Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. These chronologically organized articles and content have dominated web content and social media ever since.
Reading this thread feels like everyone is anchored to whatever methods were popular at the time they entered the internet as being the peak. The BBS people think it was all downhill after BBS declined. The self-hosting people think it was all downhill after sites like Geocities/Tripod/Xoom became popular. The Geocities people think it was all downhill after blogging platforms became popular. The blogging people think it was all downhill when social media became popular.
I think there's a heavy dose of nostalgia coloring the opinions in this thread. What people really yearn for isn't Geocities or Usenet or whatever. It's the feeling of excitement that came from first getting immersed in the internet when it was all new to you.
> Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. These chronologically organized articles and content have dominated web content and social media ever since.
I don't see the problem with chronological ordering. Most of those platforms and sites make it easy to search for related posts. Worst case, the author can just drop some hyperlinks into the posts to tie them together.
Curated and organized websites tend to fall out relevancy and decay very rapidly. Might as well just let people post as they see fit and then we can find it by searching.
(Specifically, Livejournal was the tipping-point between blogging platforms and social media, Myspace was unquestionably downward, Facebook is the antichrist pure and simple.)
I have no problem with chronological or hierarchical content. Whatever the author wants to put out, is their prerogative.
What I have a problem with is walled gardens, stalking-as-a-business-model, and arbitrary automated deplatforming with no recourse.
Big social media and especially recommendation algorithms have ruined much of what made the old Internet fun.
There's no longer the discovery or organic sharing; everything is just shoved down your throat by a soulless algorithm.
Sometimes that's a good and useful thing, like with search engines. Clearly not always though.
Also there was a lot of pushback and poo-pooing the human element; lots of well-regarded (at the time) people saying that there was no future in human-curated content, and I know that I (as a young person) believed them. Look at the cool stuff they were making; they have to be right! They're smart adults, they would know, right?
It just stopped being fun to curate.
Certainly there is nostalgia.
But back then the web was not controlled by add financed mega companies - and the dreams of the teens using it, were not mainly to become a influencer. Meaning getting somehow famous and then sell that attention for - advertisement.
Your points about nostalgia I sort of agree with but this part I take issue with. Many sites use blog software which does the whole chronological ordering. Unless the site's particular blog theme exposes archives, a sitemap, or the author meticulously tags (and the theme shows tags) it can be stupid hard to navigate around blog-like sites.
Blog-like sites also tend to have a partial chronological list of posts at the root of the site. If you're writing some personal journal or topical things that makes sense. For someone writing about some particular topic(s) this is a navigation anti-pattern. It doesn't matter if the latest post on Topic A was posted on Monday. As a reader interested in Topic A you want all of the posts on it. Most blog-like sites make this challenging to find or don't expose it.
I don't really like "just search" as a replacement for categorical organization because most search sucks anymore. That might have been ok for Old Google, before the DoubleClicking, but now it's just another navigation anti-pattern.
Interestingly, had Web 2.0 concepts been implemented a bit better by CMSes, navigation of sites could be ably handled by user agents. A site with an OPML/Sitemap XML pointed to with an "alternative" meta tag could let a user agent (or service) build nice navigation for sites automatically no matter how the blog-like CMS organized the HTML.
However, I do think there is a lot of lost value due to today's "search for it" attitude replacing curation. Yes, curation takes a lot of work, but that also makes it more robust against SEO spam and such. But I also don't think it added enough value that people would pay for it - original web companies were benefiting from wildly optimistic funding numbers for "eyeballs" and display ad rates that are never coming back.
There was non-commercial curation back in the day, DMOZ was the most prominent example. In general, commercialism was very rare on the early Internet. "Business" sites were thought of as somewhat exceptional, not the norm.
You could also work backwards from what you stated. For someone who first experienced digital connectivity via BBSes, would they also state the Geocities "era" was better than the blogging platforms era? Perhaps?
As far as I remember web 2.0 was all about user generated content spruced up with Ajax experiences:
Blogs (chronological as opposed to more freeform web sites) were arguably the first.
The comments, follows ("blog rolls"), tagging, ratings and third party sites providing the same like del.ico.us and digg.
RSS also was a web 2.0 thing in my mind at least.
I think most people classify Facebook as web 2.0 as well but in my mind they aren't as much web as a silo built on web technology.
For news or personal diary-format blogs, it makes sense, but I agree. Why did the blog become the default way to present a page on the internet? Aside from serving as an indicator of 'freshness,' publication date usually has no relation to the content I read. It's weird that most content is organized around publication date by default.
I like reading old bike websites with stories about touring and such published around the 90s [1][2][3]. Most sites back then had a small section called "News" with short blurbs letting readers know about the status of the author, or new content added to the site, but it was not the main content itself. Content was usually organized in a way that makes sense to humans, rather than feed aggregators and content recommender systems.
It's so much better to explore a site by navigation through a few index pages. Ken's site [1] is especially a pleasure to browse. Right on the home page he lists his directories along with straightforward descriptions of what you'll find in them. On a directory page will be a list of pages organized under subheadings, and each one has a brief description. To me, this may be peak internet. It's easy to get a sense of what's there, how to get to the part of it that interests me, and doesn't keep me on a treadmill searching for something I want to read co-mingled with everything else.
I can't help but think that if WordPress was the default when Ken decided to make a website, it would be much worse. Each page does have a tiny 'last updated' date at the bottom, but as a reader 30 years later, the publication date has no relevancy to me any of the content here. It would be a pity to center everything on the site around that minor detail. And adding tags or category labels to blog pages usually doesn't help. It still squishes is all into a feed, just a subset feed.
[1]: https://www.phred.org/~alex/kenkifer/www.kenkifer.com/bikepa...
Consider that one of the premier features of the Jetbrains IDE is "search everywhere" which will search command help text for you as well and then return the command as a possible result - much easier to describe what you're trying to do and be led to the exact command, then try to understand the mind of the person who did the categorization.
I wonder how much of this is still true.
Google results from a few years ago were much better than they are now. That's a combination of SEO ruining the results by Google assuming anything not hosted on a megaplatform is suspect and not showing it plus SEO ruining results by still being there in them despite that, but it happened.
If someone made a curated list of interesting small sites by category, it would be a lot more useful now than it was before that happened.
Pipe dream: If someone wishes hard enough, maybe we can convince the Apollo guys to leave Yahoo alone so it can return to its roots as (surprise!) a directory.
This helps individual sites, but says little about why the overall quality of links has nosedived. Who they link to continues to matter, except that now there is so much noise this is very difficult to get right unless you are extremely clever, lucky, or probably both.
The old web never went away, and the "new old web" will either fail to become popular or well become the "new new web". Eternal September is a social phenomenon and can't be solved with technology.
(I've never had an ISP that allowed hosting HTTP servers in its TOS. But I've always hosted HTTP servers, and I've never had any issues. FWIW Gemini servers are also servers.)
The people that actually know what they are doing have to pay more but I never hear from them.
Except, because I came with my own modem, they won't let me get the static IP. They would need to come back to my place and replace my modem with their own version of that same modem, they tell me, before they will be willing to take my $50/month to give me a static IP.
I told them I would agree to this if they would at least not charge me for the modem, but apparently this is not possible. I might try again one day, but really am just waiting until my area gets the local electric company's fiber connection they'll be rolling out in a couple of years.
I don't think the self-hosting people with their own domains ever went away. They're all still out there.
The difference is that the internet isn't just for those people any more. Everyone is online, and the average person has no intention of learning how to host and maintain and design their own website when they can just as easily post the same content on an easy to use platform.
A lot of the nostalgia in this thread isn't so much for the technologies of years past. It's for an internet that was just for us nerds, without the regular people participating.
Pretty much. It’s painful to watch the mass commodification of a technology you love, but that’s how the world advances.
It's just that a lot more inconvenient to have and manage one for most people.
However, I think you're making a mistake that I also make quite often, of conflating the use and mastery of the technology required with the actual end goal.
Lots of people might like to create their own dedicated websites focused on some particular interest of their own. Very few of them have any interest in Apache, Amigas, FreeBSD, servers, operating systems, bandwidth, IPv6 or any of the technology that would underpin them doing this.
Hence ... Squarespace ;)
We (computer technologists in general, and web folk in specific) failed to make running servers a trivial matter, and as a result in 2022, the honest truth is that running your own website no longer has much to do with any of the skills we might have smiled about back in the day. At least not for 99% of the people who don't already do it but might somehow have an interest in the idea.
Elaine Benes : [yells] Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert, and just die already! DIE!
J. Peterman : [surprised] Elaine, you don't like the movie?
Elaine Benes : [shouts] I hate it!
[the audience shushes Elaine]
Elaine Benes : [shouts back] Oh, go to hell!
Fix that, and you might have a chance of competing with big corporations.
(In the old days we had "web rings", but I'm afraid that's not going to work today)
I don't mean that snarkily: I have at least 2-3 webrings on my personal link page, and neocities is home to literally hundreds more.
You're supposed to take your time checking out cool shit people make for the love of it.
Wow. Do you know if there's any enthusiasts out there doing this? A phone would actually be a great hosting device for tinkerers. It's always on, always connected, and supports IPv6.
There is however this starlink dashboard hosted by awlnx on starlink and its IPv6 only. https://starlink.awlnx.space
Isn't this easier to this than it ever was?
Granted, my 'server' is a VM in a server farm thousands of kilometres away, but I installed the server and wrote the HTML. What's even better is that he server was caddy and the html is html5 - both a marked improvement!
Nothing's really changed, in the sense that there's nothing stopping you (or anybody else) from running your own server that serves up simplehand-written HTML, if that's what you want to do.
You can probably even do it on your phone, but I wouldn't hold my breath for the app to get accepted to any official app stores.
Personally, I think the UI on phones is atrocious, and would never want to use one for any kind of development work, but to each their own.
When the OP said
> but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends
I think he meant actually running the serving of the content from the phone's hardware, not actually doing the development itself on the phone.
I know the feeling. Even though I use Hetzner and OVH I also host stuff in my home office. Ordered business 1gbps fiber line with static IP for $120 CDN per month for that.
<blink>This text could blink</blink>
Yeah it's nostalgia speaking here, there's always gonna be hobbyists but the internet is now gonna be what it is today, massive conglomerates fighting for attention/eyeballs and monetizing it either through ads or pay services.
Are you making this more complicated than it needs to be?
I'm not sure. I guess if one trusts the default logging settings on the server software to be compliant, and only uses static HTML, maybe that's adequate? But as soon as any third-party code or data provided by some other server gets involved, it's hard to know what might be logged elsewhere as a result of visiting your site.
I mean, would an old-fashioned web visitor counter be compliant? It's tracking something in order to provide that number.
It is a complication, but I believe it's worded so that small companies and individuals are immune from its consequences.
That said, an IP address is a shitty device to detect unique visitors. Session cookies, as long as you aren't trying to correlate them to usage patterns and such, are more reliable (you can tell that this is the same phone jumping networks, or you can tell apart users coming from behind multiple layers of NAT) and anonymous.
A large proportion of folks on HN seem to think GDPR is "out to get" everyone rather than a set of common sense regulations that should not at all be a concern for an individual who's serving a blog or personal site and doing nothing to collect PII/track their visitors.
I don't understand why this view is so prevalent.
Fearmongering from those actually affected by these common sense regulations.
I think we underestimate the power of PR way too often.
Last I've read GDPR itself it's been way clearer than any of the Terms of Service written by the very same companies who complain that GDPR is too incomprehensible.
Of course reality is more particularized and varied, but in the big picture I think GDPR and other threats to surveillance advertising is treated as an existential threat to an entire class of skills, skills that can buy houses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135264 "GDPR penalty for passing on of IP address to Google by using Google Fonts"
It's absolutely true that using Google Fonts will cause a user's IP to be shared with Google, and that this is a violation of the GDPR. But having to review content at this level of detail is burdensome for individuals or small organizations putting anything onto the internet.
You need a session cookie for the login function the user uses? - Use a cookie. No banner needed.
The user puts something in their shopping basket? - Use a session cookie. No banner needed.
You want to store information, not required, in order to identify the user again even though they didn't login, maybe to share the identity with an ad network? - You need a cookie banner where the user can opt out easily.
If your shop just sells them a virtual thing there is no need to collect personal information.
If you ask for the address and more or less directly print it on the label and then delete again it is a bit of an edge case where no explicit confirmation might be needed, however having a good data policy is good practice anyways and then having the extra checkbox in the order flow is not a big deal.
The CCPA doesn't apply to personal, not-for-profit sites.
You are not Amazon. In the unlikely event you become Amazon, you will be able to rearchitect. Trust me, Amazon did.
That's what I want the Internet to look like for my younger family and friends. It'll probably never happen exactly this way, but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends. I know what their smile would look like because that was once my smile, too.