 4.0 GHz. I'm adding data, am not live yet, and have not settled in a domain name yet.
What'd you think?
Just curious how you plan to make money off this. I think profitability is what has killed most recommendation ventures. It's easy enough to find something that's fun (like StumbleUpon). But they usually eventually self-cannibalize by inserting ads in the recommendations.
On the flip side, if you attempt to do some sort of gated boutique thing where you need a subscription to see the results, you may encounter resistance when you attempt to discover recommendations (assuming you're crawling by yourself, which you'd almost have to I think).
Don't mean to be a downer, but profitability is arguably the hard problem to solve in this space.
Yes, I saw StumbleUpon early on. I just intend and hope to do better pleasing the users.
So, it's recommendation -- maybe the user has heard of the content but wants the quality of the curated results.
Uh, now the Internet has a lot of specialized content (e.g., as in this OP) and, presto, bingo, that means that there are also some specialized AUDIENCES, e.g., audiences the mainstream media (MSM), back to TV, radio, and all the larger newspapers worked hard to ignore -- instead, they went for the mass audience. One general result is, even now, floods of URLs where less than 1% are of interest to any one person. Early on a solution is to pick an audience (of course, one with good demographics), and more generally just to have better means of helping, pleasing users.
It's discovery -- the user has never heard of the content but the dialog is good evidence that they will like the results.
It's search -- the user knows about the content, it's likely famous, will recognize it once can find, see it, but doesn't know where to find it, and it's not easy to find keywords that (accurately) characterize it. Can get some examples out of the fine arts.
The "interactive, iterative dialog", particular to each use, is supposed to be a more powerful, effective way to find, get to, have URLs for content the user will like. Here like is intended to be basically, short for, like the meaning of the content. The user may like the content for entertainment, information, curiosity, etc.
It appears that now both Google and YouTube have seen the basic problem and have their versions of solutions. I'm hoping that my techniques do better where their solutions work poorly or not at all. I'm not trying to replace or compete with where Google, YouTube, Bing, ..., StumbleUpon work well. I'm a sole, solo founder and don't have to be worth billions to be successful.
Yes, my plans are for my site to be ad supported. But I intend actually strongly to follow, say, the old newspaper standard of a wall between (a) the URL results for the users and (b) the ads. E.g., as in this thread of "old Internet", at least early on, the ad targeting is supposed to be maybe from only broadly the demographics or some such of my intended audience, essentially independent of the user or the data from their dialog, or hardly targeted at all.
Right, better ad targeting could yield more revenue, and maybe the dialog data could permit some especially good ad targeting, but NO WAY do I want to have even a hint of giving users URLs that help advertisers. Some such used to be called payola and was made actually illegal.
Or, so far, the code I've written to find the URLs to report to the users has nothing about ads.
Maybe the long term situation would be that for some use instances the dialog data and the reported content URLs would do well at suggesting what ads would be especially effective but no way would ads influence what URLs are reported. Or, the connection between URLs and ads is a one way street: URLs can be used to pick ads, but ads can never pick URLs.
Also- I applaud you on the way you plan on serving ads. I do know that there are mechanism by which one can serve relevant ads with high likelihood of these being useful hence clicked and yet without the need to build user profiles.
Yup, you bring up some good points.
In the usual senses, approaches of getting to know users, essentially I don't want to do that: (a) Users can regard uses of such data as a threat to, compromise with, and an invasion of privacy -- an important term but ill defined and with possible negative emotional reactions. (b) E.g., what a user did for the past month going deep into the NFL does not mean that they want the NFL for this visit. Instead maybe they want the NBA, a recipe for cheese popcorn, background music for a dinner party with her boyfriend, or an art print to hang over the sofa. Uh, what key words to type in to get an art print will like -- hmm ....
Assuming that their purpose of this visit is much like that of earlier visits can irritate users. (c) Using information on users personally can require cookies, a user ID, their IP address, fingerprinting, etc., all of which can irritate users, i.e., a bad taste in their mouth, a bad user experience. Quite broadly, one way to anger people, to insult them, is to let them know you believe that you have categorized them, that they are so simple that you can pigeonhole them. So, I want no hint of any such thing.
Ah, besides, maybe they are shopping for an art print to give to their daughter for her to hang over the sofa in her new house -- so the visit isn't even about the visitor but about the visitor's daughter! Fine with me!
So, instead of using general, old information about users, the interactive iterative dialog is to get data, some new data, I can manipulate to please the user for their interest that brought them to my site THIS time. The phrasing "Users who give the same dialog on the same day get the same results" is partly to have the user execute the dialog and still be comfortable about privacy.
In simple terms, my current guess is to have a narrow audience, e.g., maybe the BMW set. Then, sure, just from that, Cadillac, Tesla, Toll Brothers, Williams Sonoma, cruise lines, etc. may discover that their ads on my site are a bargain, have a quite good click thru rate. So, that would be targeting just via broad demographics.
I've always intended to announce going live at Hacker News and still plan to. But this OP and thread raise issues so close to my project that here I took the opportunity to outline my work and to ask for reactions. These days I'm gathering initial data, but there is some time to adjust some of the work. Maybe even more important, from the reactions here I can try to refine how I present this project to the public, e.g., so that the public or at least the intended users can understand how this project can help them and for me better to understand this project as others will see it.
This project has been delayed by unpredictable external events independent of the project -- the project work has been fast, fun, and easy while handling the external events has been a pain from the head down to the feet.
HN is likely the world's best collection, concentration of people to make perceptive reactions.
If you want to create and showcase your own stuff you have a ton more options than you used to, it could be nostalgic HTML pages with blinking colors or some slick thing on a prefab site builder, up to you.
I do think the retro-aesthetic is more of a statement than anything else. It's like the long hair of a hippie. Like there's no reason a hippie couldn't have a crew cut and think like a hippie and live like a hippie. Yet almost none of them did. For the same reason almost no small website has a bootstrap template.
The problem with the Bootstrap example is that Bootstrap is exactly the kind of overly-bloated, JS-heavy (depending on use) Web 2.0 tool that the "old web" spirit is firmly against. A hippie can live like a hippie and still have a crew cut, but using Bootstrap on an "old web" website would be like a hippie heading to a board meeting wearing a polo and khakis bought brand new at Banana Republic as they yell, "Fuck the man!" from their sports car.
Most of it did. It was dropped from search engine indexes and died from starvation.
But finding out that the death grip that major corps have on hosting costs, IP lawyers, data accessibility, regulators, search results, and on audiences will be the biggest obstacle to overcome.
I'm stoked to see what happens with the rebellion, even though I, like many other independents are a bit jaded about ranting that this was gonna happen years ago when nobody listened... hah.
Our best tools at this point are probably to bring back RSS and to re-establish more cost-effective independent hosting alternatives.
The old Internet is not a page with flashing colors and dancing babies, you can still create those today. It isn't geocities, or its newer counterpart neocities either.
The old internet is people making their own website. It's old because people surfing on the web today think that having a website is a business decision. Before it was just cool to own one.
I do miss the old days when you could run an open netcat on a popular port and every now and then get actual messages from people exploring the internet (burried under automated scanner attempts to collect banner version strings of course).
My method is not better against spam bots but it does suffer from a different type of them. For example, if a spider follows a link it sees of an existing comment, "...com/something.jpg/@say/..." then my system will interpret that as a comment. So... spam bots don't see it, but normal spiders can cause spam.
Really? I do. I spent the early years of the web trying to get all the new people who had suddenly joined the net to understand that the web and the internet were two very different things. I gave up after a while.
/rant
I’m still frying my body and rotting my brain but at least it’s different content.
Yes that won’t solve anything, but does it have to?
The only "nice" trend that is happening is that PC and laptop sales are slightly up. That and higher reliable network speeds might facilitate bringing back 'the old internet'. But as long as the web is still made for smartphones it will remain bland and boring.
Might be worth an unban, admin.
1. Have a computer in your house open exposed to the internet on port 80- port forward on your router.
2. Run an http server on that box. Apache is a reasonable choice but there are probably easier pieces of software out there to set up.
2a. Create an index.html or equivalent default page name and put some html in it even if it's just hello world- it can even be in plain text.
3. Technically you are now self hosted on the internet! Figure out your external IP from your router and point a browser to http://$YOURIP/ and you should see your page.
The next steps are optional but kind of required to have a "real" site.
4. Set up dns. Since you won't have a static IP from your ISP almost certainly, you will need to use a dynamic dns provider. Noip.com is a popular choice. Once this is working you can register a domain name with GoDaddy or whoever and then point that name to your dynamic dns provider. Now you can load up http://www.yourdomain.com (or whatever tld you choose)
5. Set up https. For some reason beyond my comprehension google is forcing everyone to use https if they want to really exist on the internet in any real way even if they are just serving static pages. Let's encrypt can you there for free. Now you can go to https://www.yourdomain.com and your page will show up and Google et al might even consider you to be a real presence on the internet and index you one day.
Setting up Apache properly is a much bigger PITA for anything other than a static html use IMHO.
In the 90s I taught myself html to build out stuff, but never had to host anything.
Apache? I've heard it a thousand times. Couldn't tell you what it was.
So, yeah. Assume I'm yr mom.
This is also a good example of why web2 came to be. Cuz people like me have zero idea what's being talked about.
I don't think anyone was lamenting that its not super duper easy to create a freestanding website these days, just that its becoming increasingly difficult to without requiring centralized services- most notably ssl.
web2 also generally refers to web2.0 where we moved from static webpages and webpages that could only really change in significant ways if you hit refresh, to dynamically updated webpages, initially using AJAX, but there are now a myriad of ways to do so- but this allowed clunky web pages to have capabilities that are more or less at parity with desktop applications. Then again with all this web3 talk, what "web2" refers to may get distorted over time.
But yeah- running your own web infrastructure is work and hence why wordpress and other blog service providers, as well as even things like Geocities were/are so popular. While it is a lot more common these days, but even having a computer that was on 24/7/365 was not common and this was reason enough to use a hosted solution. Most of my friends have some sort of media server setup that is on 24/7 these days, but we are admittedly likely still outliers on this, compared to entirely non-technical people.
Hundreds of people a day read my rantings (and I probably owe most of them an apology for that) but the point is you can still make a 'personal' website and grow an audience even now, you don't need an 'alternative' web to do that, you just need to put in the effort.
The generation born after social media began their socialization and individuation journey in life on snapchat/tiktok/instagram. This generation doesn't give a shit about google.
I think the "web" is dying, paradigm of using a browser to access websites is almost gone by comparison to a decade ago. The internet is mobile-centric. All this metaverse shit is trying to get ahead of the platform curve. The success there depends on if it gets traction with 16-24 year olds.
(full disclosure zero research has gone into this, I didn't live through web 1.0, and I know nothing about how the web works).
In my head, web 1.0 was the automation of one-way communication. You could request a site and the equivalent of a newspaper was sent to you; and anyone else who requested the same site was sent the same newspaper. If you wanted to order something you had to call the phone-number listed on that website, same as if you had seen an ad in a newspaper. Two-way communication existed but it was the equivalent of a really fast mail and was for the most part was between people over the internet rather than with the internet.
Web 2.0, suddenly if you requested a site you get a different version with different ads than someone else making the same request; without a person choosing for you to see those different ads. You can place an order and human doesn't get involved until that item needs to be picked off the shelf to be transported in meat space. Now the internet is 2-way communication, you make a request and it responds to you in seemingly unique ways. The internet itself is replacing some of the human effort that goes into communication. Before it was just transporting human information, now it's responding.
So what's left now that the internet has conquered communicating in two-directions through space? Time. If you want information (ideas, values, whatever) to transmit through time you create institutions. Something that is resilient so that it survives mostly intact and that is enforced to ensure compliance. Web 3.0 seems to fit that. Immutable (if desired), enforcement is achieved from the immutable code itself, and it runs on belief (the more people that are part of it the stronger its self-sustaining characteristics). It might also explain why all the big blockchain uses have been activities traditionally controlled by institutions (money, property, contracts).
Web 1.0: Let's serve web pages
Web 2.0: Let's serve REST APIs, and have Javascript to all the formatting
Web 3.0: Let's get rid of DNS and have GUIDs/Crypto/something
Web0: universities and TCP
Web1: data centers and HTTP
Web2: cloud and JavaScript
Web3: blockchain and JavaScript
There really isn’t a name for home hosting. That has never really been the status quo. At any rate, home hosting needs some augmented infrastructure (like backups, DDNS, etc). So possibly:
Web4: homes and CDNs
I keep it going to keep myself sharp on how the underlying plumbing of the internet works. I definitely don't think it will scale well, but that isn't the point.
Additionally, since Elon is the dictator of spaceX and has a long history of bowing to oppresive regimes demands (See his China factory/ Data rights promised on cars produced), Elon will sell the internet to the highest bidder.
Is there a connection between these two statements?
Like its either someone that was actually around then or a Gen Z strange reimagining of it, both are strange imo
At the same time, the corporate internet means high investment in useful centralized platforms that reduce the expertise required to publish and share something to near zero. It's not clear to me that such platforms could survive in a non-corporate setting. Maybe if they were user-owned in some material way.
Would love anyones feedback!