The Return of the 90s Web • Hacker News Board

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#81

Post by kickscondor » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 11:30 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #75

kickscondor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track. This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out: *…

The alternative to Google for discovery is Reddit. Reddit is the modern web directory: - Directories are Communities defined by their link rules - Human-curated - Easy to start a new one - SSO across all communities - Built-in forum technology - Unified comment technology for every website You can get communities like reddit.com/r/Sizz for instance or larger ones like /r/esp8266 or massive ones like /r/sanfrancisco o…

Except:

- Most subreddits are hostile to self-promotion of Web stuff. If you're unknown, you're going to have to be socially involved there enough that people know your name. (Though I agree that small subs like /r/esp8266 are begging for self-made content.)

- Related: people don't know your name because it's in small gray text. You're just another comment.

- You need upvotes. A personal directory requires only one upvote.

- You need to be on-topic. Your work may not fit Reddit's categories.

- Reddit mods are generally more like forum mods than librarians.

- Agreevotes do not equal quality. I don't want to overstate this, but I like that I'm not seeing vote counts on personal directories.

Reddit is cool - but it has its own rules and its own culture that goes with it. I personally wouldn't call it 'the modern web directory'. I do think it's less hostile to the Web than many other platforms - and certain subs like /r/InternetIsBeautiful and /r/SpartanWeb do good work.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#82

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 11:31 PM UTC

mtgp1000 wrote: post #28

waltbosz wrote: post #21

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which the…

I think what you're saying about reduced barriers to entry has lowered the standard of all popular media. It used to be expensive to publish anything - especially the further back in time you go. So classics for example typically represent particularly bright writers, as having something published before the printing press, and widely disseminated, was simply unlikely to happen. But today anyone can create an account…

I think what you're saying about reduced barriers to entry has lowered the standard of all popular media.

You're more right than you know.

When there were only a handful of television channels, the content was higher quality than what we have now.

When there were only a couple of dozen cable channels, the content was higher quality than the endless reruns we have now.

When publishing a book went through the big publishing houses, the quality of what was available was higher than it is now where anyone can self-publish and pretend to be an expert.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#83

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 11:32 PM UTC

kickscondor wrote: post #39

mtgp1000 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you're saying about reduced barriers to entry has lowered the standard of all popular media. It used to be expensive to publish anything - especially the further back in time you go. So classics for example typically represent particularly bright writers, as having something published before the printing press, and widely disseminated, was simply unlikely to happen. But today anyone can create an account…

I don't quite follow - if low quality media is everywhere, doesn't high quality media stand out? Perhaps you're saying that so much low quality media drowns out the high quality media - such that it can't be found. The ratio is off, right?

if low quality media is everywhere, doesn't high quality media stand out?

Because there is so much low-quality content, it's become nearly impossible to find the high-quality content. Needles in haystacks.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#84

Post by MaxBarraclough » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 11:34 PM UTC

waltbosz wrote: post #21

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which the…

> content for content's sake

I think there's some truth to this. Some junior developers make it a goal to be seen as a respected blogger, so they feel the need to write something, even if they have nothing to say.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#85

Post by asdff » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 11:35 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #72

nextaccountic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO, popularity, links, and other metrics that Google find interesting but we don't necessarily do.

Of course the problem is that if your site becomes popular it will be overrun by SEOs pushing monetized vapid content. This is how people earn money, they aren't going to stop just because you want to return to a time before they ruined the internet.

Results could be better filtered. SEO spam isn't very nuanced, it all reads the same and frequently plagiarized. I wonder if you can crudely use something like turnitin to filter for original content.

Maybe you could try and make a model SEO article for your own search engine, just taking your existing SEO results and figuring out which parameters are contributing the most to their ranking, then filtering out results that contain these parameters that worked well in your model. Rinse and repeat as SEO writers try and step up their arms race, but they should always end up being foiled by your changes to the search engine after optimizing your own perfect SEO model regularly.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#86

Post by Polylactic_acid » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 11:41 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #15

I can't wait for server-side rendering to take its place in the sun again. There are many use cases for which a client-side framework like React is eesential. But I feel the vast majority of use cases on the web would be better off with server-side rendering. And... There are issues of ethics here. You are kidding yourself to an extent when you say that you are building a "client-side web app." It is essentially an a…

The less stuff on the server the better imo. Whenever I can get away with it I use a static site generator or I use vuejs with a json file containing all the data for the site. Being able to just drop a static set of files in to a webserver without any risk of security issues in my code is great. I also hate the tools for backend rendering since if you need any kind of interactivity it becomes so much easier if you had just built it all in vue/react with no downsides other than not running in someones cli web browser.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#87

Post by SilasX » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 11:42 PM UTC

kickscondor wrote: post #38

waltbosz wrote: post #21

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which the…

People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track. This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out: *…

Wow, those sites are blazingly fast and usable compared to most that I see these days. (With the possible exception of the third not making it visually obvious that the list items are links and having to figure it out from the context.)

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#88

Post by koreth1 » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 11:44 PM UTC

StillBored wrote: post #78

nextaccountic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO, popularity, links, and other metrics that Google find interesting but we don't necessarily do.

For a long time I assumed that google indexed pretty much everything it, and it was only a question of providing a specific enough set of search terms to drag up older content. But what you hint at might be more correct these days. They are running a reverse wayback machine in that anything not changed in the last year gets removed. If you click the advanced search its "updated within" and the max timeframe is a year…

> They are running a reverse wayback machine in that anything not changed in the last year gets removed.

Sometimes I wish that were true! Try Googling for, say, PostgreSQL documentation and the top result will often be for a 10-year-old version of the software.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#89

Post by jandrese » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 11:44 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #85

jandrese wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the problem is that if your site becomes popular it will be overrun by SEOs pushing monetized vapid content. This is how people earn money, they aren't going to stop just because you want to return to a time before they ruined the internet.

Results could be better filtered. SEO spam isn't very nuanced, it all reads the same and frequently plagiarized. I wonder if you can crudely use something like turnitin to filter for original content. Maybe you could try and make a model SEO article for your own search engine, just taking your existing SEO results and figuring out which parameters are contributing the most to their ranking, then filtering out results…

SEO is exactly as sophisticated as it needs to be to get to the top of your rankings.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#90

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 11:44 PM UTC

waltbosz wrote: post #21

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which the…

i remember that most of the early internet was under construction. The noise to signal ratio wasn't very high - but that might have been due to some universal constant of physics.