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The Web We Lost

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Re: The Web We Lost

#51

Post by majormajor »

groby_b wrote: post #45
shiftpgdn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the barrier to entry that we used to have. I know this might be a narrowminded view but that barrier to entry prevented a lot of the drivel that we see on the internet today. In the 90s and early 2000s if you wanted to put something online you had to have at least a moderate level of technical aptitude. Compare that to today's nonstop garbage fountain of ignorance on sites like tumblr, twitter and facebook.

Oh, how soon they forget. Remember geocities? And before that, there were many fountains of ignorance to be found on Usenet (alt.* :), Archie, Gopher... It was in general a smaller community, and that kept the amount of drivel small, too. But it wasn't all as rosy as you seem to remember.

Yeah, my experiences on the late-90s, early-2000s internet don't support the idea that some level of technical aptitude correlates to a desire to share anything other than drivel.

Timecube, dancing babies, blink/marquee tags, MIDI music backgrounds on yet another "hey look at these pictures of the new muffler I put on my car!" site... ah, the good ol' days.

I honestly haven't noticed any increase in drivel, as a proportion of overall content, on the web now compared to when I first got on in 1998.

Re: The Web We Lost

#53

Post by gfodor »

Wow. Microsoft Passport. I haven't thought about that in years, and recalling how the tech world recoiled in horror then for things we have eagerly embraced now is illuminating.

Re: The Web We Lost

#54

Post by Mz »

smacktoward wrote: post #4

I agree with Anil 110% that the Web he's talking about was, in many, many ways, a Better Web than the one we have today. The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had t…

If you aren't technical, it kind of doesn't matter if you know up front or not (about potential risks). If you don't have the skill, you accept the risk or loss and hope that because it isn't relevant now, that it won't ever matter. Or you say "I will cross that bridge when I come to it."

I know a little html and css. I learned them to manage my own sites. I have some tech training (Certificate in GIS from a decade ago, never really used). I wish I were more technically savvy. I migrated my sites to Wordpress and found that frustrating and I am still trying to work out how to complete the migration. But it means that when I want to put up new content, I can at least do that much in a fairly brief span of time.

So, agreeing with you that the web we lost was harder and that was a showstopper for many people. Not agreeing that it is terribly relevant if those people know the risks or not up front, because if they want to participate (and this is increasingly not something you can really opt out of) and you can't do the technical piece yourself, well, you suck it up. Too bad, so sad.

Re: The Web We Lost

#55

Post by haldean »

kamjam wrote: post #35

Meh, I disagree with a lot of that. You speak as if the internet ONLY consists of social now. Your points are nostalgic and looking at the past through rose tinted glasses IMO. Five years ago, most social photos were uploaded to Flickr You can still do this. People choose not to. I don't want strangers viewing my social pictures, esp if I had kids. These are private moments to be shared with my friends. Ten years ago…

The point about links is that other people can profit by posting links on your site. Before Ad(Words|Sense), you could freely allow people to post links in comments (without having to worry about nofollow or anything) because people would only profit from those links if what they linked to was relevant/interesting. Now just the act of following a link can mean a few pennies in someone's pocket, so allowing links to be posted to your site is a quick way to get seriously astroturfed.

Re: The Web We Lost

#56

Post by netcan »

smacktoward wrote: post #4

I agree with Anil 110% that the Web he's talking about was, in many, many ways, a Better Web than the one we have today. The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had t…

"But to non-technical people, those losses aren't obvious"

To most people, those losses aren't losses. You can't lose what you don't have. I don't think its just about techie vs non-techie people. There are plenty of people who could have posted photos online 15 years ago that didn't until more recently. Accessibility is one thing, a critical component. But, culture is another essential part. It's a component hosted services contributed too.

People didn't tweet before twitter because there was no way of tweeting, but also because there was no such thing as tweeting. The cultural concept didn't exist.

Re: The Web We Lost

#57

Post by quasistar »

Just a few reasons today's Web trumps anything from the 'Technorati' (seriously?) era: Open API's that reply in JSON, Cloud VPS's at $0.02 per hour, 10 Gb ethernet, 54 Mb fiber in my house, multicore computers in everyones pocket, GPS at everyones fingertips, web frameworks like Sinatra (yes, it took more than three lines of code and two bash commands to publish 'Hello World!' to the web back then), caching solutions like Redis, data crunching pipelines like hadoop, payment processing like Dwolla...need I go on? There will always be folks hankering for the glory days of alt.religion.kibology and compuserve. Ignore them. Create something game-changing instead.

Re: The Web We Lost

#58

Post by brigade »

smacktoward wrote: post #50
groby_b wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, how soon they forget. Remember geocities? And before that, there were many fountains of ignorance to be found on Usenet (alt.* :), Archie, Gopher... It was in general a smaller community, and that kept the amount of drivel small, too. But it wasn't all as rosy as you seem to remember.

Yeah, when the 2000 Web was flourishing, all you heard about from the neckbeards was how the same people had killed Usenet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September To a certain degree every generation thinks the Net it grew up with is the Real Net, and the Net that came afterwards is a wasteland.

Are you arguing that the Eternal September effect doesn't exist? Because having been seen the effect first hand in no less than a dozen different online communities over the years, I can confidently say that it very much does exist.

But this is in regards to specific sites and communities; "The Net" has long since become too large to be considered a single community.

Re: The Web We Lost

#59

Post by motters »

netcan wrote: post #56
smacktoward wrote: post #4

I agree with Anil 110% that the Web he's talking about was, in many, many ways, a Better Web than the one we have today. The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had t…

" But to non-technical people, those losses aren't obvious " To most people, those losses aren't losses. You can't lose what you don't have. I don't think its just about techie vs non-techie people. There are plenty of people who could have posted photos online 15 years ago that didn't until more recently. Accessibility is one thing, a critical component. But, culture is another essential part. It's a component hoste…

The reason why people didn't post photos 15 years ago was that digital cameras barely existed back then. There was a revolution in photography in the early 2000s which made sites like Flickr possible.

Re: The Web We Lost

#60

Post by marcioaguiar »

kamjam wrote: post #35

Meh, I disagree with a lot of that. You speak as if the internet ONLY consists of social now. Your points are nostalgic and looking at the past through rose tinted glasses IMO. Five years ago, most social photos were uploaded to Flickr You can still do this. People choose not to. I don't want strangers viewing my social pictures, esp if I had kids. These are private moments to be shared with my friends. Ten years ago…

I completely agree with you. He's just nostalgic. We can do everything we did before and much more. The social aspect of the web seems very positive to me. Communities like reddit, twitter, kickstarter have real impacts on people life. If nobody wants to go chat on IRC anymore it was their option to do so.
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