The web can be anything you want when you self host.
Resurrect the Old Web
221–230 of 263 posts
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've been using adblockers for as long as I can remember, and now also sponsorblock for youtube, so I don't see them in that form either.
My point is that there seem to be more things to "skip over" these days. Search results being the worst place.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#223> Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online. It was cozy. No ads, no feeds, no endless videos. Instead it was just people, the whole reason you started in the first place. Now it's just noise and scary addicting and effective algorithms that keep you plugged in for hours on end
If people want a mechanism of connecting with their friends who are far away, why not create a dedicated forum for this purpose? Either with something like discord, or even with something like phpbb?
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#224At this point HN should have a list of tropes that are just banned topics. These should include: - Bring back the old web but only the good parts that my nostalgia filter remembers - Software used to be fast and now it's not, look how long it takes for my magic pocket computer to transcode 4K videos and perform facial and object recognition on it - Large download sizes have ruined everything, it takes my phone 1 minu…
How about: I’m so tired of seeing the same old tropes on hn ?
Ooooo going meta, I love it!
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> someone else's platform > Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped. The key is to put everything under our own domains. This turns the platforms hosting it into mere implementation details. If the host goes down, just move the data elsewhere. I use GitHub Pages for my static site but I could trivially move everything to Cloudflare Pages if needed. I could also pay for a VPS or make m…
Until you stop paying ICANN and they take your domain away from you. You are just a serf in ICANN's kingdom, don't get deluded. At leasr other platforms like X let you reserve a name for free, forever unlike ICANN which has persistent fees to keep your name.
Until someone buys X and decides you didn't have the correct political opinion, or they wind it down because ad revenue wasn't high enough.
Buy a cheap domain, lay off the avocado toast for two days a year and you're set. It's far less likely to run afoul of the TLD registrar than X.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#226I was wondering whether old web means people, or the old web is entirety of old web. Certainly companies will not provide features of old. No RSS for you, since they want to control what you see with the "algorithm".
What about people? Well some of them, as most of you pointed, want to monetize your attention, so it is not necessarily that they create something from passion, but to use you.
Besides that most of content is Audio-Video now, so it has two outcomes. One is that most of people chasing attention will create Audio-Video. This allows us to find niche and simple blogs, which is difficult, because Google will not index them, or not rank them.
What we are left are curated list of blogs. There are some.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#227I've used a lot of social networking systems over the years based on a lot of technologies. I deeply understand the nostalgia for blogs and RSS—I had a blog for many years and have used an RSS reader continuously since probably 2002. I still enjoy reading blogs to this day. The problem with blogs, though, is that there is no great solution to limit the visibility to certain audiences. It really limits the types of th…
> there is no great solution to limit the visibility to certain audiences
There's an important sense in which you are very wrong here because nothing on the internet is actually hidden. Everyone can see everything regardless of the visibility you think you've put on something.
But there's another sense here where audiences do tend to self select into groups and do tend to see and (crucially) engage with things in niches. The early web was very much this first kind of social network where we all could go and read random stuff but we all found niches that we fell in love with. This gained more structure (and convenience) with web forums and then perhaps MySpace and Facebook and other social media added even more structure (pictures only with Instagram, short messages with Twitter, video on YouTube, etc). The structure has also morphed so that these platforms all start to look a bit like each other too.
All this to say, for the "old web" to return, it would need to be as "structured" as the one we have now but give us back the freedom to build whatever really cool thing we wanted. I think the only way to do this is with progressive enhancement of some kind.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#228I've never been huge into social media or even blogging when that was en vogue, but I did set up a forum on my site a little over a year ago after realising how much of a black hole for technical discussion Discord has become. I use it as an easy way to document any screwball problems I run across when working with hardware and software, and occasionally people pop in and ask questions, so I'm glad I set it up. Somet…
What forum software did you use? I’m thinking about adding a forum to my site for the same reasons you gave.
How long did it take before the first user signed up and posted?
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#229I used to think that technology, or lack of it, would solve these problems. More connection. More communication. But it really won't. It's just as much about the outreach as it is about the writing. Email authors you like. Give them thoughtful feedback. Be generous. It's hard work. It's a relationship and community building.
This! Not many people will reach out to a blogger to say thank you or give their take on a post. That's the first building block to a thriving community.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#230Something that was pointed out to me the other day: Firefox can show you "important dates" in the address bar, but they've yanked RSS support. You now need a plugin to get the RSS feed link for a site. I miss the old web, but I'm not sure it's coming back. You can still go on Usenet as well, not sure why anyone is spending time keeping the servers running, because I can not find an active newsgroups anymore. It was n…
Do it! We need more of that energy. Setting up a website or a blog in 2025 is super easy, regardless of what avenue you choose.