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Does anyone remember websites?

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Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#24
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some bigger websites at the time were like mazes with some of the words on each page hyperlinked to other pages on the site that were about each of those separate topics, and you had to open up multiple links from each page otherwise you'd lose them, and you wanted to read every word.

This was a nightmare before tabs were a thing.

why?

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#25
See also the analysis (from 2015) of an Iranian blogger who got arrested in 2008 and got free in 2015 - he did not recognize the new web. (Ironically also posted on Medium...) According to him, hyperlinks turned into a social media stream.

https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a4...

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#27

Last night I ended up, for some weird nostalgic reason, installing a Gopher client, just to see if there was anything still around. Amazingly, there's a bunch of blogs (called phlogs in Gopherspace) that people are updating regularly! Pretty amazing!

I hope there’s a Gopher phlog CMS called Phlogiston?

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#29
post #15

> Does anyone remember websites? These might be unfamiliar to anyone unexposed to the internet before 2005 or so [...] it was largely a collection of websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write about it and put it online. Does the author mean web rings? I do remember these :)

I wasn't exactly talking about webrings, but now I'd like to see one. Can you link me to one please? (- the author)

http://www.homebrewcpu.com/

Bottom of the page.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#30
I do remember those websites. For me, the difference is that now the Web is much more useful, but back then it was a lot more fun. True, you could sometimes waste hours following random links hoping to find something good, but the thrill of discovery when you stumbled across a gold mine of information was a huge part of the appeal.

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. That makes the Web on the whole much more useful, but the thrill of the hunt is gone -- that's what Jakob Nielsen was referring to all those years ago when he talked about "information scent".

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/

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