The big thing HTML brought over literal static documents is easy and pervasive hyperlinking. Without that, I'm not even sure if you can call whatever's left "the web".
The argument basically boils down to "everything used to be better, and the general populace shouldn't be able to use the internet". While I have good nostalgic feelings about the way the internet used to be, this misses a lot of things the modern internet offers our society, and only focuses on the negatives.
Couldn't there, technically speaking, be a technology that offered the things the Internet used to offer, in parallel with the technology that offers the things the modern offers our society?
There could be, and there are, but the article focuses a lot on the negative effects the modern web (and especially social media) had on society. These effects would not change with parallel systems.
Perhaps it sounds cynical, but can't we just let things burn instead of spending all this time and energy attempting to put out the eternal dumpster fire that is the 2020s web-scape? Perhaps it isn't possible.
Instead, maybe we build the replacements that we want, invite those who want a piece, sure, even put up a few signs pointing the way; but for the rest, you really can't save those who aren't looking for salvation, so let them have their technological dystopia if they can't see it for what it is.
Sure, there's systems for that, such as Gemini. If you don't want to use the modern web alongside the rest of society, it's fairly easy to just... not.
Yes, but that seems like something new we want to strive for. Going back to Web 1.0 is basically saying that 90% of people shouldn't really be able to interact with the internet in a meaningful way beyond consumption. It's not all that different than the argument that things were better when newspapers were the only ones participating in the news.
The original promise of the Internet was heavily tied to democratization of publishing media. In many ways, the internet of today is far closer to that goal than the internet of the late 90s, just with a lot of backsteps and additional problems created along the way. We ought to solve those problems, but just resetting the clock back 20 years isn't a step forward.
If the technological "improvements" over the last 20 years have largely had negative effects, wouldn't it at be possible that going forward toward something new will have even more destructive effects?
Well the point is you we can't. It's every bit as baseless to assume continuing on this path will have beneficial effects as it is to assume they will have negative effects.
Change may be discovering a hundred dollars in the pocket of your old jacket, or it may be discovering an ominous lump on your neck. You really don't know what it brings.
“And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
to artificially constrain content to a tiny horizontal sliver. Some sites did it with tables, but most didn't bother to try to dictate so much style. Part of the wonderfulness of web 1.0 was taking advantage of browser defaults: Background colors, default text fonts, and not doing so much specifying exact style.
The site is pleasantly readable and "responsive" to different browser sizes when you turn Style Sheets off!
1.0 is a bit of an arbitrary distinction (especially since it's a term only applied in retrospect, no one called anything "Web 1.0" at the time). But there's definitely two distinct periods - one of which is what you're describing where styling was pretty minimal and many sites looked more or less like the browser defaults, but also a distinct period prior to "Web 2.0" where styling was overused even compared to today, and stuff like flash, image maps, frames, etc were fairly common.
yep, nobody is bringing up marquees, horrible gradient background, unreadable bright blue text on yellow backgrounds, flashing GIFs and all the other atrocities. Plus the endless "coming soon" and "under construction" pages
I browse the internet full screen, which often makes text blocks far too wide. It's hard to read long lines. Yes, in principle, I could resize the window for every website, but in practice that would be annoying to do.
Given current browser capabilities, on my own websites it would probably be best to set a maximum text width rather than a fixed text width. That way I can still adjust the window size to be smaller if I want to.
In the future, it would be nice for a user to set their own desired text width (similar to setting the serif or sans-serif font) which could hypothetically be available to websites in CSS like this:
Yes! These things should all be user-controllable preferences, NOT overridable by web site designers. Browsers have ceded way too much control over look and feel to web designers! Ideally, a site like HN would just serve structured text content, and I would get to decide font typeface, text size, margins, color scheme, background image, and so on, from my configured preferences. This should be the browser’s built-in default: I should not have to turn on extensions and plugins just to wrest control back from website designers. At most, website designers should be able to offer a default style for the case where the user did not set preferences, but the user’s preference should always override!
In UIKit under iOS/iPadOS, there’s a concept known as “readable width” which is dynamic and changes depending on the width of the device’s screen, and apps can take advantage of it to make blocks of text flow in a readable and pleasant way regardless of device form factor and orientation.
I think this concept would be immensely useful in the browser. The closest one can get to that currently is to use media queries for a variety of screen widths with hand-tuned content widths, which is laborious and doesn’t leave room for user customization.
I still wish multi-column CSS got more love. (It exists but it has seen more regressions in browser support than fixes for its papercuts.) Newspapers figured out centuries ago that good multi-column layouts are great for reading and it's kind of sad that web-browsers still aren't great at "newspaper" layouts. We could much better take advantage of our wide (and ultra-wide) screens with nice multi-column layouts than anything we could get away with just max-width alone.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but it seems a little ironic that this author is pining for a return to the simple old days of hand-written HTML but has written a site that doesn't even show links to its own pages with JS disabled.
1. Manually add a link to every page on the site each time a new one is added.
2. Give up on hand-writing HTML and use a server-side templating system
3. Give up on having navigation on each page
4. Load the navigation through JavaScript
Given that they want to hand-write HTML,
and they (presumably) want it to be easy enough for everyone to do,
the JS options seems like a reasonable choice.
3 seems like the sane option to me... That's what I remember most sites doing back in the day if they weren't going for 2. Have a top-level "directory" page with individual pages linking back up to it and to the homepage, rather than having pages that link to literally nothing at all.
That's my preference as well, but I can understand how someone might want a more complex design while still using hand-written HTML.
Perhaps a good compromise would be to put a link to a navigation page in the sidebar, but when available, use JavaScript to replace the link with the navigation page content.
I just want a web where everyone has their own space. Not renting a space from Facebook, Google, or XYZ. A space that can be ad free. One where people can choose what data is released and how; where deny all is default for any information gathering.
If we want to socialize with someone, couldn't we just go to that person instead of a social media broker?
The tech of web 1.0 is limiting and less approachable for the average person. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.
We went down the rabbit hole of web 2.0 and it doesn't look like we will come back out. Web 3.0 feels dystopian.
Social media has it's drawbacks, but large hosted services exist for good reasons and have spawned entire new industries. An independent artist couldn't host a server to share their work (especially if they want to share content like video widely), or run a store capable of handling a spike of traffic if they became popular. Also the network effects of the platforms give huge benefits allowing at least a portion of promising diamonds in the rough to be found and shared (even if they are mixed in with a bunch of dumb clickbait and cheap knockoffs of products as discussed in the recent Etsy boycott thread).
It's definitely not all roses, but I don't really see a clear path out of this. Because for whatever feelings people have about big tech, YouTube, Facebook, Etsy, Instagram have all driven billions in business for non-tech companies. And they've done it by creating experiences that are engaging to end consumers. Sure we might see traffic exchange hands among the big players, and there will be other successful new networks like we have seen with TikTok. But I think people don't want to self host for good reasons.
The core argument is the same as a recent post here [1] about using
older computers - that it reduces distractions and that older
technology was better in its simplicity. Today's we are teetering on
the brink of complexity breakdown.
These are good arguments that stand alone.
The counter-arguments are always the same "Hey, that's a problem with
people - just exercise willpower and don't get distracted". Or "Hey,
modern electronics and software is more 'efficient', just throw more
cycles at it (silicon and cognitive) and get with the programme" But
these only serve to minimise and deny real sentiments that smart
software developers would pay close attention to.
There's lot's of sentiment out there that is being mistaken for
'nostalgia', which is genuine dissatisfaction with modern tools.
That's why projects like suckless.org [2] seem more relevant every
day.
I am sympathetic to the argument here, but I think this misrepresents the counterargument. I think the argument against this is simply that it's not what people actually want, it's what people like us want them to want.
It sort of reminds me of that series where an architect makes fun of mcmansion monstrosities. The architect is right - those mcmansions suck - and we're right - simplicity in computing is better - but I think people want the mcmansions and I think people want the flashier more interactive software.
>but I think people want the mcmansions and I think people want the flashier more interactive software
I think that's a bit too condescending. People don't want mcmansions and flash, they want to publish to the internet quickly and efficiently. The web is a tool for them, a means to an end.
The HN set might prefer to live in a world where computers only shipped with Emacs and the web was just a raw JSON API and you had to write your own software for everything from scratch, but no one else does. And that's perfectly legitimate. Why should someone making music, or art, or who wants to set up a business or network with people have to hand-code their own HTML or write their own backend just because some self-appointed gatekeepers decided that using a service ruins the artisinal quirkiness of the web? That's like saying authors should have to hand-write their manuscripts or set their own type. The web is a tool that's supposed to serve everyone.
> People don't want mcmansions and flash, they want to publish to the internet quickly and efficiently. The web is a tool for them, a means to an end.
I think for many and probably most people, the web is an entertainment much more so than a tool.
What I said is only condescending if you add a judgment to it, rather than it just being an observation. I think I did that when I said that the architects are "right" about mcmansions and that we're "right" about simplicity. But those are just my own preferences and I really don't begrudge people for having different ones. I think it is more condescending (or perhaps patronizing is a better word) to claim that we know what's better for people, that they'd see that they really prefer simple brutalist software design if only that's what we would give them.
I've just been around long enough to see this evolution from web applications that were very barebones to the current state, and my interpretation of what has happened during this period of time is that we've been following the preferences of most people who use software, as we should.
Edit: Sorry Sandersd, I did not carefefully read what you said "it's
what people like us want them to want." - which is even more
interesting!
I would go one stage more "meta" and say; No. Actually one of the
deep, deep problems in computer science and digital technology is the
very idea that "we know what people want". Or that they know
themselves. There is so much said in this forum and other software
communities about "what people really want". Outside of quite narrow
UX psychology - which deals mainly with how people prefer to complete
tasks within paradigms that have already been selected for them - I
know of little or no evidence based research on the lifestyle and
societal choices around technology. That is why I frequently use the
phrase *foisted upon" in Digital Vegan [1][2], to indicate the
extraordinary errors of sentiment attribution that occur around tech.
[2] 'Foisted' is not the same as 'forced', but nontheless there is a
'great lie' that we tell ourselves about how markets of demand and
supply work in realtion to technology.
I agree with this somewhat. But I also think in the face of unknowable true desires, that the preferences revealed by what does and doesn't get used by more people should be taken seriously and at face value.
I saw "web 1.0" versions in the early to mid 2000s of pretty much every product that became big in the late 2000s and 2010s. People made their choice.
I think there's another point to consider with older technology: It was hard to use! The technical know-how required to get a site online in the 90's, early 2000's was a big filter for the quality of its content.
>The technical know-how required to get a site online in the 90's, early 2000's was a big filter for the quality of its content.
It really wasn't. I don't know why people here believe that being able to set up a web server and write HTML has any relationship to the quality of the content being marked up and served. They're completely different things.
And by then Geocities, etc. were a thing and it didn't exactly take an engineering degree to use those.
Did it take an engineering degree? Of course not. But knowing how to write HTML and get it on the internet was harder than, say, sending a tweet is today. I might also just not be remembering all the crappy Geocities sites with perfect clarity :)
> There's lot's of sentiment out there that is being mistaken for 'nostalgia', which is genuine dissatisfaction with modern tools. That's why projects like suckless.org [2] seem more relevant every day.
Suckless (the org) is too elitist to produce software usable by non-power users, which is a shame, because these folks are for the most part excellent at balancing perfectionism and minimalism with pragmatism; they could go a very long way to help "fix" rampant complexity, but their complete disinterest in accommodating people who can't program in C will keep their projects irrelevant on the grand scale of things.
Back to tables and shim.gif and Mosaic? No thanks. :-)
However I think the "how it was / how it is /where to now?" postulate is right. Especially the "immediate dopamine injection via Tweet" versus "build on your own independent site". It could actually make for far less concentrated content and so data and so power (in a way).
Twitter: "give hime a fish a eat".
Independent Web: "Give him a fishing pole so he can learn how to catch them himself".
Call me when something "finally makes it unnecessary" to update browser or throw away perfectly usable devices.
Tables work with IE6 and NetFront, so they rule. :P
Many years ago I had a job to add some features to an existing PHP site. The code base was a mess. I think there were 7 copies of the code in production that were copied and modified slightly to some specific purpose. It was like 300,000 lines of code (IIRC, it's been awhile).
This forced me to do what I always try and avoid doing (because no one will thank you for it) and that is to clean it up. Some of it was necessary (eg it was open to SQL injection). In doing so I reduced it down to <20,000 including the new features required.
This was a fairly stock standard database driven website but in just doing things the right way the page load times got to under 50ms (from 500-1000ms). This wasn't an SPA (of course) but I remember thinking how refreshing it was. You could link to any page. Those links loaded superfast (this is the bane of SPAs when they support deep-linking at all) and ran on everything just fine.
This is actually one of the best featurs about PHP too: a static functional core so there's basically no bootstrapping. This means you can tear down all the resources of rendering a page. Performance becomes way more predictable and you're way less prone to resource leaks.
There is magic in fast loading pages and I miss that about good Web 1.0 sites.
This is actually the biggest problem with all the ad and tracking JS packages: the load times go to shit. This becomes a justification for SPAs
As for Web 3.0... ugh. Why? Just... why? I guess that's a whole separate topic.
This is still 100% possible, and many frameworks support it. SPAs are not the only way to build things, and frankly aren't even the most popular way to build things outside of tech startups.
What you describe matches exactly my view on webdevelopment. Every click is a new request (with some exceptions, which prove the rule). Instead of jumping from document to document by clicking a link, it becomes one big flow with fast page loads. If you have fast page loads (easily done with PHP), it feels and behaves like any other application.
I love the simple and honest idealism that drives this message. I think it’s completely unrealistic, and goes against human nature, but I still appreciate the vision.
Sure, the web used to be a fun place for tinkerers in the beginning. But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back inside.
Going luddite is never a good solution. We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new development has brought us and learn how to live with it, not suppress all recent development in the hopes of recreating an environment that only really worked for a small subsection of humanity.
Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 2.0."
> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 3.0."
Also agree. However, I do yearn to relive the days where one can load up a web page and start reading content, without being jarred by pop-ups and ads that inadvertently move the content post load (which of course happens 3 seconds later..).
I know a site, it's on mobile. You use it by entering a location in a search bar.
You select the search bar, the keyboard takes a second to appear. You start typing, nothing happens because they've reimplemented the text box in javascript, and the script hasn't fully loaded yet. The script loads and the second half of the letters you typed appears in a letter by letter fashion. The page freezes and a suggestion box appears, every second or so the suggestions change to reflect the letters you typed earlier. You erase what you've typed. With every letter that changes, the page freezes a second as a new suggestion loads. When it freezes, it stops accepting letters, so there's a lot of erasing and re-typing. Alright, you're almost done typing... then the page freezes and the page turns grey, and a pop over loads. They want you to load fill out a satisfaction survey. You try to close it to continue, but the script handling the close button hasn't loaded yet so it doesn't work for a good 20 seconds.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a javascript stomping on a human face -- for ever.
This accurately describes my experience using Google Search on Google Chrome on a Google Pixel 5 running the latest version of Google Android (for good measure, using Gboard). It baffles me that for a long time I couldn't even select text in the search bar without something going so wrong that my phone ground to a halt and had to soft reboot.
There was an article posted here [1] a few weeks ago called I Don’t Like Computers which had the same nostalgic vibe about computing in the past and I argue it boils down to loss of control. End users used to be in charge. We used to be in the driver’s seat. We used to tell computers what to do. Now, with pop-ups, ads, notifications, and so on, they tell us what we should be doing and we have to beg and work around them to do what we want. “Where do you want to go today?” is long dead.
> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online?
I disagree. The first point is saying we shouldn't go backwards, which I agree with. The second is hoping for forward progress, the exact thing that he was arguing for with the first point.
Being a luddite is not about withholding support, it is about completely denying the existence of new technologies, or even actively trying to destroy them.
A return to the state of web 1.0 would definitely be a major move backwards, similar to banning the use of cars to prevent traffic accidents from happening. Wouldn't it be better to just learn how to drive?
The Luddites were a group of people who destroyed machinery that threatened their livelihood. In modern parlance it typically just means someone who is opposed to the adoption of new technology. I think parent's definition is more accurate than yours in either case.
Sharing a vastly smaller fraction of things is completely reasonable. Currently systems are optimized by social media companies to maximize engagement not utility.
Unfortunately, the only way that’s likely to change is a new company or nonprofit that decides not to sell out to Facebook or Advertising.
I've come to think of this as just a culture problem. We think of share-everything and recent social changes as innovation and "the future" but not everything that is modified at t+1 vs at time t is necessarily a pareto improvement. I've come to believe something similar to you, that we need to come to our senses (each individually) and converge to more reasonable social norms.
> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself.
I think it definitely has passed, at least in my environment. I see less people sharing inane things, and most of the time it's done they use things like stories, which are temporary and with less feedback (no "like button" on Instagram stories, for example, only messages), and more organic (the same way some people talk about whatever they ate in person, they share it with their friends with these tools).
> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 2.0."
I expect future generations may well say the same thing about memes. "People thought that was cool???"
Memes are a new type of language, a development supported by technology that is in some ways comparable to the rise of remixing music.
I don't think they will be ridiculed to the same level as I hope our current social media behavior will be. They will more likely evolve to new levels, when the methods of remixing media expand and they become even easier to create.
It's not the users choosing to share something that's the problem, it's the corporations choosing to collect every bit of data on their users they can without the consent of the users. From the article:
> "But it gets worse. These social media giants are collecting data about every single internet user at an alarming rate, housing it in enormous data storage facilities around the world. Once collected, this information is analyzed, compiled, and sold to any interested parties willing to pay for it. It’s not only your activities in a web browser that are gathered; many smart devices including televisions, smart phones, home automation equipment, and more will passively listen to casual conversation looking for key words and phrases. This data will be correlated with the online profile of the speaker with speech recognition and anything you talk about will be added to a database of your interests. Once complied, this data becomes impossible to track down and remove. A user’s personal data will never disappear from the internet. It will be continually be added to, recompiled, reanalyzed, and sold over and over in order to sell ads in the hope of selling a product. If you sign up for a free service on the web, then you are what is being sold."
Going Web 1.0 wouldn't stop that. The genie that came out of the bottle was the realization that such whole-data aggregation is possible.
Take away JavaScript today, and it'd be replaced with the (slower, but still lucrative enough to justify it) process of paying site admins to share their access logs and user account data.
> many smart devices including televisions, smart phones, home automation equipment, and more will passively listen to casual conversation looking for key words and phrases.
That sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense. Is there any evidence for this beyond anecdotes that are probably Baader-Meinhof effects?
If it was happening, hundreds of people would be working on those systems, and at least one of them would have talked.
I don't think anyone will be able to find out easily since this communication is encrypted. Who knows what the random bursts of data from some IoT device are?
I can guarantee someone built a way to enable telemetry and diagnostic data into these devices "to improve user experience". It wouldn't take much for another engineer/sociopathic PM to enable it across the board (telemetry is now opt out) or change the sampling frequency or storage location.
I was about to agree but GP is actually not far off.
Smart TVs have been caught listening to people before. Cell phones absolutely do. Home automation is generally voice controlled, etc.
I feel bad for individuals with paranoid schizophrenia. Give it another 10 years and there really will be invisible cameras and microphones everywhere recording you!
Schizophrenic here with a long time interest in computer security. I've had many discussions with my (previous) psychiatrist about exactly this, often arguing that it's not that far fetched that there are a swarm of entities (not just three-letter-agencies) that are interested in surveilling you. Add to that that your paranoia might be more or less well-founded, say that you're doing various criminal activities, the bounderies between justifiable paranoia and illness can become _very_ hard to make out.
I remember especially us discussing three-letter-agencies' mass-surveillance and I brought up NSA's ECHELON and other things that have been semi-known/-public for decades. About two years later the Snowden leaks came about and my psychiatrist started telling me about different cases he had had where people were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and there later turned out to be real world explanations and not hallucinations and/or delusions.
I just wanted to share this anecdote. It's a shitty disease and you're absolutely on point about how it already is and will become even more so in the near future.
What most privacy advocates don't get is that users do not care. The vast majority of people make their choice by buying the cheapest thing. In this case, the cheapest thing is free, paid with data.
However I also believe that's only because they haven't considered
the potential impact of constant surveillance from everything you own
sent to third parties who will keep the data forever.
...or maybe they just trust faceless strangers more than I do.
> Once collected, this information is analyzed, compiled, and sold to any interested parties willing to pay for it.
The part about selling isn't true. Google and Facebook slurp in a lot of data, but they hoard it. It's only "sold" by allowing advertisers to target against it.
Google claims
> we do not sell your personal information to anyone.
Facebook claims
> No, we don't sell your information.
Maybe there's an asterisk when it comes to heavily aggregated data, and they both work with legitimate researchers, but big tech selling your data isn't true. A bunch of medium-sized adtech players you've never heard of sell your data.
Well, just imaging a different society: you have broadband at home and that means you have a small homeserver at home, an IPv6 global for it, a domain name for you/you family/business with eventual subdomains.
You took photos with connected device like you do today, but instead of sync them against your Google Drive/iCloud your phone sync them to your homeserver both via internet when you are on the go or at home in your LAN. Your friend have a phonebook like all modern smartphones have today but that's phonebook is a little bit more featuresful, from it looking for a contact you can initiate a voice{,+video} call IP2IP, you can write a mail but also see a classic blog page of the contact if he/she/it have one, this is just a local app that offer you correspondents "public namespaces" (Plan 9 style) mounted locally as you wish and cached locally as you wish. That's means that you photo gallery offer access to your contacts public photos and videos, just looking for them. You browser, a real browser, not a modern WebVM offer your contacts sites, cached as you wish in similar ways etc.
That's means: more functionalities, no feature erased by some corporate decision, only the community decide, you contents on your iron, contents you like on your iron, so far faster usage, far better integration, far less reliance on any specific third party services. Not a single functionality less.
It's not a dream, technically is perfectly doable, those systems actually are already designed decades ago, with the first P2P video-conference with screen sharing in 1968 (NLS mother of all the demos), with late '70s Xerox Star Office system etc it's not there just because few big & powerful have other plans for their own interests and most others do not know nor care.
We can't put it back inside, but we can create new silos within the web that are not built around Delaware c corps and instead built around communities with standards/culture so that we can choose the kind of places we want to be online. We need to move away from the "app" and platform metaphors and into something different that connects people together. I think Jack sort of wanted Twitter to be this but in realizing it wasn't possible to build this as a Delaware C corp itself, kicked off Bluesky.
Please, I do wish you would think carefully before using what is
really a pejorative and potentially quite insulting term in regard to
modern tech critique. Some of the smartest people out there, who built
the digital world you take for granted today, are having (belated)
second thoughts about the social and geo-political impacts of these
creations. Heartily I recommend Cory Doctorow's recent piece about
this [1].
One could arguably turn it around and say that those "cargo-cultists"
hell-bent on ploughing ahead regardless, without pause or reflection,
are closer to the common misuse of the word "Luddite" - a kind of
straw-chewing bumpkin who lives in fear of progress. No. Progress is
the radical questioning of "progress" itself.
> We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new
> development has brought us and learn how to live with it
No we won't. Be careful of this "genie and bottle" fallacy. It is
absolutely the wrong attitude found at the intersection of unreasoned
defeatism, resignation, learned helplessness, and abdication of civic
engagement and responsibility. We are here, as hackers, to _shape_
the technology that runs our world, not to sit on the sidelines and
amuse ourselves to death [2].
> recreating an environment that only really worked for a small
subsection of humanity.
There's a framing error in this reasoning. The technology of Web 1.0
did not exist in limited scope because it was only suitable for a
small subsection of humanity. It was only being used by a small
subsection because that was the developmental stage of the web. One
could say (disingenuously) that at the time Web 1.0 was such a
successful technology it was being used by 100 percent of web users!
Just to add, Luddites weren't irrationally afraid of technology like is commonly believed. They destroyed machinery because they saw it being used to destroy artisanship and their livelihoods. Perhaps we'd be better off of there were more Luddites going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 or offshoring jobs, or military AI. Just as an example, I own furniture my parents bought in the 1960s when they were first married. It's still solid. My family has furniture from the 1800s that still is solid. The furniture I buy today I have to replace every 5 years and is complete garbage. Maybe we should stop considering being a Luddite as a pejorative and perhaps concede they might have been right about some industries.
> My family has furniture from the 1800s that still is solid. The furniture I buy today I have to replace every 5 years and is complete garbage.
This is the perfect example of where this ideology fails. You can _still_ find furniture like those bought in the 1800s that stand the test of time. Cabinetmakers exist and would be happy to build nice furniture that will outlive both the cabinetmaker and yourself. In the age of the Web many of them advertise their services online.
The reason most people don't buy furniture from a cabinetmaker is because their furniture is _expensive_. Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well. Families would save up to buy furniture and preserve it at all cost because of how expensive it was to get nice furniture. Wealthy families would have nice furniture passed down for generations while poorer families made do with their seconds and thirds. Moreover cabinetmakers in the past often relied on cheap stocks of solid wood. In the present, wood has become more scarce due to overforesting and environmental concerns. When you buy furniture made from MDF it uses an order of magnitude less wood than a solid piece of Oak or Poplar made in the 1800s or even plywood from the 1960s. This comes at the cost of worse load-bearing capabilities and brittle joints.
The difference is that consumers now have the option for cheap, environmentally friendly furniture. If a consumer wants long lasting furniture, they could do what most cultures did in the past; save up for furniture over years and commission a cabinetmaker for their services. If you want furniture that lasts made of mostly solid wood and/or plywood, cabinetmakers would be overjoyed to work with you. Most consumers don't care enough about furniture to inflate the cost 10x for long lasting furniture. That's their choice as consumers.
> Moreover cabinetmakers in the past often relied on cheap stocks of solid wood.
A luthier I met in Berlin had a large stock of wood in their workshop. I asked him what it was for, and he said "oh, that's my supply for the next 10 years, I add to it every year to keep it about the same size".
Granted, luthiers use less wood than a cabinet maker.
> You can _still_ find furniture like those bought in the 1800s that stand the test of time.
You mostly can't. I always wanted quality wood furniture and once I had enough income I went shopping. Nothing. It can't be bought anywhere that I can find. Eventually gave up and bought the nicest office furniture I could find but it is still a very nice veneer over junk plywood. And even that was many thousands of dollars because it is a nice veneer instead of a cheap junk veneer.
> Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well.
Not really. Both my grandparent families were dirt poor small farmers and the furniture they had was orders of magnitude better quality than anything I can find or buy on a 2020s silicon valley tech salary.
I'll be honest I have no idea where you're looking. If you're looking at retail furniture stores in the US, then no you're not going to find it, unless you go far upmarket. But hop onto any woodworking forum/subreddit (well not r/woodworking as that's mostly beginners) and you'll find cabinetmakers willing to work with you for pieces. Few retail furniture outlets have a customer base willing to pay the prices needed for cabinetry, though I presume on a Silicon Valley tech salary you should be fine. Alternatively, reach out to an interior designer in your area who probably has contacts with many small cabinetry shops in the area. I'd link a few cabinetmakers I know of but I'd rather not call them out in a public forum. Patreon is going to have some also. Reddit's r/finishing has some experienced cabinetmakers. Another strategy is to go to a used furniture store, pick up an old piece made of solid wood/plywood, and ask a cabinetmaker to restore it, the same as furniture used to be passed down. If you're in the Bay Area I'll recommend Urban Ore as a good, cheap place to find used furniture. There are antique stores galore which restore old furniture and sell them for large amounts of money.
In the past, the capability to build cheap furniture just wasn't there so everything you bought was made from solid wood and was hand-joined which is why your grandparents' family's furniture seems so much stronger. The market also had a floor on how cheap it could get before mechanization and the invention of composite materials so it was "easy" to find expensive furniture and "hard" to find cheap furniture. FYI plywood can make furniture that outlasts individuals and has been in use in furniture since the early 1900s. When you're thinking of crappy veneered engineered wood, you're probably thinking of MDF and OSB furniture. Most furniture at retail furniture stores are majority MDF and OSB because of cost and largely weight as both plywood and solid wood tend to be very heavy for their load bearing capabilities.
> I'll be honest I have no idea where you're looking.
Silicon Valley area.
At the very top of the market, yes, one can get fully custom furnitue to any spec you like, for a very high price. I know a few people who have done remodels with such custom furniture and the cost has been over 100K on the low end to closer to a million on the high end. Even with a senior silicon valley salary, that's as good as impossible.
That's why I mention that in my grandparents generation, even low-income families could afford solid quality furniture. Today it is a privilege limited to those who hit major IPOs.
> That's why I mention that in my grandparents generation, even low-income families could afford solid quality furniture. Today it is a privilege limited to those who hit major IPOs.
Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks would buy their furniture. You're just not going to be able to get new, solid wooden furniture as cheap as you did even 80 years ago and this has nothing to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". There's exponentially more people in the world now, correspondingly less wood, and greater awareness about how to sustainably forest. Modern cabinetry is done with PPE to keep the woodworker safe and shops are ventilated and vacuumed to keep the area clean.
None of this has to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". The ideology itself is tautological; instead of exploring what the problem is, it purports itself to be the solution to all problems. Good cabinetry is still available in the market at expensive prices but there are reasons why solid wooden furniture has become more expensive. These reasons are immaterial in the face of "good old days before progress for the sake of progress", even though PPE and occupational safety has been some of the gains made through this "progress for the sake of progress."
>None of this has to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress".
It wasn't for the sake of progress, it was for the sake of profits. Making something almost as good that costs half the price is what the US has been doing for the last 30 years. After 30 years of "almost as good," turned in to absolute shit when compared to the older stuff.
Technology of course isn't bad for the sake of being bad. Electric tools is what allowed the old furniture to be so good at a reasonable price. Wood glue and sawdust being pressed into something that looks like wood but falls apart fairly easily, is an example of when technology makes things much worse and is used strictly for maximizing profit at the expense of quality. There's a lot of that today.
> Wood glue and sawdust being pressed into something that looks like wood but falls apart fairly easily, is an example of when technology makes things much worse and is used strictly for maximizing profit at the expense of quality. There's a lot of that today.
Right so let's dive into that a bit. Why is this maximizing profit? Because solid wood is expensive. Why is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited resource. I can guarantee you that if governments took away forestry restrictions that solid wood furniture would start to be built in a matter of months as new wood mills setup churning through previously restricted lands, at least until the Earth is deforested and climate change wreaks even greater havoc than it is already. Then once the forests are gone, the wood industry will collapse and wooden furniture would end until some brave government musters the will to repopulate a few forests.
Profit isn't the scary boogieman that this ideology likes to make it out to be. Profit is the difference between revenue and expense. Reducing expenses is a way to use resources more efficiently. In this case, we stave off deforestation by pressing low-quality wood scraps and sawdust into OSB and MDF boards. Would you rather we deforest the Earth instead? Remember that working with OSB and MDF is tricky because of how brittle they are as materials. It is much easier _and cheaper_ to design processes around solid wood or plywood if possible. Fundamentally wood is a limited resource. Learning how to use wood more efficiently is what allows more humans to have a quality of life where they can afford furniture at all while keeping the Earth forested.
In general though, applying the critique that chasing profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted. Margins on furniture are tiny. Consumers only have so much money they are willing to spend on furniture and cabinetmakers and industrialized furniture companies respond in kind. The critique would be more cogent _if_ furniture profit margins were higher but they really aren't. Unfortunately, wood really is just that expensive. Don't believe me just ask some woodworkers. Or go to the lumberyard and just try to do some rough calculation on how much it would take to build a piece out of solid wood.
This all comes back to my main point. The ideology that progress/profits/conspiracy is what's making things worse and the past was a better status quo is tautological; there's no proof or even research necessary to make the statement, only the invocation of conspiracy (c.f. profits.) Markets are complicated because reality is complicated. Some markets are indeed full of morally bankrupt boards charging huge margins on cheap goods. But reality has a surprising amount of detail and using some tautological ideology to advocate for technological regression is short-sighted.
Go talk to a few cabinetmakers and ask them about their feelings (or complaints lol) on Ikea furniture. I can guarantee you that will give you better insight into the world of furniture and wood than making a tautological anti-capitalist statement would with ideological eschatological fervor.
>I can guarantee you that if governments took away forestry restrictions that solid wood furniture would start to be built in a matter of months as new wood mills setup churning through previously restricted lands, at least until the Earth is deforested and climate change wreaks even greater havoc than it is already.
>Why is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited resource.
Wood is a renewable resource, it gets cut and replanted all_the_time. Pine is a 30 year cycle and our country is full of it. Can you tell me what restrictions you think are in place preventing tree farmers from growing and selling trees?
> ideology
You keep saying ideology. What ideology are you talking about specifically?
>we stave off deforestation by pressing low-quality wood scraps and sawdust into OSB and MDF boards
Trees are a crop just like any crop, they just have a much longer grow cycle.
>In general though, applying the critique that chasing profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted.
It's really not. There is a market for higher end furniture made at an industrial scale, but it's just not being met. Chasing profits at the cost of quality is obvious everywhere you look, if you think it's not been happening I don't know what to tell you.
>The ideology that progress/profits/conspiracy is what's making things worse and the past was a better status quo is tautological; there's no proof or even research necessary to make the statement, only the invocation of conspiracy
You contradict yourself. You said if you want quality wood furniture, buy antique.
>Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks would buy their furniture.
> Wood is a renewable resource, it gets cut and replanted all_the_time. Pine is a 30 year cycle and our country is full of it. Can you tell me what restrictions you think are in place preventing tree farmers from growing and selling trees?
Nothing. But they also aren't growing the kind of wood your grandparents' furniture was made from.
The trees grown today are the fastest growing varieties available, and are correspondingly softer on average. You certainly couldn't dig your thumbnail into a plank of old growth pine like you can into a modern 2x4 (even though pine is technically a softwood).
> Wood is a renewable resource, it gets cut and replanted all_the_time. Pine is a 30 year cycle and our country is full of it. Can you tell me what restrictions you think are in place preventing tree farmers from growing and selling trees?
Young-growth, sustainably farmed pine is a very different product than the thick growth pine that older generations used for their furniture. I'm confident that sustainable pine is being grown anywhere someone thinks they can turn a profit buying the land and then growing pine. After all, MDF and OSB are originally made from the scraps of these young pine anyway. Sustainably grown pine is hard to grow and mostly comes from the Southern US these days. I urge you to try to grow your own sustainable pine farm if you disagree.
> You keep saying ideology. What ideology are you talking about specifically?
The ideology that it's profits/progress/some conspiracy which drives change causes inequitable distribution of resource.
> Trees are a crop just like any crop, they just have a much longer grow cycle.
Crops are complicated. They grow in certain climates, under certain growing conditions, at certain rates, in certain soils. There's physical realities we have to contend with with crops. They aren't an unlimited resource we plant and reap. Get too greedy and you get the Dust Bowl. They're even hard to regulate and subsidize without ill-effects, like America's glut of cheap corn thanks to farm subsidies.
> Chasing profits at the cost of quality is obvious everywhere you look, if you think it's not been happening I don't know what to tell you.
That's what I mean: ideology. It's "obvious everywhere you look". The flat-earthers say the same thing, along with the QAnon folks. "Trust your eyes not what the politicians say." These ideologies are seductively simple answers to complex questions. Whenever you dislike the quality of something, it's "chasing profits at the cost of quality." The explanation does not need to contend with different input goods, resource types, markets, or anything. No observations, other than personal dissatisfaction, are needed to make the conclusion stick.
> You contradict yourself. You said if you want quality wood furniture, buy antique.
In the past many people couldn't afford quality _new_ wooden furniture. They would buy used furniture. You can still do this now at Goodwill or any local thrift store or used furniture store. The difference now is that poorer folk can afford to buy low-quality new furniture instead of used furniture. The middle-class would save a bit and buy what we call "antique" today, restored pieces of old wooden furniture. The wealthier and some of the middle-class would save up to buy a few nice pieces and have a few heirlooms to lean on. I'm confident that if you spend a few years saving up, you can save up for antique furniture. If you're a highly-paid SV tech worker, I expect a few years of savings could let you pay for a cabinetmaker to make you furniture. The wealthiest, then as now, could commission what they want when they want it. If you're annoyed at progress, you can make the _same choices_ people used to make before progress. It's just that people don't make those choices anymore because other choices are available.
For most people Ikea furniture delivers what they need at a price they are comfortable with. It lasts long enough. If you don't move homes and are careful not to bump your furniture too often Ikea furniture can last decades. It took me decades to get rid of my Ikea furniture from college and I just sold it to someone else. But don't blame profits when the reality is differing market conditions resulting in different preferences.
>I'm confident that sustainable pine is being grown anywhere someone thinks they can turn a profit buying the land and then growing pine. After all, MDF and OSB are originally made from the scraps of these young pine anyway. Sustainably grown pine is hard to grow and mostly comes from the Southern US these days. I urge you to try to grow your own sustainable pine farm if you disagree.
I have land with pine on it, so does a colleague of mine It's a really good long term investment. Plant for $10K, harvest 30 years later for $1M+. I mean do you have land, or are you just hypothesizing? I suspect the latter.
>That's what I mean: ideology. It's "obvious everywhere you look". The flat-earthers say the same thing, along with the QAnon folks. "Trust your eyes not what the politicians say." These ideologies are seductively simple answers to complex questions. Whenever you dislike the quality of something, it's "chasing profits at the cost of quality." The explanation does not need to contend with different input goods, resource types, markets, or anything. No observations, other than personal dissatisfaction, are needed to make the conclusion stick.
If you can't attack the idea, attack the person. It's not my ideology, it's market forces. You haven't show any numbers, just hyperbole. Show me somewhere that the margin on particleboard is less or the same than the margin of hardwood of the same furniture type and it will be more convincing. Companies are motivated by profit, pure and simple. To deny this is to deny understanding of how companies work or their purpose for existence. If they can cut costs, they will. If you think they will never cut costs at the expense of quality, I'm not sure what world you live in. Granted, there are exceptions, but of course they haven't dropped in quality so those aren't the companies I'm talking about.
Show me somewhere that the margin on particleboard is less or the same than the margin of hardwood of the same furniture.
> It wasn't for the sake of progress, it was for the sake of profits. Making something almost as good that costs half the price is what the US has been doing for the last 30 years. After 30 years of "almost as good," turned in to absolute shit when compared to the older stuff.
Where does people preferring to purchase cheaper furniture fit into this?
I can afford furniture that lasts 100 years, but I have no desire to. I would rather spend that money in other ways. My IKEA stuff lasts plenty long.
>Both my grandparent families were dirt poor small farmers and the furniture they had
I believe you, which makes me curious when they would have gotten it, and from where. 1940's? 1970's?
EDIT:
I was poor in the 70's and the best you were likely to come across (as a poor person) was fingerhut crap so I'm guessing it was earlier than that.
> There's a framing error in this reasoning. The technology of Web 1.0 did not exist in limited scope because it was only suitable for a small subsection of humanity. It was only being used by a small subsection because that was the developmental stage of the web. One could say (disingenuously) that at the time Web 1.0 was such a successful technology it was being used by 100 percent of web users!
Do you have any proof of those assertions? You're strident in defending your ideology but this claim seems fantastically unsubstantiated. I remember trying to help parents and non technical friends use Web 1.0. they'd get URLs wrong, forget which TLDs a site hung off, clicked on phishing emails, and deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0, as much as this wasn't a buzzword, was a strict increase in usability for every non-technical person I know.
> and deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0 was a strict increase in usability for every non-technical person I know.
I have no idea precisely what you are calling "Web 2.0" because in my mind, the technology elements of Web 2.0 outlined on the wikipedia page definitely have absolutely nothing to do with "getting URLs wrong", "forgetting TLDs". Changes from the same time period (around 1999) that were not typically considered to be part of "Web 2.0" were also responsible for a dramatic increase in the prevalence of popup ads. I think you're talking about something entirely different.
It's tricky because I don't know what Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc even mean since they're poorly defined. Generally I see the anti-Web2.0 digital vegan perspectives to be about opposing Javascript. I maintain that the Web after widespread Javascript was strictly more usable for non-technical people. I disagree that the pre-JS web was somehow incomplete or in a developer preview.
I see you are a stalwart defender of JavaScript :)
> Web after widespread JavaScript was strictly more usable for
non-technical people.
I suppose that's true. The "web" now has more reach, and generally
user interfaces have improved, and JavaScript has had many positive
effects on that improvement. But none of these things are necessarily
causative, and may be more or less coincidences along the timeline.
JavaScript solves some issues to do with presentation, and allowing
web browsers to compute things instead of needing a server to. It also
allows dangerous security holes, browser malware, spying on the user
and a host of "bad things". So whether the overall experience is an
"improvement" cannot be easily argued.
There are some "Web Applications" like browser based videoconferencing
that would be impossible without JavaScript. Whether these belong "in
the browser" is debatable. However the misuse of JavaScript to lazily
construct or decorate web content is a growing problem that is
denounced by all sorts of people, including web developers and
ordinary users who find their pages take ages to load, or function
sporadically, or leak information.
Have you used Gemini? Give it a try. Many non-technical people find it
very "usable" and it is a technology on-par with Web 1.0 in many ways.
> Generally I see the anti-Web2.0 digital vegan perspectives to be
about opposing JavaScript.
:) The DV arguments are much bigger and broader than JavaScript. But
to put it in that context for you; most people like myself argue that
JavaScript and other "web technologies" have transformed it into
something that isn't the web any longer. It doesn't function as an
information publishing and distribution system. It's still called "The
Web" by dint of evolutionary lineage, but in reality has transformed
into something unrecognisable (a surveillance engine and content
pushing system). The simple, safe and widely understood function
(that some here are calling Web 1.0) is now forced to live alongside
something else with no clear boundaries or distinctions between them,
and no sense of what parts of that technology are operating when you
visit a site. This is very bad for everyone regardless of the
usability gains obtained. I hope that makes sense.
The dividing line between Web 1.0 and 2.0 was, roughly speaking, the dotcom crash. In terms of business model, Web 2.0 is the era of Freemium and User Generated Content, and of Google Adwords. One of the original poster children for this was Flickr, another was Blogger.
Technologically, there isn't much to separate the eras, except perhaps the deprecation of Big Iron approaches to infrastructure in favor of horizontal scaling with commodity hardware, but that's really a spectrum rather than a sharp division.
The Web 2.0 era really hasn't ended, regardless of how the web and it's infrastructure has evolved in the past 20 years. There are various candidates for what will define the next era, but so far none that are indisputably "it".
While XMLHttpRequest dates to approximately the same time period, it really didn't get a lot of mindshare until Google used it to implement Gmail's and Google Maps' front ends (2004-2005), which is also when the term AJAX was coined by Jesse James Garrett:
> Do you have any proof of those assertions? You're strident in defending
your ideology
It's a logical argument with one premise - that fewer people used the
internet in the past than today - which I hope you can accept without
further proof.
Of course we should not be complacent about it. We can try to come up with creative solutions, that limit the more negative side effects of this thing we have unleashed. But the one thing we cannot do is take it back. The general public needs their nuggets of endorfine.
There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web, but really, most blogs were a pretty lonely place back then. It is hard to deny how modern solutions allow even someone with the most limited technical skillset to establish a meaningful online presence. Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility.
True. We cannot take it back in it's entirety, nor would we want
to. But for some people that quickly becomes the argument for a kind
of technological irreversibility principle, that we cannot take back
any mis-step or feature no matter how immediately awful and obvious
its effects. Left unchallenged that entitlement becomes an argument
for bullheaded intransigence and the labelling of whatever suits us
as 'progress'.
In reality many "genies" are strategically limited; poisons, invasive
species, bio-agents, nuclear materials, knowledge hazards, weapons,
bad poetry...
Sure, I am really glad we won the crypto wars and that "code wants to
be free" etcetera, but on the other hand that seems to have set off a
kind of megalomania in tech, which legitimises turning the entire
digital world into our own personal laboratory for experimenting on
everyone, sans ethics oversight committee.
> The general public needs their nuggets of endorfine.
Here we go again "saying what people need" for them. I meet a lot of
people desperate to get off the digital morphine drip.
> There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web
It seems like that. I've made a more elaborate argument in other
threads. You're right that it's "rosy", like all nostalgia. Of course
the past was crap in its own ways. But melancholia is a symptom of
crisis, retro is a sign of interregnum and loss of common sense
(literally our common sense of things). What does it mean? It means
that our "progress" isn't serving us fully, and in some cases causing
people to recoil from it. Not acknowledging that would be an error.
> Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility.
Of course not. But there are many qualities/metrics by which we might
judge things if we are to avoid what I'd call the "democratic
fallacy"; external cost, stability, longevity, coherence, security,
safety, interoperability, accuracy and truth content, environmental
cost.... Technology is multi-dimensional. Accessibility is all lovely
and cool, but it should not be put ahead of more important human
concerns. OTC opioids are more accessible than street drugs ever were,
that doesn't make it an unqualified "good thing". So we can still
enumerate the ways in which Web 2.0 is worse than Web 1.0 without
invoking nostalgia for a "smaller cosy digital world".
That's a terribly fatalistic position and also a misrepresentation.
Rejecting the centralized ad-driven wall-garden spyware model isn't "luddite" in the offensive sense you're using it. It's a matter of noticing what's best for the user and consumer, not for the adware companies.
The good thing is that it's still all there, just drowned out by the noise.
I maintain my blog as always have, I maintain my hobby interest websites for others as a reference source (some of these going back to mid 90s, some I've just started recently).
Search engines today make these harder to find because my sites don't bring the advertisers any benefit. I have no ads, no trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just content by regular people for regular people interested in various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those niche interest find their way to them.
My suggestion to anyone is that if you're looking to become famous and gather millions of followers and all that, sure, use the mainstream platforms.
But if you're just looking to share an interest, do it in a way that you control and keep the ad-spyware out: start a website, start a blog, start a mailing list. You won't scale to millions of users but that's a wonderful thing.
> I have no ads, no trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just content by regular people for regular people interested in various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those niche interest find their way to them.
We need a search engine/card catalog that makes it easier to find these real-person sites, that also checks on occasion that they are still not running analytics, ad-spyware, etc. I suppose an “Awesome” list could do the trick, even.
> But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back inside.
I browse the web with javascript off for most sites, and my site works fine without javascript, renders text beautifully and readably. Millions read it without issue.
Web 1.0 is still there and can still be used. I do. It's great.
"Sure, the web used to be a fun place for tinkerers. But the cat's out of the bag and we cannot put it back inside.
"Going luddite is never a good solution."
Making the web more fun for tinkerers is "going luddite"?
I first used the web in 1993. I do not remember it being more "fun". Seems like there is far more "tinkering" going on today, namely by "web developers" who try to keep themselves entertained while pledging loyalty to surveillance and advertising.
Reducing the amount of tinkering with respect to the "web development" would actually improve the web, at least for this user. Less "fixing" and "replacing" of things that work well enough.
I hope in vain for a return to pre-web 1.0 -- when we were able to read without being watched. Many a revolution probably happened due to that "feature" of paper books ... which we lost when we went online with words.
There's nothing holding people back from returning to Web 1.0.
HTTP 1.1 is still a thing.
Static webpages are still a thing.
IRC is still a thing.
Even better, host it on a P2P network like I2P where those on the network have to get over the hurdle of knowing about it in the first place and being able to set it up, just as early web users had to know how to plug in a modem, install a browser, and use those "URL" things.
If your pages provide value, people will still find them in any case.
Oh... but you wanted Web 1.0 content with Web 3.0 levels of traffic.
Well, you're not gonna get that. Pick your poison.
I don't understand the rational behind throwing away one of the most useful, most brilliant, and most valuable resource humans have created just because it has a few major problems. There's a strong argument in favor of fixing the problems, sure, but the world without the modern web would be significantly worse, not least because 90% of HN users wouldn't have jobs.
The modern web (eg Web 2.0) is an open software distribution platform that forms the basis of hundreds of thousands of company's products. Social media is a part of that, and it needs fixing, but a return to Web 1.0 is not the solution.
Many of us share this nostalgia for the early-day, long-tail pioneer phase.
I feel business model innovation is the key to moving the pendulum back towards that landscape - that the ad model will also result in centralization in which we are the product?
Most people like being ruled. That's why it's one person performing and thousands sitting and watching, not the other way around. Once early adopters are gone from something, it's usually all spectators what's left, and that's when things turn for the worse. The only thing that can bring back web 1.0 is good dictatorship of sorts, where one person with strong beliefs and good moral character takes control over something big. E.g. somebody wealthy purchasing large social media platform. But we can only hope for that to happen, it's very unlikely there's a person crazy enough to do such a thing today.
I do remind myself that most people are followers. The leaders among us need to help lead others. I would like people to stop berating 'Social Media' because that is a general category and instead berate the specific corporate, AI, state affiliated social media platforms where the problems lie. Free social media such as those in the fediverse do not have the same problems and don't deserve to be lumped in with them. They have their own problems but much fewer.
Do you believe we should also go back to not having search engines? BBS as primary information sharing? Email & IRC as pretty much the only way to communicate?
Web 1.0 was riddled with scalability problems, you are free to take what you consider the best parts of it and simplify your Web 2.0 site.
No disagreement on having message boards and instant messaging or search engines, I am saying that they are an actual step backwards when it comes to making lay people productive when using the web.
Not everyone is a HN alum ready to write a boolean query to find the most relevant post on a forum.
If a "return to web 1.0" means going back to baroque and quirky websites on which I have to constantly fight to find information and not carve my eyes out out of digust then no, thanks. The Web was meant as a means to publish hyperlinked text documents, nothing more, nothing less.
I don't want to read an entire book on a web page, just let me download an .epub file. I don't want to read your poorly formatted artsy manifesto in my browser, just let me download a PDF. I don't want to read your blogpost which is just a presentation in disguise filled with inline images, just let me download a powerpoint file.
I'm glad that if I want to search for some information Wikipedia presents me a consistent interface and gives me a brief overview of a subject and presents me with further hyperlinked content both pointing to IRL and web-hosted documents. Wikipedia to me perfectly represents the spirit of true Web 1.0 even if the content is Web 2.0 in nature.
It seems like you are conflating simple websites with the aesthetic of websites of web 1.0. these things are mutually exclusive and going back to web 1.0 will allow you to just download an epub of a very very simple text heavy website.
It's a matter of principles. If you give people javascript and css they will use it, full stop. The reason why the web has evolved this way is because the people back then were responsible for it. You have to cut the hydra's head and simply remove everything that is graphic and only keep basic text formatting.
There needs to always be a place for anonymity, but I’d argue not in all forums.
Words have impact. I’d love to see some foundation or something to work on the problem of toxicity/hate. Develop technologies to allow sites to better police against it, detect bots trying to incite, etc..
Of course, you have to draw a line between free speech and hate speech but we already do that.
183 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadInstead, maybe we build the replacements that we want, invite those who want a piece, sure, even put up a few signs pointing the way; but for the rest, you really can't save those who aren't looking for salvation, so let them have their technological dystopia if they can't see it for what it is.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
The original promise of the Internet was heavily tied to democratization of publishing media. In many ways, the internet of today is far closer to that goal than the internet of the late 90s, just with a lot of backsteps and additional problems created along the way. We ought to solve those problems, but just resetting the clock back 20 years isn't a step forward.
Where would you even start to determine if that was true or not?
Change may be discovering a hundred dollars in the pocket of your old jacket, or it may be discovering an ominous lump on your neck. You really don't know what it brings.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
Douglas Adams
"The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!"
Please see the full Poem 'To a Mouse' : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_A_Mouse,_on_Turning_Her_Up_...
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Edit: OT: To add the context to my reply to the quote from jameshart, who quoted;
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galax...
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https://www.quotes.net/mquote/901391
The Script states:
Frankie Mouse: Still, the best laid plans of mice.
Arthur Dent: And men.
Frankie Mouse: What?
Arthur Dent: And men... The best laid plans of mice and men.
Frankie Mouse: What have men got to do with it?
The site is pleasantly readable and "responsive" to different browser sizes when you turn Style Sheets off!
I browse the internet full screen, which often makes text blocks far too wide. It's hard to read long lines. Yes, in principle, I could resize the window for every website, but in practice that would be annoying to do.
Given current browser capabilities, on my own websites it would probably be best to set a maximum text width rather than a fixed text width. That way I can still adjust the window size to be smaller if I want to.
In the future, it would be nice for a user to set their own desired text width (similar to setting the serif or sans-serif font) which could hypothetically be available to websites in CSS like this:
I think this concept would be immensely useful in the browser. The closest one can get to that currently is to use media queries for a variety of screen widths with hand-tuned content widths, which is laborious and doesn’t leave room for user customization.
1. Manually add a link to every page on the site each time a new one is added.
2. Give up on hand-writing HTML and use a server-side templating system
3. Give up on having navigation on each page
4. Load the navigation through JavaScript
Given that they want to hand-write HTML, and they (presumably) want it to be easy enough for everyone to do, the JS options seems like a reasonable choice.
Perhaps a good compromise would be to put a link to a navigation page in the sidebar, but when available, use JavaScript to replace the link with the navigation page content.
If we want to socialize with someone, couldn't we just go to that person instead of a social media broker?
The tech of web 1.0 is limiting and less approachable for the average person. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.
We went down the rabbit hole of web 2.0 and it doesn't look like we will come back out. Web 3.0 feels dystopian.
It's definitely not all roses, but I don't really see a clear path out of this. Because for whatever feelings people have about big tech, YouTube, Facebook, Etsy, Instagram have all driven billions in business for non-tech companies. And they've done it by creating experiences that are engaging to end consumers. Sure we might see traffic exchange hands among the big players, and there will be other successful new networks like we have seen with TikTok. But I think people don't want to self host for good reasons.
These are good arguments that stand alone.
The counter-arguments are always the same "Hey, that's a problem with people - just exercise willpower and don't get distracted". Or "Hey, modern electronics and software is more 'efficient', just throw more cycles at it (silicon and cognitive) and get with the programme" But these only serve to minimise and deny real sentiments that smart software developers would pay close attention to.
There's lot's of sentiment out there that is being mistaken for 'nostalgia', which is genuine dissatisfaction with modern tools. That's why projects like suckless.org [2] seem more relevant every day.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001296
[2] https://suckless.org/
It sort of reminds me of that series where an architect makes fun of mcmansion monstrosities. The architect is right - those mcmansions suck - and we're right - simplicity in computing is better - but I think people want the mcmansions and I think people want the flashier more interactive software.
I think that's a bit too condescending. People don't want mcmansions and flash, they want to publish to the internet quickly and efficiently. The web is a tool for them, a means to an end.
The HN set might prefer to live in a world where computers only shipped with Emacs and the web was just a raw JSON API and you had to write your own software for everything from scratch, but no one else does. And that's perfectly legitimate. Why should someone making music, or art, or who wants to set up a business or network with people have to hand-code their own HTML or write their own backend just because some self-appointed gatekeepers decided that using a service ruins the artisinal quirkiness of the web? That's like saying authors should have to hand-write their manuscripts or set their own type. The web is a tool that's supposed to serve everyone.
I think for many and probably most people, the web is an entertainment much more so than a tool.
What I said is only condescending if you add a judgment to it, rather than it just being an observation. I think I did that when I said that the architects are "right" about mcmansions and that we're "right" about simplicity. But those are just my own preferences and I really don't begrudge people for having different ones. I think it is more condescending (or perhaps patronizing is a better word) to claim that we know what's better for people, that they'd see that they really prefer simple brutalist software design if only that's what we would give them.
I've just been around long enough to see this evolution from web applications that were very barebones to the current state, and my interpretation of what has happened during this period of time is that we've been following the preferences of most people who use software, as we should.
I would go one stage more "meta" and say; No. Actually one of the deep, deep problems in computer science and digital technology is the very idea that "we know what people want". Or that they know themselves. There is so much said in this forum and other software communities about "what people really want". Outside of quite narrow UX psychology - which deals mainly with how people prefer to complete tasks within paradigms that have already been selected for them - I know of little or no evidence based research on the lifestyle and societal choices around technology. That is why I frequently use the phrase *foisted upon" in Digital Vegan [1][2], to indicate the extraordinary errors of sentiment attribution that occur around tech.
[1] https://digitalvegan.net
[2] 'Foisted' is not the same as 'forced', but nontheless there is a 'great lie' that we tell ourselves about how markets of demand and supply work in realtion to technology.
I saw "web 1.0" versions in the early to mid 2000s of pretty much every product that became big in the late 2000s and 2010s. People made their choice.
It really wasn't. I don't know why people here believe that being able to set up a web server and write HTML has any relationship to the quality of the content being marked up and served. They're completely different things.
And by then Geocities, etc. were a thing and it didn't exactly take an engineering degree to use those.
It was crappy, of course, but it was something. And it was easy.
Suckless (the org) is too elitist to produce software usable by non-power users, which is a shame, because these folks are for the most part excellent at balancing perfectionism and minimalism with pragmatism; they could go a very long way to help "fix" rampant complexity, but their complete disinterest in accommodating people who can't program in C will keep their projects irrelevant on the grand scale of things.
However I think the "how it was / how it is /where to now?" postulate is right. Especially the "immediate dopamine injection via Tweet" versus "build on your own independent site". It could actually make for far less concentrated content and so data and so power (in a way).
Twitter: "give hime a fish a eat". Independent Web: "Give him a fishing pole so he can learn how to catch them himself".
This forced me to do what I always try and avoid doing (because no one will thank you for it) and that is to clean it up. Some of it was necessary (eg it was open to SQL injection). In doing so I reduced it down to <20,000 including the new features required.
This was a fairly stock standard database driven website but in just doing things the right way the page load times got to under 50ms (from 500-1000ms). This wasn't an SPA (of course) but I remember thinking how refreshing it was. You could link to any page. Those links loaded superfast (this is the bane of SPAs when they support deep-linking at all) and ran on everything just fine.
This is actually one of the best featurs about PHP too: a static functional core so there's basically no bootstrapping. This means you can tear down all the resources of rendering a page. Performance becomes way more predictable and you're way less prone to resource leaks.
There is magic in fast loading pages and I miss that about good Web 1.0 sites.
This is actually the biggest problem with all the ad and tracking JS packages: the load times go to shit. This becomes a justification for SPAs
As for Web 3.0... ugh. Why? Just... why? I guess that's a whole separate topic.
stated; >The web was established with the best of intentions.
The basic idea was that if everyone could share their thoughts and ideas with the world, the best ones would be vetted and float to the top.
The bad ones would be ignored and pushed to the bottom.
But human nature has a tendency to corrupt the best of intentions.<
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
stated; > Microsoft shuts down AI chatbot after it turned into a Nazi - By Amy Kraft Updated on: March 25, 2016<
Going luddite is never a good solution. We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new development has brought us and learn how to live with it, not suppress all recent development in the hopes of recreating an environment that only really worked for a small subsection of humanity.
Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online? "Yep, and then we had buttons to tell each other that we liked seeing it. It was a weird time. Some people still miss it and argue we should go back to Web 2.0."
This. 100%.
You select the search bar, the keyboard takes a second to appear. You start typing, nothing happens because they've reimplemented the text box in javascript, and the script hasn't fully loaded yet. The script loads and the second half of the letters you typed appears in a letter by letter fashion. The page freezes and a suggestion box appears, every second or so the suggestions change to reflect the letters you typed earlier. You erase what you've typed. With every letter that changes, the page freezes a second as a new suggestion loads. When it freezes, it stops accepting letters, so there's a lot of erasing and re-typing. Alright, you're almost done typing... then the page freezes and the page turns grey, and a pop over loads. They want you to load fill out a satisfaction survey. You try to close it to continue, but the script handling the close button hasn't loaded yet so it doesn't work for a good 20 seconds.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a javascript stomping on a human face -- for ever.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30851371
> Personally, I'm hoping all this share-everything is just a trend, that will pass by itself. Future users will look back at it with a sense of wonder: did people really post pictures of their food online?
This seems like a very contradictory post.
A return to the state of web 1.0 would definitely be a major move backwards, similar to banning the use of cars to prevent traffic accidents from happening. Wouldn't it be better to just learn how to drive?
Unfortunately, the only way that’s likely to change is a new company or nonprofit that decides not to sell out to Facebook or Advertising.
Torture time is so long. A generation loss is bearable. A couple generation loss seems like hell. I'm pessimistic that we are going to a worse era.
Change is merely change, neither good nor bad. Same for absense of change.
I think it definitely has passed, at least in my environment. I see less people sharing inane things, and most of the time it's done they use things like stories, which are temporary and with less feedback (no "like button" on Instagram stories, for example, only messages), and more organic (the same way some people talk about whatever they ate in person, they share it with their friends with these tools).
I expect future generations may well say the same thing about memes. "People thought that was cool???"
I don't think they will be ridiculed to the same level as I hope our current social media behavior will be. They will more likely evolve to new levels, when the methods of remixing media expand and they become even easier to create.
> "But it gets worse. These social media giants are collecting data about every single internet user at an alarming rate, housing it in enormous data storage facilities around the world. Once collected, this information is analyzed, compiled, and sold to any interested parties willing to pay for it. It’s not only your activities in a web browser that are gathered; many smart devices including televisions, smart phones, home automation equipment, and more will passively listen to casual conversation looking for key words and phrases. This data will be correlated with the online profile of the speaker with speech recognition and anything you talk about will be added to a database of your interests. Once complied, this data becomes impossible to track down and remove. A user’s personal data will never disappear from the internet. It will be continually be added to, recompiled, reanalyzed, and sold over and over in order to sell ads in the hope of selling a product. If you sign up for a free service on the web, then you are what is being sold."
Take away JavaScript today, and it'd be replaced with the (slower, but still lucrative enough to justify it) process of paying site admins to share their access logs and user account data.
That sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense. Is there any evidence for this beyond anecdotes that are probably Baader-Meinhof effects?
If it was happening, hundreds of people would be working on those systems, and at least one of them would have talked.
I can guarantee someone built a way to enable telemetry and diagnostic data into these devices "to improve user experience". It wouldn't take much for another engineer/sociopathic PM to enable it across the board (telemetry is now opt out) or change the sampling frequency or storage location.
Smart TVs have been caught listening to people before. Cell phones absolutely do. Home automation is generally voice controlled, etc.
I feel bad for individuals with paranoid schizophrenia. Give it another 10 years and there really will be invisible cameras and microphones everywhere recording you!
I remember especially us discussing three-letter-agencies' mass-surveillance and I brought up NSA's ECHELON and other things that have been semi-known/-public for decades. About two years later the Snowden leaks came about and my psychiatrist started telling me about different cases he had had where people were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and there later turned out to be real world explanations and not hallucinations and/or delusions.
I just wanted to share this anecdote. It's a shitty disease and you're absolutely on point about how it already is and will become even more so in the near future.
However I also believe that's only because they haven't considered the potential impact of constant surveillance from everything you own sent to third parties who will keep the data forever.
...or maybe they just trust faceless strangers more than I do.
The part about selling isn't true. Google and Facebook slurp in a lot of data, but they hoard it. It's only "sold" by allowing advertisers to target against it.
Google claims
> we do not sell your personal information to anyone.
Facebook claims
> No, we don't sell your information.
Maybe there's an asterisk when it comes to heavily aggregated data, and they both work with legitimate researchers, but big tech selling your data isn't true. A bunch of medium-sized adtech players you've never heard of sell your data.
You took photos with connected device like you do today, but instead of sync them against your Google Drive/iCloud your phone sync them to your homeserver both via internet when you are on the go or at home in your LAN. Your friend have a phonebook like all modern smartphones have today but that's phonebook is a little bit more featuresful, from it looking for a contact you can initiate a voice{,+video} call IP2IP, you can write a mail but also see a classic blog page of the contact if he/she/it have one, this is just a local app that offer you correspondents "public namespaces" (Plan 9 style) mounted locally as you wish and cached locally as you wish. That's means that you photo gallery offer access to your contacts public photos and videos, just looking for them. You browser, a real browser, not a modern WebVM offer your contacts sites, cached as you wish in similar ways etc.
That's means: more functionalities, no feature erased by some corporate decision, only the community decide, you contents on your iron, contents you like on your iron, so far faster usage, far better integration, far less reliance on any specific third party services. Not a single functionality less.
It's not a dream, technically is perfectly doable, those systems actually are already designed decades ago, with the first P2P video-conference with screen sharing in 1968 (NLS mother of all the demos), with late '70s Xerox Star Office system etc it's not there just because few big & powerful have other plans for their own interests and most others do not know nor care.
Please, I do wish you would think carefully before using what is really a pejorative and potentially quite insulting term in regard to modern tech critique. Some of the smartest people out there, who built the digital world you take for granted today, are having (belated) second thoughts about the social and geo-political impacts of these creations. Heartily I recommend Cory Doctorow's recent piece about this [1].
One could arguably turn it around and say that those "cargo-cultists" hell-bent on ploughing ahead regardless, without pause or reflection, are closer to the common misuse of the word "Luddite" - a kind of straw-chewing bumpkin who lives in fear of progress. No. Progress is the radical questioning of "progress" itself.
> We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new > development has brought us and learn how to live with it
No we won't. Be careful of this "genie and bottle" fallacy. It is absolutely the wrong attitude found at the intersection of unreasoned defeatism, resignation, learned helplessness, and abdication of civic engagement and responsibility. We are here, as hackers, to _shape_ the technology that runs our world, not to sit on the sidelines and amuse ourselves to death [2].
> recreating an environment that only really worked for a small subsection of humanity.
There's a framing error in this reasoning. The technology of Web 1.0 did not exist in limited scope because it was only suitable for a small subsection of humanity. It was only being used by a small subsection because that was the developmental stage of the web. One could say (disingenuously) that at the time Web 1.0 was such a successful technology it was being used by 100 percent of web users!
[1] https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-lite...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
This is the perfect example of where this ideology fails. You can _still_ find furniture like those bought in the 1800s that stand the test of time. Cabinetmakers exist and would be happy to build nice furniture that will outlive both the cabinetmaker and yourself. In the age of the Web many of them advertise their services online.
The reason most people don't buy furniture from a cabinetmaker is because their furniture is _expensive_. Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well. Families would save up to buy furniture and preserve it at all cost because of how expensive it was to get nice furniture. Wealthy families would have nice furniture passed down for generations while poorer families made do with their seconds and thirds. Moreover cabinetmakers in the past often relied on cheap stocks of solid wood. In the present, wood has become more scarce due to overforesting and environmental concerns. When you buy furniture made from MDF it uses an order of magnitude less wood than a solid piece of Oak or Poplar made in the 1800s or even plywood from the 1960s. This comes at the cost of worse load-bearing capabilities and brittle joints.
The difference is that consumers now have the option for cheap, environmentally friendly furniture. If a consumer wants long lasting furniture, they could do what most cultures did in the past; save up for furniture over years and commission a cabinetmaker for their services. If you want furniture that lasts made of mostly solid wood and/or plywood, cabinetmakers would be overjoyed to work with you. Most consumers don't care enough about furniture to inflate the cost 10x for long lasting furniture. That's their choice as consumers.
A luthier I met in Berlin had a large stock of wood in their workshop. I asked him what it was for, and he said "oh, that's my supply for the next 10 years, I add to it every year to keep it about the same size".
Granted, luthiers use less wood than a cabinet maker.
You mostly can't. I always wanted quality wood furniture and once I had enough income I went shopping. Nothing. It can't be bought anywhere that I can find. Eventually gave up and bought the nicest office furniture I could find but it is still a very nice veneer over junk plywood. And even that was many thousands of dollars because it is a nice veneer instead of a cheap junk veneer.
> Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well.
Not really. Both my grandparent families were dirt poor small farmers and the furniture they had was orders of magnitude better quality than anything I can find or buy on a 2020s silicon valley tech salary.
In the past, the capability to build cheap furniture just wasn't there so everything you bought was made from solid wood and was hand-joined which is why your grandparents' family's furniture seems so much stronger. The market also had a floor on how cheap it could get before mechanization and the invention of composite materials so it was "easy" to find expensive furniture and "hard" to find cheap furniture. FYI plywood can make furniture that outlasts individuals and has been in use in furniture since the early 1900s. When you're thinking of crappy veneered engineered wood, you're probably thinking of MDF and OSB furniture. Most furniture at retail furniture stores are majority MDF and OSB because of cost and largely weight as both plywood and solid wood tend to be very heavy for their load bearing capabilities.
Silicon Valley area.
At the very top of the market, yes, one can get fully custom furnitue to any spec you like, for a very high price. I know a few people who have done remodels with such custom furniture and the cost has been over 100K on the low end to closer to a million on the high end. Even with a senior silicon valley salary, that's as good as impossible.
That's why I mention that in my grandparents generation, even low-income families could afford solid quality furniture. Today it is a privilege limited to those who hit major IPOs.
Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks would buy their furniture. You're just not going to be able to get new, solid wooden furniture as cheap as you did even 80 years ago and this has nothing to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". There's exponentially more people in the world now, correspondingly less wood, and greater awareness about how to sustainably forest. Modern cabinetry is done with PPE to keep the woodworker safe and shops are ventilated and vacuumed to keep the area clean.
None of this has to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". The ideology itself is tautological; instead of exploring what the problem is, it purports itself to be the solution to all problems. Good cabinetry is still available in the market at expensive prices but there are reasons why solid wooden furniture has become more expensive. These reasons are immaterial in the face of "good old days before progress for the sake of progress", even though PPE and occupational safety has been some of the gains made through this "progress for the sake of progress."
It wasn't for the sake of progress, it was for the sake of profits. Making something almost as good that costs half the price is what the US has been doing for the last 30 years. After 30 years of "almost as good," turned in to absolute shit when compared to the older stuff.
Technology of course isn't bad for the sake of being bad. Electric tools is what allowed the old furniture to be so good at a reasonable price. Wood glue and sawdust being pressed into something that looks like wood but falls apart fairly easily, is an example of when technology makes things much worse and is used strictly for maximizing profit at the expense of quality. There's a lot of that today.
Right so let's dive into that a bit. Why is this maximizing profit? Because solid wood is expensive. Why is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited resource. I can guarantee you that if governments took away forestry restrictions that solid wood furniture would start to be built in a matter of months as new wood mills setup churning through previously restricted lands, at least until the Earth is deforested and climate change wreaks even greater havoc than it is already. Then once the forests are gone, the wood industry will collapse and wooden furniture would end until some brave government musters the will to repopulate a few forests.
Profit isn't the scary boogieman that this ideology likes to make it out to be. Profit is the difference between revenue and expense. Reducing expenses is a way to use resources more efficiently. In this case, we stave off deforestation by pressing low-quality wood scraps and sawdust into OSB and MDF boards. Would you rather we deforest the Earth instead? Remember that working with OSB and MDF is tricky because of how brittle they are as materials. It is much easier _and cheaper_ to design processes around solid wood or plywood if possible. Fundamentally wood is a limited resource. Learning how to use wood more efficiently is what allows more humans to have a quality of life where they can afford furniture at all while keeping the Earth forested.
In general though, applying the critique that chasing profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted. Margins on furniture are tiny. Consumers only have so much money they are willing to spend on furniture and cabinetmakers and industrialized furniture companies respond in kind. The critique would be more cogent _if_ furniture profit margins were higher but they really aren't. Unfortunately, wood really is just that expensive. Don't believe me just ask some woodworkers. Or go to the lumberyard and just try to do some rough calculation on how much it would take to build a piece out of solid wood.
This all comes back to my main point. The ideology that progress/profits/conspiracy is what's making things worse and the past was a better status quo is tautological; there's no proof or even research necessary to make the statement, only the invocation of conspiracy (c.f. profits.) Markets are complicated because reality is complicated. Some markets are indeed full of morally bankrupt boards charging huge margins on cheap goods. But reality has a surprising amount of detail and using some tautological ideology to advocate for technological regression is short-sighted.
Go talk to a few cabinetmakers and ask them about their feelings (or complaints lol) on Ikea furniture. I can guarantee you that will give you better insight into the world of furniture and wood than making a tautological anti-capitalist statement would with ideological eschatological fervor.
>Why is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited resource.
Wood is a renewable resource, it gets cut and replanted all_the_time. Pine is a 30 year cycle and our country is full of it. Can you tell me what restrictions you think are in place preventing tree farmers from growing and selling trees?
> ideology
You keep saying ideology. What ideology are you talking about specifically?
>we stave off deforestation by pressing low-quality wood scraps and sawdust into OSB and MDF boards
Trees are a crop just like any crop, they just have a much longer grow cycle.
>In general though, applying the critique that chasing profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted.
It's really not. There is a market for higher end furniture made at an industrial scale, but it's just not being met. Chasing profits at the cost of quality is obvious everywhere you look, if you think it's not been happening I don't know what to tell you.
>The ideology that progress/profits/conspiracy is what's making things worse and the past was a better status quo is tautological; there's no proof or even research necessary to make the statement, only the invocation of conspiracy
You contradict yourself. You said if you want quality wood furniture, buy antique.
>Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks would buy their furniture.
Nothing. But they also aren't growing the kind of wood your grandparents' furniture was made from.
The trees grown today are the fastest growing varieties available, and are correspondingly softer on average. You certainly couldn't dig your thumbnail into a plank of old growth pine like you can into a modern 2x4 (even though pine is technically a softwood).
Young-growth, sustainably farmed pine is a very different product than the thick growth pine that older generations used for their furniture. I'm confident that sustainable pine is being grown anywhere someone thinks they can turn a profit buying the land and then growing pine. After all, MDF and OSB are originally made from the scraps of these young pine anyway. Sustainably grown pine is hard to grow and mostly comes from the Southern US these days. I urge you to try to grow your own sustainable pine farm if you disagree.
> You keep saying ideology. What ideology are you talking about specifically?
The ideology that it's profits/progress/some conspiracy which drives change causes inequitable distribution of resource.
> Trees are a crop just like any crop, they just have a much longer grow cycle.
Crops are complicated. They grow in certain climates, under certain growing conditions, at certain rates, in certain soils. There's physical realities we have to contend with with crops. They aren't an unlimited resource we plant and reap. Get too greedy and you get the Dust Bowl. They're even hard to regulate and subsidize without ill-effects, like America's glut of cheap corn thanks to farm subsidies.
> Chasing profits at the cost of quality is obvious everywhere you look, if you think it's not been happening I don't know what to tell you.
That's what I mean: ideology. It's "obvious everywhere you look". The flat-earthers say the same thing, along with the QAnon folks. "Trust your eyes not what the politicians say." These ideologies are seductively simple answers to complex questions. Whenever you dislike the quality of something, it's "chasing profits at the cost of quality." The explanation does not need to contend with different input goods, resource types, markets, or anything. No observations, other than personal dissatisfaction, are needed to make the conclusion stick.
> You contradict yourself. You said if you want quality wood furniture, buy antique.
In the past many people couldn't afford quality _new_ wooden furniture. They would buy used furniture. You can still do this now at Goodwill or any local thrift store or used furniture store. The difference now is that poorer folk can afford to buy low-quality new furniture instead of used furniture. The middle-class would save a bit and buy what we call "antique" today, restored pieces of old wooden furniture. The wealthier and some of the middle-class would save up to buy a few nice pieces and have a few heirlooms to lean on. I'm confident that if you spend a few years saving up, you can save up for antique furniture. If you're a highly-paid SV tech worker, I expect a few years of savings could let you pay for a cabinetmaker to make you furniture. The wealthiest, then as now, could commission what they want when they want it. If you're annoyed at progress, you can make the _same choices_ people used to make before progress. It's just that people don't make those choices anymore because other choices are available.
For most people Ikea furniture delivers what they need at a price they are comfortable with. It lasts long enough. If you don't move homes and are careful not to bump your furniture too often Ikea furniture can last decades. It took me decades to get rid of my Ikea furniture from college and I just sold it to someone else. But don't blame profits when the reality is differing market conditions resulting in different preferences.
I have land with pine on it, so does a colleague of mine It's a really good long term investment. Plant for $10K, harvest 30 years later for $1M+. I mean do you have land, or are you just hypothesizing? I suspect the latter.
>That's what I mean: ideology. It's "obvious everywhere you look". The flat-earthers say the same thing, along with the QAnon folks. "Trust your eyes not what the politicians say." These ideologies are seductively simple answers to complex questions. Whenever you dislike the quality of something, it's "chasing profits at the cost of quality." The explanation does not need to contend with different input goods, resource types, markets, or anything. No observations, other than personal dissatisfaction, are needed to make the conclusion stick.
If you can't attack the idea, attack the person. It's not my ideology, it's market forces. You haven't show any numbers, just hyperbole. Show me somewhere that the margin on particleboard is less or the same than the margin of hardwood of the same furniture type and it will be more convincing. Companies are motivated by profit, pure and simple. To deny this is to deny understanding of how companies work or their purpose for existence. If they can cut costs, they will. If you think they will never cut costs at the expense of quality, I'm not sure what world you live in. Granted, there are exceptions, but of course they haven't dropped in quality so those aren't the companies I'm talking about.
Show me somewhere that the margin on particleboard is less or the same than the margin of hardwood of the same furniture.
Where does people preferring to purchase cheaper furniture fit into this?
I can afford furniture that lasts 100 years, but I have no desire to. I would rather spend that money in other ways. My IKEA stuff lasts plenty long.
I believe you, which makes me curious when they would have gotten it, and from where. 1940's? 1970's?
EDIT: I was poor in the 70's and the best you were likely to come across (as a poor person) was fingerhut crap so I'm guessing it was earlier than that.
> I believe you, which makes me curious when they would have gotten it, and from where. 1940's? 1970's?
That would've been early 1900s, pre-WW1.
Do you have any proof of those assertions? You're strident in defending your ideology but this claim seems fantastically unsubstantiated. I remember trying to help parents and non technical friends use Web 1.0. they'd get URLs wrong, forget which TLDs a site hung off, clicked on phishing emails, and deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0, as much as this wasn't a buzzword, was a strict increase in usability for every non-technical person I know.
I have no idea precisely what you are calling "Web 2.0" because in my mind, the technology elements of Web 2.0 outlined on the wikipedia page definitely have absolutely nothing to do with "getting URLs wrong", "forgetting TLDs". Changes from the same time period (around 1999) that were not typically considered to be part of "Web 2.0" were also responsible for a dramatic increase in the prevalence of popup ads. I think you're talking about something entirely different.
> Web after widespread JavaScript was strictly more usable for non-technical people.
I suppose that's true. The "web" now has more reach, and generally user interfaces have improved, and JavaScript has had many positive effects on that improvement. But none of these things are necessarily causative, and may be more or less coincidences along the timeline.
JavaScript solves some issues to do with presentation, and allowing web browsers to compute things instead of needing a server to. It also allows dangerous security holes, browser malware, spying on the user and a host of "bad things". So whether the overall experience is an "improvement" cannot be easily argued.
There are some "Web Applications" like browser based videoconferencing that would be impossible without JavaScript. Whether these belong "in the browser" is debatable. However the misuse of JavaScript to lazily construct or decorate web content is a growing problem that is denounced by all sorts of people, including web developers and ordinary users who find their pages take ages to load, or function sporadically, or leak information.
Have you used Gemini? Give it a try. Many non-technical people find it very "usable" and it is a technology on-par with Web 1.0 in many ways.
> Generally I see the anti-Web2.0 digital vegan perspectives to be about opposing JavaScript.
:) The DV arguments are much bigger and broader than JavaScript. But to put it in that context for you; most people like myself argue that JavaScript and other "web technologies" have transformed it into something that isn't the web any longer. It doesn't function as an information publishing and distribution system. It's still called "The Web" by dint of evolutionary lineage, but in reality has transformed into something unrecognisable (a surveillance engine and content pushing system). The simple, safe and widely understood function (that some here are calling Web 1.0) is now forced to live alongside something else with no clear boundaries or distinctions between them, and no sense of what parts of that technology are operating when you visit a site. This is very bad for everyone regardless of the usability gains obtained. I hope that makes sense.
Technologically, there isn't much to separate the eras, except perhaps the deprecation of Big Iron approaches to infrastructure in favor of horizontal scaling with commodity hardware, but that's really a spectrum rather than a sharp division.
The Web 2.0 era really hasn't ended, regardless of how the web and it's infrastructure has evolved in the past 20 years. There are various candidates for what will define the next era, but so far none that are indisputably "it".
This doesn't seem right. AJAX was one the main breakpoints.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150910072359/http://adaptivepa...
It's a logical argument with one premise - that fewer people used the internet in the past than today - which I hope you can accept without further proof.
There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web, but really, most blogs were a pretty lonely place back then. It is hard to deny how modern solutions allow even someone with the most limited technical skillset to establish a meaningful online presence. Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility.
True. We cannot take it back in it's entirety, nor would we want to. But for some people that quickly becomes the argument for a kind of technological irreversibility principle, that we cannot take back any mis-step or feature no matter how immediately awful and obvious its effects. Left unchallenged that entitlement becomes an argument for bullheaded intransigence and the labelling of whatever suits us as 'progress'.
In reality many "genies" are strategically limited; poisons, invasive species, bio-agents, nuclear materials, knowledge hazards, weapons, bad poetry...
Sure, I am really glad we won the crypto wars and that "code wants to be free" etcetera, but on the other hand that seems to have set off a kind of megalomania in tech, which legitimises turning the entire digital world into our own personal laboratory for experimenting on everyone, sans ethics oversight committee.
> The general public needs their nuggets of endorfine.
Here we go again "saying what people need" for them. I meet a lot of people desperate to get off the digital morphine drip.
> There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web
It seems like that. I've made a more elaborate argument in other threads. You're right that it's "rosy", like all nostalgia. Of course the past was crap in its own ways. But melancholia is a symptom of crisis, retro is a sign of interregnum and loss of common sense (literally our common sense of things). What does it mean? It means that our "progress" isn't serving us fully, and in some cases causing people to recoil from it. Not acknowledging that would be an error.
> Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility.
Of course not. But there are many qualities/metrics by which we might judge things if we are to avoid what I'd call the "democratic fallacy"; external cost, stability, longevity, coherence, security, safety, interoperability, accuracy and truth content, environmental cost.... Technology is multi-dimensional. Accessibility is all lovely and cool, but it should not be put ahead of more important human concerns. OTC opioids are more accessible than street drugs ever were, that doesn't make it an unqualified "good thing". So we can still enumerate the ways in which Web 2.0 is worse than Web 1.0 without invoking nostalgia for a "smaller cosy digital world".
"Hope" is not a strategy
That's a terribly fatalistic position and also a misrepresentation.
Rejecting the centralized ad-driven wall-garden spyware model isn't "luddite" in the offensive sense you're using it. It's a matter of noticing what's best for the user and consumer, not for the adware companies.
The good thing is that it's still all there, just drowned out by the noise.
I maintain my blog as always have, I maintain my hobby interest websites for others as a reference source (some of these going back to mid 90s, some I've just started recently).
Search engines today make these harder to find because my sites don't bring the advertisers any benefit. I have no ads, no trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just content by regular people for regular people interested in various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those niche interest find their way to them.
My suggestion to anyone is that if you're looking to become famous and gather millions of followers and all that, sure, use the mainstream platforms.
But if you're just looking to share an interest, do it in a way that you control and keep the ad-spyware out: start a website, start a blog, start a mailing list. You won't scale to millions of users but that's a wonderful thing.
We need a search engine/card catalog that makes it easier to find these real-person sites, that also checks on occasion that they are still not running analytics, ad-spyware, etc. I suppose an “Awesome” list could do the trick, even.
I browse the web with javascript off for most sites, and my site works fine without javascript, renders text beautifully and readably. Millions read it without issue.
Web 1.0 is still there and can still be used. I do. It's great.
"Going luddite is never a good solution."
Making the web more fun for tinkerers is "going luddite"?
I first used the web in 1993. I do not remember it being more "fun". Seems like there is far more "tinkering" going on today, namely by "web developers" who try to keep themselves entertained while pledging loyalty to surveillance and advertising.
Reducing the amount of tinkering with respect to the "web development" would actually improve the web, at least for this user. Less "fixing" and "replacing" of things that work well enough.
HTTP 1.1 is still a thing. Static webpages are still a thing. IRC is still a thing.
Even better, host it on a P2P network like I2P where those on the network have to get over the hurdle of knowing about it in the first place and being able to set it up, just as early web users had to know how to plug in a modem, install a browser, and use those "URL" things.
If your pages provide value, people will still find them in any case.
Oh... but you wanted Web 1.0 content with Web 3.0 levels of traffic.
Well, you're not gonna get that. Pick your poison.
Because the author clearly states that corporate social media are the problem, which I - and a lot of psychologists and sociologists - agree with.
The modern web (eg Web 2.0) is an open software distribution platform that forms the basis of hundreds of thousands of company's products. Social media is a part of that, and it needs fixing, but a return to Web 1.0 is not the solution.
I feel business model innovation is the key to moving the pendulum back towards that landscape - that the ad model will also result in centralization in which we are the product?
I realize this is hardly earth-shattering news to the HN audience, but it's meaningful.
Do you believe we should also go back to not having search engines? BBS as primary information sharing? Email & IRC as pretty much the only way to communicate?
Web 1.0 was riddled with scalability problems, you are free to take what you consider the best parts of it and simplify your Web 2.0 site.
Not everyone is a HN alum ready to write a boolean query to find the most relevant post on a forum.
I don't want to read an entire book on a web page, just let me download an .epub file. I don't want to read your poorly formatted artsy manifesto in my browser, just let me download a PDF. I don't want to read your blogpost which is just a presentation in disguise filled with inline images, just let me download a powerpoint file.
I'm glad that if I want to search for some information Wikipedia presents me a consistent interface and gives me a brief overview of a subject and presents me with further hyperlinked content both pointing to IRL and web-hosted documents. Wikipedia to me perfectly represents the spirit of true Web 1.0 even if the content is Web 2.0 in nature.
Words have impact. I’d love to see some foundation or something to work on the problem of toxicity/hate. Develop technologies to allow sites to better police against it, detect bots trying to incite, etc..
Of course, you have to draw a line between free speech and hate speech but we already do that.