Wait, we don't call websites "websites" anymore? What do we call them now?
Webapps.
Does anyone remember websites?
141–150 of 386 posts
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Care to expantiate on this ?
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
I swear the last five years or more of searching for products lead to the first two pages being fake reviews/ads. Google must make money from this otherwise they would fix it.
Do you have an example query handy?
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#144Last 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!
How did you find these Gopher sites? Is there a Gopher search engine, or is it just a hand-updated list?
After installing the gopher client (apt install gopher) and running it, you can navigate through the menus to Veronica-2, which indexes a ton of them. You can also just browse around. The linking reminds me a lot of the old days of the web.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true. The only way I can find product buying advice is: 1. To find a community of enthusiasts and see what they have to say about products in that space. This works pretty well for products that actually have enthusiasts. 2. Go to Amazon and read a product's bad reviews. The good reviews are nearly useless. But, with bad reviews, you have to weigh the number of bad reviews against the product's popularity. If…
I bought a subscription to Consumer Reports and have been happy with the two purchases I made on their recommendation (headphones in the $100 range, and a new food processor). Do you consider them compromised? It's actually just about time to renew my subscription and i've been wondering whether I should. I've also used your strategy of reading the bad reviews on Amazon!
The appliances I bought using their advice has been hit/miss - ranges are decent but the fridges and dishwasher I bought are noisy and required service barely outside warranty period. These are big name brands too.
I don't necessarily fault CR but I with the hundreds of models released all slightly similar but different (I hear partly to prevent price-matching across stores) it must be as impossible to review for CR as it is for consumers to keep track of.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#146I 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 recently tried to search for certain Nintendo 64 ROMs because I wanted to try out an emulator. The first couple of results on Google all lead to horrible, ad-infested websites that claimed to offer a download but either kept on redirecting me to more ad-filled sites, or tried to get me to download some sort of "download helper", "media codec" or "PC cleaning software". Then there were the sites with dozens of fake…
bittorrent would probably have been easiest since it's already ranked by popularity.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 satel…
> discussion websites like reddit/HN are better than Usenet
I strongly disagree with this, as Usenet and even mailing lists offer many advantages over web forums. With web forums, I can't natively...
- Store, read, search content offline
- Read only new messages
- View thread context
- Access information redundantly (no SPOF)
- Killfile senders
- Integrate viewing and composing with local tools
While a particular site mitigates its disadvantages, perhaps via a better UI or via information not available elsewhere, the medium as a whole cannot. A website might be a fine view of information, but it should not be the only interface to that information. Doing so prevents all of the above uses and makes it much harder to reuse content in ways unforeseen by the original site. I suspect this is the root of the problem -- such reuse is not desirable for most sites, as it conflcts with their business model.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#148Remember when the Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" button was interesting and took you to one of these random sites?
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#149Shameless plug but what he describes was partly my inspiration for building https://nogradient.com/. It is very stripped down and minimal. Would love some feedback on it.
Re: Does anyone remember websites?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. Unstyled HTML (optionally with user style sheets) is more usable and accessible than today's one-size-fits-the-designer design for the kind of content that u…
Sure, but 100% unstyled HTML was extremely rare even in the 90s. The problem with everyone writing their own crap HTML is that the sites become terrible and unusable, because they lack good design. What platforms like Twitter/FB initially did was just provide a unified, usable interface to a certain kind of information. Compare to MySpace, which collapsed partly because vast amounts of the profile pages were horrible…
Browsers should (have) provide(d) good design by default — write simple
s and s and get beautiful presentation.