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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure if it is a matter of perspective or what. But I definitely wouldn’t look back at 90’s internet too nostalgically. It was legitimately hard to find things. People made these quirky collections of websites because that was the only way to find interesting stuff. I didn’t know about websites until I heard about them IRL. I was a kid, and scared of all the weirdos on the internet, so maybe it felt harder to explore for me, but I think that was not so uncommon.

Decades tend to smear forward a bit, I think. I wonder if people are remembering, like, 200X-201X internet when they think of the 90’s? Google was really good before SEO fully figured it out (or maybe somebody really good at SEO in 200X was actually probably clever enough that you wanted to go to their site anyway).

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> I’m not sure if it is a matter of perspective or what. But I definitely wouldn’t look back at 90’s internet too nostalgically. It was legitimately hard to find things. People made these quirky collections of websites because that was the only way to find interesting stuff. I didn’t know about websites until I heard about them IRL.

I think it's more complicated that "easier is better" assumption. The 90s internet may have been better precisely because things were hard to find, for instance.

It's kind of like a lot of technology, by solving one "problem" it makes worse ones. People might have complained about needing to walk everywhere before cars were invented, but once they got cars they stopped walking and started getting fat.

There's probably a sweet spot where both "less solution" and "more solution" are in fact worse.

> I think it's more complicated that "easier is better" assumption. The 90s internet may have been better precisely because things were hard to find, for instance.

I think "easier is better" is flawed for a slightly different reason -- the early personal computing era and the early internet had a lot of creativity and a lot of people doing things on their own terms precisely because getting there required a learning curve.

Once you learn how a fundamental technology works, you can adapt it, modify it, put it to your purposes, and truly own it in ways that open a world of possibility to you that go far beyond whatever short-term use cases the original designers had in mind.

There's a reason why so many people doing interesting things with tech today are the ones who learned BASIC on their C64s or wrote HTML by hand to create their first GeoCities websites. People who got into technology when you had to read the manual tend to grok tech in a way that those who started off with overpolished consumer-appliances don't get exposed to without going to great lengths to deliberately seek it out.

Part of what made the 90s internet exciting was the sense, whenever I found a useful site, that I too could make such a site. I could probably get v1 going in an afternoon, and it would be (partly) fun.

I guess I could also make a 2020s content site, full of ads and signup clickthroughs, but I don't want to.

Movies made this transition around the 1940s. It went from "if you could put on a play, you could rent some cameras and lights and make a popular movie" to "you need a 9-digit production budget and 3 years."

I salute indie video game developers, who continue to resist this trend, making good 6-digit titles that are often more enjoyable than 9-digit titles.

That's the difference between a golden age and a silver age.

The golden age has wide open frontiers, low barriers to entry, and low hanging fruit.

The silver age is more closed off but also achieves greater sophistication.

Is there a canonical definition of these ages? It seems like a useful way of making analogies between industries/mediums.

If there isn't, maybe you could make some sort of website to explain...

And the bronze age is a new bronze age.

> The 90s internet may have been better precisely because things were hard to find, for instance.

The 90's internet was sort of like pawing through the piles of records at a thrift store. When you found something amazing, it felt really, really good.

I rarely have those moments these days, but the sweet spot definitely felt like 2000-2010. Facebook was a great way to keep up with people and didn't have too many ads. There was enough "old, weird internet" going on.

I think the point though is that we're heading to where we're no better off than we were in the 90's as modern "search" returns results that are somehow even less than no results at all.

Those curated lists are looking better and better.

Fuck - from an average coder perspective, try getting a working linux DNS server for home lab use in 2005 without having to waste a weekend or two on it.

LAMP servers were heralded as the best thing since sliced bread because of how it all just "worked."

And then add in maintenance and all the other sucky sucks of having competing binaries screw everything up.

Now, when it worked, it felt more accomplished than spinning up a `docker run...` or `argocd app create...`

However, I enjoy doing the cool shit on top of this stack now rather than waste my life figuring out why my apache process can't properly invoke php code.

> Fuck - from an average coder perspective, try getting a working linux DNS server for home lab use in 2005 without having to waste a weekend or two on it

I never found myself able to waste time on these sort of projects, because all of the time I spent on them invariably turned out to be a fruitful investment instead.

Yes, I agree about the decades blurring together. A lot of "the Sixties" happened in the early- to mid-1970s, and the 2010s didn't seem to start until about 2015 (and are ongoing today).

However, there was definitely a distinct 1990s Internet, and I remember using it in the actual 1990s. A big part of it was just the newness of the whole thing. That was still happening in like 2001 and 2002, but by the middle of the 2000s the Internet was not new anymore and large numbers of people had home broadband.

I agree the 90s internet experience wasn't something really worth pining for. It's easy to forget that broadband wasn't, in most cases, consistently broad enough yet (and server response latency was often pretty poor), the software tech stack was still too immature and much of the presentation was still designed around dial-up constraints. While the experience of discovering exponentially more genuinely interesting content on forums and personal blogs was revelatory compared to Usenet, there's even more good content available today, it's just frustratingly buried in vast mountains of click-bait crap auto-generated to deceptively look like authentic content.

I think "peak web" was somewhere around 2010 to 2012 and even as late as 2015. I'm still able to mostly put together a fairly useful and minimally annoying daily experience but it does require increasingly more work to sustain. This includes finding, integrating, and, in some cases, writing userscripts and browser add-ons to variously fix and/or de-crapify the web. uBlock Origin (with lots of my own filter rules to hide various crap elements) is just the beginning. Just checking my Firefox ViolentMonkey and Stylus scripts, there are now four scripts just to fix Google (along with a layered set of my own regex-scripted redirects in the Redirector add-on which manipulate Google Search's URL parameters fix a bunch of things and enforce useful defaults).

* YouTube: The AdashimaaTube Stylus script makes YT usable and useful again (has >700k users)

* Reddit: OldReddit plus the essential Reddit Enhancement Suite along with defaulting the homepage to a carefully curated MultiReddit list of small, special-interest niche subs.

* For the rest of the web I have about 30 add-ons in Firefox (and that's after recently culling my add-on list down to what I consider the bare essentials). About a third of them fix things related to websites, a third address issues with Firefox itself, and a third add features to Firefox or specific sites (Amazon: (item price history, fix default sort), Steam Store: comparative pricing, Twitter: fix Twitter layout & defaults, Netflix: add Metacritic, IMDB and Rotten Tom. review scores, etc).

* Although it remains the 'least-bad' browser for user choice, privacy and personalization, the current product management of Firefox seems intent on destroying even this last refuge. I can't even use FF without the amazing Lepton userchrome that extensively fixes all the insane things FF's run-amuck designers keep doing to fuck up its interface. Essential: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix. On top of that I have my own extensive fixes, adaptations and personalizations in UserChrome.css and User.JS. Lepton and my own scripts require an emergency intervention to maintain at least once every three months because they keep getting broken by new Firefox versions. Just the maintenance is getting bad enough that I'm about to switch to the latest long-term version of FF. Frankly, the changes, improvements and 'modernizations' FF has been making the last couple years seem about 90/10 irrelevant/useful. The community at FirefoxCSS is a godsend for crowd-sourcing how to keep fixing, patching and maintaining UserChrome (www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/).

* Lastly, since we're talking about tech overall, it's the same clusterfuck on Windows 10 and Android. Yes, I know Linux is better in many ways but it's a personal preference thing for me. Unlike the other non-linux option, Mac/iOS, at least Windows can still be variously "fixed" and otherwise made usable with sufficient effort and diligent hackery. Tools like Ditto (a sharable macro + multi-clipboard), 7TT, Start10, Groupy, AutoHideMouseCursor, Textify, AlwaysMouseWheel, ShareX, PowerToys, WinAeroTweaker, WinGetUI, a dozen free utility apps from NirSoft and the absolutely essential "Everything" (an incredible, lightning fast whole-system search). Together, these along with an extensive personal AHK script and a few dozen registry customizations (which I now have scripted for new installs) allow Windows 10 to be pretty okay. (Note: I'm not forgetting all the similar work I've had to do to hack, fix, de-ad-ify and de-crapify my television, Android-ish streaming sticks and nearly everything else marketed with the word "Smart". I'm just too tired to enumerate all of that too.)

Obviously, this amount of literal per-user work being required to actually experience a reasonable form of the "Better Future" we thought we were building is ridiculous. My whole life I've always believed in the ability of technology to broadly improve our lives. While this belief has proven (mostly) true, I never imagined we'd have to endure these kinds of trivial yet maddening functionality and usability regressions in routine daily activities. It's like a malevolent fairy tale genii granted our wishes for useful AI and routine spaceflight yet perversely doomed us to walk around with sandpaper in our underwear! Maybe I'm too idealistic but I just refuse to give-in, give-up and accept that our technological future is destined to be worse than the past - especially in such mundane ways - and for such trivially stupid reasons.

Would you be willing to share any of these configurations?

I've largely curated my own UBO rules/handful of TamperMonkey scripts over the years; seems you've gone above and beyond. Sounds like an admirable effort.

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