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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#41

Post by ozim »

ori_b wrote: post #19
Kiro wrote: post #3

I 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.

Thing is commercialization made it easier for people to express themselves and actually start using that resource.

Commercialization made it form "only nerds sit in there" to "everyone is on the internet and it is cool", if there would be no commercialization, internet for masses would still be a silly toy.

Just like going to the Mars - it is just a "hobby" for NASA, most of people on Earth are not giving a damn that they just landed another rover. There is no practical way to make money on space travel currently. Find a way to earn money on sending rockets to Mars or Moon, everyone is going to jump into it.

Companies on its own without hype would not go to the internet or digitalize their processes. There is still loads of companies that are not digital. There are loads of stories of how companies started switching to digital last year because of recent events...

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#42

Post by api »

fabbari wrote: post #34

I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things. A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".

Even more annoying: it's now considered necessary to have a bunch of videos about any major new product or project. Video production is either very expensive, very time consuming, or both, so it's a new "tax" that you have to pay to look serious.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#44

Post by mopsi »

jumploops wrote: post #20

Admittedly, 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”…

> 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?

1. Sign up to $5/mo virtual hosting service and choose a domain name.

2. In their control panel, click "Install Wordpress".

3. Open Wordpress.

4. Write and publish whatever you want, structured however you want.

This is much-much easier than working with Frontpage or Dreamweaver was in the olden days. Connecting to a server via FTP alone was a huge hurdle. Now it's all WYSIWYG in a browser.

Obstacles to self-hosted personal websites are smaller than ever before, but the corpo web has turned everyone from homeowners into hotel guests who have to follow their house rules. It's a cultural problem, not a technical one.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#45

Post by jrootabega »

fabbari wrote: post #34

I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things. A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".

It's 8 minutes now.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#46

Post by j_wtf_all_taken »

Its still there, its just buried under all the other crap.

As more and more people generate content, more and more bullshit exists. Unfortunately, Google etc. - despite all their big announcements - can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit.

Where's the semantic web that was promised? I wonder if we're still paying for the mistakes that were made with the whole XML stuff ...?

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#47

Post by jcfrei »

failwhaleshark wrote: post #5

"I miss old ATX." "I miss old [X]." There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.

I feel like a lot of those nostalgic posts are made by people who were simply happier when they were younger. And they conflate this general decline in happiness with a perceived decline in quality (of anything, be it the internet, television, music, etc). But in most cases it's just that things change and they no longer fit their desired qualities - they haven't become worse per se.

For a lot of people who are young today the internet the way it's right now (with TikToks, Instagram, Twitter discussions, rants and memes) will be the one, true internet. And in 10-20 years they will say it has changed and how they miss it. This is a cycle as old as time.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#48

Post by randomguy3344 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #17

I 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 b…

I disagree with point 3)

People used to have big desire to meet each other and exchange information. Internet evolution has throttled that desire greatly, we don't have one to one or group conversations any more, not nearly as much as we used to, social media & mainstream access are the culprits.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#50

Post by keiferski »

Million Short is a nice way to find some of these old websites. It lets you remove the first million search results from your query:

https://millionshort.com

The thing I really miss about the old Internet are forums. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and other social media sites lack a certain intimacy. Everyone is somewhat hostile by default and there is no incentive to contribute to the community. It's very different and a lot less fulfilling than the Internet forums circa ±2000-2005.

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