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The Return of the 90s Web

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#231

Post by sacado2 »

curiouser2 wrote: post #109
worble wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if low quality media is everywhere, doesn't high quality media stand out? You would think so, but more often than not, most people don't want high quality. What happens is that the media that panders to the lowest common denominator stands out the most, since that what the majority focus on.

The psychology of the "hot take" on twitter is a prime example of this. Is it less friction to read a 3 page blog post that critically analyzes a subject and takes into account different viewpoints that all have merit, or to read someone's 280 character reaction? I am guilty myself, I often find myself jumping to the comments section even here on HN to understand what people are taking away from an article without ev…

And that's where we need more journalitic (does that word exist?) writing. Even by non-journalists, I mean.

Make a long form content, start with the most important information in the first paragraph, and give more and more developments in the following paragraphs. Someone who thrives for short content will be happy with the first paragraph. Someone who want to delve into the details will ready each and every word. Heck, your first paragraph could even be a tweet containing a link to the long form.

This is clickbait taken backwards. You will get very few clicks as you already delivered the main information for free, but those who clicked will be there for a good reason.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#232

Post by esperent »

iphone_elegance wrote: post #144
esperent wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody denies React and co. are excellent tools. The frustration occurs when people who enjoy these tools claim that, if you choose not to use them, or suggest they're not fit for a certain task, you're WRONG. In the case of React in particular, this happens a lot. Then of course the people who don't want to use a framework feel frustrated, and next thing you know it's a flame war. I've seen this happen multiple time…

I run into very few people who claim this.. oh you mean on Twitter? well there's the problem.

Twitter is where a large percentage of web devs hang out. If something is problematic, you can't dismiss it as "but that's just Twitter". If it's a common mode of discourse on Twitter, then it's legitimately a part of developer culture.

In any case, discussions around front end frameworks and especially React are scarcely any better here. Although they are usually politer at least.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#234

Post by giantrobot »

miffy900 wrote: post #209
echlebek wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 1 GHz Cortex-8 is a ton of computing power. The proof of this is iOS itself. When you bring the GPU into the mix, it's obviously capable of a lot as an operating system. There are no problems displaying high resolution static content and video content on an iPad. But around the same time, it became fashionable to start rendering static content on the fly, maybe inserting some not-so-static content around it to just…

>I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware. Keep in mind, the 1st gen iPad was single core and only had 256MB of RAM, which was the same RAM capacity as the then current iPod touch. Compare it to any PC with a single core Intel CPU and the experience will be largely the same, except of course the Intel CPU will…

The issue is that when the GP's iPad was new, it didn't have many problems browsing the web. I know mine did not. Outside of Flash-using sites or extreme JavaScript beasts the original iPad was a pretty capable web browsing machine.

The web has regressed when an old iPad (or PC) can no longer reliably view it. It's not like words got harder to display in the intervening decade.

A blog post, news article, or a tweet shouldn't require a quad core CPU and gigabytes of RAM to be readable.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#235

Post by Summershard »

hedora wrote: post #172
bradgessler wrote: post #91

I’d love to use a search engine that simply didn’t index websites with moderate or excessive amounts of JavaScript, images, and video. You wouldn’t need AMP because it would load quickly, ads would be minimal, and the text content would probably be forced to be higher quality because it would have to stand on its own. Does such a thing exist?

Even better. Blacklist all sites with ads. I’m guessing google will never implement that.

How would websites create revenue then? People are very unwilling to pay for online articles.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#236

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

One of the things I say (when I think some poor bastard has no choice but to listen), is “The September That Never Ended was the best thing to happen to the Web.”

That was what changed it from a niche community of geeks to a true “everyman’s town square.”

It was also the worst thing to happen to it. It heralded a tsunami of money and God-awful content.

Money tends to be a damoclean butterknife. It will spur tremendous growth and energy, and also reduce the moral structure to a septic tank.

I’m glad the BLINK tag is dead.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#237

Post by benhurmarcel »

malwarebytess wrote: post #165

Wow, Hey.com has none of the lag that modern websites have. Is the email client as responsive?

I find the client quite responsive, yes. On login it opens instantly, and interactions feel almost instant to me. But I haven't tried Superhuman to compare, I highly suspect Hey isn't as fast.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#238

Post by fit2rule »

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…

>monetized blogs

I believe that we have the 'web' today because big decisions were made about how little control the end-user (i.e., consumer) should have over the content made by producers, and that the #1 priority for all technology involved in the web has been to separate producer from consumer as stringently as possible.

If we had the ability to safely and easily share a file that we create on our own local computer, using our own local computer, to any other computer in the world - we would have a nice balancing act of user-create content and world-wide consumption.

Instead, we have walled gardens, and the very first part of the wall is the operating system running on the users computer - it is being twisted and contorted in such ways as to make it absolutely impossible for the average user (i.e. the computer owner/user) to easily share information.

Instead, we have web clients and servers, and endless, endless 'services' that are all solving the same thing for their customers: organising documents in a way people can read them. And all the other things.

And its all so commercial, because there is a huge gate in the way, and it is the OS Vendors. They are intentionally stratifying the market by making the barrier to entry - i.e. ones own computing device - untenable to serve the purpose.

Imagine a universe where OS vendors didn't just give up to the web hackers, in the early days, and instead of making advertising platforms, pushed their OS to allow anyone, anywhere, to serve their documents to other people, easily, directly from their own system. I.e. we didn't have a client-/server age, but rather leaped immediately to peer-to-peer, because in this alternative universe, there were managers at places like Microsoft that could keep the old guard and the new young punks from battling with each other .. which is how we get this mess, incidentally.

There really isn't any reason why we all have to meet at a single website and give our content away. We could each be sharing our own data directly from our own devices, if the OS were being designed in a way to allow it. We have the ability to make this happen - it has been intentionally thwarted in order to create crops.

Give me a way to turn my own computer, whether it is a laptop or a server or my phone, into a safe and easy to use communications platform, and we'll get that content, created with love, back again.

Its sort of happening, with things like IPFS, but you do have to go looking for the good stuff .. just like the good ol' days ..

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#239

Post by fit2rule »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #229
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.

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

I think the thing that happened, is the OS vendors spent too much time addicted to the web themselves, and forgot that one of the duties of the core OS of any device is to serve data from it, safely and securely, to any other device.

Instead, most stacks are designed to enforce a walled garden, from which very little is shareable unless you go through the gateway (the web client app) to some approved destination.

Semantic web and total availability at the personal-computer level, are aspects of OS design I wish had been paid more attention.

Basically what we have now is a very, very expensive system of dumb terminals.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#240

Post by clarry »

ricardo81 wrote: post #215
rkagerer wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you substantiate #1? The content on the sites I visit is created by humans. Until automation genuinely overtakes us, I'm not ready to accept at face value the scale of the internet has grown so large that humans couldn't tackle the problem.

#1 can somewhat be substantiated by some technical info, without knowing the true number of pages. - Using DNS "zone files", the DNS database for TLDs (which are not available for all, but most) show there's circa 200 million domains registered at any moment - A large percentage of these are parked, i.e. no unique content. - Many domains are "tasted", i.e. bought, are alive for a few days then disappear, so potential…

On the other hand, most of that is stuff that human curation can rightfully reject as not worth linking and indexing. We don't need to index the entire web, we need to index the good stuff (that is likely to stay there anyway and be worth archiving).
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