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I Miss the Old Internet

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#81

Post by akiselev »

gfody wrote: post #79
superkuh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dis…

when comes time for your personal websites 15 minutes of fame it becomes inaccessible due to severe upstream bottlenecking

If that 15 minutes of fame is so important, put up a load balancer with autoscaling or make sure the Wayback machine archives every post upon publication.

Not every site needs to have 3+ nines of uptime.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#82

Post by dencodev »

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…

Shameless self plug but I did a simple site recently to this effect (though it is hosted on a free Heroku account):

http://iwillansweryouremails.com

I like that I'm not tracking anyone, it doesn't require UI/UX, I have little to nothing to gain from it - it's just a human connection. Something fun we might have seen in the early years of the internet.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#83

Post by lethologica »

esotericn wrote: post #28

It's all still there, the major search engines are just broken because they've been co-opted by SEO. Tons of people still own and operate their own websites; BBSes exist; IRC is still here; mailing lists are still here; and so on and so forth. You just won't find it on the top hit at Google because their business model is based on ad sales wankery. Whilst we're on the topic, I'm gonna take the chance to write - if yo…

>if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that

I once worked for an SEO agency and ended up quitting after 4 months. Everything about it went against my morals. I was disgusted with myself for pushing rubbish sites, snooping on peoples browsing behaviour, and working to squeeze every cent from it all through what I believed to be manipulative practices (despite it all being 'white hat')

Quitting that job was a major relief, though I'm haunted by the fact that there are thousands of other agencies and even more people willing to fill my previous role.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#84

Post by dencodev »

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…

I miss the "discussion" filter that Google used to have. For a while it still worked if you added a parameter to the URL. Now it's often difficult to impossible to search for stuff without 99% blog spam.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#85

Post by ImprovedSilence »

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…

So much this. Unfortunately post google reader I never found an rss reader that really clicked with me as much. Part of it is because I followed a mix of text and just pure image sites, and par of it is the sites come and go and I haven’t found new sites. RIP ffffound and the like...

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#86

Post by User23 »

solarkraft wrote: post #56
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…

> 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. Exclusivity makes things cool.

More precisely, as the sample size approaches the total population size, the mean of any trait in the sample approaches the mean of that trait in the total population.

Specifically, the subset of the population that was on the early Internet had much higher average cognitive ability and creativity than the total population. Now the two groups are virtually identical.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#87

Post by beckerdo »

Any good guide or recipes for hosting your own website over a major ISP (Spectrum, Comcast, etc.)? I currently host my site on GoDaddy, but I find simple things like providing https and certificate are a monthly recurring charge.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#88

Post by PinkMilkshake »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #53
vinylkey wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't use any javascript frontends. I'm struggling to find the connection between a Javascript front end and content that has (to quote the article posted) "the voice of individuals"

Because getting content on the web is only as difficult as people make it, and beneath all the bloat of "modern front end development practices" there is still a simple set of tools to work with.

Exactly. You can basically pick any subset of web technologies and just use those.

And honestly, when teaching the average person how to make a website, they should just be taught the minimum required to make a valid HTML document.

I think it's something like:

  
  My first webpage
  Hello, World!

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#89

Post by esotericn »

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.

A pitiful 10mbps, eh?

Back in my day...

That's your 100K image 10 times a second, or 600 times a minute.

You could also just like, run a caching server on a 5$ VPS.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet

#90

Post by sien »

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…

Exactly this.

It's much easier today for someone who isn't a technologist to go and set up a website on wordpress or whatever or create a podcast or do whatever they'd like. Or put up videos on Youtube. Not to mention being able to easily self-publish a book.

My RSS reader (inoreader) is full of things like that. Even inoreader itself is independent. Lots of the podcasts I listen to are like that too. Physical Attraction, The Internet History Podcast and all sorts of things are just set up by one person who wants to do it. A friend of mine who is a writer has an amazingly professional sounding podcast.

There is just so much more stuff out there that this can be swamped. Also people who do it well often get pulled into larger organisations and are less independent.

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