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Resurrect the Old Web

stevedylandev.bearblog.dev

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Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#51

Post by evilduck »

101008 wrote: post #22

I did something similar a few months, launched it on HN, no traction. It's really difficult. No one wants to host their blog / posts on a platform that will dissapear when the owner gets bored or can't maintain it anymore. Added this to other comments: old web had ads (iframes, banners, popups!), and also was completely self-hosted, which gave you more freedom than any other cloud platform. If you want to resurect ol…

> If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.

Also know as: How to get a visit from the FBI or a state agency equivalent once someone discovers you're a viable conduit of unsavory content.

The old web is dead, it will never come back because it relied on ignorance, naivety, charity, and good faith. Those are mostly all gone. You can still stand up one of these hosts and pages for yourself but you must still be incredibly vigilant because automated attacks on your host will be happening non-stop. Jumping into hosting for others is no longer a hobby and it never will be again.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#52

Post by 2THFairy »

reactordev wrote: post #30
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…

They all wish they had the viewership for ads. They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers. Banners, side banners, buttons, applets, most web advertising size standards are derivative of these initial placements. What you’re talking about was geocities or aol’s members sites that anyone could build a site with. Anyone running CGI wishes for that sweet ad revenue to pay for the Sun servers…

> They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers.

I am not disputing that ads were a thing. I am not disputing that ads were common.

I said that there were a lot of sites that chose not to run them.

> They all wish they had the viewership for ads.

This is just not true. Like, c'mon man, the very site you're on right now takes this approach.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#53

Post by vallassy »

kshahkshah wrote: post #33

I think we need a new protocol, a hard break

Obligatory XKCD:https://xkcd.com/927/

I fail to see what a new protocol would bring to the equation. I see it more as a human behaviour issue, network effect, worse is better etc etc.

My grandma uses Facebook because someone taught her how, she doesn't have the capability to explore technology on her own. That honestly goes for most people, they treat their computer as necessary for getting along in modern society and nothing more.

Facebook is the internet.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#54

Post by st_goliath »

corytheboyd wrote: post #41

> In my opinion the answer is honestly pretty simple: blogs and RSS feeds. This point is made very often, and I do believe it was true for many people, but I honestly didn’t care about individual blogs at all when I was a young net user. I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it? All the action for me was on forums and chat rooms. Like the…

> I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it?

I wonder, have you ever read a novel? Hundreds of pages a single person wrote about a story that happened (usually) entirely in their head, printed on paper, no way to interact with it. It's a great experience if the author has some skill at this.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#55

Post by Y-bar »

wiether wrote: post #3

I don't get HN's appeal for the bearblog platform? If anything else, if one wants to resurrect the "Old Web", one shouldn't do it on someone else's platform. Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped. The brutal shutting down of Typepad should be another reminder of this reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/one-time-wordpress-c...

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.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#56

Post by flyinghamster »

> Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones.

This reflects on another problem: the sorry state of journalism and willingness to turn press releases into news. That story ran in a wide variety of media outlets, and a Google News search of "children landline phones" turns up a bunch of these.

It turns out that these articles were really ads for "Tin Can," a VoIP phone for kids. Not really a landline at all, it's seriously nerfed, and I'd assume that if it's SIP, it's locked to their service, or else it's their own proprietary protocol. Not really a surprise, given that real landlines are almost extinct, and expensive where available.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#57

Post by alisonatwork »

M95D wrote: post #17
davey48016 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banner ads, pop up ads, pop under ads...If browsers added a feature, then websites used it to show you ads.

I prefer those ads to today's ads. At least they didn't track anyone.

Every time I get on my tracking and internet privacy soapbox, and I lament how little people care about it these days, I need to cast my mind back to when I was a teenager and everyone wanted a counter on their homepage. Not all hosts provided a counter script in their cgi-bin so various third-party websites offered counter image links that you could add into your page. Of course when you clicked through you could see all the different countries of your site's visitors and it was the coolest thing ever. I was thrilled when I hit 1000 visitors at some point! But looking back, even if a few of those third-party counter providers were just benevolent sysadmins offering a public service, I have no doubt some of them turned into the data mining giants of today.

To be fair, Geocities did get done by the FTC for secretly selling users' PII to third-party advertisers almost 30 years ago, so it wasn't just our own faults. But I think rather than the FTC actually putting a stop to the behavior, the outcome was just that websites had be more honest in their EULA that users would be giving up their privacy rights, so here we are.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#58

Post by gjsman-1000 »

Y-bar wrote: post #55
wiether wrote: post #3

I don't get HN's appeal for the bearblog platform? If anything else, if one wants to resurrect the "Old Web", one shouldn't do it on someone else's platform. Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped. The brutal shutting down of Typepad should be another reminder of this reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/one-time-wordpress-c...

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 alternatives.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#59

Post by lunias »

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 an image and getting a Javascript alert telling you the image was "copyright". It was learning that you could copy it anyway if you spammed enter. It was hotlinking those same images in protest. It was waiting 5 hours to download a 37 second 320x240 RealPlayer video. It was having a password "protected" area where the password is base64 encoded in the source. It was trying the same search query in multiple search engines because they would return different results. It was typing random URLs in to see if you could find something interesting yourself. It was playing midi files on loop in the background. It was Macromedia Flash, explicit popups, pure yellow text on black backgrounds, and reformatting your computer to get rid of viruses.

The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks.

I run my own blog on AWS for ~a dollar a month.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#60

Post by giantrobot »

Y-bar wrote: post #55
wiether wrote: post #3

I don't get HN's appeal for the bearblog platform? If anything else, if one wants to resurrect the "Old Web", one shouldn't do it on someone else's platform. Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped. The brutal shutting down of Typepad should be another reminder of this reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/one-time-wordpress-c...

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.

> 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.

Let's not forget ISPs and schools offering hosting. Universities even used to let students and faculty have routable IPs and DNS entries on the school's domain.

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