201–210 of 231 posts
Websites always have been shopping windows. They change with the seasons, they come and go. The idea that websites are forever and archived like newspapers might be laudable, but it really applies only to… online newspapers.
Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web. I am not saying old content needs to be preserved forever, but so much content has factually been lost over time. Old logs from text-based MUDs for instance, even for MUDs that still exist today.
The technology is still in its infancy unfortunately, so there's no way the web could have been based on it, but I think content-addressing is the long-term play. If I click a link, there are some cases where I want the server to respond with a fresh response just for me (e.g. a website showing the weather). But often I just want whatever content was linked to (e.g. a webpage explaining a math content). In the latter…
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The only thing not "old" about it is upvoting, which is one of those YMMV features.
I have fond memories of Slashdot in 1998. It was the spiritual forerunner to HN, and had upvoting, and in a more complex form as there were categories of votes. I got lots of +5 Funny comments. Hard to imagine, isn't it.
It gradually became a comedy website and at that point I stopped visiting it.
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I’m old and it’s definitely not the old web. I consider the old web to be when PNGs were sliced with Fireworks and laid out in tables. 2009-2014 is Web 2.0, back when people still thought social media was a good idea.
> I consider the old web to be when PNGs were sliced with Fireworks and laid out in tables. PNGs? We had (mostly static) GIFs and we liked them.
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> your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state Wouldn't the proper tense be "I won't have lived long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN" then? > We like that you are still here with us. Same here, and it feels like a very "old web" kind of feeling, as we're expressing this empathy towards an anonymous stranger with a very deemphasized…
"I won't have lived long enough" implies you will be missing out on the tail end of HN, "I haven't lived long enough" implies you have missed the start (head end?) of HN (as I understand it).
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,…
The old web relies on people thinking "I'm going to make a website about X" and following through, not relying on visitors, income, validation, etc.
The new Web is for the median human. The median human is very ordinary.
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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.
Isn't there a vested interest here for bots though to communicate here though? HN is a certainly a smaller but more targeted market but there's no reason to assume we're communicating with other humans here necessarily especially given HN demographics.
I'd define it as the web until the time that Facebook truly took off and conquered the hearts and minds of so many (that was the first huge shot in the losing war of the old web). For example, a key part of the old web was what used to be called the "blogosphere", and the blog's height was those final years before FB (in the ascendancy) and the first years of the FB era (descendancy).
https://gwhatchet.com/2005/10/13/professor-describes-influen...
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(Score:3, Insightful)
I love how great this "takedown" is, but also how it'll only be apparent to people over 35 or so.