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Comment by barbs | Hacker News Reader

It's sites like these that make me dearly miss the old internet.

Then I remember that the old internet is mostly still there, just buried under the ad-riddled mass-produced garbage pile of the current internet, and there are ways to dig through to it, but I never do.

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Exactly my sentiment.

I’d like to add that I’m grieving the discoverability of all these ingenious self made often a bit unpolished experiences.

Platforms come to provide a shiny space for the makers and then slowly enshittify everything snuffing out the life out of the originals. Just like Disney ;)

There's a search engine for it.

https://wiby.me/

Thanks for reminding me!

Also, for those who already had wiby on top of their minds, https://search.marginalia.nu can be used to look for old or old-style websites.

"enshittify" for the win

Look up Corey Doctorows post that coined it. It is beyond brilliant.

Enshittifying is deeply encoded in the mechanisms of VC money and unlimited growth.

I clicked around to an old Fluxus Blogger site and I saw a bunch of comments from about 2018 and I thought, "Yay! People are still into Fluxus!" but then I read the comments and realized they were all spam.

I miss the old internet too. It's bigger than ever now, but most of it is garbage.

It's so much harder to find the good parts of the web like this than it used to be that it drains a lot of the fun out of it.

Is there any particular technique anyone uses to find sites like this? About the only way I know of is to happen across a link to them on some forum, like this instance.

There's this search engine which seems to show some cool older-style websites:

https://wiby.me/

> In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.

EDIT: I found it via this HN thread that you might find interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31999259

I made a server that redirects you to a random site from a selection of are.na channels, where users actively add interesting sites. There’s a bit more to it than that - you can read about it on the homepage: https://moonjump.app

Add https://moonjump.app/jump to your bookmarks if you want a shortcut to jump to a random site.

Not the World Wide Web, but Gemini and Gopher has this feel. There are multiple aggregators [1][2] that bubble up new and interesting content from individuals.

1. https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/capco...

2. https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/rawtext.club/~sloum/spacewalk....

I would say the old internet is everything before about 2000 or so. It was getting pretty commercialized around that time already.

A good rule of thumb is hand coded content > content managed by a CMS.

you dug through today, barbs

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