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I Miss the Old Internet

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#41

Post by danso »

> 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, at least in the case of MayVaneDay. In the early 90s, how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"?

> I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks, back when websites like Vane's were the internet. Don't get me wrong, many cool things can be found on the internet today. But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out...

This feels incredibly myopic. The Internet of those days were limited to the extreme minority of people who were aware of the Internet and had access to a connected computer, nevermind took the time to figure out how to create for it. The author derides Facebook and Reddit as being too "easily monitored and controlled" to allow for individual voices but that's utter bullshit. The modern Internet is far from perfect, but the diversity and quantity (and arguably, quality) of voices is far better than when the Internet catered mostly to college-age kids and academics, i.e. people with access to free, high-speed Internet portals.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#42

Post by elorant »

I don't miss the old Internet because it never went away, at least the part that interests me the most and that's communities. Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine. Even IRC is still active.

What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent.

And I certainly don't miss the dial-up days when depending on the time of the day you might had to redial a dozen times to get a connection, and your bandwidth was a mere 28.8 Kbps which seems ridiculous by today standards.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#43

Post by danso »

JohnFen wrote: post #30
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…

Do you not find Reddit to be a bit of a cesspool? I tend to avoid it for that reason, but how true it is probably depends on which subreddit(s) we're talking about.

No. It's not a monolithic entity. Various subreddits can be extremely well-run and vibrant.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#44

Post by fouc »

The Old Internet is when the web browser was a "smart document reader" and information was open and accessible.

Now the web browser is more of a VM for "web applications" and the web is turning into walled gardens.

The tendency for the tech world to centralize around a single browser like Chrome is a big culprit. But once we started having auto-updaters for browsers, that was the nail in the coffin. The centralizing effect of that is huge.

Things became easier for web developers, but not necessarily better for the end user.

The new internet is in the favor of commercial interests. The open internet & the open browser is being strangled.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#45

Post by WilliamEdward »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #37
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…

> 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.

Any way around this? Surely i don't need an industrial setup to scale my home website

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#46

Post by Ididntdothis »

elorant wrote: post #42

I don't miss the old Internet because it never went away, at least the part that interests me the most and that's communities. Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine. Even IRC is still active. What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent. And I c…

“What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent.”

Totally agree. If I am on a site about kiteboarding I would actually appreciate to get ads about kiteboarding. This could probably be useful. But instead I am getting ads about toasters because I bought one last week.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#47

Post by zozbot234 »

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…

> how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"?

By browsing Web-Directories such as DMOZ/ODP, mainly. Albeit that's really a late-90s and 2000s thing. We should go back to that kind of curation effort. It would be more of a challenge for politically-sensitive stuff (the Internet overall is a lot more politicized and less free-speech-friendly than it used to be) but for most uncontroversial stuff it would work well enough.

(And no, Wikipedia is not a true replacement even though it might be the closest thing to one we happen to have. They purposefully keep external links to a minimum, for sensible reasons - they're building an encyclopedia, not a Web directory.)

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#48

Post by superkuh »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #37
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…

> 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.

How many 100k image hits do you get on your personal website you made for fun? In the entire 20 years I've hosted my website on my comcast connection I have never had this issue. If you're going to post an image to reddit (which is kind of going backwards from the point of all this) then just mirror it onto some popular image host (or your VPS). This doesn't prevent you from also serving up a copy from your local disk to visitors.

1 megabit of upstream is plenty for a personal website. I can say this from long experience.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#49

Post by thrower123 »

zokier wrote: post #7

This sort of post is a recurring theme here on HN, and in some ways I do sympathize with the sentiment. But I seriously believe that today that "independent" web is actually much bigger than it was in the olden days. It only seems small because of the illusion created by the hugeness of the non-independent web. And of course it is not clean binary option of independent or not, instead it really is more of a spectrum…

I'd arguably divide history into a pre-Bootstrap and a post-Bootstrap internet. Bootstrap made it easy for anybody to have a decent looking website, replacing the raw and chaotic and wonderful mess that came before, and bringing down an echoing sameness across huge swathes of the internet.

Another bright line is the Flash internet and the no-Flash internet. So much experimentation and uniqueness bloomed, and then died.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#50

Post by zozbot234 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #37
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…

> 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.

IPFS solves this. You only need to host an index of the content, plus the "seed" copy, for anyone else to download and mirror as they please.
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