[dead]
Resurrect the Old Web
101–110 of 263 posts
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, so we need Old Web with extra steps (security). I’ll admit that when I lament the web we used to have, I’m never thinking about viruses, malware, pop ups/unders, &c. Seems like all that stuff was just a small price to pay for connecting with likeminded people. I have a slice of that with Mastodon but maybe being 20 years older and jaded is making me wistful, yearning for something that is never coming back.
We more-so need Old Web with actual consequences for bad actors. You know, the days when you could email an ISP's abuse mailbox with evidence of someone running portscans and they'd get at least told to clean up shop or else , and the or else went as far as getting their contract cancelled entirely. These days it seems like abuse@ is routed straight to /dev/null, and that's not even addressing enemy nation states tha…
This is a great point
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#103The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings, banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy…
It was also visiting pages like pages.small-isp.net/~username and digging through the HTML to see if somebody had
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#104The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings, banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy…
It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Absolutely miss Newgrounds. It's still around of course, I'm reflecting more on the vibes when it was in its heyday. Unbelievable the games people were making with Flash back then and how it spawned the careers of a ton of indie darlings. Also, not Flash at all, but does anyone remember Exit Mundi? Absolute gold. Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging u…
Newgrounds was incredible! At the time, games (of any quality) for free was a biiiiig deal. It was even more amazing that you didn't need to wait hours to download and install them.
I agree w/ your take on blogging... kind of a bland "one-stop-shop" for everything a person thinks of rather than an experience tailored to a specific interest. I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly... even within a single domain I would have multiple websites all linking to each other, each with a different design, and subtly different content, but now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol. Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#105The old web hid search results from behind paywalls and logins.
New web literally makes Google worthless for 80% of my searches.
q: What will the web / social media be like when the only people using it are idiots and the poor?
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#106The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings, banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy…
It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Absolutely miss Newgrounds. It's still around of course, I'm reflecting more on the vibes when it was in its heyday. Unbelievable the games people were making with Flash back then and how it spawned the careers of a ton of indie darlings. Also, not Flash at all, but does anyone remember Exit Mundi? Absolute gold. Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging u…
Agreed on both points. When blogging became the dominant reason for having a website, we were already on the way to the "content" hell. Any semi popular website had pressure to post more frequently, diluting quality. And pretty soon after that, blogs went from 500 words to 140 characters, but 10x the frequency.
Static websites that were updated only once in a while were far better at showing a cross section of someone's life In that respect, StumbleUpon and browser bookmarks were superior to RSS.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge. The old web was to me about people publishing whatever for whatever reason, especially amateurs and persons. That web has to me been pushed aside for the benefit of the gain-market-and-profit-from-everything crowd.
Why did the old web die? I'm a HN Heretic. HN says dark patterns, money, power, corporate interests. I think it was very simple: Proprietary platforms solve real-world problems the more "open" web doesn't and did not effectively solve: discoverability, spam filtering, content filtering, community. Regular people don't want the open web, and never have. They only tolerated it when it was given to them without alternat…
Also it is easier to publish to a walled platform than the open web.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#108NetNewsWire will choke out on you if you have a large number of feeds, because of the way it is designed.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and the like all had banner ads. I think you could pay not to have them but for free accounts they were mandatory.
That wasn't the case in the beginning, on Geocities at least. It was a pretty big deal when they started introducing popups and mandatory banner ads.
Yes, I had some pages on geocities around 1996/97 and to the best of my memory they had no ads. I must have stopped using the site entirely by the point they got added.
edit: Wikipedia claims that happened in May 1997.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#110> In some ways it's bringing back old web rings and simple networking through hyperlinks.
And there are plenty of likeminded individuals, many who have posted here. It may not seem like it because linking with hrefs and webrings is much more fragmented than services that beat you over the head with engagement metrics.
I think the distributed linking model coexists well with centralized resources like: (https://indieseek.xyz/links/internet/blogging/) and (https://outerweb.org/explore/category/indieweb) (mine)