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

331–340 of 386 posts

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#331

Post by sixstringtheory »

tomduncalf wrote: post #272
jancsika wrote: post #207

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 n…

Check out Soulseek, it is very similar to how I remember the original Napster. Lots of obscure rarities on there music-wise, I've not tried it for anything else. The one P2P thing I am nostalgic for is Audio Galaxy - it had an awesome system where it they indexed everyone's content on their website, so you could see every file that had ever been on the network and add it to your "want list", then when that person cam…

Soulseek is incredible, discovered all sorts of smaller-time musicians that never wouldve been sold at the Best Buy in the suburban wasteland of my youth.

I can’t believe it’s under active maintenance after all these years!

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#332

Post by madcaptenor »

JohnBooty wrote: post #116
rayiner wrote: post #98

Earlier 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.

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…

Also, with bad reviews, you can keep in mind if the bad reviews seem to be legitimate complaints, or whether they're just written by either someone with an axe to grind or someone who doesn't understand the purpose of the product. For example, some negative reviews of textbooks on Amazon seem to be people who are reviewing a course they took using the textbook. And some negative reviews of restaurants on Yelp seem to have wanted the restaurant to serve a different kind of food than they do.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#334

Post by adam-_- »

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 tried searching for "cyclocross", a slightly obscure cycling niche, perfect for a search engine like this, you might think? Unfortunately, no one has curated any content around that topic :(

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#335

Post by DamnInteresting »

pers0n wrote: post #193

Another thing is people often just go to Wikipedia, Wikipedia replaced the need for many fan sites. I had things copied from my sites and put on Wikipedia and tired to get a link back or a source mentioned and it was removed each time. So I lost motivation to even update fan sites, since whatever I type is going to get pasted onto Wikipedia with no link back.

Even when Wikipedia does link to the original source, that has minimal benefit to the original source. Very few Wikipedia readers follow the links through to the source, so Wikipedia essentially replaces the original.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#336

Post by DamnInteresting »

As the operator of a website old enough to still have a "webmaster" email address, it can be hard to remain relevant in the age of Google's search monopoly. Their algorithm has become the de facto gatekeeper to the entire Internet, and it happens to favor newer content over old. Consequently it favors those crappy flip-shop[1] sites where "writers" find quality content, perform a mild thesaurus modification, and re-post it. The original source, where the actual research and writing occurred, is stomped into insignificance.

Yes, perhaps I'm slightly bitter, why do you ask?

Between that and the "Wikipedia wall," boutique websites have been an endangered species for some time.

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flip%20shop

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#338

Post by fenwick67 »

discreditable wrote: post #330
Jaruzel wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"best viewed with" followed by your query (ex: "best viewed with" dragons) gets you lots of great old results in a regular search engine. It will grab any sites that said "best viewed with truetype fonts", "best viewed with Netscape" et cetera from the internet's heyday.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#339

Post by autokad »

jasode wrote: post #53
inetknght wrote: post #40

Earlier 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…

i agree in total todays web is better, but today its so closed, and we lost a lot as well.

- excite chat was better than anything we have today, irc chat remains awesome.

- on social networks of yore, you could actually meet new people. you could search for new people and expand your circle to people completely outside it. I believe its against facebooks TOS to try and connect to someone you dont know. i know my account was banned for 3 days because someone declined with 'they dont know me'.

- youtube sucks for viewing songs. like really sucks. you have commercials MID SONG. one time I had a playlist play a 15 minute long commercial. FIFTEEN MINUTES. half the songs in my playlist end up getting removed, and It doesnt tell me the song it use to be. so if i find a song i really like, add it to a play list and it gets removed, i completely forget about it. song lost. if you are going to compare songs, youtube losses hands down. napster / audogalaxy / was far superior. youtube is still great for watching a cat jump in a box, after watching a minute long commercial of course.

- google search is great, its superior to alt vista, which is why i switched from alt vista to google when it came out. but google gets stuck, if it cant give you want you want in the first 5 hits, it basically cant do it ever. you have to change search strategies. alt vista was bad, but the content was diverse. you could still find gems 5 'nexts' in. google also gets locked in on what it knows about me. sometimes i have to search in incognito mode to find what i want.

the 1990s web experiences was not just about how well content was delivered to you. you could chat a person you never met with a simple ASL. maybe you continued talking after the first day, maybe you didnt, but it was fun and you met new people all the time. people dont want to meet new people anymore.

people dont email or contact eachother anymore. before people would put effort into staying in touch. i remember checking emails with excitement. now even though you can talk to your network at any day, because you are always connected people dont. and its just a 'hey whats up'. people dont write long responses saying how their day was, and how their cat got locked int a closet, etc.

edit: i forgot to say the original digg was awesome, and in may ways better. also, I think most of us are comparing the web from 1998 - 2006, not the late 90s.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#340

Post by herpdorplarp »

kuschku wrote: post #224
moultano wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example query handy?

Google for any game, and then check which of the articles doesn't just copy its enture text, images, and score from the stuff on the press server. If you have access to, say, the bethesda press ftp, and compare the material there to any review of the games, you'll see that over 90% just copy-pasted without writing much themselves. It's all fake. Oh, and those that don't copy-paste often still review everything positi…

That explains why every BioShock review I read back in the day seemed like it had been written by the same person. Suddenly, everyone were talking about protagonists and antagonists in their game-reviews.
Post reply on HN