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Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

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Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#101

Post by ColdStream »

Razengan wrote: post #90
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #80

Here's a contrarian timeline: maybe the old web will return? My reasoning: when the "old web" was great, most people thought the internet was for nerds. Sure even casual users would forward funny emails to their friends, but when it came time for news most people would read the paper or watch the nightly broadcast. When they paid for their Big Mac they'd lay down cash. There were plenty of people using the internet,…

Allow me to switch to asshole mode for a minute: "Things used to be so good" is mostly rose-tinted glasses: What exactly WAS the "old web" anyway? 100s of half-baked sites hosted on Geocities, Yahoo, about pointless stuff? Epilepsy simulator websites splattered with gif-vomit? Everyone and their grandmother asking you to install their 10 toolbars? Honest, serious question: What actually was of objective substance on…

I think it is a case of, it is easier to find those niches nowadays but when you do it is a more shallow and controlled version of said thing.

On the old web, you would just stumble onto something deep but the barrier to get to it was fairly high. It could also just be total nonsense but at least you could see the passion behind it.

I agree with your general take. People talk about the old web as 'the good old days' but it really wasn't that great. I do have some fond memories of the mid 2000's when it was all starting to mature but also before corporate capture took hold. Even then, you would just end up stumbling around blindly most of the time.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#102

Post by monk_grilla »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #80

Here's a contrarian timeline: maybe the old web will return? My reasoning: when the "old web" was great, most people thought the internet was for nerds. Sure even casual users would forward funny emails to their friends, but when it came time for news most people would read the paper or watch the nightly broadcast. When they paid for their Big Mac they'd lay down cash. There were plenty of people using the internet,…

We're participating in it right now. HN is a living example of a simple website facilitating discussion between humans with a shared interest. That's why I come here more than any other news/social site now.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#103

Post by sodapopcan »

Razengan wrote: post #100
sodapopcan wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved Diaryland since it was fully customizable. It was my intro into templating! It was very crude, but it worked.

Oh my gosh I loved Diaryland, and how you could customize your shit with some simple HTML, but I think they went through enshittification while they were still around anyway But..what says something like Diaryland can't be brought back now?

Did they? I think it was LiveJournal that enshittified. Diaryland is actually still around. I just checked it out and it now "Diaryland v2!" I actually last checked it out in the past year and it still looked exactly like it did back then!

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#104

Post by AuthAuth »

ColdStream wrote: post #101
Razengan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allow me to switch to asshole mode for a minute: "Things used to be so good" is mostly rose-tinted glasses: What exactly WAS the "old web" anyway? 100s of half-baked sites hosted on Geocities, Yahoo, about pointless stuff? Epilepsy simulator websites splattered with gif-vomit? Everyone and their grandmother asking you to install their 10 toolbars? Honest, serious question: What actually was of objective substance on…

I think it is a case of, it is easier to find those niches nowadays but when you do it is a more shallow and controlled version of said thing. On the old web, you would just stumble onto something deep but the barrier to get to it was fairly high. It could also just be total nonsense but at least you could see the passion behind it. I agree with your general take. People talk about the old web as 'the good old days'…

Niches nowdays are far deeper and more vibrant than they were 20 years ago. Instead of 1 guys website or 1 fourm with 30 users you now have many discord servers with 1000s of users talking in real time, youtube channels putting out videos and making money, reddit/lemmy aggregating content, the community interacting in real time and building what it needs.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#105

Post by sieabahlpark »

monk_grilla wrote: post #102
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #80

Here's a contrarian timeline: maybe the old web will return? My reasoning: when the "old web" was great, most people thought the internet was for nerds. Sure even casual users would forward funny emails to their friends, but when it came time for news most people would read the paper or watch the nightly broadcast. When they paid for their Big Mac they'd lay down cash. There were plenty of people using the internet,…

We're participating in it right now. HN is a living example of a simple website facilitating discussion between humans with a shared interest. That's why I come here more than any other news/social site now.

[dead]

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#106

Post by Razengan »

sodapopcan wrote: post #96
Razengan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allow me to switch to asshole mode for a minute: "Things used to be so good" is mostly rose-tinted glasses: What exactly WAS the "old web" anyway? 100s of half-baked sites hosted on Geocities, Yahoo, about pointless stuff? Epilepsy simulator websites splattered with gif-vomit? Everyone and their grandmother asking you to install their 10 toolbars? Honest, serious question: What actually was of objective substance on…

> What exactly WAS the "old web" anyway? Pre-Google, specifically, pre-PageRank, and even more specifically, pre-SEO. Your post is oddly hyper-focused on pointing out the negatives, probably due to the asshole hat you put on. There were lots of good sites with tons of good, free information, and because the main way people searched was using directories, we weren't inundated with 1,000s of results on the same topic,…

> Your post is oddly hyper-focused on pointing out the negatives

because people are hyper-focused on the negatives of the "current" web, or acting like the sites they used to love can't be recreated anymore..

> it was just a bunch of people writing about themselves, their interests, and generally being creative.

There still are. on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, 5ch and other Japanese subcommunities.. the fact that they're all "silo'ed" into these less-than-benign corpoctopuses is another matter, but people are still people'ing

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#107

Post by inigyou »

AuthAuth wrote: post #104
ColdStream wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is a case of, it is easier to find those niches nowadays but when you do it is a more shallow and controlled version of said thing. On the old web, you would just stumble onto something deep but the barrier to get to it was fairly high. It could also just be total nonsense but at least you could see the passion behind it. I agree with your general take. People talk about the old web as 'the good old days'…

Niches nowdays are far deeper and more vibrant than they were 20 years ago. Instead of 1 guys website or 1 fourm with 30 users you now have many discord servers with 1000s of users talking in real time, youtube channels putting out videos and making money, reddit/lemmy aggregating content, the community interacting in real time and building what it needs.

And they have to self censor so they don't get banned off those platforms.

There are so many piracy discords where you can't ask how to pirate something because that's against discord rules. I mean really? Why are you using it then?

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#108

Post by inigyou »

ryandrake wrote: post #77
z_rho_one wrote: post #14

Remember the good ol' days when we all thought that everything on the web would exist for eternity and over.

I remember the naive implication/expectation that a URL would be permanent. That once a file is identified by its URL, you could bookmark it and it would always be there. And absolute worst case, if someone really, really, really had to change a file's URL, they would politely return 301 Moved Permanently, and feel very bad about it. Now people don't give a shit about URLs. Webmasters casually move files around all t…

It's been 40 years. Half the webmasters are dead. You can't keep things alive longer than yourself.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#109

Post by dasil003 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #70
dasil003 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vaguely recall those, but they were more for normies trying to get online. For me the old web is what I saw when I logged into my university gopher server and saw the advertisement for something called the World Wide Web which I could browse via lynx. Soon enough I got a PPP connection and then Mosaic/Netscape 1.0. However everything after javascript shipped (let alone CSS) is new new new. I'd almost go as far as s…

That’s the prehistoric web or maybe that’s BBSs…

Correct. Don't get me started on Fidonet, as a young computer nerd in the 80s before even dial-up internet was available, that was a portal to the global internet that my adolescent shit-posting self definitely didn't deserve.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#110

Post by inigyou »

tokai wrote: post #7

Am I getting old? 09-14 is not even close to the old web for me. The old web, to me, was back when people still published physical 'phone' books for websites.

Someone called that the Cretaceous web. The old web was the era before social media sucked everything up (so 2009 wasn't it).
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