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The Return of the 90s Web

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#241

Post by summerlight »

rkagerer wrote: post #167
WalterBright wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google says there are 2 billion web sites. Each one may consist of a huge number of web pages (see wikipedia.org). All I can say is, good luck with your human curation startup.

Sure, it also estimates more than twice that many people in the world with access to the internet. And Wikipedia is already well-curated by humans. If there were orders magnitude more pages than humans, I'd agree. But I'd also ask: Who created them all?

We can say the exact same thing on all the technical debts that we've been accumulated in our code base. But I've never seen those technical debts properly payed off :D

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#242

Post by pjc50 »

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?

You can't determine the quality of media without consuming it. So the whole Akerloff "market for lemons" process applies: low quality cheap content dominates.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#243

Post by foolmeonce »

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 the problem is that hiring practices across the entire "intellectual worker" market is a market for lemons that specifically ruins anything of quality.

Some blogs were great (i.e. created to solve the problem of too much interest in what one is up to even to answer internal questions individually) and signaled a few great minds that can be hired at a discount.. Those engineers told also pretty good co-workers in stage 1, by stage ~3, managers tell their underperforming direct reports to blog whatever they understand about what their group is doing in the hopes that they (either improve or better yet:) become a burden somewhere else.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#244

Post by system2 »

Summershard wrote: post #235
hedora wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe websites should stop spamming junk for SEO and don't rely on clickbait to create revenue? I am very happy to use adblockers and have very little sympathy.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#246

Post by system2 »

mafuyu wrote: post #127

Along these lines, does anyone have any recommendations for a service or framework to create a simple personal site? I just want a basic blog, project pages, and photo gallery. I use Jekyll at the moment to statically generate pages to host on github.io, but frankly, I don't have much webdev experience and I'd rather just have something work out of the box at this point.

Why not $5 Digital Ocean hosting + wordpress image + $20 wordpress theme with visual composer from themeforest? You can also use the digital ocean hosting to serve many other sites not only one.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#247

Post by codetrotter »

japanuspus wrote: post #169
esfandia wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we have hand-curated directories, and we have social networks. Put them together and you could have a scalable, crawlable, searchable, customizable and non-gamable decentralized indexing system. Just don't know why nobody has come with this yet. Maybe lack of (monetary) incentives? Maybe something for IETF or WWWC to initiate?

This is alive and doing well: https://wiby.me/

I tried to search for irish setter but none of the first results were related to irish setter dogs.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#248

Post by Tade0 »

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…

To me SPAs were useful for one thing: to establish that JSON is the only blessed format for FE-BE communication.

Back before the age of SPAs we had those "dynamic" apps which updated parts of the DOM by firing requests to the backend, getting a piece of rendered HTML and just throwing it there.

It was an absolute nightmare to maintain and I'm happy we're past that.

As for server rendering, I've been getting good results with Sapper.js [0]. Here's an example of a webcomic page I started doing for a friend of mine, but it never took off:

https://dev.chordsandcordials.com

It's a pure HTML static web page, which started off as a server-side-rendered app, but with Sapper's export tool I didn't actually need to deploy the backend, since the content of each page is deterministic with respect to the URL.

My friend is not technical, but understands what FTP is and is able to edit a JSON file, so that's how we went about this.

[0] https://sapper.svelte.dev/

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#249

Post by TheMightyLlama »

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…

The whole idea of SEO in order to get clicks for your advertising based revenue model feels “bad” to me. Content is created which is controversial because that will get the most eyeballs on page. The side effect is that we veer towards a broken society the moment we go down that route.

I had an idea of a search engine that allowed you to permanently remove domains or pages with certain keywords as a paid service.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#250

Post by anaxag0ras »

esfandia wrote: post #161
majormajor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any new google will become the current google because it will be gamed. I agree with the parent poster about hand-curated directories being the key to finding better stuff. It's necessarily much more distributed - because one person can't index everything - and therefore much harder to algorithmically game. Google has conditioned us into thinking that "an algorithm that automagically separates the wheat from the chaf…

So we have hand-curated directories, and we have social networks. Put them together and you could have a scalable, crawlable, searchable, customizable and non-gamable decentralized indexing system. Just don't know why nobody has come with this yet. Maybe lack of (monetary) incentives? Maybe something for IETF or WWWC to initiate?

Social networks are becoming walled garden so it's kind of tough to crawl them. I mean look at Facebook and Instagram, the biggest social networks. They have robots.txt configured to disallow any crawlers.

Facebook also used have RSS feed for public pages and posts. Now they've not only removed that feature but also have heavy restrictions for third apps.

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