71–80 of 203 posts
I feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.
It even comes pre-packaged with a theme song.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions. And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
I respectfully respect the premise that the choices are "paper books" or "Youtube influencers", though I'll note we didn't have Gilbert Strang's 18.06 course back in 1999 either. I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.
[gestures wildly at all the bots in 2026]
Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions. Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
Fark is farking great! Though its old-school HTML doesn't flow so well on mobile. Can we get the best of 1999 with the best of 2026? Probably not...
I'm not opposed to the message but it perplexes me the amount of people who bemoan the loss of the "old web" and then use a web page comprised of massive modern frameworks to deliver said message.
How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past? This has been on my mind for a while. The layer of trash some companies have built over the internet has been ruinous.
I theorize it is going back to the protocol layer. The "web" for most people is a bunch of social media frontends.
I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.
Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.
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[1]: https://dap.sh
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I theorize it is going back to the protocol layer. The "web" for most people is a bunch of social media frontends.
Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I theorize it is going back to the protocol layer. The "web" for most people is a bunch of social media frontends.
Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to…
If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.