In 20 years somebody will write an article about missing this ‘old’ internet from 2021. I wonder what they will miss.
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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
11–20 of 435 posts
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#12counterculture is ephemeral
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#13Blame the gatekeepers and the users who made them, not the Web.
Only using FB or TW for content discovery is just the equivalent of starting a browsing session via Yahoo's catalogue — It's just that the ratio of lazy people using the Web has outgrown those who still take the effort of finding the nuggets. At the same time, it has become too easy to publish fluffy spur of the moment content and people craving for upvotes over meaningful discussion. I'm not against giving anyone a voice or leaving it only to the tech-savvy, but I can't say that zero-effort publishing has contributed to the perceived quality and original idea of the Web.
Do I miss the old Web? Yes, but only as much as I miss analogue photography. It's nice to get into that reminiscent mood while flicking through old screenshots made up of spacer gifs, but as I watch the world go by on four screens at a time while ordering groceries on the fifth and paying with my fingerprint, it's kinda nice to see how far we've come.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#14I remember the backlash against unique designs where everyone said they just wanted plain sites, with the information in focus. Now when big parts of internet basically have become standardized and sterile everyone wants these unique designs back.
It's not the same thing.
What everyone misses are the personal, hobbyist, non-commercial websites. This was replaced by things like Facebook, Wikia, Pinterest, Twitter, Medium, which are both constrained and ad-ridden. A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr.
The "every site looking the same" thing is fine, however, and still preferred for commercial sites, government, newspapers, startups, other utilities. In fact most of those could still look more of the same, because visitors rarely care about the differentiation for marketing purposes. You could get away with removing all parallax effects from those sites and nobody would miss them. Same for advertisements: nobody cares for the forced variety of colourful banners in web advertisement.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#15Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#16In 20 years somebody will write an article about missing this ‘old’ internet from 2021. I wonder what they will miss.
Memes, Discord, the “old” Twitter, and either having ad supported sites (as opposed to everything being paid) or having premium sites (as opposed to everything being as supported.
Memes won’t go away. Nor will ads.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#17I actually enjoy today's Internet much more. I'll lay out the reasons:
1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain new knowledge, but reading books, watching videos and most importantly implementing it by myself, IMO, is the only true way to learn.
2) Fast enough to view high quality videos without any delay. Again this is related to learning new things. It is also important for me because it's one of the few ways that I entertain myself.
3) This might be arguable, but getting knowing a lot of different people from different places is a lot fun. People who comes from different culture usually have different standard of "good", "bad" and other moral judgment and it's fun to read all of those. This was doable 20 years ago but far fewer people were online at the time.
4) It's a lot cheaper. 20 years ago only a company can afford something faster than 1M (back then I had a 56K Modem I think but can't be sure) in my country and it was very expensive even for the modems. Nowadays pretty much everyone has access to some high speed internet. Even if they cannot afford a computer (which is actually a rare case), they have Internet access through mobile phones.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#18In 20 years somebody will write an article about missing this ‘old’ internet from 2021. I wonder what they will miss.
AI-enhanced web pages. Sorry, SPAS.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#19I remember the backlash against unique designs where everyone said they just wanted plain sites, with the information in focus. Now when big parts of internet basically have become standardized and sterile everyone wants these unique designs back.
It's not about the design, it's about the commercialization.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#20Admittedly, I miss the “old internet” too, however I have hope we can build it again.
As I see it, there are two main issues to solve:
1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision?
2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry. Parallel to this shift, people have moved to podcasts, news articles and videos for their daily content. The group of people that consume text is no longer the majority. In many ways, each new social media platform is attempting to recapture an aspect of community/shared experience that has been achieved before. The good platforms extend this reach, the bad suffocate it. A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.