Ask HN: Is there a way to get back to the web we lost?

Naturally you're 25 years older now. So you're seeing that time from a different perspective. Age-wise I'm guessing you're in yor 40s now looking back again at a teenage self.

Your lament is pretty common to adults of that age, and has been going on for hundreds of years. It has nothing to do with the Web, and everything to do with a time which was less complicated for you, a time when you first interacted with a world beyond home/school. A time unfettered by the responsibilities of adult life.

Yes, your experience will be different to your children. You bemoan that they're not writing blogs, I bemoan that my kids were inside (in my youth we didn't have computers, we roamed outside on the mountains.) Our kids will bemoan to their kids (as they spend all their time in VR) of the simple days watching tiktok on a phone.

In truth of course, nothing stops you having a personal site today. Of writing a blog. Of building community around a shared interest. But I bet you don't, because in truth that's not what you are really missing.

Rest assured though. You don't need to be sad. Your kids will find their own experiences, they'll form their own memories, ultimately they'll have their own nostalgia- and when they do in 20 years or so, smile gracefully.

> Your lament is pretty common to adults of that age

It's not just about age but also about circumstance. I guess the first radio-pirates were also nostalgic about the era of complete freedom when everything was allowed. We just happened to live through the era of the birth of internet. The newer platforms, controlled by google and apple are draconian in comparison.

And similarly, generation Z is living through the era of the birth of similarly impactful (debatable) technologies. Perhaps gen Z will look back 20 years later, comparing their past with the times of 2040

As is so often the case, the fundamental problem is that people realised that could use it to make money. And once the big companies move in and monetise something, it's never going back.

People used to make websites and post on BBS/forums because they enjoyed it, and they didn't expect anything back. But as the Internet became more mainstream, the corporates started to wipe out many of the small sites - because they could make money from their views and that data.

And it's not just the Internet - think about how much gaming has changes with microtransactions, lootboxes and pay2win compared to how it used to be. Or how much YouTube has changed since people were trying to make money and a career out of it, rather than just making cool content. Or how much cryptocurrencies changed when they shifted from being largely supported by people who really believed in them as the future, rather than day-traders trying to get rich.

> But it felt free. You could just make a thing, and put it up for the whole world or no-one to find, and it felt like the future was condensing rapidly in front of the whole world. Like everything would accelerate from here and that we were going somewhere incredibly exciting, and then we went somewhere.. else.

Nothing is stopping you creating your own website today and sticking it on the Internet - a domain and hosting is dirt cheap. And there are still plenty of sites and communities out there - you just have to go and look for them.

The mainstream has moved on and will never come back - but that doesn't mean that everyone has to follow it.

The counter culture and the "slow" internet still exists, but you won't find it on the front page of a Google search, or by visiting the same megacorps property over and over again (with the possible exception of YouTube, which has some truely wonderful channels by passionate creators).

IRC still exists, and it's often frequented by the same sort of interesting people that it was back in the day.

Try MoonJump[1] and hit the moon button a few times - I've always been pleasantly surprised.

If you'd like that nostalgia hit, I'd highly recommended watching Halt and Catch Fire[2] if you haven't already - fictional series, but really captures the excitement of the industry from IBM PC Clones, BBS/Dial-Up, 90s Internet and the start-up culture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...

[2] https://moonjump.app

Google today owns most of mobile with Android, most of email with Gmail, most of web browsing with Chrome, pretty much all of search with Google Search, Google News, Google Images, etc., most of maps with Google Maps, and most of office apps with Docs/Sheets/etc., and it also has most of schools with Chromebooks so they've got the next generation locked into all of the above.

The only way the Web gets better is by re-distributing all of that to smaller players, undoing the acquisitions that made all of that possible. The only way that happens is if you continue to vote for politicians with the fortitude to use anti-trust laws to target Google.

Want a better web, vote for it.

Yes we miss it. The wild wild west, of early 2000s for me.

No you're not alone. No, it had nothing to do with age (the most patronizing retort tbh).

No it's not coming back, something else will have a reminscient feel of the freedom, exploration, hype and Witness to something realy exciting that computing did at the start. This event won't happen for quite a while.

We got to experience. The only options you have is to capture your experience in some media, books, film, spoken tradition, ect. Or keep the fond memories of the golden age in your mind, revisiting them to precent them from fading.

All the old haunts are gone and empty now, discarded like broken down robots on the scrap heap. All the promises were lies, tech has it's own purposes and it's lip service to our dreams is the same old lie from middle management.

You can still put stuff on the internet for everyone to see. Once upon a time, I had a web site advocating the killing of the "save" button in programs.[1] (Specifically, the lack of auto-save)

You can get hosting almost anywhere for a few $ per month, free in a few places, and put whatever you want there, if it's legal, and suitable for polite company. Get a hosting plan, set up some FTP folders for your kids to upload things into, and away you go. You can edit HTML files in notepad++ if you want.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080621173441/http://killsave.o...

My introduction to the web was, I'd say, about a year earlier - and I don't miss it at all.

Sure, it was nascent and full of promise. But that's mostly what it was - promise. Yes, there were all these offbeat websites you could find in the Yahoo directory, but that was not much different to aimlessly scrolling (or, fine, clicking on HN stories).

When I was studying CS one didn't have a hope in hell of building anything of substance independently, because Every.Single.Little.Thing had to be built from scratch - in C or C++ at best. And you'd better have enjoyed those late nights at the lab, it's not like you had anywhere to turn to at 1am when your code is buggy...

The ability to just build is, I feel, far more democratized today - and there's still a long way to go. So to me, the web is still very new, and still full of promise.

The Internet was also incredibly elitist back then. In 1998 only 17% of people in the developed world had access to it. Globally, that number was 3%...You could meet anyone in the world! So long as they were rich. Today these corresponding numbers are 90% and 63% - I think it's better that way. Certainly, that has been the promise, hasn't it?

And walled gardens? AOL wanted to own the Internet point blank... I think if anything, our generation was dumb the way all people are dumb in the face of something new. I think our kids would look back at the time we wasted on FB and Twitter and think - "You morons. You spent hours scrolling reading random people's posts? Were you THAT bored?"

Besides, we ARE, right now, part of something very new and incredibly big. Anyone can play with transformer models, with about the same relative ease and accessibility as you could with the Internet 25 years ago. (Which is to say - as a user, easy enough. As a builder, requiring a healthy dose of determination.)

I think of technology as, like, a tidal force, that just sweeps everyone. It does good and bad. It creates and destroys. Pining for any moment in time is like pinpointing a moment in a stochastic process...it was only ever just a moment in flux.

Hey let's connect, would love to talk more about this and show my project. Hit me up on linkedin or send me yours: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khaliljezini/

I thought so too coming from the same generation. But there was a moment, few years back, where I stopped worrying about it.

My kids made me watch Sex Education on Netflix. My initial reaction was just irritation. There is so much content that uses sex, shock and awe to capture attention. And once achieved, there is no further message delivered. My initial reaction was here we go again with this crap. It also took me straight back to my days as a kid, waiting eagerly with the neighborhood gang for episodes of the Wonder Years. It was innocent. It was beautiful. It was dealing with day to day stuff kids dealt with. At least that's what I thought kids needed to see. And was I annoyed at what they were getting instead.

But as Sex Education progressed, and it pulled me in quick, I was just blown away, by how the writers were handling so many complicated subjects. Not with the usual cynicism (think fight club or the wire) but with humor, imagination and loads of innocence and beauty. It was just so heartwarming. I was looking forward to the new seasons as much as my kids were :) And I cant imagine it being produced in the 90s.

And it showed me, as complicated as the world is getting, there is so much more possible today. And beauty isn't dead. It just looks different.

Even if it had a more "family guy" type of humor (like it or hate it) big mouth is good in that sense too

It talks about puberty, sexuality (straight, gay and everything in between and outside) depression, anxiety, obsessions and a lot of other stuff.

All while being funny and entertaining.

I don't get the comparison to TV shows though. TV shows are at an all time high with streaming platforms allowing creators to break free from cable tv norms.

The difference is only two things: walled gardens and low confidence.

Most front end developers have absolutely no idea what they are doing now. They struggle is about putting text on screen and needing frameworks larger than a circa 1998 web browser to do it. Yes, React and Angular only solve for one problem: put text on screen. On the flip side there is opportunity to make a lot money cleaning up that mess with jobs in A/B testing, test automation, accessibility, and so on.

The difference with walled gardens is that there is frequently less a direct correlation between a web address and the content that appears at that address. Frequently that is due to either telemetry and/or login state.

I'd think that many of here are some form of software developer, and many of us do miss the "Wild West" of the Internet we grew up with.

So, the big question is what's stopping us from building fun projects to bring back what we miss?

Is the problem the financial risk and the harder path to making money? Is it the fear of being cancelled/deplatformed? Is it we're afraid of looking stupid if we guess wrong and create a failure?

The main issues are : the control of advertising and the control of payments. The first is monopolized by Google, second is monopolized by VISA/mastercard.

Most people gave up on their forums and communities because they can't monetize effectively, as google favors mobile, large advertisers, and their own content (youtube). Visa will make up arbitrary rules about what content is allowed and in any case microtransactions is an unsolved problem. Things like Patreon make up even more rules and don't help, it soon becomes a festival of rent-seekers.

If you want to see people putting up things on the open web, start by fixing those

I think this pendulum will keep swinging. We won’t go back to that exactly, but things will always consolidate, explode or die, reconstitute into new things, consolidate, repeat.

There was a time when AOL felt like it would be around forever. And Yahoo. And ICQ. And Earthlink.

And today it feels like Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok will be around forever.

Something new is coming and it is hard to imagine, but we wont be going back.

100% know the experience you're talking about. As for getting it back..

I was at a fair/market the other day and someone said "check my latest stuff on Instagram. My website is outdated. I normally put new stuff up on Instagram because the website is so hard to update".

With that being true, and the audiences that are on these walled-gardens, I don't think we're ever getting the old web back.

I am enjoying Gopher, BBS, IRC apps, and the sdf.org PDP terminals that make me feel like I am in the 90s again.

Web 4 will fix all these problems (I have no idea what that means)

No.

Enshittification is just a internet based capitalistic enterprise.

Anywhere society focuses it's attention becomes filled with snake oil.