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Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

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121–130 of 149 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#122
post #16

News websites https://web.archive.org/web/19990128201038/http://dnes.sezna... no spying, popups, animations, autoplaying videos, clickbait thumbnails... just a simple website with information now I have to use three addons just to get back this clean look

Seriously you dont remember the gifs, the flash , the unblocked popups/popunders/popovers/hijackers etc? It was far worse back then but the signal to noise was better. The reason: lack of social media which is 99.999999% absolute informational garbage.

>lack of social media which is 99.999999% absolute informational garbage.

The purpose of social media isn't to provide "information," but to facilitate communication between people. Making jokes or discussing trivial matters which don't interest you personally, or not doing so in a way that maximizes information density, does not make it garbage.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#124
I’m not yet in my 40s but can postulate that the 90s was not simpler from a tech perspective let me explain.

1. Today we have google in the 90s we had mailing lists . It is much easier to use google than it is to construct a well thought out question.

2. At the start of the 90s we had very little access to mobile phones. We had no uber. Imagine landing at an airport and having to use a pay phone- or calling collect. This is much more complex and difficult then what you can do today with a smart phone.

3. Say you wanted to build a website. There was no simple answer or Ruby on Rails to make give you a right way to approach it. You had to figure it out without google. For reference lookup corba. Software engineering was definitely not simpler

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#125
post #16

News websites https://web.archive.org/web/19990128201038/http://dnes.sezna... no spying, popups, animations, autoplaying videos, clickbait thumbnails... just a simple website with information now I have to use three addons just to get back this clean look

Seriously you dont remember the gifs, the flash , the unblocked popups/popunders/popovers/hijackers etc? It was far worse back then but the signal to noise was better. The reason: lack of social media which is 99.999999% absolute informational garbage.

No, didn't have flash or java installed before XP; and as I said below - gifs sure, no don't remember any popups on czech sites i visited.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#128
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously you dont remember the gifs, the flash , the unblocked popups/popunders/popovers/hijackers etc? It was far worse back then but the signal to noise was better. The reason: lack of social media which is 99.999999% absolute informational garbage.

>lack of social media which is 99.999999% absolute informational garbage. The purpose of social media isn't to provide "information," but to facilitate communication between people. Making jokes or discussing trivial matters which don't interest you personally, or not doing so in a way that maximizes information density, does not make it garbage.

the problem is they leak out

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#130
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In retrospect things seem simpler because you know how they turn out.

I feel fairly safe in the assertion that DOS was simpler than Windows 10.

Simpler for what it does? It's an unfair comparison. You could say that walking is simpler than flying, but that's not true if you're trying to get from New York to Beijing.
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