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The Return of the 90s Web

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#221

Post by cvshepherd »

revskill wrote: post #168

Actually it depends on the kind of website you'll build. Some years ago, i made an app with Rails and turbolinks and some "tricks" to make ajax work smooth. The first version was built in 6 month, then i rebuilt the second version with React in 3 weeks ! The pain is in refactoring and adding new features as well as speed of development. That's the day i discovered React. The way i develop Rails app is just make api j…

would you mind saying what the main roadblock to more productivity in rails was for you, compared to react?

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#222

Post by Tiltowait-- »

mech422 wrote: post #198
nkozyra wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find reddit particularly navigable nor user friendly. It's a social media platform, not a discovery or search one. Even the communities I care about have limited utility.

I thought it was just me... Every time I end up on a reddit (from a search result), its a click fest trying to see anything except 'top comments' and ultimately ends up very unsatisfying.

They did that on purpose. Too many icky normals with dangerous ideas, and too many articles got ripped to shreds as misleading in the top comments. So they had to discourage comments.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#223

Post by Tiltowait-- »

tomc1985 wrote: post #47
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: *…

If DMOZ could have held on for a few more years...

[dead]

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#224

Post by Tiltowait-- »

reaperducer wrote: post #82
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 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 publi…

It's more like the powers that be were very badly jolted to see that the people, at last, had a voice to speak back with, and we could show that they were lying to us. They then had a reaction and attempted to silence us again, which is still playing out today.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#225

Post by INTPenis »

Another point to this, I equate the modern fediverse with all the old message boards.

Message boards are still around but it used to be an integral part of web culture. They essentially took over from dial up BBS.

But now community boards have moved to cloud services like Discord. The self-hosted boards are still around in the shape of federated ActivityPub instances.

It makes a lot more sense than hosting an isolated island of PunBB or vBulletin.

I just hope more communities host their own small localized ActivityPub instance, using AP relays to create a vibrant fediverse.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#226

Post by Tiltowait-- »

purerandomness wrote: post #5

I recently watched the "Helvetica" documentary that was posted here a few days ago [0], where they briefly mention "Grunge Typography" [1], a seemingly dead-end branch of typography that, for some strange reason, became pretty popular for a short period of time. After some years however, consensus amongst designers formed that what they've created was a pile of illegible garbage, and realized that there was no other…

These are people who are high in Openness, a personality trait. They are in love with new things. It does not matter if it is good or not, as long as it is new. They lose interest quickly and move on to the next new thing.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#227

Post by te_chris »

JohnBooty wrote: post #195
peruvian wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an exponentially growing recruiting, training, and hiring industry based on developers who only know how to write fat JS frontends. I think everyone has probably experienced high growth in their company’s frontend team. Many developers choose to write them not out of expertise but to have them in their resume and for job security.

developers who only know how to write fat JS frontends Yeah. This is often a big challenge for small companies / small teams. Nearly every web app is now two apps , and it's increasingly infeasible for any developer to have a mastery of both backend and frontend stacks. Not necessarily a terrible problem when you have dozens of developers, but a lot of dev teams are 1-3 people. Instead of web dev circa 2010 where you…

Phoenix liveview solves this and the overhead of Ex is much lower than the overhead of mainting separate codebases and APIs, in our experience.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#228

Post by ryan-allen »

jb3689 wrote: post #180
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.

> What we really need is a new Google Maybe, maybe not. How useful is Google (or search in general) to you? For me search is more of a convenience tool than for finding sites that have information. There are questions I need answered but without search would have an easy time figuring out (e.g. "how many cups are in a pint?"). Sometimes I want opinions, but I almost always am going to the same sources. Sometimes I us…

> Maybe, maybe not. How useful is Google (or search in general) to you?

I think I use google in the same way as you.

Most of the time, I could go to the websites directly (MDN, Stackoverflow, HN), but sometimes I'm trying to find something I don't know about, by trying different terms. I usually do this when I want a particular product but I don't know what it's called or what it is "smallest itx case without gpu", "midi router no power supply", "waterproof tarp diy tent setup".

I installed a browser extension called uBlacklist as recommended by someone here a couple of weeks ago, so now 90% of the time Google search is like my Ctrl-P for MDN, Stackoverflow, etc since I've managed to filter out the sites I don't want to see results from.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#229

Post by MaxBarraclough »

nextaccountic wrote: post #50
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: *…

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.

It's a pity the semantic web never took off. It might have greatly reduced the need for sophisticated centralised search-engines.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#230

Post by sacado2 »

nextaccountic wrote: post #50
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: *…

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.

I'm surprised by this content, because Google actually changed the web for the better in this regard. Anybody remembers the ezinearticles era? Where people kept publishing the same short articles filled with just a few keywords and nothing more, over and over again, just to get backlinks? Back then you couldn't make a search on any topic without falling on page after page of those light articles filled with keywords only.

Those article directories were eventually murdered by Google within the blink of an eye maybe a decade ago, and quite frankly on any given topic nowadays it's way easier to find good content rather than SEO filler. Google's algorithms will nowaydays favor fresh (aka published or updated recently), long content over short, "popular" (aka lots of links on it), duplicated content.

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