The thing that I just keep coming back to with all this Web 1.0 rose tinted glasses is that "no one" used the web back then. Many people _did not_ have personal web pages. Only a few individuals did, if you were lucky/smart enough.
It's fair bemoan about the state of the web now - there's many faults, but it's considerably more accessible than it was before. There is more information available that's, and more opportunities for people on this new web, and its all (ultimately) easier to access
Yeah, you used to get web space and email thrown in with your ISP, in the UK. Snobbery hadn't taken hold, you could just upload a few pages from File Explorer, via FTP. Yeah sure it was rough around the edges, but in many ways far more accessible or rather, less confusing. Not as much a big pile of mud than it is now.
Well you didn't even have to write HTML back then. You could author it in whatever program and FTP it. Which to be fair was still a stumbling block for some, but out of all the hurdles and hoops you have to jump over and through to put something on-line anyway, it wasn't that difficult.
I'd extend the sweet spot to 2010ish. The commercialization of the '00s didn't screw things nearly as badly as the arothighmization of engagement we've seen since IMO.
2010ish sounds right to me, APIs used to be widely available and accessible, which still left a way for people to have control over how they used the internet.
But maybe the API was ultimately a trap. A la "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Offer an API to encourage adoption, and then start restricting it later.
Which got us to leave our federated platforms with open protocols and enter closed silos.
Google started to go to shit around '08 or '09, allowing their results to be taken over by ad-spammers and a handful of top sites. At the same time, that's about when they adjusted search to make it extremely hard to narrow in on something obscure, even if you know for a fact it's there (this used to be a thing one could reliably do, with some guesswork about word and phrase rarity in the target page and in link text pointing at the target page).
> Until the MSN messenger rebrand in 2005 sounds like a good rule of thumb.
I think the point of no return was the launch of the iPhone. Not that the writing wasn't already on the wall, but everything accelerated after that, and it was clear things weren't going back after those devices took over.
The hand-helds gave access to the web without a the burden of a large personal computer. Which could and can be a PITA to maintain. And were slow. The hand-held OSs are in some ways easier to use.
My Uncle was a headmaster for about 35 years. When I presented a laptop to him, he couldn't use it. Told me he had never had to use a typewriter and couldn't use one. It was a really hard hurdle for him to adapt to a keyboard. And he still struggles.
The thing I'm really uneasy about is the Googles tracking everywhere you go, and all of that. It's very difficult to opt-out of tracking. I desperately tried to suppress my location from Google for years, and in one afternoon with a product activation via location/bluetooth they finally appeared to get it. Play services etc., make harvesting your contacts, reading your mail, and following you much easier. And it then becomes that bit easier to turn you into a commodity.
My Samsung was pre-loaded with Facebook. These are shitty little tricks. But advert networks in the browser also make it very difficult to escape the big trackers without a fight. Fingerprinting is everywhere.
We also dump files into the cloud these days. Which is very trusting.
Indeed. That rapidly accelerated the shift from the Web, for most people, being a physical place you went (a desk with a computer on it, in a specific spot) to being everywhere at all times. You had to choose to go use it before, and make an effort—now it follows you around, wherever you go, never more than a few seconds away.
I mean, I get it, and I agree. But to rail against Social Media and SEO in one breath, and then to have Twitter optimized headers and SEO stuff right at the top of the code seems a wee bit hypocritical.
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<meta property="twitter:title" content="The Web Is Fucked" />
<script type="application/ld+json">
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nothing we can do about it. This is a manifesto by Kev Quirk looking back
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Feels like this is not really a constructive critique of OPS argument. Indeed, it is merely them ensuring they can gain reach on the platforms they are critiquing, as opposed to screaming into the void as a Web 1.0 holdout.
Look, I don't like mowing the lawn. I think long grass looks nice.
It isn't hypocritical of me to mow my lawn to avoid fines while still advocating for elimination of the grass ordinances in my city.
To directly address your point: the motivation of web 2.0 sites is to get a bunch of money by making the content hard to read without first looking at a bunch of ads, and futher to disallow a reading experience uninterrupted by adds every 30-60s. The web page in question did not show me any ads.
My question to you is: how do you not see the difference?
I didn't see anything that said that the author had to play the game. You're certainly free to post stuff to the web without SEO optimizations and Social Media headers.
It might not get the amplification that they author expected. But that would be pretty in keeping with the Web 1.0 ideals being extolled, right?
Erm, kinda. The site does talk about POSSE (Post Once to your Site, Syndicate Everywhere), as well as using web 2.0 to your advantage. So I don't think it's hypocritical for the site to be SEO or social optimised.
Also the fact the author appears to work for Bank of America... hard to take seriously his complaints about big tech just wanting to make money, in light of that.
I wasn't implying they're big tech, or tech at all. I'm saying it's hypocritical because BoA is a big company that just wants to make money, and sometimes does horrible things [1][2]. Yet the author lobs profanities at tech companies for doing the same?
Clearly I didn't explain my point very well. I'm responding specifically to the author's throwing shade on big tech's focus on profits. He mentions this five times:
* "It was all about one thing… MONEY!"
* "Why all the tracking? Well, again it comes down to one thing…money."
* "If you’re more likely to click, they make more money."
* "As with social media, it’s all about money."
* "Do you know why, dear reader? You guessed it…MONEY!"
To me, this just seems like a ridiculous thing to harp on when the author works for a massive financial institution. Is BoA's motivation not all about money? Why would you expect big tech companies, or big companies in any industry, to be any different?
It's hypocritical in the same way that "You critique capitalism, yet you still have an iPhone" is technically hypocritical. Hypocrisy is an overrated faux-pas; you're allowed to critique systems which you still participate in.
this is just metadata, e.g. any decentralized search would also benefit from this. the best time to add it is when you publish, just like the best time to document your code is when you write it
This is kind of beating a dead horse. Of course the web was better when only the intellectual elite were on it. Of course it turned into a cesspool when the other 99% joined, including the 1% who are prolific destructive trolls.
Arguably the history of trolling goes back to the ancient Greeks. Eris for example clearly became the godess of trolling when she threw a golden apple marked 'for the fairest' into a party she was rejected from, causing the other godesses to fight over it until the Trojan War happened.
Trolls and kooks were around on Usenet even in the UUCP days, and on dialup bulletin boards as well. They've become far more visible and destructive, and manipulation has become far easier, as it got easier to go online. I hate thinking that the Eternal September meme should be anything but an oldtimer in-joke, but looking at what social media has done to society makes me shudder. Making the grapevine worldwide and instantaneous, which I once thought was a Good Thing, is now looking more to me like a mistake, but that genie is long out of the bottle now.
I'm glad to see old-school forums soldier on, at least. For specialized information and advice, they tend to be a lot more reliable than social media - mostly because they're communities that have no patience for trolls. That doesn't stop them (and spammers) from trying to cause trouble, though. Once you let the general public in, it's inevitable that some will be jerks. Just a look through the "New" queue on HN with "show dead posts" shows it vividly. :)
Of course it's not quite as binary as 1990s = good / 2020s = bad, but this article does resonate fully with my most cynical side.
I'm surprised there was no mention of cookie banners (unless I missed it).
> Although Zuckerberg and his merry band of wankers have a lot to answer for, the death of web 1.0 and the humble personal blog is not their fault alone. Search plays a huge part in this shit show too.
There was SO MUCH more I wanted to mention. Cookie banners being one of them, but I figured it was long enough as it was. I will likely add more to it in the future though.
Is this not something we (ie 'people on HN with the appropriate skill sets who are miffed at the state of the web') are actually in a position to do something about? Maybe we need a search engine that's specifically there to index sites that aren't aggressively monetised, or even excludes commercial web content altogether. We'd need some heuristics to figure out how heavily monetised a site is and obviously we'd want to favour self-hosted sites and forums rather than centralised blogging platforms and things like Reddit.
This wouldn't be aimed at replacing DDG or other generalised search engines, it'd just scratch that itch of 'where do I find web 1.0 style content that's not endless ad-ridden cruft and SEO spam?'.
Web 3 has components of what he’s nostalgic about. Especially when you start using products such as Spooky Swap and Trader Joe. There’s no cookie notices, no ads, no dark patterns.
Too bad HN absolutely loathes crypto in general, because I do see a glimmer of hope in the wild wild West that is web 3
Sounds what you're complementing is not technologies, but rather just niche communities.
There's plenty of "no cookie notices, no ads, no dark patterns" on the normal web. My guess (from zero experience) is that there's more of it on the "web 2.0". There's just lots of other junk also.
I'd love to expand my horizons but apart from peertube I have yet to see a web 3.0 project that's not some thinly veiled pump and dump coin shilling operation. The disguise may be novel, but the underlying motive is always the same.
> Web 3.0 is basically putting all the things on blockchain.
> Yeah, fuck that. Fuck blockchain. Fuck Meta. Fuck Zuck the schmuck. That’s all I have to say about that.
To expand upon this, I have yet to see a single thing a blockchain solves other than moving money around (usually from the scammed to the scammer). Web 3.0 is doubling down on what made Web 2.0 so shit.
You will NEVER get that experience back. Everything changed. The tech, the people, the culture. If you care about having quality conversations and non monetary value, you can cultivate it yourself. You can still hang out on topic specific forums, participate in webrings, make friends through shared interests.
I don't even know where to find people with shared interests anymore who are actually willing to deal with other people as something other than a potential customer, victim, or at best a single-serving friend for the duration of exactly one interaction. Hell, I'm guilty of it a lot of the time too when I'm not paying attention to it.
I think I originally enjoyed the internet because it allowed me to find communities of people who shared my interests that no one in real life did. Nowadays I've gravitated back to real life because while no one really shares my interests I at least can, rarely, find people who treat me like a person instead of an NPC, at least when they aren't looking at their phone.
Discord is the new IRC, in my experience. I was sceptical, but there are servers for some pretty niche stuff out there. The key here is that each Discord server is walled off from everyone else, and that some servers are invite-only to limit the influx of outsiders.
Take note though, it definitely doesn't replace in person interaction - it's almost social junk food.
I've tried the discord thing and there's a lot that turns me off of the experience. It seems to desire that you always be on it, for one, and of course the whole thing is under the control of one company in particular, the client is closed source and bloated, etc. Not to mention that I certainly haven't had the experience you describe community-wise regardless.
Sounds right to me. The client is too heavy, and I too wish that there was more decentralisation and ability to use alternative clients, but it is what it is. IRC hardly has the user count or the features needed to compete with Discord. The world has upgraded the expectations of what a chat client should be capable of, and IRC hasn't followed suit.
But you didn't say that you wanted an experience, you said that you wanted "people with shared interests anymore who are actually willing to deal with other people as something other than a potential customer, victim, or at best a single-serving friend for the duration of exactly one interaction."
The communities are there - just because the current platform sucks (which I agree, Discord is privacy-invasive, controlling, and dog-slow) doesn't mean that the communities have vanished. And, if there's already people, you can make connections that move to other platforms.
Much like with online dating, while what I want may exist somewhere on that platform, there is only a certain amount of quality of life decrease I am willing to tolerate in an attempt to find it.
Yawn. Another "hot take" article that's really just pandering to the HN/"true hacker" crowd that romanticizes anything pre-Google. It's a pretty shallow article that just regurgitates the same old "money makes things evil" rhetoric and slams the big Z cause it's low hanging fruit.
I'd be much more interested in something that highlights or talks about what _is_ better about web 2.0 than meme-ing about "old web good, new web bad". This is just click bait dressed up as anti-establishment / edge-lord blog spam.
In my younger days I was a loud crusader for keeping the web (and Internet in general) as free as possible both in the "free speech" and "free beer" sense of the word, but now I see that I was wrong.
What's now going on is that the huge mess of SEO techniques and ad tracking is solving one particular problem: monetisation.
I don't know exactly how would the web have spread if the early HTTP monetisation codes, headers and efforts were actually continued (like the "402 Payment Required" response), but I do believe now that not having monetisation built in to the new medium has caused the majority of freedom and surveillance issues today.
The web is not just fucked up. We fucked it up by not planning far enough.
That's a very interesting perspective, and one you don't hear a lot.
For at least a small subset of early Internet and computer pioneers there was a sense that technology would usher in a new post-scarcity or even post-money era.
The "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" gives a torrid and breathy example of the kind of thought and rhetoric floating around: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
In hindsight it seems so naive to me. I don't wonder that we got blindsided.
I remember the Declaration, for us growing up at the time, it was an era all filled up with bringing to life what Neuromancer and Snow Crash talked about.
Maybe we'll get another chance with the metaverse thing.
There is Xanadu [0], which features a royalty mechanism and authentication. Early planning began in 1960, but it didn't help that Xanadu became one of the world's longest-running vaporware efforts.
"Web 3.0" isn't the metaverse. It was the Semantic Web.
Web 3.0 was designed to give individual web publishers and consumers the capabilities that giants like Facebook and Google have.
Documents had structured data, marked up in rich RDF or Owl ontologies that could expose APIs for your data. You're probably familiar with RSS and Atom and the wonderful ecosystem of tools they had, but there were hundreds of RDF schemas. FOAF, for example, would let you publish and consume contact info, and even encode friends lists if you were interested. There were lots of these.
This was also at the time of peak Bittorrent/P2P, and we were really close to having schemas for sharing news and commentary in a P2P swarm. Imagine fully decentralized Reddit and Twitter (not federated!), where identities were anonymous by default, comments and upvotes were cryptographically signed and published, and you could curate your own peer group, interest graph, attention algorithm, and filtering. We were almost there.
Clients that operated on RDF schemas were also faster and less cludgy than HTML. We could write native code and GUIs to consume and publish this data, and we were close to evolving the HTML soup into something better.
Unfortunately, this is right at the time Google and Facebook had grown immensely from VC and ad money jet fuel. Academics and builders were distracted. People flocked to centralized platforms because it was easy and our tools were immature.
We were really close, but the tech cos got there first, got lock in, and then started messing with the commons.
Please don't forget that "web 3.0" wasn't crypto. It was more than about payment. It was a stack that gave you and I capabilities and potential that the giants have. It was a distributed knowledge graph that would have been a nirvana of innovation and sharing. But we got sidetracked, out engineered, and roadblocked.
Web 3.0 = Semantic Web.
We can still remember what it aspired to be, and we can still build it.
the semantic web is philosophically bankrupt. schemas and curation lost to the algorithm, by a wide margin, and for a good reason. ontologies are infinite.
You can define an infinite number of hypothetical APIs in all different shapes and sizes, but you don't. You decide what you're building and move on, letting other people begin to use your work.
seasoned programmers struggle to figure out the "right" API for a single purpose, and still get it wrong. good luck figuring out the "right" API for the sum of human knowledge & our ever changing interpretations & interrelations of it.
until it isn't. then the semantic librarians have to re-classify everything. while an army of them spend months on their RDFs, OWLs, & re-taggings, a lone undergrad overtakes them in a week with a web scrape & word vectors.
- The web was much smaller back then. Of course it's difficult for your personal blog to gain traction now, there are so many alternative content producers (most of them are better than you), and alternate content medium like video and audio. A lot of people who would have started a blog in 1999 probably have a podcast, video channel, or do live streaming instead. All these things were not really possible in 1999. Or, maybe they blogged because that was their only technological choice, maybe they actually just prefer posting content on social media only for their friends now that the technology exists (LiveJournal and Xanga were basically social media blog platforms, supplanted by the posting capabilities of Facebook and others).
- And, speaking of that, blogging is not at all dead, it's just that the people making a living doing it are much more sophisticated than they used to be, and use their blog as a complement to other methods of reaching their audience. For example, a food blogger will have social media images and videos of their food/recipes, and then host the recipes on their blog/website. But here we've got the other author who is probably mad that they can't get some solid views and ad revenue from putting out a low-effort blog with 20 minutes of spare effort every month.
- The Internet used to be "whoever is wealthy enough to own a $2000 computer and has Internet infrastructure available in their wealthy country" and now it's available to the entire world. So, sorry it isn't your own personal gated community for your rich nerd friends anymore.
- The big corporations on the Internet are only part of the Internet, perhaps even the minority of it. Shaking a fist at Google or Facebook is tired and played out, as is complaining about hamburger menus.
- The article is mad at easily-blockable ads in search engines. How do you expect them to make any money if you aren't willing to pay for it?
- The reason there's white space in websites now is because the Internet is big and important enough to justify hiring graphic designers and UX designers who know a lot more about what they're doing than the author would ever be willing to give them credit for. News flash: UX/UI people work off of real usage data and know what designs customers like better based on actual hard data.
- Web directories sucked hardcore compared to modern search engines. You'd never be able to find specific things that have just escaped your mind. Try searching for "modernist movie comedy office building" in 1999 (this is what I searched when I tried to remember the title of Playtime (1967)).
I agree with a lot of what the author is saying. But they are missing a really important point. The number of people willing to make blogs or static websites versus the number of people now on the internet is staggeringly small. My Mom will gladly converse with people on Facebook. She'd never in a million years make a blog or personal website. This holds true for most people.
So wishing it all went back to "1.0" has a gatekeeping and elitist undertone in my opinion. Back then most people had personal sites because most people on the web were the type that found html interesting. Early adopters tend to be more savvy on what they are adopting.
I also think there's plenty of "1.0" content still out there. Yeah, you gotta look for it, but it didn't all go away.
(author here) I agree - there's definitely a technical ransom to pay for hosting your own site, even with managed solutions, there's still domain names, hosting etc. to work though - it's not for everyone and I'm not claiming it is.
Maybe I wasn't clear on that point, apologies if that's the case. I spoke about POSSE and using more decentralised platforms, like Mastodon.
Again, they're not for everyone either, and I don't expect them to be. It would just be nice if we got a little more of web 1.0 back. :-)
In some version of the game "Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle", there was a easter egg that allowed you to play the first version of the game if you interacted with a computer stacked away in the back of the scene.
The game was difficult and looked old to me as a kid. But I somehow thought that this must have been the way people knew games before DOTT. You could run out of time, die, choose the wrong set of characters in the beginning of the game, making it impossible to win. I never finished it.
On the web today I find echoes of the "Web 1.0" on Tor-.onion-Websites (including the uncontrolled cesspool that it was in the 90s when people bought illegal guns on the "Clearweb" as we call it today). And Neocities, that is mentioned in the article as well, provides something that takes the best from the past web. The gemini protocol brings back very simple websites and SpaceHey brings back the feeling of the early "Web 2.0" when user profiles could still be heavily modified using html.
While much of what the author rightfully hates on is true, and it is the main characteristic of what the web is today, these developments also show that the web diversifies in niche corners. Whenever I discover them, it's really cool :)
SpaceHey was developed by teenagers who might be young enough not to bother creating a Facebook account for themselves anymore [1]. And yet, they came up with the idea of recreating a piece of Web history.
And if the worst becomes true and the Metaverse takes off, maybe there will be a computer stacked away somewhere in the back where you can access good old BBS boards, at least.
[1] Okay, I checked their site again and they might be a little older than teenagers, but still :)
That argument works well against generic RETVRN sentiments, but I don't know if it applies to regretting how a subculture changed when acted upon by the outside world. Is "I wish we hadn't been invaded and conquered by people with very different values" incoherent?
They weren't people with very different values. In general, they were our friends and neighbors who hadn't figured out how to use a web browser yet.
The apart-ness that some original netizens imagined for themselves was always fantasy and, I would argue, destructive fantasy when it crossed over to belief in personal elitism. Is being online to the exclusion of real world relationships with those physically adjacent to us building a new, better culture, or the digital equivalent of hiding out in the woods?
I will address the problem of technological advancements using only a small subsection of the overall argument linked above. Please read the entire manifesto to understand the context.
127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)
How many of these "X sucks" articles with an attention-grabbing headline can make it to the top of HN in a week?
While these articles lament the state of technology today and wish it were better like back in the good old days, there are never solutions put forward. Only negativity.
Why do they gain so much traction on HN, one of the few remaining outposts of thought-provoking articles and discussion?
What do we get from these endless articles about why some product or technology sucks?
Quite simple, it's a real problem but without a realistic solution short of burning everything to the ground. Once the bean counters had discovered and invaded the paradise there was no way to kick them out again. Maybe the only solution is to build a new paradise and hope that it never gains enough traction to attract the vultures.
The cool thing is that you can do that on the existing system.
Make a new service. Make it username / password authenticated. Don't give out the usernames and passwords to everyone that comes in. Have some kind of gating function (BBS's were all about who you knew, somethingawful.com made you pay twenty bucks one time, some old systems were gated on something no more complex than single-administrator bandwidth).
You won't grow at a rate that any VC will care about, but that kind of capitalism-feeding growth isn't your goal if you're trying to cultivate a "web 1.0 experience:" web 1.0 didn't support most people's capitalist ventures.
What you may find (what I've found participating in these experiments) is that the resulting space is a whole lot quieter than the rest of the web. And if you're replicating the web 1.0 experience, that's the goal.
The site administrator will also spend a lot more time glad-handing individual users who have individual issues. That's fine; if you're going for a web 1.0 experience, authentication management isn't automated beyond a few simple config scripts.
And if that's what a person wants, nothing about the modern web stops them from doing it, except that very few people will care they're doing it because (unlike the web 1.0 days) there are alternatives that accept all comers with functionally infinite capacity now.
I think that's a large part of the appeal of overlay networks like Tor, GNUnet, I2P, IPFS, etc. All of them are niche and not supported by any notable ad networks, many of them heavily discourage JavaScript and tracking, and with the networks often being either slow or high latency (or both) websites are forced to be fairly lean.
Because it's generally agreed upon that the current web is indeed fucked, and along with the empathy in the sentiment, up-voting is one small way of raising awareness in the hope that someone will fix it.
+1. All these "fucks" and "shits" felt pointless, tiresome, not convincing. Overuse of this kind of language often results in a more superficial text imo.
There wasn't much in that rant. But it does stroke our nostalgia zones.
You know something is not quite right, and can moan about it, without having a solution to the problem.
Considering many people have drifted away from some of the big socials. Niche sites, and communities may and no doubt have sprung up elsewhere. Newsnet and PhpBB rooms of old have been replaced by other forums.
In the UK, the web was the preserve of the well-to-do for a long time. Ubiquitous smart phones have put the web in almost every man's pocket these days. And the initial lavish jump on and novelty will wear off. Everyone's a troll and photographer for 5 minutes, or some such.
My Mum has only just really discovered the web in the last year, via Youtube. She still doesn't really get the web, but gets that website (ish). It's still fresh for many.
It's probably just easier to poke at a thing.
Web rings still exist. My partner has a hobby, which is shared on a forum and via Youtube, and they are all very good at supporting and bigging up each other across those boundaries. It's a very vibrant community. And the technology is just backgrounded.
> ...there are never solutions put forward. Only negativity.
What are you supposed to do when you recognize a shortcoming or a way society/technology has regressed, but the thing is out of your or anyone's control to actually fix? Not talk about it?
> What do we get from these endless articles about why some product or technology sucks?
Recognition of the problem, so that no one could just claim that everything is great, when there are good demonstrable historical reasons to rightfully claim otherwise. Sure, on one hand some of it might make you feel worse, but on the other, i think it's nice to document how things were in a time where many weren't around to experience all of it. Not everyone should grow up with only the knowledge of walled gardens, closed platforms and largely centralized and corporation driven Internet.
Very rarely (but still) you also get actionable steps to take, or the ability to build communities with like minded individuals, such as: https://512kb.club/
Or maybe just fun little projects, for example, by people like Luke Smith: https://based.cooking/ (there is information at the bottom of the site about it)
The clash between conservative and progressive is becoming very apparent on HN. Any of the crypto or web3 discussions are just 2 opposite sides shouting at each other.
I recently was discussing web3 on indiehackers. Way more constructive discussions.
Maybe the next article reaching the top is how the old HN was better ;).
edit: And looking at those articles, the conservative side is definitely in the majority. Like I say: just shouting at each other.
I agree, and this article doesn't even make a remotely compelling case that the web does suck. It's all just "back in my day we had to walk uphill both ways and we liked it".
Seriously, they lead with "it was better when there were no search engines and you had to trawl through a directory". I'm old enough to remember that. It wasn't better. It sucked.
They even list phpBB style forums as a positive thing. I mean sure I guess they're better than StackOverflow and Discourse if you like clicking "next page" 84 times to find the solution to your problem.
Their spectacles are so rose-tinted I'm surprised they can see through them at all.
If I felt that I had to write a rant, it would read a lot like this. Well said.
I'd also add that smartphones and tablets have done much to mess up the Web. The "all white space" site design trend is one of the results. The old version of the NHL stats page was chock full of information; now it's chock full of white space and requires a lot of extra scrolling, all so it's usable on a touchscreen.
"Web 1.0" being billed as "glorious" is a stretch, to say the least. There was a lot to dislike about the early web but the glow of nostalgia covers up those blemishes. "Web 1.0" was great for some people and not-so-great for others. There are good reasons why "Web 2.0" happened, and to truly understand it we need to separate the corporatization of the internet from the actual human needs that were and are being addressed by social media, et al.
Sounds like he remembers an over romanticised version of the web. if you would really remember how the old web worked or ever used Altavista or other early search-engines to look for stuff, you'd realise the web is a LOT more accessible today, with a lot more information available. Yes I met new, and kept in touch with people through forums and IRC, but that has just shifted to other places online. Maybe less accessible to people from my generation or older, but this is still there. Now it's Discord, Slack, Tik-Tok, Instagram, Twitch, Snapchat, ... all run by companies, but offering services that are WAY more accessible. I remember explaining non-techie friends how to get on IRC in the late mid/late '90s and early 2000's, which was a mess.
Yes it's all commercialised, but that's a 2-way street. It costs money to run infrastructure, the web has boomed. You're not talking about a couple hundred users on a forum, or a few thousand IRC users on an irc node ran by some volunteer who in exchange for being an ircop or forum admin was prepared to swallow the cost, or was ran by some guy working at or owning a small ISP.
With scale comes money. Even late-stage forums were full of ads, just to cover the hosting cost. And this was not a sudden change, this was an evolution, driven by demand.
Part of the "new Web" that that I'm not a fan of is, with the massive reach of the modern Internet, some person's infelicitous comment or ribald joke can permanently end a career. The force multiplier of these corporate silos of information make this situation worse.
I would like to return to a more HTML-ified Web, with less reliance on JS frameworks that scatter spinny loading icons all over, but IMO the worst aspect is a social and cultural problem, not a technical one.
Yes, this is definitely a concern: while the public nature of most content hasn't changed (even in the 1.0 days, your blog could be read by anyone who could access the URL), what public means has changed as the userbase has grown from several hundred thousand or a few million to billions of people.
I don't have a great solution for this other than for people to remember / realize that everything they put online is that visible (including this comment. ;) ).
Well, part of the solution is to enable anonymity, on the legal, technical, and platform levels. Just reminding everyone that "everything you say online can be publicly tied to your real identity" causes a chilling effect when you have opinions on anything remotely controversial.
Very true, and I simply don't believe that humans are wired to deal with what is, essentially, a permanent Panopticon. Most people understand on some level that gossip is destructive, but also a lot of fun. Now that gossip can circle the globe twice in seconds, and combine that velocity with the fact that nearly everything online is gossip, it's like some kind of destructive psyop that nobody could have ever imagined.
Even if you could have some flavor of anonymity, the cozy relationship that the big tech corporations have with national governments around the world means that only the most paranoid and OpSec-savvy can avoid having that anonymity pierced.
We just quietly slid from "you shouldn't say that," to "you can't say that" in less than a generation.
When I started using the web back in the 90's, everyone used to use a handle/nickname and so it was never easy to link an online person to a reallife individual.
These days everyone is encouraged to enter their real name, DOB and telephone number (see Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) which then creates a link to a real person.
I think the web was better because it was anonymous, rather than anything else really. If you had "SuperHardLord" posting abuse at you on IRC, it didn't really matter. However if you have a Twitter user with full photo and details doing the same, it feels much more personal.
People say this, but before the web, on USENET in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was standard protocol (at least on serious newsgroups dealing with science and technology) to not only use your real name but even include a signature explaining where you worked and what your job was or if you were a student studying something or whatever. It was helpful in evaluating the responses -- a university professor, a professional in industry, and a student in a field each would have different viewpoints on a new technology or method, for example.
Still is this way. Just because 1 billion people jump off a bridge, are you going to do the same? There are many of us online who have never used Facebook, Twitter, etc and never signed up with real names. The only thing that gets me is I submit to using a credit card and online purchases. The express reason the web __is__ going to such lengths to become advert-laden trash is that too many common users all agree to these traps. It's ruining the entire world, I for one am eagerly awaiting most of these "constant growth" web plagues to tank and dotcom bubble 2.0 and won't miss these tyrants.
I'm not on Facebook or Twitter and know very well not to post my real name or other information if I can help it... Mainly to reduce the chance of fraud.
While yes, social media encourages identity ownership for obvious reasons, in modern forums like discord, reddit, and hn, most people use anonymous aliases like you describe. That hasn’t changed. I decided to not use social media and have no problem engaging with the world on the modern web.
People that only have an artificial online presence can evade these negatives while not missing much in my opinion.
Facebook, Instragram and Twitter have all a specialized demographic and all these platforms are orientated around people instead of topics. This is why I would not compare them to irc, reddit, 4chan and similar consorts as the parent did. Given, that probably does have much to do with a difference in audiences.
Problem with Discord is that it swallows content. Nothing is searchable (cannot crawl discord, only relies on internal search), I believe that will cost many communities in the long run. It is convenient for small indie developers, but discoverability is extremely inhibited.
But the major difference is personalization. Now everyone gets their own search results. In favor of advertising against general education. This is a huge factor why the net is worse. Also, if you look up any term that is part of the news cycle, you only find shitty news rags that pushed their presence with nepotism and have a direct business relationship to search engine providers.
> if you would really remember how the old web worked or ever
used Altavista or other early search-engines to look for stuff, you'd realise the web is a LOT more accessible today,
with a lot more information available.
I would dispute this. At that time, search was not gamed the way it is now, you didn't have to wade through millions of terrible low quality SEO bs to find the nuggets you're looking for.
It was early SEO that helped to do in AltaVista. When spammy, irrelevant search results started plaguing it, and AV's pages began to be crammed with ads, a neat little upstart came along with a very simple search page and a clean user interface, that returned better search results. This, of course, was Google, and guess what's happened to Google in the meantime? We've come full circle.
The SEO gaming, of course, continues unabated, and will continue as long as search engines exist.
Back in the day, a lot of content that we take for granted today didn't even exist online (e.g. wikipedia, webmd, heck even mundane things like maps)
As someone who got into the web industry through discovering content for a niche topic, search engines have always been only a superficial helper in finding content, with most content discovery happening through finding niche, relevant, obscure long tail keywords via deep diving, then unearthing more content via deep diving into searches based on these new keywords, rinse and repeat.
> Look, we will never get the web of old back. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t perfect either. The web of today is more accessible, more dynamic and pretty much a cornerstone of our society.
I agree with almost everything that you said, and would bring it even further.
I wouldn't even say that "Yes it's all commercialised". If anything, I bet you there are multiple orders of magnitude more fun, silly, webring-like content than there were before the web exploded in popularity - they're just not visible to the average person, and are outnumbered by orders of magnitude more junk and commercial content.
And you know what? That's totally expected. The web was great originally because only a small cadre of people of above-average and technical skill used it. When all of the rest of the humans joined, the usual stuff that you would expect happened - commercialization, low-quality content, passive consumption instead of active participation, etc. But that's what happens when everyone joins.
There's also nothing preventing you from siloing off your own section of the internet where you only let certain people in! Hacker News already heavily curates content, and there are places like Lobste.rs where you can only be invited by an existing member. Don't complain that "the internet" has gotten worse, because "the internet" is just a communication technology, and it's gone from "limited access to a few elite" to "almost unlimited access to almost all humans"...and humans are kind of bad.
Also, now that everyone's on the internet, the best content has also gotten significantly better. So there's that.
If you're not liking the state of the web, you're either not looking in the right places (stop browsing YouTube and start looking for webrings and joining IRC channels), or you're complaining that the average internet user isn't as good as they used to be, which is dumb.
Just a personnel nit: I actually found altavista to be better then any current search engine in terms of query power - what it was missing was the huge index..
Things like the 'near' keyword were awesome: john near doe matched 'john doe', 'doe, john', etc. It REALLY let you craft a query to return just the results you wanted. Unfortunately, that probably made it harder for the hordes of new users getting on-line.
I'm soo tired of search engines just returning whatever they want, instead of what I asked for.
Altavista was great. I was #1 for Beanie Babies. All I had to do was put "Beanie Babies" 20,000 times on my front page in white-on-white text and Altavista would automatically know I was the #1 authority on small beanbag plushies.
> Google et al where supposed to make content discovery easier. What the fuck happened?
Content explosion. It turns out that when everybody is putting everything online, a vast tract of the human condition is redundant signal. And because Google's search results are based on click-through satisfaction, and click-through satisfaction on redundant content is a positive feedback loop (i.e. if two sources are almost identical, the one that happens to sort to the top of Google results first will get more clicks than the second, which will cause it to sort closer to the top, which will cause it to get more clicks, which...), a few content sources end up being winners and the ones that are very similar in that search space rapidly become also-ran.
Imagine trying to start a Wikipedia competitor today. How would you pull it off? 95% of the search results for anything that look like Wikipedia could satisfy them are going to go to Wikipedia.
I absolutely get the sentiment behind Kev's post. I don't disagree.
Where it takes me, is that I think how weak minded we are - how the web was destroyed is just one example in (some of) our lifetimes.
All it takes is throwing money at whatever-it-is and you can get it. Buy design, metrics, adverts, promotions, etc and you will get what you want. Better still, be the market (appstore), the access (google), etc and you're set for life.
I think Urbit + Web3 (and yes some blockchain tech) is a pretty cool frontier that has the chance to fix a lot of incentives that lead to megacorp centralization and SaaS for Web2.
I don't get the dismissal. Running linux servers is too hard for people - that (and spam) is why the promise of the decentralized web (Web1) failed - and why federated systems built on this stack like Mastodon are dead on arrival.
We won't get out of the local maximum we're trapped in without the new tech. Until recently I thought we may never get out, but now I have some hope.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadIt's fair bemoan about the state of the web now - there's many faults, but it's considerably more accessible than it was before. There is more information available that's, and more opportunities for people on this new web, and its all (ultimately) easier to access
Until the MSN messenger rebrand in 2005 sounds like a good rule of thumb.
HTML? FTP? People just want an online presence.
But maybe the API was ultimately a trap. A la "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Offer an API to encourage adoption, and then start restricting it later.
Which got us to leave our federated platforms with open protocols and enter closed silos.
I think the point of no return was the launch of the iPhone. Not that the writing wasn't already on the wall, but everything accelerated after that, and it was clear things weren't going back after those devices took over.
My Uncle was a headmaster for about 35 years. When I presented a laptop to him, he couldn't use it. Told me he had never had to use a typewriter and couldn't use one. It was a really hard hurdle for him to adapt to a keyboard. And he still struggles.
The thing I'm really uneasy about is the Googles tracking everywhere you go, and all of that. It's very difficult to opt-out of tracking. I desperately tried to suppress my location from Google for years, and in one afternoon with a product activation via location/bluetooth they finally appeared to get it. Play services etc., make harvesting your contacts, reading your mail, and following you much easier. And it then becomes that bit easier to turn you into a commodity.
My Samsung was pre-loaded with Facebook. These are shitty little tricks. But advert networks in the browser also make it very difficult to escape the big trackers without a fight. Fingerprinting is everywhere.
We also dump files into the cloud these days. Which is very trusting.
See: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
Indeed. But how does that differ from the motivation of any other Web 2.0 site?
It isn't hypocritical of me to mow my lawn to avoid fines while still advocating for elimination of the grass ordinances in my city.
To directly address your point: the motivation of web 2.0 sites is to get a bunch of money by making the content hard to read without first looking at a bunch of ads, and futher to disallow a reading experience uninterrupted by adds every 30-60s. The web page in question did not show me any ads.
My question to you is: how do you not see the difference?
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
He mentioned this in the article.
I disagree with working a 5 day week too...I suppose I'd better call my boss.
It might not get the amplification that they author expected. But that would be pretty in keeping with the Web 1.0 ideals being extolled, right?
Also the fact the author appears to work for Bank of America... hard to take seriously his complaints about big tech just wanting to make money, in light of that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America#Controversies
[2] https://www.americanbanker.com/news/ex-bank-of-america-emplo...
* "It was all about one thing… MONEY!"
* "Why all the tracking? Well, again it comes down to one thing…money."
* "If you’re more likely to click, they make more money."
* "As with social media, it’s all about money."
* "Do you know why, dear reader? You guessed it…MONEY!"
To me, this just seems like a ridiculous thing to harp on when the author works for a massive financial institution. Is BoA's motivation not all about money? Why would you expect big tech companies, or big companies in any industry, to be any different?
If we're gonna promote web 1.0, then we need to promote web 1.0 compatibility also.
Well, people who thought of themselves as the intellectual elite anyway.
I'm glad to see old-school forums soldier on, at least. For specialized information and advice, they tend to be a lot more reliable than social media - mostly because they're communities that have no patience for trolls. That doesn't stop them (and spammers) from trying to cause trouble, though. Once you let the general public in, it's inevitable that some will be jerks. Just a look through the "New" queue on HN with "show dead posts" shows it vividly. :)
Of course it's not quite as binary as 1990s = good / 2020s = bad, but this article does resonate fully with my most cynical side.
I'm surprised there was no mention of cookie banners (unless I missed it).
> Although Zuckerberg and his merry band of wankers have a lot to answer for, the death of web 1.0 and the humble personal blog is not their fault alone. Search plays a huge part in this shit show too.
I like this guy.
BTW your personal site is superb. A really impressive balance of design and usability.
Is this not something we (ie 'people on HN with the appropriate skill sets who are miffed at the state of the web') are actually in a position to do something about? Maybe we need a search engine that's specifically there to index sites that aren't aggressively monetised, or even excludes commercial web content altogether. We'd need some heuristics to figure out how heavily monetised a site is and obviously we'd want to favour self-hosted sites and forums rather than centralised blogging platforms and things like Reddit.
This wouldn't be aimed at replacing DDG or other generalised search engines, it'd just scratch that itch of 'where do I find web 1.0 style content that's not endless ad-ridden cruft and SEO spam?'.
Too bad HN absolutely loathes crypto in general, because I do see a glimmer of hope in the wild wild West that is web 3
There's plenty of "no cookie notices, no ads, no dark patterns" on the normal web. My guess (from zero experience) is that there's more of it on the "web 2.0". There's just lots of other junk also.
> Yeah, fuck that. Fuck blockchain. Fuck Meta. Fuck Zuck the schmuck. That’s all I have to say about that.
To expand upon this, I have yet to see a single thing a blockchain solves other than moving money around (usually from the scammed to the scammer). Web 3.0 is doubling down on what made Web 2.0 so shit.
Web 3 is nothing like that.
I think I originally enjoyed the internet because it allowed me to find communities of people who shared my interests that no one in real life did. Nowadays I've gravitated back to real life because while no one really shares my interests I at least can, rarely, find people who treat me like a person instead of an NPC, at least when they aren't looking at their phone.
Take note though, it definitely doesn't replace in person interaction - it's almost social junk food.
The communities are there - just because the current platform sucks (which I agree, Discord is privacy-invasive, controlling, and dog-slow) doesn't mean that the communities have vanished. And, if there's already people, you can make connections that move to other platforms.
I'd be much more interested in something that highlights or talks about what _is_ better about web 2.0 than meme-ing about "old web good, new web bad". This is just click bait dressed up as anti-establishment / edge-lord blog spam.
What's now going on is that the huge mess of SEO techniques and ad tracking is solving one particular problem: monetisation.
I don't know exactly how would the web have spread if the early HTTP monetisation codes, headers and efforts were actually continued (like the "402 Payment Required" response), but I do believe now that not having monetisation built in to the new medium has caused the majority of freedom and surveillance issues today.
The web is not just fucked up. We fucked it up by not planning far enough.
For at least a small subset of early Internet and computer pioneers there was a sense that technology would usher in a new post-scarcity or even post-money era. The "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" gives a torrid and breathy example of the kind of thought and rhetoric floating around: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
In hindsight it seems so naive to me. I don't wonder that we got blindsided.
I remember the Declaration, for us growing up at the time, it was an era all filled up with bringing to life what Neuromancer and Snow Crash talked about.
Maybe we'll get another chance with the metaverse thing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
"Web 3.0" isn't the metaverse. It was the Semantic Web.
Web 3.0 was designed to give individual web publishers and consumers the capabilities that giants like Facebook and Google have.
Documents had structured data, marked up in rich RDF or Owl ontologies that could expose APIs for your data. You're probably familiar with RSS and Atom and the wonderful ecosystem of tools they had, but there were hundreds of RDF schemas. FOAF, for example, would let you publish and consume contact info, and even encode friends lists if you were interested. There were lots of these.
This was also at the time of peak Bittorrent/P2P, and we were really close to having schemas for sharing news and commentary in a P2P swarm. Imagine fully decentralized Reddit and Twitter (not federated!), where identities were anonymous by default, comments and upvotes were cryptographically signed and published, and you could curate your own peer group, interest graph, attention algorithm, and filtering. We were almost there.
Clients that operated on RDF schemas were also faster and less cludgy than HTML. We could write native code and GUIs to consume and publish this data, and we were close to evolving the HTML soup into something better.
Unfortunately, this is right at the time Google and Facebook had grown immensely from VC and ad money jet fuel. Academics and builders were distracted. People flocked to centralized platforms because it was easy and our tools were immature.
We were really close, but the tech cos got there first, got lock in, and then started messing with the commons.
Please don't forget that "web 3.0" wasn't crypto. It was more than about payment. It was a stack that gave you and I capabilities and potential that the giants have. It was a distributed knowledge graph that would have been a nirvana of innovation and sharing. But we got sidetracked, out engineered, and roadblocked.
Web 3.0 = Semantic Web.
We can still remember what it aspired to be, and we can still build it.
Never forget.
Same with ontologies.
that, and people lie.
- The web was much smaller back then. Of course it's difficult for your personal blog to gain traction now, there are so many alternative content producers (most of them are better than you), and alternate content medium like video and audio. A lot of people who would have started a blog in 1999 probably have a podcast, video channel, or do live streaming instead. All these things were not really possible in 1999. Or, maybe they blogged because that was their only technological choice, maybe they actually just prefer posting content on social media only for their friends now that the technology exists (LiveJournal and Xanga were basically social media blog platforms, supplanted by the posting capabilities of Facebook and others).
- And, speaking of that, blogging is not at all dead, it's just that the people making a living doing it are much more sophisticated than they used to be, and use their blog as a complement to other methods of reaching their audience. For example, a food blogger will have social media images and videos of their food/recipes, and then host the recipes on their blog/website. But here we've got the other author who is probably mad that they can't get some solid views and ad revenue from putting out a low-effort blog with 20 minutes of spare effort every month.
- The Internet used to be "whoever is wealthy enough to own a $2000 computer and has Internet infrastructure available in their wealthy country" and now it's available to the entire world. So, sorry it isn't your own personal gated community for your rich nerd friends anymore.
- The big corporations on the Internet are only part of the Internet, perhaps even the minority of it. Shaking a fist at Google or Facebook is tired and played out, as is complaining about hamburger menus.
- The article is mad at easily-blockable ads in search engines. How do you expect them to make any money if you aren't willing to pay for it?
- The reason there's white space in websites now is because the Internet is big and important enough to justify hiring graphic designers and UX designers who know a lot more about what they're doing than the author would ever be willing to give them credit for. News flash: UX/UI people work off of real usage data and know what designs customers like better based on actual hard data.
- Web directories sucked hardcore compared to modern search engines. You'd never be able to find specific things that have just escaped your mind. Try searching for "modernist movie comedy office building" in 1999 (this is what I searched when I tried to remember the title of Playtime (1967)).
So wishing it all went back to "1.0" has a gatekeeping and elitist undertone in my opinion. Back then most people had personal sites because most people on the web were the type that found html interesting. Early adopters tend to be more savvy on what they are adopting.
I also think there's plenty of "1.0" content still out there. Yeah, you gotta look for it, but it didn't all go away.
Maybe I wasn't clear on that point, apologies if that's the case. I spoke about POSSE and using more decentralised platforms, like Mastodon.
Again, they're not for everyone either, and I don't expect them to be. It would just be nice if we got a little more of web 1.0 back. :-)
The game was difficult and looked old to me as a kid. But I somehow thought that this must have been the way people knew games before DOTT. You could run out of time, die, choose the wrong set of characters in the beginning of the game, making it impossible to win. I never finished it.
On the web today I find echoes of the "Web 1.0" on Tor-.onion-Websites (including the uncontrolled cesspool that it was in the 90s when people bought illegal guns on the "Clearweb" as we call it today). And Neocities, that is mentioned in the article as well, provides something that takes the best from the past web. The gemini protocol brings back very simple websites and SpaceHey brings back the feeling of the early "Web 2.0" when user profiles could still be heavily modified using html.
While much of what the author rightfully hates on is true, and it is the main characteristic of what the web is today, these developments also show that the web diversifies in niche corners. Whenever I discover them, it's really cool :) SpaceHey was developed by teenagers who might be young enough not to bother creating a Facebook account for themselves anymore [1]. And yet, they came up with the idea of recreating a piece of Web history.
And if the worst becomes true and the Metaverse takes off, maybe there will be a computer stacked away somewhere in the back where you can access good old BBS boards, at least.
[1] Okay, I checked their site again and they might be a little older than teenagers, but still :)
Sigh. As with everything in this regard: If it was better, how come we "advanced" to something else then?
The apart-ness that some original netizens imagined for themselves was always fantasy and, I would argue, destructive fantasy when it crossed over to belief in personal elitism. Is being online to the exclusion of real world relationships with those physically adjacent to us building a new, better culture, or the digital equivalent of hiding out in the woods?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
I will address the problem of technological advancements using only a small subsection of the overall argument linked above. Please read the entire manifesto to understand the context.
127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)
While these articles lament the state of technology today and wish it were better like back in the good old days, there are never solutions put forward. Only negativity.
Why do they gain so much traction on HN, one of the few remaining outposts of thought-provoking articles and discussion?
What do we get from these endless articles about why some product or technology sucks?
Make a new service. Make it username / password authenticated. Don't give out the usernames and passwords to everyone that comes in. Have some kind of gating function (BBS's were all about who you knew, somethingawful.com made you pay twenty bucks one time, some old systems were gated on something no more complex than single-administrator bandwidth).
You won't grow at a rate that any VC will care about, but that kind of capitalism-feeding growth isn't your goal if you're trying to cultivate a "web 1.0 experience:" web 1.0 didn't support most people's capitalist ventures.
What you may find (what I've found participating in these experiments) is that the resulting space is a whole lot quieter than the rest of the web. And if you're replicating the web 1.0 experience, that's the goal.
The site administrator will also spend a lot more time glad-handing individual users who have individual issues. That's fine; if you're going for a web 1.0 experience, authentication management isn't automated beyond a few simple config scripts.
And if that's what a person wants, nothing about the modern web stops them from doing it, except that very few people will care they're doing it because (unlike the web 1.0 days) there are alternatives that accept all comers with functionally infinite capacity now.
You know something is not quite right, and can moan about it, without having a solution to the problem.
Considering many people have drifted away from some of the big socials. Niche sites, and communities may and no doubt have sprung up elsewhere. Newsnet and PhpBB rooms of old have been replaced by other forums.
In the UK, the web was the preserve of the well-to-do for a long time. Ubiquitous smart phones have put the web in almost every man's pocket these days. And the initial lavish jump on and novelty will wear off. Everyone's a troll and photographer for 5 minutes, or some such.
My Mum has only just really discovered the web in the last year, via Youtube. She still doesn't really get the web, but gets that website (ish). It's still fresh for many.
It's probably just easier to poke at a thing.
Web rings still exist. My partner has a hobby, which is shared on a forum and via Youtube, and they are all very good at supporting and bigging up each other across those boundaries. It's a very vibrant community. And the technology is just backgrounded.
What are you supposed to do when you recognize a shortcoming or a way society/technology has regressed, but the thing is out of your or anyone's control to actually fix? Not talk about it?
> What do we get from these endless articles about why some product or technology sucks?
Recognition of the problem, so that no one could just claim that everything is great, when there are good demonstrable historical reasons to rightfully claim otherwise. Sure, on one hand some of it might make you feel worse, but on the other, i think it's nice to document how things were in a time where many weren't around to experience all of it. Not everyone should grow up with only the knowledge of walled gardens, closed platforms and largely centralized and corporation driven Internet.
Very rarely (but still) you also get actionable steps to take, or the ability to build communities with like minded individuals, such as: https://512kb.club/
Or maybe just fun little projects, for example, by people like Luke Smith: https://based.cooking/ (there is information at the bottom of the site about it)
I recently was discussing web3 on indiehackers. Way more constructive discussions.
Maybe the next article reaching the top is how the old HN was better ;).
edit: And looking at those articles, the conservative side is definitely in the majority. Like I say: just shouting at each other.
Insight into the thought processes of other people. That's enough for me.
This one did actually point out a few ideas.
Seriously, they lead with "it was better when there were no search engines and you had to trawl through a directory". I'm old enough to remember that. It wasn't better. It sucked.
They even list phpBB style forums as a positive thing. I mean sure I guess they're better than StackOverflow and Discourse if you like clicking "next page" 84 times to find the solution to your problem.
Their spectacles are so rose-tinted I'm surprised they can see through them at all.
I'd also add that smartphones and tablets have done much to mess up the Web. The "all white space" site design trend is one of the results. The old version of the NHL stats page was chock full of information; now it's chock full of white space and requires a lot of extra scrolling, all so it's usable on a touchscreen.
Yes it's all commercialised, but that's a 2-way street. It costs money to run infrastructure, the web has boomed. You're not talking about a couple hundred users on a forum, or a few thousand IRC users on an irc node ran by some volunteer who in exchange for being an ircop or forum admin was prepared to swallow the cost, or was ran by some guy working at or owning a small ISP.
With scale comes money. Even late-stage forums were full of ads, just to cover the hosting cost. And this was not a sudden change, this was an evolution, driven by demand.
I would like to return to a more HTML-ified Web, with less reliance on JS frameworks that scatter spinny loading icons all over, but IMO the worst aspect is a social and cultural problem, not a technical one.
I don't have a great solution for this other than for people to remember / realize that everything they put online is that visible (including this comment. ;) ).
Even if you could have some flavor of anonymity, the cozy relationship that the big tech corporations have with national governments around the world means that only the most paranoid and OpSec-savvy can avoid having that anonymity pierced.
We just quietly slid from "you shouldn't say that," to "you can't say that" in less than a generation.
These days everyone is encouraged to enter their real name, DOB and telephone number (see Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) which then creates a link to a real person.
I think the web was better because it was anonymous, rather than anything else really. If you had "SuperHardLord" posting abuse at you on IRC, it didn't really matter. However if you have a Twitter user with full photo and details doing the same, it feels much more personal.
Discord and Reddit are just modern incarnations of USENET and forums.
Facebook, Instragram and Twitter have all a specialized demographic and all these platforms are orientated around people instead of topics. This is why I would not compare them to irc, reddit, 4chan and similar consorts as the parent did. Given, that probably does have much to do with a difference in audiences.
Problem with Discord is that it swallows content. Nothing is searchable (cannot crawl discord, only relies on internal search), I believe that will cost many communities in the long run. It is convenient for small indie developers, but discoverability is extremely inhibited.
But the major difference is personalization. Now everyone gets their own search results. In favor of advertising against general education. This is a huge factor why the net is worse. Also, if you look up any term that is part of the news cycle, you only find shitty news rags that pushed their presence with nepotism and have a direct business relationship to search engine providers.
I would dispute this. At that time, search was not gamed the way it is now, you didn't have to wade through millions of terrible low quality SEO bs to find the nuggets you're looking for.
The SEO gaming, of course, continues unabated, and will continue as long as search engines exist.
As someone who got into the web industry through discovering content for a niche topic, search engines have always been only a superficial helper in finding content, with most content discovery happening through finding niche, relevant, obscure long tail keywords via deep diving, then unearthing more content via deep diving into searches based on these new keywords, rinse and repeat.
It was a lot harder once PageRank came along and required you to have external parties essentially vouch for you.
> Look, we will never get the web of old back. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t perfect either. The web of today is more accessible, more dynamic and pretty much a cornerstone of our society.
I wouldn't even say that "Yes it's all commercialised". If anything, I bet you there are multiple orders of magnitude more fun, silly, webring-like content than there were before the web exploded in popularity - they're just not visible to the average person, and are outnumbered by orders of magnitude more junk and commercial content.
And you know what? That's totally expected. The web was great originally because only a small cadre of people of above-average and technical skill used it. When all of the rest of the humans joined, the usual stuff that you would expect happened - commercialization, low-quality content, passive consumption instead of active participation, etc. But that's what happens when everyone joins.
There's also nothing preventing you from siloing off your own section of the internet where you only let certain people in! Hacker News already heavily curates content, and there are places like Lobste.rs where you can only be invited by an existing member. Don't complain that "the internet" has gotten worse, because "the internet" is just a communication technology, and it's gone from "limited access to a few elite" to "almost unlimited access to almost all humans"...and humans are kind of bad.
Also, now that everyone's on the internet, the best content has also gotten significantly better. So there's that.
If you're not liking the state of the web, you're either not looking in the right places (stop browsing YouTube and start looking for webrings and joining IRC channels), or you're complaining that the average internet user isn't as good as they used to be, which is dumb.
Nowadays, anything that is gaining enough popularity to eventually possibly compete with the mega-corps gets purchased and often shutdown.
Things like the 'near' keyword were awesome: john near doe matched 'john doe', 'doe, john', etc. It REALLY let you craft a query to return just the results you wanted. Unfortunately, that probably made it harder for the hordes of new users getting on-line.
I'm soo tired of search engines just returning whatever they want, instead of what I asked for.
Content explosion. It turns out that when everybody is putting everything online, a vast tract of the human condition is redundant signal. And because Google's search results are based on click-through satisfaction, and click-through satisfaction on redundant content is a positive feedback loop (i.e. if two sources are almost identical, the one that happens to sort to the top of Google results first will get more clicks than the second, which will cause it to sort closer to the top, which will cause it to get more clicks, which...), a few content sources end up being winners and the ones that are very similar in that search space rapidly become also-ran.
Imagine trying to start a Wikipedia competitor today. How would you pull it off? 95% of the search results for anything that look like Wikipedia could satisfy them are going to go to Wikipedia.
Where it takes me, is that I think how weak minded we are - how the web was destroyed is just one example in (some of) our lifetimes.
All it takes is throwing money at whatever-it-is and you can get it. Buy design, metrics, adverts, promotions, etc and you will get what you want. Better still, be the market (appstore), the access (google), etc and you're set for life.
Content is not king.
I don't get the dismissal. Running linux servers is too hard for people - that (and spam) is why the promise of the decentralized web (Web1) failed - and why federated systems built on this stack like Mastodon are dead on arrival.
We won't get out of the local maximum we're trapped in without the new tech. Until recently I thought we may never get out, but now I have some hope.