When the web was first created, everybody got on and just started learning html and making things... because humans are creative.

I did the same. I made fun websites with/for my friends. I loved geocities.

Then after a few years, I was only concerned with pumping out crap content and how many pageviews I was getting.

Things like photopea.com which is created by one person would probably have never progressed beyond the very basics were there no ad revenue to be made.

Additionally, there are countless bloggers and content creators that create rich, amazing content and there is no way they would be able to do anything close to what they are doing if they couldn't make a living at it.

I posit that the ability for even the lowest level of content creators to make a few pennies hawking their crap is what has lead to the downfall of the greatness that was the early web.

Now if you want a GIF, you have to pick one from GIPHY, a Facebook owned company.

.. and new stuff today https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOHbM4GGWADc5bZgvbivv...

https://ruffle.rs/

Bug reports always welcome.

Hypnotizing.

Websites that take my time > Websites that take my money (and my time).

http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/

http://www.hiyoooo.com/

http://unknowablesymbols.com/rain

(I forgot they have a domain that redirects)

https://inception.davepedu.com/

My fav from back of the day http://www.davesweboflies.com/

(Also: warning to folks who might be bothered/harmed by flashing animations.)

You had to go somewhere to find them. They didn’t just pop up in your browser all of a sudden.

Back in those days it would be mailing lists or irc or some the general/random channel of a niche forum. Basically the social media of Web 1.0.

Idk if I’m being too paranoid but my google mailbox is full of phishing attempts…

Or to quote Mike from Gamefromscratch: "I'm here to make your ears bleed." :)

You'd struggle to build a mediocre version of this site in the early days of the Web. And it'd try to eat your browser alive as you used it if someone managed to use early Flash or an applet to shoehorn it onto the Web back then.

HN itself is, in part, a link content mill. No different than links posted to FB.

People merely like to remember the past far better than it really was, it happens automatically as time passes and we become emotionally connected to the past in a different way. Our ability to experience new things is not the same at 40 or 50 years old as it is when we're eg 15-20 years old. We experience everything increasingly at a reduced excitement as the experiences pile up, our ability to experience new things the way we used to is dulled (it's why people don't fall in love at 40 or 50 anywhere close to the way they did in their youth in terms of sheer emotional joy and excitement (and yes, of course there are rare exceptions to the rule)).

The feeling people experience when they talk about the early days of the Web, is identical to the feeling people on TikTok that are ~16-20 years old today will proclaim when they look back and talk about how amazing that era was - when they're 30+ years old; they'll talk about how nothing like that exists any longer, and social media is no longer fun like it was when they first discovered TikTok in 2020. That's nothing more than vast subjective, emotional projection; it's real for the person in terms of their subjective experience, and the extended context is false (where they project their emotional feeling outward to encompass more than their personal experience really covers; the difference between N experience for me vs N experience for everywhere else). There will be some young group of people having an amazing experience 20 years from now, that those 40 year olds (longing for the old 2020 TikTok days) can't share in it, they can't experience the new thing the same way (instead they'll sit around talking about how things have sucked since TikTok faded in 2024 or whatever); the typical 40 year old today - dulled by a lifetime of experiences - can't get the same thrill from TikTok that a 16 or 18 year old can when experiencing it for the first time.

People that highly enjoyed ICQ or IRC or AIM in the 1990s, do the exact same thing today that those TikTok users will do in the future and for the exact same reason. It's true for their personal experience (it's true that they can't enjoy things like they used to, which is what is really being admitted), and that's all it's true for (it's false that there isn't anything like that experience out there today; it's that the person can no longer experience things like they used to when they were young; outside that subjective bubble a whole generation of people is out there having a huge amount of fun on TikTok and to them it's vastly superior than some low quality gifs on an ugly Geocities page circa 1997). And on the cycle goes, forever repeating.

This is the same as older people proclaiming music used to be better in their day (whatever day, 1960s rock, 1990s grunge or rap, etc) and music today mostly sucks. It's a very common emotional feeling, and it's true for their subjective experience; and it's false when projected beyond themselves, when they attempt to apply it widely (because they're attempting to override other people's emotional experiences out there, which you can't actually do via such a projection).

If you sit down to play with new action figure toys at 40 years of age, will you experience it in the same amazing way that you did when you were playing with similar action figure toys at 6 or 7 years old? When everything was still so new in the world. Will the excitement and thrill and repeat play value be there? Will your imagination work the same way? Is it the modern action figure toys that are the problem? Maybe a 40 year old person would proclaim they just don't make action figure toys like they used to, otherwise they'd be having a lot more fun playing with them; thus, action figure toys today suck, and so on. Now hand them over to a 6 or 7 year old today and witness the real difference: time had its way with you, as it does all things, a lifetime of experiences, physical change and emotional sediment has dulled your ability to interact with things the way you did in your youth.

Here's a hint to the widespread nature of the feeling (about the old Web): there are a lot more older people using the Web today, with a long duration of experience at using it, than there are new people coming on for the first time to experience it fresh. The balance between the two has never been more skewed than it is right now. So the most common sentiment is going to be the older, experienced users projecting their subjective emotional context (longing for the old Web) as supposedly representing the objective context (when in reality it's only true for them and their context of experiences).

There are probably 3 orders of magnitude more crap though, so the good stuff is harder to find. And the random fun stuff doesn't bother with SEO so it's easy to feel like the internet is full of more crap, because it is. In the early days people were building websites for fun, nowadays people are doing it for money (or marketing, or they feel obligated to have a LinkedIn even if they hate it, or whatever - nobody used to feel obligated to use the internet). Sure, there are still some gems, but they're drowned out by turds.

The early days are more fun because true believers are building something they really care about, by the time something becomes mainstream it's already generic.

Your point about music doesn't apply because music has existed for millenia. The internet has existed for decades.

I really like 4e, our big serious campaign is 4e with increasing amounts of customisation because of course Wizards never really polish the high level game, there's no money in it. But it's a very different game from 2nd edition.

My Wizard was written out (the other PCs basically killed him, hint taken) but you couldn't write a character like that in 2nd, limitless power just comes naturally to Magic Users in the old game, in 4e Magical Trevor had to make some really difficult compromises to be able to have his flexibility and he still wasn't the star of the show.

(The other characters think giving Orcus a god-killing weapon was a bad idea, and they blamed Trevor even though it might work, apparently Orcus is "bad" and it's better that the universe is destroyed than he gets a god-killing weapon. Trevor did not agree)

4th by comparison feels like a MMO with all the uniquesness sucked out of it.

5e backpedals on that and goes more or less back to where 3.5e used to be, but less complicated (magic still hasn’t recovered to it’s former levels though).

There's something to what you're saying, but where are the modern equivalents to DMOZ.org where all those "quirky" sites would be listed in a transparent and easy to browse way? The topic-specific "awesome" lists that people sometimes point to are a piss-poor substitute for what DMOZ made available. Sometimes the present really is worse than the past.