One negative aspect of yesterday’s web was bad links and lost pages. Since the web relied a lot in users and small businesses to host their own pages, it was common to lose content if its owner lost interest.
The social aspect was different. Only a few people had an online presence, but the engagement felt more real.
Some of my teenager memories from the late 90s: suddenly finding communities sharing my niche interests (fantasy books, korg trinity sequences) that I never had access to. I also found Julius Smith's DSP book and several lecture notes from different universities which made a big impact on my career decades later. The only ads were for web rings, which seems quaint now. At least the DSP stuff was world class and freely shared.
Look at all the parts of the Internet today that don't make any money. Now imagine that is the only part there is. Lots of IRC chats, BBSes, newsgroups, email, MUDs, FTP, fan sites, and sharing of software. Lots and lots of text. What few images, and later video/audio, there were was very low quality. Try the wayback machine and you can at least see the old web even though it would be harder to see the other old parts.
I didn't get on usenet until 1998 (didn't have internet access before 1995), but I found it quite informative for the topics I was interested in. Unfortunately, the groups frequented died out around 2013 when pretty much all the regulars stopped posting.
When I got my first email address in college in 1991, I had no idea what to do with it cause I didn't know anyone else with one.
Ended up finding some lists where you could e-penpal with random people around the world. Chatted with some people in Australia (I was in Los Angeles), when their internet was working (the connection would go down or be slow for them quite a bit).
I ran an internet BBS called 'Dolphin Cove BBS' [1] which had people randomly chatting about stuff I don't even remember.
I setup a CU-SeeMe server (early video chat room software) and found out from some other people that it had been used for... oh gawd... porn!, over the weekend while I was gone.
I remember when it was frowned upon to advertise for business purposes on places like usenet. I setup a gopher and ftp server and put information about my school on it. That didn't last long because Mosiac came out not too long after that.
finger was a big thing to share information and snoop on people.
The green terminals were so slow that you could read the letters as they formed words on the screen.
There used to be a lot of well maintained FAQ's hosted on usenet. The information there was quite good and informative. The early days were filled with the smart people who were focused on building the early internet, so I think the information was a lot more trusted.
Sites were generally labors of love regardless of accuracy or credibility. There were cold hard facts and hard science. There was also a substantial amount of wild theorizing about UFOs, parapolitics, or bigfoot, but almost all of it was presented in this basically honest way. It was just people putting up information that interested them.
There were political sites but they were mostly straightforward and honest, even the extreme ones. If a site or forum was for Nazis or Leninists, it said so.
Ads and other clutter were more minimal. This was before the dynamic web so documents were just hypertext except for a few forms and little basic widgets.
A condensed description of the early net would be: uncluttered and mostly honest.
IMHO three things killed this information (relative) paradise: spam, gamification, and manipulative propaganda techniques.
These are listed roughly in order.
Spam came first and killed all the open federated systems like usenet, free blog comments, trackbacks, etc. Anything not gated became deluged by spam. Email almost died too but in the end was too valuable to abandon, but it was "saved" largely by being taken over by a small number of providers with the resources to fight spam. To this day running your own mail server is a big PITA.
The next blow was gamified social media and the algorithmic timeline. Social media started to eat the open web quickly, but social media itself was still mostly neutral until social feeds started to be driven by engagement maximizing algorithms and popularity started to be gamified. Humans started getting trained to optimize the content they create for the algorithm, and since that is optimizing for engagement that means divisive, sensational, or click bait content wins. The algorithms have basically nudge theory trained us all to be tabloid copy writers.
Last came firms like Cambridge Analytica and their ilk that view the net as a way to do con artistry at scale. Now you can't even trust that the content is real at all or that the "people" posting it are honest or are real people. I also call this "spam 2.0". Spam 1.0 was the same message blasted everywhere. Spam 2.0 is spam personalized by AI and content mills.
Much of it still survives -- freenode.net IRC, instant messaging, email, independent blogs, domestic and overseas message boards. It's just that back then that's all we relied on. Nowadays many people may or may not check their email, but they always check their Facebook page. Lots of them browse it on a device which listens in on their conversations and monitors practically everything they type (Android). I myself am typing this on an Android.
Not exactly related to big corporations getting control over the Internet, but I remember when I was 12 I would browse all day on underground hacking sites.
These sites had usually a dark theme, the hilarious feature of blocking right click (usually followed by a JS alert saying something like "Copyright - create your own content") and several script kiddies tutorial. There even were some phreaking articles!
It wasn't that long ago, maybe around 2005, same period I started using computers. I wonder, do websites like these still exist?
Individuals hosting servers with whatever functionality they wanted that people would connect to, substantially spread by word of mouth (like MUDs and IRC channels) but otherwise difficult to search. People would link to others they found interesting in "rings" to help visitors find new people to read, and often online communities were made up of a lot of people who knew each other in person and wanted a way to communicate from home more easily.
Information you found was generally published or organized by a passionate individual, for instance if you wanted to know about Star Trek you could find a star trek website that had factoids assembled manually by a few people. So you can imagine that the information was probably pretty reliable, delivered without commercial intent, but the breadth of availability was limited to what individual people felt like publishing.
In the beginning, I remember borrowing books on the internet from the local public library which had a CDROM that had basic software like mosaic to browse the web, and many would provide IP addresses and port numbers for public FTP servers containing things like freeware games and open source software. I was about 11, I'm not sure how adults at the time got online but it's probably not that far different.
Basically, imagine the entire content of the internet being like open source -- if someone was passionate about something and wanted to share it it was there. If not, it wasn't. Servers were often located in people's homes, I remember many times services just not responding because the hosts home internet was down.
> Individuals hosting servers with whatever functionality they wanted that people would connect to, substantially spread by word of mouth ... Information you found was generally published or organized by a passionate individual ... delivered without commercial intent ... if someone was passionate about something and wanted to share it it was there. ... Servers were often located in people's homes
Woa, I'm not old enough to have experienced that period of the internet, but this perfectly describes what I do. My servers are at home, I have lots of little tools in a folder that I'm happy for people to use ('connect to'), I used to run a lot more services but with my email hosted on it that is quite a security risk (maybe I'll start doing it again on the new system that I'm setting up, which is much more compartmentalized), my websites do not have ads and only one has visitor counting (using StatCounter, installed when I was 16 and curious how people used my first site). In the early days, I collected facts, links, and flash games about BMXing because I thought that sport was epic. I also shamelessly hacked those games' online highscores, if they had one, and that's how I ended up where I am today (security consultant) :-)
If you want to see what the tail end of that, where we had the web but content generation was still largely amateur, a lurkers guide to Babylon 5 is exactly as I remember
This really captures many of the differences. I'll just add that though we have more content creators today the motivation is what's really changed so much.
Back then it was harder to share your own content, either by learning HTML or hosting your own server and no real monetary rewards for doing so, and no social status indicators except for maybe 'hit counters'. Because of this it was passion for the topic that motivated people to share with far less focus on how it looked or the way it was presented.
Now with advertising, upvoting and platform biases people are more judgemental while reading others work. The motivation to create traffic and increase social outreach changed the nature of sharing itself.
I had forgotten about webrings. The web of the mid-90s was truly a "web". The search engines were basically garbage, so you never knew what you were going to find. It was weird and interesting and there was a lot of random interesting stuff on it (mostly if you were a nerd, which we all were because normal people didn't use it yet).
I remember a time when search engines were just link directories. Finding stuff was hard but at the same time we used to pay more attention and read through the information, I feel like now attention span is very short.
Slow and rare. It’s easy to forget this now with near ubiquitous high speed access but when you used the internet it was for a session. You’d sit down with an intention and be there for a while because the overhead of connecting and the loading speeds.
Also when traveling finding a Internet cafe or a hotel with a connection was an important event because you could check in.
What I remember most is what a big deal it was when UseNet started allowing ads - I want to say that was 1992 or so. Pre-WWW, UseNet was essentially a big BBS or social network for information sharing. I helped run the virtual reality newsgroup, sci.virtual-worlds, and the community building that happened as a result of the open sharing of information was incredible. It seemed as if all the experts were connected and willing to discuss their work for the good of the field. You assumed that if a person was on the Net, they were probably at a research institution or site with enough importance to be connected. Advertising your company's products was a real taboo, and people would get booted for it. Don't get me wrong, there were definitely flame wars... but for academic information sharing, the early Net in this period was invaluable.
I started using internet in 1996 I think. And I remember reading an article at that time saying that we should enjoy internet now before it becomes full of ads and taken over by corporations. At that time, I didn't get the point of the article and couldn't envision what internet would become.
To answer the question, I remember using IRC and newsgroups. I spent nights trying to find interesting content on the web (mostly personal webpages, before blogging was a thing). There was no wikipedia, no youtube, search engines sucked. Besides, there wasn't that much content in my language and I didn't speak so much English at the time.
I also remember when Youtube started. I naively wondered how personal videos could ever be interesting!
A lot less useful, a lot less developed, but like the Wild West it was a place where you got to have fun, experiment, go wild and bend the rules. And unless you went too far, you would always be welcome back into the saloon once you’ve paid your penance.
Everyone involved was passionate in what they did.
I chose my house because of the walking trail behind it. One of my neighbors really loves the walking trail too, but he hates the fact that the city took it over and made it a public park. He hates the fact that it is improved and there is parking because now other people use it too (See also Eternal September).
My neighbor also hates the stores that came in on the edge of the park and cleared the brush between the park and the roads. Plenty of people drive on those roads, and visit those stores and never know that the park is there.
I feel like the internet is very similar: The old part is still there, but most people use the stores, roads, and gathering places next to it instead of visiting it.
I think this is a useful analogy since while the old part is still here it is extremely vulnerable to the passing ill informed laws and sadly most people won't notice when it is gone.
I would add that you could meet people on this walking trail who enjoy peace and nature and who aren't there anymore. Or if they are, they are mixed with others so you can't just say hi and have a moment together just based on the fact that you both know this trail.
People used to have personal pages, not just blogs, often trying to share their knowledge and notes on different topics. I miss that. Plus casual IRC.
A search engine for only pages catered by an individual and not a company would be very cool. The first PageRank patent recently expired[1], so one could use the early Google methods for setting up such a thing. I thought early google was great and much better than today's.
Looking at quite a few modern social networks, like Instagram, "success" and engagement on many of these platforms seems to follow many of the same rules people use for SEO in regular websites.
From an outside perspective much of the difference between many influencer or aggregation accounts and a bot with nice imagery escapes me. (Although I realize much of that is just me being old and grumpy and the difference is likely the community around those figures that I am simply not a part of)
I wonder if it was a paid search portal owned by someone that did not feel the need to maximize profits could do a much better job? Like Craigslist worked well for a long time.
I thought early google was great and much better than today's.
In terms of treating bacterial infections, the early years of penicillin were also better than our own era because the pathogens hadn't evolved resistance yet. Early Google was great because the Web's pathogens hadn't evolved resistance yet.
Maybe one would have to have a system where the websites were vetted by people, set up trees of trust, and then let people choose the top of the tree and the depth for the search. Probably too computationally intense, if one has many nodes and websites, but it would be interesting to try.
Reminded me of a blog post from 2000, written by a disheartened techie during dot-com era. Here is what she wrote about the "dot-com" people: "They don't have personal sites. They don't want personal sites. They don't get personal sites. They don't get personal."
There is a mountain in the alps where I used to hike in the winter, cross-country with ski skins - a day outing with excellent fresh snow. Few people had the skills or equipment to get there - it felt exclusive, we had fun and the people we met there sometimes and exchanged a few words with were always excellent people just like us. On summiting we used to add a stone to the cairn.
Now there is a ski resort, with cable car going to the summit. Every day thousands of people of all stripes enjoy the wonderful view, have fun in the good and well groomed snow on the marked pistes - with the convenience of a heated shop for snacks & souvenirs...
Lots of invite only websites around that have really great communities. Getting in can be a bit hard but once you are in they tend to cross invite to other invite only sites.
There is also Wilby, a search engine for "oldschool", static, single-person-curated sites like these:
https://wiby.me/
From Wilby's about page:
"Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as page results are more suitable for their performance."
Slow is fine for me. The ones I look at tend to have a slow but quality stream of posts. Encourages you to check just once a day and leave a few well thought out comments. The slowness also means your comments get read by more people before they get drowned out by the firehouse of memes and insults.
When I post something on tildes.net I see there are a lot of upvotes that come in over a few days so I know people are reading but when I post something on twitter I don't think anyone ever reads that unless they log in at the second I post it.
I had thought the cable cars have all been there for a lifetime by now, and of course it seems like every great mountain has some ancient town or another at it's base. Where in the Alps was this?
it's a very common feeling; something pure when small evaporates when public. At least it didn't become a new layer for life like internet is.. it's a weird money making machine now.. it spoils almost everything.
And to an extent, I wish the world was not trying to give everything to everyone. I think it's more beautiful for things to be small and wild and only those who really connect to it live there.
Was in college in early 90's and remember being on an email list that everyone used to announce creation of a new website. Most striking thing from today and back then is it was all highly educated people using the internet and it was very friendly and open to sharing and discussing ideas.
First and foremost, a lot of IRC. Also, a lot of Counter-Strike & HLTV. RFI (Remote File Injection -- r57 / c99 anyone? :P) and SQL exploitation in the wild. Enjoying being a part of actual forum communities with proper moderators and clearly defined subject matters. DDoS'ing other IRC networks that were talking shit. Manipulating Google search results for AdSense revenue and otherwise -- I jumped on this too late, unfortunately. Going to Russian hacker forums to read up on the latest exploits. Learning Perl and Visual Basic to build shitty programs and scripts.
Indeed, the word pure feels appropriate. Sure, in my circles a lot of people were no-lifers (including myself), but I learned a lot and I also got to work on my English skills over the years. It was crazy to look at my writing when I started in comparison to 3-4 years later... astonishing, even!
On fun, games have certainly lost somethings along the way. I watched a friend view some snippets of Overwatch this past week. I was genuinely unimpressed with how little the graphics have come since quake2/3. I know other games look different, but I’m not seeing 20 years of progress. The mechanics of the game were clearly missing some of the old fun factors too.
I used to think graphics mattered, and then I played BotW and Mario Odyssey on the Switch and I realized just how unimportant they are. (To be fair, the artwork is superb)
Nintendo is great for that. I don’t game much, but Nintendo seems to have a different take on gaming than others. They’ve always valued game play and being innovative over hardware performance or price increases.
I used mosaic in 1994. It was bad and good. It was good because it was authentic. It was bad because it was low fidelity but lots and lots of great information. The post corporate Internet is definitely better. It's a good example of a well regulated free market.
It was amazing, so much energy and excitement. No one used HTTP, no one was selling anything. It was mainly about communication over usenet , email, and irc. Public ISP's didn't exist.
The corporations were not really the first one to monetise and usher in e-commerce/www, it was porn, this ushered in lots of new tech.
The internet switched from active participation to passive consumption, and now we have both except now everything is monetised, monitored, and moderated.
For starters, most people on the internet were science/tech minded, since it was rather niche. Webrings were a big thing, as a way to attempt to try to share traffic between similar sites.
As for the websites themselves, it was pure HTML. It generally wasn't pretty, but loaded as fast as it does now due to the lack of JS and CSS imports, ads, analytics, etc. One of my favorite sites to browse to this day is reminiscent of how most pages of that time looked - http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk.
Don't be fooled into thinking it was more innocent, though. But it sure was a fun time, and felt a lot more wild west, in a good way, than it does today.
Like most things are before corporations get involved - a hobby.
That is - it was filled with people who were excited about it and dedicated their time for free to help other enthusiasts and grow the community. It was filled with character and personal content.
It was also hard to use for people who aren't part of a dedicated group and it's utility was limited to the needs those group had and could provide for to others.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this thread is chat rooms. It was quite common to enter a chat room with complete strangers and become actual friends with them. The Internet was truly the first "safe space" where no one felt they needed to hide the real part of themselves or self-censor. You might never learn their real name, but you learned the person behind the handle.
There were quite a few instances where people from chat rooms on Yahoo and otherwise became real friends separated by distance only, talking on the telephone nightly.
It's nice of her to look at the individual and be able to see past his awful disability of being a Lakers fan :P
Getting back on topic, this brings up a weird thing to me: While not raised with the internet, it has been around for a good portion of my life, chat rooms and message boards, channels and newsgroups were my daily fodder. I've met numerous friends I've gamed with in person, had meetups with others, and traveled with some.
But having tried it across a few sites, and even tried some of the paid experiences, online dating-even as a guy-absolutely REPULSES me.
Being in the generation that birthed it, you'd think the exact opposite. It's a weird phenomenon to me.
I agree with that. There were a number of anonymous remailers [0] where you could send emails to others, or make posts to Usenet[1]. The remainers would strip all the headers from your post and replace them with a specific number. Other users could then reply to you using that number without knowing your real email address or name. Likewise, you wouldn't know theirs. Coupled with PGP, anonymity was very high.
I spent many months making good friendships with people like that before being comfortable with coming out as trans.
Yep, takes a lot more effort these days. Effort I am just not willing to put forth. The most I do is periodically Google my name and remove old information I no longer want out there.
That does not ring true for me. I was always self-censoring and hiding parts of myself on internet, including or especially in chats.
I mean seriously, we are talking about time when people were hiding "rm -rf" into newbie advice and such or would try to hack you if they did not liked you.
I was maybe 9 or younger in the early 90s and I was very computer savvy (am in software now, surprise?) I knew how to log into chat rooms. My parents had no idea and it wasn't as dangerous as it was now. It was just a lot of people really excited to talk to each other. I may have been lucky.
oh man. I've neer been into irc, but this reminds me of msn and chat days. You know, IMs with online status and not. I hate to be always present in the current ecosystem.
The difference is the mentality of the people going into them. It was a different time; you'd join one looking for friends and the novelty of the experience meant that everyone at the same level, exploring this new place together.
It was sparse. Strip away Facebook, Google, all the phone apps, all the commercial news sites, blogs, you're left with a a few specialist resources. Now imagine without browsers, just ftp and email (for students, academics and a few tech companies only). That is about it. It was exciting and new but not really that useful. Usenet was a bit like Reddit but smaller and text only, and friendly, but that was the highlight for me.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadThe social aspect was different. Only a few people had an online presence, but the engagement felt more real.
Best place to find interesting new music and bands. Also miss some of the funny quirky spots like alt.religion.kibology
Ended up finding some lists where you could e-penpal with random people around the world. Chatted with some people in Australia (I was in Los Angeles), when their internet was working (the connection would go down or be slow for them quite a bit).
I ran an internet BBS called 'Dolphin Cove BBS' [1] which had people randomly chatting about stuff I don't even remember.
I setup a CU-SeeMe server (early video chat room software) and found out from some other people that it had been used for... oh gawd... porn!, over the weekend while I was gone.
I remember when it was frowned upon to advertise for business purposes on places like usenet. I setup a gopher and ftp server and put information about my school on it. That didn't last long because Mosiac came out not too long after that.
finger was a big thing to share information and snoop on people.
The green terminals were so slow that you could read the letters as they formed words on the screen.
There used to be a lot of well maintained FAQ's hosted on usenet. The information there was quite good and informative. The early days were filled with the smart people who were focused on building the early internet, so I think the information was a lot more trusted.
[1] http://bio4human.fortunecity.ws/jang/bbs.htm
Sites were generally labors of love regardless of accuracy or credibility. There were cold hard facts and hard science. There was also a substantial amount of wild theorizing about UFOs, parapolitics, or bigfoot, but almost all of it was presented in this basically honest way. It was just people putting up information that interested them.
There were political sites but they were mostly straightforward and honest, even the extreme ones. If a site or forum was for Nazis or Leninists, it said so.
Ads and other clutter were more minimal. This was before the dynamic web so documents were just hypertext except for a few forms and little basic widgets.
A condensed description of the early net would be: uncluttered and mostly honest.
IMHO three things killed this information (relative) paradise: spam, gamification, and manipulative propaganda techniques.
These are listed roughly in order.
Spam came first and killed all the open federated systems like usenet, free blog comments, trackbacks, etc. Anything not gated became deluged by spam. Email almost died too but in the end was too valuable to abandon, but it was "saved" largely by being taken over by a small number of providers with the resources to fight spam. To this day running your own mail server is a big PITA.
The next blow was gamified social media and the algorithmic timeline. Social media started to eat the open web quickly, but social media itself was still mostly neutral until social feeds started to be driven by engagement maximizing algorithms and popularity started to be gamified. Humans started getting trained to optimize the content they create for the algorithm, and since that is optimizing for engagement that means divisive, sensational, or click bait content wins. The algorithms have basically nudge theory trained us all to be tabloid copy writers.
Last came firms like Cambridge Analytica and their ilk that view the net as a way to do con artistry at scale. Now you can't even trust that the content is real at all or that the "people" posting it are honest or are real people. I also call this "spam 2.0". Spam 1.0 was the same message blasted everywhere. Spam 2.0 is spam personalized by AI and content mills.
These sites had usually a dark theme, the hilarious feature of blocking right click (usually followed by a JS alert saying something like "Copyright - create your own content") and several script kiddies tutorial. There even were some phreaking articles!
It wasn't that long ago, maybe around 2005, same period I started using computers. I wonder, do websites like these still exist?
Information you found was generally published or organized by a passionate individual, for instance if you wanted to know about Star Trek you could find a star trek website that had factoids assembled manually by a few people. So you can imagine that the information was probably pretty reliable, delivered without commercial intent, but the breadth of availability was limited to what individual people felt like publishing.
In the beginning, I remember borrowing books on the internet from the local public library which had a CDROM that had basic software like mosaic to browse the web, and many would provide IP addresses and port numbers for public FTP servers containing things like freeware games and open source software. I was about 11, I'm not sure how adults at the time got online but it's probably not that far different.
Basically, imagine the entire content of the internet being like open source -- if someone was passionate about something and wanted to share it it was there. If not, it wasn't. Servers were often located in people's homes, I remember many times services just not responding because the hosts home internet was down.
Woa, I'm not old enough to have experienced that period of the internet, but this perfectly describes what I do. My servers are at home, I have lots of little tools in a folder that I'm happy for people to use ('connect to'), I used to run a lot more services but with my email hosted on it that is quite a security risk (maybe I'll start doing it again on the new system that I'm setting up, which is much more compartmentalized), my websites do not have ads and only one has visitor counting (using StatCounter, installed when I was 16 and curious how people used my first site). In the early days, I collected facts, links, and flash games about BMXing because I thought that sport was epic. I also shamelessly hacked those games' online highscores, if they had one, and that's how I ended up where I am today (security consultant) :-)
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html
Back then it was harder to share your own content, either by learning HTML or hosting your own server and no real monetary rewards for doing so, and no social status indicators except for maybe 'hit counters'. Because of this it was passion for the topic that motivated people to share with far less focus on how it looked or the way it was presented.
Now with advertising, upvoting and platform biases people are more judgemental while reading others work. The motivation to create traffic and increase social outreach changed the nature of sharing itself.
Also when traveling finding a Internet cafe or a hotel with a connection was an important event because you could check in.
To answer the question, I remember using IRC and newsgroups. I spent nights trying to find interesting content on the web (mostly personal webpages, before blogging was a thing). There was no wikipedia, no youtube, search engines sucked. Besides, there wasn't that much content in my language and I didn't speak so much English at the time.
I also remember when Youtube started. I naively wondered how personal videos could ever be interesting!
A lot less useful, a lot less developed, but like the Wild West it was a place where you got to have fun, experiment, go wild and bend the rules. And unless you went too far, you would always be welcome back into the saloon once you’ve paid your penance.
Everyone involved was passionate in what they did.
Right now it looks like a country forever lost.
I chose my house because of the walking trail behind it. One of my neighbors really loves the walking trail too, but he hates the fact that the city took it over and made it a public park. He hates the fact that it is improved and there is parking because now other people use it too (See also Eternal September).
My neighbor also hates the stores that came in on the edge of the park and cleared the brush between the park and the roads. Plenty of people drive on those roads, and visit those stores and never know that the park is there.
I feel like the internet is very similar: The old part is still there, but most people use the stores, roads, and gathering places next to it instead of visiting it.
People used to have personal pages, not just blogs, often trying to share their knowledge and notes on different topics. I miss that. Plus casual IRC.
https://www.gwern.net
https://bellard.org
Looking at quite a few modern social networks, like Instagram, "success" and engagement on many of these platforms seems to follow many of the same rules people use for SEO in regular websites. From an outside perspective much of the difference between many influencer or aggregation accounts and a bot with nice imagery escapes me. (Although I realize much of that is just me being old and grumpy and the difference is likely the community around those figures that I am simply not a part of)
What's it matter?
In terms of treating bacterial infections, the early years of penicillin were also better than our own era because the pathogens hadn't evolved resistance yet. Early Google was great because the Web's pathogens hadn't evolved resistance yet.
https://www.walterbright.com
It hasn't changed much for 20 years :-)
Here is the full post:
https://megnut.com/2000/04/14/ive-been-thinking-a-lot/
Now there is a ski resort, with cable car going to the summit. Every day thousands of people of all stripes enjoy the wonderful view, have fun in the good and well groomed snow on the marked pistes - with the convenience of a heated shop for snacks & souvenirs...
Cue Dire Strait's Telegraph Road...
You can definitely recreate the feeling of exclusivity today on the internet.
tildes.net - similar to reddit but with a heavy focus on no memes/fluff posts
RED - great music and general forum with next to no bait/troll posts.
There are lots more but those are the ones I personally enjoy.
From Wilby's about page:
"Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as page results are more suitable for their performance."
EDIT: See also this reddit thread for additional references: https://www.reddit.com/r/TTTThis/comments/72ukag/rememberweb...
(with e.g. sheldonbrown.com being my object of fascination in circa 2005 -- a remarkable encyclopedia for bicycle maintainers).
When I post something on tildes.net I see there are a lot of upvotes that come in over a few days so I know people are reading but when I post something on twitter I don't think anyone ever reads that unless they log in at the second I post it.
I had thought the cable cars have all been there for a lifetime by now, and of course it seems like every great mountain has some ancient town or another at it's base. Where in the Alps was this?
The corporate web is an "improvement" on the decentralized web only in the way ice-cream is an improvement on vegetables.
A better analogy is Henry Ford's hyper tidy and closely monitored neighborhoods built for his workers. Some didn't like it.
And to an extent, I wish the world was not trying to give everything to everyone. I think it's more beautiful for things to be small and wild and only those who really connect to it live there.
First and foremost, a lot of IRC. Also, a lot of Counter-Strike & HLTV. RFI (Remote File Injection -- r57 / c99 anyone? :P) and SQL exploitation in the wild. Enjoying being a part of actual forum communities with proper moderators and clearly defined subject matters. DDoS'ing other IRC networks that were talking shit. Manipulating Google search results for AdSense revenue and otherwise -- I jumped on this too late, unfortunately. Going to Russian hacker forums to read up on the latest exploits. Learning Perl and Visual Basic to build shitty programs and scripts.
Indeed, the word pure feels appropriate. Sure, in my circles a lot of people were no-lifers (including myself), but I learned a lot and I also got to work on my English skills over the years. It was crazy to look at my writing when I started in comparison to 3-4 years later... astonishing, even!
Fond memories...
The corporations were not really the first one to monetise and usher in e-commerce/www, it was porn, this ushered in lots of new tech.
The internet switched from active participation to passive consumption, and now we have both except now everything is monetised, monitored, and moderated.
It was the wild west.
As for the websites themselves, it was pure HTML. It generally wasn't pretty, but loaded as fast as it does now due to the lack of JS and CSS imports, ads, analytics, etc. One of my favorite sites to browse to this day is reminiscent of how most pages of that time looked - http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk.
Don't be fooled into thinking it was more innocent, though. But it sure was a fun time, and felt a lot more wild west, in a good way, than it does today.
That is - it was filled with people who were excited about it and dedicated their time for free to help other enthusiasts and grow the community. It was filled with character and personal content.
It was also hard to use for people who aren't part of a dedicated group and it's utility was limited to the needs those group had and could provide for to others.
I've written about this before: https://johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-miss-the-unlimit...
There were quite a few instances where people from chat rooms on Yahoo and otherwise became real friends separated by distance only, talking on the telephone nightly.
Getting back on topic, this brings up a weird thing to me: While not raised with the internet, it has been around for a good portion of my life, chat rooms and message boards, channels and newsgroups were my daily fodder. I've met numerous friends I've gamed with in person, had meetups with others, and traveled with some.
But having tried it across a few sites, and even tried some of the paid experiences, online dating-even as a guy-absolutely REPULSES me.
Being in the generation that birthed it, you'd think the exact opposite. It's a weird phenomenon to me.
I spent many months making good friendships with people like that before being comfortable with coming out as trans.
It was good not being tracked and traced.
[0] The most famous being anon.penet.fi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
I mean seriously, we are talking about time when people were hiding "rm -rf" into newbie advice and such or would try to hack you if they did not liked you.
Well, the FAQs under the comp.sci usenet newsgroup hierarchy were a truly awesome resource when I was a C++ dev in the early '90s.
Whatever happened to Serdar Argic?!