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Comment by anderspitman | Hacker News Reader

The web may never be better than it was about 5 years ago, and that makes me very sad

Make that 25 years ago, before the FAANGs came out.

N'ah, I remember that era. Search engines were basically worthless. Google was the first one to get the formula right.

Before Google, search engines were basically just doing keyword matching and so you'd have the issue that every search for a programming topic landed you on expertsexchange. Google was the first to start leveraging click-away signal, and they were able to successfully down-sample keyword-farmers like that one and their ilk.

Search engines were bad in the 90's, but the web was much smaller and community-driven. Most of the websites people visited were created by individuals and people linked to each other to form web rings.

I remember.

It was the worst. Crawling a ring all day to find useful content was incredibly inconvenient.

Expertsexchange was one of the main reasons I began contributing to Stack Overflow in 2010-ish.

I'm not going back to using Alta Vista, no thanks.

The early Yahoo was pretty great. I discovered a lot of cool creative sites there, none of whom tracked me or abused my email address.

still like the new internet to be honest.

Google came out in 1998, 25 years ago.

I wouldn't consider 1998 a peak. There was a local maxima in 1993, before the September that never ended. Then the rest of the 90's were exciting because of the rapid growth, but the actual state of things at the time was pretty messy. I'd personally put the next peak around 2007. Broadband was widespread but smartphones were not. Google existed but hadn't yet purchased DoubleClick. IE6, while not quite dead, no longer had a stranglehold on web development. Independent blogs and forums and RSS were still big, and hadn't yet consolidated with social media.

To me the inflection point was the 2016 US election (which also coincided with Brexit).

Independent of the elections I think social media websites had by this time “perfected” engagement-driven algorithmic feeds and online news had started getting good at optimizing their content for those purposes. And around this time, anecdotally, is when I think a lot of older people started taking the internet more seriously, as real-world services like Airbnb/Uber/Amazon prime (to be fair, started earlier) became popular and middle aged people started using social media more. This, in combination with the polarizing content of the elections, made the internet into the hostile and echo-chambery place it is today. And it also attracted a lot more Government attention leading to things like GDPR (good in theory, bad inasmuch as it led to the current cookie banner bullshit) and link taxes.

> To me the inflection point was the 2016 US election (which also coincided with Brexit.)

And with the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict.

Do you mean the Russian invasion of sovereign Ukraine territory?

I mean what the hell I said.

Russian annexed Crimea in 2014. Or are we talking about "2016-ish"?

When do you think the 2016 election was held, and when did the participants in it campaign?

Yeah I wanted to mention Euromaidan and Russia increasing its general hostile activity on the internet (overstated in the wake of the 2016 election? Yes. Literally something that verifiably happened with eg various Facebook groups for divisive political issues run by Russians acting on behalf of their government? Also yes). I do think Euromaidan was partially the root cause as it woke Russia up to the possibility that the internet could be used to destabilize its various client states as in Euromaidan or its rivals like the US.

But a lot of people will debate the actual overall influence of that vs it being a scapegoat used to delegitimize the right wing surge at the time; undeniably even if the right wing surge/political divisiveness trend was aided by Russian activity, it was still real people who engaged with it online and voted for the right wing causes.

Cell phones.

The shift away from desktop and laptops to cell phones is a major factor as well.

I wonder how old you are to think anything changed in 2016.

To me 2016 was just a continuation of what started before, there was no inflection then.

The 2000's are when things started to change, not 2016. And Obama's first election was when the internet started to be taken seriously by politicians (2008). It's basically what gave him the win.

I think the cookiewalls are older than 5 years, no?

Peak web was probably around 2010

Totally disagree, LLMs are so much better than search engines ever were.

LLMs are a complement to search, not a replacement.

That kind of proves the point: the internet is more than LLMs and search engines.

Yeah, it's also cryptocurrency and NFT's /s

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