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I Miss the Old Internet

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#281

Post by rchaud »

ars wrote: post #14
notJim wrote: post #5

I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet w…

reddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully. (Teenagers, and yes I was one and I remember, usually have an inflated sense of their own abilities and knowledge, and they write that way.) What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and shari…

I think that depends on how you use Reddit. You're right, there are lots of teens on there, but I'm not subscribed to the subreddits they frequent, nor do I browse r/all, which is the equivalent of Youtube's "Trending" tab.

r/webdev for instance is one of the subs I'm subscribed to, and the culture there is not really meme or inside joke-oriented like a lot of the entertainment-type subs are.

The other day I was googling info related to legal review of real estate documents, and my top search results were all keyword-heavy content mill articles that weren't helpful at all. I decided to do the same search with "site:reddit.com" added, and the information was much better, as you're often hearing people's stories of working with lawyers when buying property. It was very helpful to get this kind of 'organic' information instead of the 'corporatized' version that's really a lead-up to their sales pitch.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#282

Post by rchaud »

PinkMilkshake wrote: post #88
amiga-workbench wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because getting content on the web is only as difficult as people make it, and beneath all the bloat of "modern front end development practices" there is still a simple set of tools to work with.

Exactly. You can basically pick any subset of web technologies and just use those. And honestly, when teaching the average person how to make a website, they should just be taught the minimum required to make a valid HTML document. I think it's something like: My first webpage Hello, World!

You can create a free account or a site on blogspot or Wordpress with significantly less friction. That is still a full-fledged website, and not an IG page or Twitter that's a walled garden serving only logged in users.

In this day and age, nobody is going to bother with writing HTML markup when they've used rich text editors to compose everything from emails to Tumblr posts.

Back in the early 2000s I used to write music reviews for a site called Epinions. They didn't have a rich text editor, so if you wanted to do bold, you needed to wrap those words in a tag, or tag for italics. It was extremely irritating to have to do that, especially if you were pasting in the content from a pre-existing Word doc that already had all the proper formatting.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#283

Post by agumonkey »

One paradox of Google's era is that we needed it when the web was full of websites like this that would pick our curiosity and feel good but hard to find. That's why we all flocked to it .. it made it easy. But it shaped the system to make people please search engines now that the web is a socio-economic platform and everything is formatted and structured for ROI... making Google's original job meaningless.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#284

Post by rchaud »

danso wrote: post #41

> You have to enter the exact name of the website to find it on Google. MayVaneDay is also mirrored on I2P, TOR, and Dat...You have to look really hard for them now, and the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old Internet was any better…

Yahoo! back in 1998 was a web directory, structured like a phone book. Being the age that I was then, my favourite site was something called Maniac Joe's WWF page, which had reviews of the latest Raw episodes, Pay Per View Specials, Midi theme songs and pictures.

I had a 30-min per week time allowance on the INternet-connected family computer, and I pretty much spent it all on that site.

Those are the types of sites I miss. Single-topic with incredible depth of content, and written in a funny, friendly tone without the "content strategist" tone of voice that's all too common on "fun" websites like Vice, Gizmodo etc.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#285

Post by agumonkey »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #72
superkuh wrote: post #21

The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use any javascript frontends. It's a good time. As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an articl…

https://millionshort.com/ lets you exclude that thick layer of corporate shite. Search without the top million (or 100k, 10k etc) sites. !mill from DDG. Not perfect but often turns up those personal homepages, hobby sites and esoterica the early internet thrived on. Stuff that Google and co forgot existed - or is down on page 200+

oh yeah, such a funny and nice idea :)

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#286

Post by jciochon »

kristofferR wrote: post #179
ALittleLight wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been missing the old internet. A little while ago I tried to find StumbleUpon and discovered it's transformed into more of a social media thing. I took a couple days to recreate what I thought of as the core StumbleUpon functionality - click button, get random site. And I've been trying to aggregate what feel like unique, individual, not well known sites into my index for it. https://stumblingon.com It currently…

Awesome site! It would be cool if you made the button linkable, so you can bookmark it and get a random URL each time.

Yeah, or a quick firefox addon like stumble used to have!

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#287

Post by rchaud »

mreome wrote: post #8

> the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites That's also a property of the "Old Internet" though. Discoverability has always been a problem for smaller entities. It's why every fan/personal site in the 90's/00's belonged to a half-dozen web-rings or link-list sites. > it's getting increasingly harder to find them It's getting harder to find them because most content creators have moved to…

I'd wager it's getting harder to find because content strategists have figured out that they can pick up search traffic by creating throwaway blog posts about unrelated topics on a site that already has a high domain ranking.

Take for example Game of Thrones. What does GoT have to do with personal finance? Nothing, but that doesn't stop sites like Yahoo Finance from posting bilge like "10 Epic Personal Finance Lessons From 'Game of Thrones'".

Who's going to rank higher on a search for GoT related content? It depends on the search query for sure, but chances are Yahoo Finance, or HuffPost, or any of the other content mills will beat out your hand-coded personal website that probably doesn't even have Google Analytics set up on it.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#288

Post by rchaud »

CalRobert wrote: post #24
pwinnski wrote: post #2

The Old Internet was much smaller. Much, much smaller. I don't think it can scale.

When the Old Internet was a small part of my life, it felt huge. The New Internet is a huge part of my life, and feels small.

True. It's everywhere but it feels small because we've trained ourselves to ignore 95% of it. There is so much coming out, all the time, and all vying for our attention. I can't stand it.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#289

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

akiselev wrote: post #81
gfody wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when comes time for your personal websites 15 minutes of fame it becomes inaccessible due to severe upstream bottlenecking

If that 15 minutes of fame is so important, put up a load balancer with autoscaling or make sure the Wayback machine archives every post upon publication. Not every site needs to have 3+ nines of uptime.

While yes, that would work, we were talking about hosting things yourself at home.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#290

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

esotericn wrote: post #89
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Start hosting your website from home. This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps. Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.

A pitiful 10mbps, eh? Back in my day... That's your 100K image 10 times a second, or 600 times a minute. You could also just like, run a caching server on a 5$ VPS.

Right, but then you wouldn't be hosting it at home anymore, which is what we were talking about.
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