Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)(jarredsumner.com)
jarredsumner.com
Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
https://jarredsumner.com/codeblog/
282 comments
Here's a site I like to link whenever this discussion comes up (not associated):
https://wiby.me
I love hopping in and hitting the "surprise me" every once in a while, and reading some obscure webpage written by an actual person with a passion for a subject. In the past I've seen a site dedicated to the soundtrack for a film series (I can't remember which), not even necessarily streaming the soundtrack or something, but just a bunch of articles about every facet of these soundtracks.
Just now I got linked to a page about Kodak Photo CDs
http://www.tedfelix.com/PhotoCD/
https://wiby.me
I love hopping in and hitting the "surprise me" every once in a while, and reading some obscure webpage written by an actual person with a passion for a subject. In the past I've seen a site dedicated to the soundtrack for a film series (I can't remember which), not even necessarily streaming the soundtrack or something, but just a bunch of articles about every facet of these soundtracks.
Just now I got linked to a page about Kodak Photo CDs
http://www.tedfelix.com/PhotoCD/
Awesome site. For those looking for a summary:
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.
https://wiby.me/about/
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.
https://wiby.me/about/
In a similar vein, I like Marginala's discover/site hopping mode. The little cards make it easier to get the vibe of more than one site at a time too.
https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
Got this link:
https://mebious.neocities.org/Layer/Wierd.html
It's a Thought Experiments Lain website
P.S. There absolutely is definitely going to be sound coming through speakers. Fair heads up.
https://mebious.neocities.org/Layer/Wierd.html
It's a Thought Experiments Lain website
P.S. There absolutely is definitely going to be sound coming through speakers. Fair heads up.
I really enjoy that the Lain fans are not slowing down in the slightest with their love for Lain.
I'm fairly certain this is a really old site...
Wow this is fantastic!
Landed on some HAM radio operator's personal text-only site and then a site about birds in some far off place in Nova Scotia: http://www.capebretonbirds.ca/.
Landed on some HAM radio operator's personal text-only site and then a site about birds in some far off place in Nova Scotia: http://www.capebretonbirds.ca/.
Serendipity, I am in Nova Scotia right now and heading out to Cape Brenton tomorrow! I will keep an eye out for some of those birds!
Oh my gosh, the "surprise me" link took me here:
http://www.rechenmaschinen-illustrated.com/
It's a site full of photos and descriptions of antique calculators!
http://www.rechenmaschinen-illustrated.com/
It's a site full of photos and descriptions of antique calculators!
I clicked "surprise me" and found a page that has a picture of astronauts on the ISS with SPHERES: http://www.madsci.org/
In high school my friends and I were on a team for a robotics/programming competition run by NASA and MIT that involved programming 3d models of these SPHERES to do some action in a virtual space against an opponent. But if you made it to the final round, you got to watch your code get executed by ACTUAL SPHERES on the INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION. We won 2 years in a row, and made it to the final round 3 times (while I was on the team, I think they made it to the final round once the year before I joined). I doubt I'll ever do anything nearly that cool ever again in my actual career now.
In high school my friends and I were on a team for a robotics/programming competition run by NASA and MIT that involved programming 3d models of these SPHERES to do some action in a virtual space against an opponent. But if you made it to the final round, you got to watch your code get executed by ACTUAL SPHERES on the INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION. We won 2 years in a row, and made it to the final round 3 times (while I was on the team, I think they made it to the final round once the year before I joined). I doubt I'll ever do anything nearly that cool ever again in my actual career now.
Perfect page for Links+ on my OBSD powered crappy Atom N270 netbook :).
* Got a crappy knock-off Dustin Diamond page that wasn't official and looked like it was the result of a 12 year old and a copy of MS Frontpage and a case of Jolt Cola.
* A "furniture porn" site that was horrific. Not the modern usage where it's a lot of photos of nice furniture, the other interpretation. No humans, just weird ass pictures of chairs.
* Then something actually good: http://marc.merlins.org/linux/refundday/ Apparently there was a Windows Refund day in 1999 where *nix users could get a refund for the copy of Windows that came in their PC.
I got this http://nothings.org/writing/websucks.html so fascinating in 2004 the web already suck
This is so great. I was just telling my son about the wonder of the old internet and how great stumbleupon was.
Thanks for this.
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This is awesome, i found a very simple dutch oven bread recipe.
Cant wait to try it.
Cant wait to try it.
IMO it's not just about being bite-sized, memeable content catering to the lowest common denominator. It's that nearly everyone making content is copying marketing strategies. Back then it was more of a show-and-tell vibe, now everything is trying to sell something.
Everyone has become a sellout. When I was growing up this was considered a bad thing. Today it’s a virtue.
Maybe less virtue and more necessary evil. It was a lot easier to not be a sellout in the economic boom of the 90s when you could find that paid the bills. The younger generation now is barely scraping by. They aren't into hustle culture because they love it, they do it because they're broke.
But 99.99% of people could stream Twitch 10 hours a day, put out half a dozen Youtube videos a week, chase every TikTok trend, and never make a dime. And at the end of it all? They wasted so much of their time doing things to chase the money, instead of things they liked, and when Twitch decides they're not going to preserve archives from unpopular streams, they don't even have the artifact left over.
Twitch/TikTok/YouTube is the "move to LA and do foodservice whist waiting to hit it big" of the current generation. You don't actually make any money doing it, but you think someday you will.
I don’t think people are broke per say. They have been promoted to and have internalised the idea that if you are not a huge success you are a failure but in absolute term most people seem to be doing fine.
There's not incentives currently for the no money involved approach. Before, there was still some unknown promise of the thing you are doing being discovered at some point, and also you could still sellout - lots of creators did this eventually. The noise is really high today.
I've done a penance ^h^h career in advertising ,[0] and I left because advertising sold out. Advertising and commercial art/advertising/deductible graphics used to nurture the most amazing arrays of cultural perpetual moonlighting geniuses. Now that went down the first conversion funnel long ago. We're not even a number were just amorphous $rnd now.
[0]Computational advertising for print in the very early nineties...)
Edit: a last gasp website I absolutely considered Sui Generis and was invaluable in the graphics world was Drawn.ca . I'd be immensely grateful to hear of any mirrors or archive.
[0]Computational advertising for print in the very early nineties...)
Edit: a last gasp website I absolutely considered Sui Generis and was invaluable in the graphics world was Drawn.ca . I'd be immensely grateful to hear of any mirrors or archive.
I feel like the pendulum is swinging back. Interest rates, rent, housing and commodity prices are up, so discretionary spending will almost certainly be lower.
Could that reduce demand for marketing and advertising in general? Maybe the tighter market will drive up demand for more aggressive data capture? Where does all that leave social sites and content creators who but their empire selling fast fashion an overpriced gaming accessories during a time when access to money was easier?
Could that reduce demand for marketing and advertising in general? Maybe the tighter market will drive up demand for more aggressive data capture? Where does all that leave social sites and content creators who but their empire selling fast fashion an overpriced gaming accessories during a time when access to money was easier?
I doubt it will for marketing in general. It is a real red queen's race/prisoner's dilemma. Now discretionary spending can and will go down in a recession even among those who could afford it. Due to the gaucheness of showing off during bad times (ironically making things worse if taken in a vacuum).
This is especially ironic since the original article was using nostalgia to sell his new codeblog service...
Frankly it always struck me as kind of insane that it was considered a bad thing. Especially since the definition of selling out seemed to consist of any and everything while not being successful. Was it some hippie movement vestige or something?
As far as I can tell, selling out has always been a subjective thing and has always been directed towards those who turn their back on principles for personal gain. Of course, everyone has a different idea of what those principles are so pretty much everyone who is sucessful gets branded as a sellout by someone. While some of this may be a vestige of the hippie movement, I suspect most of it is not.
The book "The Rebel Sell" points out that creating businesses and selling products was central to the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The "Whole Earth Catalogue" was not a 'leave a penny, take a penny' dish!
Yes, I think people miss the genuineness more than the fun. Everything happening nowadays seems to be geared towards selling you something. It seems to go further than the internet too. Reading the discussion on pubs closing on this site, some people seem to genuinely have internalised that they themselves are a product which should be optimised in some form of globalised meat market. Late stage capitalism is a bit depressing.
I’ve built something different that I blog about with a show and tell. I love my product but the weird thing is dev.to the perfect portal to blog about such things is shadowbanned on HN.
My site [1] tends to get linked to by these kinds of things (well, more than by normal things) so I've found a few just through referrer traffic, and joining webrings has been fun too.
https://gossipsweb.net
https://fediring.net
https://nightfall.city
https://linkbudz.m455.casa
https://indieblog.page
https://indieweb.xyz
https://stumblingon.com
https://webring.dinhe.net
https://hotlinewebring.club
https://handmade-web.net
https://biglist.terraaeon.com
https://xn--sr8hvo.ws
https://nownownow.com
https://blogsurf.io
https://theforest.link
There's a ton of cool stuff going on on the internet, much even public, but the ethic by which things are shared still seems to me to resemble these insights: https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web Thinking of things as small social niches is helpful in figuring out where the best bits are.
[1] https://maya.land :)
https://gossipsweb.net
https://fediring.net
https://nightfall.city
https://linkbudz.m455.casa
https://indieblog.page
https://indieweb.xyz
https://stumblingon.com
https://webring.dinhe.net
https://hotlinewebring.club
https://handmade-web.net
https://biglist.terraaeon.com
https://xn--sr8hvo.ws
https://nownownow.com
https://blogsurf.io
https://theforest.link
There's a ton of cool stuff going on on the internet, much even public, but the ethic by which things are shared still seems to me to resemble these insights: https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web Thinking of things as small social niches is helpful in figuring out where the best bits are.
[1] https://maya.land :)
Ah I just commented about my app, Moonjump, which uses Gossip Web as one of the sites to source material from. Just found Gossip Web a couple weeks ago. Great job!
Here's mine: https://moonjump.app
Here's mine: https://moonjump.app
thx for the list,
I already knew about your page, very cool
Thanks for this list!
> so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever
I did this for quite awhile using bookmarks, and the link rot is real. If 10% of my historical bookmarks were valid, I’d be pleasantly surprised.
I did this for quite awhile using bookmarks, and the link rot is real. If 10% of my historical bookmarks were valid, I’d be pleasantly surprised.
Anecdotally, my own search engine index starts to feel stale after about two months. I wonder what the half-life of a link is.
I'm highly tempted to run a "caching" proxy 24x7 just to keep archives of some of these decaying gems around past their lifespan on the web.
I'd say I could just use archive.org (or similar), but their (admittedly necessary) respect of robots.txt makes their archive incomplete.
I'd say I could just use archive.org (or similar), but their (admittedly necessary) respect of robots.txt makes their archive incomplete.
I've considered running my own IA (https://github.com/internetarchive/heritrix3), which only archives my chrome history, which is stored in a local sqlite db.
I haven't had the time to figure out the details of how the pieces should be glued together.
I haven't had the time to figure out the details of how the pieces should be glued together.
I also wish for a modern local archiving solution. HTTRACK just doesn't cut it anymore, unless you really want a local copy of a webcomic that stopped updating in 2003.
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I use screenshots on my search engine to work around this issue. If you are interested, I have an open server deployment for it.
It won't help with ones that are already gone, but there's a firefox plugin called Archiveror that automatically archives your bookmarks.
>I wonder why it wasn't viable.
Because for the most part, people making content would rather earn money for their content than not earn money. The silos of TikTok and Instagram and YouTube allow for sufficiently low transaction costs such that this market of advertisers interested in buying attention and content creators interested in buying money can exist.
Maybe stumbleupon was too early, but the fact that the app ecosystem makes it much more difficult to copy content makes the silos much more appealing to both content creators and advertisers.
Because for the most part, people making content would rather earn money for their content than not earn money. The silos of TikTok and Instagram and YouTube allow for sufficiently low transaction costs such that this market of advertisers interested in buying attention and content creators interested in buying money can exist.
Maybe stumbleupon was too early, but the fact that the app ecosystem makes it much more difficult to copy content makes the silos much more appealing to both content creators and advertisers.
An economic explanation makes sense. I wonder if a monetizable ecosystem could exists with longer form content in multiple forms, ie. multimedia, a word that has almost disappeared.
There is Patreon, Substack, Youtube and others that does work, the problem lies in the curation and personalisation that seems to have gone out the window replaced by algos and simple designs with bland and uninspired designs and concepts.
There is Patreon, Substack, Youtube and others that does work, the problem lies in the curation and personalisation that seems to have gone out the window replaced by algos and simple designs with bland and uninspired designs and concepts.
I wish the app moguls would just give us a "Turn off Personalization" option and let me explore freely. I turn off all history tracking on YouTube, but it doesn't matter. Whether it's on or off, you can't explore a topic deeply. You have 1-2 videos on the subject, then you have completely random unrelated click-bait garbage.
Even music apps are disappointing. Sometimes they do well, but most of the time it seems not. I play a radio station for Mat Corby, which is a pretty chill downtempo vibe, and the app throws in stuff from my library that has no relation--like Kanye West's Jesus Walks. Literally did that multiple times. Those vibes could not be more different.
Maybe cataloging music is a difficult problem, but there was a time (maybe 2010?) when YouTube would efficiently suggest music that had a vibe to what I was listening to, and it helped me find many artists I listed to now.
Edit: And a time when Apple's Genius was not a bad house party DJ
Even music apps are disappointing. Sometimes they do well, but most of the time it seems not. I play a radio station for Mat Corby, which is a pretty chill downtempo vibe, and the app throws in stuff from my library that has no relation--like Kanye West's Jesus Walks. Literally did that multiple times. Those vibes could not be more different.
Maybe cataloging music is a difficult problem, but there was a time (maybe 2010?) when YouTube would efficiently suggest music that had a vibe to what I was listening to, and it helped me find many artists I listed to now.
Edit: And a time when Apple's Genius was not a bad house party DJ
And even if the vast majority of them don't in fact make material money, many of them have a hope of doing so and act accordingly.
A lot of that content has moved to newsletters and Twitter threads. If you know the right people to follow, there are a lot of niche, quirky, and insightful pieces that remind me of the homepages of yore.
One problem is that these things get lost in the timeline. So I made a StumbleUpon for Twitter threads [0]. Check it out!
[0] https://mood.surf
One problem is that these things get lost in the timeline. So I made a StumbleUpon for Twitter threads [0]. Check it out!
[0] https://mood.surf
I really love the design/idea, but after hitting “Shuffle” a few times, it looks like it threw an unhandled exception due to an async error (now I just get a TypeError on every page load):
O@https://mood.surf/build/routes/tweets/$tweetId-ID4B42CB.js:1:8106
Zi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:64683
li@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:74110
bs@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:104095
Kf@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:104026
st@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:103886
yi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:7:100770
yi@[native code]
@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50511
@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:1:4097
_s@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50458
we@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50393
Ve@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:7:98358
bi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:69948
bi@[native code]
onChange@https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:31745
u@https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:18647
@https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:26238
asyncFunctionResume@[native code]
@[native code]Thanks for reporting this. I think it has to do with certain tweets being made private/inaccessible after being added to the index. I'll look into it.
Also, video. All that "weird and fun" stuff that was in text 30 years ago is in front of a camera now.
I doubt StumbleUpon would be able to take off in the same form today - it installed a browser toolbar, collected a profile of your interests, and collected your up/downvotes to fed them all to an opaque algorithm that took you to the next random page. Who knows where that data went.
Could we come up with a privacy-preserving equivalent to stumbleupon today?
Could we come up with a privacy-preserving equivalent to stumbleupon today?
Firefox’s Pocket recommendations took a good approach. The browser downloads a big daily file with “potential recommendations”, then filters it at the client side.
The big downside was that, because it was turned on by default, a whole bunch of people who didn’t actually want it had it foisted upon them, so it got a very bad reputation right out the gate. Right algorithm, bad execution.
The big downside was that, because it was turned on by default, a whole bunch of people who didn’t actually want it had it foisted upon them, so it got a very bad reputation right out the gate. Right algorithm, bad execution.
I actually really like Pocket's recommendations, but yeah, the way it's all forced on you it's basically an ad. That's pretty much why I feel like I have to boycott it despite liking the product. It's such a Mozilla move to take something nice and turn it bad for no good reason.
At inception it was just a website that redirected you. There are variations of this created all the time but centered around essays and journalism. It would be trivial to create what is basically a glorified copy of SU, but no one cares enough to do it. Or more accurately, they already exist and we collectively don't care enough to notice.
A lot of it is still out there! A personal favorite of mine is https://www.fujichia.com/ which is, among other things, a blog inside a castle, with a fish pond outside and an art gallery. It reminds me of a simpler time when everyone had a handcrafted, bespoke HTML homepage with all sorts of secrets and surprises.
Definitely check out:
https://neocities.org/
https://neocities.org/
I miss old internet stuff to, but in a way I think it’s just morphed. First you have to look past the influencer/marketing cruft trying to pass as authentic but I find real great content is predominantly being created on YT and other video channels. The production value I see some amateur folks take is insane and has to be a massive hobby in of itself.
Also have to just realize the web is now public transport where it used to be exclusive. It’s like flying in 1962 versus 2022
Also have to just realize the web is now public transport where it used to be exclusive. It’s like flying in 1962 versus 2022
> The production value I see some amateur folks take is insane and has to be a massive hobby in of itself.
Doesn't YT share some ad revenue with you if you're over a certain amount of views? :)
Doesn't YT share some ad revenue with you if you're over a certain amount of views? :)
Is it material for most? I’d bet it hardly offsets the investment in AV equipment as well as editing software. For a lot of people, learning video editing is path for content creation just like learning to code is/was for many others. To some degree, I’d venture they are in competition with each other. And code has more business value while video has broader appeal. So more so just pointing out how the trends have played out such that developers are not necessarily the “creators” of the experienced internet any more. They mostly just do the plumbing.
My YT watching tends to be around DIY stuff, how to, engineering and home/construction. These are people that in past would have made high quality blogs with tutorials but now just make videos. I’m consistently impressed by the storytelling and production value. Even if they technically receive an ad share I still think they’re amateur. There are a few that have crossed over into massive popularity and it’s probably significant but that’s not the norm. Even in the old days, people put ads on their tutorial pages and a lot of blogs so it’s no different, to me.
My YT watching tends to be around DIY stuff, how to, engineering and home/construction. These are people that in past would have made high quality blogs with tutorials but now just make videos. I’m consistently impressed by the storytelling and production value. Even if they technically receive an ad share I still think they’re amateur. There are a few that have crossed over into massive popularity and it’s probably significant but that’s not the norm. Even in the old days, people put ads on their tutorial pages and a lot of blogs so it’s no different, to me.
Reddit and other social media has largely replaced it I'd say (not to the same quality though).
Huh.
I feel like Reddit doesn't really have links anymore. The subreddits that have external links are usually spam subreddits which humans don't visit.
The human-inhabited subreddits seem to mostly be favoring selftext, images, youtube videos, maybe wikipedia, and possibly some image hosts (but they are falling out of favor since imgur turned to shit). Very rarely do they seem to link to other websites.
I feel like Reddit doesn't really have links anymore. The subreddits that have external links are usually spam subreddits which humans don't visit.
The human-inhabited subreddits seem to mostly be favoring selftext, images, youtube videos, maybe wikipedia, and possibly some image hosts (but they are falling out of favor since imgur turned to shit). Very rarely do they seem to link to other websites.
I don't think they're talking about links but about content. No need for real links when the content is within reddit. For instance, I've curated my subs to all my hobbies: farming, watch collecting, coffee stations, coffee in general, musician fan pages, etc and they're mostly very small and have content very much like the old web I grew up on.
Yeah, but in that sense, it hasn't replaced StumbleUpon as a way of discovering websites, as the only website you're discovering is Reddit.
I can get with that. I'd say it's mostly semantics because at the end of the day, we're just trying to find interesting content and both ways accomplish that but there's really no way to win that argument. Lol
StumbleUpon was awesome!
I remember when I first showed my mum how to use a computer, StumbleUpon (the FF add-on) was one of the first things I installed. She was hooked! And then she'd email me every time she saw something interesting - which was every 5 minutes...
I guess now the equivalent is your mum tagging you on Facebook?
(Thankfully my mum's not on social media)
I remember when I first showed my mum how to use a computer, StumbleUpon (the FF add-on) was one of the first things I installed. She was hooked! And then she'd email me every time she saw something interesting - which was every 5 minutes...
I guess now the equivalent is your mum tagging you on Facebook?
(Thankfully my mum's not on social media)
I liked Stumbleupon, I miss it too
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/bifurcated/rivets/ - This is pretty great, run by my old professor (and I graduated in '95...)
StumbleUpon was such a fun way to blow time where you needed to do something in a bit but had a few spare minutes. At one point in time I probably had a lot of random ass fun bookmarks through that.
I think we would need something like a modern Geocities to encourage people to start building indices again.
It would have to support mobile, perhaps have a nice editor like the Medium mobile app had.
It would have to support mobile, perhaps have a nice editor like the Medium mobile app had.
Good news, it exists over on neocities which is experiencing something of a revival in younger circles now. :)
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I remember things like the DOOM FAQ https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text and there was one for Star Wars, also. I printed them out and read them; hundreds of pages.
https://stumblingon.com/
I like this clone.
I like this clone.
Read Something Interesting (www.readsomethinginteresting.com) is a great compilation of interesting blog posts, I've spent many an long afternoon discovering new blogs there.
Seconding this, Read Something Interesting is amazing.
I was at StumbleUpon at shutdown and for a few years before. I'm creating a single-purpose account to avoid doxxing myself on my main account. Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that killed SU.
SU relied on individual human curators to discover worthy new web pages instead of trying to crawl the web in bulk. Our most passionate users, the people who would submit great new URLs, tag URLs, rate heavily, and curate good collections, were heavy users of our XUL based Firefox extension. We were never able to build an extension as featureful post-XUL and that hurt new content acquisition and categorization.
The linked content we served to users on the web had to be iframeable. That described most of the web in the early years of SU. By the time of the shutdown, most new sites and even many established sites couldn't be displayed in iframes any more. It would have been technically possible to replicate most of the iframe experience without iframes by serving up our own crawled copies of pages, but then we would have been infringing copyright. Iframes allowed SU to show a third party page without actually copying it.
Over time, more sites disallowed crawling via robots.txt or by thwarting them without prior declaration by rejecting "crawler-looking" requests that didn't come from Google.
Our mobile apps allowed us to serve content in a webview even if it wasn't iframeable, but mobile platforms inherently excluded a lot of the "weird and wonderful" stuff that people loved SU for. For example, our online games category contained mostly Flash games. Even most of the non-Flash games assumed either keyboard or mouse access; few of them worked well on a phone's touch screen. Similar problems applied to other interactive content (simulations, interactive visualizations). Take away the interactive content and SU started to look more like just another app for passive scrolling.
Web pages became increasingly encrusted with ads, nags, and tracking scripts. I was the final developer responsible for maintenance on our Android app. 95% of the performance complaints we received about the app were, in truth, complaints about the analytics and ads an individual recommended web page was loading. This was also the source of 95% of the complaints about ads that we received. SU monetized itself with interstitial ads between recommended web pages. Every ad running on a recommended page was put there by the site owner, not us. But negative reviews and customer emails blamed us for the battery-killing, device-heating, content-obscuring ads running on-page. The ad problem was much less severe for people who used the web site instead of mobile apps, since they were largely power users who had ad blockers installed, but see previous problems about iframes and Firefox plugins.
Consolidation toward siloed content platforms certainly didn't help either. But I think that SU would have been able to keep going until the present day if not for the problems mentioned above. Some of them seem like mere happenstances of history; I could imagine Flash living a lot longer if it hadn't been a notorious source of exploitable security holes. Other things, like long-form articles getting increasingly barnacled with ads, nags, analytics, and paywalls, seem like a more inevitable outcome of the collapse of old-media print revenue.
One thing I've idly pondered since SU shut down is just recommending weird-old-web content that's findable in the Wayback Machine yet missing from the modern internet. The beauty would be two-fold: it's likely to be cleaner content in the first place, and you can transform it (e.g. running Reader Mode over it server-side) without worrying about the site owners coming after you for copyright infringement. Or at least not worrying as much. It seems like marginalia_nu has managed to find a goodly amount of content that still lives so maybe resorting to the Wayback Machine isn't necessary at all.
SU relied on individual human curators to discover worthy new web pages instead of trying to crawl the web in bulk. Our most passionate users, the people who would submit great new URLs, tag URLs, rate heavily, and curate good collections, were heavy users of our XUL based Firefox extension. We were never able to build an extension as featureful post-XUL and that hurt new content acquisition and categorization.
The linked content we served to users on the web had to be iframeable. That described most of the web in the early years of SU. By the time of the shutdown, most new sites and even many established sites couldn't be displayed in iframes any more. It would have been technically possible to replicate most of the iframe experience without iframes by serving up our own crawled copies of pages, but then we would have been infringing copyright. Iframes allowed SU to show a third party page without actually copying it.
Over time, more sites disallowed crawling via robots.txt or by thwarting them without prior declaration by rejecting "crawler-looking" requests that didn't come from Google.
Our mobile apps allowed us to serve content in a webview even if it wasn't iframeable, but mobile platforms inherently excluded a lot of the "weird and wonderful" stuff that people loved SU for. For example, our online games category contained mostly Flash games. Even most of the non-Flash games assumed either keyboard or mouse access; few of them worked well on a phone's touch screen. Similar problems applied to other interactive content (simulations, interactive visualizations). Take away the interactive content and SU started to look more like just another app for passive scrolling.
Web pages became increasingly encrusted with ads, nags, and tracking scripts. I was the final developer responsible for maintenance on our Android app. 95% of the performance complaints we received about the app were, in truth, complaints about the analytics and ads an individual recommended web page was loading. This was also the source of 95% of the complaints about ads that we received. SU monetized itself with interstitial ads between recommended web pages. Every ad running on a recommended page was put there by the site owner, not us. But negative reviews and customer emails blamed us for the battery-killing, device-heating, content-obscuring ads running on-page. The ad problem was much less severe for people who used the web site instead of mobile apps, since they were largely power users who had ad blockers installed, but see previous problems about iframes and Firefox plugins.
Consolidation toward siloed content platforms certainly didn't help either. But I think that SU would have been able to keep going until the present day if not for the problems mentioned above. Some of them seem like mere happenstances of history; I could imagine Flash living a lot longer if it hadn't been a notorious source of exploitable security holes. Other things, like long-form articles getting increasingly barnacled with ads, nags, analytics, and paywalls, seem like a more inevitable outcome of the collapse of old-media print revenue.
One thing I've idly pondered since SU shut down is just recommending weird-old-web content that's findable in the Wayback Machine yet missing from the modern internet. The beauty would be two-fold: it's likely to be cleaner content in the first place, and you can transform it (e.g. running Reader Mode over it server-side) without worrying about the site owners coming after you for copyright infringement. Or at least not worrying as much. It seems like marginalia_nu has managed to find a goodly amount of content that still lives so maybe resorting to the Wayback Machine isn't necessary at all.
Taking into account the technical limitations, couldn't SU simply link to/open the site in a new tab?
It was possible to open recommended pages in a new tab. This is one of the things we tried at StumbleUpon's quasi-successor, Mix. It was significantly less engaging for new users than having everything in one tab. Some people who had used the real StumbleUpon didn't just find it less engaging; they hated it and sent hate mail to make sure we knew. It was a distinctly inferior experience.
You can no longer deliver the full StumbleUpon experience through a web browser, at least not legally. The tightening technical constraints make it impossible to replicate what we could do 10 years ago. Of course now it's also harder for someone to enroll your machine in a botnet because you played a game, or steal your passwords because you installed a browser extension, so those things are to the better. But increasing attention to security and control also make it harder to offer "fun and weird" experiences of various kinds.
You can no longer deliver the full StumbleUpon experience through a web browser, at least not legally. The tightening technical constraints make it impossible to replicate what we could do 10 years ago. Of course now it's also harder for someone to enroll your machine in a botnet because you played a game, or steal your passwords because you installed a browser extension, so those things are to the better. But increasing attention to security and control also make it harder to offer "fun and weird" experiences of various kinds.
It's called TikTok. The internet evolved dude.
"Evolved" is not the word I would use. As the Internet was already showing signs of being twisted by its own mythos in the 1990's, there was plenty of then-obvious opportunity that resulted in the type of profit-driven curation we see today. I remember the Internet then, but I feel a lot of people allow the lense of nostalgia to twist it into something far more wild and pure than it actually was.
The post you are replying to mentioned TikTok.
TikTok used to suggest all sorts of long-form articles. Tiktok is all short-form video; a bunch of vapid trash.
All the fun and weird stuff is still around, it just typically doesn't SEO well and doesn't show up on Google, and is too long-tail to show up on popularity-based algorithms like those of Reddit or Facebook.
I've spent the last year or so building tools and algorithms specifically to dig up "fun and weird". It's still there: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
I've spent the last year or so building tools and algorithms specifically to dig up "fun and weird". It's still there: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
There's still something to be said about the fact that all the mainstream internet platforms don't really encourage much in terms of "internet creativity" outside of the tight boundaries that are allowed (uploading a video, writing text, posting a picture, etc)
The fact that MySpace was mainstream and allowed for HTML/CSS hacking did exactly what the article said -- it tricked a generation of teenagers into learning how to do that "weird internet stuff."
For the most part, if you want to do anything like that now you're gonna be stuck figuring out domains and hosting and whatnot which isn't nearly as fun as typing some HTML into the platform you and your friends already use. So not as many people are going to do it.
The fact that MySpace was mainstream and allowed for HTML/CSS hacking did exactly what the article said -- it tricked a generation of teenagers into learning how to do that "weird internet stuff."
For the most part, if you want to do anything like that now you're gonna be stuck figuring out domains and hosting and whatnot which isn't nearly as fun as typing some HTML into the platform you and your friends already use. So not as many people are going to do it.
The good thing about MySpace, which was arguably also its weakness to Facebook, was that you weren't forced to use a real name. You could create multiple accounts, multiple identities, let your freak flag fly. Facebook/Instagram are so tied to people's real lives that you don't just have to filter yourself, you basically have to construct a false happy life for public display.
That's the direction the internet has been moving in general, and naïve people are getting on-board with the corporate sales pitch that removing anonymity from the internet enables us to catch pedophiles or nazis or something.
Police state utopia!
Police state utopia!
MySpace was my first coding experience and I think ultimately tipped me to CS in school.
I remember laying out my page like a pink and black newspaper. All that work for no one to read lol.
But now it is essentially my career
I remember laying out my page like a pink and black newspaper. All that work for no one to read lol.
But now it is essentially my career
Excellent site - thank you!
Perhaps it is the way we think about the internet that has also changed...
Back in the day, when I wanted to find something on the internet, I knew I was going to have to dig and search and explore. My mind expected this experience.
Since web 2.0, my mind doesn't work the same way.
Perhaps it is the way we think about the internet that has also changed...
Back in the day, when I wanted to find something on the internet, I knew I was going to have to dig and search and explore. My mind expected this experience.
Since web 2.0, my mind doesn't work the same way.
I wonder if there's a search engine that ranks results with worst SEOs first
It's not that far off what my search engine does.
Awesome. I think there's a huge need for a search engine filtering out commercial content. It's basically just all spam.
Recently I wanted to find information on hacking a device I had obtained - but of course any search query I could throw at search engines only yielded ways to buy it or low-effort reviews. I tried marginalia but it seems like the index wasn't quite large enough for my purpose yet.
Recently I wanted to find information on hacking a device I had obtained - but of course any search query I could throw at search engines only yielded ways to buy it or low-effort reviews. I tried marginalia but it seems like the index wasn't quite large enough for my purpose yet.
May well be that what you were looking for is in the index. My algorithms have a lot of potential for improvement. Right now they only really work well for broad topical searches. They are also entirely blind to some fairly rich websites, such as certain types of forums.
Consider trying Kagi. (I first started using it while it was still in closed beta, but I am not otherwise affiliated with them. I am very satisfied with it so far.)
I also used it during its beta phase and found it rather unremarkable. What really kept me from seriously considering it is that the account requirements prevents using it anonymously.
Precisely. It isn't fun or weird because YOU aren't fun or weird. If you were fun or weird you'd already know where all the fun and weird stuff is.
Another aspect is that your view of the internet, which on its own is incomprehensibly large, is largely shaped by the tools you use to interact with it. It's difficult to become aware of just how much your choice of internet gateway will shape your view of what exists.
If your primary mechanism is Hacker News, the internet is going to look like it's dominated by a bunch of startups and open source projects.
If your primary mechanism is Twitter, the internet is going to be dominated by big-name thought leaders, there will appear to be a lot of outrage and inflamed conflict, maybe some culture wars stuff will stay on your radar.
If your primary mechanism is Google, then a bunch of huge websites are going to be extremely prominent: Wikipedia, Goodreads, WebMD, Pinterest, Stackoverflow, etc. It's also going to look like every blog is just a bunch of spam.
If your primary mechanism is Facebook, then the web will look like a bunch of tabloid news articles, try-hard viral videos, minions memes.
and so on and so forth.
If your primary mechanism is Hacker News, the internet is going to look like it's dominated by a bunch of startups and open source projects.
If your primary mechanism is Twitter, the internet is going to be dominated by big-name thought leaders, there will appear to be a lot of outrage and inflamed conflict, maybe some culture wars stuff will stay on your radar.
If your primary mechanism is Google, then a bunch of huge websites are going to be extremely prominent: Wikipedia, Goodreads, WebMD, Pinterest, Stackoverflow, etc. It's also going to look like every blog is just a bunch of spam.
If your primary mechanism is Facebook, then the web will look like a bunch of tabloid news articles, try-hard viral videos, minions memes.
and so on and so forth.
My navigator tends to remember the websites I view more, which are mostly communities, and I tend to click on the links it has when the browser opens. So I tend to use these communities as the internet gateway as you say - like hacker news! This concept of the internet gateway and the perceptual islands of ideas is really interesting, I think you should someday write about this.
This is one of the things I liked about StumbleUpon. You never knew what you were going to get, but it was almost always something interesting.
>All the fun and weird stuff is still around, it just typically doesn't SEO well and doesn't show up on Google, and is too long-tail to show up on popularity-based algorithms like those of Reddit or Facebook.
In other words, it's a bunch of dead websites and there is little incentive to create anything out of the ordinary.
In other words, it's a bunch of dead websites and there is little incentive to create anything out of the ordinary.
Dead in what sense?
The web in the 90s was an evolving, alive ecosystem. Without the ecosystem, websites that approximate something old-school are standalone entities. Flowers in a vase. They might look the same or even temporarily feel the same, but they are both authored and browsed in an entirely different context.
For example, browsing a website that looks original, but is likely abandoned is a very different experience from browsing it in the 90s or early 00s when it was a part of something big, new and exciting. Even if the content is identical. The same principle applies to authoring.
I have seen countless claims that all the technology that someone could use in the 90s is still available. Regardless of whether it's true or not (mostly not), it misses the point. The social project that was web 1.0 is now defunct.
Paradoxically, the only way to create something equivalent to old-school web now is to invent something entirely new.
For example, browsing a website that looks original, but is likely abandoned is a very different experience from browsing it in the 90s or early 00s when it was a part of something big, new and exciting. Even if the content is identical. The same principle applies to authoring.
I have seen countless claims that all the technology that someone could use in the 90s is still available. Regardless of whether it's true or not (mostly not), it misses the point. The social project that was web 1.0 is now defunct.
Paradoxically, the only way to create something equivalent to old-school web now is to invent something entirely new.
I don't get what you mean. That ecosystem is still alive, though. It's easy to miss because lives in the shadow of another parallel ecosystem, but it's still there, and it still roughly functions the same.
Web 1.0 was and still is a fringe project by and for oddballs. Just like most people in the '90s didn't know how to get on the web, most people today can't find their way past google and social media. In that regard, it's very much still the same.
Web 1.0 was and still is a fringe project by and for oddballs. Just like most people in the '90s didn't know how to get on the web, most people today can't find their way past google and social media. In that regard, it's very much still the same.
Thanks.
This site is excellent, worth a submission of its own.
Just look at one of the best platforms for "fun and weird" - YouTube.
The algorithm aggressively promotes freshness (things posted in the past few hours for certain queries!) and 10+ minute long videos.
Every algorithm change directly impacts what creators, create, because no one wants to put in a whole lot of work for something to never be seen.
If, for example, the ideal format for a joke or video is 3 minutes, that either gets disappeared from public view or becomes part of a longer video.
The real answer, in my opinion, is that current recommendation engines prioritize profit rather than quality or innovation. Or perhaps their evaluation metrics are so bad that their goal is misunderstood. Or perhaps those who stand to profit have become too adept at gaming algorithms (or human psychology e.g. lewd thumbnails) that they degrade results.
...or perhaps we all suffer from nostalgia and forget how terrible the results were of yesteryear.
Who knows, all I know is I feel disappointed in what the internet has become. Even this thread is really just an ad, hijacking our biases and climbing the HN ranks accordingly.
The algorithm aggressively promotes freshness (things posted in the past few hours for certain queries!) and 10+ minute long videos.
Every algorithm change directly impacts what creators, create, because no one wants to put in a whole lot of work for something to never be seen.
If, for example, the ideal format for a joke or video is 3 minutes, that either gets disappeared from public view or becomes part of a longer video.
The real answer, in my opinion, is that current recommendation engines prioritize profit rather than quality or innovation. Or perhaps their evaluation metrics are so bad that their goal is misunderstood. Or perhaps those who stand to profit have become too adept at gaming algorithms (or human psychology e.g. lewd thumbnails) that they degrade results.
...or perhaps we all suffer from nostalgia and forget how terrible the results were of yesteryear.
Who knows, all I know is I feel disappointed in what the internet has become. Even this thread is really just an ad, hijacking our biases and climbing the HN ranks accordingly.
> The algorithm aggressively promotes freshness (things posted in the past few hours for certain queries!) and 10+ minute long videos.
I mostly agree, but there are some counterexamples that provide very in depth, quality information and have gotten popular because of it. Off the top of my head, Ben Eater, Sebastian Lague, 3Blue1Brown, and Reducible.
I think it's still very possible to get stuff that doesn't fit into the algorithm to take off if you make it interesting and high quality :)
I mostly agree, but there are some counterexamples that provide very in depth, quality information and have gotten popular because of it. Off the top of my head, Ben Eater, Sebastian Lague, 3Blue1Brown, and Reducible.
I think it's still very possible to get stuff that doesn't fit into the algorithm to take off if you make it interesting and high quality :)
The internet has changed from communities of interest to communities of people who commoditize social interaction within those interests. On the surface they seem fairly close to actual communities but they incentivize different things which changes how the community operates and personally I think they don't provide many of the healthy benefits of communities while cultivating some pretty unhealthy behavior loops.
You just described Reddit, right?
Basically every "community" that has some emphasis on a voting/ like system. So yeah Reddit and most of the large social media communities like Tiktok, Twitter and so on. Even HN probably has similar effects although they aren't as pronounced.
It's an awkward and elitist thing to say, but I believe it to be true: whatever is embraced by the masses, suffers in some ways.
The expert/nerd internet was pioneering, weird, edgy, cooperative. The internet for the masses is...different.
You'll see the same effect in movies, following "safe" formulas. Every movie must have a romantic side story, no matter how irrelevant. It must deliver to the broadest audience possible. And of course, nothing should be thought-provoking, keep it middle of the road.
Check out musical charts, songs are so repetitive that they seem AI generated.
I've found another recent example in F1 racing. It's a pretty technical sport that used to have a fairly limited following. Now the thing is exploding and there's friction between the "original" fans and the clueless idiots spoiling the well (not my words).
As soon as you have the masses on board, this obviously also invites a heavy commercialization of any space, with goals entirely opposite to the original spirit of the internet.
Concluding, the only way to get it back, is to be elitist. Create well defined spaces, heavily curated in both members and content.
The expert/nerd internet was pioneering, weird, edgy, cooperative. The internet for the masses is...different.
You'll see the same effect in movies, following "safe" formulas. Every movie must have a romantic side story, no matter how irrelevant. It must deliver to the broadest audience possible. And of course, nothing should be thought-provoking, keep it middle of the road.
Check out musical charts, songs are so repetitive that they seem AI generated.
I've found another recent example in F1 racing. It's a pretty technical sport that used to have a fairly limited following. Now the thing is exploding and there's friction between the "original" fans and the clueless idiots spoiling the well (not my words).
As soon as you have the masses on board, this obviously also invites a heavy commercialization of any space, with goals entirely opposite to the original spirit of the internet.
Concluding, the only way to get it back, is to be elitist. Create well defined spaces, heavily curated in both members and content.
I might phrase it, "whatever is embraced by the masses becomes more appealing to the masses." Broadening in appeal is not necessarily worse, although it's surely worse from the perspective of the initial specialized interest group.
Yes, the Internet of yesteryear was more interesting to our type of people, but it had no appeal whatsoever to anyone else. The world is better off today with an Internet that billions find fun and useful, even if it's way less fun for us specifically.
Yes, the Internet of yesteryear was more interesting to our type of people, but it had no appeal whatsoever to anyone else. The world is better off today with an Internet that billions find fun and useful, even if it's way less fun for us specifically.
Honestly, I think we have a discovery problem.
There's plenty of room for both groups. In a way the internet is limitless. A lot of that weirdness still exists, it's just incredibly hard to find.
There's plenty of room for both groups. In a way the internet is limitless. A lot of that weirdness still exists, it's just incredibly hard to find.
That's a good point. I'd love to find a small chatroom full of a couple dozen strangers who share my interests, and many thousands of such chatrooms surely exist, but I'd never find one unless I had a friend point me to it.
I mean, you and me and many other are here on HN, so I think close enough?
That weirdness does still exist, whether it's kept up from a long time ago or people making brand-new weird stuff. I got into making a site on Neocities, essentially a modern Geocities equivalent, a while back after a friend told me about it. I didn't end up sticking with it too long, but I found so many gloriously weird personal sites, projects, shrines, zines, and fan pages.
Quick question, what makes Neocities different than Cloudflare/GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg/x Pages?
Its just like any static page hosting right? The selling point is its open source?(Codeberg and GitLab are open source.)
Once you realize you Can choose what you do online and what music you listen to you can get the best of the best. What helped me is deleting Facebook, Whatsup, Instagram, LinkedIn, Apple Music. Im building my new music collection mainly focused on classical music (the best performers). Im reading quanta magazine, harward magazines etc. You can get anything, the only question is what you really want
Something like a tragedy of the commons in creativity.
Maybe Gopher or one of those similar inspired projects is the future after all. Too weird for mass appeal.
Don't sugar coat it. Call it what it really is: gentrification.
2000: creating content and fostering an online community in private was seen as super nerdy.
2022: binge watching TikTok in public and grown-ass adults fighting over Internet Points is "normal."
And, yeah, the content is much worse. It's a lot of overly-socialized people taking care to say the things they should say so the great Algorithm gives them more Internet Points. And those Internet Points warp the process of creation, especially when they're tied to money.
Like the article said, it's all taken way too seriously, and there's no going back.
2000: creating content and fostering an online community in private was seen as super nerdy.
2022: binge watching TikTok in public and grown-ass adults fighting over Internet Points is "normal."
And, yeah, the content is much worse. It's a lot of overly-socialized people taking care to say the things they should say so the great Algorithm gives them more Internet Points. And those Internet Points warp the process of creation, especially when they're tied to money.
Like the article said, it's all taken way too seriously, and there's no going back.
Is there no going back though? It doesn't take much to delete your social accounts and it seems like more and more people consider this. At some point you get tired of being a product. And when you create content, at some point you just want to do your thing instead of minmaxing the algorithm.
We don't have to compromise for the huge social platforms or to make money for them.
We don't have to compromise for the huge social platforms or to make money for them.
What I did about it today is bookmarking some of the websites that were shared, I mean isnt it the same as in any century, now the difference is that you can have free access to good stuff
Increasingly, I see the value in archiving long-form content I like, because link rot is so pervasive. Maybe time to start using pinboard again.
"Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?!?"
Turns post into an advertisement
Turns post into an advertisement
Everything is money. But! There are subcultures that are hard to monetize though, e.g. furry subculture since it comes with so much pornography. No brand wants to be close to that. At this point, as a furry artist, I feel it's refreshing that this very weird and mostly harmless adult nature keeps the rest of the art also somewhat safe and in the hands of small artists.
Hello fellow furry pornmonger :)
It’s fucking GREAT really, furry is poison to megacorps and there’s a ton of room for individual creators to thrive without corporations relentlessly optimizing their cash extraction at huge scales.
It’s fucking GREAT really, furry is poison to megacorps and there’s a ton of room for individual creators to thrive without corporations relentlessly optimizing their cash extraction at huge scales.
The fandom creates such an incredible environment for creators to thrive in. I went to a con near me and a walk through the dealer's den showed the vast variety of creators. Of course, there were artists with prints and merch, but there were also furry musicians with CDs of albums and DJ sets, a woodworker with carvings and laser-cut journals where the pages were magnetic inserts, someone selling fursuit parts like eyes and horns made out of resin, even a small handful of adult businesses (behind a curtain and with staff checking ages, of course). Music, games, books, especially art, it's all by furries, for furries, with the exception of a few mass-market friendly franchises that furries happen to love like Beastars or Zootopia.
I have not been to a con since a few years before the pandemic, I really gotta figure out what’s around me now that I’ve moved.
It’s poison to mega corps because it doesn’t fit into contemporary “coolness”. Using furries decreases sales and that’s all they care about.
Yeah, it is nice being in at least one fandom that is mostly left alone from most of the mainstream.
One thing I love about the greater furry community is that a LOT of art gets aggregated to a certain site, which I am sure you are aware of, that puts high value on proper sourcing/tagging. (And still respects the wishes of the creators)
Maybe unrelated: Do you think furry commissions are so expensive because so many furries are wealthy, or do furries pursue wealth to pay for commissions?
One thing I love about the greater furry community is that a LOT of art gets aggregated to a certain site, which I am sure you are aware of, that puts high value on proper sourcing/tagging. (And still respects the wishes of the creators)
Maybe unrelated: Do you think furry commissions are so expensive because so many furries are wealthy, or do furries pursue wealth to pay for commissions?
There's tons of broke-ass furries who can't afford a ton of commissions. There's also a lot of furries with tech jobs who have more money than they know what to do with, and are willing to pay artists fees that approach a significant percentage of what the techie's hourly wage works out to.
Furry art is a significant part of my income and trust me: furry commissions are crazy cheap. Yes, even that one guy charging in the low four figures - he does some pretty complex work that I'd charge four figures for too, if I was willing to work that long on a client's piece.
I could be making a lot more money if I'd stayed in the animation industry, or if I was hunting corporate illustration work. But then I'd have to deal with much tighter deadlines, restrictive style guides, clients who really have no idea what they want and no idea how to articulate how what I just spent a while working on fails to capture what they want, figuring out how to make the lucrative but incredibly boring world of, say, standardized shipping pallets visually interesting, and a whole bunch of office politics. Drawing happy animal-headed people having a good time is a lot more fun. It's nice when a corporate gig comes my way now and then because it can pay a few months rent, but it definitely takes its toll in the amount of tedious bullshit I have to deal with.
I'd also maybe have things like "health insurance" and "a retirement fund" but, hey. It's a tradeoff.
Furry art is a significant part of my income and trust me: furry commissions are crazy cheap. Yes, even that one guy charging in the low four figures - he does some pretty complex work that I'd charge four figures for too, if I was willing to work that long on a client's piece.
I could be making a lot more money if I'd stayed in the animation industry, or if I was hunting corporate illustration work. But then I'd have to deal with much tighter deadlines, restrictive style guides, clients who really have no idea what they want and no idea how to articulate how what I just spent a while working on fails to capture what they want, figuring out how to make the lucrative but incredibly boring world of, say, standardized shipping pallets visually interesting, and a whole bunch of office politics. Drawing happy animal-headed people having a good time is a lot more fun. It's nice when a corporate gig comes my way now and then because it can pay a few months rent, but it definitely takes its toll in the amount of tedious bullshit I have to deal with.
I'd also maybe have things like "health insurance" and "a retirement fund" but, hey. It's a tradeoff.
>Furry art is a significant part of my income
looked up your art, pretty cool style youve got going.
And yeah, corporate anything can be a pretty miserable experience.
Also, maybe I shouldve added a /s to my implication that most if not all furries are somewhat wealthy.
looked up your art, pretty cool style youve got going.
And yeah, corporate anything can be a pretty miserable experience.
Also, maybe I shouldve added a /s to my implication that most if not all furries are somewhat wealthy.
Thanks!
And yeah, it didn't read as sarcasm to me, oh well :)
And yeah, it didn't read as sarcasm to me, oh well :)
These days for me, the content that is considered an Ad is really anything that makes a large company profit, or anything that is possibly a scammy or low value product. I don't consider an individual trying to gain attention for their independent work as an ad... And it can be far more easily ignored than a bunch of corporate employees brigading online about Tesla or Uber on a daily basis, and getting away with it in droves.
That being said, I think sometimes it's better to just reply based on the title and theme of the HN post and not focus on the other promotional elements or ignore the post altogether provided that the poster is not really trying to spam or deceive us... Coming up with creative ways to work your own struggling ideas into conversations online is not really easy when you don't have a marketing staff and lots of ad money.
That being said, I think sometimes it's better to just reply based on the title and theme of the HN post and not focus on the other promotional elements or ignore the post altogether provided that the poster is not really trying to spam or deceive us... Coming up with creative ways to work your own struggling ideas into conversations online is not really easy when you don't have a marketing staff and lots of ad money.
most people are boring/normal by definition and the internet is now mainstream. The internet used to be filled with a pretty weird subset of the general population but now that is drowned out by the masses. The old school internet still exists to some degree but you are going to have to look harder to find where the weird people are at and most the people claiming they want the "weird" internet back would probably complain about those places
same thing happens in any community/society as it ages and grows. People who create it are different from those who move in later once things are great
same thing happens in any community/society as it ages and grows. People who create it are different from those who move in later once things are great
> most people are boring/normal by definition and the internet is now mainstream. The internet used to be filled with a pretty weird subset of the general population but now that is drowned out by the masses.
That doesn't explain MySpace, though. Extremely mainstream/mass-oriented, but still fun and weird, while it lasted.
That doesn't explain MySpace, though. Extremely mainstream/mass-oriented, but still fun and weird, while it lasted.
MySpace really wasn't that weird, they just had a bug that allowed people to express themselves with code and decided to leave it.
Exactly; it was novel not weird. And if it had prevailed over FB it would have adopted a slicker, uniform ui by default sooner or later (maybe let old heads keep seeing version 1 like Reddit does).
Eventually it got to the point where comments on people's pages were making them unreadable or crashing the browser. That was too much customizability.
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I think it's a wide-scale effect of everyone scrambling in trying to make Internet money to fund themselves through our current tough and uncertain times but finding out that a lot of the Web 3.0 stuff and the Gig economy was undercover "scammy A.F.". Many people do not have savings now because of crypto, stock manipulation, and NFT schemes...
There is a lot of heavy stuff going on around the world right now, and many of the routes to money success are heavily overcomplicated and undesirable in execution.
I have been keeping calm on my end through working on music and editing (often strange and comical) TikTok videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9__Jq3hyHuI), commenting on HN and Twitter, and through doing occasional stand up comedy open mic nights...
There is a lot of heavy stuff going on around the world right now, and many of the routes to money success are heavily overcomplicated and undesirable in execution.
I have been keeping calm on my end through working on music and editing (often strange and comical) TikTok videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9__Jq3hyHuI), commenting on HN and Twitter, and through doing occasional stand up comedy open mic nights...
There are lots of fun and weird things on the internet, but SEO prevents you from seeing most of them---you end up seeing only the parts that someone is motivated to pay to get you to look at. That's essentially Google's business model.
Another related problem is the pathological economy of kickbacks that has developed on the internet. Early on,it made some sense to offer a small finders fee for referring traffic that bought something---you were connecting someone with a service they needed but couldn't easily find online since the search engines were not very good. Now it would be trivially easy to find almost any online service if those services weren't deliberately obfuscated by a jungle of middlemen trying to be the one that snags the referral fee.
I agree. Search having such a bias towards SEO as a measure of credibility has been incredibly damaging.
I'm always thinking of building an old-school directory of interesting sites on a limited number of topics. With the only automation being checking if the website is still up and either removing it or redirecting to an archive.
>Codeblog is powered by MDX, a new flavor of Markdown that supports JSX. With MDX, words look like words, and code looks like HTML.
Or, you know, you can write HTML and avoid all that complexity.
About 100 lines of PHP code to add navigation, feed and routing.
About 50 lines of CSS to avoid cringe nonsense like P tags while retaining the power of everything else in the browser. (The main ingredient being white-space: pre-line.)
Then you just upload your posts via SFTP and they become published.
Instantly portable to any shared hosting provider in the world. The only local tool requirement is an SFTP client.
Or, you know, you can write HTML and avoid all that complexity.
About 100 lines of PHP code to add navigation, feed and routing.
About 50 lines of CSS to avoid cringe nonsense like P tags while retaining the power of everything else in the browser. (The main ingredient being white-space: pre-line.)
Then you just upload your posts via SFTP and they become published.
Instantly portable to any shared hosting provider in the world. The only local tool requirement is an SFTP client.
I think the point is to provide the entry level access for people who can’t do that yet
I made an app called Moonjump as a tool to browse the fun/weird internet. It's a server that redirects you to a random page harvested from Are.na, Hacker News, Marginalia Search, Gossip Web, and other sources yet to be configured... I saw someoe mentioned Wiby - totally forgot to include that. Going to do it this weekend!
My project aims spark curiosity and provide a portal to the vast collection of interesting material hidden by the commercial web. The source material is compiled with care by users of these aggregation platforms. Since this accumulation is performed by hand, pages are saved because they had an effect on the users who saved them. Hopefully you will find things that have an effect on you. Everything opens in a new tab, so you can easily close and jump again. I find that it's fun to map the jump function (https://moonjump.app/jump) to a keyboard shortcut.
Try it out: https://moonjump.app
My project aims spark curiosity and provide a portal to the vast collection of interesting material hidden by the commercial web. The source material is compiled with care by users of these aggregation platforms. Since this accumulation is performed by hand, pages are saved because they had an effect on the users who saved them. Hopefully you will find things that have an effect on you. Everything opens in a new tab, so you can easily close and jump again. I find that it's fun to map the jump function (https://moonjump.app/jump) to a keyboard shortcut.
Try it out: https://moonjump.app
I think these old "remember MySpace" ideas are off the mark.
What actually happened was not minor changes in UX culture.
The web became powerful, instead of a subculture over to the side. It became democratic and populist, with everyone participating rather than a self selected few. It became monopolized, regulated by Google/etc. and regulatable because giant companies are easier to regulate. The coming of copyright is underated as a factor in changing the web.
Remember the spindletop days. Why is the oils industry no fun anymore?
What actually happened was not minor changes in UX culture.
The web became powerful, instead of a subculture over to the side. It became democratic and populist, with everyone participating rather than a self selected few. It became monopolized, regulated by Google/etc. and regulatable because giant companies are easier to regulate. The coming of copyright is underated as a factor in changing the web.
Remember the spindletop days. Why is the oils industry no fun anymore?
"introducing codeblog"
.. you might want to lead with that. You know, so people know what kind of thing they're clicking on
.. you might want to lead with that. You know, so people know what kind of thing they're clicking on
Fun and weird has moved into TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram with stickers, music, sounds and overlays. It allows millions of people to enjoy creating fun and weird things and not only the handful of people who want to mess around with html snippets.
I miss it too, but we are the minority.
I miss it too, but we are the minority.
I find TikTok and Instagram primarily about vanity, show-boating and moral crusades than creative expression. Of course, the internet of old had those negative elements in it, but now those seem to have become the bread and butter of such networks.
Dig deeper. TikTok is fantastically weird and niche. I've learned about so many things I'd never seen on the web or YouTube like small scale trains that people ride around in their back yard, throw gliders, and tether car racing.
The availability of fun and weird has redefined both fun and weird.
What's relatively tame and normal by today's standards would have been groundbreaking only a few years ago.
Desensitisation is the issue, not a dearth of fun and weird.
A guilty pleasure of mine are some of those klrdubs YouTube videos. My daughter launches a series of them at me every now and then, and whilst many of them are so-so, a few of them are absolutely spot-on genius. Fun, clever, and weird.
Maybe accessibility contributes towards this desensitisation too? At any time that level of genius is at our fingertips. We're spoilt by the accessibility of the top 0.01% creative talents of humanity.
Maybe we also actively avoid some of the fun and weird because we know we'll get caught in a productivity destroying rabbit hole of fun and weirdness?
What's relatively tame and normal by today's standards would have been groundbreaking only a few years ago.
Desensitisation is the issue, not a dearth of fun and weird.
A guilty pleasure of mine are some of those klrdubs YouTube videos. My daughter launches a series of them at me every now and then, and whilst many of them are so-so, a few of them are absolutely spot-on genius. Fun, clever, and weird.
Maybe accessibility contributes towards this desensitisation too? At any time that level of genius is at our fingertips. We're spoilt by the accessibility of the top 0.01% creative talents of humanity.
Maybe we also actively avoid some of the fun and weird because we know we'll get caught in a productivity destroying rabbit hole of fun and weirdness?
Interesting take. I think it definitely plays a role.
Because of Big Tech. They buy everything up, make it go away, or monetize the shit out of it. Nothing weird or exciting survives.
Because Google is the gatekeeper to what you see, and Google prioritises the boring and bland and CEO-friendly websites you see.
Google also prioritizes what is new over what is original. This rewards the lazy borderline plagiarism copycats, resulting in perpetual soulless regurgitation of content.
Google isn't my gatekeeper. Stop using them and giving them power
Correction: English-language Google is. — I find that very often the vaunted Anglo-Saxon moralism indeed only polices English content.
I can find the most interesting and entertaining subjects searching in Japanese that do not show up when the same search is replicated in English, where it instead gives me something only barely related to my search that was simply popular enough.
It's quite simple how Twitter is actually a bastion of free expression, so long it not be in English.
I can find the most interesting and entertaining subjects searching in Japanese that do not show up when the same search is replicated in English, where it instead gives me something only barely related to my search that was simply popular enough.
It's quite simple how Twitter is actually a bastion of free expression, so long it not be in English.
Every culture has their norms, including Japan.
Japan may have some areas they are more flexible with, but they have just as many, if not more that they rigid about too.
People are different, trying to make them the same would be just as boring.
Japan may have some areas they are more flexible with, but they have just as many, if not more that they rigid about too.
People are different, trying to make them the same would be just as boring.
Perhaps Japan does, but I'm simply saying that Anglo-Saxon moral overlords do no care about enforcing Japan's sense of moral offence, only their own, or even when written in Japanese.
People have long noted that one can get away with writing many things that would have one banned or removed on Reddit or Twitter, so long as one not do it in English but in another language. The same thing applies to Youtube's anti-swearword system that really only demonitizes based on English swearwords, not in any other language.
People have long noted that one can get away with writing many things that would have one banned or removed on Reddit or Twitter, so long as one not do it in English but in another language. The same thing applies to Youtube's anti-swearword system that really only demonitizes based on English swearwords, not in any other language.
Well replace google with Facebook and Apple.
Google just wants you to click adds.
Advertisers are Google's real cu$tomer and they don't like to see their ads next to your experimental goatse art.
The internet is more fun and weird than it has ever been, but there's astronomically more boring unfun content getting in the way of finding fun stuff. Kind of the same story offline.
Isn't this just art imitating life? In real life, the boring is every where. You have to find those niche stores/clubs/eateries/etc by putting forth effort vs just going to the same-ol-same-ol that advertises to get your attention.
I think this is probably correct. The fun stuff is still there, but the people trying to profit from their creations are more motivated to get it in front of you (SEO effort, etc).
I didn't see a conversation on this in the comments, maybe I missed it, but I think one of the reasons why you don't see as much creative control over web pages is spambots. Lots of things that I've put up on my own personal web page that let anyone add things to it also allowed spambots to invade. And since most software to repel spambots needs to be rather advanced to work effectively, you see instances where the user content part just keeps locked up until it's closed completely.
This is a problem that big companies can solve, but it's much trickier for one guy with a web page to solve.
This is a problem that big companies can solve, but it's much trickier for one guy with a web page to solve.
Native advertisement disguised as a blog post.
The reason the web is not fun anymore is because it's now hypercentralized. Companies that effectively control the web found the formula that works for them. They want you to mindlessly consume streams of curated information. They want you to do that at maximum throughput. Most of your "interactions" with websites are fake and exist only to improve "engagement".
If everyone starts fiddling with colors and creative designs, it will decrease the throughput of an average information consumer. Therefore, no meaningful customization is allowed. It's that simple.
If everyone starts fiddling with colors and creative designs, it will decrease the throughput of an average information consumer. Therefore, no meaningful customization is allowed. It's that simple.
MySpace letting people put CSS and HTML into their pages was a huge security nightmare. My wife, before she left the company, led the security team and it was a constant battle to keep JS injection attacks off the site. I can only imagine how much worse it would be in 2022 vs 2008.
The answer is fear. The internet used to be full of fun, and whimsey, and people doing strange things, and being accepted for it.
This applies to web sites, social media, and even discussion forms like HN.
If you try to express humor on 90% of the internet today, you are attacked by anonymous mobs of people who get dopamine hits from being offended for other people who they have not met, and may not even exist.
Case in point:
In another thread, someone accidentally or through auto-correct used the word "silicone" instead of "silicon." A helpful HNer replied:
You mean silicon. Silicone means something else.
In the early days of the internet, someone could then have replied "What a boob!" and a certain percentage of the viewers would have gotten a slight giggle from it and moved on with their lives. Those who didn't find it humorous would also have moved on with their lives.
But today, the self-righteous internet mobs would attack the person who wrote the boob comment, so people self-censor.
Almost any time someone introduces any humor into HN, for example, someone points to imaginary "rules" and gets upset that if something isn't humorous to 100% of every single person on the planet, it shouldn't be uttered in public. Well, guess what — you're never going to get 100% of the people on the planet to agree about anything, so get over it.
This applies to web sites, social media, and even discussion forms like HN.
If you try to express humor on 90% of the internet today, you are attacked by anonymous mobs of people who get dopamine hits from being offended for other people who they have not met, and may not even exist.
Case in point:
In another thread, someone accidentally or through auto-correct used the word "silicone" instead of "silicon." A helpful HNer replied:
You mean silicon. Silicone means something else.
In the early days of the internet, someone could then have replied "What a boob!" and a certain percentage of the viewers would have gotten a slight giggle from it and moved on with their lives. Those who didn't find it humorous would also have moved on with their lives.
But today, the self-righteous internet mobs would attack the person who wrote the boob comment, so people self-censor.
Almost any time someone introduces any humor into HN, for example, someone points to imaginary "rules" and gets upset that if something isn't humorous to 100% of every single person on the planet, it shouldn't be uttered in public. Well, guess what — you're never going to get 100% of the people on the planet to agree about anything, so get over it.
This irks me:
> We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products.
Nope. People chose the simpler platforms and tools with lower barrier to entry (no need to code) and the strange, fun, weird things were choked out or relegated to the unseen corners of the Internet. For a brief period you had a lot of people learning to code at some level because it was the only way to engage with the Internet at all.
It wasn't developers, designers, etc. that decided things should no longer have access to the tools, it was the consumer base at large who consistently chose the smoother, simpler, easier-to-use, less flexible, locked-down products.
People still have access to the tools. The Internet has an extremely low barrier to entry. It is accessible in a way most serious technology isn't. My son has been publishing his own page, full of weird little games and odd styling choices, etc. since he was nine.
Most people don't want products like MySpace. They voluntarily chose Facebook.
I hope this company finds a successful niche. I'm glad for any tools that encourage people to invest in their own creativity. But I doubt they are going to achieve mainstream success. Hopefully I'm wrong.
> We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products.
Nope. People chose the simpler platforms and tools with lower barrier to entry (no need to code) and the strange, fun, weird things were choked out or relegated to the unseen corners of the Internet. For a brief period you had a lot of people learning to code at some level because it was the only way to engage with the Internet at all.
It wasn't developers, designers, etc. that decided things should no longer have access to the tools, it was the consumer base at large who consistently chose the smoother, simpler, easier-to-use, less flexible, locked-down products.
People still have access to the tools. The Internet has an extremely low barrier to entry. It is accessible in a way most serious technology isn't. My son has been publishing his own page, full of weird little games and odd styling choices, etc. since he was nine.
Most people don't want products like MySpace. They voluntarily chose Facebook.
I hope this company finds a successful niche. I'm glad for any tools that encourage people to invest in their own creativity. But I doubt they are going to achieve mainstream success. Hopefully I'm wrong.
Related: this guy built bun[0] (the new javascript runtime built with Zig and JavascriptCore)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31993429
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31993429
How is this related?
Honestly, the internet has seemed somewhat barren to me since the death of Flash.
Technical purists disparage flash, all with valid reasons, but ignore all the respects in which it was extremely good. It allowed developers (young amateur/learning developers especially) to easily make extremely high quality games and animations, and publish them online in a format that was easy to access and run on very low-spec hardware. Nothing else I know of today comes close.
> Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?
Etiquette. For example, humor is frowned upon on some forums (HN included).
Etiquette. For example, humor is frowned upon on some forums (HN included).
Any forum that does not frown upon it ends up with a bunch of low effort rehashed posts by people who don't know enough to actually discuss the topic at hand. This dilutes an interesting conversation at best, and at worst just makes the signal/noise ratio so low that people with knowledge on the topic get drowned out for the lols and eventually stop contributing. Its nice that HN is an island away from that.
I've found that humor on HN is fine, it just can't be the low-effort trash you usually see on reddit.
Reddit loves to beat the dead horse until it's not even recognizable as something that used to be an animal.
Reddit loves to beat the dead horse until it's not even recognizable as something that used to be an animal.
HN actually holds the current record for being the most humorless forum on the internet (sorry, can't seem to find link atm).
There is a specific type of gem you find on HN sometimes: full-blown rants. I find them very entertaining and started to collect them recently.
Also, occasionally there are REALLY high quality, altough subtle, jokes in a comment that is still a part of a productive discussion. Humour for humours sake is definitely frowned upon though.
such as the above post
So subtle, it flew over my head and is still flying off into the sunset. I genuinly thought it was just someone enjoying collecting rants. (Which, some rants are quite enjoyable to read.)
When I realized I was making a joke it was already too late!
In all seriousness I actually did start to collect HN rants I find funny a short while ago. There is something about elaborate rants that just gets me. Similarly I love elaborate, negative (social media) reviews. They are often way too serious and over the top.
In all seriousness I actually did start to collect HN rants I find funny a short while ago. There is something about elaborate rants that just gets me. Similarly I love elaborate, negative (social media) reviews. They are often way too serious and over the top.
What you're talking about (rants that seem like they should be instant classics, which you save for later amusement) are known in chanspeak as 'pasta' (copypasta). There are many, many classic pasta rants (the Navy Seal Pasta being possibly the most well known). Bless you for keeping our culture alive.
[deleted]
[deleted]
We need some kind of framework for humor development.
Lets start with the scripted spaghetti jokes, work towards functional humor then eventually do classes. OOH!
Lets start with the scripted spaghetti jokes, work towards functional humor then eventually do classes. OOH!
Citation needed.
/j
/j
Because you're using the wrong search engine. Try Mojeek for fresh results, and get involved with their community.
I believe Mojeek will be a gamechanger.
I believe Mojeek will be a gamechanger.
Because the barrier of entry is gone. Some level of difficulty of creating content weeded out the morons. It is now flooded with "content creators" of at best average intelligence. The early web was glorious. A bunch of weirdos and nerds with at least some technical skills created personal websites, mostly horrible-looking, and linked to each other. There were counters, guestbooks, moderated discussion boards...
We were children discovering a new world, all over again. It was full of wonder and magic.
Now - any idiot can whip out their phone and write anything they want, in a few seconds, and create "content". And THEN we all have to process that shit.
We were children discovering a new world, all over again. It was full of wonder and magic.
Now - any idiot can whip out their phone and write anything they want, in a few seconds, and create "content". And THEN we all have to process that shit.
While this rationale sounds true, but it doesn't actually align with my observations.
Most of the web's noise content isn't low-effort comments, but low-effort commercial websites: Sometimes "tutorials" for extremely easy tasks padded with a bunch of superfluous instructions, sometimes freebooting other content, other times apparently AI-generated texts that seem legitimate at first glance but don't really make sense.
Most of the web's noise content isn't low-effort comments, but low-effort commercial websites: Sometimes "tutorials" for extremely easy tasks padded with a bunch of superfluous instructions, sometimes freebooting other content, other times apparently AI-generated texts that seem legitimate at first glance but don't really make sense.
Yes, absolutely, but it's in the same vein. In the past, to create content you had to go through some things.
I still remember being on the phone with Network Solutions for an hour to activate my first domain. They asked for my password... Over the phone.... Now content creation is easy and, yes, automated.
I still remember being on the phone with Network Solutions for an hour to activate my first domain. They asked for my password... Over the phone.... Now content creation is easy and, yes, automated.
Scraping blogs for content to steal and training language models to produce legit-seeming blog posts is hardly low-entry stuff, surely?
First I thought the article (or maybe promotion) didn't gave an answer to the topic question, but it actually did; the need to sanitizing inputs destroyed what myspace enabled. The need for security is bigger than the need for customisation nowadays, you can't have a social network that has a big security flaw because users could edit the code on their pages. The product this article promotes isn't a solution, you still need developers to create the components users want, and users are not going to send requests to add something they think would be "fun" or "weird".
This convinced me that the HN upvote button should throw confetti.
TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram have tons of cool content. This isn't 2005 anymore.
Ok, I made something weird, recently: https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2022/philosophia-mechanica
In case you asked, there's also an explanation for this. :-)
(Notebook or desktop preferred, at least some mobile browsers seem to have issues with scaling SVG origins.)
In case you asked, there's also an explanation for this. :-)
(Notebook or desktop preferred, at least some mobile browsers seem to have issues with scaling SVG origins.)
This is a submarine article at its finest.
“Make the internet weird again with codeblog”
“Make the internet weird again with codeblog”
Weirdness is a choice. Taking on an affectation of weirdness in order to sell products or advertising is quite obvious to the beholder, who ignores it, and not long after that, the Internet becomes a wasteland of e-commerce webshops and ad-ridden 'fun blogs'.
There's also an enormous difference between personal 'weird' and corporate 'weird'. 'Personal weird' came from early-gen web designers who had to do everything on their own, including making GIFs with primitive '90s image editors. We have more advanced tools on our phones today, yet bloggers would sooner pick something off the shelf from GIPHY (a Facebook company), because it's easier.
We don't even have weird homemade clipart anymore, we have soulless stock graphics from Canva. And a big Discord button where the webrings would be.
There's also an enormous difference between personal 'weird' and corporate 'weird'. 'Personal weird' came from early-gen web designers who had to do everything on their own, including making GIFs with primitive '90s image editors. We have more advanced tools on our phones today, yet bloggers would sooner pick something off the shelf from GIPHY (a Facebook company), because it's easier.
We don't even have weird homemade clipart anymore, we have soulless stock graphics from Canva. And a big Discord button where the webrings would be.
I think the Internet is fun and weird. I mean, you can find videos of people playing metal and reggae guitar riffs over crazy preachers speaking in tongues:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsTcs1nU5MU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsTcs1nU5MU
I find it somewhat ironic that despite starting as a love letter to the colorful, fun things people did with MySpace, this post is still black text on a white background like the entire rest of the modern web (that’s not in dark mode). Pick some damn colors and make a statement, dude.
Wasn't the hugest reason that they stopped allowing people to write their own code in myspace and made it into something nobody uses anymore was because you could do code injection attacks on it? [1] I mean doesn't anyone else remember that kid who got convicted of a felony for getting everyone's myspace pages to say 'but most of all, samy is my hero'? [2]
[1] https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2019/readings/advisory4.5.06...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)
[1] https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2019/readings/advisory4.5.06...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)
All the fun and weird people either get:
ignored, banned, de-platformed, censored , ridiculed, etc. So you end up with dozens of the same Vox and NYTs pieces about the same dozen subjects written in the same style, because those are the only things that survive the filter.
ignored, banned, de-platformed, censored , ridiculed, etc. So you end up with dozens of the same Vox and NYTs pieces about the same dozen subjects written in the same style, because those are the only things that survive the filter.
I was thinking about this earlier today. Several years ago I used to read Gwern's blog and I was thinking to myself how difficult it would be for someone to do anything remotely similar in today's environment. It's not just the superficial stuff the author of this article is mentioning - editing HTML and CSS and glitter. It's deeper than that. There's just not enough attention to go around. The economics are off and the incentives are misaligned.
No one's going to read a hyper-neurotic blog post about a quantified self experiment anymore and that sort of content won't fare well on tik tok. And it's a shame.
No one's going to read a hyper-neurotic blog post about a quantified self experiment anymore and that sort of content won't fare well on tik tok. And it's a shame.
> The internet added<canvas />, but the internet stopped being one.
Wow, well stated. I particularly miss just seeing more original content written by people's personal experiences. Now, it seems like any Google search results in bloat-ware sites with a ton of journalistic fluff around a few data points that came out on a news wire.
I personally have some hope in the Gemini protocol returning some value to this space. It doesn't quite fit the "internet as a canvas" model, being text based with only links to images, but I think there is a lot of potential to bring more interesting content to the forefront again.
Wow, well stated. I particularly miss just seeing more original content written by people's personal experiences. Now, it seems like any Google search results in bloat-ware sites with a ton of journalistic fluff around a few data points that came out on a news wire.
I personally have some hope in the Gemini protocol returning some value to this space. It doesn't quite fit the "internet as a canvas" model, being text based with only links to images, but I think there is a lot of potential to bring more interesting content to the forefront again.
These periodic articles hand-wringing over the loss of old internet quirkiness are basically just re-posing a question isomorphic to "Why aren't people more fun and weird?" or "Why isn't society/culture/reality more fun and weird?", which are not actually interesting questions in my opinion. I mean, I get it, the internet used to be a different before it was the primary infrastructure for most human productivity, but is it not basically self-evident why things get less fun and weird when the user base goes from futurist nerds to everyone else?
I signed up for a Codeblog! The Captcha making me pick photos of traffic lights and cross walks to verify my humanity feels like the antithesis of what this article and product is trying to do.
The answer to the title's question:
"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever." - George Orwell, 1984
"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever." - George Orwell, 1984
My favorite bit of the old, weird internet was Portal Of Evil.
Which took the "look at the weird stuff I found" aspect of stumbleupon, and used it as comedic fodder to poke fun at all the weird stuff.
Which took the "look at the weird stuff I found" aspect of stumbleupon, and used it as comedic fodder to poke fun at all the weird stuff.
I don't understand. Having those 3 quirky HTML tags is fine, but can users add other tags? How do they go about doing that? Can they enter the React definition of those tags somewhere on their site's configuration? Or in the page? Or install them from a marketplace, like the Sticker Packs of some apps?
Right now this reads as "content platforms today don't let you enter code, so publish with us we don't allow code but we have confetti".
Right now this reads as "content platforms today don't let you enter code, so publish with us we don't allow code but we have confetti".
I mean, if you can write arbitrary jsx and react, seems like you can define your own components?
In a nutshell, my internet routine has become: Check email > check ESPN > check HN > check WSJ. Every blog site I visit nowadays is literally full of ads, popups, etc...the content to ad ratio seems to be about 50/50, which is just bleh. I 100% think the internet still has lots of interesting things, but I think so much has moved to a centralized location nowadays, its a bit harder to find the unique parts of the web.
As more people joined the internet, the content reverted to the mean of humanity. What surprised us is just how low down that mean is.
Twitter : We hoped for listening in on The Algonquin Round Table we got listening to the last round at Al's bar.
Facebook We hoped for pleasent updates from our friends lives, we got content moderators with PTSD
Instagram: we hoped for pictures of our friends lives - we got told our friends aren't as good as other peoples friends.
Twitter : We hoped for listening in on The Algonquin Round Table we got listening to the last round at Al's bar.
Facebook We hoped for pleasent updates from our friends lives, we got content moderators with PTSD
Instagram: we hoped for pictures of our friends lives - we got told our friends aren't as good as other peoples friends.
Because "mobile first."
> Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?
Because everything is complicated now. To code your own website you have to learn hundreds of hours of web technologies. There is no clear way and a lot of old, now wrong, advice in old blog posts. This limits the creativity that can be expressed a lot and is probably the main reason why "everyone" is now using "platforms".
Because everything is complicated now. To code your own website you have to learn hundreds of hours of web technologies. There is no clear way and a lot of old, now wrong, advice in old blog posts. This limits the creativity that can be expressed a lot and is probably the main reason why "everyone" is now using "platforms".
I disagree. its no harder to program today than it was 15 years ago. in fact it is easier. its less meaningful....less satisfying....and has been eroded by copy-cats and everyone spinning up a product instead of a passion project.
I created my static site with scripting, CSS, and HTML skills from the 1990s, an oughties Comp Sci degree, and w3cschools. HTML5 makes it scary easy to make a pretty site which works on a wide range of screens (no more full-width columns of black text on a white background!)
There's a new social media site called Cohost that actually allows stuff like this inside of posts. It lets people, say, recreate Blender's UI or make a Warioware microgame. It's a nice middle ground between the hellscape that is Twitter and the more self-contained DIY sites of Neocities (which is also cool, but never really stuck with me).
Could you share an invite code for Cohost, if you have one?
God I hate articles like this. If you want to make a myspace clone, then make one. No-one is stopping you.
The problem is that people didn't like MySpace. It looked like crap and giving people that level of control made them feel bad. Only a few fearless kids actually made the gloriously crappy content you admire.
The other problem is that the Internet is well-settled terrain now, and users have many many options about where to hang their hat(s) and what they do there. Try convincing a Medium author that HTML is a good authoring tool.
This article is the Internet version of "good old days" nostalgia, which is, ironically, retrograde and horrifying. One important exception: if the internet ever deprecates the tools needed to make another myspace (http 1.1, html, css, available ip addresses, ability to host a durable process) then you'd have my full-throated support. And of course you're allowed to like old things that failed because of market pressure. Just don't fool yourself that the world is worse because the thing you like fell out of fashion. As much as I hate to admit it, the world is better off without coin-op arcades.
The problem is that people didn't like MySpace. It looked like crap and giving people that level of control made them feel bad. Only a few fearless kids actually made the gloriously crappy content you admire.
The other problem is that the Internet is well-settled terrain now, and users have many many options about where to hang their hat(s) and what they do there. Try convincing a Medium author that HTML is a good authoring tool.
This article is the Internet version of "good old days" nostalgia, which is, ironically, retrograde and horrifying. One important exception: if the internet ever deprecates the tools needed to make another myspace (http 1.1, html, css, available ip addresses, ability to host a durable process) then you'd have my full-throated support. And of course you're allowed to like old things that failed because of market pressure. Just don't fool yourself that the world is worse because the thing you like fell out of fashion. As much as I hate to admit it, the world is better off without coin-op arcades.
You make it seem like todays internet monopolies exist because of all the platform there are, they are the most well-designed ones, and they would simply be replaced if a better product came along.
I disagree with that, youtube for example is not the prevalent video platform today because it is better than its competitors. Youtube today is absolutely terrible.
But it does not get replaced, because it is the established platform, and using a competitor is suicide because your content will never get any traction.
So we are stuck with a horribly monopolized web, where the established websites can become very shitty, but you have to stay on them because everyone else is.
I disagree with that, youtube for example is not the prevalent video platform today because it is better than its competitors. Youtube today is absolutely terrible.
But it does not get replaced, because it is the established platform, and using a competitor is suicide because your content will never get any traction.
So we are stuck with a horribly monopolized web, where the established websites can become very shitty, but you have to stay on them because everyone else is.
The phrase you're looking for is "network effect". And it is indeed a real thing [0]. But I find it ironic you're implying it's implacable on a thread about MySpace.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
>and using a competitor is suicide because your content will never get any traction
You can post on multiple platforms, you know. Content creators aren't stupid. They post on whichever platform is buzzing. It's their day job and the most popular ones know what they are doing than any of us.
You can post on multiple platforms, you know. Content creators aren't stupid. They post on whichever platform is buzzing. It's their day job and the most popular ones know what they are doing than any of us.
I wish I could upvote it 10 times.
No one is stopping these nostalgic folks. Those older techs aren't banned. They have just lost their war for network effect.
No one is stopping these nostalgic folks. Those older techs aren't banned. They have just lost their war for network effect.
(2019)
Previous discussion from not really that long ago when this was first posted, probably alot of same sentiment as the question has been asked many times last few years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038327
Previous discussion from not really that long ago when this was first posted, probably alot of same sentiment as the question has been asked many times last few years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038327
When I was a teenager I came up with several technical and nontechnical websites, zines with programming and reverse engineering tutorials, interviews, and just plain fucking around. And everyone else around me was pretty much the same. There were multiple "scenes", we formed deep relations on IRC, even though almost none knew my real name or how I looked. I still meet some of those people online (few even in real life) more than 20 years later.
Nowadays, I don't put anything too valuable on the web. Because why should I do anything for free, right? I don't live at the expense of my parents anymore, and society does not provide me with means to survive if I spend my time doing all that and "share". Now, since I'm unemployed and basically unemployable (no linkedin/facebook/whatever, disagree with gov policies re. covid and the society that accepts and promotes them hence don't get out much, won't consider working for unethical companies that track people for any purpose whatsoever (there are so many of those), introversion, etc.), I continue to do what I always did, write code, come up with theories that sometimes lead to personal projects, etc. But I definitely won't put these up on the web.
Nowadays, I don't put anything too nonconforming on the web. There are still people doing stuff "for free". They get money from something or somewhere else. But nowadays it's mostly boring as shit. Why? Because nowadays people learn to abide by the dystopia's unwritten dicta: conform, obey, self-censor, follow, like, share. When you can no longer post anonymously, when everything you say is on a permanent record, when everything around you is moderated to Hell. When every movement is tracked, your best bet is to move along in the direction of the herd. If you don't, you will be disappeared from the relevant environment. Such a society can't be fun and weird; it actively discourages fun and weird.
Nowadays, I don't put anything too valuable on the web. Because why should I do anything for free, right? I don't live at the expense of my parents anymore, and society does not provide me with means to survive if I spend my time doing all that and "share". Now, since I'm unemployed and basically unemployable (no linkedin/facebook/whatever, disagree with gov policies re. covid and the society that accepts and promotes them hence don't get out much, won't consider working for unethical companies that track people for any purpose whatsoever (there are so many of those), introversion, etc.), I continue to do what I always did, write code, come up with theories that sometimes lead to personal projects, etc. But I definitely won't put these up on the web.
Nowadays, I don't put anything too nonconforming on the web. There are still people doing stuff "for free". They get money from something or somewhere else. But nowadays it's mostly boring as shit. Why? Because nowadays people learn to abide by the dystopia's unwritten dicta: conform, obey, self-censor, follow, like, share. When you can no longer post anonymously, when everything you say is on a permanent record, when everything around you is moderated to Hell. When every movement is tracked, your best bet is to move along in the direction of the herd. If you don't, you will be disappeared from the relevant environment. Such a society can't be fun and weird; it actively discourages fun and weird.
So much this
Odd. This is a promotional post and but because it has a fun headline no one seems to care.
I think this internet probably still exists, in a different form of course (15years later).
I just think its discoverability has been swamped by the platforms overwhelming everything with low-effort-to-consume autoplay-until-I-fall-asleep content.
I just think its discoverability has been swamped by the platforms overwhelming everything with low-effort-to-consume autoplay-until-I-fall-asleep content.
I created instant.gallery (no spam, no ads, no notifications) to be a fun and weird website - the problem is getting quality sites noticed without a huge ad spend. The big funnels (twitter, google and fb/ig) have taken over.
It's been listed here before, but a fun ride that my son and I like to take in our Internet explorations...
https://wilderness.land/
https://wilderness.land/
Individuals want customization, novelty and the ability to relate between one another and share and show off.....companies want ubiquity and uniformity amongst their user base......
My hope is that with ipv6 everyone will be default have a static IP address. That would make it much easier for people to play around with their own personal websites etc.
IPv6 addresses aren't going to be any more static than what we have now. And even if they were, the fundamental problem of self-hosting is reliability, not getting a static IP address (which you can work around with dynamic DNS services easily). But most people just don't want to play server admin 24/7 and having a site down for days just because you went on vacation just isn't a good way to a run a site.
I think the only way to get back on track is if somebody comes up with a way to make publishing content on the net both trivial and robust. It needs to be a feature of your browser, not something you have to fiddle around with, with other tools.
IPFS kind of promises that and at least in theory would be a great tool to rebuild the Web, but the performance is downright miserable right now and doesn't seem to be improving either. So maybe that's a dead end.
Publishing aside, web browsers also need to get much better at discovering and keeping track of content. Bookmarks haven't improved in 30 years or even gotten worse, thus making it impossible to look for new content on small sites that don't update frequently. Having RSS support removed from all browsers was another big loss.
I think the only way to get back on track is if somebody comes up with a way to make publishing content on the net both trivial and robust. It needs to be a feature of your browser, not something you have to fiddle around with, with other tools.
IPFS kind of promises that and at least in theory would be a great tool to rebuild the Web, but the performance is downright miserable right now and doesn't seem to be improving either. So maybe that's a dead end.
Publishing aside, web browsers also need to get much better at discovering and keeping track of content. Bookmarks haven't improved in 30 years or even gotten worse, thus making it impossible to look for new content on small sites that don't update frequently. Having RSS support removed from all browsers was another big loss.
I’m surprised no one mentioned Neocities which is a spiritual revival of Geocities and the early 2000s web. The aesthetic is much more pronounced, possible too pronounced.
I dont anyone can class this website as not fun and not weird!
Seeing is believing!
https://www.lingscars.com/
Seeing is believing!
https://www.lingscars.com/
The "old web" was quirky and cool, but it could also be extremely horrifying and disgusting. I miss some of it, but definitely not all of it.
rotten.com, ratemypoo. Aaah, my wasted teenage years.
The internet is dominated by winner-take-all markets. Niche sites generally don't stand a chance unless they get lucky.
Because Facebook and its uniformity bringing uniformity to the uninformed letting them stay uninformed.
Also, bootstrap.
It's still fun and weird, but it's in the dark corners of Twitter where you find these communities, Milady.
So I hit the confetti button compulsively. I didn’t realize every page needs a confetti cannon until now.
It was, but then went mainstream. And much like Metallica, the later stuff just isn't as good.
get on Urbit, it's early but it feels pretty weird
You have to learn a new language to do anything, people are publishing weird sci-fi on it , there are raves and parties , it is self selecting a lot of weird people
You have to learn a new language to do anything, people are publishing weird sci-fi on it , there are raves and parties , it is self selecting a lot of weird people
I enjoyed the internet more when I had fifty bookmarks instead of five.
The link to codeblog.app doesn't work. Maybe hugged to death?
because either you get a groovy bathroom wall or you get a heavily moderated bathroom wall.
You need populaces with higher than 86% literacy to make things like, "Internets" work.
You need populaces with higher than 86% literacy to make things like, "Internets" work.
Because it's corporate and serious business.
The same reason television isn't more fun and weird.
I just don't want it to involve React
React.js and friends.
btw it is worth mentioning for those interested that a German guy recently cloned the old myspace: https://spacehey.com/
This sales pitch doesn't impress me. The internet isn't fun or weird any longer because corporations have taken over, and most normies aren't going to bother to learn how to build and operate their own websites. Just like most normies aren't going to bother to become their own sysadmins so they can run GNU/Linux on their PCs.
Most people are fine with the Web being what it is today: QVC with a comments section.
Most people are fine with the Web being what it is today: QVC with a comments section.
But the internet was already taken over by corporations during the time this article reminisces about, wasn't it?
MySpace was owned by a corporation, but allowed massive customization including custom CSS anyway. Youtube also allowed way more customization in the past (remember the old profile pages?), all those small local social networks that often allowed straight custom HTML died when Facebook expanded worldwide, they were mostly for-profit.
MySpace was owned by a corporation, but allowed massive customization including custom CSS anyway. Youtube also allowed way more customization in the past (remember the old profile pages?), all those small local social networks that often allowed straight custom HTML died when Facebook expanded worldwide, they were mostly for-profit.
Not exclusively taken over, no. It was more balanced between the corporate and the non-commercial.
QVC is almost quality content compared to parts of the web. Corporations do like it sanitized and fun is the lowest common denominator of content that is still able to hold your attention while reaching the largest audience as possible.
But there is also truth that creativity of people gets stifled by locked down environments. In the past myspace blogs got a lot of mockery but I guess most people will miss it in contrast social media we have today. There is good stuff too and Tiktok is not the end of society, but the interesting stuff that can hold your attention beyond 10 minutes is rare. Perhaps it was never different and just seems this way because there is unlimited content.
But there is also truth that creativity of people gets stifled by locked down environments. In the past myspace blogs got a lot of mockery but I guess most people will miss it in contrast social media we have today. There is good stuff too and Tiktok is not the end of society, but the interesting stuff that can hold your attention beyond 10 minutes is rare. Perhaps it was never different and just seems this way because there is unlimited content.
>QVC with a comments section
haha this is gold :)
haha this is gold :)
Mind expanding stuff.
I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever - it's all just streams of disconnected content free floating towards oblivion in a few days.
This has made everything bite-sized and fragmented everyones attention as nothing is getting polished or curated to perfection.
I miss people polishing stuff, then just letting it sit out there for people to enjoy. Today everything is hidden after a few days - so the rare gems disappear too while the algorithms and search engines favour the easily devourable in the first place.
We need something like Stumbleupon back, does that exist? I wonder why it wasn't viable.