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Does anyone remember websites?

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Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#321

Post by lmm »

fshaun wrote: post #147
jasode wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sit…

Reddit covers almost all of those and has as wide a range as Usenet did. In terms of the broader web, there's a tension between wanting customizability and wanting consistency; realistically the only thing most people do with any given content is read it, and so the web focused on that use case and things that helped with that at the expense of offering consistent structure.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#322

Post by lmm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #208
hexane360 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One simple improvement that would apply both here and on reddit is to move the up/downvote arrows to the end of the comment rather than the start. At the moment it's disproportionately easy to upvote a short comment because you're still at the right place for the arrow.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#323

Post by ashark »

Kiro wrote: post #263
ashark wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still surprised the resistance-to/wailing-about Google’s placing ads inline with search results died down as quickly as it did. It’s a total shitbag move on their part. Bottom-feeding scum behavior, right there in your face at the top of search results screens. Maybe the worst, because so effective, dark pattern on the entire web. That anyone from the company gets away with speaking in public without being shoute…

DuckDuckGo does the same. I think you're exaggerating.

It’s the Internet equivalent of guys who go door to door selling old people driveway treatments and crappy brick façades they don’t need, at obscene markup. Preying on the least able to defend themselves. If you have any friends or relatives who aren’t “good at computers” Google tricks them for money, as a core part of their business model.

And yeah, it’s bottom-feeding scum behavior any time you see it, fit for failed used car salesmen and other low-ability scam artists. That’s the company Google workers keep, ethically speaking. Could be worse, but still bad enough you don’t want them near your kids or grandparents.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#324

Post by ashark »

dEnigma wrote: post #268
ashark wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

archive.org is the unofficial official source for ROMs on the Internet now, FYI.

Ah yes, I didn't even think of that. But now that I've checked it out, it seems like they only have ROMs up too the SNES, and none for the Nintendo 64 ("only" videos, soundtracks and manuals)

You wanna search by obscure-to-outsiders collection names. “No intro”, “tosec”. That kind of thing. Pretty sure they have n64, in with the rest of a large multi-system collection.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#325

Post by lmm »

fphilipe wrote: post #218
Illniyar wrote: post #213

"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. " Oh,you mean like blogs? Seriously, this sounds like being nostalgic for it's own sake. I fail to see how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a good idea - now everyone…

> Oh,you mean like blogs? Yes, but before they all looked the same and were hosted on the same platform. I miss the days where you would encounter a blog filled with great content and with a unique look and feel. It's as if it almost burned in in my memory. I still remember how the website looked of some great articles that resonated with me. That's one of the reasons I dislike Medium et al.

As a reader I like the consistency of Medium et al. No need to learn another interface every time you look at a different subject.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#326

Post by lmm »

Illniyar wrote: post #213

"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. " Oh,you mean like blogs? Seriously, this sounds like being nostalgic for it's own sake. I fail to see how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a good idea - now everyone…

> I fail to see how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a good idea - now everyone can have their own website.

Everyone being able to make sites is great, but I miss having sites that were deliberately organized rather than purely chronological. I wish the typical wordpress/livejournal had a frontpage similar to, say, http://www.gwern.net/ . In theory tags provide the same information, but somehow I've never found them useful in the same way.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#327

Post by lmm »

kps wrote: post #150
fiala__ wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. The original Bootstrap is a bug report against browsers - its defaults are what the browser should have been doing with unstyled pages all along.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#328

Post by HelloNurse »

pasquinelli wrote: post #71
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…

i don't think browsing's that rare, actually, it's just different, having been centralized by facebook, tumblr, wikipedia, reddit, and the like. it's less like going out and exploring the web and more like just living there.

Living there and watching TV instead of going out.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#329

Post by brlewis »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #93
millstone wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why?

Follow a link, lose your place and have to start over.

I don't get this. What's wrong with the back button plus visited link colors?

I feel like the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and the number of open tabs makes things more confusing.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#330

Post by discreditable »

Jaruzel wrote: post #58
disconnected wrote: post #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 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.

It could probably be easily accomplished by filtering out sites that use JS libraries like jquery, etc.
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