An argument for a return to Web 1.0
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Going luddite is never a good solution. We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new development has brought us and learn how to live with it, not suppress all recent development in the hopes of recreating an environment that only really worked for a small subsection of humanity.
Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 2.0."
Please, I do wish you would think carefully before using what is really a pejorative and potentially quite insulting term in regard to modern tech critique. Some of the smartest people out there, who built the digital world you take for granted today, are having (belated) second thoughts about the social and geo-political impacts of these creations. Heartily I recommend Cory Doctorow's recent piece about this [1].
One could arguably turn it around and say that those "cargo-cultists" hell-bent on ploughing ahead regardless, without pause or reflection, are closer to the common misuse of the word "Luddite" - a kind of straw-chewing bumpkin who lives in fear of progress. No. Progress is the radical questioning of "progress" itself.
> We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new > development has brought us and learn how to live with it
No we won't. Be careful of this "genie and bottle" fallacy. It is absolutely the wrong attitude found at the intersection of unreasoned defeatism, resignation, learned helplessness, and abdication of civic engagement and responsibility. We are here, as hackers, to _shape_ the technology that runs our world, not to sit on the sidelines and amuse ourselves to death [2].
> recreating an environment that only really worked for a small subsection of humanity.
There's a framing error in this reasoning. The technology of Web 1.0 did not exist in limited scope because it was only suitable for a small subsection of humanity. It was only being used by a small subsection because that was the developmental stage of the web. One could say (disingenuously) that at the time Web 1.0 was such a successful technology it was being used by 100 percent of web users!
[1] https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-lite...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
This is the perfect example of where this ideology fails. You can _still_ find furniture like those bought in the 1800s that stand the test of time. Cabinetmakers exist and would be happy to build nice furniture that will outlive both the cabinetmaker and yourself. In the age of the Web many of them advertise their services online.
The reason most people don't buy furniture from a cabinetmaker is because their furniture is _expensive_. Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well. Families would save up to buy furniture and preserve it at all cost because of how expensive it was to get nice furniture. Wealthy families would have nice furniture passed down for generations while poorer families made do with their seconds and thirds. Moreover cabinetmakers in the past often relied on cheap stocks of solid wood. In the present, wood has become more scarce due to overforesting and environmental concerns. When you buy furniture made from MDF it uses an order of magnitude less wood than a solid piece of Oak or Poplar made in the 1800s or even plywood from the 1960s. This comes at the cost of worse load-bearing capabilities and brittle joints.
The difference is that consumers now have the option for cheap, environmentally friendly furniture. If a consumer wants long lasting furniture, they could do what most cultures did in the past; save up for furniture over years and commission a cabinetmaker for their services. If you want furniture that lasts made of mostly solid wood and/or plywood, cabinetmakers would be overjoyed to work with you. Most consumers don't care enough about furniture to inflate the cost 10x for long lasting furniture. That's their choice as consumers.
You mostly can't. I always wanted quality wood furniture and once I had enough income I went shopping. Nothing. It can't be bought anywhere that I can find. Eventually gave up and bought the nicest office furniture I could find but it is still a very nice veneer over junk plywood. And even that was many thousands of dollars because it is a nice veneer instead of a cheap junk veneer.
> Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well.
Not really. Both my grandparent families were dirt poor small farmers and the furniture they had was orders of magnitude better quality than anything I can find or buy on a 2020s silicon valley tech salary.
In the past, the capability to build cheap furniture just wasn't there so everything you bought was made from solid wood and was hand-joined which is why your grandparents' family's furniture seems so much stronger. The market also had a floor on how cheap it could get before mechanization and the invention of composite materials so it was "easy" to find expensive furniture and "hard" to find cheap furniture. FYI plywood can make furniture that outlasts individuals and has been in use in furniture since the early 1900s. When you're thinking of crappy veneered engineered wood, you're probably thinking of MDF and OSB furniture. Most furniture at retail furniture stores are majority MDF and OSB because of cost and largely weight as both plywood and solid wood tend to be very heavy for their load bearing capabilities.
Silicon Valley area.
At the very top of the market, yes, one can get fully custom furnitue to any spec you like, for a very high price. I know a few people who have done remodels with such custom furniture and the cost has been over 100K on the low end to closer to a million on the high end. Even with a senior silicon valley salary, that's as good as impossible.
That's why I mention that in my grandparents generation, even low-income families could afford solid quality furniture. Today it is a privilege limited to those who hit major IPOs.
Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks would buy their furniture. You're just not going to be able to get new, solid wooden furniture as cheap as you did even 80 years ago and this has nothing to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". There's exponentially more people in the world now, correspondingly less wood, and greater awareness about how to sustainably forest. Modern cabinetry is done with PPE to keep the woodworker safe and shops are ventilated and vacuumed to keep the area clean.
None of this has to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". The ideology itself is tautological; instead of exploring what the problem is, it purports itself to be the solution to all problems. Good cabinetry is still available in the market at expensive prices but there are reasons why solid wooden furniture has become more expensive. These reasons are immaterial in the face of "good old days before progress for the sake of progress", even though PPE and occupational safety has been some of the gains made through this "progress for the sake of progress."
It wasn't for the sake of progress, it was for the sake of profits. Making something almost as good that costs half the price is what the US has been doing for the last 30 years. After 30 years of "almost as good," turned in to absolute shit when compared to the older stuff.
Technology of course isn't bad for the sake of being bad. Electric tools is what allowed the old furniture to be so good at a reasonable price. Wood glue and sawdust being pressed into something that looks like wood but falls apart fairly easily, is an example of when technology makes things much worse and is used strictly for maximizing profit at the expense of quality. There's a lot of that today.
Where does people preferring to purchase cheaper furniture fit into this?
I can afford furniture that lasts 100 years, but I have no desire to. I would rather spend that money in other ways. My IKEA stuff lasts plenty long.
Right so let's dive into that a bit. Why is this maximizing profit? Because solid wood is expensive. Why is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited resource. I can guarantee you that if governments took away forestry restrictions that solid wood furniture would start to be built in a matter of months as new wood mills setup churning through previously restricted lands, at least until the Earth is deforested and climate change wreaks even greater havoc than it is already. Then once the forests are gone, the wood industry will collapse and wooden furniture would end until some brave government musters the will to repopulate a few forests.
Profit isn't the scary boogieman that this ideology likes to make it out to be. Profit is the difference between revenue and expense. Reducing expenses is a way to use resources more efficiently. In this case, we stave off deforestation by pressing low-quality wood scraps and sawdust into OSB and MDF boards. Would you rather we deforest the Earth instead? Remember that working with OSB and MDF is tricky because of how brittle they are as materials. It is much easier _and cheaper_ to design processes around solid wood or plywood if possible. Fundamentally wood is a limited resource. Learning how to use wood more efficiently is what allows more humans to have a quality of life where they can afford furniture at all while keeping the Earth forested.
In general though, applying the critique that chasing profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted. Margins on furniture are tiny. Consumers only have so much money they are willing to spend on furniture and cabinetmakers and industrialized furniture companies respond in kind. The critique would be more cogent _if_ furniture profit margins were higher but they really aren't. Unfortunately, wood really is just that expensive. Don't believe me just ask some woodworkers. Or go to the lumberyard and just try to do some rough calculation on how much it would take to build a piece out of solid wood.
This all comes back to my main point. The ideology that progress/profits/conspiracy is what's making things worse and the past was a better status quo is tautological; there's no proof or even research necessary to make the statement, only the invocation of conspiracy (c.f. profits.) Markets are complicated because reality is complicated. Some markets are indeed full of morally bankrupt boards charging huge margins on cheap goods. But reality has a surprising amount of detail and using some tautological ideology to advocate for technological regression is short-sighted.
Go talk to a few cabinetmakers and ask them about their feelings (or complaints lol) on Ikea furniture. I can guarantee you that will give you better insight into the world of furniture and wood than making a tautological anti-capitalist statement would with ideological eschatological fervor.
>Why is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited resource.
Wood is a renewable resource, it gets cut and replanted all_the_time. Pine is a 30 year cycle and our country is full of it. Can you tell me what restrictions you think are in place preventing tree farmers from growing and selling trees?
> ideology
You keep saying ideology. What ideology are you talking about specifically?
>we stave off deforestation by pressing low-quality wood scraps and sawdust into OSB and MDF boards
Trees are a crop just like any crop, they just have a much longer grow cycle.
>In general though, applying the critique that chasing profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted.
It's really not. There is a market for higher end furniture made at an industrial scale, but it's just not being met. Chasing profits at the cost of quality is obvious everywhere you look, if you think it's not been happening I don't know what to tell you.
>The ideology that progress/profits/conspiracy is what's making things worse and the past was a better status quo is tautological; there's no proof or even research necessary to make the statement, only the invocation of conspiracy
You contradict yourself. You said if you want quality wood furniture, buy antique.
>Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks would buy their furniture.
Nothing. But they also aren't growing the kind of wood your grandparents' furniture was made from.
The trees grown today are the fastest growing varieties available, and are correspondingly softer on average. You certainly couldn't dig your thumbnail into a plank of old growth pine like you can into a modern 2x4 (even though pine is technically a softwood).
Young-growth, sustainably farmed pine is a very different product than the thick growth pine that older generations used for their furniture. I'm confident that sustainable pine is being grown anywhere someone thinks they can turn a profit buying the land and then growing pine. After all, MDF and OSB are originally made from the scraps of these young pine anyway. Sustainably grown pine is hard to grow and mostly comes from the Southern US these days. I urge you to try to grow your own sustainable pine farm if you disagree.
> You keep saying ideology. What ideology are you talking about specifically?
The ideology that it's profits/progress/some conspiracy which drives change causes inequitable distribution of resource.
> Trees are a crop just like any crop, they just have a much longer grow cycle.
Crops are complicated. They grow in certain climates, under certain growing conditions, at certain rates, in certain soils. There's physical realities we have to contend with with crops. They aren't an unlimited resource we plant and reap. Get too greedy and you get the Dust Bowl. They're even hard to regulate and subsidize without ill-effects, like America's glut of cheap corn thanks to farm subsidies.
> Chasing profits at the cost of quality is obvious everywhere you look, if you think it's not been happening I don't know what to tell you.
That's what I mean: ideology. It's "obvious everywhere you look". The flat-earthers say the same thing, along with the QAnon folks. "Trust your eyes not what the politicians say." These ideologies are seductively simple answers to complex questions. Whenever you dislike the quality of something, it's "chasing profits at the cost of quality." The explanation does not need to contend with different input goods, resource types, markets, or anything. No observations, other than personal dissatisfaction, are needed to make the conclusion stick.
> You contradict yourself. You said if you want quality wood furniture, buy antique.
In the past many people couldn't afford quality _new_ wooden furniture. They would buy used furniture. You can still do this now at Goodwill or any local thrift store or used furniture store. The difference now is that poorer folk can afford to buy low-quality new furniture instead of used furniture. The middle-class would save a bit and buy what we call "antique" today, restored pieces of old wooden furniture. The wealthier and some of the middle-class would save up to buy a few nice pieces and have a few heirlooms to lean on. I'm confident that if you spend a few years saving up, you can save up for antique furniture. If you're a highly-paid SV tech worker, I expect a few years of savings could let you pay for a cabinetmaker to make you furniture. The wealthiest, then as now, could commission what they want when they want it. If you're annoyed at progress, you can make the _same choices_ people used to make before progress. It's just that people don't make those choices anymore because other choices are available.
For most people Ikea furniture delivers what they need at a price they are comfortable with. It lasts long enough. If you don't move homes and are careful not to bump your furniture too often Ikea furniture can last decades. It took me decades to get rid of my Ikea furniture from college and I just sold it to someone else. But don't blame profits when the reality is differing market conditions resulting in different preferences.
I have land with pine on it, so does a colleague of mine It's a really good long term investment. Plant for $10K, harvest 30 years later for $1M+. I mean do you have land, or are you just hypothesizing? I suspect the latter.
>That's what I mean: ideology. It's "obvious everywhere you look". The flat-earthers say the same thing, along with the QAnon folks. "Trust your eyes not what the politicians say." These ideologies are seductively simple answers to complex questions. Whenever you dislike the quality of something, it's "chasing profits at the cost of quality." The explanation does not need to contend with different input goods, resource types, markets, or anything. No observations, other than personal dissatisfaction, are needed to make the conclusion stick.
If you can't attack the idea, attack the person. It's not my ideology, it's market forces. You haven't show any numbers, just hyperbole. Show me somewhere that the margin on particleboard is less or the same than the margin of hardwood of the same furniture type and it will be more convincing. Companies are motivated by profit, pure and simple. To deny this is to deny understanding of how companies work or their purpose for existence. If they can cut costs, they will. If you think they will never cut costs at the expense of quality, I'm not sure what world you live in. Granted, there are exceptions, but of course they haven't dropped in quality so those aren't the companies I'm talking about.
Show me somewhere that the margin on particleboard is less or the same than the margin of hardwood of the same furniture.
I believe you, which makes me curious when they would have gotten it, and from where. 1940's? 1970's?
EDIT: I was poor in the 70's and the best you were likely to come across (as a poor person) was fingerhut crap so I'm guessing it was earlier than that.
> I believe you, which makes me curious when they would have gotten it, and from where. 1940's? 1970's?
That would've been early 1900s, pre-WW1.
A luthier I met in Berlin had a large stock of wood in their workshop. I asked him what it was for, and he said "oh, that's my supply for the next 10 years, I add to it every year to keep it about the same size".
Granted, luthiers use less wood than a cabinet maker.
Do you have any proof of those assertions? You're strident in defending your ideology but this claim seems fantastically unsubstantiated. I remember trying to help parents and non technical friends use Web 1.0. they'd get URLs wrong, forget which TLDs a site hung off, clicked on phishing emails, and deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0, as much as this wasn't a buzzword, was a strict increase in usability for every non-technical person I know.
I have no idea precisely what you are calling "Web 2.0" because in my mind, the technology elements of Web 2.0 outlined on the wikipedia page definitely have absolutely nothing to do with "getting URLs wrong", "forgetting TLDs". Changes from the same time period (around 1999) that were not typically considered to be part of "Web 2.0" were also responsible for a dramatic increase in the prevalence of popup ads. I think you're talking about something entirely different.
Technologically, there isn't much to separate the eras, except perhaps the deprecation of Big Iron approaches to infrastructure in favor of horizontal scaling with commodity hardware, but that's really a spectrum rather than a sharp division.
The Web 2.0 era really hasn't ended, regardless of how the web and it's infrastructure has evolved in the past 20 years. There are various candidates for what will define the next era, but so far none that are indisputably "it".
This doesn't seem right. AJAX was one the main breakpoints.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150910072359/http://adaptivepa...
> Web after widespread JavaScript was strictly more usable for non-technical people.
I suppose that's true. The "web" now has more reach, and generally user interfaces have improved, and JavaScript has had many positive effects on that improvement. But none of these things are necessarily causative, and may be more or less coincidences along the timeline.
JavaScript solves some issues to do with presentation, and allowing web browsers to compute things instead of needing a server to. It also allows dangerous security holes, browser malware, spying on the user and a host of "bad things". So whether the overall experience is an "improvement" cannot be easily argued.
There are some "Web Applications" like browser based videoconferencing that would be impossible without JavaScript. Whether these belong "in the browser" is debatable. However the misuse of JavaScript to lazily construct or decorate web content is a growing problem that is denounced by all sorts of people, including web developers and ordinary users who find their pages take ages to load, or function sporadically, or leak information.
Have you used Gemini? Give it a try. Many non-technical people find it very "usable" and it is a technology on-par with Web 1.0 in many ways.
> Generally I see the anti-Web2.0 digital vegan perspectives to be about opposing JavaScript.
:) The DV arguments are much bigger and broader than JavaScript. But to put it in that context for you; most people like myself argue that JavaScript and other "web technologies" have transformed it into something that isn't the web any longer. It doesn't function as an information publishing and distribution system. It's still called "The Web" by dint of evolutionary lineage, but in reality has transformed into something unrecognisable (a surveillance engine and content pushing system). The simple, safe and widely understood function (that some here are calling Web 1.0) is now forced to live alongside something else with no clear boundaries or distinctions between them, and no sense of what parts of that technology are operating when you visit a site. This is very bad for everyone regardless of the usability gains obtained. I hope that makes sense.
It's a logical argument with one premise - that fewer people used the internet in the past than today - which I hope you can accept without further proof.
There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web, but really, most blogs were a pretty lonely place back then. It is hard to deny how modern solutions allow even someone with the most limited technical skillset to establish a meaningful online presence. Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility.
True. We cannot take it back in it's entirety, nor would we want to. But for some people that quickly becomes the argument for a kind of technological irreversibility principle, that we cannot take back any mis-step or feature no matter how immediately awful and obvious its effects. Left unchallenged that entitlement becomes an argument for bullheaded intransigence and the labelling of whatever suits us as 'progress'.
In reality many "genies" are strategically limited; poisons, invasive species, bio-agents, nuclear materials, knowledge hazards, weapons, bad poetry...
Sure, I am really glad we won the crypto wars and that "code wants to be free" etcetera, but on the other hand that seems to have set off a kind of megalomania in tech, which legitimises turning the entire digital world into our own personal laboratory for experimenting on everyone, sans ethics oversight committee.
> The general public needs their nuggets of endorfine.
Here we go again "saying what people need" for them. I meet a lot of people desperate to get off the digital morphine drip.
> There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web
It seems like that. I've made a more elaborate argument in other threads. You're right that it's "rosy", like all nostalgia. Of course the past was crap in its own ways. But melancholia is a symptom of crisis, retro is a sign of interregnum and loss of common sense (literally our common sense of things). What does it mean? It means that our "progress" isn't serving us fully, and in some cases causing people to recoil from it. Not acknowledging that would be an error.
> Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility.
Of course not. But there are many qualities/metrics by which we might judge things if we are to avoid what I'd call the "democratic fallacy"; external cost, stability, longevity, coherence, security, safety, interoperability, accuracy and truth content, environmental cost.... Technology is multi-dimensional. Accessibility is all lovely and cool, but it should not be put ahead of more important human concerns. OTC opioids are more accessible than street drugs ever were, that doesn't make it an unqualified "good thing". So we can still enumerate the ways in which Web 2.0 is worse than Web 1.0 without invoking nostalgia for a "smaller cosy digital world".
> "But it gets worse. These social media giants are collecting data about every single internet user at an alarming rate, housing it in enormous data storage facilities around the world. Once collected, this information is analyzed, compiled, and sold to any interested parties willing to pay for it. It’s not only your activities in a web browser that are gathered; many smart devices including televisions, smart phones, home automation equipment, and more will passively listen to casual conversation looking for key words and phrases. This data will be correlated with the online profile of the speaker with speech recognition and anything you talk about will be added to a database of your interests. Once complied, this data becomes impossible to track down and remove. A user’s personal data will never disappear from the internet. It will be continually be added to, recompiled, reanalyzed, and sold over and over in order to sell ads in the hope of selling a product. If you sign up for a free service on the web, then you are what is being sold."
Take away JavaScript today, and it'd be replaced with the (slower, but still lucrative enough to justify it) process of paying site admins to share their access logs and user account data.
That sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense. Is there any evidence for this beyond anecdotes that are probably Baader-Meinhof effects?
If it was happening, hundreds of people would be working on those systems, and at least one of them would have talked.
Smart TVs have been caught listening to people before. Cell phones absolutely do. Home automation is generally voice controlled, etc.
I feel bad for individuals with paranoid schizophrenia. Give it another 10 years and there really will be invisible cameras and microphones everywhere recording you!
I remember especially us discussing three-letter-agencies' mass-surveillance and I brought up NSA's ECHELON and other things that have been semi-known/-public for decades. About two years later the Snowden leaks came about and my psychiatrist started telling me about different cases he had had where people were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and there later turned out to be real world explanations and not hallucinations and/or delusions.
I just wanted to share this anecdote. It's a shitty disease and you're absolutely on point about how it already is and will become even more so in the near future.
I can guarantee someone built a way to enable telemetry and diagnostic data into these devices "to improve user experience". It wouldn't take much for another engineer/sociopathic PM to enable it across the board (telemetry is now opt out) or change the sampling frequency or storage location.
The part about selling isn't true. Google and Facebook slurp in a lot of data, but they hoard it. It's only "sold" by allowing advertisers to target against it.
Google claims
> we do not sell your personal information to anyone.
Facebook claims
> No, we don't sell your information.
Maybe there's an asterisk when it comes to heavily aggregated data, and they both work with legitimate researchers, but big tech selling your data isn't true. A bunch of medium-sized adtech players you've never heard of sell your data.
However I also believe that's only because they haven't considered the potential impact of constant surveillance from everything you own sent to third parties who will keep the data forever.
...or maybe they just trust faceless strangers more than I do.
"Going luddite is never a good solution."
Making the web more fun for tinkerers is "going luddite"?
I first used the web in 1993. I do not remember it being more "fun". Seems like there is far more "tinkering" going on today, namely by "web developers" who try to keep themselves entertained while pledging loyalty to surveillance and advertising.
Reducing the amount of tinkering with respect to the "web development" would actually improve the web, at least for this user. Less "fixing" and "replacing" of things that work well enough.
I think it definitely has passed, at least in my environment. I see less people sharing inane things, and most of the time it's done they use things like stories, which are temporary and with less feedback (no "like button" on Instagram stories, for example, only messages), and more organic (the same way some people talk about whatever they ate in person, they share it with their friends with these tools).
That's a terribly fatalistic position and also a misrepresentation.
Rejecting the centralized ad-driven wall-garden spyware model isn't "luddite" in the offensive sense you're using it. It's a matter of noticing what's best for the user and consumer, not for the adware companies.
The good thing is that it's still all there, just drowned out by the noise.
I maintain my blog as always have, I maintain my hobby interest websites for others as a reference source (some of these going back to mid 90s, some I've just started recently).
Search engines today make these harder to find because my sites don't bring the advertisers any benefit. I have no ads, no trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just content by regular people for regular people interested in various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those niche interest find their way to them.
My suggestion to anyone is that if you're looking to become famous and gather millions of followers and all that, sure, use the mainstream platforms.
But if you're just looking to share an interest, do it in a way that you control and keep the ad-spyware out: start a website, start a blog, start a mailing list. You won't scale to millions of users but that's a wonderful thing.
We need a search engine/card catalog that makes it easier to find these real-person sites, that also checks on occasion that they are still not running analytics, ad-spyware, etc. I suppose an “Awesome” list could do the trick, even.
You took photos with connected device like you do today, but instead of sync them against your Google Drive/iCloud your phone sync them to your homeserver both via internet when you are on the go or at home in your LAN. Your friend have a phonebook like all modern smartphones have today but that's phonebook is a little bit more featuresful, from it looking for a contact you can initiate a voice{,+video} call IP2IP, you can write a mail but also see a classic blog page of the contact if he/she/it have one, this is just a local app that offer you correspondents "public namespaces" (Plan 9 style) mounted locally as you wish and cached locally as you wish. That's means that you photo gallery offer access to your contacts public photos and videos, just looking for them. You browser, a real browser, not a modern WebVM offer your contacts sites, cached as you wish in similar ways etc.
That's means: more functionalities, no feature erased by some corporate decision, only the community decide, you contents on your iron, contents you like on your iron, so far faster usage, far better integration, far less reliance on any specific third party services. Not a single functionality less.
It's not a dream, technically is perfectly doable, those systems actually are already designed decades ago, with the first P2P video-conference with screen sharing in 1968 (NLS mother of all the demos), with late '70s Xerox Star Office system etc it's not there just because few big & powerful have other plans for their own interests and most others do not know nor care.
> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online?
This seems like a very contradictory post.
A return to the state of web 1.0 would definitely be a major move backwards, similar to banning the use of cars to prevent traffic accidents from happening. Wouldn't it be better to just learn how to drive?
Unfortunately, the only way that’s likely to change is a new company or nonprofit that decides not to sell out to Facebook or Advertising.
I browse the web with javascript off for most sites, and my site works fine without javascript, renders text beautifully and readably. Millions read it without issue.
Web 1.0 is still there and can still be used. I do. It's great.
I expect future generations may well say the same thing about memes. "People thought that was cool???"
I don't think they will be ridiculed to the same level as I hope our current social media behavior will be. They will more likely evolve to new levels, when the methods of remixing media expand and they become even easier to create.
This. 100%.
You select the search bar, the keyboard takes a second to appear. You start typing, nothing happens because they've reimplemented the text box in javascript, and the script hasn't fully loaded yet. The script loads and the second half of the letters you typed appears in a letter by letter fashion. The page freezes and a suggestion box appears, every second or so the suggestions change to reflect the letters you typed earlier. You erase what you've typed. With every letter that changes, the page freezes a second as a new suggestion loads. When it freezes, it stops accepting letters, so there's a lot of erasing and re-typing. Alright, you're almost done typing... then the page freezes and the page turns grey, and a pop over loads. They want you to load fill out a satisfaction survey. You try to close it to continue, but the script handling the close button hasn't loaded yet so it doesn't work for a good 20 seconds.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a javascript stomping on a human face -- for ever.
"Hope" is not a strategy
Change is merely change, neither good nor bad. Same for absense of change.
Torture time is so long. A generation loss is bearable. A couple generation loss seems like hell. I'm pessimistic that we are going to a worse era.
The bar to publishing your thoughts, having an online presence,... is stupidly low. That's what big platforms and centralization have achieved. The vast majority of people who make a living online don't care about the details. They simply want to express a thought, share what they see, etc. And the proverbial smartphone and Instagram account are all you need to do exactly that.
Wishing to go back to Web 1.0 is a non sequitur because it would mean raising that same bar again. It would also run counter to the billion dollar cottage industries that have sprung up in the wake of the emergence of these platforms.
That doesn't mean using the core technologies that make up the Web and leveraging platforms are mutually exclusive. They aren't. Nothing stops you from breaking away with like minded people and building your own community. The openness and standardization of the specifications that define the technology allow you to do exactly that.
The problem is centralized systems attempting to maximize acquisition of attention by baiting for that attention with outrage and controversy.
These are good arguments that stand alone.
The counter-arguments are always the same "Hey, that's a problem with people - just exercise willpower and don't get distracted". Or "Hey, modern electronics and software is more 'efficient', just throw more cycles at it (silicon and cognitive) and get with the programme" But these only serve to minimise and deny real sentiments that smart software developers would pay close attention to.
There's lot's of sentiment out there that is being mistaken for 'nostalgia', which is genuine dissatisfaction with modern tools. That's why projects like suckless.org [2] seem more relevant every day.
It sort of reminds me of that series where an architect makes fun of mcmansion monstrosities. The architect is right - those mcmansions suck - and we're right - simplicity in computing is better - but I think people want the mcmansions and I think people want the flashier more interactive software.
I would go one stage more "meta" and say; No. Actually one of the deep, deep problems in computer science and digital technology is the very idea that "we know what people want". Or that they know themselves. There is so much said in this forum and other software communities about "what people really want". Outside of quite narrow UX psychology - which deals mainly with how people prefer to complete tasks within paradigms that have already been selected for them - I know of little or no evidence based research on the lifestyle and societal choices around technology. That is why I frequently use the phrase *foisted upon" in Digital Vegan [1][2], to indicate the extraordinary errors of sentiment attribution that occur around tech.
[2] 'Foisted' is not the same as 'forced', but nontheless there is a 'great lie' that we tell ourselves about how markets of demand and supply work in realtion to technology.
I saw "web 1.0" versions in the early to mid 2000s of pretty much every product that became big in the late 2000s and 2010s. People made their choice.
I think that's a bit too condescending. People don't want mcmansions and flash, they want to publish to the internet quickly and efficiently. The web is a tool for them, a means to an end.
The HN set might prefer to live in a world where computers only shipped with Emacs and the web was just a raw JSON API and you had to write your own software for everything from scratch, but no one else does. And that's perfectly legitimate. Why should someone making music, or art, or who wants to set up a business or network with people have to hand-code their own HTML or write their own backend just because some self-appointed gatekeepers decided that using a service ruins the artisinal quirkiness of the web? That's like saying authors should have to hand-write their manuscripts or set their own type. The web is a tool that's supposed to serve everyone.
I think for many and probably most people, the web is an entertainment much more so than a tool.
What I said is only condescending if you add a judgment to it, rather than it just being an observation. I think I did that when I said that the architects are "right" about mcmansions and that we're "right" about simplicity. But those are just my own preferences and I really don't begrudge people for having different ones. I think it is more condescending (or perhaps patronizing is a better word) to claim that we know what's better for people, that they'd see that they really prefer simple brutalist software design if only that's what we would give them.
I've just been around long enough to see this evolution from web applications that were very barebones to the current state, and my interpretation of what has happened during this period of time is that we've been following the preferences of most people who use software, as we should.
Suckless (the org) is too elitist to produce software usable by non-power users, which is a shame, because these folks are for the most part excellent at balancing perfectionism and minimalism with pragmatism; they could go a very long way to help "fix" rampant complexity, but their complete disinterest in accommodating people who can't program in C will keep their projects irrelevant on the grand scale of things.
It really wasn't. I don't know why people here believe that being able to set up a web server and write HTML has any relationship to the quality of the content being marked up and served. They're completely different things.
And by then Geocities, etc. were a thing and it didn't exactly take an engineering degree to use those.
It was crappy, of course, but it was something. And it was easy.
HTTP 1.1 is still a thing. Static webpages are still a thing. IRC is still a thing.
Even better, host it on a P2P network like I2P where those on the network have to get over the hurdle of knowing about it in the first place and being able to set it up, just as early web users had to know how to plug in a modem, install a browser, and use those "URL" things.
If your pages provide value, people will still find them in any case.
Oh... but you wanted Web 1.0 content with Web 3.0 levels of traffic.
Well, you're not gonna get that. Pick your poison.
width: 600px
The site is pleasantly readable and "responsive" to different browser sizes when you turn Style Sheets off!
I browse the internet full screen, which often makes text blocks far too wide. It's hard to read long lines. Yes, in principle, I could resize the window for every website, but in practice that would be annoying to do.
Given current browser capabilities, on my own websites it would probably be best to set a maximum text width rather than a fixed text width. That way I can still adjust the window size to be smaller if I want to.
In the future, it would be nice for a user to set their own desired text width (similar to setting the serif or sans-serif font) which could hypothetically be available to websites in CSS like this:
max-width: preferred-width;I think this concept would be immensely useful in the browser. The closest one can get to that currently is to use media queries for a variety of screen widths with hand-tuned content widths, which is laborious and doesn’t leave room for user customization.
As nostalgic as it is, I think if you were to really strive for that type of world again you need to move forward with building a new network - something that requires some measure of intelligence in order to gain access to it. Of course, what's then stopping someone from automating that and repeating the cycle all over again?
Better off just carving out your little piece in this new massive online world and building a community - or - just join one that already exists. There's millions of forums and "hand-made" websites out there, you just need to dig a little deeper these days.
Because the author clearly states that corporate social media are the problem, which I - and a lot of psychologists and sociologists - agree with.
The modern web (eg Web 2.0) is an open software distribution platform that forms the basis of hundreds of thousands of company's products. Social media is a part of that, and it needs fixing, but a return to Web 1.0 is not the solution.
For example something closer to Facebook circa 2006. No infinite scroll, a simple timeline, basic media sharing.
Would it be possible to make a reasonable profit by offering simpler versions of existing services just without the engagement dark-patterns we currently have. And if so, could you create enough disruption to move the needle back slightly?
It has for a long time been my position that technical people who are aspiring entrepreneurs (esp. those itching to practice building something) should just clone an existing product and wait for the original to change or shut down. Whenever I say "clone", I really do mean that, and not "our own take on solving the same problem". Gmail's interface changes for the worse, or Vine gets bought and shut down? Boom, there you are on day 1 of the backlash, ready to capture anyone looking to (or forced to) jump ship.
This worked so well by accident with Reddit being able to acquire the exodus of the Digg userbase that I don't understand why people don't try to do it deliberately. And in cases like Vine, due to the nature of abandoned trademarks, you could (eventually) even legally "relaunch" it under the the same brand. This is something that pizza shops do all the time, but it doesn't really happen in SV.
The original promise of the Internet was heavily tied to democratization of publishing media. In many ways, the internet of today is far closer to that goal than the internet of the late 90s, just with a lot of backsteps and additional problems created along the way. We ought to solve those problems, but just resetting the clock back 20 years isn't a step forward.
Where would you even start to determine if that was true or not?
Change may be discovering a hundred dollars in the pocket of your old jacket, or it may be discovering an ominous lump on your neck. You really don't know what it brings.
Instead, maybe we build the replacements that we want, invite those who want a piece, sure, even put up a few signs pointing the way; but for the rest, you really can't save those who aren't looking for salvation, so let them have their technological dystopia if they can't see it for what it is.
If we want to socialize with someone, couldn't we just go to that person instead of a social media broker?
The tech of web 1.0 is limiting and less approachable for the average person. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.
We went down the rabbit hole of web 2.0 and it doesn't look like we will come back out. Web 3.0 feels dystopian.
It's definitely not all roses, but I don't really see a clear path out of this. Because for whatever feelings people have about big tech, YouTube, Facebook, Etsy, Instagram have all driven billions in business for non-tech companies. And they've done it by creating experiences that are engaging to end consumers. Sure we might see traffic exchange hands among the big players, and there will be other successful new networks like we have seen with TikTok. But I think people don't want to self host for good reasons.
On most large sites this can be mitigated by blocking of toxic users
I realize this is hardly earth-shattering news to the HN audience, but it's meaningful.
I want to see what my friends, family, and acquaintances are doing and how their lives are going. To know what is "trending" and be able to look at the same thing everyone else is looking at. The crowd-sourced news and immediate updates from people who are on the ground where things are happening.
This article spends a lot of words on "us vs them" and pining for the "good old days" without seeming to consider what the faster-more-intense version of "geocities neighborhoods" would be like.
Long story short: if you want VoIP that's not necessarily a web thing, it's an internet thing. Public users DB again that's can be a web thing, in the sense a site a person, but can also be a Wikidata-like services without any web frontend, something that just offer an open API and anyone who want implement a local client for it, with relevant download/sync of information, caching etc. Internet banking? The same: a simple local desktop application that talk on an open protocols to your banks/peers, store copy of any transaction digitally signed by both parts AND by a State-run official public service as a guarantee for both etc all those things are not necessarily web and actually can be far superior in a classic networked desktop version.
About crowdsourced news and aggregators: did you try to consider a classic personal one? I mean RSS feeds of a set of sites you like to follow with local scoring and peer recommendation service built-in? It can be far powerful than Google News or FB user homepage. It does not exists simply because no one actually have written it since most of the development is pushed toward web for economical reasons, but not because the web is better. It does not exists because most people fails to imaging a different world in terms of different tools and lifestyles so fails to see the enormous advantages for us users of that classic model witch actually was and still is the base of the entire IT and still the most advanced tech we have...
Did you remember Popcorn Time? Well who impede to build a FacebookTime for instance over ZeroNet? Why do most people not ask nor look for a homeserver and ISPs that offer static IPv6 global addresses to run their own personal infra so for instance just sharing photos does not means passing through Google Drive or iCloud? Why we do not push classic distributed iNUM/VoIP so we can make call with a very big number of participants and not much bandwidth issues? Those are not technical stuff but just human habits. We all se the modern web and most of us fail to imaging a different world.
I strongly disagree. The web not only achieve but greatly exceeded it's potential. But the web has transitioned from being a destination to being a tool. Like all tools, it can be misused.
That model of web presence also does a nice job of excluding the www's multitude of trash that's otherwise inescapable these days. Playing once more in sandboxes where assholes are not invited does have a certain appeal.
This forced me to do what I always try and avoid doing (because no one will thank you for it) and that is to clean it up. Some of it was necessary (eg it was open to SQL injection). In doing so I reduced it down to <20,000 including the new features required.
This was a fairly stock standard database driven website but in just doing things the right way the page load times got to under 50ms (from 500-1000ms). This wasn't an SPA (of course) but I remember thinking how refreshing it was. You could link to any page. Those links loaded superfast (this is the bane of SPAs when they support deep-linking at all) and ran on everything just fine.
This is actually one of the best featurs about PHP too: a static functional core so there's basically no bootstrapping. This means you can tear down all the resources of rendering a page. Performance becomes way more predictable and you're way less prone to resource leaks.
There is magic in fast loading pages and I miss that about good Web 1.0 sites.
This is actually the biggest problem with all the ad and tracking JS packages: the load times go to shit. This becomes a justification for SPAs
As for Web 3.0... ugh. Why? Just... why? I guess that's a whole separate topic.
However I think the "how it was / how it is /where to now?" postulate is right. Especially the "immediate dopamine injection via Tweet" versus "build on your own independent site". It could actually make for far less concentrated content and so data and so power (in a way).
Twitter: "give hime a fish a eat". Independent Web: "Give him a fishing pole so he can learn how to catch them himself".
It has popularized access do knowledge, opened a channel to all forms of expression for millions around the world and continously lower the barrier to more innovation.
Friction is present in all social activities: politics, families, friendships. This kind of tought seems to me more as failure to cope with human nature than rational legitime analisys.
The web is the way it is becuase the forces which are seeking profit and power get their way in any new system that emerges.
There is a new system which is truly designed from the ground up to serve the masses and is immune to the tactics used to control Web 2.0. The decentralized web is the internet run for the people by the people... and even if you rely on service providers to host your data or do your computation, they can't see what you want them to see or take your content down. It is called Web 3.0 (there are two Web 3.0s, unfortunately... one is the Google's version where web is organized auch that you don't have to leave Google to browse it... think amp but for everything else... and then there is the blockchain version, which is what I am referring to).
Here's Gavin Wood's TED talk on the topic: https://youtu.be/UIBR99gOLOQ
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
Douglas Adams
"The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!"
Please see the full Poem 'To a Mouse' : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_A_Mouse,_on_Turning_Her_Up_...
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Edit: OT: To add the context to my reply to the quote from jameshart, who quoted;
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galax...
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https://www.quotes.net/mquote/901391
The Script states:
Frankie Mouse: Still, the best laid plans of mice.
Arthur Dent: And men.
Frankie Mouse: What?
Arthur Dent: And men... The best laid plans of mice and men.
Frankie Mouse: What have men got to do with it?
People still have the choice and freedom to build websites that that way - just like you might still want to record to multitrack tape instead of a DAW or shoot film instead of digital.
In terms of data collection and privacy - I think these things are important and we are thankfully nearly there in tech maturity for local-first encrypted p2p apps becoming feasible.
These technologies will enable rich collaborative user experiences without giving away your data unless you want to.
Author would be surprised if he would see what stuff people can post under their real legal names.
I assume author is not on FB/TT and is not following shitstorms there.
We are way past veil of anonymity.
For the rest I like quite from Stanislaw Lem: *Until I starded using interned, I was not aware there are so many idiots in the world.*
This isn’t any better than current social media imo.
While it is questionable if they are any better than general population, they probably have the same traits and common way of thinking. So they would like the same people to be on the internet.
Web 2.0 allows anyone to post anything so eternal September is here alive and we are living it. But closing possibility to post stuff on the internet is not the way to go.
It just takes proper motivation. When the only game in town was Myspace, many people learned just so they could have an awesome page. Knowing HTML / CSS gave you more street cred, so to speak.
Now that incentive doesn’t exist. But the same people that would have learned are still posting online.
Being open to the general public isn’t a problem to me because sub-cultures naturally spring up. Hacker News is like a safe space for people that would have made these manual websites 15 years ago lol.
Words have impact. I’d love to see some foundation or something to work on the problem of toxicity/hate. Develop technologies to allow sites to better police against it, detect bots trying to incite, etc..
Of course, you have to draw a line between free speech and hate speech but we already do that.
That's not to say the web doesn't currently have issues, it does. I just think it's healthy to be careful of embracing the past too hard.
I don't want to read an entire book on a web page, just let me download an .epub file. I don't want to read your poorly formatted artsy manifesto in my browser, just let me download a PDF. I don't want to read your blogpost which is just a presentation in disguise filled with inline images, just let me download a powerpoint file.
I'm glad that if I want to search for some information Wikipedia presents me a consistent interface and gives me a brief overview of a subject and presents me with further hyperlinked content both pointing to IRL and web-hosted documents. Wikipedia to me perfectly represents the spirit of true Web 1.0 even if the content is Web 2.0 in nature.
Absolutely magisterial! I feel represented in each and every word of yours. I [hardcore anti-algorithm, anti-collection, anti-surveillance activist] would not say it better myself.
Consider opening the licence for this post apropriately so the word can be translated and spread.
Thank you.
So much more information, media, entertainment is now available.
I have a lot of nostalgia about the past, but I'm not interested in going back.
Information, media, and entertainment were always available, but in a form where you actually own it, not pay for N subscription services before their license runs out.
That said: best of both worlds imo is fat client, traditional applications that run in a web runtime (e.g., Electron) since you can run 'em on any OS. ;p
I still pirate tons of other stuff to use and try and eventually buy. I can't buy Photoshop so that is a perma steal until they go back to $800 boxes of software.
Media is available but just this year I bought three CDs and one cassette tape.
I love moving backwards
1. Manually add a link to every page on the site each time a new one is added.
2. Give up on hand-writing HTML and use a server-side templating system
3. Give up on having navigation on each page
4. Load the navigation through JavaScript
Given that they want to hand-write HTML, and they (presumably) want it to be easy enough for everyone to do, the JS options seems like a reasonable choice.
Perhaps a good compromise would be to put a link to a navigation page in the sidebar, but when available, use JavaScript to replace the link with the navigation page content.
I feel business model innovation is the key to moving the pendulum back towards that landscape - that the ad model will also result in centralization in which we are the product?
Do you believe we should also go back to not having search engines? BBS as primary information sharing? Email & IRC as pretty much the only way to communicate?
Web 1.0 was riddled with scalability problems, you are free to take what you consider the best parts of it and simplify your Web 2.0 site.
Not everyone is a HN alum ready to write a boolean query to find the most relevant post on a forum.
stated; >The web was established with the best of intentions.
The basic idea was that if everyone could share their thoughts and ideas with the world, the best ones would be vetted and float to the top.
The bad ones would be ignored and pushed to the bottom.
But human nature has a tendency to corrupt the best of intentions.<
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
stated; > Microsoft shuts down AI chatbot after it turned into a Nazi - By Amy Kraft Updated on: March 25, 2016<