something definitely went wrong, imo.

when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest.

now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct.

Yes, this is a common topic between my girlfriend and me. Internet as we know it (we grew up in the 2000s with MSN, forums, etc) doesnt exist anymore.

First (at least for us, for other people there would be another "first") were the basic webpages done in Frontpage or Dreamweaver (if you had enough RAM), uploaded to free webservers like Tripod, Lycos, Geocities, copying and pasting scripts found out there to remove popups and iframes, reading Photoshop tutorials to do some effects or gifs animations. Everything were more crafted, it took more time to do these kind of things (now everything is an app or a drag and drop).

Then came the second version of the internet. Everything was a bit "more pro" - even amateur fansites payed for their hosting, they had forums, online chats, etc. The open source community allowed this. From Wordpress with its themes to phpBB2 forums, vBulletin, etc. Oh, I miss those days.

Then slowly all of that was lost. Nowadays we only have social accounts for things. Fansites? Only accounts on Twitter, INstagram, YouTuber. Ask an INfluencer if they have their own website. What for? Everything is centralized.

My dad, who started using a smartphone just 2 or 3 years ago, doesn't fully understand what the internet is. For him, it's just a set of apps (Whatsapp, Facebook, and the website of his fav newspaper). Outside that he doesn't understand there is (or there was) a full world of websites with a lot of contents.

It makes me sad because "the original internet" will be never be like what we experienced. I don't know who to blame for, tho. If I were in the shoes of Facebook or Twitter's founders I would have done the same. But they definitely have eaten all the webpages around them.

People still run blogs. People still run their own forums. Nothing is "lost", there is just a whole lot of new things that apparently don't interest you as much.

Personally, I can't really say that I miss any of the sites designed like they were in the 90s, with their ever-rotating GIFs, Flash-based intro pages, "Designed for Netscape" badges.

And does an influencer need to have his/her own website? Not more than an ad needs its own website.

The "original Internet" is still there, and I dare say more people are using it than back in the 90s. It's just that a lot more people are also using the newer stuff that you don't like.

And that's fine.

I think maybe they're bemoaning the dichotomy between increased access and apparent decreased use of the internet for creation of content by ordinary users -- or at least content that's not being exploited for advertising/marketing?

I'd warrant a tiny fraction of users have their own blogs now compared to a decade ago?

But that was apparent from the get-go. Most people just want to consume. In the early years, "going online" already took some effort or knowledge - only as it became gradually easier did the large swathes of consumers join.

If you lived through Eternal September, you kind of knew this was coming.

But again, just because plenty of people consume, and plenty of companies cater mostly to the consumers, doesn't mean there isn't another world out there for those who look.

I've been thinking about this even more recently, specifically in the context of online portals for Flash content (games, movies, web comics etc). My conclusion is that there has been a loss, and it's largely related to reason for creation. Everything is now so product and marketing focused that creation for creation's sake makes the end result different.

E.g. if you were to search "pug lovers" two decades ago, you might find blogs posts about pugs, people's personal sites filled with images and stories of their own pugs, a small community pug-loving, pug-adopting as its own forum.

Now the first page of Google for "pug lovers" shows: a Facebook page, an Amazon page, a Pinterest page, two Etsy pages, two bespoke (catering towards dogs) storefronts, and one cute site (http://pugdogclub.org.uk/gallery/pug-lovers/).

There's no objective better or worse - people want the things all the new top results provide - but I know which era of results I prefer.

Try “pug lovers” with Safe Search turned off.

> there is just a whole lot of new things that apparently doesn't interest you as much.

Or these new things interest them more and they don't like it. Like a frustrating addiction.

On a related sidenote, I wish a good bookmark sharing service existed. Del.li.cious used to be amazing and useful.

What you are describing is dilution of users who are not technical at all.

The people creating content, stupid simple websites, blogs, catalogs or very niche websites are still there, it's just not that obvious that they are there.

AOL was the internet for some people (and maybe still is!).

It's just capitalism, put a fence around something, sell access, keep people ignorant of what they're missing.

It's impossible for things to stay good under unrestrained capitalism because there's always some [even very minor] deleterious action that can be exploited for profit (financial or control). Those actions tend to proliferate and cascade.

Your posting this on a website that is pretty much exclusively links to other websites, "hey I made this" stuff, and people talking about their hobbies.

I think it went /okay/.

HN is pretty niche. In some countries like the phillipines, most internet users stay on Facebook for almost their entire session. Even so their internet is filtered through Facebook Basics (and one could make the argument our internet is filtered through google).

Even when looking at reddit in the western world, most people don't click the links, they stay on reddit.

I would say we did get something wrong by not regulating enough and allowing companies to monopolize the internet and further to act as private intelligence agencies with no legal liability for the data stored.

I take issue with the author mentioning blockchain though. Im not going to derail the thread but everyone should look into datproject as the future: https://blog.datproject.org/2018/01/16/dat-privacy-models/

I would say that the people who today only consume, and stay on single sites (eg not clicking the links on reddit) would simply not have cared about the internet if it had been the way you suggest.

Whether that would be a good or a bad thing is up for discussion, of course :-)

But in the "good old days" the entire WWW was pretty niche, wasn't it?

However, we could also call this a dedicated bookmarking app with discussion threads appended to it. This is certainly a special case (and also somewhat of an endangered species.) For "normal" websites, there are only few left that consider themselves as part of a bigger web, in which they are constituting yet another node (trying to make this web as a whole worthwhile).

Sure. And you could find a name like that for pretty much every website in existence in the 90's.

I strongly disagree that it's a special case, and I strongly disagree that there are only few websites left that feel like part of a bigger something. I think you are romanticizing the past (as most people do with most things they remember from their youth - remember when kids' TV shows were actually good?).

There's definitely a difference. In what may appear here as "the good old days", authors usually showed their authority on a subject by frequently linking to other sources they would consider interesting in context, thus contributing to knitting the web. (Edit: It was this very phenomenon, which provided the base for the Page rank.) Personally, I see this rarely nowadays. Also, the entire idea of adding "something amazing" to the web, another sight to see and visit, has become a rare affair. Surfing is somewhat a thing of the past.

Out of curiosity, what period are you referring to as the "good old days"? Must be prior to, say, 1993-1994?

I also remember these days as the days where we had to be very, very nice to other people and play by their rules (universities, free hosters, ...) in order to get something published online. Domain names were expensive. $5 cloud hosting? I don't think so.

I mean, I get what you mean - but I simply cannot agree.

I'd say, "surfing" became a popular buzz-word around 1997/98?

Edit: Regarding availability of webspace, back then some for personal use usually came with an e-mail account for free (but you usually had to pay for this e-mail account, as free e-mail wasn't yet normal.) And, you could find full-fledged dedicated web-space for about $5/month. (Personally, I have been working for/with ISPs since 1996 and am hosting a personal website since 1999, before this using free webspace, which was provided either by the university or the employer.)

Edit #2: Who remembers tilde-addresses (www.domain.com/~<account>/)? – These were usually free webspace.

>This is certainly a special case (and also somewhat of an endangered species.)

I'm not so sure about that. This site isn't that different from stuff like reddit or tumblr at it's heart, even if the level of discussion/quality of posts is higher. If you distilled these types of sites even further, it's really not all that different from social media like facebook or instagram. The only difference is the type of content shared and the fact that facebook and instagram are usually used with you being "yourself" rather than just a username. Then again, enough people on hackernews link their profiles to their own personal websites/linkedins/etc. that even that distinction isn't so sharp.

There's an entire category of web-applications derived from the original forum idea. However, I'd say, while fora were once a frequent thing (and, considering Steward Brand's the WELL or FirstClass, maybe the original internet application), they've become rather rare and there are only just a few "community watering holes" left.

P.S.: Here's an exemplary link to what was once the major FirstClass node in my country, which first migrated to the web and then became obsolescenced [is this a word?] by Facebook (the tagline reads "forum for politics and society", operational 11.11.1992 - 1.12.2012): http://blackbox.at

The last two items in your list were already a thing on usenet.

Sure. Most things happening here also happened back in the days. That was not my point though ;-)

I always find it interesting that different people view the golden age of the internet as happening at a different time.

Some say the 2000s. For me it was the late 90s. For others, "eternal september" marked the end of the golden age - 1993. And I'm sure the current crop of children will say it was the 2010s.

I think the only common thread here is that the internet changes. And people don't like change. What is new is bad, what was old was good.

Maybe it was all part of the golden age and people just remember the specific year that they started using it? 20 years of a free internet for the masses was not a very long period of time.

For each person, it seems to be the first few years of using the internet for the first time in their lives.

> we don't even link to other websites anymore.

Meaning, there is no WWW anymore. (Just a bunch of isolated load-on-demand apps distributed by a network.)

Edit: Is this why Google Chrome is hiding the "www." sub-domain prefix, because it doesn't apply anymore? ;-)

Google is a driving force behind the destruction of the web. They like the content they do not like the links. The best way for the web to develop from Googles point of view is if we all consume just the content that Google forwards us to without horizontal bridges between pages. So that's why you will see Google push to reduce the importance of URLs and why Google will - shamelessly - lift content of other websites and display it as their own as the result of a query on the results page rather than to link to the site that they took the content from to begin with.

> They like the content they do not like the links.

I'm not disagreeing with your appraisal - in fact I probably agree with it - but I do find it deeply and painfully ironic to read, given the entire foundation of Google's being - PageRank - is based on analyses of the web of other people's links.

It seems like the parasite doesn't realise the damage it's causing the host.

This phenomenon has been discussed to some degree; here's an article about the changing web and who benefits from it and what we've lost in the process:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/social-networks-apps-killing-o...

> we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct.

I've felt this too. Example: I made a pointless little humor website that got mentioned on HN once. I got a bunch of nice replies, and a few thousand visits that day. Since that day, none. Zero other than robots, literally.

I'm not complaining that it didn't go viral, I'm saying, in the old days, a brief spurt of popularity translated into a trickle of ongoing traffic, because people shared links to sites in a way they don't really do now. Links pages don't exist anymore (unless they're SEO spam). Slashdot and boingboing are just news now. A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet used to be a valuable thing, and now it isn't.

Alternate explanation: the competition is better now.

In the early days of the web if you put some time into making a funny site there just weren't all that many other funny things to link to. You were one in 1k or in 10k. But now there are so many other options, many of which publish new funny things every day, that you're one in 100k or in 1M.

A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet it still a valuable thing (and more or less the premise of HN, Reddit, etc) but the bar is higher.

(This is a good thing!)

You've misunderstood. I'm not saying "my site is so awesome that you should be surprised no one goes to it!". The thing I'm saying is surprising is the disparity between the reaction on day 1 and on day N.

I know it sounds like I'm whining, I'm really not. All I can say is, if you weren't there, it's hard to describe how much "I found a neat site" was part of the currency of social interaction online twenty years ago. To get a dozen positive comments and emails but no shares or links was just not a thing that happened. People shared the urls to weird/funny/awesome things the way they share memes today. And I guess that change is not surprising - memes don't have ads, don't have google analytics, don't beg to put you on a mailing list, etc.

Maybe this was a more novel thing to discover 15-20 years ago? Perhaps it is people and their opinions that have changed?

Don't blame the tool, blame the user.

It's true that very often people only start things thinking about easy to dream benefits, and rarely about the systemic implications.