How the blog broke the web (2017) | Hacker News Reader

How the blog broke the web (2017)

stackingthebricks.com

191 pointssph116 comments

Reference sites still exist, Wikipedia isn't organized by reverse-chronological and MediaWiki is a far more formidable CMS than MT ever was.

Same goes for ReadTheDocs, Sphinx, Jekyll, Hugo, or any number of static site generators that power the infinite libraries of documentation, reference material, and personal sites on the web.

What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content. What the author fails to consider is that this diminished position has nothing to do with the tools, and everything to do with the population of people who were coming online in the early 2000s.

The strangeness and lovable oddities of the early web were a function of the people who populated it. The generic, least common denominator status quo of the now is similarly defined because everyone is online, and so the content distribution reflects that.

Everyone's Eternal September comes at some point, for the author it was October 2001. Internet is full, AOL users go home.

> What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content.

When I stumble upon a Web 1.0 living fossil, it's a delight every time. Someone felt an overpowering need to say something, they made a website about their favorite topic (be that shoelace knots, unsolved mysteries of Ancient Mediterranean literature, their train trip from Europe to North Korea or the CUBIC NATURE OF TIME), wrote everything they wanted to say and mostly stopped.

They didn't enter into a parasocial relationship with millions of people, they didn't try to get rich by producing content, they didn't become slaves to The Algorithm, they didn't ruin the brilliance of their first LPs by producing a dozen more.

All relationships are parasocial.

But some are more parasocial than others.

No, some are simply social.

I don't think your wife would appreciate that.

(joking, but the point is that non-para-social relationships, "real" ones, exist and can usefully be distinguished)

Not sure I agree with this.

Once you look closely enough, the distinction collapses.

I used to think otherwise, but that was largely based on a refusal to look, knowing that if I did, the perceived reality would fall apart, and the naked nothing would be revealed.

What do you mean by parasocial here?

Bidirectional channel.

TCP.

But with respect to the shared net. The experience that makes a dent in the fabric of reality as shared or known by all, personalizes the universe to a subdomain.

Once I had the words. Now that’s gone too.

For sure, but I think the confusion here is that that's more or less the opposite of how most people use it.

Like for me, the way I experience parasocial relationships most vividly is in educational YouTubers with a particular niche. I'll binge their videos and then they become emblematic of that domain of knowledge to me. And I'll have little imagined chats with them when I have ideas about that domain, where they generally take the opposite side of a view I might be developing and debate me. But really this is just the voice I've always talked to in my head wearing a mask, I don't know who these people are.

To borrow your analogy, they're sending unicast datagrams, and I'm sending TCP to their same address, but there's a firewall rule remapping it to localhost.

If the words come to you, I'm still listening, but there's 0 Pascals of pressure.

If you define a term differently from most other people, it's on you to make the translations.

If you're a solipsist, it doesn't matter, but then nothing does.

This works perfectly for my wife.

I once believed in real relationships.

They’re just ideas running through meat.

only those where only one party knows the other exists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

If all X are Y then Y is meaningless when talking about X

I’m not fond of people who take ratheism as a major inteeest or even component of their identity, but pocm.info is just lovely.

> ratheism

Is that a misspelling or is there something called "ratheism"?

I think they meant /r/atheism, the infamous subreddit?

That’s a particular social phenomenon, as linked to atheism as gospel music is Baptist churches.

Call me crazy, but bear in mind I love a lot of modern web development marvels (no more tables everywhere) but I kind of miss when a lot of websites copied each other, and they had... tables everywhere, but the reason I miss it was because navigation was insanely consistent! It was also insanely easy to figure out.

One old as heck website that comes to mind for me is 1337.net which I think is more early to mid 2000s I'm not sure if it went back further or not. It's a joke site with l33t speak and what have you, but the fact it's still around is pure entertainment. They have not touched anything about it. I don't even think it has ads? Kudos for keeping it like the Spacejam website.

As I say in a sister thread, I transitioned from handmade websites to blogs as the author describes, and then from blogs to social media. The reason was also what the author describes: convenience.

I am the same person. I don't think I was more of a nerd when I wrote personal websites in 1998 than when I wrote blogs in 2002 or social media posts later. So I do think the tools have a lot to do with the changes described in the post.

It is true that non-chronological CMSs exist today, and they may be formidable in many respects, but I don't think they're better than MT in terms of ease of use. And also, the competition has gotten easier and easier: MT was just the beginning, now the real "trap" (as the author of the post would describe it) is social networks. The site generators you mention don't remotely compete in ease of use with social networks.

The only attempt I have seen of making publication of "permanent", non-timestamped content as easy as that of chronological content was Opera Unite. It didn't last for long.

Obviously the title and text are hyperbolic (personal websites still exist, there are just fewer of them) but the gist of what it says rings true to me, and I'm not an Eternal September curmudgeon.

> personal websites still exist, there are just fewer of them

And my point is that this isn't true. There are more weird, wonderful, random single-purpose and eclectic websites today than ever before in the history of the Internet.

It's just that they are suspended in an ocean of so much more Internet than existed before that they feel absent compared to the halcyon days.

I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's personal experience, obviously there exists a population that moved away from hand-crafted HTML to blogs and social media, but that movement is trivial compared innumerable, inconceivable, content dilution of the net that happened over the course of the 2000s.

Most people on social media would never have created those hand-crafted sites to begin with, they weren't members of that self-selected group of early web pioneers. They were only ever going to engage with easy to use systems. We didn't miss out on a similarly sized web of artisanal websites, that future was never in the cards.

Yeah people forget that we went from an internet where ANYTHING you wanted, if it was there, would be on a university site or some personal site by someone slightly obsessed with the topic (otherwise why would they have build a website about it by hand or in Dreamweaver and bothers to host it?) - Wikipedia didn’t exist so even relatively simple searches would bring up these little almost “fan” sites.

This was the era of massive FAQ posts that were just becoming webpages in some cars - an example being the Doom FAQ: that would never be written as a single document today. (Even the modern linked copies are “new”: https://www.gamers.org/docs/FAQ/doomfaq/index.html ).

A game like Factorio or Dwarf Fortress certainly has similar or greater depth; but a single massive ascii text file will never be written for them, as there are more modern ways to transmit the information

It doesn't matter that there are objectively more if one sees them more rarely.

Like the saying goes, if it isn't on Google it doesn't exist. I use Kagi full time and I am delighted when an old style website is listed in the top 5. I always think "this would never appear in modern Google."

There are absolutely more, but relatively fewer, and you come across them less. They stopped being a well-known role model for how to put content out on the web.

I think ease of use is part of it, but in my opinion there's also something else: reach. Sure, you could spend a week or two coding your own personal website... but how many people are going to actually see it? A lot of people don't leave their social media walled gardens nowadays. A tweet has a much higher chance of actually being seen by people with much less hassle.

Yeah, I agree, I think the "next" major 'Eternal September' if you will was around the 2010's give or take after Smartphones became far more common and everyone had insanely easy access to the web. A lot of web traffic is insanely on mobile, whereas before it was not, and it was a mess (remember those awful .mobi domains that you would be redirected to, BUT only the home page, so whatever content you wanted was gone, good luck finding it now since you just hopped off Google!).

The 'Eternal September' was actually pretty early on--basically pre-Web to Web 1.0. I had a Unix workstation with a Mosaic homepage which basically had links to all the sites I found interesting. I agree that something happened with mobile/social. This post is more about the Read-Write Web (I think that was O'Reilly's term)/Web 2.0 era--which was between the two.

Someone, some day, will write an elegy of how TikTok broke social networks.

And they won't be wrong.

Sure!

> What the author fails to consider is that this diminished position has nothing to do with the tools, and everything to do with the population of people who were coming online in the early 2000s.

I think it does have something to do with the tools, but not in the way the author is describing.

Rather, the need for personal homepages was diminished because search engines replaced them! When I came online, around that time, I was introduced right away to search engines as the way to find things online.

This of course was always an incomplete replacement. Search engines provided a window into a much larger set of content than any one curated website, but they were more easily manipulated, so smaller and more niche content would be comparatively harder to discover. The popular sites, and the sites whose ranking was manipulated, rose to the top.

I've started to wonder lately if it would be beneficial to revive personal, curated homepages for this reason. They can't replace search engines entirely of course, but the breadth of information you can discover on rabbit holes from older sites is mind-boggling and I feel like there's something there.

I see quite a few posts on HN that are nostalgic about the early web. But I would say that there's an interesting take here about the shift to a preference for newer content. No doubt SEO has a lot tondo with it.

Some of my favourite "digital garden" websites:

- http://100r.co/

- https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html

Made by the same people, but the second is more technical. I can't deny that there is a certain sense of visiting someone's home (in this case someone's sailboat) that is completely absent in the modern, sterile and utilitarian blog format. It is a pleasure to get lost following interesting links, chancing upon slightly dusty, delightful corners.

This is why I appreciate what https://neocities.org/ is doing, a lot. Every single one of those websites featured in the home page is not only nostalgic, but a treasure trove that someone manually collected and organised. It is ironic and sad that as technology improved, we lost Frontpage, manually written HTML and the soul in personal websites, now many are just stock Jekyll templates hosted on a github.io domain.

As someone that has struggled to blog all my career, I wonder if organising my thoughts cleanly into a polished but fleeting article just doesn't fit my way of thinking, and I would be better served by a personal website just about stuff I care about, which I keep updated over the years, and might go a bit dusty over time. Not a shop window, not a magazine, but an open garage full of thingamajigs collected over the years.

More written words on digital gardens:

- https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden

- https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/

I do this, too. My site https://benovermyer.com has a blog, but the more interesting stuff is all the _other_ pages.

The most frequently updated page is the list of books I've read.

Do you have a "digital garden" site?

Not yet, but I've been hacking on Kirby to create a regular blog-style personal website and I just want to throw everything out and have a way to host pure Markdown. Someone recommended PicoCMS elsewhere. That's my weekend sorted.

You are one step away from a garden. Move those links out of "KB" and collect them in the home page.

RSS is a bit harder to do on that type of websites. Here's my crappy definition of a digital garden: a website where most likely you have to write your RSS updates by hand. Not the literal XML but you will have to keep a changelog, because the cool stuff is outside the blog section. See also: https://journal.miso.town/

Alright, I'll do a bit of reorganization today to ditch the "KB" thing. I'm considering scrapping the static site generator in favor of pure HTML, but... that bears careful thought.

I have a draft where I talk a bit about hosting raw markdown on GitHub, which is how the draft is hosted. It’s been a draft since 2021, which I suppose is the way of the digital garden sometimes.

https://joeldare.com/how-i-use-github-as-my-blogging-platfor...

I think so…

https://joeldare.com

I love 100 Rabbits. Their web format inspired my NeatCSS framework.

https://neat.joeldare.com

“Broke the Web”? I really dislike headlines like these. Movable Type and blogs didn’t “break” the Web - not now or back then either. Blogging and the blog layout was just one emergent trend of this era. Flashed based sites were another trend that emerged alongside blogs. Folks were still hand coding HTML and FTPing the files to a server. Directory/brochure style sites didn’t go anywhere. Through all these trends the Web has always been there like a good friend. Nothing “broke” it and nothing will for the foreseeable future.

There's lots of tools around nowadays that allow you to build a site that doesn't conform to the blog format, but the old web hasn't really made a comeback. I think there is truth in the author's statement:

> Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it.

writing up whatever daily musing into a short-form article is much easier than carefully organizing and categorizing an entire library of work, so there will be more of that around. Writing a 140 character update on your social feed is even easier, so there will be more of that.

The old web hasn't totally disappeared, by the way. It's just much harder to find in a sea of other content that has grown much faster. And blogs are only a small part of that. SEO advertising clickbait spam sites are drowning out a lot of content on the web, because they are extremely low effort and there's money to be made in them.

I think what really happened is revealed when you just change 2 words:

> When something is easy, more people will do it.

I'm sure there are way more quirky, personal and lovely websites out there than 20 years ago. There's just orders of magnitude more other content.

The whole article has a vibe of "old man yelling at clouds".

I think of https://wiki.c2.com/ where pages are organized like a graph, but within a page you might see a thread of paragraphs from people replying to each other. That's an interesting mashup of the two ideas.

cf https://search.marginalia.nu

This is interesting but I don't think it's what "broke the web". What really broke it is that those 20-30 million people who would have made hobbyist blogs or posted to forums are now part of the 200million (twitter) or 2 billion+ (FB) who just post on social media instead. Almost nobody is out there blogging about gardening just cause they like the topic, the new gardening content on the web is all SEO driven

> Almost nobody is out there blogging about gardening just cause they like the topic, the new gardening content on the web is all SEO driven

The reality is almost everyone posting on social media about gardening is doing so because they like the topic. The purely market-driven "influencers" are a minority, although they seem otherwise because they're the ones most aggressively tuning their content for the algorithms. And even then, people who make money from their content can also care about what they're doing.

Yeah that's the distinction I was making--the hobbyists have gone to social media, and the people registering domains and using a self-hosted CMS are trying to make a biz out of it

Although Substack seems to be causing a little renaissance of hobbyist blogging

The ones who actually made hobbyist blogs probably went to youtube because a youtube channel is actually much better than a blog from the pov of the hobbyist.

Of course it's harder to search video than a blog from the pov of someone looking for information but that's not the hobbyists problem.

80 gardening bloggers:

https://codesupply.co/gardening-blogs/

Optimized for SEO driven possibly, but the question is, is it still useful?

The web still has all kinds of niche content, it just takes a bit of time to find it. Publishing content has diverged a great deal since 1993 and if someone is passionate about a topic, they will share it in a format they like. It might not be a classic blog post, but what matters in the end?

The web is not broken IMHO.

It was the first step. I was there. I first transitioned from totally customized, handmade websites to blogs. And then, from there to social media. The reason was always the same: convenience, as the author explains. Social media were a continuation of what the likes of Movable Type started.

BTW, I wouldn't blame Movable Type per se (I still have fond memories of that tool!) but rather the lack of tools to make the publishing of non-chronological content similarly easy. There was one attempt around 10 years ago: Opera Unite. It was a great idea (IMHO), but didn't last long.

Plus those with something more in-depth to say now tend to do it in video form.

> Plus those with something more in-depth to say now tends to do it in video form.

And, with video form it's even harder to separate the signal from the noise.

and even harder to avoid the ads

There are many suspects in the "who killed the web" mystery but blogs are low down on that list.

The real problem is that building a web page is much, much harder today than it was 25 years ago. Back then you could slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day. Everyone with their huge 800x600 monitors would see the same thing.

Today you have to take into account not just monitors, but cell phones, and tablets of various resolutions and aspect ratios. And if you want something that looks as good as all the rest of the web you need fonts, fancy css, maybe some javascript controls.

And that doesn't even take into account that all this is a moving target. I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance.

I have a personal website and it has taken me years to get it looking the way I want. Every time I try something interesting (animation, javascript, etc) I have to test it widely.

People who just want to put up a website about their favorite trees don't want to do that.

> I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance.

My personal website is like that and I’ve made no effort to improve the phone experience. I really don’t care if phone users have access or not, on every other device it looks fine.

It’s a personal website, if it looks good on my machine that’s enough for me.

That was my opinion for a while as well. It depends on your audience but about 50% of hits to my site come from one mobile device or another and in the end I felt I had to put the effort in to support them.

What is this "audience" you speak of? I've run a blog for 25 years. First, it was FrontPage, then a custom PHP site, then a custom Rails app, and now Wordpress. The only thing that hits it is web crawlers. I do it because I must.

Ha! I run a simple hit tracker and most of my posts get single digit hits a year. I rent a server to run my blog and write a blog to have something for my server to do.

I do a good bit of my web browsing on my phone and I hate those web sites that are "optimized for phones" and thus typically lacking content and features. You can sometimes disable them with desktop mode but usually those sites ignore that and force the "mobile site" version.

If the content is too small on a phone, you can always just zoom in and scroll horizontally as well as vertically. Unless the creator of the site decides to "helpfully" create a phone version of their site in which case you have to go find a computer to use the site or download some app. A great example of this is Reddit which goes out of its way to make their "mobile site" unusable to force people to download the Reddit app so they can more easily spy on you.

I do think web sites should scale properly to different window sizes which means not using certain formatting misfeatures that force certain elements to always appear on the screen or that make your menu unusable on a touch screen. That isn't hard to do because you have to make a deliberate bad design choice to make your site unusable on smaller resolutions. A well-designed web site will also work perfectly well on Lynx or a screen reader without any additional work.

On the other hand, I hate websites that are built phone-only, meaning, you have to retract a few meters from a screen, in order to read it somewhat comfortably. (Then, you've to go back to reach for the mouse and scroll, since the screen page is already over.) And it doesn't stop with the presentation: On a mobile device, three to four paragraphs is already an article, while on a screen it's the beginning of an abstract…

So there's always a mobile-only, a screen-only, a mobile-first, a screen-first and only rarely a general media web. It will depend on the author and the intended audiences.

> many suspects in the "who killed the web" mystery

Obviously it is all the fault of Millenials (/s?)

> slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day

You forgot the page counter, visitor country flags and auto playing music.

> Back then you could slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day. Everyone with their huge 800x600 monitors would see the same thing.

How I remember it was that HTML standards were lagging far behind what browsers did. So you you put a "Best viewed with Netscape <version number here>" GIF there, or even "Best viewed with Mozilla" if you weren't afraid of turning back some people.

What is much much harder in using some css from bootstrap or css grid/flex that will handle it?

Everything.

Writing plain HTML used to be easy - if you could edit a text file you could slap in a few tags and be happy enough.

Having to learn CSS (there is nothing easy about grid/flex) just to get a good looking site is way more effort than most people want.

Hence the reliance on content managers/social media site that do this hard work for you, at the cost of personalization.

What really broke the web?

1. SEO click bait crap gumming up the works.

2. Walled gardens (there are many, but Facebook is the worst)

3. Rampant polarization driven by bad actors; governments (both local and foreign), political organizations, extremists, and corporations.

4. Ad tech siphoning off the value of the web and enabling the worst of the other issues.

Blogs wouldn't even make my top ten.

i definitely think seo is a bigger killer of the web than blogs are

The Old Web was mostly blogs!

The first was certainly a big player, but that came about as a result of the rise of Google, which replaced links as the primary way to navigate the web. Once Google claimed its place, the web turned into a game to generate clicks rather than a place to put good content.

I would argue that all of those (and even more) reasons are the same reason. Ad tech driving the "free" web is the source of all the problems. Outrage (faux) is more profitable than journalism and information sharing.

That's hard to argue against, especially when targeting and tracking is taken into account.

It takes some digging to agree with the headline, but it feels true at some level.

Clearly it is the walled social media gardens that really "broke the web" and in far more fundamental ways (as in: posts that are schematic (e.g. 140 chars), that are not accessible unless logged in, where discovery is platform/algorithmic driven and not user driven etc).

These platforms flurished because they made it very easy for people to participate. In the (hypothetical) absence of social media, blogs could be accused of making it (merely) easy to follow a particular pattern of content creation.

This is a little bit like accusing writers or composers of blindly following a genre instead of crafting their own. Yes all genres are inventions and it is important not to stiffle that creative process, but it is not reasonable to expect the majority to do that...

I have a client who's web site is a series of pages within folders, no database, no scripting, html pages only. It's a complete joy to work on. Problems are rare and easily resolved, I look forward to updating it. I can't help thinking more small and medium sized web sites should be setup like this.

This with added markdown support is basically how blot.im works and it’s what got me actually working on a site (albeit in blog ish format). Not affiliated just a happy customer.

One of my go-to projects when learning a new programming language: Build a markdown based blog with it. Usually quite simple and you learn a lot about a language doing that.

That looks really cool. It seems to be a SSG hooked up to Dropbox/gdrive/git, with no front end. What a great idea.

What do you think about trump 'selling secrets', in the light of the recent story of Sergey Shestakov and Charles McGonigal?

Again, I don't like taking sides. Just searching for absolute truth. We will never get there, but we can try.

ref to your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34019912

This is a thread focused on markdown and html based SSBs. If you would like to continue our political discussion, you are welcome to contact me on my website, where I occasionally write about related issues. But HN guidelines suggest this unrelated thread is not the place for such a conversation.

I suppose things like a "design update", let alone "rebranding", never happen to this client?

Unless every page is entirely unique, a web site consisting of raw HTML pages has a lot of repetition / redundancy, and coordinated updates become repetitive, too. Authoring, too.

The upside, of course, is that there's literally nothing to go wrong in the pipeline, because there is none beside the upload operation.

I can imagine that sites like https://ciechanow.ski where every page appears custom-made could be managed like that.

I can't help thinking more small and medium sized web sites should be setup like this.

I don't. Website updates are mostly changes to the content once it's gone live, and that shouldn't require a developer. Having a CMS in the backend and a process to rebuild a static website from the content when it's changed lowers the cost of keeping things up to date, and improves the web by making websites stay relevant.

What the code looks like when a dev is working on it, or when it's sitting in a repo, it's mostly irrelevant. The important things are that the site owner can keep the content accurate and up to date, and the HTML and CSS that's delivered to the users is high quality and efficient.

Static page generator seems like ideal for that kind of stuff. Just enough to not copy-paste same stuff on different pages but not enough to get complex.

PicoCMS is even easier. Host it in whatever php hosting service. Upload markdown files to your server and you're done.

Blogs didn’t break the web, rampant advertising and social networks did.

I disguised my personal Wiki as a blog, but it’s been going on for over 20 years now and I suspect many people would do the same if they weren’t distracted off writing and sharing content by get rich quick schemes and the evolution of dopamine hooks like TikTok…

The article is internally inconsistent. Consider the following quotes:

> The early web itself, of course, was pretty exclusive: first, you had to be online, then you had to know HTML, and that wasn’t enough, you also had to have a hosting account, and know how to use it. [1]

> Culturally, though, it was devastating. Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page. [2]

> Movable Type didn’t just kill off blog customization. It (and its competitors) actively killed other forms of web production. [3]

> The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died. [4]

> There are no more quirky homepages. There are no more amateur research librarians. All thanks to a quirky bit of software produced to alleviate the pain of a tiny subset of a very small audience. That’s not cool at all. [5]

The claim about the death of the personal homepage puzzles me. If we consider statement (1), which says that people had to be fairly technically literate to set up their own, custom and quirky, homepages, then the same is true today. There are lots and lots of personal pages created by web developers for themselves; some quirky others less so. In absolute numbers, they must have multiplied. In relative numbers, they are dwarfed, of course, by all the social media apps that make it easy to just start typing into an input field somewhere. We have both the means for sufficiently skilled people to express their creativity, and low-entry-bar instruments for the rest. What's not to like? What exactly has died?

I find that lots of developers do not have a website. Many just have a Twitter and Github and that's it.

In a more short-hand summary: When money creeps into art or intellectual pursuits that originated from personal interest, they usually race to the bottom.

There's nothing wrong with blogs. There is a lot wrong with the internet as an advertising machine. Heck, the comments here frequently are first-hand blog entries on a subject and I enjoy it very much. Now if it was monetized, I'm not sure if the signal to noise would be as equivalent.

That sounds weirdly gatekeepy. How dare those new peasants not slave away in HTML mines before they can get their content shown!

If it's gatekeeping, it's also hypocritical since the article is in blog format.

This article seems like the author's personal memories asserted to sound like a comprehensive history. However, as someone online since 1993, with my own domain since 1995, I have different memories.

By 1996, we had AOL Hometown, Tripod, GeoCities, Angelfire, and more. All offering various forms of build tools and early CMS features.

The old weird web is still out there if you take the time to look. I would argue there are actually more quirky personal pages now than ever before.

I hadn’t heard of movable type before skimming that post but I would argue that a lot of web homogenisation nowadays is because of iPhones and iPads. In the early days, there were only computers so you knew that whoever was going to be interacting with your site was doing so through a keyboard and mouse and using a monitor. Now you don’t know if your user is interacting via a touch screen or mouse nor what size their screen is going to be. To fix this, people started gravitating towards certain ways of doing things to ensure a better user experience. You absolutely can make a weird old style blog, but getting it to look nice on an iPhone will likely be a pain in the arse so you either have to invest time in coding and testing it at different screen sizes or accept that the site is only going to be usable by desktop users. Everything is a tradeoff.

I suppose that, in a way, the chronological model is a reaction to the immense volume that the Internet grew into. Only focusing on new content can be a good way to drastically reduce the time spent deciding what to actually read or watch. It is also a good way to help everyone focus on a few things at a time so we can have meaningful conversations about them together.

Forums, Blogs, RSS, Newsletters, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News... Sure you often first filter for (or subscribe, or get recommended) content from topics and people that you know you like. But there's still too much stuff to choose from. If you just look at the content from the last day, it is much more manageable to decide what is worth your time. If you come back most days, you know you won't miss much quality content and it will all be mostly fresh and relevant.

> The potato gun girl and gerbil genetics guy found they didn’t want to write updates. It didn’t make sense. Their sites should have remained a table of contents, a reference tool, an odd and slightly musty personal library… the new “posts” format simply didn’t work for what they wanted to do. It felt demanding, and oppressive.

> But they’d already switched. They’d already spent all that time and energy and optimism. To switch back, they’d have to go through that process all over again. Only worse, of course, because they’d have to build the new (old) site completely from scratch. They had no tool to give it shape.

except there was. Wikipedia and other wikilike software. the start of this essay was very strong but ignoring the facts to push a point of view is a really poor end to an otherwise strong piece

I loved the insight of how the chronological method of organization took over the zeitgeist of the early Internet, pushing out the handcrafted lists/hierarchies into weird niches in the sidelines, and eventually leading to it being superseded by the algorithmic-sorting that dominates the web today.

It is not that we can't make a non-chronological (or non algorithmic-sorting) website now a days, we obviously can as there are many comments here listing various CMSs. But it is about how the vast majority of people don't do feel inclined to participate on the non-chrono/non-algo internet (either because they don't like it or don't know it). For them to put something out there in the internet is synonymous to put it on a chrono/algo format.

Liked the article but my feeling is that, at the end of the day, nobody cares about the tools you choose. People are only interested in the end results.

There's nothing preventing you from building your site out of manually crafted HTML pages (I do for instance) and I would even dare to say that it has never been easier to do so (things like Emmet make it really easier to produce HTML content from your text editor of choice, services like cloudflare pages or vercel take less than a minute to go from local to public).

CMS made it easier indeed for not-so-technical-savvy folks to push stuff on the WWW but is it actually a bad thing? At the end of the day, it's the content that matters in my opinion.

> Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page.

This is my fear with AI and other tools. Consuming more will not make us any better. The whole point of existence is alchemy: the art of changing as a person while doing something.

No matter how fast we can produce or consume, there will always be more of it and everything will have less meaning.

I remember those first blogs. They indeed had a personality and a quirkiness we have since lost from the internet.

I was recently looking through WordPress themes. I remember some years ago, it was easy to find all kinds of quirky themes that were easy to quirk up even further.

Today, there are lots of well prepared themes, but they’re all fundamentally the same: designed to “monetize” “content” with the broadest possible “reach” for someone’s “brand,” in service to modern “creator” culture.

And just as you say, the more of it there is, the less any of it seems to mean.

You can't go home again. I think an argument could be made that tools like Moveable Type and Blogger and Wordpress made the web. And, another argument could probably be made that seo-chum "articles" like this (and ad networks) broke the web. But, really Twitter and FB and YouTube are probably the most likely killers.

I think a good solution is to have both a wiki and a blog. They serve different needs.

Wiki is for maintaining information that can later be updated. New pages can start very short, or maybe just a list of links; you will expand them later, or maybe not.

Blog is where you write something when you have a coherent message, and then the article becomes read-only, a part of history.

In the past I would have added "forum" as a third category, but these days it is probably better to use an existing platform. You need to go where other people are, unless you want to become a full-time moderator of your own forum.

What else is there? Sometimes you want to make an interactive application. Or maybe upload some photos (but you could also do that in a blog or on a wiki).

An alternative approach would be to only install a wiki, and implement the blog on it, e.g. using pages like "2023-01-20" for blog articles.

For those interested, that "Mozilla Museum" site pictured is and Mozilla banners came from [1] (it is visible in status bar tooltip in the screenshot, so just to save you some typing).

That broken "Animation: Mozilla destroys Internet Exploder" is archived [2].

[1] http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/ [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20000816155258/http://www.remarca...

I think a combination of chronological and topical organisation is best because each has their own audience.

Topics are great for visitors exploring your content for the first time and chronological updates are great for followers already familiar with your work.

This is the concept i’m exploring in my app, Kapa Notes. You write notes by topic and it generates timeline updates for you that you can edit as you like. I went with an outline based editor to reduce the friction of managing topics as much as possible.

https://kapanotes.com https://kapanotes.com/cadbox1

There were way more than 23 blogs in 1999. I can't even imagine how you get to that number.

If blog means, updated page that moves in reverse chronological order. I would have called it a diary in 1999, but many of my friends from IRC had these.

Despite the somewhat clickbaity title, which I didn’t mind so much, the salient point is near the bottom, about Chronos. This is always worth being aware of and on guard against. The are other, richer models available.

Reminds me of these (https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html) digital garden style personal websites.

I remember 2002 or something, where my friends in Germany all started blogging.

One tech friend said it was bullshit. Who wants a guestbook you write into all by yourself?

I found this a hilarious explanation of what a blog is.

> "Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it."

This has an upside (i.e., anyone and everyone can do it), as well as a downside (i.e., anyone and everyone can do it).

When you can find your way through excessive noise (and ads) it's worth it. Quality signals can be paradise. Unfortunately, at this point, the noise is outpacing the ability to mitigate it. Gold is getting more and more difficult to find.

So this is one of probably tens of thousands of websites (and I mean just with this overpriced provider-tool, many more people roll with more customized stuff) that are librarian-like but generated with an user-friendly tool:

https://publish.obsidian.md/zero-chroma-infinity/

We’re here, man.

I created my first website in 1994, and started blogging (weekly, rather than daily) in 1995, so this was a nice walk down memory lane.

I too lament how much more difficult it is to build something completely independently than it was then, while rejoicing at how much more accessible building something is for more people, even if it means leaning on existing infrastructure.

Why are negative trends so often portrayed as inevitable? Why not create or at least point to some examples of the kind of website you like?

Maybe it's more appealing? No responsibility. No need to question your ideas: Do I really want a blog or a non-chronological website? Of course, you're going to have a blog, everything else is already "broken".

I wonder how much RSS/Atom has driven the chronological feed to become such a fundamental building block in website design.

RSS ? Not really. RSS aggregators however...

I don't think even at its peak RSS alone was popular enough to the average user but it did popularize the whole "get a bunch of sources and aggregate updates into one stream" idea, and that's essentially what both facebook and twitter is.

It's not worse because it's easier for people who don't want to learn a mark-up language to post their ideas.

The author seems to be arguing that the technology (i.e. MT in this case or CMS-es in general) that enabled many more people to blog (and therefore they all look alike) is what broke the web.

I understand the sentiment. But I rather have more people blogging than not.

Because blogs are the web. Many more people should be blogging.

It sounds like you missed the main point of the author: the blog-CMSs did not just impose a certain look, they also imposed some fundamental assumptions about the content, namely that content is produced as a steady stream of distinct "posts", and that the newest posts are the most interesting and massively more visible than "old" ones.

And that is a very different kind of content than webpages that are not inherently ranked in importance and discoverable through a TOC, where updates don't necessarily add new pages but often also extend or modify older ones.

Blogs are not the web. That you could even think of making that statement is the most resounding confirmation that the author is right.

If you want to blog away with simply editing HTML pages, but have no time for coming up with a template, or spend time with databases or static page generators, there's Zonelets https://zonelets.net/

Previous submission from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470426

There have been others, but that's the only one with a discussion.

I think what the author is missing is that for a long time most of the social and "chronologically updated" part of the internet was done outside of the Web and on different protocols, mainly NNTP and IRC.

Reports of the old web's death are greatly exaggerated.

> It was boring, tedious, and involved.

As a hobby, it _IS_ cozy as hell.

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