- people doing things for non-commercial reasons

- people trying brand new formats instead of filling in templates

- curated hierarchy, rather than every site feeling like querying a database

- weird people doing weird stuff

- visitor counters

> - visitor counters

I've kept those alive at w3counter.com since 2004 (before Google acquired Urchin and turned it into Google Analytics). It's not exactly an in-demand feature so I don't think it's even mentioned on the homepage, but after signing up, you can choose from a couple dozen counter styles, or the standard invisible tracking tag. Been working on redoing that site to re-launch it as a cookieless, zero-personal-data tracker later this year.

Actually I still host https://www.websitegoodies.com/ which I originally made in 1999, and that has a simple hit counter service too. So there are some counters I've been hosting for over 20 years.

I loved watching those numbers go up between visits! As a kid, I would naively think: "This many new people experienced this as well". Of course thinking back, many of those could have been repeat visitors, but it's still so cool to think about.

I remember being so ridiculously proud of myself when I realised I could make a cgi script to write each visitors IP to a text file then on each new visit collate that text file to display a counter of “unique visitors”, then display it next to a normal “hit counter”.. I thought I’d invented the idea of tracking unique-vs-visits. Then I got a job as a web dev for a big(ish) local company and realised every major website was already doing this and just not displaying it.

Wow, I haven’t heard the name urchin in a long time. For the longest time my favorite coffee shop had an urchin sticker on their tip jar. I wonder if it’s still there.

Oh damn, you just made me realize how much I miss hierarchies. When I used to go to a site everything was organized by topic instead of being a chronological stream of consciousness. You could open a gadget review site and see every review they did of a Sony product or a Palm product and know you hadn't missed anything. Now you have to type a word into their search bar and sort through a giant list of both relevant and irrelevant pages.

I think there is an enormous opportunity here. If there were a web search service that prioritized your first four points I would use it, and I suspect a very large number of others would as well. It's going to be a little more tricky to turn this into a business, because you'll be selecting for users who are allergic to websites doing things for commercial reasons, but perhaps there is a way.

One can dream.

I agree that the opportunity is there, but it doesn't seem like the VC wants to fund efforts in that direction. There are all sorts of ways to make social media better as well, but the VC doesn't want to fund that either.

Perhaps because in both cases, after some immediate improvement, the jobs get a lot harder as people fight back to bring their crap back to the top of the heap, but it sure would be nice if they had a corporate motto like "Cut the crap!" IMO...

While we're dreaming, the ultimate solution is an artificially intelligent agent that stands between you and the internet and can be instructed to pick out what you like and show it to you. It would ideally serve a variety of different types of users.

The current system basically amounts to loading code from remote servers and running it on your device in a leaky little sandbox, so it's a natural next layer of protection.

Maxthon2 could open search results in tabs. Like an upscaled version of the dial up days, one would open a bunch of tabs and let them load. I had it configured to open the first 100 results. It would somewhat prioritize the first page so that you could look at it while page 2 loaded. Eventually it was far ahead loading pages and one could tab though them (mouse gestures) and they would pop up as fast as desktop applications [use to be] There was a different gesture for next page and for close current + next page. I wrote a bunch of plugins [they were called] that are like browser extensions (without any security) They allowed selecting a sniplet of text on a page before making the next gesture. After eliminating the uninteresting pages I could export the remaining tabs (in that window) as a html sniplet with titles as links and the sniplets under them. It upgraded blog posts into pages people could spend hours or even days on.

I remember spending the better part of 15 min making a huge posts about UFO's (by repeating above process with various search queries) without reading much of anything and got comments from people who wondered why I spend so much time gathering all that "information". If I had to make that post using today's tools it would indeed take weeks.

You can find this on neocities https://neocities.org/browse

There are still some webrings out there. You can find them in the link section of some neocities websites. There is a link to one of them on my old-internet-style website (see my HN profile).

I love the old internet but this is not what people want anymore. I have to admit I rarely spend time on neocities despite my initial enthusiasm.

> - people doing things for non-commercial reasons

> - weird people doing weird stuff

There is more of both of these now than there ever was back in the 1990s. The modern internet is a utopia of interesting people doing interesting things for passion (even among people who also get paid - those things aren't mutually exclusive.)

The problem is too many people have become jaded hipsters who dismiss anything not in hand-written HTML on a personal domain as 'inauthentic.' Like, your old Metallica fanpage with the flame gifs and badly tiled background image wasn't exactly the pinnacle of art and expression.

Hacker News is a phenomenal source of hatred for using modern browser features and standards. Any amount of javascript is defined as bloat and should be strictly optional eye candy - completely disregarding the fact that UI and state management frameworks like React have made developing the sort of advanced applications we demand exceptionally easy.

Does a personal blog need React or Vue? No, and my blog is made by a static site generator (Hugo, specifically). Do most web applications built nowadays need them? Almost 100% of the time for non-trivial applications, yes. You can do it without any JS, but with that same ideology you can also write your desktop applications in x86 assembly.

Im 29, never used myspace, really had access to the internet in 2011 & Im still suspect of how much utter crap web dev is deteriorating into.

> completely disregarding the fact that UI and state management frameworks like React have made developing the sort of advanced applications we demand exceptionally easy.

Till this day, no one has given me a straight answer on why they choose react beyond the dubious claims of performance++. Or even why build a web app to begin with. Nor have the users been asked if they want native-like apps on the browser.

I complain but I use react everyday on a web app Im sure no one cares if it loads 400ms faster than a server rendered jinja template.

Now we have massive overhead, npm libraries for everything and only god knows whats going on in the node modules folder, keeping up with the joneses by using Typescript - why use typescript when Java or C# do static typing so well? I can't ask silly plebian questions like that. we are modern is translated to yarn install everything and use VScode and dont forget the babel plugins. Can you imagine being looked down on for preferring plain javascript, the thing that Typescript compiles to, as being archaic?

I'm no old timer but that's some crazy shit.

I'm 37, it really wasn't ever any better. I just don't get the sense of nostalgia people have for the "old web." When I think about it, I remember all the ugly toxicity it all was absolutely plagued with. Software bugs were just as bad if not worse, and platforms were just absolutely silly with nonsense you had to put up with. Just to talk shit to someone who probably didn't deserve it because they did to you all because there wasn't much better to do.

There's very little about my past I would go back to.

> Till this day, no one has given me a straight answer on why they choose react beyond the dubious claims of performance++. Or even why build a web app to begin with. Nor have the users been asked if they want native-like apps on the browser.

The main reason is cross platform compatibility for things that don't need to make system calls. Ultimately I would prefer to distribute statically linked Go binaries that are command line applications, but if I was asked all "UI" would be a REST API with a manual. The market finds web applications are successful and lower the barrier of entry, and so they're made.

> I complain but I use react everyday on a web app Im sure no one cares if it loads 400ms faster than a server rendered jinja template.

With NextJS and server side rendering + static optimization I find that time to first (contentful) paint is the same or faster than Jinja without me having to configure a thing.

> Now we have massive overhead, npm libraries for everything and only god knows whats going on in the node modules folder

npm/yarn provides a pretty good developer experience but the way it accomplishes that is a touch horrifying, I agree. Babel and Webpack I find bring it most of the bloat, which is probably a good thing as you're not shipping those dependencies in production bundles. It definitely chews up storage space on the local machine though.

> keeping up with the joneses by using Typescript - why use typescript when Java or C# do static typing so well? I can't ask silly plebian questions like that.

Just to get out in front of it - I do not like Typescript. I find Typescript to be a waste of time. JS's type system is broken as hell, but in just the right way for web development. It makes it flexible and easy to write. With Typescript I feel like I spend most of my time making the compiler happy instead of generating any value for the business or myself.

> Do most web applications built nowadays need them? Almost 100% of the time for non-trivial applications, yes. You can do it without any JS, but with that same ideology you can also write your desktop applications in x86 assembly.

I would love to see a clear explanation of why this is viewed as true. I've seen this stated many times, but generally in a way that seems framed to an audience already inclined to accept it as true. I've never seen an explanation of this written and framed for people who wrote such applications before things like React or Vue existed, and genuinely don't understand (and want to) why the model they present is viewed as so much simpler.

I've genuinely looked for this, and I've found only either presentations of "here's how it works, doesn't this seem better?" (to which the answer always seems like "no"), or exhortations about how CSS and to some extent HTML are obsolete constructs except as tools to be manipulated by JavaScript.

> I would love to see a clear explanation of why this is viewed as true. I've seen this stated many times, but generally in a way that seems framed to an audience already inclined to accept it as true.

To the credit of those that are skeptical, it is really difficult to explain exactly how much more productive it is without having experienced something it. The closest comparison I can make is how SCSS feels coming from plain CSS - it's like all of the things that you wish were easy are suddenly easy, while still being based off of something that you are familiar and already productive with. For people coming from traditional web development, I find that Svelte is the most comfortable tool for them to learn.

> I've never seen an explanation of this written and framed for people who wrote such applications before things like React or Vue existed, and genuinely don't understand (and want to) why the model they present is viewed as so much simpler.

I wrote such applications before React and Vue existed. I don't think I could ever go back. I would not describe it as a simpler model however - you're effectively writing two applications that communicate together to make one. The benefits you get for that are beyond worth it in my opinion. Assuming that you're using NextJS or something else that removes all of the boilerplate configuration, almost all of that complexity is hidden from you unless you need to modify it.

I don't know if I would be able to do very well explaining it myself, but generally - it allows for a more clean separation between systems. My backend exposes an API that my frontend can communicate with over background HTTP requests. I can swap out that backend on a whim (from Django to Rails to Express to Gin to...you get the picture) as long as it exposes the same API. With traditional web applications, I'd have to port over my templates and structure and state management system.

Most people don't switch backend frameworks on a daily basis though, I know I certainly don't. Some of the things that I enjoy are:

- Easier temporary messages/error handling (flash messages handle a limited version of this in traditional SSR environments) - Greater control of how my data is structured and posted (forms are simple enough once you learn them, but having your data structure dictated by DOM structure is less clean in my opinion) - Handling more complicated state is much easier - making a wizard interface with dynamically added and removed sections/questions doesn't need a large series of separate templates - Component structure is just better to work with than template structure (expanded upon below)

The real selling point for me is removing templating languages from your templates. I don't have to worry about what Jinja considers to be an acceptable replacement for control flow, I'm using a language that I already know and is fully integrated with the entire rest of the environment.

> I've genuinely looked for this, and I've found only either presentations of "here's how it works, doesn't this seem better?" (to which the answer always seems like "no")

Generally speaking, the larger and more complex your business requirements are, the more easily you can justify using an SPA framework. Every presentation I've found on that gives only trivial examples, likely for brevity.

> or exhortations about how CSS and to some extent HTML are obsolete constructs except as tools to be manipulated by JavaScript.

I believe that idea is part of the "make everything JS!" cargo cult. For apps that have very simple interactions, I use plain HTML+CSS and no JS. Use the right tool for the job, and all that. With that same mindset however, I'd be very hard pressed to say that there is no place or justification for the Reacts and Vues and Angulars of the world.

> For people coming from traditional web development, I find that Svelte is the most comfortable tool for them to learn.

That's a helpful endorsement, thank you. I'd found Svelte, and it did look promising and more comfortable.

> I would not describe it as a simpler model however - you're effectively writing two applications that communicate together to make one. The benefits you get for that are beyond worth it in my opinion.

> I don't know if I would be able to do very well explaining it myself, but generally - it allows for a more clean separation between systems. My backend exposes an API that my frontend can communicate with over background HTTP requests.

That's a much better explanation than anything I'd seen before. Every description I'd seen before holds up React and Vue as simpler or easier than traditional web development, and that didn't seem at all accurate. The potential architectural advantage, at a cost of simplicity, makes much more sense.

(I do rather like statically compiled type-safe templates, but at that point, that's a separate question of preferred development language.)

> - Component structure is just better to work with than template structure (expanded upon below)

That's one of the clearest advantages I've previously recognized. The idea of putting the HTML and CSS and JavaScript for a component in one place, and combining that with other components, makes perfect sense to me.

Frankly, the fact that we use frameworks which could provide JS-free options at little to no cost to the downstream developer but don't is more condemnation than anything else I can think of.

> have made developing the sort of advanced applications we demand exceptionally easy

Yes, it's only moderately more difficult than making it in a native app would be, and only significantly more bloated.

No, they're complaining about unwarranted complexity, privacy invasion, and monopolies, in the best tradition of "hackers". The web was a means of really easy self-publishing; we didn't need yet another shitty app platform or had a desire to serve the needs of the likes of CompuServe, AOL, etc because that already existed long before the web.

> that same ideology you can also write your desktop applications in x86 assembly

Coding a desktop application in assembly would be more work than in a high-level language, not less. The criticism against using frameworks such as React where they aren't needed is that it is a lot more work and that the end result is more complex than necessary. It is quite obvious that resume driven development is a thing.

> Hacker News is a phenomenal source of hatred for using modern browser features and standards.

Complaining about JavaScript is mere table stakes! The true path of "the modern web is ruined" discourse on HN starts with complaining about webfonts, and progresses to laments about any styling whatsoever and "why should designers have any say in how a web page on my computer looks." It's pretty hard to top "images were a mistake," but you get extra points in the lightning round if you work in a reference to Ted Nelson.

IPV6 was a colossal mistake, with its 128 bit host addresses.

But IPV4 was also a huge mistake, with its 64 bit host addresses.

We should have stuck with NCP, with its 8 bit host addresses.

Everything started going downhill once there could be more than 256 hosts on the ARPANET.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Control_Program

> It's pretty hard to top "images were a mistake," but you get extra points in the lightning round if you work in a reference to Ted Nelson.

I really can't wait for the HN rant about how Geminispace has turned into Reddit and now we need to rebuild the web on an even stricter protocol.

I think monetization has pushed almost everything to video. I miss the old days when people would actually write up how to do things.

I think that's less about monetization and more about barriers to entry. Everyone has a cellphone that takes video now, in many cases it's easier to publish video to the web than it is to write an article.

It's also about Google massively priortizing video results in their search engine.

While I agree that there are many people still doing weird stuff/things for non-commercial reasons they are being hosted within bigger and often closed eco-systems that are much more commercially minded.

That's not always a bad thing - a medium post/facebook group/stack overflow answer is still helpful and without the barrier to entry that a DIY website and probably more useful than some of the gif laden monstrosities that predated them.

But the homogenous web does lake the personality and charm of the old sites (now let me put away these rose tinted specs before I get carried away)

Yeah, everybody does it with wordpress now.

- Google (and other search engines) trying to fight and downrank or de-list, rather than giving up and embracing, webspam sites.

That's what's made what remains of, and the continuations of, the old Web, practically invisible. It's all top sites and blogspam or domain-name-spam sites on the first couple pages, now. Even those "skip the first hundred" or whatever sites don't really fix it.

I think spam just won the war of attrition. The search engines finally gave up.

Any open system that becomes sufficiently large to be worth attacking will be destroyed by spam, malware, scams, and other types of exploitation. The Internet is a dark forest.

When GPT type systems really get figured out by the spammers it will be game over. No open forums will remain. I don’t even think open but regulated social networks like Twitter or Facebook will survive. They won’t be able to distinguish spam at all anymore so the whole platform will become bots trying to sell or propagandize bots.

The future is closed enclaves and walled gardens that cost something or require that you know someone to enter.

> I don’t even think open but regulated social networks like Twitter or Facebook will survive. They won’t be able to distinguish spam at all anymore so the whole platform will become bots trying to sell or propagandize bots.

Beautiful.

I want to go back to 1995-2005s Internet. Small communities like HN, not Reddit monoliths.

Did you pick your Snoovatar and switch to the mobile app? No? Well, have eight thousand reminders of it.

I think it’s a mixed bag too. The enclave style network could be more interesting and less toxic and full of stupid crap, but it will be much less discoverable.

The golden age was after search but before spammers got really smart, and also before algorithmic timelines turned social media to shit. I’d say 1998 to 2012 roughly.

Things went to total shit after that, largely due to algorithmic timelines prioritizing engagement (which means triggering crap and trolls) and the emergence of industrial scale web spam. Cryptocurrency didn’t help either as a lot of today’s spam is linked to crypto scams.

There are MUDs still around last I knew, but I think that Eternal September was the harbinger of the end.

I think we need to look at more P2P communication to make the web smaller again. Share things with only your connections again, not FAANG & the entire world.

If your friends want to signal boost something, sure they can to their connections, but the default should be that you get stuff from someone directly connected to you, not via systems run by giant companies trying to learn how best to sell things to & manipulate the world.

> I think we need to look at more P2P communication to make the web smaller again. Share things with only your connections again, not FAANG & the entire world.

There's stuff like that out there now. Secure Scuttlebutt comes to mind.

Yeah, I've heard of a few such things. The trick is to get more users onto them instead of FAANG products.

Plug for my favorite: https://alteraeon.com/

I’m actually building a website where you can navigate/explore my local national forest with the camps and trailheads are organized like rooms in a MUD.

I have it set up so you can navigate and traverse it using the numpad keys for the directions of a compass.

Personal directories still exist. https://indieseek.xyz/ That's an example of one of those. Webrings are still kind of with us, some people tried to revive them. https://indieweb.org/webring Believe it or not, MUDs are still around too. https://www.aardwolf.com/

RIP Stumble Upon. I miss its random weirdness.

A useful sitemap.