Does anyone remember websites? • Hacker News Board

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#41

Post by pessimizer » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #35

mojuba wrote: post #9

The early internet was like some settlers' shacks, built uncontrollably and unsystematically whereas the modern web is all skyscrapers, residential and business. Uniform apartments, uniform offices all looking very similar differeing in only subtle interior design details here and there. Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not. But maybe we should start a new era of land exploration and start over. It shoul…

I like to compare today's web to radio in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Back then, if you could piece together a transmitter and throw an antenna up, you were a broadcaster and many broadcast whatever they felt like. Just like today's internet. Social media is the CB radio of the 1970s and 80s when anyone could buy a small rig and do all kinds of weird and wild things for cheap. But, eventually, something had to re…

> But, eventually, something had to reign in all that and the FCC along with international laws and standards came up to calm all that down.

No, it actually stayed pretty lively until the 90s, when the government decided that there could be huge monopolies in media, all the stations were bought up by like 6 guys, and were automated to play Disney music 24 hours a day.

Not such a neat story, right?

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#42

Post by krapp » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 3:47 PM UTC

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #35

mojuba wrote: post #9

The early internet was like some settlers' shacks, built uncontrollably and unsystematically whereas the modern web is all skyscrapers, residential and business. Uniform apartments, uniform offices all looking very similar differeing in only subtle interior design details here and there. Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not. But maybe we should start a new era of land exploration and start over. It shoul…

I like to compare today's web to radio in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Back then, if you could piece together a transmitter and throw an antenna up, you were a broadcaster and many broadcast whatever they felt like. Just like today's internet. Social media is the CB radio of the 1970s and 80s when anyone could buy a small rig and do all kinds of weird and wild things for cheap. But, eventually, something had to re…

The rationale behind the FCC is that it's regulating a limited resource (spectrum space.) The web is not a limited resource (although bandwidth is, but that's a different debate.) The web is also international, and we're already seeing conflicts where one country tries to force their regulations onto another. That metaphor just doesn't work where the web is concerned.

I agree that the web in the US, and specifically large social media platforms, will probably be regulated because that seems to be one of the few things both parties agree on for their own reasons. But more so because the government wants to control information and surveil citizens. I think the balkanization of the web as a whole into smaller, closed networks is probably inevitable.

But what's most depressing of all is how many people in tech and on HN would be thrilled if one needed a license to publish on the internet just because that would implicitly push most people off of the web and leave it for a privileged elite.

As bad as social media can be (and I think its harm is often oversold for political ends) having a space where anyone can publish and communicate and create freely, where different platforms can exist and cater to different needs, where media isn't entirely controlled and gatekept by corporations, is critically important. More important than any other communications paradigm before it, including the printing press.

It's really going to be sad when we burn it all down, because it seems unlikely anyone is going to make something as free and open as the web ever again.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#43

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 3:47 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #40

krapp wrote: post #24

Websites do still exist. People do know what they are. There are more of them on the web than there ever have been. Nothing is stopping anyone from creating a website if they want. Nothing is stopping you.

They will not be indexed by search engines, though, so you had better email all your friends so you'll have a few visitors.

[deleted]

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#44

Post by pessimizer » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

gdubs wrote: post #30

mojuba wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind the early websites were mostly built by an enthusiast minority, technical or not but willing to learn HTML and Netscape Composer. You can't expect the whole humanity to be as enthusiastic. The skyscraper era, no matter how much we all hate it, makes the web more democratic: it gives everyone some standardized space (Facebook, Youtube, etc) with algorithmized discovery which is parking and elevators if yo…

Hard to live through what social media has done to society over the past decade without at least entertaining the idea that the higher barrier to entry of being online was maybe not a bad thing.

I wouldn't agree that the higher barrier to entry was a good thing, but I also would say that the barrier to entry was actually pretty low, with angelfire, geocities, etc. Dreamweaver + other wysiwyg, and the lack of a necessity of a giant js framework with bundling and tree-shaking.

The problem is that the barrier to entry got too low, so it was necessary for large companies to interpose themselves between producers and audiences, starting with google (becoming something other than a grep for the web, and instead becoming the editor and main income source for the web) and expanding outwards into facebook.

Remember that we started with walled gardens like AOL and Compuserve, and the web (and the end of those companies) was people desperate to break out of them. Now people have been herded in again since the indexers bought the ad companies.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#45

Post by chneu » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #40

krapp wrote: post #24

Websites do still exist. People do know what they are. There are more of them on the web than there ever have been. Nothing is stopping anyone from creating a website if they want. Nothing is stopping you.

They will not be indexed by search engines, though, so you had better email all your friends so you'll have a few visitors.

Yes they will?

I run/host a bunch of personal websites for friends.

I do nothing special to get them indexed and they are all on search engines.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#46

Post by tuukkah » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

I think e.g. Mastodon with IndieWeb is a way to fight against the enshittification and to bring back the good from the early years. "The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”. We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content." https://indieweb.org/

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#47

Post by c22 » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #35

mojuba wrote: post #9

The early internet was like some settlers' shacks, built uncontrollably and unsystematically whereas the modern web is all skyscrapers, residential and business. Uniform apartments, uniform offices all looking very similar differeing in only subtle interior design details here and there. Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not. But maybe we should start a new era of land exploration and start over. It shoul…

I like to compare today's web to radio in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Back then, if you could piece together a transmitter and throw an antenna up, you were a broadcaster and many broadcast whatever they felt like. Just like today's internet. Social media is the CB radio of the 1970s and 80s when anyone could buy a small rig and do all kinds of weird and wild things for cheap. But, eventually, something had to re…

The FCC licenses radio broadcasters because the spectrum is finite. Which finite aspects of the internet do you see driving such eventual practice?

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#48

Post by hayleox » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 3:51 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #25

devin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is true to the original, I am surprised to see this was table-oriented layout and not a bitmap image with clickable x,y coordinates.

It was common to make tables and use them to assemble a bitmap , where each cell had zero border/margin/padding and an exact size, and contained a "slice" of the image. Web authoring tools (and Photoshop) even had explicit support for generating this sort of thing, as I recall. This was I guess simpler to automate than defining clickable regions of a single image, and it allowed for the individual pieces of the image…

Ah, nothing like trying to save the logo from such a website, then discovering the image you saved is partially cut-off and includes the navbar behind it instead having a transparent background.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#49

Post by ptero » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 3:54 PM UTC

mojuba wrote: post #9

The early internet was like some settlers' shacks, built uncontrollably and unsystematically whereas the modern web is all skyscrapers, residential and business. Uniform apartments, uniform offices all looking very similar differeing in only subtle interior design details here and there. Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not. But maybe we should start a new era of land exploration and start over. It shoul…

> Should we go back to the shack era? Of course not.

I am not sure. Different people want different things. I ran a Hetzner cloud instance where I toss a simple webpage with locally hosted travel photos for friends and family. And a Jupiter server (with a very weak password) on the same instance for myself and any friend when we want something more powerful than a calculator.

And this messy, improperly organized, breaking all design patterns way works just fine for me. So I'm fine with a shack for personal communication and as a personal space. My 2c.