10 years from now, we'll be waxing nostalgia about entrepreneurs who made a living off Instagram, Amazon, WordPress, and other platforms. 'There was a kid who used to "rate dogs" and he was hilarious! And he did it for free without any corporate backing! Made a killing on T-Shirts and stuff as well!'
Does anyone remember websites?
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Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. Yep, that's exactly what I used to do. That's really what "surfing the web" meant back in those days -- that you would spend hours just clicking links, seeing where they would take you. And of course, they would quite often take you to completely unexpected but cool…
Is that any different from spending an hour finding links on Wikipedia or HN or Reddit or Facebook or whatever you're into?
Invested effort yields quality.
It was/is different: folks who are excited enough about something to build a website to share it have more interesting and deep content than you typically find on social media.
These days The same goes for people with personal blogs (or website) as opposed to medium and other one design blogging platforms.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#53I 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…
Useful? I would argue that it's actually a lot less useful today.
I grew up with 1980s dial-up modems (slow 300 baud!) to dial directly into BBS systems and USENET. I then continued dialup access into the early internet (GNN not AOL) in 1995. I now have Verizon fiber optic.
To me, the modern web today is better in virtually every way compared to 1990s web surfing.
+ Google search engine is better than Alta Vista and Excite.
+ Google Maps with smooth scroll, 3D streetview, and satellite view is better than the clunky 1990s MapQuest without AJAX. Google Maps also uses colors to highlight traffic congestion.
+ Wikipedia is better than the non-existent online encylopedias of 1990s
+ airline websites now bring up a graphical map of the airplane and let you click on the actual seat you want. When I booked etickets from airline websites in 1998, it was just rudimentary ticket purchase.
+ youtube obviously has videos but it also has virtually every song. If some music forum mentions an obscure song, I think to myself that someone else may have already uploaded it to youtube. Sure enough, 99% of the time, it's there. It's even better than Spotify in that respect.
+ discussion websites like reddit/HN are better than Usenet. The better replies are voted and sorted at the top. I learned a lot of C Language from USENET "comp.lang.c" in the 1980s and I'm jealous that today's programmers have StackOverflow which is better. Again, the superior answers are voted to the top.
+ Amazon.com also made the UI better. In 1990s, they didn't have "Look Inside" feature to see sample pages of books. I use that all the time. One thing they did make worse is you now have to manually click "see all 50 reviews" to read all reviews; I assume they did that to prevent web scrapers. In any case, Amazon is good enough that I stopped wasting gas driving to Barnes & Noble.
I'm having a hard time thinking of a 1990s web experience that's superior to now.
I can only assume that a big part of why some think that today's web is worse has to do with Facebook and its walled garden. To those people, the web feels "less open". Well, I don't have a Facebook account and none of my longtime friends do either. Therefore, it doesn't feel like the web is any less open to me.
The web is more useful now in 2017 than 2007. And back in 2007, it was more useful than 1997.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#54I think Ward's Federated Wiki approach could help bring some personality back to the web.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#55> Does anyone remember when you they stumbled on a new website written by some guy and read his first article, then clicked back to his homepage and saw he had a list of similar articles that looked like they'd be just as interesting.
Or, more likely, you clicked "back" on the "navigation bar" and it would 404 because the author messed up the links, since it was all hand crafted HTML.
Funny stuff aside, there are still loads of "websites" out there. If I understand the criteria here, we are looking for mostly hand crafted pages maintained by individuals (or small groups) that have interesting content. Something, should I say, very "web 1.0"?
Here's a good one. Make sure to check the GUI Gallery section:
User Friendly is always hilarious (unfortunately, updates stopped ages ago, but going through the archive is sill fun):
And here's something random, the best page in the universe:
Like I said, there are TONS of these out there. You just have to, you know, look for them.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#56I 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…
Browsing vs. searching. We don't seem to do much browsing anymore. We search and selectively pick what we consume. It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. Now, I search a term and click on the first few results, at most. Sure, there are exceptions but…
I'd go further and say: browsing vs scrolling.
I remember 10+ years ago we designed websites so that important content was "above the fold". Today people are addicted to scrolling their Facebook feed.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#57I 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…
Useful? I would argue that it's actually a lot less useful today.
I don't know the exact date, but the internet did have a few very Golden years.
Yes, some of us were in denial over our downloading, but it was fun.
Now--it's just different. Not worse, but different. I don't like the conformity of websites, nor the big players that dominate/destroy any/all competition.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#58> Does anyone remember when you they stumbled on a new website written by some guy and read his first article, then clicked back to his homepage and saw he had a list of similar articles that looked like they'd be just as interesting. Or, more likely, you clicked "back" on the "navigation bar" and it would 404 because the author messed up the links, since it was all hand crafted HTML. Funny stuff aside, there are sti…
We need a good search index of these and all the other sites likes them. Something that deliberately doesn't include pages from bigger sites or sites full of cruft.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#59Last 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!
Shameless Plug (ahem):
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#60Earlier 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.
One notable example from the 90s that I was referring to with this statement was a site that had many, many pages about unusual science/mystery/gnosis/anarchism. I haven't been able to locate it. (- the author)
I know the one you mean. It disappeared a while back, but maybe some of these will help:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/realitycarnival.h...
https://josephmatheny.com/
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index
https://www.livereal.com/spiritual_arena/practical_experimen...