The Return of the 90s Web

Re:The Return of the 90s Web by julianeon on Thursday June 18, 2020 @06:13PM (#23568716)

I had just started college and I remember going to the computer lab and clicking around for hours at a time, at night. Just going from blog to blog, reading interesting stuff. You didn't have to have a particular goal in mind - one blog would lead to another interesting blog would lead to another one, endlessly. They would all be engagingly written, to a high standard of quality.

Like you, I know things have changed, but I still can't imagine I could do that today, going from blog to blog, without running low on material within ~60 minutes.

EDIT: I see the webring links here now, I may try them.

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Re:The Return of the 90s Web by gen220 on Thursday June 18, 2020 @08:57PM (#23569906)

I came of age in the early 2000s, and Wikipedia was this for me. Eventually, it ran out of meaningful depth to me and in college I hopped to surfing books. You can surf on books til the end of time.

I think hypertext as a medium has a lot going for it that books don’t, but I don’t think we’ve figured out distribution, quality control, and discovery sufficiently to make the internet so stimulatingly surfable.

There was a period of time a few centuries ago when adults looked at kids reading romance novels the way that adults today look at kids scrolling through TikTok. I think all mediums go through cycles.

On the other side (when the wild internet’s commercial viability wanes, and people can no longer make easy money hosting mediocre terrible, SEO-driven drivel), I think a lot of the good content will survive the great filter, and that’s when we’ll be able to appreciate it for what it is/was. The next 20 years might be rough, but the work of this generations’ Dickenses and Pushkins and Gogols will survive.

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