>> "The quickest way for a 'dramatic' speedup of the web is to install an ad blocker."
Because most websites would go out of business and there wouldn't be much left to browse?
Because most websites would go out of business and there wouldn't be much left to browse?
The signal to noise ratio in '97 was high because there was very little signal, and not as many people cared.
I don't agree with that at all, there was plenty of signal, it just wasn't in 'rich media' format. Pages were static and simple instead of having a multi-media circus to put across a simple point.
RiderOfGiraffes has a neat little page up elsewhere right now that could have existed in exactly the same form in '96.
The web changed dramatically when 'big money' moved in and started turning the whole thing into a shopping mall / advertising space and I really think that that is degrading the medium.
The internet has certainly improved in many ways since then as you rightfully illustrate but there was lots of good in those early days (of the web) as well, and plenty of it got destroyed.
Usenet is a good example, there are those who argue that usenet had had it's run and that the web killed it, but it is my opinion that the spam is what killed it, not the competition from the web.
Probably I prefer to have less signal but of a higher quality rather than an absolute overload where you have to sift for the bits that are worth your time.
Quick. What's the site you most miss that the modern "corporate" web has destroyed?
I'm not talking about individual sites, it is more a sense of atmosphere, the lack of commerce.
That changed somewhere around 1997 or so, and was absolutely unstoppable.
Anyway, I can see there is no way I'm going to be able to make you see what I'm getting at. I'm grasping at putting a feeling in to words and apparently the words fail me. But I can't help that feeling...
Contrast that to post-1997. You had a brief blip of SecurityFocus around 1999, and in 2003 it began fragmenting into a myriad of blogs. For tech news, we saw the migration of slashdot/digg/reddit/HN. Each time they grew, lost focus, and people with words worth reading moved on.
Bugtraq is around today but I do not read it. Take each minor bug report and multiply it by X-dozen vendor echo bulletins and it becomes unbearable. HN is on the verge of falling into the political trap of digg.
Meanwhile, random blogs pop up, have some useful posts for < 1 year and then die off or evolve into navel-gazing and I unsubscribe. An RSS reader is useless to find new blogs. I'll sit out twitter until it turns into a ghost town in a few years, thanks.
The BBS was great for locality. You knew most people on it because it was extremely local. Earlier Usenet was the same, just organized by topic instead of location. I contend that the web replacement for these has not yet arrived.
Craigslist or random PHPBB message boards may be somewhat local, but the former is too broad for real discussion and the latter tends to be too narrow (say, a neighborhood association focused on pets).
Topical discussion is very fragmented and migrates between sites too often. I don't think it's an advance to have to keep changing sites or access methods (NNTP, Web, RSS) without any real change in functionality. It's change due to novelty or running from spammers or dumb commenters.
We need less change, not more. This is something that was better in 1997.