Ask HN: How did you browse the internet before aggregators and social media? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How did you browse the internet before aggregators and social media?

#11

Post by pageandrew » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 7:32 PM UTC

I was active on web forums related to my interests, and IRC channels generally stemming off of those.

My internet browsing was much more contained to the network of sites that I was already aware of.

This was in 2006/2007 when I first started using the internet. The aggregators definitely existed back then, but I wasn't aware of them.

Re: Ask HN: How did you browse the internet before aggregators and social media?

#12

Post by rikkhill » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:22 PM UTC

Word of mouth. In the halcyon days of the late 90s, the social aspects of the internet were a lot more deliberate. You'd belong to online communities or established social groups, and people would actively tell other people they knew online about things they'd found in the weirder corners of the internet. You couldn't just blast out a context-free link to everyone you knew and have the platform take care of assembling a preview. It had to be worth your time to share, and people would complain if you spammed them with junk.

"Worth your time" is a pretty relative notion, though. It's worth mentioning that the web of 15-20 years ago was of very little "value" compared to what we have today. Some links I remember sharing on a mailing list circa 2000 include the Poorly Drawn Lamp Page [1] and the William Shatner Acting Simulator [2] (warning: the depiction of Sulu has not aged well).

[1] - http://www.flamingmayo.com/poorlydrawnlamps/

[2] - http://simshatner.fanspace.com/

Re: Ask HN: How did you browse the internet before aggregators and social media?

#13

Post by potta_coffee » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 9:32 PM UTC

rikkhill wrote: post #12

Word of mouth. In the halcyon days of the late 90s, the social aspects of the internet were a lot more deliberate. You'd belong to online communities or established social groups, and people would actively tell other people they knew online about things they'd found in the weirder corners of the internet. You couldn't just blast out a context-free link to everyone you knew and have the platform take care of assemblin…

This, and webrings.

Re: Ask HN: How did you browse the internet before aggregators and social media?

#14

Post by pc2g4d » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 10:09 PM UTC

Search Altavista/Hotbot/Dogpile/Lycos, wind up somewhere on Geocities or a million independent sites, jump around on a webring that it was part of. That was one way. Webring.org is even still running. The webring my site was on is still accessible over the original URL: http://webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=daddyo&list (it redirects, though)

There was also just finding some news sites and returning to them often. I would start out at the news.com and download.com CNet sites.

Slashdot came later for me.

Re: Ask HN: How did you browse the internet before aggregators and social media?

#15

Post by joezydeco » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 2:27 AM UTC

randomerr wrote: post #3

In the very early days we used BBS that we dialed or telnet'ed into. These were text systems where you chat and leave messages about you had found. If you search around you can find web interfaces that will let you telnet into some them. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system ) After that there were USENET/Newsgroups. Its a universal discussion board. You can still get to it by using 'news reader' soft…

The Comic Chat abuse continues daily at http://www.jerkcity.com. Stop on by!

Re: Ask HN: How did you browse the internet before aggregators and social media?

#16

Post by joezydeco » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 2:29 AM UTC

Memepool.

Re: Ask HN: How did you browse the internet before aggregators and social media?

#17

Post by fern12 » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

My favorites were VersionTracker and the MacAddict forums. A lot of the comments here on HN remind me of the MA forums, which is great.

Re: Ask HN: How did you browse the internet before aggregators and social media?

#18

Post by pmiller2 » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 3:25 AM UTC

I started at the Yahoo! directory and built up a list of bookmarks (which I stored in a bookmarks.html) file.

Re: Ask HN: How did you browse the internet before aggregators and social media?

#19

Post by aurenen » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 7:37 PM UTC

BjoernKW wrote: post #4

Apart from search engines and directories such as AltaVista and Yahoo and later obviously Google, bulletin board systems and Usenet were popular ways of getting and recommending new content on the Internet. Another - somewhat quirky - concept was called 'webrings': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring These allowed websites with related or similar content (though the definition of what would be similar enough to qua…

That's what I used, the webrings. I did a lot of link hopping from people's amateur sites because they all had "Links Out" pages, and there was a lot of website social circles that operated with message boards and webrings.

Re: Ask HN: How did you browse the internet before aggregators and social media?

#20

Post by throwaway_atl » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

I remember someone giving me a copy of the Internet Yellow Pages back in '96 or so. It looked like the Yellow Pages you get for phones, but it had about 10,000 or so links grouped by category (e.g. astronomy, comics, newsgroups). I would sit down with that and just start exploring.

Later on sites like Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos would help you find information.

You also had webrings to lead you around.

It used to be pretty fun.