Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Resurrect the Old Web

stevedylandev.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 263 posts

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#111

Post by philipkglass »

sumtechguy wrote: post #84
onion2k wrote: post #4

No ads I don't know what "Old Web" the author is remembering but when I was first paid to make a website in 1997, it had banner ads on it.

The 94/95 web had no banners. Because most of it was hosted on university servers or some random guy/company just wanted to bear the cost. I remember the big decision on if adverts should even be allowed... Well here we are. Users get free things. Advertisers pick up most of the bill. The second that model doesnt work sites pack it up. The 'before time' could be there but servers/bandwidth/people are not free. You ca…

I have been running my own web site for 20+ years without ads. The server and bandwidth costs are minute. I use a basic VPS. I started it when I was still a poor grad student. This is cheaper now than shared hosting was back in the early 2000s and it's easier too. But it's not cheaper than "free" and it's significantly more administrative work than just using a social network. The "people" costs (including my own time fiddling with software configurations) is the biggest barrier.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#112

Post by lunias »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #87
lunias wrote: post #59

The "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…

This was a beautiful read. Can I read your blog? Mine is https://blog.webb.page .

Very nice! Mine is https://ethanaa.com, but I basically only updated it for the first couple months after I built it lol.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#113

Post by randomNumber7 »

CapsAdmin wrote: post #80
2THFairy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, obviously, ads were the norm back in the day. The author had to be wearing several rose tinted glasses when writing that. But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game". This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad…

I may be wearing the same glasses here, but it felt like ads were more like "real ads" back then. Like when walking down a street, you may see some posters advertising something, but they are clearly ads, because they are noisy rectangles bunched up with other noisy rectangles. On the older internet, ads felt more like that, and seemed to stay in the corner away from the content. However, on the modern internet, ads…

I don't know, I rarely see ads these days. I surf the internet with adblock exclusive and just try to skip over things like sponsored links or youtubers advertising in their video.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#114

Post by rootsudo »

lunias wrote: post #59

The "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…

Wow this hit too close to home but describes my internet experience of the 00s exactly. Except for anime vhs tapes it was fansubs on irc or mailing burned cds/dvds.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#117

Post by randomNumber7 »

crnkofe wrote: post #66

I like to go on a nostalgia trip every now and then as well. Loved the old forums that got taken out by social networks. Also loved the various private communities in IRC and Usenet and the blog-o-spheres I was part of and read about. But the sad reality is that its more about the community than the technology. And the communities of old mostly disbanded and moved on and restoring old tech won't bring them back. Nowa…

Forums had been better but I wonder how much is about peeple just beeing different. Nowadays people have less time and struggle more, so they favor s.th. more effortless in their free time and also are more egoistic (on average of course only).

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#118

Post by tolciho »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #93
lunias wrote: post #59

The "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…

Flash was the first broken site I ever encountered, some restaurant had an all-flash webpage. Never did end up going to that restaurant. Why bother? If they render content inaccessible behind some needless jank like Flash or JavaScript, why bother? Another fun thing to do was to keep a tally of how many "OMG stop the presses!!" security vulnerabilities Flash had racked up over time, which was lots. Many hundreds. Made even a lolfest like Windows look bad. Flash, it was not killed with fire soon enough. Chrome and other such bloatware arguably also need some sort of fire, or at least a diet or trepaning or something, but that's a different rant, though one very much related to the Old Web or the smolweb.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#119

Post by alwillis »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #93
lunias wrote: post #59

The "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…

> It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash.

Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.

The iPhone had about 14% marketshare at the time, so it's not like Apple was in a commanding position to dictate terms to the industry.

But if you read his letter, what he said made total sense: Flash was designed for the desktop, not phones—it certainly wasn't power or memory efficient. Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.

And of course Flash was proprietary and 100% controlled by Adobe.

Jobs made the case for the (still in development) HTML5--HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

What people don't seem to remember: most of the industry thought the iPhone would fail as a platform because it didn't support Flash, which was wildly popular.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#120

Post by _DeadFred_ »

The old web was people that could afford PCs, a select group, and who knew how/chose to connect to the internet, smaller sub group, plus college students. Then it was people who could afford very expensive toys (iPhone) on expensive phone plans that required credit qualifications. The types of people who are inquisitive, or who have expensive hobbies, or even time/energy for hobbies. There was a time early on when services that normally require some kind of credit check just...didn't... if you used the iPhone app.

Today's internet is wage slaves on prepaid phone plans using apps on cheap cell phones that want a cheap/free distraction from their lives.

Post reply on HN