it’s like broadcast cable, the signal has become too strong from the major players that it has demoralized the rest
Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
211–220 of 286 posts
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is half the explanation. The other half is that people stopped making cool internet things just out of the passion and craft of it. Now everything on the internet is "content," a hyper optimized form of human intellectual output that is devoid of art, minimal on information, excreted instead of created, measured to the lowest common denominator, monetized yet worthless, just enough bait on the hook for t…
Internet is too damn hard to make these days!!!! When I go back through wayback and look at the sites I was making as an early teenager in the late 90/early 2000s, it was me every month publishing the same thing but you could tell I'd just discovered a new menu in dreamweaver. Tables to tables and frames, tables and frames to some css, css to some dhtml. At some point I learned all the dreamweaver menus I wanted to l…
> the idea of me making a fun mess around project to learn web today literally gives me anxiety, hell even using sqarespace is an unrewarding utilized journey.
I think vanilla javascript isn't too hard, but it is kind of hard to find easy and fun onramps to it.
This reference is what recently inspired me to do some things in vanilla javascript: https://htmldom.dev
github search came up with this which reminds me of retro DHTML sites: https://github.com/Vishal-raj-1/Awesome-JavaScript-Projects
There seem to be a number of interesting things on github, e.g.:
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#213Most of my exploring happens on Youtube these days: mostly DIY videos from people explaining how to do certain things like home improvement, woodworking, etc.
My assumption is that a lot of the interesting sites have moved from text to videos on Youtube.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#214Before search engines got good, websites had a links page they used to link sites about similar content. I used to play a game with friends to find something first by following a chain of those links. That was exploring the internet and that was what we had to do instead of googling.
I also visit only a few sites nowadays but I jump to dozens of random sites with either Google, DDD or HN.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#215What was that interesting Microsoft program where it was based on data vis, pixel?
Basically the premise was it was a new way to explore the web. An actual web. One topic lead to another, not just a series of web pages. See data stats, zoom into high res ads; zoom in further for what print could never give us.
Pretty sure there was an impressive Ted talk on it, at one point.
Edit: it’s called pivot https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_poin...
May have gotten it confused earlier with a ms photosynth talk.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#216You explored it. That's it. Turns out there's less of it than you imagined. There are, of course, plenty of sites that you could visit. Most of them will be incredibly boring. Years ago you found that interesting just because it was all new, but you don't any more because you've seen similar things already. I suspect that most of those "5 to 6 sites" are aggregators like Hacker News where people seek out new stuff (o…
I heard about this "Outside". It seems pretty new and interesting, but how do you explore it? I heard it was still slow and expansive?
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#217What I've been doing recently, is exploring Anonymous FTP sites again.
Backing the late 1990s, I was lucky to have (although I didn't appreciate it at the time) an unfettered always-on internet connection at work. I had to jump through some hoops to get it[1], but it was there, and unmonitored.
I spent most of my free time, wandering around FTP sites seeing what was there. It was a magical doorway to so much random stuff; source code, images, text documents... Most of which has now been lost to time.
I even managed to get a the source of Mosaic for VMS, and then compile it so I could use it on a VAXStation that was also in my office.
Anyway... So I've been exploring anonymous FTP again... They are a shadow of their former selves I think. There's a few nice nuggets out there, but mostly it's just mirrors of Linux distros, and fragments of the old SIMTEL and Walnut Creek collections.
What I did find out is that there are no Archie servers anymore. There's a few Web based FTP search engines, but that just not the same. So I'm toying with building one.
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[1] Crawl under the floor of my office, splice a CAT3 cable to another one, then configure SLIP on my Windows 3.1 PC using Trumpet Winsock.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a little confused to be reading comments where people are nostalgic for that. I feel like I always have to remind people that the web was horrible back then. All I remember from that era is that everyone used Myspace, which allowed you to load arbitrary Javascript and CSS into your profile page. When you visited a new person's page, it was a crap shoot as to whether or not it would slow your browser to a crawl be…
Where are you getting myspace out of that comment? The author seemed to be talking about regular static or semi-static sites with hand-crafted HTML and CSS, perhaps driven by a bit of Perl or PHP. Yeah, myspace was terrible, but it was the facebook of the time. Very popular with teens and some adults. Not so much with those of us who had been denizens of the net (not just the web) for a decade prior.
I didn't mention that because I think the "website with just some simple HTML and CSS" has moved mostly to Facebook and Medium and things like that. "Small bit of Perl and PHP" has been replaced with Wordpress and Squarespace. Those things are still around in a modern form. Nobody needs to do things the old way so they don't. My observation was just that if you're looking for the vibe of the old Geocities web, to me that disappeared along with the death of Myspace, for very good reason.
The other thing I remember about the web back then is that it seems to have had (relatively speaking) about as many cranks, kooks, conspiracy theorists, and other "outsider" types as it does now. There's still plenty of weird stuff to find. The only difference is they do it with memes on facebook now instead of on a Geocities site filled with stolen animated gifs. Some things just never change.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#219I will sometimes start with a zone file, like com.zone. I search for keywords in registered domainnames. Then I filter by nameserver (registrar). Finally, I run a script to fetch the page titles. You would be surprised at how effective this can be in finding websites that you would never be able to find using simple Google searches. Of course, it is cumbersome; search engines can make this process very easy but they…
Is this something that could be scripted with some foo to be a basic search engine in itself?
Anyone know if something like this exists?
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#220Directory/portal death happened. That together with a good-working (but highly marketed) search shifted focus from exploring some areas to consuming little pieces of information. Sites also changed because to make it to the top of the search you have to produce eye-catching pieces, not a complete theme coverage. All sites are almost identical time-sinks so with time only on few of them you decided to land.