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Resurrect the Old Web

stevedylandev.bearblog.dev

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Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#71

Post by gjsman-1000 »

nativeit wrote: post #67
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alternat…

Proprietary platform solve all the problems you cite for exactly as long as it remains profitable to do so, and not a nanosecond longer. Once you’ve been captured, say goodbye to every one of those things.

That's not new; it's been happening all the way back since AOL. AOL was basically an abstraction layer over the whole internet that we tolerated (remember when every show had both a URL and an AOL keyword?), but it broke like anything can.

For that matter, your maxim also applies to the open internet, and watch what's happening. It's not profitable, so sites are packing up.

In a nutshell, content costs money. People make content anticipating money. Doesn't matter if it's on Discord, on YouTube, or a private blog. No money, no investment.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#72

Post by mallowdram »

wiether wrote: post #62
HermanMartinus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creator of Bear here. Suggesting that because one project fails, others will too is a bit of a fallacy. Fact is that whether you self-host or not, you're still using someone else's platform (unless you're a real self-hoster with a box in your closet, in which case, good on you and godspeed). I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to backup and migrate, that's fair. Additionally, part of the appeal o…

Thank you for taking your time to reply to my comment. I want to clarify one thing first: I don't have anything special against your platform, it's just that it seems I see at least one article a week about it on HN lastly and I'm wondering why. I'm sure you are well intentionned and you'll do your best to keep the plaftorm as true to the mission you have chosen to take and described in your manifesto, no doubt about…

Tech is stuck behind the symbolic threshold. We're at the point we use the symbolic, which is arbitrary, for literally everything as a substitute, mimic, representation that's in reality. Eventually the symbolic eats itself alive in arbitrariness and society capitalizing on that arbitrariness. This is basic stuff CS doesn't make itself aware of.

We're at the end of communication in this symbolic era. You can see it in politics, climate policy, fiscal policy, trade policy, media, everything is at an end-point or a breaking point.

So lacking an awareness of the end-game for the symbolic, we retreat to an easier, earlier state, which is nostalgic. But its nostalgia for a system already on the way out.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#73

Post by Fluorescence »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #35
onion2k wrote: post #4

No ads I don't know what "Old Web" the author is remembering but when I was first paid to make a website in 1997, it had banner ads on it.

It's like the nostalgia about the "Summer of Love" and the 1960's... it really only lasted a single summer and only in one or two little areas. Same thing with the "old web." It was about the very early 90s before Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic days) and when everyone was just throwing up a single HTML page with a bunch of links... that's the "old web". The modern WWW kicked off with the ability to make credit card t…

> it really only lasted a single summer

"The Summer of Love" literally refers to one summer in 1967 not the whole of 60's counter-culture. Even Woodstock was in '69.

In terms of the various cultural strands then of course they lasted longer with many roots in 50's beatnick culture (bohemianism, poetry, LSD, Buddhism) to today where bands that played Monterey '67 and Woodstock are still touring and a "definitely not a hippy" in San Francisco might live in a polycule, micro-dose psychedelics while using a meditation app before writing a blog about effective altruism.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#75

Post by 1dom »

corytheboyd wrote: post #63
st_goliath wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, I have read novels. I don’t think blog posts and novels compare at all.

I can't downvote, but this comment feels a little rude or standoffish towards someone who read what you wrote, thought about it, and gave a response.

You said you didn't care for 1000 words that someone wrote about their trip abroad, and that's clearly an example to illustrate something, but it's not clear what, because it's contrived and falls apart easily: nobody else really read those blogs either, people read blogs from people and topics they're interested in.

So what about 1000 word blog from an a single individual that does interest you? Or more than 1000 words from a single individual on a different topic, like a novel?

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#76

Post by klez »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #39
maxrecursion wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are amazing retro games that are still awesome to play to this day. To say they all suck, and it's just nostalgia is not true at all. Sure, a lot of them suck, especially on Nintendo 64, because of the 3d transition, but from the NES onward there are timeless classics. My kid beat super Metroid several times, he decided to play it on his own on his switch, and he loved it. He plays the old pokemon games too. In…

You're choosing the top 10 games on the Nintendo 64 and NES to make your analogy; out of the thousands and thousands of games produced for those systems. Give your kid game #50 (Waialae Country Club: True Golf Classics on N64) and see if she would prefer it over literally any modern game that ranks on Steam. My analogy holds.

Why would you compare "any modern game that ranks on Steam" with random games from the era?

You said

> It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually."

I actually tried re-playing PS games I remember enjoying, and I still enjoy them.

I see what you mean about the fact that people look at old stuff with rose-tinted glasses, but really some things did age well (including parts of the early web).

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#77

Post by pif »

lunias wrote: post #59

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…

> 8080

You mean 80. Ports after 1024 were for wimps.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#78

Post by armchairhacker »

nativeit wrote: post #70
armchairhacker wrote: post #64

I, too, felt the old web was much more creative and limitless. But to be blunt, these attempts to resurrect it feel like the opposite: another collection of 90s-style HTML and artwork about generic "old web" stuff (or about the old web itself, which makes no sense - you don't hear people today reminiscing about 2025). I think a big problem is desensitization. When I was young, MSPaint art looked good, bitcrushed musi…

Not for nothing, the last time I checked the most popular indie games on steam are all intentionally made to look vaguely 8-bit (really prob more like 64-bit, but lofi retro).

Sometimes for nostalgia, but I think that’s usually because it’s easier to make decent graphics if they’re 2D and low resolution. You don’t see many games with the low-quality Flash style, pixelation happens to be less “ugly”.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#79

Post by root_axis »

A post like this makes the rounds every few months on HN. What posts like this neglect to consider is that the overwhelming majority of people who use social media apps didn't use the internet during the "old" era. The reality is, this is nerd nostalgia that nobody cares about or wants besides a sub-population of nerds. The masses don't care about blogs, rss, or small networks. The internet grew because the social media and internet companies invested billions in bringing the masses online via these shiny addictive platforms - the "old web" is never going to appeal to them - it is a relic of the past.

Re: Resurrect the Old Web

#80

Post by CapsAdmin »

2THFairy wrote: post #18
onion2k wrote: post #4

No ads I don't know what "Old Web" the author is remembering but when I was first paid to make a website in 1997, it had banner ads on it.

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…

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 and content feels entangled.

It's a bit like visiting a touristic area. It can feel like everything is trying to grab your attention to sell something and merchants become untrustworthy.

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