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

0.mk

131–140 of 231 posts

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

#131
post #2

I found an old database backup of 0.mk on a disk I had kept. 0.mk started in 2009 as a passion project built by three of us. We worked on it for a few hours each week around our regular jobs. We eventually closed it in 2014 because the revenue (hint: no revenue) could not cover hosting, development, and the constant work of fighting spam and reviewing abuse. The recovered historical corpus contains 657,607 links. For…

".mk" is a ccTLD assigned to North Macedonia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mk

Intriguingly, the current Republic of North Macedonia (and its neighbors/constituent parts) has undergone a protracted and contentious naming dispute of its own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_naming_dispute

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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..

Fair!

> 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

I know there are, but as per my comment, it's just harder to find and you used to almost not be able to avoid it. I don't think platforms like YouTube and Instagram are great examples due to the monotization... everyone is trying to "make it." But ya, I mean, I do know it's out there. But I think the whole point wasn't that this stuff doesn't still exist, just that maybe it will become the more prevalent thing again. At least that's how I read GP's comment. But who knows.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't live long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN, but it's definitely part of the old web in my book. Its functionality is the same it's always been, it's rock solid, lightweight and simple. No personalization or engagement maximizing, no modern-style ads. Being spun off from something as big as Y Combinator meant they can run this site almost indefinitely.

> I didn't live long enough to see...

Whoa, careful with your verb tenses! You just wrote a ghost story :)

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't live long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN, but it's definitely part of the old web in my book. Its functionality is the same it's always been, it's rock solid, lightweight and simple. No personalization or engagement maximizing, no modern-style ads. Being spun off from something as big as Y Combinator meant they can run this site almost indefinitely.

The only thing not "old" about it is upvoting, which is one of those YMMV features.

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

#136

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…

Newer websites are filtered through what is acceptable from a corporate lens. The old web culture can't exist because advertisers won't let it exist on modern platforms. Additionally the spread of information is significantly less organic because of relentless pushes to use algorithmic feeds along with far worse distractions from content than there used to be.

> The old web culture can't exist because advertisers won't let it exist on modern platforms.

Again, what's preventing you from buying a domain name and putting up your own website? bypass the advertisers?

"Not enough people will see it", you say? So you want the reach provided by "modern platforms" but you don't want their rules?

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

#137

Fun experiment: Have an LLM “guess” random URLs seeded with words from a dictionary, iterating over each word and guessing a URL. It guesses a lot of correct URLs. This is one method of “URL hunting” that doesn’t involve a 3rd party list or index. Then just scan those pages for other URLs, visit them, and add a tally every time you come across a URL (for page rank). Then search anything, see what the results are. You…

> dark web Guessing random words and .onion at the end probably won't get you anywhere, although onion is also quite a random word...

[dead]

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

#138

Fun experiment: Have an LLM “guess” random URLs seeded with words from a dictionary, iterating over each word and guessing a URL. It guesses a lot of correct URLs. This is one method of “URL hunting” that doesn’t involve a 3rd party list or index. Then just scan those pages for other URLs, visit them, and add a tally every time you come across a URL (for page rank). Then search anything, see what the results are. You…

Deep Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web The deep web,[1] also known as the invisible web[2] or the hidden web,[3] is the parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard web search-engine programs.[4] This is in contrast to the surface web, which is accessible to anyone using the Internet.[5] Computer scientist Michael K. Bergman is credited with inventing the term in 2001 as a search-in…

That's the one

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

#139

Fun experiment: Have an LLM “guess” random URLs seeded with words from a dictionary, iterating over each word and guessing a URL. It guesses a lot of correct URLs. This is one method of “URL hunting” that doesn’t involve a 3rd party list or index. Then just scan those pages for other URLs, visit them, and add a tally every time you come across a URL (for page rank). Then search anything, see what the results are. You…

> dark web Guessing random words and .onion at the end probably won't get you anywhere, although onion is also quite a random word...

[dead]

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

#140

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,…

Your misjudgement comes from not seeing the economic incentive here. The web as a surveillance mechanism is just way too juicy to let go. As of now, pretty much all economies depend on it, just from an economic numbers calculation.

Mind you, 200 years later, we still live in cities built for cars, not people. Rockefeller, Shell, BP and the like are still not dead, and still use everything they got to not go extinct while corrupting every politician that will accept their money. Just for a couple more years at a time, and a couple more, and a couple more...while destroying our planet like a cancer.

In 200 years we'll still have the web built for surveillance capitalism, not people.

There is no old web to go back to. Meanwhile state surveillance depends on its existence. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, three letter agencies, Palantir, and now the AI companies depend on it, and they're selling to nation states at a time. Again, it's just too juicy not to.

Back then we called them trusts, but now those big tech companies are seemingly worth more than actual countries. That's too much power without legislation, as they can effectively abandon the rule of law. Remember what happened with the Enron scandal? That was about billions, not trillions.

If we want a human web again, we need to build a new one, with privacy and secrecy first and not as an afterthought. No CA, and with mutual cryptography that acts like both a ledger and as a privacy shield for the users. No cookies, no tracking, no degenerate google controlling it all through owning the source code.

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