Hacker News Reader

I think you and the author both misunderstood what we really lost.

I don’t think that what we miss the most is the old 90’s patchwork of gif style. Not that I’m not nostalgic of it, of course I am.

But what I miss is the fact that back in the day, owning a little part of the internet was the normal thing and, contrary to nowadays profiles on social media, this space was really yours. It was as awful as what people’s tastes and minds are but it had, well, personality. And you really owned it. It was awful because you were awful but that was ok because everybody is awful. If it was nice, that was because you took the time to make it nice.

It’s not the style I miss, but the fact that it was the result of a real person’s hobby.

For a long time letters were only written by hand. Nowadays the only people writing them by hand are the people who truly want it.

In the early days you really had no choice. There was no WordPress, no MySpace and no Github Pages. It was the norm because it was the easiest thing to do if you wanted a presence on the web. If something like Facebook existed in 1993 let me assure you a whole lot of people would have been contempt with just creating a profile there and calling it quits.

There are more personal websites today than there ever were, people who want to be creative on the web always find a way.

This is the most salient point. The lost feature of the 90s web is the content, not the GeoCities aesthetic.

Web pages were quirky not because of gifs but because someone lovingly collected a bunch of Dragonball Z images or wrote summaries of X-Files episodes and put those up for others to enjoy. Some people put up recipes or stories or whatever. Most amateur homepages weren't a monetized side hustle, just content about the creators' interests.

Unfortunately today a lot of passion content lives in social media silos. Some still survives on the web, though now on Wikis rather than homepages.

I don't miss the GeoCities aesthetic of the 90s web, I suffered through the design to get to the interesting content. The design wasn't the important part.

I truly don't understand this argument.

First of all, people post extremely niche and personal content on their social media feeds. Heck, my own Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram feeds are mostly comprised of stuff on the same level of quirky ingenuity of the early web. So if your issue is with the presence of this type of "content", then I really don't see it.

Secondly you might argue, like many others, that the true problem is not that the content is here, but it's not the norm. It's not the norm to have a website, it's not the norm to be fragile and personal and quirky online. But even if that were the case, why do you care? There is more "90s-style" content today that there were in the 90s. You don't have enough time to live on this earth to read it all. Do you care if "in proportion" they don't make up the same share of the total webpages like they once did? Doesn't the sheer number of them not satisfy you enough?

>First of all, people post extremely niche and personal content on their social media feeds.

In the old internet you could be reasonably certain that people where sharing because they wanted to share. There was no ulterior motive of profit, growing a large following, etc. It felt more genuine. Today, most people who actively post seem to be trying to build a following to become an "influencer".

It could be that this is a product of lack of discoverability of differently motivated content, but that lack of discoverability is still directly caused by what the modern internet is (its incentives and what is promoted by the giants in the space: engagement).

Gemini[1] and other small nets seem to capture some of that old share-with-no-ulterior-motive vibe, but we will see how long it lasts.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

> Heck, my own Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram feeds are mostly comprised of stuff on the same level of quirky ingenuity of the early web.

This is exactly a problem I mentioned. You've got content on three social networks only one of which is readily crawlable by search engines. Twitter and Instagram are silos that really only want registered users to have access to content in their silo.

As to your second point you're ascribing to me an argument I did not make. I was pointing out that the amateur web of the 90s wasn't quirky because of garish colors or animated gifs. It was quirky because people put up passion projects. Seeing some "90s style" page that just puts animated gifs and garish colors is completely missing what made the web incredibly interesting.

Mind that this was the amateur section of the web. By 1999, professional websites had become pretty complex (often more complex than they are at average nowadays) and invested considerably in navigation. (There was still some experimentation going on, as building a website was also a question of ambitions, which included improving on what was considered a common or average standard. Website navigation was the most obvious one and was also a creative challenge with prominent awards having dedicated categories for this. No way you could have gotten away with a "hamburger" in 1999. ;-) )

As for the modern web and amateur content, does a post in some infinite-scroll content compilation really compare that favorably?

I'd argue the inconsistency in design is not limited to old websites. If anything, it's far worse with modern websites, since they aggressively re-style interface elements and frequently invent their own paradigms. Scrolling may re-arrange the content of a document, sometimes a desktop website has mobile paradigms like hamburger button causing a laggy menu to appear, often with buttons with no label that are decorated with minimalist line-art icons that are about as easy to parse as Linear B. Links are replaced with buttons, which are never natively styled and rarely clear that they are buttons. You have to click and find out. Sometimes clicking in a blank area causes something unpredictable to happen. Scrolling up or moving the mouse cursor to the edge of the window may cause pop over-elements to cover the text. The design is constantly shifting and moving around as ads are loaded randomly within whatever you're reading. Resizing the window may cause UI elements to move around, or to appear, or be hidden. Clicking a link may cause the ephemeral state of the document to change. The back button doesn't work after this happens. Sometimes scrolling down breaks the back button as well.

>There's a reason why Wikipedia has kept basically the same layout since forever, because it works.

I wish other designers and developers internalised this. The constant treadmill of redesigns common with seemingly all modern software development undervalues the users' mental model and muscle memory for how the site works.

I guess it would be shit for job security though.

One factor that makes me prefer that retired professor's website is that it works perfectly with reader mode, which a JS heavy website isn't guaranteed to.

The point of people who fetishize the old web is about the quirkiness of the websites. If you just slap a reader mode on them all the aesthetics vanishs and only the html shines, which is a whole other topic

> This fetishization of the "old web" initially works when you're just browsing some terse blog or personal web page from people you don't even know, but the moment you want to actually search for information on the web this style of websites immediately becomes annoying.

This. I see a lot of people being angry at UI changes on bug platforms with the reason that "they all look the same", but unless the platform is a blog or a personal site, having some standardised look helps reading and avoid being distracted. I totally agree with you.

s/bug/some

Language standardization, typography, and published vs unpublished works are all in separate domains.

Language standardization is not typography and we have figured out typography for the most part before language standardization. Look at the American English 'argument' vs the British English 'arguement' or 'color' vs 'colour'.

I also just so happen to have a collection of German children's books - the font family each uses is different, but it's still German.

I liken web sites to digital magazines and newspapers. These have an artistic quality to them in terms of content, structure, pictures, etc.

Would you not think it bland if every newspaper or magazine on the planet used the same structure, font-face, and voice?

I've found some of the most informative websites look like they were made in the late 90's