Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Does anyone remember websites?

tttthis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 386 posts

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#101

Post by freeflight »

KGIII wrote: post #39
ambrosite wrote: post #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…

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 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.

I sometimes still do that with Wikipedia articles and their sources, it's a fun way to kill a couple of hours and can lead down some really interesting rabbit-holes.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#102

Post by userbinator »

dbrgn wrote: post #78
ambrosite wrote: post #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…

I found http://lygte-info.dk/ (website about batteries, chargers, and more stuff like that) through a search engine when looking for specific information about a LiIon cell. But then I started clicking through that maze of links and found so much useful information that I would never have thought of searching for. I spent hours "trapped" on that page. The navigation is crappy (randomly interlinked handwritten HTML-pa…

If you're interesting in electronics and software in general, and can read German (or can stand the surprisingly good Google Translate), another site I recommend: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#103

Post by plcancel »

ambrosite wrote: post #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…

Rather, nowadays, the search engine has a basic understanding of you and obliges you with what you think you want.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#104

Post by marcosdumay »

rayiner wrote: post #98
userbinator wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at a…

Google is not great for finding stuff. I’ve complained at length about how bad it is for doing research, but recently I’ve also found it’s totally useless for finding things like reviews of products (unless it’s something like the new iPhone). It’s like legitimate reviews are a casualty in the war between Google and clickbait SEO crap.

It's amazing how between reviews, sellers, features, and availability, when I make a google (or DDG) search of some product none of the links are of the kind that I want.

I've gave up googling for products I intend to buy (what has probably the largest revenue potential).

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#105

Post by Typhon »

kaoD wrote: post #5

> This article can be discussed on r/TTTThis. Oh the irony. The web has changed: in some ways for the worse, and in others for the better. I remember websites being like a lottery: sometimes you'd hit jackpot but most of them were "Under construction" GIFs over ugly tiled backgrounds. There is still ton of content and much more than what I would've dreamt on the 90s. Platforms like Reddit allow everyone , whether the…

most of them were "Under construction" GIFs over ugly tiled backgrounds

Oh you remind me of the beautiful paean to those GIFs in Olia Lialina's "A Vernacular Web", which is a pretty cool discussion of early internet aesthetics.

http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/uc/

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#106

Post by edflsafoiewq »

rayiner wrote: post #98
userbinator wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at a…

Google is not great for finding stuff. I’ve complained at length about how bad it is for doing research, but recently I’ve also found it’s totally useless for finding things like reviews of products (unless it’s something like the new iPhone). It’s like legitimate reviews are a casualty in the war between Google and clickbait SEO crap.

Google is excellent at giving the appearance of finding everything. The fact that there is an enormous world of which Google remains completely ignorant is a fact of which we seem increasingly unapprised.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#107

Post by feedbeef »

dfps wrote: post #15
ggambetta wrote: post #4

> 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.myth-and-fantasy.com/misc/webrings.html

These webrings with graphical designs most accurately capture my memories of them (possibly at their height) from the late 90s.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#109

Post by peterburkimsher »

The most ironic part to me is that the page is PHP, not static HTML.

Although this type of style isn't common with the online web these days, it's still visible in offline caches of popular websites (e.g. offline Wikipedia). Pages load so fast, and the total file size is much smaller because of the lack of JS/jQuery/React/etc bloat.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#110

Post by KGIII »

always_good wrote: post #69
KGIII wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Dunno, how much of this is also just getting older and set in our life routine? When was the last time I explored my own city on a bike like I would as a kid? Our interests and patience for browsing change. How old are you now vs in this "golden era of the web"? Most of…

When I first used networked computers, you paid someone to do searches for you and got a reply in 3 to 7 days.

It pretty much sucked, honestly. Translation was obscenely expensive and not much better than Google can do today. You paid by the minute or, in my case, the university did.

It was pretty terrible.

Then, this fancy world wide web came about, only it had been world wide before that, albeit at a different scale. It was pretty great.

Now? It's much better in that it is much more useful. I can still make discoveries of novel content, but I seldom do. I search, rather than browse, when I seek information on a subject.

It's not nostalgia, I don't think. It's much more useful today. It was pretty terrible the first times I used it. In fact, it wouldn't improve for like a decade, maybe longer.

If it helps, I also hated computers back then. They were slow, unintuitive, and I had to learn to program to actually have a functional (well, useful to me) device. They clanged, beeped, and whirled. They made dreadful noises and did exactly what you told them to do, even if what you told them to do was stupid. They didn't have things like a recycle bin. Hell, they didn't even have internal storage.

One computer was so horrible that I had to buy 'memory chips' (RAM) just so I could use lowercase letters. All told, it cost me more than a brand new car. You know what I did with it? I played Zork.

Edit: that translation was done by a human, by the way. It could take a week, or more, to get something translated.

Post reply on HN