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Comment by gonzobonzo | Hacker News Reader

This came up the other day and it became clear that many people, even on HN, don't realize that in the late 90's it was pretty common for non-tech people to have their own websites. There were many places where you could do this for free, and it was extremely easy to spin up a simple one. The actual content being shared - text and images - isn't really different from the majority of the content that's still being shared.

In many ways, we've actually regressed over the past 30 years, to the point where people say that the average person couldn't even create their own page before Web 2.0. And the web has become much more homogenized as a result, and most of the platforms people gravitate to, starting with Web 2.0, went for quick throw away engagement instead of more thoughtful evergreen content.

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If you think of technical and nontechnical as a spectrum, the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals.

And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.

Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, design, ux, marketing and stuff like that over basic webdev work.

> the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals.

I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.

because they don’t use neovim

Today I explained to a sales engineer working at a Fortune 500 company how to open an Incognito window in Google Chrome.

Maybe the inflection point was the transition between Windows XP and Windows Vista. In XP, the default behavior was to show file extentions in Windows file explorer. In subsequent Windown releases, file extentions for known file types were hidden by default. This led to future generations being less capable of identifying common file formats. Computer illiteracy has been snowballing ever since.

The inflection point was iOS

It didn't take deep technical skill and knowledge to build a Geocities website in the 1990s though, and most people who did were minimally computer literate. I feel like you're conflating issues here.

Nitpick: I think known file extensions where hidden in Explorer since at least Windows 95

https://www.brainbell.com/tutors/A+/Hardware/Managing_Files_...

As opposed to having Hacker News accounts ;P

Those people would have been more tuned in, since it was the early days of the Web. But in terms of technical skills? Throwing up a very simple Geocities page was about as much effort as starting a blog on Blogger. Easier than fiddling around with Wordpress most of the time.

It was likely a lot easier for most people than having to figure out how to do something in DOS (which was also pretty common at the time).

Throwing up a page on geocities and editing the HTML was not only easy but it was fun, and you could immediately get into a dopamine-feedback loop that sees you actually improving your basic web development skills. The game-designers paradigm of "easy to learn, hard to master" rings out here.

Back then even throwing up a colored background and marquee text was sorta thrilling. I remember people put so much effort even to basic shit like their AOL profiles back in 1999 and that sorta bled into the personal website scene. But really for me I think it was tools like html and geocities that enabled this.

But where is that today? Python beginner webdev stuff? Can you really get into that feedback loop by messing around with flask and elixir? I guess it must work for some people but I look out at the web today and most of what I see is SEO garbage. Definitely not 100 flowers blooming, but one ugly google-kudzu blanketing the entire thing.

>> not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.

Aside: the first time I put some data in a database table, and built a page to display it in the browser is one of those head exploding moments from my life.

I'm pretty sure it was MS Access, classic ASP (there were... 4? objects total to learn?) and IIS Express.

> Aside: the first time I put some data in a database table, and built a page to display it in the browser is one of those head exploding moments from my life.

This kickstarted webdev for me too. I remember the moment exactly.

Yes, the only substantial change to the web's usability (genuinely useful apps like maps excepted) has been addition of streaming video that just did not work all that well in the nineties. Everything else has been mostly fluff. The period of so called "Web 2.0" and the subsequent proliferation of SPA and framework wars around them has felt particularly pointless. In this regard the birth of useful LLMs is a bit of a fresh air in the tech sector in that it feels like something novel has emerged that isn't just an nth way of dynamically spitting out HTML.

I absolutely abhor this idea that there are "tech people" and "non tech people". It's complete defeatest bullshit. When I was 12 years old setting up a website in 1997 I was not a "tech person", I was someone curious and motivated enough to learn a very simple skill (html). There's nothing special about me. We don't talk about "bread people" and "non bread people," we just talk about people who decide to learn to make bread. There are not "driving people" and "non driving people" there are those who have learned to drive and those who haven't. I'm sick of this stupid divide. You either care to learn a skill or not.

I can't speak for others, but for me it's not a matter of dividing people in the way you describe. It's more about deciding who my audience is. If I talk to someone about my latest programming project, the conversation is completely different if it's someone who has never done programming before, versus someone who also does programming, versus someone who uses the same technologies as I do.

A website that requires the user to write HTML code targets an audience that knows HTML. That's really all there is to it. But knowledge of HTML correlates extremely strongly with knowledge of CSS and JavaScript and a couple other internet basics, so it's not labeled “people who know HTML”, it's labeled “tech people”.

What you see as defeatist I see as recognizing reality. I consider myself nontech and I run a few webapps-- if you don't see it as a useful distinction let me connect to your live database, I dare you :)

Most important was to have a under construction sign gif and a counter. And maybe a guestbook.

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