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Comment by jasoneckert | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the Cowboy Bebop nostalgia hit, this site is a great example of how clear, creative, and fun sites were in the late 1990s. While I struggle to identify the many reasons why I think sites looked better back then, I think being simple and content focused are two of them.

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>I think being simple and content focused are two of them.

You mean you don't like newsletter subscription pop-ups? Or a virtual assistant chat window on the corner? Or auto-playing videos that follow you when you scroll down? Or a choice between "Accept all cookies" and "Learn more?"

You can close the auto-playing video by simply waiting 10 seconds for the “x close” button to appear, which is 5px high and 12px wide.

"which is 5px high and 12px wide"

And that is just the visible part, actual clickable area is 1px by 1px so even when you correctly click on the "x", you don't actually close it.

Reddit mobile site does this when you tap a post. It drives me nuts. Then you have to hit back, which refreshes Reddit and brings you back to the top. I think it’s intentionally designed to get people to switch to the app.

> I think it’s intentionally designed to get people to switch to the app.

This might also be a dark pattern to exploit attention spans compromised by chronic content consumption.

A user sees new content at the top of the page, forgets the content they wanted to see, sticks around to look at novel material.

THEN the user either goes back and gets distracted again, or at the very least, goes back to their intended page.

Also to note, Reddit disabled i.reddit.com (the old mobile site that was snappy) within the last month.

I wouldn’t be surprised if old.reddit.com was next on the chopping block.

The day old.reddit.com goes so do I

If you get value from Reddit, it might be worth trying to migrate that elsewhere. Better to have some control than none.

I doubt they'll care. By that time, they'll be confident that whatever loss they incur by killing old. will be worth it for them. If there was an actually significant user base using old., I imagine "regular" Reddit would look a bit different than it does.

Completely honest here, I use old Reddit on mobile web. Under settings scroll down a bit and you'll see the option.

The cookie or whatever seems to expire every week or so, then I'm unceremoniously dumped back into the mess that is their "modern" design.

Despite that, the layout of old Reddit is much more information dense. Just use the phone in landscape and it's perfectly fine.

Except for when you go to try and click that tiny x, only to find that there was an intentionally coded delay for another ad just above it that pushed the x lower on the page, so you end up clicking that other ad.

It looks like you have an ad blocker! Click here to disable it for this site.

And, oh, you don't want advertising cookies? Here's a list of a dozen categories you have to manually deselect one-at-a-time. To help with this there's a bright-colored button that says, "accept all" and a drab text link that says, "use my selection."

Especially annoying when this shows up in Firefox on iOS which doesn’t even support plugins (uBlock) to begin with (since it’s on WebKit there).

Consent-O-Matic lets you to select which cookies you want in a site, and then automatically clicks the selections to popups if they appear. Has been working pretty well for me.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

Well it's impossible to have anything better than that. I mean, it's not like the worst solutions would win out and the entire planet would tacitly go along with it to prevent having to do something harder but better.

Block unvetted JS and that bullshit disappears. Your browser will be faster and you won't have to navigate around distractions hiding the content.

Hey now, don't say anything bad about cookie consent popups, the Europeans will be waking up soon and they'll downvote you to hell.

I think someone should put up a counter of how many lives the EU parliament has taken by summing the collective time every cookie banner has taken from human cognition / lives. Maybe it'll be enough to charge them with crimes against humanity.

Part of it might be because everyone did their own thing back then. There weren't many frameworks or templates, and your content weren't delivered on top of massive social networks that enforced consistency, so individual websites looked unique and refreshing.

You might say that old websites were more artisanal while modern websites are more mass produced.

Responsive websites pretty much killed this type of aesthetic. It would be an absolute nightmare to get this sort of design to work well while supporting mobile.

It's a real pity, because the hybrid designs we get now all looks like a bunch of uninspired rectangles.

This site works fine on mobile

Mobile design was something created for old phones that didn't have quite the resolution of computer monitors. Modern phones don't really need mobile designed sites.

Kinda doesn't though. Mobile most of all needs concessions for the much more limited input precision.

Personally I prefer pinch zoom for input precision instead of overly mobile design.

You need text to scale and reflow to device width if you want text to be readable. This is one of the main reasons for mobile web design. Else you're stuck panning around the screen to read the text zoomed in.

Once you decide to scale text to device size so that it's readable, you are stuck doing the rest of mobile web design (fluid layout).

You need to allow users to scale text as desired, as the original web intended. You shouldn't make a site targeted to mobile; you should make a site that allows the user to display in their client as they wish.

The problem will fix itself.

To solve that, you have to move from the easier static made-for-one-width design (what we think of as desktop-first design) and move to fluid, reflowable design which we tend to call mobile-friendly design.

Unfortunately, it tends to take more thought because we usually want widescreen components, like sidebars, that are easier to build when you can hard-code a device width, and hard-coding width is what breaks zooming and text size changes.

If by fine you mean I need to zoom and pan to read it then I guess it does, but I doubt anyone would call that "working well on mobile".

I would take

>need to zoom and pan to read

over every time I forbidden to pan and zoom by the site author.

Especially when I'm behind 43" 4k monitor and the site decide

WHAT TEN LINES

PER SCREEN

IS EVERYTHING

I WISHED FOR

It works way better for me on mobile than most new sites do.

Developers assume everyone has the latest iPhone or Pixel. So they take like a minute to load, heat my phone up, drop the battery by 10%, and have a 20% chance of OOM-ing my browser.

The Guardian is the absolute worst at this. I don't know why, it brings mobile Firefox to its knees.

Basically, fancy "mobile friendly" JS is no good if it makes my phone stutter and go catatonic.

Whereas if people just wrote old school "CSS Zen Garden" sites, or even this old table stuff, any ancient phone could handle them easily.

But no, I need to go pay a kid to dig up more coltan.

I can scroll. It's ok. What I can't do is will my phone faster, without shelling out more stupid cash.

People should just stop making web pages for mobile. So many times I have had to force the desktop version of a page to actually get what I'm there for.

The handset is a dead concept and yet here we are carrying them around it’s sad. I can’t remember the last time I put a phone to my face yet that is exactly what the form factor was made for. It’s all but guaranteed Apple cannibalizes the phone handset market for a new mobile platform.

I think the real dead end is making websites for both mobile and desktop. They are simply too different to ever have any real hope of producing something that translates well to both without hopelessly crippling one of them.

Mobile-only sites, sure. Desktop-only sites, why not. If you want both, do both instead of making a hideous web design Cronenberg pleading for the relief of death.

Back when mobile exploded I got a bee in my bonnet that I had to have an app for my website. I spent a couple thousand dollars to have a highly recommended mobile website designer do this for me. The result was HORRIBLE and I decided to just live with what I had. Turns out my native website on mobile looks GREAT, far better than on a computer screen. Go figure.

> hideous web design Cronenberg

Deep cut

I find that responsive design works well for simpler webpages. But for more complex pages or apps, yeah: it totally falls apart.

However... whenever I see an app or site that has two separate websites, I know I'm in for trouble: sometimes one version will miss some features, and I'll invariably have to request the desktop website. The worst of them was my previous health insurance provider, that only had one very important feature in the mobile version.

m.website.com or website.com/m

Yes, this is the kind of thing that also sucks in my experience.

Yeah I remember using my palm device or flip phone to browse these sites

I think this is already happening. People are realizing that not every site needs to work (or more often, become a horrible vertically-scrolling soup) on mobile. The only laggard is Google which is still stuck in 2009 and downranks mobile-unfriendly pages (even on desktop searches)

The trick for mobile is to go even simpler: plain unstyled html is as responsive as it gets.

Sites mostly didn't look this good though, they were even more garish colors and 'under construction' banners

Guilty as charged. Also don’t forget about frames, marquee text, and that smoking skeleton wearing sunglasses gif. :)

Frames were quite useful at times, though, particularly for sites that acted as a directory of other sites. With how slow dialup could be it was sometimes nice to have the list of sites you might want to visit in a compact list frame to the left so you didn’t have to hit back 5 times to get back to the directory or juggle multiple windows (because tabs didn’t yet exist).

Frames were a great way to keep around nav before the sticky css attribute. However, they were horrible for linking.

Frames were the OG SPA

This is a great example of classic graphics design (at least I'm guessing she probably had some training in it) being directly translated to the web. It's just an image made entirely in Photoshop and the space for the links are carved there. Photoshop-designed websites definitely peaked in the early 2000s. Nowadays you'd be wild to start with PS for designing a website.

I kinda miss the dead simple near-pixel-perfection and freedom of font choice that could be achieved with tables-and-images web design. If you were smart with choice of color, image format, etc you could even make them load fast on slow connections despite the large number of images involved. Their source code was awful to look at but it’s not like modern web design doesn’t come with its own dump truck full of trade-offs.

* Photoshop-designed websites definitely peaked in the early 2000s*

It lasted longer than that. Sketch wasn’t launched until 2010 and it probably took a good five years (at least) for people to switch to that

To be fair, for 1999, this is an all around fantastic site.

It was updated for the Netflix series. So it's still maintained

I think he's talking about the look of the site. If so, it hasn't changed much (apart from the content) since 1999 AFAIK.

Consistent updates for 24 years. Makes me feel bad I never stuck with anything that long in my life.

My website started in 2004 and after 18+ years the only thing that's changed is the images are larger.

And she's not even watched all of the anime yet.

I honestly liked it more than the anime.

/me ducks

The html is in lowercase so that slightly helps to calculate a date. (Older websites were all uppercase)

I think making everything lowercase hurts reading code. I really liked reading Pascal code where all keywords were uppercase.

I was strongly opinionated that upper case html tags were better and more readable, and I still believe that it should have won. Building sites in '96 nearly everyone upper cased.

Now that there is syntax highlighting though the readability benefit is minimal so not a big deal. I still think SQL keywords should be capitalized though...

Most sites were designed for 640x480 displays too so you really had to keep things concise to fit on the first screen/page.

Lack of ads, lack of SEO.

Sites from the late 90s had ads and SEO. Some pretty terrible ads like flashing banners, popups, and later Flash. In fact Flash bad reputation wasn't because the tech was bad, far from it, but because of how it was used, particularly in ads. Popup blockers were the ad blockers of the time, and the situation with popups was so bad that popup blocking became a standard feature of most browsers. As for SEO, it was crude, like the search engines of the time, but it was there, keyword stuffing, link farms, etc...

Some sites from the 90s, like the one linked here were ad-free, SEO-free and usable on a browser that is not Internet Explorer, but far from all of them were. I still like their simplicity, especially now that we have modern hardware and broadband connectivity, I don't miss the 56k modems that were part of late 90s experience.

SEO from that era involved putting a bunch of "keywords" in the same color text as the background at the bottom of the page.

Good times...

For me, what was great back then were splash pages. The more creative your splash page, the better. It was l33t if someone centered their site, like one would center their splash page. This site does that.

Winamp skins!

Sorry, but there's no webring membership on this site. The webmaster clearly does not deserve their title.

0/10

It’s because so many websites have become generalized to become a platform to gain as large an audience as possible but that audience is splintering and decentralizing and there is nothing they will be able to do to draw them back to the gray zone

They looked original.

I've been thinking about this too. Why is it about these sites that they transmit that changes how we approach and experience them. The internet of the 90's had a sort magical feeling to it. It was new and different and felt very personal. In essence it wasn't yet devoured by capitalism. It felt honest and real.

It eschews convention.

Convention had yet to be established in the 90s; anything was fair game.

I suspect we are going to run into the same burnout with AI, and much quicker. Today, "holy shit anything is possible with this magic." Tomorrow, it's going to be as exciting as your average HR drone.

These days you only see creative interfaces in video games.

I don't feel like this site is simple, it's noisy and crowded. It doesn't aid me in finding what's provided to me. Although it looks very cool I'm quite glad we simplified designs and put UX on top of the priority list vs showing off what we can do.

Why does it have to aid you in finding anything? We’re so obsessed with efficiency and “productivity” these days.

Let’s be honest, when you came to this site you weren’t looking for anything in particular. Instead the site invites you to simply look around, embrace the excitement of clicking randomly and not really knowing what you’re going to get, and not really caring either. Just be a thoughtless child, wandering a garden yanking leaves along the way. Now isn’t that rejuvenating?

"Whatever happens, happens."

As much as I want to agree with you, we're not kids anymore.

When I need to find a store's operating hours so I can try to dash over after work and before dinner, I don't have time for the Scavenger Hunt in the Garden of Narnia Experience.

> We’re so obsessed with efficiency and “productivity” these days.

I consider the internet something like a library. I want to find relevant stuff, not sift through shit to get to something interesting.

I didn't even know what it had because I was overwhelmed with colors and unusual styles that I clicked around and left. Sure, it's a nice reminder of the old days and some people find it pretty, but it's bad at conveying information imho.

I agree with the sibling saying that no website owes you anything, but what you say is not even true in the first place. In general we didn't really "simplify designs", and the "good UX on top" is often negated by modern website cruft.

As an example: the modern replacement for this kind of fan-site would be a Fandom.com site, which has an interface full of cruft, focused mostly on ads and "engagement" stuff. Only a small portion reserved for actual content. Unless there is a lot of customization, list pages are often alphabetical and have a terrible design that make it very difficult to find stuff. So you need to use their terrible search that is hidden in a tiny 30x30 button on the top among other buttons.

Plenty of other examples there. For every website like Hacker News, there's dozens of forums whose design is more focused on useless ornamentation, monetization and increasing engagement through stupid tactics.

Sorry but I totally disagree, not only with you but all the other commenters and down-voters. We got rid of flash, gifs, auto play videos with hideous sound, and blinking shit. We got reader mode, focusing on good UI/UX (given you're using ad blockers). In the times of myspace every website tried to pull fancy shit on us and I'm glad it's over. Just because there's still enough shit around doesn't mean that the internet got more readable in the mean time. Maybe I'm not using these shitty sites like you do, by MY experience is better than it was in these days.

/edit: and browsers and plugins are our saviours, hail reader mode and not auto-playing videos! I consider that part of the UI/UX development as well.

You started your message complaining about this specific website. Now, the things you complain of in this reply don't really apply to it. It's still better to use than the kind of website that replaced it. My browsing habits have nothing to do with it, I just picked an appropriate apples-to-apples example for comparison. I think it's unfair to compare this to Apple's website or something.

Also, you mention auto play videos. Those are pretty much a staple of the current website era, with browsers themselves having to fight back [1]. Now, even Reddit's new version has it. Annoying animated gifs and annoying flash were mostly novelties in personal webpages.

If anything, needing ad blockers, reader mode and and anti-autoplay in browsers, is an indication of how things aren't exactly great in the web anymore. And that website from 1999 doesn't need any of those.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay/

Yeah I was talking more broadly.

My point was that in the early days I couldn't really shape my browsing experience. Now I can because a necessity arose due to websites delivering shit (and imho this started in the early days). So now they are nice. That was my point, not really sure the delivery was on point haha. And with the demise of flash it really got a lot better. But maybe I don't visit shitty websites a lot.

> Now I can because a necessity arose due to websites delivering shit

Ah got it! We're in agreement, then. And I also can't live without those tools.

Glad we changed a disagreement to an agreement ;)

i don't understand what you mean, the landing page is a table of contents.

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