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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

#171

Post by inigyou »

AuthAuth wrote: post #144
inigyou wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Most niches dont have to self censor. Even the ones that do still have no trouble communicating their message. I follow a lot of military channels and they post uncensored versions of their videos off yt but there is little reason to go because seeing the gore is not why im watching the video. I still get the entire value of the video from youtube even though you might argue its self censoring.

There's a lot of people who want to talk about things like Gaza or Luigi Mangione more, but can't because of platform rules. The new web has been successful at changing society at large by preventing discussion of these things. Even here on HN I have to be careful how I describe this effect, because an account that is flagged a few times in quick succession is automatically rate-limited, which is effectively a ban.

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

#172

Post by ketzu »

What I find really interesting is that people can heavily disagree what and when the old internet was. It may have ended anywhere from 1989 to 2023, brought by the introduction of the www, mass accessibility, social media, or Ai.

For me, this doesn't indicate that those young folks don't know what they are talking about. Rather, that missing the "old web" is more a cultural thing in itself. We got introduced to the web and discovered these communities we became part of, but something changed and our community died.

There had to be a cutoff that changed something! That killed our community. In reality the change, destruction of communities happened all the time. Some survived, some changed that returning to them wouldn't feel the same, some moved. If you don't feel part of that community anymore, it is destroyed, even if someone else thinks it is still alive and just moved to new-forum/teanspeak3/dig/reddit/discord/tumblr/facebook/tiktok/next thing.

The small Ultima online private server I used to be part of died, because a few people moved on with life, even though it was still there for a long time. Not because of WoW. My WoW guild suffered the same fate, despite Wow still being there. Now the few people I became close friends with are still left, wearing the guild name as a server name on discord, but that's a very different community.

Even if the exact people suddenly came back, it wouldn't be my community anymore.

My old web can't come back, because it is not a matter of technology.

I am sure the people that join the web today will lament the death of the old web of today in a decade.

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

#173

Post by zem »

spockz wrote: post #164
zem wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what would be amazing would be a resurgence of the old style forums, but where users could choose to see a flat or tree view of a discussion (and even customize those views, e.g. the tree could be reddit style without subject lines, or slashdot style with them)

SwedeSpeed has this. It is a forum, posts have threads. It isn’t always nice because the threading/three view also breaks the sense of time and makes it harder to see new posts. I actually prefer a linear view with posts that quote what they want to reply to. This also allows a single post to reply and combine multiple remarks. So it allows more for convergence instead of divergence as with a tree.

right, i agree with you - there's no one size fits all. that's why the best thing would be to let the reader toggle views on any given post/thread. one could even experiment with fancier views like a flat layout but with a git tree like sidebar that shows the perhaps multiple parents for any post and support for clicking on a post and popping up a mini thread with just the posts it's replying to.

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

#174

Post by sebastiennight »

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,…

> Because people are just using AI for search now (this is the main reason I use it) that there will be no point in making these spamming sites anymore

Or: because people are just using AI for search now, the only websites left will be spamming sites trying to rank in/influence AI results.

Think about it: if human traffic is no longer optimized for, and the entire focus was catering to bot traffic, how amazing are you imagining that those bot-optimized sites will be?

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

#175

Post by Razengan »

throwaway5233 wrote: post #112
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…

[flagged]

I like your quote formatting, I'll steal it. And no, yes I do like butt stuff :)

Seems like most of your whinge is "AI → anti-AI measures → net bad for everyone"

Like guy, as if you didn't notice all the enshittification happening for decades before that. All this AI shit is barely 1-2 years old at most.

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

#176

Post by Razengan »

mkjs wrote: post #156
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…

The best way I can explain it is that the old web was like going to thousands of individual boutiques, and the new web is like going to a dozen or so big supermarkets. Even if the boutiques were sometimes bad, at least they were unique and you could feel there was a real person behind each of them. The supermarkets sell everything, but they feel sterile and bland. Yes you can still find roughly all the same stuff. No…

  No it's not the same.
You can still buy a domain name, host your website somewhere, and tell people about it, no?

When was the last time you actually visited any of the Old Web websites? I just found that Diaryland and Halfbakery are still around, over 20 years old, but it's been years since I visited them

Even though there was a lot of forced enshittification, the tech did not really force people to change: it's that fewer people feel the need to be the way they used to be.

and that can change again

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

#177

Post by inigyou »

mkjs wrote: post #156
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…

The best way I can explain it is that the old web was like going to thousands of individual boutiques, and the new web is like going to a dozen or so big supermarkets. Even if the boutiques were sometimes bad, at least they were unique and you could feel there was a real person behind each of them. The supermarkets sell everything, but they feel sterile and bland. Yes you can still find roughly all the same stuff. No…

Three. Three big supermarkets.

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

#178

Post by Razengan »

zem wrote: post #125
Razengan wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

it's not "another thing", it means that your community forum lives on reddit (or whoever's) sufferance, and is subject to some corporation's capricious and arbitrary whims. this comment brings up a good concrete example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293553

This is a better comment on the same page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296018

Basically: "everyone has a different idea about what the Old Web™ was depending on when they first started using the internet, and when the community they liked was discontinued or changed"

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

#179

Post by inigyou »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #64
stillpointlab wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just gotten used to this at this point. My first time on the web was somewhere around 1995 I think, although my first time on the Internet was earlier (it was a proxy through some ancient BBS and I'm pretty sure it was using gopher). Even though I was just a kid back then, clearly that makes me old now.

Speaking of gopher, I'm low-key hoping that becomes the new place for all the non-bot traffic. Gopher felt magical back in the pre-www days.

Too many protocols. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/SmolNet

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

#180

Post by inigyou »

dd8601fn wrote: post #61
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…

I’m vaguely remembering tilde username for our public html folders. Was that old Apache behavior? And now I wonder if Apache is even still common. I spent so much time fiddling with apache configs.

It was at least an option with Apache. I read about it while setting up Apache on Windows XP and thought, who would possibly want that feature?
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