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Does anyone remember websites?

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Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#201

Post by TeMPOraL »

rb666 wrote: post #180
dogcow wrote: post #167

Check out the search engine at http://wiby.me From their about page: Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercia…

I hit "Surprise me" and first site it hits autodownloads a .mid file, that used to work better I 'member.

I hit "Surprise me" and got this gem: http://g2mil.com.

I like that search site already.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#202

Post by TeMPOraL »

observation wrote: post #197
JohnBooty wrote: post #116

Earlier 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…

> annnnnnnd.... I'll let you know when I find another one. Recommend the BIFL (buy it for life) community on Reddit.

That's also good heuristic for 1. - if you're looking for a community about $obscure_topic, there's a good chance there exists reddit.com/r/$obscure_topic. Personally, I always search for a related subreddit as a first order of business when researching an unfamiliar area.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#203

Post by gboudrias »

username223 wrote: post #70
clydethefrog wrote: post #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...

After blocking all the JavaScript and hiding the position=fixed garbage, that was an interesting article. > So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it. I write a blog, and publish links to posts on Facebook because doing so costs me nothing. I…

> hiding the position=fixed garbage

Oh wow, I literally never want this behavior! Do you have a generic trick? "Inspect element" is tedious.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#204

Post by bacondev »

dogcow wrote: post #167

Check out the search engine at http://wiby.me From their about page: Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercia…

I find things that I didn't know that I wanted to know through Wikipedia.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#205

Post by superkuh »

fiala__ wrote: post #38

> Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique. 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. I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by ` `s, poorly-laid out flash…

It doesn't count when you use a javascript to generate the html. Just look at a site like NASA.gov. Without JS enabled it's just a black, blank page.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#207

Post by jancsika »

I've never been particularly nostalgic for websites.

I'm slightly nostalgic for shared Windows folders on LANs at college dorms. I remember seeing the first South Park short from such a folder as it was going viral.

I'm extremely nostalgic for the original Napster. I don't ever remember searching for a piece of music and coming up short. And I remember it being a very sudden shift-- one month you're making a mental note to search for a CD you misplaced somewhere back home, the next month you're getting on Napster to check if the theme to Ghostbuster's 2 has lyrics that recount the plot of the movie. It does.

A few weeks ago I typed "Battlestar Galactica" into Netflix, and guess what? It showed me lots and lots of results, none of which were Battlestar Galactica. And this isn't your run of the mill entitlement of a fool addicted to his Iphone apps. That is entitlement of a person yearning for modern functionality to match a shitty piece of software that saw its last stable release 15 years ago.

I'm having a hard time finding any numbers for the actual amount of music that was available on the original Napster at the time. Can anyone put some hard data to my rose colored glasses?

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#208

Post by TeMPOraL »

hexane360 wrote: post #137
snerbles wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully disagree on more votes == better. Visible score systems often lead to groupthink, and commenters aiming for the lowest common denominator in the form of karma whoring. While HN has some measures to reduce hivemind voting, it's quite rampant on the default subreddits.

It seems to me like HN still has a long way to go. I find my detailed, careful, well researched comments typically get an order of magnitude less votes than my one sentence inanities.

I doubt it's fixable - it's just humans being humans. If you write a short one-liner, anyone can quickly evaluate it and decide whether they like it or not. When you write a long essay in a comment, a lot of people won't upvote it because they won't even bother to read it, and others may find that they disagree with one of your many points but don't have time for a thorough response, hence they just won't upvote and move on.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#209

Post by spc476 »

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…

As for games, in the 80s, no one knew what worked or didn't work as far as computer games went, so everybody was pretty much throwing everything against the wall and seeing what stuck. And you ended up with some memorable games [1][2]. But over time, people learn, genres develop, budgets rise and you get less original and more homogeneous games.

It's the same with the web. When it went big in 1994, no one knew what they were doing, so everybody was pretty much throwing everything against the wall and seeing what stuck. But over time, people learn, genres develop, budgets rise and you get less original and more homogeneous pages, only this time with so many ads that it takes 500 requests to download your typical page these days.

What I think people are missing is this original, outrageous and anything goes type of experience. But I suspect the Cambrian explosion of web expression is dead for the time being.

[1] Qix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix). An abstract game that was mainstream and quite popular at the time. Haven't seen much like it sense.

[2] "The Earth Dies Screaming", a game I've never seen but the name alone is so evocative that I still remember it to this day. I think it was in the "alien invasion" genre popular back then.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#210

Post by Tomte »

rayiner wrote: post #157
stefanpie wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do research, what are the best resources that you use (if you were referring to academic research)

I do historical research in the context of legal work, and for that Hein Online is pretty good. It’ll have old copies of speeches given in Congress, contemporaneous articles, and that sort of thing. It also has tons of old articles and research papers in the social sciences. ProQuest is indispensible for more modern stuff. If you’ve got a Library of Congress card, many of these resources are free. A lot of stuff just…

I highly, highly recommend Thomas Mann -- The Oxford Guide to Library Research.

There are all kinds of cool reference works out there. And Mann has a striking criticism of the impoverished, dumbed-down search interface that's ubiquitous now: the search box.

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