Those are some rose tinted glasses you must be wearing. All these animated gifs and visitor counters were not here to convey valuable information but rather to make the website more popular.

If people back then could've played full screen interactive video on page load, they would have. Look at how popular Flash became.

I too still use IRC (although a lot less than I used to). I don't think it's really about interesting people vs. "pop culture" though, it's more of a generational thing. I'm sure today's relevant coders are more likely to be found on Discord than IRC.

That's quite unfortunate I might add, Discord is a bloated, centralized, closed source mess. But what can you do, it is shinier.

> All these animated gifs and visitor counters were not here to convey valuable information but rather to make the website more popular.

One of my websites (for my first startup - an ISP) used a server side include that called out to ping the client IP to inline either a static image or one of several "big" - by 1997 standards - animated GIFs by guessing at the client bandwidth based on ping time (yes, it was a very rough heuristic, but it worked surprisingly well at the time), because we wanted to be able to serve up a fancy animated logo to those whose connection could handle it...

If we could have served up something fancier we certainly would have.

I don't know if you have tried using Discord for any signifiant amount of time, but I have and I didn't find it to be the expertise filled successor that I thought it would be. I've joined channels for programming languages and it's at best the blind leading the blind, like a Programming 101 class forum. At worst it's lots of people asking if they can ask, or if anybody knows the language, and then leaving forever before someone replies.

definitely depends on the server, I’ve had difficult time finding groups for certain lang’s. but Rust, React, TypeScript have super active great communities there

I think in general what’s difficult these days is bringing communities together - there’s too much noise and promotion, too many places for people to be. so you get the situation you mention above - a lot of unanswered questions in a discord server with a perpetual churn of users looking for a community that fits what they’re looking for.

feels like people are less willing to become a part of a community - forum, IRC, discord, whatever - these days either. but I have a feeling that’s because I’m more out of the loop... FB groups seem to constantly pop off

I think IRC still has in depth communication is due to the fact that there is a barrier to joining. All these apps are trying to be easy, without realizing there's sometimes something good with being hard.

Yeah IRC needs a few features discord has to get better. Problem is those few features require central hosting

Were I inclined to implicate anybody, it would be the advertisers and marketeers, who will always be ahead of the rest of us in terms of understanding how to command attention.

That, and eroom's law applied to increasing bandwidth.

I was one of the average people. I started surfing the web on the day that AOL made it possible for customers to do so, rather than keeping us in their walled garden. Yes, I picked up a CD with the new version at the supermarket.

I remember reading about, and almost grasping, the article about hypertext in Byte Magazine. The idea as presented was that the tags controlled the formatting of a page to some extent, but also allowed people to have customized readers, e.g., for the blind. And if someone composed their HTML well, you could usually read it in raw format with minimal difficulty.

My personal web page is still written in plain HTML on a text editor, and would stand a pretty good chance of being readable on a 1990s machine.

What the Web evolved into was more like (to my mind) a general purpose GUI framework, and with it came the explosion of GUI bloat and constant revision, that we also experience on the desktop today.

Since I was dialing in with a slow modem, I learned the setting in Netscape to disable displaying images unless I clicked on them. Most websites remained functional that way for a few years, at least until broadband arrived in most cities.

Of all the early internet, I do miss Usenet the most. So much of it worked because it was really managed by sysadmins - if someone was a problem, spamming or griefing - was to simply email the sysadmin where they were posting and the admin would usually block them from Usenet. As public internet as a utility became a thing, the bigger isps couldn't manage at that scale. There's more to it, but as the sysadmins lost control, usenet was overwhelmed by spam.

Yes and everyone who was anyone was on usenet at that time. Lines were short, apolitical and open. I really miss that.

In those days I still dialled up daily with UUCP just to get my mail and news :P

It really wasn't geeks and information (unless you talk about early early web).

Even in early 2000s lots of non geek boards with people just chillin. There were issues but less intense, less frequent, less invasive.

Early 2000 isn’t early web. By that point it had already been around for a decade, had been heavily commercialised and a lot of the fun independent portals were already starting to disappear. By early 2000 Yahoo! was already losing favour to Google and the MS buyout of Hotmail was already a distant memory. VRML2 had been and gone, XHTML was deprecated and FutureWave / Macromedia Flash was just about to move to it’s 3rd company, Adobe. By early 2000s the browsers wars had already been lost too Microsoft and the era of Internet Explorer.

There’s so much history that had already been and gone by 2000 that it’s a real stretch to argue the middle third of the web as it’s early period.

Yeah, early 2000s is Web 2.0. Upthread is talking more like mid-1990s when you could plausibly have a hand-curated directory of the interesting sites (which Yahoo did at scale of course but for a time I even maintained an internal home page that was links to the sites I was interested in).

maybe I got the date wrong but web 2.0 is ajax/myspace/fb

I was talking about the phpbb era

Myspace in 2003, O'Reilly coined read/write web at about the same time. The original iteration of Facebook was 2004. The Ajax book I have on my shelf is 2006. All this stuff started coming in as the industry was starting to pick itself up from the dot-com bubble bursting. phpBB was a little bit earlier with the first release at the end of 2000.

Ahhh the era of blahblah");drop table users; -- , and unencrypted unhashed password databases :+ I'm still amazed the internet didn't just blow up in those days. Strange enough that was sufficient security back then.

Because those were the days that you didn't trust a website enough to enter a credit card number. If you needed to give a credit card number you called a land line phone number listed on the page that took you to their sales department (or the one guy answering the phones who also worked as sales, tech support, and customer service).

That was true in the 90s but by the early 00s there were already a few online payment processors around. I remember using WorldPay a lot in around 2000 to 2004. PayPal came onto my radar shortly after, though even then I was aware it had been around for a while beforehand.

I vaguely recall there was another service like WorldPay, and possibly named similarly too, around that time.

I’ve been running websites since 1994 as well as a keen record collector in the early 00s so used to do a lot of transactions online. I can’t really remember how I payed for stuff online in the 90s, which leaves me wondering if it was all via phone. But I definitely remember using WorldPay sometime around 2000 as I recall being frustrated by the lengthy process (lots of questions, which in hindsight I should have been pleased they did thorough checks).

That's the issue today. Everything is serious. Old web wasn't about security and payment :)

Absolutely.

Keywords I remember (?) from a developer perspective:

- basecamp (product from 37 signals, now Basecamp)

- prototype and scriptaculous

- tags, "folksonomy"

- later: gmail

And with gmail, don't be evil. Lol were we fooled.

Explains a whole lot of the the anti-Google sentiment here.

I think a lot of us thought for once we had a smart, nice, funny tech giant and they just had to prove us wrong.

We now

- don't have any really good search engine anymore, no Reader, no Desktop Search, no Google+. It seems Google after 2009 is incapable of maintaining what they once built.

- Google long ago abandoned the idea of not being evil

- and even Microsoft is wittier and more playful in their messaging at the moment

So why am I writing this? Because I hope they will change their ways or that someone else will pick up the really nice niche they left behind:

- to find results for the things I actually ask for. (A bonus would be if they or whatever replaces them also implements the ~ operator for "something like".)

> I am really mourning about usenet. It was dying but still kicking, then google destroyed it with google groups.

There's this website https://www.usenetarchives.com/ providing an alternative, recently seen it on Hacker News.

It’s not “average people”s fault. We’re not that special. The underlying problem is the ad industry if you ask me.

Early adopters are special.

The ad industry just optimizes for what companies want to promote and what consumers pay attention to.

Even the parts of the Internet without ads are different these days.

I disagree. "Eternal September" is a well known phenomenon that results in significantly degraded quality.

People talk about "Eternal September" in regards to the web as if to imply that all of the cool, interesting smart people were on the web in the early 1990s, and that the culture of the internet rightly belonged to those people alone, and that everyone who joined afterwards were part of the web's degradation and downfall. It's typical for people to draw an imaginary line in the sand of cultures or subcultures they care about and believe that everything that came before them was better than everything that came after.

They're right in a particularly narrow-minded way that only considers the "modern web" to be the public feed on Reddit and the worst parts of Twitter, and corporate sites and the effect of SEO. But it's also the case that the quality of content on the modern web far surpasses that of the early web because so many more people, representing a greater diversity of cultures and ideas, are on it and able to express themselves.

So if that's "Eternal September" then I think it can be argued that it was as much evolution as devolution.

> "People talk about 'Eternal September' as if to imply ... that the culture of the internet rightly belonged to those people alone, and that everyone who joined afterwards were part of the web's degradation and downfall".

Yes, that is exactly correct. The people who made the web, and built a beautiful space were the 'rightful owners'. A few outsize capitalists then saw that they could extract value from this made world -- and make themselves rich -- by encouraging and enabling colonization of that once peaceable space. It was a form of cultural theft and appropriation -- indirect through corporate marketing and lawyers.

If we follow the argument of 'diversity everywhere', no culture could be any culture anywhere because it would "lack diversity". One grey world is not a win.

The existing pre-93 culture was wholly supplanted and destroyed by the "new and improved" "higher quality" culture that replaced it. Of course, that estimation of 'better' and 'higher' is evaluate from the mindset of the colonizers -- not at all from the perspective of whomever came before.

Moreover, its not just the corporate profiteering -- that just opened the door for all of the colonizers. It is all of the self righteous fake "representative" identity virtue signaling that goes with it. Capitalism and wall street corporate profits enabled an entire world of trolls -- who then use the claim of colonization on others to hide their own prior actions in kind. And this is an improvement?

I think the line in the sand that a lot of people draw is when the web went from requiring skills to access vs being made easy for most people.

It's the commercialized Internet's reaction to a large number of "average people" who want things and would rather pay with their attention than with cash.

No, paying with money is subject to AML/KYC while paying with attention is exempt. Lower friction. This is why micropayments-with-money hasn't taken off while micropayments-with-attention has exploded.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24006703

I don’t think there’s anything preventing anyone from setting up a usenet similar service? As long as the barrier to entry is high enough it’ll keep out all the average people.

why would you need a usenet similar service? usenet still exists and the barrier is, as you say, high enough.

that’s revisionist. usenet was already dead. google extended its life, in fact.