Sounds like he remembers an over romanticised version of the web. if you would really remember how the old web worked or ever used Altavista or other early search-engines to look for stuff, you'd realise the web is a LOT more accessible today, with a lot more information available. Yes I met new, and kept in touch with people through forums and IRC, but that has just shifted to other places online. Maybe less accessible to people from my generation or older, but this is still there. Now it's Discord, Slack, Tik-Tok, Instagram, Twitch, Snapchat, ... all run by companies, but offering services that are WAY more accessible. I remember explaining non-techie friends how to get on IRC in the late mid/late '90s and early 2000's, which was a mess.<p>Yes it's all commercialised, but that's a 2-way street. It costs money to run infrastructure, the web has boomed. You're not talking about a couple hundred users on a forum, or a few thousand IRC users on an irc node ran by some volunteer who in exchange for being an ircop or forum admin was prepared to swallow the cost, or was ran by some guy working at or owning a small ISP.<p>With scale comes money. Even late-stage forums were full of ads, just to cover the hosting cost. And this was not a sudden change, this was an evolution, driven by demand.
How many of these "X sucks" articles with an attention-grabbing headline can make it to the top of HN in a week?<p>While these articles lament the state of technology today and wish it were better like back in the good old days, there are never solutions put forward. Only negativity.<p>Why do they gain so much traction on HN, one of the few remaining outposts of thought-provoking articles and discussion?<p>What do we get from these endless articles about why some product or technology sucks?
In some version of the game "Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle", there was a easter egg that allowed you to play the first version of the game if you interacted with a computer stacked away in the back of the scene.<p>The game was difficult and looked old to me as a kid. But I somehow thought that this must have been the way people knew games before DOTT. You could run out of time, die, choose the wrong set of characters in the beginning of the game, making it impossible to win. I never finished it.<p>On the web today I find echoes of the "Web 1.0" on Tor-.onion-Websites (including the uncontrolled cesspool that it was in the 90s when people bought illegal guns on the "Clearweb" as we call it today). And Neocities, that is mentioned in the article as well, provides something that takes the best from the past web. The gemini protocol brings back very simple websites and SpaceHey brings back the feeling of the early "Web 2.0" when user profiles could still be heavily modified using html.<p>While much of what the author rightfully hates on is true, and it is the main characteristic of what the web is today, these developments also show that the web diversifies in niche corners. Whenever I discover them, it's really cool :)
SpaceHey was developed by teenagers who might be young enough not to bother creating a Facebook account for themselves anymore [1]. And yet, they came up with the idea of recreating a piece of Web history.<p>And if the worst becomes true and the Metaverse takes off, maybe there will be a computer stacked away somewhere in the back where you can access good old BBS boards, at least.<p>[1] Okay, I checked their site again and they might be a little older than teenagers, but still :)
I thoroughly enjoyed this. I kind of agree.<p>Of course it's not quite as binary as 1990s = good / 2020s = bad, but this article does resonate fully with my most cynical side.<p>I'm surprised there was no mention of cookie banners (unless I missed it).<p>> Although Zuckerberg and his merry band of wankers have a lot to answer for, the death of web 1.0 and the humble personal blog is not their fault alone. Search plays a huge part in this shit show too.<p>I like this guy.
The thing that I just keep coming back to with all this Web 1.0 rose tinted glasses is that "no one" used the web back then. Many people _did not_ have personal web pages. Only a few individuals did, if you were lucky/smart enough.<p>It's fair bemoan about the state of the web now - there's many faults, but it's considerably more accessible than it was before. There is more information available that's, and more opportunities for people on this new web, and its all (ultimately) easier to access
In my younger days I was a loud crusader for keeping the web (and Internet in general) as free as possible both in the "free speech" and "free beer" sense of the word, but now I see that I was wrong.<p>What's now going on is that the huge mess of SEO techniques and ad tracking is solving one particular problem: monetisation.<p>I don't know exactly how would the web have spread if the early HTTP monetisation codes, headers and efforts were actually continued (like the "402 Payment Required" response), but I do believe now that not having monetisation built in to the new medium has caused the majority of freedom and surveillance issues today.<p>The web is not just fucked up. We fucked it up by not planning far enough.
This is kind of beating a dead horse. Of course the web was better when only the intellectual elite were on it. Of course it turned into a cesspool when the other 99% joined, including the 1% who are prolific destructive trolls.
If I felt that I had to write a rant, it would read a lot like this. Well said.<p>I'd also add that smartphones and tablets have done much to mess up the Web. The "all white space" site design trend is one of the results. The old version of the NHL stats page was chock full of information; now it's chock full of white space and requires a lot of extra scrolling, all so it's usable on a touchscreen.
I mean, I get it, and I agree. But to rail against Social Media and SEO in one breath, and then to have Twitter optimized headers and SEO stuff right at the top of the code seems a wee bit hypocritical.<p><pre><code> <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
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You will NEVER get that experience back. Everything changed. The tech, the people, the culture. If you care about having quality conversations and non monetary value, you can cultivate it yourself. You can still hang out on topic specific forums, participate in webrings, make friends through shared interests.
"Web 1.0" being billed as "glorious" is a stretch, to say the least. There was a lot to dislike about the early web but the glow of nostalgia covers up those blemishes. "Web 1.0" was great for some people and not-so-great for others. There are good reasons why "Web 2.0" happened, and to truly understand it we need to separate the corporatization of the internet from the actual human needs that were and are being addressed by social media, et al.
> Google et al where supposed to make content discovery easier. What the fuck happened?<p>Content explosion. It turns out that when everybody is putting everything online, a vast tract of the human condition is redundant signal. And because Google's search results are based on click-through satisfaction, and click-through satisfaction on redundant content is a positive feedback loop (i.e. if two sources are almost identical, the one that happens to sort to the top of Google results first will get more clicks than the second, which will cause it to sort closer to the top, which will cause it to get more clicks, which...), a few content sources end up being winners and the ones that are very similar in that search space rapidly become also-ran.<p>Imagine trying to start a Wikipedia competitor today. How would you pull it off? 95% of the search results for anything that look like Wikipedia could satisfy them are going to go to Wikipedia.
I agree with a lot of what the author is saying. But they are missing a really important point. The number of people willing to make blogs or static websites versus the number of people now on the internet is staggeringly small. My Mom will gladly converse with people on Facebook. She'd never in a million years make a blog or personal website. This holds true for most people.<p>So wishing it all went back to "1.0" has a gatekeeping and elitist undertone in my opinion. Back then most people had personal sites because most people on the web were the type that found html interesting. Early adopters tend to be more savvy on what they are adopting.<p>I also think there's plenty of "1.0" content still out there. Yeah, you gotta look for it, but it didn't all go away.
Eternal September, web edition. Or maybe I joined late when it was already <i>fucked</i>? Near 2000 we had to deal with all kinds of shenanigans, browsers having no standards, outright freezing when you did some thing with your webpage, obnoxious banners, popups, popunders, a lot of games on the web already had micro-transactions in the form of high price SMSs (which silently subscribed you to things, only for you to find out later in your monthly bill). When was it better, in the BBS era? Except not, because I watched a documentary and even then, people complained about the same thing. Older internet had nice things and shit things and the same can be said about the modern internet, except now I can install a proper ad blocker.
Dear author,<p>"Web 3.0" isn't the metaverse. It was the Semantic Web.<p>Web 3.0 was designed to give individual web publishers and consumers the capabilities that giants like Facebook and Google have.<p>Documents had structured data, marked up in rich RDF or Owl ontologies that could expose APIs for your data. You're probably familiar with RSS and Atom and the wonderful ecosystem of tools they had, but there were hundreds of RDF schemas. FOAF, for example, would let you publish and consume contact info, and even encode friends lists if you were interested. There were lots of these.<p>This was also at the time of peak Bittorrent/P2P, and we were really close to having schemas for sharing news and commentary in a P2P swarm. Imagine fully decentralized Reddit and Twitter (not federated!), where identities were anonymous by default, comments and upvotes were cryptographically signed and published, and you could curate your own peer group, interest graph, attention algorithm, and filtering. We were almost there.<p>Clients that operated on RDF schemas were also faster and less cludgy than HTML. We could write native code and GUIs to consume and publish this data, and we were close to evolving the HTML soup into something better.<p>Unfortunately, this is right at the time Google and Facebook had grown immensely from VC and ad money jet fuel. Academics and builders were distracted. People flocked to centralized platforms because it was easy and our tools were immature.<p>We were really close, but the tech cos got there first, got lock in, and then started messing with the commons.<p>Please don't forget that "web 3.0" wasn't crypto. It was more than about payment. It was a stack that gave you and I capabilities and potential that the giants have. It was a distributed knowledge graph that would have been a nirvana of innovation and sharing. But we got sidetracked, out engineered, and roadblocked.<p>Web 3.0 = Semantic Web.<p>We can still remember what it aspired to be, and we can still build it.<p>Never forget.
I absolutely get the sentiment behind Kev's post. I don't disagree.<p>Where it takes me, is that I think how weak minded we are - how the web was destroyed is just one example in (some of) our lifetimes.<p>All it takes is throwing money at whatever-it-is and you can get it. Buy design, metrics, adverts, promotions, etc and you will get what you want. Better still, be the market (appstore), the access (google), etc and you're set for life.<p>Content is not king.
This reads like "Old man yells at cloud" satire, but he's not wrong on calling out that internet has become heavily commercialized.<p>I think we'd be much worse off if that hadn't happened though.<p>Imagine if you still needed $xx,000 to get a production-ready website off the ground instead of, say, $5 and an AWS account.<p>Imagine if users couldn't rate the places they favorite and had to rely on biased reviews from newspapers or TV shows to tell us where to eat<p>Imagine if you had to buy a piece of overpriced and under-engineered hardware to watch TV instead of buying an overpriced and satsifactorily-engineered router/internet gateway/wireless access point and stream literally everything through it<p>Imagine if we had to print maps instead of using Google Maps on our phones that can give us mostly-accurate departure notifications before we head out<p>Imagine if we still needed to use ActiveX/DCOM for websites to do anything meaningful with our machines instead of using web workers, websockets, XHRs, and all of the awesome async client-server abstractions that we have today<p>Personally, I'm excited for Web 3.0, as from my understanding, it will make it much easier for people to use their machine's spare CPU cycles to pay for services they actually use and get paid to host services they like. This way we don't have to rely on so much of the web being powered by advertisers and tracking.
Another old man shouting at the clouds, I guess.<p>- The web was much smaller back then. Of course it's difficult for your personal blog to gain traction now, there are so many alternative content producers (most of them are better than you), and alternate content medium like video and audio. A lot of people who would have started a blog in 1999 probably have a podcast, video channel, or do live streaming instead. All these things were not really possible in 1999. Or, maybe they blogged because that was their only technological choice, maybe they actually just prefer posting content on social media only for their friends now that the technology exists (LiveJournal and Xanga were basically social media blog platforms, supplanted by the posting capabilities of Facebook and others).<p>- And, speaking of that, blogging is not at all dead, it's just that the people making a living doing it are much more sophisticated than they used to be, and use their blog as a complement to other methods of reaching their audience. For example, a food blogger will have social media images and videos of their food/recipes, and then host the recipes on their blog/website. But here we've got the other author who is probably mad that they can't get some solid views and ad revenue from putting out a low-effort blog with 20 minutes of spare effort every month.<p>- The Internet used to be "whoever is wealthy enough to own a $2000 computer and has Internet infrastructure available in their wealthy country" and now it's available to the entire world. So, sorry it isn't your own personal gated community for your rich nerd friends anymore.<p>- The big corporations on the Internet are only part of the Internet, perhaps even the minority of it. Shaking a fist at Google or Facebook is tired and played out, as is complaining about hamburger menus.<p>- The article is mad at easily-blockable ads in search engines. How do you expect them to make any money if you aren't willing to pay for it?<p>- The reason there's white space in websites now is because the Internet is big and important enough to justify hiring graphic designers and UX designers who know a lot more about what they're doing than the author would ever be willing to give them credit for. News flash: UX/UI people work off of real usage data and know what designs customers like better based on actual hard data.<p>- Web directories sucked hardcore compared to modern search engines. You'd never be able to find specific things that have just escaped your mind. Try searching for "modernist movie comedy office building" in 1999 (this is what I searched when I tried to remember the title of Playtime (1967)).
When considering someone's claim the web is fucked, it's always worthwhile to ask "For whom?"<p>I can tell you who didn't enjoy web 1.0: most people I knew. The infrastructure was too complicated to use, and if they even owned a computer, they didn't have network access independent of their voice phone line, and even if they logged on, there wasn't much content they'd care to see anyway.<p>The web we have now is ubiquitously accessible, content-rich, and hosts billions of users. Of course it's different than the web of a few million users spread across tens of thousands of sites with little way to discover others.
I think Urbit + Web3 (and yes some blockchain tech) is a pretty cool frontier that has the chance to fix a lot of incentives that lead to megacorp centralization and SaaS for Web2.<p>I don't get the dismissal. Running linux servers is too hard for people - that (and spam) is why the promise of the decentralized web (Web1) failed - and why federated systems built on this stack like Mastodon are dead on arrival.<p>We won't get out of the local maximum we're trapped in without the new tech. Until recently I thought we may never get out, but now I have some hope.
That's why I believe we should bring back WebRings or something similar: Get a curated list of websites that have content for the sake of sharing. That do not have any SEO crap, ads or any "ulterior motive" rather than sharing knowledge.<p>That's how I host my blog: A small Ghost instance with snippets of stuff I want to "talk loud" about. Some personal projects and whatnot. No ads, no crazy javascript, no SEO. Just share for the sake of community.
Like every tool and technology it's how you use it that counts.<p>My memories of Web 1.0 were not so fond. It was a rogue's gallery of low quality websites that lacked any sense of security and much harder to tell if something was official and legitimate. People who never used the web before were easily scammed. That's why most people stayed within the AOL walled garden. Remember most of my friends used the open web to download warez (games/apps) which was usually loaded with viruses and we were on Windows and not on MacOS/Linux yet so it was easy to get pwned.<p>The progression to Web 2.0 brought about social media but it also brought about web apps. We could now build really useful websites that actually helped users do things they could never do before. Even look at GitHub something we take for granted but is made possible by Web 2.0. The tech industry has built an incredible amount of utility and value using Web 2.0 that does not include social media or invasive tracking.<p>Social Media like Facebook is regressive because it uses Web 2.0 technology but using the walled garden paradigm that AOL used in the past. So it effectively is a misuse of the technology originally designed for the open web. Jack Dorsey mentioned that the future of social media is federated and decentralized using blockchain so efforts like Blue Sky will make Facebook and the centralized walled garden obsolete.
Web2.0 was scam. Basically catching and selling people and communities.<p>Web1 ...
I had GeoCities page as well. But it was crap with frames, tables and injected ad banners provided by hosting.<p>Then there were more banners. Maybe not tracking as much. And pop-ups and pop-up blockers. (Pop-ups are back on the menu with 'subscribe!' and 'let as track you'.)<p>Java applets. Not sure what they were all about - never really loaded. Then Flash - sometimes fun sometimes pain.<p>Then there was phpBB where post signatures were bigger then actual content of the post. Reading it was mess.<p>What I actually liked were local custom servers inspired by BBS. Like cyberspace.cz, nyx.cz, kyberia.sk ...<p>But even there people complained about 'lost spirit' with more and more users coming.<p>It was interesting exploring niche topics, meeting new people (and some of the even later IRL).<p>I could join the Mastodon and maybe try it again. But I'm older, grumpier, not really motivated. Just scrolling to death.
I learned about <a href="https://www.are.na/" rel="nofollow">https://www.are.na/</a> at a meetup a couple years ago. IMO they're doing a solid job of bringing 1.0 wonder to the 2.0 world.
ha, this week in angry web heads. On board with the rage post but it's hard to distill what was all going on during '1.0' and what was going on during '2.0' when so much was changing and there were little developments in corners. And then as is often the case end up with some the pushing for Mastodon or TOR or some paranoid thing no one is going to use on a larger scale.
But whatever, fight on my dude.
The only way to unfuck the web is to do it yourself. Have some self control, be disciplined about how and what you build, and don't just drop your trousers for the first investor that gives you the time of day. Have some principles. That's the difference between then and now (perhaps in the past it was by accident). There are scant principles anymore, just a whole lot of people looking for their "out," blind to their contribution to the downfall.<p>Read: be the change you want to see, not a dime-a-dozen snarker who smugly contributes dick all to the world.
Web 3 has components of what he’s nostalgic about. Especially when you start using products such as Spooky Swap and Trader Joe. There’s no cookie notices, no ads, no dark patterns.<p>Too bad HN absolutely loathes crypto in general, because I do see a glimmer of hope in the wild wild West that is web 3
> everything was better back in the days<p>Sigh. As with everything in this regard: If it was better, how come we "advanced" to something else then?
Yawn. Another "hot take" article that's really just pandering to the HN/"true hacker" crowd that romanticizes anything pre-Google. It's a pretty shallow article that just regurgitates the same old "money makes things evil" rhetoric and slams the big Z cause it's low hanging fruit.<p>I'd be much more interested in something that highlights or talks about what _is_ better about web 2.0 than meme-ing about "old web good, new web bad". This is just click bait dressed up as anti-establishment / edge-lord blog spam.