I Miss the Old Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#21

Post by superkuh » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use any javascript frontends. It's a good time.

As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an article check the site to see if it has an RSS feed. In fact, do this with every web interaction. Pretty soon you can completely decouple yourself from content aggregators and start perceiving the web as a community again.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#22

Post by mattlondon » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #7

This 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…

It is also relatively easy now for independent individuals to create "professional" websites that look and behave like commercial ones - professional templates on some hosted CRM system with dynamic features (ads, shopping baskets, comment systems etc) just a few clicks away. Wix, wordpress, shopify to a certain extent, disqus etc all make things pretty easy and decent looking.

They may not be as "kooky" it as "characterful" as they used to be any more which I guess is part of what people are missing.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#23

Post by Yetanfou » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #6

When I think of the old internet, I think of Usenet before the Green Card Lawyers spammers.

That, and a working DejaNews, before Google bought and sank it. I made a two-frame (as in ) browser for it and revelled in the sheer abundance of information it provided. Enter Google, exit stage left DejaNews. Progress.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#24

Post by CalRobert » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:30 PM UTC

pwinnski wrote: post #2

The Old Internet was much smaller. Much, much smaller. I don't think it can scale.

When the Old Internet was a small part of my life, it felt huge. The New Internet is a huge part of my life, and feels small.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#25

Post by skyyler » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #14

notJim wrote: post #5

I 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 w…

reddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully. (Teenagers, and yes I was one and I remember, usually have an inflated sense of their own abilities and knowledge, and they write that way.) What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and shari…

Did those forums go away? Or are new ones not being made?

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#26

Post by romwell » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

>But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out, except on.. Reddit

A pretty big exception there. This reminds me of "But what did the Romans ever do for us?"[1] sketch.

"apart from free hosting and cataloging and tagging and community and moderation and upvote/downvote ordering and making all that easy to read with restrictions on formatting and still allowing individual expression by this newfangled concept of 'linking'[2]... what has the new Internet done for helping voices being heard?"

I'll tell you, I had a website that I hosted on my own PC. And before I got DSL, you could only reliably connect to it by dialing into the computer with a modem.

DSL didn't change much. My voice was heard by exactly one user: me.

And now I can make an comment on reddit about, say, why we use radians instead of degrees in Calculus, and it will have hundreds of upvotes, a dozen of responses, and an audience of at least thousands who actually read it.

Yes, there's no opportunity to practice Geocities-style web design there. That's why the things you write there actually get read by other people. Surprise, that's how it works in the old world too: print newspapers look and function about the same, and math papers are all generally typeset with the same font and style, as to not distract the reader from the content.

In today's internet, the voice of the individuals has been amplified. I had a lot of fun with HTML back in the day, but my voice was only heard when portals like reddit/fb/ng/etc came to be.

[1]http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html

[2]Somebody please tell the author of the article that they can simply link to https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/ instead of ranting about how hard it is to find on Google

Also, it's not hard to find on Google. It's a personal homepage of "Vane Vander", and looking for Vane Vander gives you that page.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#27

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

> Although many websites like Vane's exist on the clearnet, it's getting increasinly harder to find them through the commercial smog thrown up by Google.

This is true, and is one of the big reasons why I don't use Google search -- it tends not to surface the sites that I am most interested in finding.

Other search engines don't have the problem so much.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#28

Post by esotericn » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

It's all still there, the major search engines are just broken because they've been co-opted by SEO.

Tons of people still own and operate their own websites; BBSes exist; IRC is still here; mailing lists are still here; and so on and so forth.

You just won't find it on the top hit at Google because their business model is based on ad sales wankery.

Whilst we're on the topic, I'm gonna take the chance to write - if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that. Be the change you want to see. Cheers.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#29

Post by samplatt » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #12

I don't miss the days when you had to physically send a paper form with a cheque or postal order, go to a bank, wait 28 days for things to be delivered, stand in line at a post office, or phone someone up to get mundane stuff done. Can you imagine sorting out car insurance quotes or booking flights/hotels or doing your tax return without the internet? What a ballache! The modern internet has been utterly transformati…

>mary-celeste servers

That is a wonderful term for it, and a delicious mental image.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#30

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 10:35 PM UTC

notJim wrote: post #5

I 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 w…

Do you not find Reddit to be a bit of a cesspool? I tend to avoid it for that reason, but how true it is probably depends on which subreddit(s) we're talking about.