I Miss the Old Internet
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I Miss the Old Internet
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Re: I Miss the Old Internet
#2The Old Internet was much smaller. Much, much smaller.
I don't think it can scale.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet
#3To me, the best "old internet" site is Wikipedia. Although they also partially succumbed to madness of breaking the web (opening images in JavaScript popups?? breaking the "Back" browser button??) it's mostly a well-done clean HMLL/CSS site which has everything you want. I even treat it as "slow news" source [1], instead of MSM.
In a way, they have outperformed Google at Google's vision of organizing the world's information. That's why I try to donate as much as I can every year.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet
#4We don't have to "miss it". Let's just share it. There are many corners of the internet away from the spotlights. Let's just share some links, what are they ?
Re: I Miss the Old Internet
#5I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.)
I think the old internet went away because it was more profitable to create a walled garden distribution channel than it was to develop a syndication protocol like email or rss. I honestly don't see any way around this.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet
#6When I think of the old internet, I think of Usenet before the Green Card Lawyers spammers.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet
#7This sort of post is a recurring theme here on HN, and in some ways I do sympathize with the sentiment. But I seriously believe that today that "independent" web is actually much bigger than it was in the olden days. It only seems small because of the illusion created by the hugeness of the non-independent web. And of course it is not clean binary option of independent or not, instead it really is more of a spectrum of independence, which further confuses the matters.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet
#8> the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites
That's also a property of the "Old Internet" though. Discoverability has always been a problem for smaller entities. It's why every fan/personal site in the 90's/00's belonged to a half-dozen web-rings or link-list sites.
> it's getting increasingly harder to find them
It's getting harder to find them because most content creators have moved to platforms. They don't want to deal with all the complexities and annoyance of running their own site and dealing with the discoverability problem -- they want to focus on creating their content. I'm also a fan of the personality small self-created/run sites can have, but it's not what most creators want to do.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet
#9We don't have to "miss it". Let's just share it. There are many corners of the internet away from the spotlights. Let's just share some links, what are they ?
I find people don't want to share these. I can understand to a degree as I've seen good communities go to hell once the "normies" show up.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet
#10There are some search engines that help to solve this problem (no affiliation):
Reddit is not bad for discovering content if you understand the inherent biases, and I personally have good results with blogrolls on blogs I already enjoy such as https://slatestarcodex.com/.