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Comment by asimpletune | Hacker News Reader

It’s crazy to think how close humanity was to having pretty nice stuff right before Facebook came along. I don’t think it was obvious at the time but in retrospect, just before Facebook there was:

- RSS/atom for notifications without requiring an account

- Creative Commons for establishing a legal framework to choose how you wanted your stuff to be shared

- IRC for real time messaging

- Wikipedia for knowledge

- Craigslist for local

Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website, but if we had built off these things I think the web itself could have been the platform.

I know in the last few years some of these have come back in popularity (eg RSS/atom), and for me it’s been an absolute revelation experiencing what the web could have been.

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> how close humanity was to having pretty nice stuff right before Facebook came along. [...] RSS/atom [...] IRC for real time message

Those protocols are "nice" to you but they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies. The decentralists who evangelize RSS & IRC have to step outside of their heads to understand why normal people don't find them compelling and easy-to-use. The web couldn't have "stayed as RSS & IRC" unless it also stayed a small niche community for geeks. I tried to explain why those technologies are not useful to a lot of internet users:

Why a lot of normies don't use RSS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35861928

Why many chat groups don't use IRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42964882

If you still insist, "I don't see why regular people couldn't just adopt RSS and IRC like me" -- it means you still haven't truly stepped outside your mind to internalize why users have different preferences and priorities on how to interact with the web.

While you're right that social media has well-designed UX/UI, it's optimized for engagement and addiction rather than well-being, much like smoking in the past, but targeting different organs.

Yea, this is the real reason. Facebook and Social Media won because they invested $billions into it, shoved it down everyone's throat, and then got them addicted to the content. It has nothing to do with how easy or hard the technology is to use. In an alternate universe, if some other company poured $billions into evolving IRC, people would just be using that.

I think that majority prefer "algorithms" to serve them information, and that is a killer of any other solutions for media consumption, and for RSS.

People do not want to 'hunt' for information, they prefer to be served. This opens doors to tiktoks, facebooks, and other. This opens door to feed manipulation, where big tech can decide what you see, and what not.

That is why I have little regard for "what majority" is using, as commonly it is lowest possible denominator. Often such "algorithms" are abusive, and the take advantage of you, of your lizard brain, and your attention.

I am sure there is no golden solution, no ideal. That said I use mostly RSS, but sometimes I also check the "algorithm" of reddit to check what is happening outside of my bubble.

This gives me opportunity to taste both worlds, and have some sanity and middle ground.

I also like small blogs, than let's say Facebook posts, as the latter easily turn into quarrel, shouting, and small blogs offers insight without much social media distractions.

I concur. "Broken Code" book by Jeff Horwitz at the Wall Street Journal amply elaborates how business metric driven algorithms stir user attention at their convenience, that may or not agree with the user's. For one data point, I prefer to be gourmet than to be fed.

> I think that majority prefer "algorithms" to serve them information

This possibility was the theme of the (most?) recent video essay on the YouTube Technology Connections channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA

There's definitely something to the appeal of algorithmic feeds, I suspect there's a fundamental neurological mechanism* in play which encourages us to scan somewhere for novel appearances / developments, same as seeing what's in the garden or on the market or who is present at the oasis etc etc.

But there's probably more to be said for consciously directing attention.

(*There's a certain d-word that probably has a genuine neurochemical meaning when not laden by a lot of popular baggage as it's entered colloquial use that I am intentionally not using because at this point I'd suspect it encourages misunderstanding more than helps, but I'm willing to believe it's related.)

Is the word “degenerate”?

Dopamine.

relevant post: https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...

> Simply put, companies building apps have strong incentives to gain more users, even users that derive very little value from the app. Sometimes this is because you can monetize low value users by selling them ads. Often, it’s because your business relies on network effects and even low value users can help you build a moat. So the north star metric for designers and engineers is typically something like Daily Active Users, or DAUs for short: the number of users who log into your app in a 24 hour period.

> What’s wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of. Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user - the billion-plus-first user - and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app. Yes, if you neglect the existing users’ experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted.

> So in practice, the design of popular apps caters almost entirely to the marginal user.

How do you fit podcasts into that philosophy? RSS/atom based and still going strong.

The amount of people that use RSS for podcasts is incredibly tiny

> Those protocols are "nice" to you but they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies.

I used to think this, and then remembered that there are hundreds of millions of people on FB liking AI slop and typing their search term into their "Update my Status" box.

The Facebook interface is absolutely unusable now, and I'm saying this as someone who signed up for it ~20 years ago. They've intentionally made it a disorienting content firehose now that they've captured however many users.

Not every technology will permeate 100% of all possible users. Even if it could, it wouldn't be desirable make that permanent. FB's design decisions suggest technology can be 'made easy', as long as its in the interest of the maker to do so. That can be rescinded at any time. That's why I'll always support interoperable protocols over proprietary.

Right, but those technologies are like 20 years old now.

Imagine if Facebook didn’t come along and we had 20 years of development and improvements over those base protocols instead of today’s social platforms.

I don't agree with this assertion. Back in those days, most people in my friend group were using MSN Messenger. The steps to get onto that were probably easier than signing up for Facebook/Insta nowadays. The same was true for yahoo, AOL or a whole bunch of other messenger services. But these all had open protocols that clients could implement, and they did - Adium for Mac was a great example, and it worked brilliantly. The only thing missing there was an open protocol for group video calls, which is why Skype came along. If we had continued on that path of open protocols (not even standards) vs. proprietary & locked down services, we'd be in a much different place now.

Small nitpick; RSS is still alive and well, but it's in the podcast space and slowly getting phased out by Apple and Spotify (in fact, most podcast SaaS's make it really hard to find the bare RSS feed). I think t would have fared well for blogs and news sites, but economic forces found it oppositional to their subscription model.

>they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies.

They were "polite", to put it in another frame. for RSS and IRC: You controlled the platform and essentially you decided to connect to services to extend your own platform. But corporations decided that you must use their platform or leave.

> The web couldn't have "stayed as RSS & IRC" unless it also stayed a small niche community for geeks.

I don't think it needed to be. People complain so much these days about finding another streaming service or games store or... well not music these days. The model they want is the one they abandoned.

Imagined you have a "netflix" as a UI and you simply browse for services to subscribe or unsubscribe to. Then your UI controls all the sorting, filters, libraries, etc. That was essentially RSS for articles. Of course, people with Plex or Emby don't need to imagine this. But an ethical framework would have been nice. I wouldn't call Plex's UI any less intuitive than any private platform.

The only argument that may hold weight here is that "you're not gonna get a good UX scheme without someone in the private sector being paid 200k/yr to figure it out". But if that's the requirement for progress, I question how my country did anything the first 200 years.

>it means you still haven't truly stepped outside your mind to internalize why users have different preferences and priorities on how to interact with the web.

Sure, people don't care about ads and I vehemently hate them in my media. I understand, I just highly disagree. I don't want an easier experience at the cost of all my personal data extracted to Morgan who calls me 5 times an hour about my extended warranty. I don't want a company being the sole factor in deciding on what I want to watch, or especially search for. Yadda yadda.

But apathy reigns supreme.

EDIT: I'll also address one argument in the RSS article: I think it's a bit biased to say "people don't follow cooking recipe websites"... on a forums focused on mostly technical topics. Most people don't follow literally everything. I'm sure you can definitely find a community of cooks and find their versions of Cory Doctorow or John Carmack or Sam Altman if you engage in such cooking discourse. But if you don't engage, then some relatively slop of "how to bake a chicken" suffices just fine, similar to any slop article in tech on "how to fix blue screen" that is just telling you to reset your computer

You don't make a community out of lurkers. But modern platforms sure do profit off them.

And Usenet groups for discussion.

A lot of the traffic (especially in pre-Google times) was due to organic networking, i.e., not an AI algorithm for "engagement", but people on their websites recommending cool websites—knowledge, humor, and jokes (it was big things before social media), interactive experiences (especially Flash, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225560), fun projects, personal social profiles with GeekCode, etc.

Do you remember when FB chat was just Jabber and you could get RSS feeds from there?

Pepperi... I remember. I think I still have the local chat logs somewhere :D

But at one point they figured out the most valuable thing a social media site has is the content and the graph between users - and they locked it down first (APIs with limits). Then started turning off the API endpoints completely, just selling the aggregate data.

The bots and troll farms don't care, they can just use browser automation instead.

> Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website

At least by the Geocities stage it was incredibly easy. Probably about as difficult as making a PowerPoint slideshow. Lots of non-techy kids were doing this in the 90's and early 2000's.

Blogging was the first big degradation of the web that I noticed. There was a big shift from evergreen content to churning out quick dopamine hits matching the time sensitive nature of blogging.

It was not easy. Everybody was copying and pasting "HTML templates", because HTML stops being readable the second you want your layout to have more than one column.

I really think you're forgetting what most web pages looked like back then. A simple background, often just one or two columns of text, a few images put in there, some HTML links. Maybe frames for the more complex sites.

Here's some popular pages from back then:

Maddox's Page[1]

Marathon Story Page[2]

Both of these could be recreated by someone who had no previous knowledge of HTML after studying HTML for one or two days.

And a lot of people's sites were even simpler - just text thrown up their with some images and links. But the thing is - people don't really need much more than that. Most Tweets, Blogs, articles, etc., are still just test and images when it comes down to it. The vehicle to deliver the content has gotten much more complex, but the content itself is usually (though not always) about the same as it was 30 years ago.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20021112205429/http://maddox.xmi... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20000815234125/https://marathon....

Yeah HTML5 + CSS3 were not a thing yet. They were one of the last missing pieces to the puzzle of solving desktop publishing. I think after all these things (rss, usenet, irc, html5, css3, etc...) the only thing left was search. I don't think a user friendly solution for search ever came along. The original algorithm was good enough, and if google wanted to be good at search I think they could have combatted set spam. The problem for search was always money.

Yeah, some sites were simple. Most sites people wanted to build required more sophisticated layouts, and thus began the great <table> age. Dreamweaver was a successful consumer product because of HTML and CSS' learning curve.

would you say making a powerpoint is "easy" or that "everyone copy/pastes a template they think looks good because design is hard"?

Yes, PowerPoint is orders of magnitude easier, because it is a GUI-based app that's fully WYSIWYG with snap guides for aligning items. HTML + CSS is non-WYSIWYG and that alone will weed out a good 50% of the Word/PPT/Excel crowd.

Even if they used Word and exported to HTML, that's just step 1 completed. How would they put that page online? What's SFTP? Why do I need SSL? Why doesn't the page look right on mobile?

> Creative Commons for establishing a legal framework to choose how you wanted your stuff to be shared

I'll disagree a bit on this. Absolutely nothing against the broader spirit of Creative Comments but I'm pretty against the Chinese menu of no derivatives and, especially, non-commercial with even CC basically threw its hands up about defining in CC 4.x.

I'm also not sure why setting up a personal website is still a relative headache. I suspect that a lot of the designers who put together templates overly prioritize glitz over simplicity.

I mean, it's a license. They can't enforce what they want if someone else wants those factors. If CC didn't provide it then we go back to the wild west of custom licenses.

The website question is easy. The biggest clients are in fact webdevs who help people make the website anyway. A layman can navigate through it, but many people will just throw a few hundred to a "wordpress developer" to whip up the site in a few days. And of course, when your audience is tech, they prioritize features over simplicity.

WYSIWYG is also just really hard to do when you're making it yourself.

> Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website

It wasn't _that_ difficult, tbh, with blogger, Wordpress, livejournal etc.

Most people creating websites want feedback too. Those platforms all had comment sections, but by the late 2000s, automated comment spam became impossible to manage. Remember all the blog comments linking to Prada and Air Jordans using nonsensical sentence structures?

All of those people who once had thriving blogs quickly moved to Facebook after that, preferring to have them handle moderation. In exchange FB took their audiences and locked them inside. Which is why every website now begs you to sign up for their mailing list as soon as the page loads.

I think that's _slightly_ ahistorical; Facebook showed up in 2005 or so, and the golden age of blogging (certainly blogging with comments and backlinks and so on) was somewhat later, really only ending around 2012 (IMO the death of Google Reader was the last straw, though it had likely been in gentle decline for a bit at that point). Comment spam was a problem throughout, but not an intractable one, and many blogs _did_ use authentication with third parties (including Facebook) to try to stem it.

Also, most people who had blogs did _not_ move to Facebook. They moved, mostly, to _Twitter_, which wasn't locked up until Musk broke the logged-out view, though it was certainly less convenient for non-logged-in users to view than a blog.

The idea that Facebook replaced blogging just doesn't hold up at all, I don't think; it primarily replaced other social networks, and Craigslist and similar services.

I was around at the time. Facebook started in 2004, I had my acct in 2005 when it was US colleges only. General availability began in 2007, and then came the flood of parents and grandparents, causing college students to rapidly sanitize their pages and switch communications to Messenger instead of posting directly on people's pages (then known as 'walls').

The flood of 'normal users' led to creation of "groups" and "pages", that were effectively blogs. Discoverability of Groups and Pages was far easier compared to climbing the SEO mountain, so many moved to FB.

One of the biggest blogs/websites that moved were the webcomic The Oatmeal, and the author has written (or illustrated) what happened when he moved.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people

I believe that since these things have not ceased to exist once FB came up, we were never close.

These all still exists no? Why do everything have to be popular. In fact popularity kills the fun.

Also I don't understand how people liked IRC. Is there any reason I am missing? Surely discord has everything that IRC had.

> Also I don't understand how people liked IRC. Is there any reason I am missing? Surely discord has everything that IRC had.

"Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.ht...

As someone who was very active on IRC back in the day and is now forced to use Discord (because that's where certain communities are now), from a design and user perspective Discord is so much worse. It's like looking at something that was designed by 14 year old boys pounding oreos, Mellow Yellow, and adderall. Like it was built by "the Carver."

I am comparing IRC protocol with discord. For valid comparison you need to compare IRC servers with discord, and many of them were operated by scummy people.

IRC was simple and light. It went (and still does) under the radar for many. There are channels on IRC that are older than many people here. I'm still on the same channel with my school friends from class of 1999.

You could easily see who can see your messages, especially on smaller channels with no lurkers or unknown bots.

The only major problem with IRC was that it requires an active TCP connection at all times. So you either had to have your Windows machine with mIRC online all the time or have a shell with either ircII/irssi+screen or a bouncer.

Modern-ish solutions like IRCCloud kinda-sorta fix that.

popularity isn't needed. But they are futher abstracted (by design) and it perpetuates this idea that RSS feeds need to be super techy to work.

>Also I don't understand how people liked IRC

same as RSS: decentralization. You control the platform. As is, you're stuck with Discord servers and any alternatives require you to leave discord. You get an IRC client and you can connect to anything that implements its interface. Which could theoretically include discord servers.

Nothing is wrong on the surface until discord does something stupid in your eyes and now you need to disconnect. Same trap as all the other big tech.

Decentralization: IRC wasn't as decentralized as people make it to be. All the top servers were in freenode and other centrally managed networks.

Discord trap: IRC was non persistent. For that comparison you can shift away from discord quickly. If you care about persistence and search of messages then yes discord has a lock in, but again this wasn't even a feature of IRC.

Perhaps RSS makes a comeback in some shape or form, as a way for LLMs/agents to fetch the latest content from sites?

RSS still exists, it's just hidden. Like you can just add any Youtube channel page to an RSS reader and get a feed for it - instead of visiting youtube's algorithm-generated front page.

I just a month ago started moving all my feeds to a self-hosted FreshRSS installation. It lets me create feeds from pages without RSS using XPath[0] or CSS selectors to pick the elements.

I also did a handful of Go applications that generate and/or modify existing feeds to be actually usable instead of just the title. I run those from cron daily and add the generated feeds to FreshRSS

And with FreshRSS I can filter out the "XXX (YC xx) is hiring" posts from HN feeds automatically :)

[0] https://danq.me/2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/

fb/xitter/tiktok/rednote/applemusic/podcastas those things replaced only open air TV, radio and magazines.

if you were reading quality content you probably never even had a fb account.

if you moved entirely to those things, i habe bad news about what demographics you really belong to.

You still have all of those things; but no the 95% also have it (albeit in a walled garden). It's more "Others are participating, but not how I want to" than anything I think.

I do wish more tech oriented communities ran off RSS/blog/etc instead of Twitter though.

there are a lot of them, actually. I added the Kagi Small Web feed to my RSS reader a few days ago and I'm kind of overwhelmed.

considering where I am in my personal journey (discovering a ton of bloggers) this whole thread is so weird to read but increasingly I feel like I live on a different planet

It almost feels like people are annoyed the non-technical population has options now.

>but no the 95% also have it (albeit in a walled garden)

They have it but are in a prison or a butchery, which sort of defeats the entire spirit of the before-tools.

>It's more "Others are participating, but not how I want to" than anything I think.

You could phrase it like that. I dont want Musk to tell me who to subscribe to. I don't want Google to hide specific articles I searched for, even when I surround with quotes. With my feeds, I would simply unsubscribe from such muck. Here, you surrender your feed to the platform. But apparently the majority love being shepherded into whatever makes the company the most money. Content is content in their eyes.

It's not how I want it. I also speak out against it because how they are doing it is dangerous. But perhaps it is too late these days.

Don't forget the webring,

i deeply miss the curating of the webrings ...

We could fix this!

Once the big providers disappeared webrings became harder to create. They are making a bit of a comeback and the largest management system is now onionring.js - https://garlic.garden/onionring/ , but there are loads of others - https://brisray.com/web/webring-tech.htm

> I think the web itself could have been the platform.

The web itself does not suggest new content.

People really want novelty. They want a feed of new and interesting stuff, without having to make too much curatorial effort of their own. So there's been generations of "link aggregator" sites: slashdot, k5, digg, reddit, HN itself. As well as that being a key part of twitter and now bluesky use. Providing a feed is also crucial to youtube and TikTok - the recommendation algorithm for TikTok is ultimately what got it "banned" in the US, and then unbanned when they agreed to change the propaganda to something more favourable to Trump.

I use bluesky, but I'm not really optimistic about it any more. It's doomed by the all-consuming US news cycle.

Yes, I agree. Search/discovery was not something that was solved in a way that respected the commons. Probably the biggest hole in the 'web is the platform' model. Sometimes I wonder if something like PageRank could have been implemented in a more fundamental way, like DNS, for the public benefit.

Anyways, I think if regulation had happened earlier then a lot of the things you mentioned would never have taken root. They should have just made it unprofitable to hoard and trade consumer data. The industry would have been so much better if the incentives required businesses to compete for consumer dollars.

> Sometimes I wonder if something like PageRank could have been implemented in a more fundamental way, like DNS, for the public benefit.

I immediately thought of https://www.mywot.com . I was surprised to see it still exists.

Though not so surprised to see that it now asks you up top to

> Connect with Google to scan your browsing history and see if you've been exposed to untrusted sites.

Sigh.

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