Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Miss the Old Internet

misc-stuff.terraaeon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 317 posts

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#71

Post by faissaloo »

errantspark wrote: post #19
x2f10 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's so hard to strike a balance between inclusion and 'eternal september'. Managing a community is incredibly hard work. I don't really know if I can think of a way to be both inclusive and preserve the value of a community indefinitely. It seems that at some point you really need barriers to entry to keep things sane.

I've found that an effective way to strike a balance is to simply refuse to scale. Once people can't access your site only the dedicated will remain.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#72

Post by NeedMoreTea »

superkuh wrote: post #21

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 articl…

https://millionshort.com/ lets you exclude that thick layer of corporate shite. Search without the top million (or 100k, 10k etc) sites. !mill from DDG.

Not perfect but often turns up those personal homepages, hobby sites and esoterica the early internet thrived on. Stuff that Google and co forgot existed - or is down on page 200+

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#73

Post by milquetoastaf »

zozbot234 wrote: post #47
danso wrote: post #41

> You have to enter the exact name of the website to find it on Google. MayVaneDay is also mirrored on I2P, TOR, and Dat...You have to look really hard for them now, and the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old Internet was any better…

> how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"? By browsing Web-Directories such as DMOZ/ODP, mainly. Albeit that's really a late-90s and 2000s thing. We should go back to that kind of curation effort. It would be more of a challenge for politically-sensitive stuff (the Internet overall is a lot more politicized and less free-speech-friendly than it used to be) but for most unco…

Doesn't Wikipedia explicitly encourage external links e.g. citations?

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#74

Post by stonogo »

brandon272 wrote: post #62
elorant wrote: post #42

I don't miss the old Internet because it never went away, at least the part that interests me the most and that's communities. Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine. Even IRC is still active. What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent. And I c…

> Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine. I wonder what the stats would be on the number of forums and overall forum activity today vs. 5, 10, or 15 years ago.

That would depend on your definitions. Reddit is #18 on Alexa's top sites list, and it's arguably nothing but forums.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#75

Post by GreenJelloShot »

WilliamEdward wrote: post #45
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Start hosting your website from home. This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps. Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.

Any way around this? Surely i don't need an industrial setup to scale my home website

Free Cloudflare account

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#76

Post by mkozlows »

danso wrote: post #41

> You have to enter the exact name of the website to find it on Google. MayVaneDay is also mirrored on I2P, TOR, and Dat...You have to look really hard for them now, and the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old Internet was any better…

Back in the dawntimes (aka like 1995/96), you got to all sites by starting at the Yahoo! directory, and browsing to the category that you were interested in, and then going through their list of sites. If you made your own site, getting it listed on Yahoo felt like hitting the big time.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#77

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

function_seven wrote: post #66
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries On duck duck go you can use !r to search reddit if you're so inclined.

Unfortunately that redirects to Reddit's own search engine, which is often worthless for what I'm looking for. For example, if I'm looking for a comment that refers to my lat 2014 model of some widget, Reddit's search will fail to find it, and try to show me subreddits instead that are tangentially related to what I'm looking for. Still a good tip, don't get me wrong. But I find that asking the search engine to do th…

Sure that makes sense. Their search engine is not amazing.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#78

Post by Aeolun »

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…

> sorting out car insurance quotes or booking flights/hotels

Due to the limitations of the medium, I think this actually used to be easier (if slower). You certainly didn’t get a different price if you were booking a minute later.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#79

Post by gfody »

superkuh wrote: post #48
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Start hosting your website from home. This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps. Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.

How many 100k image hits do you get on your personal website you made for fun? In the entire 20 years I've hosted my website on my comcast connection I have never had this issue. If you're going to post an image to reddit (which is kind of going backwards from the point of all this) then just mirror it onto some popular image host (or your VPS). This doesn't prevent you from also serving up a copy from your local dis…

when comes time for your personal websites 15 minutes of fame it becomes inaccessible due to severe upstream bottlenecking
Post reply on HN