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Comment by simongray | Hacker News Reader

I think the sentiment is great, but reviving the old style is not necessary and makes it more kitsch than it has to be. I'm no fan of the boring, corporate Silicon Valley style either, but IMO the real revival spirit is about making your own personal style and not a fake 90s website.

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Having read the article, there's no mentioning of reviving a particular visual / graphic style. On the contrary, the author explicitly states:

> It's important not to confuse the web revival with artistic styles such as Vaporwave;

Instead, the author tried to capture a set of first principles that seem to drive a more broad revival of early online culture. The first of those principles they list is:

> Creativity comes first - They value creative expression and the ability to customise and decorate their digital spaces.

Which agrees with what you're saying.

Arguably, the author's chosen design might inadvertently detract from that message. Then again, it's their personal website. They're calling the shots. This is how this individual chooses to express themselves. And that's just every bit as valid as what anyone else does, which would be a core tenet in support of online freedom.

If you click on some of the many outgoing links to other "revival" websites on that page you will see that they're all in that style. Perhaps this is just the case of the 90s aesthetic being the fashion of the day—particularly for zoomers who mostly didn't experience the 90s—but I still find it quite unoriginal.

I suppose that's personal taste, which is absolutely fine. Personally, I feel that the design isn't particularly appealing either, but that's, like, my own opinion.

If anything, it's not brutalist design: https://brutalistwebsites.com/

It's just that one can choose to see the design as distinct from the content.

Hah, I actually kinda like that so-called brutalist aesthetic! Not for every type of website, obviously.

Brilliant stuff. Bookmarked forever.

The problem with revivals is that they're all about what the revivalist resonated with at the time. Most times are rich with creativity and multiple, often contrasting, viewpoints. When you distill them into a form of nostalgia, they are necessarily the reduction that resonates most with the folks orchestrating the revival.

The early web meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but many people want to claim that they represent the true spirit of the early web.

> the real revival spirit is about making your own personal style and not a fake 90s website

Can't do that if we also care about being ranked in Google. Got to be prepared to be never found.

But do we care?

This calls back to a web of interconnected, non-commercial websites. Before Google there certainly were search engine websites but they weren't the big internet hub Google is today.

Instead people created webrings, toplists, link sites, directories (DMOZ!) to drive traffic, leading to fewer but more curated content

I really don't miss the bright and GIFy aesthetic, but I do miss a web to really "surf" from homepage to homepage, losing track of time, instead of "grinding" the same pages over and over.

There are some places that still evoke this feeling, notably Wikipedia and TVTropes

You can't find anything useful with Google anyway. It's about as reliable as Amazon search.

On Amazon you'll find a lot of faux-branded trash that is very specifically and very blatantly designed to resemble what you're looking for (if you're a pensioner or perhaps a dog)

but the result you were actually looking for will be on page 2 or in a thread on a forum. Or not listed at all.

Similar story for Google Search, you don't find anything useful, you find a dozen results that have been designed to look like they'll be useful.

Why use Google then? Half the "quick answers" results are wrong or based on unreliable sources, but presented as fact.

Google Images being peppered with shopping results is annoying as eating glass.

Google Shopping has never been useful because it just sends you to expired eBay listings or websites you wouldn't necessarily trust with your lawnmower let alone your card details.

And then there's YouTube — what a cesspool! There's only one view that matters there, your subscriptions. The feed/trending is just a torrent of genuinely crazy conspiracy/disinformation stuff that is obviously very popular... but I think if I ran, say, a library, I wouldn't fill the shelves with books about how to make guns and explosives, nor would I fill the racks with pornography. I'd stock such things but

The common feature is that the drive for profit = drive for views/clicks = skews all content moderation and indeed content creation towards that goal.

All art, wit, originality, truth is sucked into this vortex and spat out the other side as something "eye-catching" "clickbaity" "engaging" etc

This is true of Facebook, Twitter, you name it. Anything based on user engagement, clicks, ad views/interactions — all of that horseshit. It's all simply twisting content to suit the business rather than doing what's in the best interest of the user.

The user deserves accurate search results, impartial presentation of data and points of view, no dark patterns.

It frankly amazes me that we've gotten as far down this road as we have, in the last decade especially. It's nauseating.

You don't have to convince me, I was around in 1990's and loved the early days of the internet. You have to convince ambitious people to make sites that won't rank well in Google.

+100

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