It's because gen z kids are sick of their dad's pulling up shit from the 90s like here, check out this ace of base midi file and zine txt files in l33t speak...
I also miss the old FTPs, and the days when you could list all website directory contents. I miss the early days when BBSes tried to migrate to telnet online. I miss P2P sharing apps that had chat rooms and communities build around them (anyone reading this remember VNN2000?).
alt.tasteless, principa discordia, and I remember reading about was the 3rd (or 4th) burning man long before it was "a thing".
Back when "The New Hacker's Dictionary" used to provide a common lexicon and even people who didn't read 1960s Sci-Fi knew what "grok" meant.
I remember literally running out of websites to visit in 1996 or so.
If you read fast enough that was a legit thing that could happen.
I also remember how terrible forums were until a few generations of AJAX happened. Massive sites could afford beefy servers to make forums not suck, but everywhere else things were pretty bad.
Search engines were beyond bad, it was pretty much "I know this exact term exists on this site, so I'll put it in quotes and hit search."
I never used WASTE, I was a fan of Direct Connect though.
It is weird how technological limitations forced tiny servers and users to talk in order to swap files.
IRC of course being the precursor to all this.
Bit torrent has everything, but I don't get to stumble on someones shared files know they like somethings I like, and then explore organically.
What I miss most from the earlier web is mp3.com. To this day I am angry at the founder for screwing over countless independent artists so he could try and prove a point against the RIAA. The market still hasn't consolidated on a similar product that does everything MP3.com used to do:
1. Bands Organized by Genre
2. Streaming of the band's songs
3. Ability to order a band's music
4. Social discovery of new music
If I cobble together Sound Cloud and Bandcamp I'm still stuck with a discovery problem that Spotify only kinda helps. Mp3.com was a directory like the old Yahoo, so browsing around was a great way to discover new music and then BUY it.
(I still haven't been able to find a replacement for an album I ordered off mp3.com, the band up and vanished as most bands do and I lost the CD.)
> (I still haven't been able to find a replacement for an album I ordered off mp3.com, the band up and vanished as most bands do and I lost the CD.)
I feel you. There a tons of bands (and other works such as books) that aren't and likely won't ever be accessible. This grinds my gears when I read comments about how the Internet/Piracy has everything. It has everything that is mainstream enough and even then the ephemeral nature of some technology used to share it (torrent, emule, etc.) don't necessarily mean it's available years later. In the sense that torrent networks aren't for storage but for sharing.
It's an error to believe piracy makes everything available.
1) pretentious journalist wanting to link it to politics. Picks 2 or 3 "good" examples (like the MDH) to make their point
2) commentors on HN or elsewhere jumping on everything with a notion of nostalgia
3) smarter pundits trying to explain why the older "solutions" aren't "perfect"
My personal conclusion is that Google has been heavily down-scoring content which is more than a couple months old. Try installing a blacklist extension and blacklist all news sites and take a look at what remains. I have no doubt this is algorithmically driven. This is what's wrong with the Internet today. And Neocities or whatever else ain't gonna fix it.
Google’s algorithm is weird when it comes to this.
Yes they downscore anything old. But sometimes they decide an old thing is the perfect answer for all time.
And so if you google 60*60 my article about newbie programming mistakes with time shows up above even the google calculator. It’s been unchanged for almost 5 years.
On mobile I get only the calculator in the result, and a button with “more results”.
But when I press the button and the results from the web are shown, then your site with the article you mentioned is the first result indeed.
So contrary to what the sibling suggested, it’s not just you that it is showing this for. And I probably live in a different country than you even. I live in Norway.
Commenters anywhere are going to bring up “the good old days” in relation to anything. This is called “being human.”
Your personal conclusion doesn’t fit the facts presented in the article: stuff disappears because it is not maintained. Dead links are such an issue that there are businesses who are paid to watch out for dead links in websites and determine whether the target is actually gone, has moved to a new URL or is just temporarily missing.
Businesses like “Link Alarm” aren’t politics, they are just dealing with reality.
I suppose one political angle is that long before the current Age of FAANG, corporate consolidation of the web during the '00s led to the dilution of websites and their downfall- see News Corp. buying MySpace, Yahoo! buying GeoCities, even the AOL-Time Warner merger. On the other hand, that's a pretty simplistic reading of the situation of web sites that were all behind the times in their own ways, and you can also point out to non-consolidated websites whose financial downfalls destroyed a lot of internet history- Photobucket and ImageShack paywalling everything and the demise of a ton of other image-hosting services also happened as well.
> My personal conclusion is that Google has been heavily down-scoring content which is more than a couple months old.
I think it depends. I have some technical posts that are ~3 years old and they're my most popular posts by orders of magnitude.
I'm not an SEO expert but if you're writing about topical things, then that could explain why you might be losing rankings / traffic after a few months.
I'm fighting the good fight by keeping my thoroughly embarrassing personal website from the 90s online. Neither the URL nor the pages have changed since 1999!
Yep. You put a form on the Internet that might show a URL to the general public, a bot will fill it out endlessly in the hopes of spewing malware links.
I had a personal website from 2007 that ran for maybe 10 years. Unfortunately I had an open comments section and it was not paginated. Once bots made a half-million comments the site wouldn't load anymore. Decided to just shut it down for good.
I had another WordPress site that was hacked by prescription medicine scammers. I thank bots for ruining the early internet.
Last year I briefly erected a CMS that I imagined had no abuse potential. I got asked by my host to fix it (I nuked it too), because spammers were registering accounts with it... setting the email address as the target of their spam.
I apparently got into trouble here because I was tired of WordPress and decided to try something else... and look where it got me.
On one hand, I love finding pristine pre-Web 2.0 websites untouched by modernity. On the other hand, I love finding such sites that are actually being updated semi-regularly while keeping that older aesthetic. Shows that they can still live on into the future.
I've stumbled upon some rare updates here and then for specific interests. For instance, an early '00s Gundam site on Angelfire that was updated in 2014:
Fair enough! I had forgotten about that. The site made it to the #1 spot on HN one day and I must have added it then because I was curious about the traffic.
Come to think of it, I vaguely remember using my web host’s built in editor to do that which felt like it dated back to the 90s as well.
I have absolutely no idea why I still keep this site running on my domain. I pulled it together in a fit of jokefullness back in the very early 2000s. It has no relevance today and, on several occasions, I almost got round to taking it down -- but never did. I was a big fan of tables, back in the day ...
The best thing left on the internet is Wikipedia and archive.org, and they nearly got that with the .ORG takeover attempt which they would take down those sites with excessive fees, cuts and slashes from copyright/corporate attacks veiling the authoritarian aims.
The web was once anti-authoritarian and decentralized, it is now more authoritarian and centralized, and where it isn't authoritarian it is big fish corporate owned.
There is so much propaganda, marketing and astroturfing, even the places set aside for real people have been steamrolled. I don't know what the solution is, it was a nice Wild Wild West of the web from 1992-2012-ish.
Mobile/apps also did a number on the web in terms of viability and longevity. The sites that are successful are locked and walled gardens and highly centralized in moderation. Moderation is also something that has been abused, almost censorship level now, it has created shrouded content contained with moderation moats.
The solution as I see it is to encourage independent creators who want things that represent that 1992-2012 spirit to create them. The cost and time required to do that now is really cheap and seeing as how a lot of people lament their absence, some level of success is guaranteed.
Ultimately I think it comes down to personal desire and long-term goals. It seems like a lot of great, ambitious ideas that could/should have stayed one-person or small team operations get looped into the VC/growth thing (effectively destroying their original intent).
I'd be tempted to create something like a reddit clone with less moderation, but I'm wondering:
1. How many unsuccessful reddit clones are out there already?
2. How much would regulations be a problem nowadays? You can be held liable for the content you host, and there's things like GPDR. Would that make it much harder to start a new social media platform?
1. Several, I'd imagine. But is the quality any good? Probably not.
2. I'm sure some weasel would find a way to cause trouble if it got popular enough, but it may be an opportune time to do it as a DAO or some other decentralized app so you can circumvent that stuff.
In what way would less moderation prevent the causes of the loss of the early web: propaganda and astroturfing? If anything, that would seem to make it worse.
Yeah, actually not opposed to moderation, but opposed to some forms of censorship. There's a balance to be struck, but right now, you can get kicked off Facebook for politically-incorrect memes, for instance.
There's a good argument to be made for the Internet as not the sum total of human knowledge. But rather a very temporal view influenced by search engines and social media.
Content business models are temporary. Why would anyone keep high-quality, non spammy knowledge freely available? Ad revenue is drying up more and more, there has to be another angle? And who's to say whatever business model they think of won't change in 5 years, the company acquired, or something else...
> Why would anyone keep high-quality, non spammy knowledge freely available?
This is really the crux of the issue. To understand the original purpose of the internet, you have to look at it as a space devoid of any business model. It was primarily about sharing. Commercialization drove the current state of ad dollars and fake news.
There was a time, long ago, when it was just about community. And because you cared about your community, each member was an arbiter of truth of sorts. We lost that connection.
Facebook likes to call itself a community too, but the two are not very similar.
I was doing an ml thing trying to teach the algorithm how to sort trash: recycling, compost, trash.
I wanted to add some additional labeled data so I thought I would start out with an item like 'strawberry' and google image search the item. I realized it was nearly impossible to find an actual image of a strawberry. If you google search something as simple as strawberry, all you get is page after page of stock photos and images of strawberries on various forms of eCommerce sites.
No actual image of someone taking a picture of a strawberry.
I find it hard to believe that Reddit effectively replaced BBS. The Reddit interface is woeful for exploring the comments on any given thread. I don't know how Reddit so popular...
58 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadNo dad.. It's ok..
alt.tasteless, principa discordia, and I remember reading about was the 3rd (or 4th) burning man long before it was "a thing".
Back when "The New Hacker's Dictionary" used to provide a common lexicon and even people who didn't read 1960s Sci-Fi knew what "grok" meant.
It's all very boring and feels filtered.
If you read fast enough that was a legit thing that could happen.
I also remember how terrible forums were until a few generations of AJAX happened. Massive sites could afford beefy servers to make forums not suck, but everywhere else things were pretty bad.
Search engines were beyond bad, it was pretty much "I know this exact term exists on this site, so I'll put it in quotes and hit search."
Nah. But I really did dig WASTE !
It is weird how technological limitations forced tiny servers and users to talk in order to swap files.
IRC of course being the precursor to all this.
Bit torrent has everything, but I don't get to stumble on someones shared files know they like somethings I like, and then explore organically.
What I miss most from the earlier web is mp3.com. To this day I am angry at the founder for screwing over countless independent artists so he could try and prove a point against the RIAA. The market still hasn't consolidated on a similar product that does everything MP3.com used to do:
1. Bands Organized by Genre
2. Streaming of the band's songs
3. Ability to order a band's music
4. Social discovery of new music
If I cobble together Sound Cloud and Bandcamp I'm still stuck with a discovery problem that Spotify only kinda helps. Mp3.com was a directory like the old Yahoo, so browsing around was a great way to discover new music and then BUY it.
(I still haven't been able to find a replacement for an album I ordered off mp3.com, the band up and vanished as most bands do and I lost the CD.)
I feel you. There a tons of bands (and other works such as books) that aren't and likely won't ever be accessible. This grinds my gears when I read comments about how the Internet/Piracy has everything. It has everything that is mainstream enough and even then the ephemeral nature of some technology used to share it (torrent, emule, etc.) don't necessarily mean it's available years later. In the sense that torrent networks aren't for storage but for sharing.
It's an error to believe piracy makes everything available.
Email is still going somewhat strong, I guess.
Edit: I'm not asking to be doxxed. It wouldn't be that hard, but just having some sort of online pseudonym makes me feel better.
1) pretentious journalist wanting to link it to politics. Picks 2 or 3 "good" examples (like the MDH) to make their point
2) commentors on HN or elsewhere jumping on everything with a notion of nostalgia
3) smarter pundits trying to explain why the older "solutions" aren't "perfect"
My personal conclusion is that Google has been heavily down-scoring content which is more than a couple months old. Try installing a blacklist extension and blacklist all news sites and take a look at what remains. I have no doubt this is algorithmically driven. This is what's wrong with the Internet today. And Neocities or whatever else ain't gonna fix it.
Yes they downscore anything old. But sometimes they decide an old thing is the perfect answer for all time.
And so if you google 60*60 my article about newbie programming mistakes with time shows up above even the google calculator. It’s been unchanged for almost 5 years.
But when I press the button and the results from the web are shown, then your site with the article you mentioned is the first result indeed.
So contrary to what the sibling suggested, it’s not just you that it is showing this for. And I probably live in a different country than you even. I live in Norway.
Commenters anywhere are going to bring up “the good old days” in relation to anything. This is called “being human.”
Your personal conclusion doesn’t fit the facts presented in the article: stuff disappears because it is not maintained. Dead links are such an issue that there are businesses who are paid to watch out for dead links in websites and determine whether the target is actually gone, has moved to a new URL or is just temporarily missing.
Businesses like “Link Alarm” aren’t politics, they are just dealing with reality.
I think it depends. I have some technical posts that are ~3 years old and they're my most popular posts by orders of magnitude.
I'm not an SEO expert but if you're writing about topical things, then that could explain why you might be losing rankings / traffic after a few months.
https://wiki.c2.com/
Sadly it's been recently made read-only, and development shifted to a convoluted "Web 2.0" JS app.
http://boglin.iwarp.com/
I had another WordPress site that was hacked by prescription medicine scammers. I thank bots for ruining the early internet.
I apparently got into trouble here because I was tired of WordPress and decided to try something else... and look where it got me.
I can find a lot of web-1.0-style sites that are updated regularly, but few originally from that time.
Daniel J. Bernstein's site is one example I remembered off the top of my head: https://cr.yp.to/djb.html
http://www.antipope.org
I've stumbled upon some rare updates here and then for specific interests. For instance, an early '00s Gundam site on Angelfire that was updated in 2014:
http://www.angelfire.com/anime2/zeonbase/1aindex.html
https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
And RMS's website.
Come to think of it, I vaguely remember using my web host’s built in editor to do that which felt like it dated back to the 90s as well.
The Usenet Poetry Groups "Rogues Gallery" - http://www.rikweb.co.uk/photos/rogues-gallery.html
Oh yeah, that vintage cynicism. Smells like a nice old book.
The web was once anti-authoritarian and decentralized, it is now more authoritarian and centralized, and where it isn't authoritarian it is big fish corporate owned.
There is so much propaganda, marketing and astroturfing, even the places set aside for real people have been steamrolled. I don't know what the solution is, it was a nice Wild Wild West of the web from 1992-2012-ish.
Mobile/apps also did a number on the web in terms of viability and longevity. The sites that are successful are locked and walled gardens and highly centralized in moderation. Moderation is also something that has been abused, almost censorship level now, it has created shrouded content contained with moderation moats.
Ultimately I think it comes down to personal desire and long-term goals. It seems like a lot of great, ambitious ideas that could/should have stayed one-person or small team operations get looped into the VC/growth thing (effectively destroying their original intent).
1. How many unsuccessful reddit clones are out there already?
2. How much would regulations be a problem nowadays? You can be held liable for the content you host, and there's things like GPDR. Would that make it much harder to start a new social media platform?
Content business models are temporary. Why would anyone keep high-quality, non spammy knowledge freely available? Ad revenue is drying up more and more, there has to be another angle? And who's to say whatever business model they think of won't change in 5 years, the company acquired, or something else...
This is really the crux of the issue. To understand the original purpose of the internet, you have to look at it as a space devoid of any business model. It was primarily about sharing. Commercialization drove the current state of ad dollars and fake news.
There was a time, long ago, when it was just about community. And because you cared about your community, each member was an arbiter of truth of sorts. We lost that connection.
Facebook likes to call itself a community too, but the two are not very similar.
I wanted to add some additional labeled data so I thought I would start out with an item like 'strawberry' and google image search the item. I realized it was nearly impossible to find an actual image of a strawberry. If you google search something as simple as strawberry, all you get is page after page of stock photos and images of strawberries on various forms of eCommerce sites.
No actual image of someone taking a picture of a strawberry.