Why the ‘Weird Internet’ of the GeoCities Era Had to Die(onezero.medium.com)
onezero.medium.com
Why the ‘Weird Internet’ of the GeoCities Era Had to Die
https://onezero.medium.com/why-the-weird-internet-of-the-geocities-era-had-to-die-383f2870662c
73 comments
The weird internet went away not because people on the internet became boring, but because the internet opened up to non weird people. The article talks about how complicated it can seem to build your own site now, but it's easier then ever to build your own website - the whole point is that the internet isn't necessarily dominated by the types of people that are willing to put in that kind of work anymore. Its not like there are some mysterious new barriers preventing you from building a custom site on the internet that have been thrown up now. This post itself didn't have to be on medium - but medium and Facebook and YouTube deliver that "boring, non weird" audience that you want to read your stuff.
That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true? Tech has been moving in the direction of oversimplifying technology and telling people white lies (such as that they can be private and secure on the internet). They created tablets and phones, removed any "quirky" options that might cause their owners to think a little harder , and often dumbed down devices. I think smartphone is a misnomer, it's not smart, and it doesnt really think for you, it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information. All people are weird, just ask them to explain their dream or paint a picture if you want to be disturbed by their weirdness. But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates. We need to add back complexity and optionality to devices and interfaces.
>Tech has been moving in the direction of oversimplifying technology
Completely agree with that. There's an animator (nina paley) that keeps an old computer with Macromedia Flash on it for the sake of keeping that sweet spot of software power or complexity and creativity.
It's weird seeing productivity tools reduce and guide their functionality towards what the devs think we mean to use the tool for. Getting more power and more complexity is still desirable in production. The ML procedural tools coming in productivity software will help with that, but the overall design ethos has been to cut out and simplify things that didn't need to go.
Completely agree with that. There's an animator (nina paley) that keeps an old computer with Macromedia Flash on it for the sake of keeping that sweet spot of software power or complexity and creativity.
It's weird seeing productivity tools reduce and guide their functionality towards what the devs think we mean to use the tool for. Getting more power and more complexity is still desirable in production. The ML procedural tools coming in productivity software will help with that, but the overall design ethos has been to cut out and simplify things that didn't need to go.
And i know a musician who uses a commodore 64 - agreed though, that 's on a different level
> guide their functionality towards what the devs think we mean
I think it's the fault of management. Software used to always have a few quirky buttons that almost nobody used, yet they were there for the sake of completeness. But ever since quarterly corporate revenue and engagement turned to a penile size contest, it's all about the bottom line. If it doesnt affect our bottom line, cut it off, which ends up leaving people with little more than a Skinner box in their hands.
> guide their functionality towards what the devs think we mean
I think it's the fault of management. Software used to always have a few quirky buttons that almost nobody used, yet they were there for the sake of completeness. But ever since quarterly corporate revenue and engagement turned to a penile size contest, it's all about the bottom line. If it doesnt affect our bottom line, cut it off, which ends up leaving people with little more than a Skinner box in their hands.
Phones/tablets are not good at creating web pages or writing code, but what about the other innumerable creative uses they are good for? Photography and video making has never been simpler. An iPad is as good a digital painting device as a beefy PC combined with a heavy Cintiq now. Plug a microphone (or not) into a phone and it becomes a portable recording studio with an included editor.
Phones were never good at producing web pages, it's not like their presence has somehow now removed the ability from the PC.
Phones were never good at producing web pages, it's not like their presence has somehow now removed the ability from the PC.
> Photography and video making has never been simpler.
Agree, but largely because their form factor allowed them to replace the camera. Cameras and photography are creative, and this carried over to the phone form factor, not the other way around. Cookie-cutter instagram filters and other prepackaged disney stuff is very lowly creative though.
And I wouldn't say it has enabled creativity for either sound or painting. It made sound recording easier yes, but it did not push the boundaries of what is possible to make with digital sound. The same with painting. IMHO, real creativity is always at the boundaries of what is available, and always pushes it a little further.
Agree, but largely because their form factor allowed them to replace the camera. Cameras and photography are creative, and this carried over to the phone form factor, not the other way around. Cookie-cutter instagram filters and other prepackaged disney stuff is very lowly creative though.
And I wouldn't say it has enabled creativity for either sound or painting. It made sound recording easier yes, but it did not push the boundaries of what is possible to make with digital sound. The same with painting. IMHO, real creativity is always at the boundaries of what is available, and always pushes it a little further.
Many people carry their phone everywhere, which was/is much less common for discrete cameras, dictaphones, etc. This also lowers the barrier to entry.
My point is that mobile had mostly positive effect on availability of tools for the masses. It pushes the boundaries in quantity, a lot more people now actually can record video at all.
At the same time the number of people who can create wacky websites has not decreased, all of the tools are still out there. Phones may have simplified interfaces but they did not make the complex programs disappear.
At the same time the number of people who can create wacky websites has not decreased, all of the tools are still out there. Phones may have simplified interfaces but they did not make the complex programs disappear.
>That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true?
It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low active participation rates. There's a wikipedia article[1] about this that happens to focus on the internet and its low ratio of contributors.
However, this phenomenon of passive consumption has been happening all through history before the internet and it is independent of technology. Whether it's the Gutenberg Press or earlier primitive technology as simple as the quill pen & paper, there's always been a very small group of people that create the content vs the much larger group that consumes it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low active participation rates. There's a wikipedia article[1] about this that happens to focus on the internet and its low ratio of contributors.
However, this phenomenon of passive consumption has been happening all through history before the internet and it is independent of technology. Whether it's the Gutenberg Press or earlier primitive technology as simple as the quill pen & paper, there's always been a very small group of people that create the content vs the much larger group that consumes it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
> It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low
you 're speaking of a different thing, and as u said participation was low even before the internet's eternal september of 2005-10 happened.
you 're speaking of a different thing, and as u said participation was low even before the internet's eternal september of 2005-10 happened.
>you 're speaking of a different thing.
No, I was responding to your claim of smartphone technology being the barrier to creativity by the mainstream audience:
>smartphone [...], it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information.[...] But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates.
That claim assumes that there's a pent up wave of creativity that's being held back by smartphones. However, that misunderstands the fact that new technology doesn't really change the ratio of the people expressing creativity vs those that consume it. There wasn't really any massive creativity to "evaporate"; the desire to "be creative" was never there in the mainstream audience. You can't put the blame on technologies such as smartphones / Gutenberg press / pen & paper.
No, I was responding to your claim of smartphone technology being the barrier to creativity by the mainstream audience:
>smartphone [...], it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information.[...] But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates.
That claim assumes that there's a pent up wave of creativity that's being held back by smartphones. However, that misunderstands the fact that new technology doesn't really change the ratio of the people expressing creativity vs those that consume it. There wasn't really any massive creativity to "evaporate"; the desire to "be creative" was never there in the mainstream audience. You can't put the blame on technologies such as smartphones / Gutenberg press / pen & paper.
Yes that is true, but it is the content from the 1% that is also degraded.But i do put the blame on tablets/phones. Kids have visibly lost the creativity they might have with a desktop computer (be it word processing / a spreadsheet/ photo editing or writing their first programs). And we as developers are also affected. It used to be that anyone could run P2P nodes for file sharing etc. This no longer happens, the P2P web is not taking off, and nothing of equivalent value has replaced it.
> but it's easier then ever to build your own website
Is it though? When I was 9, I created a site on Angelfire (and loved the fact that the default page was this craptastic html example where you could view source and kind of learn various html tags relating to lists, tables I believe, and various other things as a quick primer for those uneducated in HTML). I also created one on Geocities (different use cases in the end, but more or less I just wanted to see which was better/easier. Ended up with Angelfire as my main one as you could actually "name" your site as opposed to the generic "city"/"street" name-ish thing of Geocities). And if memory serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page. Tried it, think there was a work around for that one, but I didn't like battling it so didn't retain.
Now, sure, I can find a host that I can pay $x to host the HTML that I build outright, but I don't know if kids coming up have the same resources I did as it relates to starting up a free site and having a default page with various HTML elements (too many at this point for a single page to be of value. Would probably have to look something like W3Schools or whatever with a list on the left you could go through).
Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.
Is it though? When I was 9, I created a site on Angelfire (and loved the fact that the default page was this craptastic html example where you could view source and kind of learn various html tags relating to lists, tables I believe, and various other things as a quick primer for those uneducated in HTML). I also created one on Geocities (different use cases in the end, but more or less I just wanted to see which was better/easier. Ended up with Angelfire as my main one as you could actually "name" your site as opposed to the generic "city"/"street" name-ish thing of Geocities). And if memory serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page. Tried it, think there was a work around for that one, but I didn't like battling it so didn't retain.
Now, sure, I can find a host that I can pay $x to host the HTML that I build outright, but I don't know if kids coming up have the same resources I did as it relates to starting up a free site and having a default page with various HTML elements (too many at this point for a single page to be of value. Would probably have to look something like W3Schools or whatever with a list on the left you could go through).
Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.
Back in 1996 a friend of mine with no computer training put together a simple website in Notepad and uploaded it to free web space provided by her ISP.
That doesn't happen today. People bumble along with Wordpress or services like Wix, but the customisation options for non-experts are very limited and generic.
Hosting has become much more complicated and confusing, and the web simply doesn't do simple any more. Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time.
There really isn't anything equivalent to AF/Geo. And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling.
That doesn't happen today. People bumble along with Wordpress or services like Wix, but the customisation options for non-experts are very limited and generic.
Hosting has become much more complicated and confusing, and the web simply doesn't do simple any more. Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time.
There really isn't anything equivalent to AF/Geo. And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling.
There are still free hosts out there, and the simple HTML of yesteryear still renders fine today.
> Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.
followed by later:
> I just mean organically though. Hate to sound old, but back then, Yahoo was basically a nested index and Google if it was a thing at that point wasn't a commonly known one. Yet Angelfire, Geocities, etc. were easily located because sites hosted on them were shared so heavily and drop the /something/something (edit: from the URL) and it says "hey, you can create your own for free here".
> I just did a search for "free website" and there was Wix, Wordpress, Yola, and Weebly. Going to assume those are legit, but the rest of my results (which were way more common than those 4 entries) were offshoots of "[best/top/10] web site builders 2019" or some random other ones that won the SEO game.
followed by later:
> I just mean organically though. Hate to sound old, but back then, Yahoo was basically a nested index and Google if it was a thing at that point wasn't a commonly known one. Yet Angelfire, Geocities, etc. were easily located because sites hosted on them were shared so heavily and drop the /something/something (edit: from the URL) and it says "hey, you can create your own for free here".
> I just did a search for "free website" and there was Wix, Wordpress, Yola, and Weebly. Going to assume those are legit, but the rest of my results (which were way more common than those 4 entries) were offshoots of "[best/top/10] web site builders 2019" or some random other ones that won the SEO game.
>Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time.
Sorry, but when was it common for people to write and host their own blog and commercial sites, and when was this less than moderately complicated?
I remember Geocities and other similar sites offering server-side includes and CGI scripting, and of course services like Blogger and Livejournal existed, but I don't think writing your own blogware was ever really a common thing.
>And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling.
You can still write perfectly simple 90's style HTML and CSS, and vanilla javascript, even in Notepad (although I wouldn't recommend it just because I don't like Notepad.) You're mistaking the bloat and increasing complexity of the enterprise web development environment and tooling with what are still basic components. The web really hasn't changed that much, what's changed is what people put on it.
Sorry, but when was it common for people to write and host their own blog and commercial sites, and when was this less than moderately complicated?
I remember Geocities and other similar sites offering server-side includes and CGI scripting, and of course services like Blogger and Livejournal existed, but I don't think writing your own blogware was ever really a common thing.
>And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling.
You can still write perfectly simple 90's style HTML and CSS, and vanilla javascript, even in Notepad (although I wouldn't recommend it just because I don't like Notepad.) You're mistaking the bloat and increasing complexity of the enterprise web development environment and tooling with what are still basic components. The web really hasn't changed that much, what's changed is what people put on it.
My ISP still provides free web space.
I don’t think it’s any harder now than it was then. It’s not like people somehow automatically knew where to get free hosting or how to use it. They’d learn it from friends, or books, or online sources. You can do the same today. The only difference in difficulty is that the resources are much more readily available and there’s far more high quality free software you can use. (Anyone remember paying for an FTP client?)
If it seems harder today, it’s only because the newer options are so much easier. Back in the day, if you wanted to put something up for people to read, you figured out web hosting or you didn’t do it. Now, you figure out web hosting or you post it on Medium/Facebook/whatever.
If it seems harder today, it’s only because the newer options are so much easier. Back in the day, if you wanted to put something up for people to read, you figured out web hosting or you didn’t do it. Now, you figure out web hosting or you post it on Medium/Facebook/whatever.
Yes and no. I remember as a child, I simply clicked the little "built with Geocities" or "built with [Free Blog provider]" badge at the bottom of the sites I went to and then read what those services were.
Created an account, put text and images in the WYSIWYG and saved. There you go, the site was online.
Created an account, put text and images in the WYSIWYG and saved. There you go, the site was online.
Similarly, I think I got started because AOL added a "feature" of free web host space, and curious about such new features I explored using it. As much as Usenet laments that first part of "Eternal September" when AOL opened up a ton of such features to become a "real" ISP, they also launched a lot of test space for early website design for some of us. (At one point I think I had all 5 screen-names that AOL allowed per account just for website hosting. I was privileged in that no one else in the household ever needed to use AOL much, I suppose in hindsight.)
I remember moving stuff to GeoCities and Angelfire and weirder lost cousins like XOOM only when AOL started adding hidden fees for web space (I recall something like they started with a 10MB/screen-name free cap and then dropped to 1MB/screen-name cap), and then it was more important when the cost structure of AOL itself couldn't compete with other ISPs and it was time to move on from AOL dial-up to DSL.
It's a shame that "free web space" stopped being a competitive "feature" for ISPs. I like the tilde.town aesthetic of bringing back shared shell space. I sometimes wonder if there were a way to make something like that a "feature" that any kid "already has access to and should explore", but doing that at scale seems tough. Maybe more reason to see if we can do interesting things in decentralized web and decentralized web discovery mechanics as most people's home computers are already more capable than many of the very web servers ISPs used early in the web when free space was a competitive feature (they are just locked behind too many NAT layers and firewalls, for both good and bad reasons).
I remember moving stuff to GeoCities and Angelfire and weirder lost cousins like XOOM only when AOL started adding hidden fees for web space (I recall something like they started with a 10MB/screen-name free cap and then dropped to 1MB/screen-name cap), and then it was more important when the cost structure of AOL itself couldn't compete with other ISPs and it was time to move on from AOL dial-up to DSL.
It's a shame that "free web space" stopped being a competitive "feature" for ISPs. I like the tilde.town aesthetic of bringing back shared shell space. I sometimes wonder if there were a way to make something like that a "feature" that any kid "already has access to and should explore", but doing that at scale seems tough. Maybe more reason to see if we can do interesting things in decentralized web and decentralized web discovery mechanics as most people's home computers are already more capable than many of the very web servers ISPs used early in the web when free space was a competitive feature (they are just locked behind too many NAT layers and firewalls, for both good and bad reasons).
I haven't played with it, but I know that there's https://neocities.org/ which is a spiritual successor.
The Angelfire of today is Neocities, FWIW:
https://neocities.org/
I wonder if they have a "proudly hosted on Neocities" button, 1990s-style.
https://neocities.org/
I wonder if they have a "proudly hosted on Neocities" button, 1990s-style.
You should also mention that their site / code is 100% open source. [1] You could run your own NeoCities if you so desired.
[1] - https://github.com/neocities
[1] - https://github.com/neocities
Angelfire is the Angelfire of today, actually.
For whatever reason, be it luck, tenacity, or a contract with an eldritch god, they're still around[0].
[0]http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/
For whatever reason, be it luck, tenacity, or a contract with an eldritch god, they're still around[0].
[0]http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/
Yeah there are a few people have made.
Is Neocities still active? I sent you $100 a few hours ago to support the project and for the supporter status, but I haven't gotten any replies. I also just noticed that the last tweet is from April.
I want to support Neocities if it'll ensure a good future, I'd just like to know that I'm supporting a project that still has one.
I want to support Neocities if it'll ensure a good future, I'd just like to know that I'm supporting a project that still has one.
> And if memory serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page.
Remember ".tk"?
Remember ".tk"?
What about Wordpress? When I was trying to build my own site, wordpress popped up multiple times in my searches. When I tried it out, it didn't seem that hard to create your own custom-ish website. I don't think you even write HTML all that much, mostly it's a GUI.
WordPress is probably a fair one. I don't know that I've ever been on a *.wordpress.com site (probably wrapped in a custom domain, but that's going to be oblivious to me. Seen tons using WordPress as in the tool though).
Edit: just did a search here for wordpress.com to see if anything shows up from the site itself. There are entries, but everything seems to be a communication of sorts from WordPress to developers (vip.wordpress.com, developer.wordpress.com, etc.) or an article about WordPress.com that is on techcrunch or the like. I'll grant you that Hacker News is probably not the gateway to the Internet for kids coming up now, so that probably doesn't say anything of importance (just figured maybe something that someone hosted there may turn up, but they may be custom domained and at that point, very unlikely someone is going from that site to WordPress.com to start up a site).
I just mean organically though. Hate to sound old, but back then, Yahoo was basically a nested index and Google if it was a thing at that point wasn't a commonly known one. Yet Angelfire, Geocities, etc. were easily located because sites hosted on them were shared so heavily and drop the /something/something (edit: from the URL) and it says "hey, you can create your own for free here".
I just did a search for "free website" and there was Wix, Wordpress, Yola, and Weebly. Going to assume those are legit, but the rest of my results (which were way more common than those 4 entries) were offshoots of "[best/top/10] web site builders 2019" or some random other ones that won the SEO game.
Edit: just did a search here for wordpress.com to see if anything shows up from the site itself. There are entries, but everything seems to be a communication of sorts from WordPress to developers (vip.wordpress.com, developer.wordpress.com, etc.) or an article about WordPress.com that is on techcrunch or the like. I'll grant you that Hacker News is probably not the gateway to the Internet for kids coming up now, so that probably doesn't say anything of importance (just figured maybe something that someone hosted there may turn up, but they may be custom domained and at that point, very unlikely someone is going from that site to WordPress.com to start up a site).
I just mean organically though. Hate to sound old, but back then, Yahoo was basically a nested index and Google if it was a thing at that point wasn't a commonly known one. Yet Angelfire, Geocities, etc. were easily located because sites hosted on them were shared so heavily and drop the /something/something (edit: from the URL) and it says "hey, you can create your own for free here".
I just did a search for "free website" and there was Wix, Wordpress, Yola, and Weebly. Going to assume those are legit, but the rest of my results (which were way more common than those 4 entries) were offshoots of "[best/top/10] web site builders 2019" or some random other ones that won the SEO game.
but it's easier then ever to build your own website
Because the bigger thing is that the web itself is going away.
Kids don't browse the web. Most people don't browse the web.
People, particularly kids, use apps.
Let's suppose you could create a high-quality website literally at the speed of thought. For free.
Who would look at it?
(to be clear, I hate this state of affairs)
There's a lot of truth to that, though I think what makes the situation even worse is algorithms. Algorithms can be good for the individual(or at least seem as such), but they can be bad for a community that could benefit from a more common experience. The internet does still have interesting stuff on it, but discovering it may be difficult for the average person when algorithms are steering them towards things they either know the user already likes or things that are profitable.
As for the good stuff, who says it's bad for it to be hard to find?
Or maybe it's the opposite, the fact that information is so easy to find, and everybody knows it, had devalued it.
But the hard stuff ? Because it's hard to find, it has some value. Maybe you could become better at your job, comparatively, and earn more money. Or develop a unique skill and gain self esteem. Or offer some helpful bit of info for someone, and help the relationship.
Or maybe it's the opposite, the fact that information is so easy to find, and everybody knows it, had devalued it.
But the hard stuff ? Because it's hard to find, it has some value. Maybe you could become better at your job, comparatively, and earn more money. Or develop a unique skill and gain self esteem. Or offer some helpful bit of info for someone, and help the relationship.
It can't be the case that the "weird internet" went away because the "internet opened up to non weird people," because it opened up to everyone as soon as it was available outside of university research labs, and there are exponentially more weird people on the internet now than there ever were.
You seem to be mistaking the creation of layout with the creation of content and assuming, incorrectly, that one must be boring, uncreative or uninteresting to not want to put in the effort of manually creating an HTML page, maybe with a black starry background and some flames and a spinning skull gif. That because layouts have become homogeneous and centralized in services, content and the web itself must as well.
You don't think there's "weird" content on Youtube and Facebook? I would assert that there is more of it, and more of higher quality, than there ever was on the old web. Sure, there are real barriers preventing someone from creating their own website and hosting their own fan group or videos or whatever, but people don't do so because it's a waste of time when what they want to do is create content. Once making your own site no longer became necessary, it became a specialized interest.
You seem to be mistaking the creation of layout with the creation of content and assuming, incorrectly, that one must be boring, uncreative or uninteresting to not want to put in the effort of manually creating an HTML page, maybe with a black starry background and some flames and a spinning skull gif. That because layouts have become homogeneous and centralized in services, content and the web itself must as well.
You don't think there's "weird" content on Youtube and Facebook? I would assert that there is more of it, and more of higher quality, than there ever was on the old web. Sure, there are real barriers preventing someone from creating their own website and hosting their own fan group or videos or whatever, but people don't do so because it's a waste of time when what they want to do is create content. Once making your own site no longer became necessary, it became a specialized interest.
> This post itself didn't have to be on medium - but medium and Facebook and YouTube deliver that "boring, non weird" audience that you want to read your stuff.
I think the problem here is that content discovery and hosting have become complected. Most people reading Hacker News can figure out how to self-host a video, for example, but if it's to reach a mainstream audience, it must be on Youtube.
I think the problem here is that content discovery and hosting have become complected. Most people reading Hacker News can figure out how to self-host a video, for example, but if it's to reach a mainstream audience, it must be on Youtube.
"but because the internet opened up to non weird people"
For my tastes, the original blogosphere of 2000-2008 was one of the finest things the human race ever created, and the intellectual stimulation of the debates has no equal in any other age. But also there was still plenty of weirdness. I'd extend the era of "early Web" all the way to 2008, and I'd focus on advertising as the thing that killed it. In 2000 advertising on the Web meant banner ads, which had the reputation of being over-priced and ineffective. Especially when the crash hit in 2001, many companies swore they would never again waste money on advertising on the Web. But Overture came up with the idea of buying keywords for specific searches, and then Overture was absorbed into Google and became the Google business model, and by 2007 or 2008 many businesses were willing to get serious about advertising on the Web. At which point advertising, as a business model, took off, and it helped drive the consolidation of the Web, and it helped give us the boring Web of today.
I should add, the worst aspects of the consolidation were driven, specifically, by the adoption of algorithms that are designed to maximize engagement, because the goal is to serve as many ads as possible. The algorithms have a deadening effect. To his endless credit, Clay Shirky sketched out some of the forces that were likely going to lower quality on the Web over time:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...
That was way back in 2003. The key passage is:
"Finally, there is no real A-list, because there is no discontinuity. Though explanations of power laws (including the ones here) often focus on numbers like "12% of blogs account for 50% of the links", these are arbitrary markers. The largest step function in a power law is between the #1 and #2 positions, by definition. There is no A-list that is qualitatively different from their nearest neighbors, so any line separating more and less trafficked blogs is arbitrary."
But this turned out to be incorrect:
"Third, the stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake."
The algorithms are designed to fake a kind of preference, or to distort those preferences, because of the desperation of the company to move higher on the power law curve.
The point is, Shirky pointed to a natural process, and advertising money provided a powerful incentive to hack that natural process and try to distort it for the benefit of the company.
For my tastes, the original blogosphere of 2000-2008 was one of the finest things the human race ever created, and the intellectual stimulation of the debates has no equal in any other age. But also there was still plenty of weirdness. I'd extend the era of "early Web" all the way to 2008, and I'd focus on advertising as the thing that killed it. In 2000 advertising on the Web meant banner ads, which had the reputation of being over-priced and ineffective. Especially when the crash hit in 2001, many companies swore they would never again waste money on advertising on the Web. But Overture came up with the idea of buying keywords for specific searches, and then Overture was absorbed into Google and became the Google business model, and by 2007 or 2008 many businesses were willing to get serious about advertising on the Web. At which point advertising, as a business model, took off, and it helped drive the consolidation of the Web, and it helped give us the boring Web of today.
I should add, the worst aspects of the consolidation were driven, specifically, by the adoption of algorithms that are designed to maximize engagement, because the goal is to serve as many ads as possible. The algorithms have a deadening effect. To his endless credit, Clay Shirky sketched out some of the forces that were likely going to lower quality on the Web over time:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...
That was way back in 2003. The key passage is:
"Finally, there is no real A-list, because there is no discontinuity. Though explanations of power laws (including the ones here) often focus on numbers like "12% of blogs account for 50% of the links", these are arbitrary markers. The largest step function in a power law is between the #1 and #2 positions, by definition. There is no A-list that is qualitatively different from their nearest neighbors, so any line separating more and less trafficked blogs is arbitrary."
But this turned out to be incorrect:
"Third, the stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake."
The algorithms are designed to fake a kind of preference, or to distort those preferences, because of the desperation of the company to move higher on the power law curve.
The point is, Shirky pointed to a natural process, and advertising money provided a powerful incentive to hack that natural process and try to distort it for the benefit of the company.
Your timeline seems to align better with the introduction of the smartphone. The phone screen severely limited the weirdness of content that fits in it, (with or without advertising). It might be the case that it actually enabled the boring , single-task engagement economy that came after it. I think that endlessly scrolling facebook would not be equally addictive on a desktop computer - there is better things to do there, while there is not much else to do on a phone.
Yes if you think weird stuff is no longer available on the Internet, look a bit harder.
And the battle is long from over. The whole anti free speech crowd is just living on a similar effect. People who are so intolerant to weirdness that they want to censor it away just because they feel offended by it.
Sorry who is trying to censor weirdness? Last I knew albinoblacksheep.com and zombo.com where doing just fine, and no one was trying to take them down.
Maybe you are aware of something I'm not, and there really is a campaign against weirdness that I just haven't seen, but it feels to me like you are trying to drag this topic down an unrelated political tangent. Please don't.
Maybe you are aware of something I'm not, and there really is a campaign against weirdness that I just haven't seen, but it feels to me like you are trying to drag this topic down an unrelated political tangent. Please don't.
This reply seems needlessly obstinate and accusatory
Accusatory? Probably. I'll acknowledge that I'm making assumptions about GPs motivations based on the language he used. Obstinate however implies stubbornness in the face of reason, and there is absolutely none in the original comment to be stubborn in the face of. It simply states, with no evidence, that there is an "anti-free speech" crowd, and that it hates weirdness.
If there is a real campaign against weirdness on the internet, I'd genuinely like to know about it and where it's coming from.
If there is a real campaign against weirdness on the internet, I'd genuinely like to know about it and where it's coming from.
People experience the dismal anti-literate Twitter (concept and style and non-member popup 'experience') and think it's... normal?
And the Twitter embed system is hilarious at times. There is nothing as face-palmy as a controversial tweet that gets embedded in a news article describing it and then the owner deletes it, leaving a news article with a tweet-not-available hole.
Facebook, where you are 10 narrow screens and 1500 back-end js-directed cloud bloat loads loads away from something you saw yesterday? The Modern Web where even scroll keys do not really work anymore?
Or for that matter Youtube, whose text comments are designed to explode into illiterate mush with no hint or hope of proper spaces or paragraph breaks if copied to clipboard? Predatory.
Here we are in the 21st century where people take SCREENSHOTS of things rather than copy information. This is regression, devolution.
Back in the dark ages of 2000 it was considered bad manners to design a system that appeared to scroll endlessly until the web browser simply gummed up and crashed. Search engines wouldn't bother to render any of that. Now it's the preferred way to do it.
And now Google is replacing their results page text stream paragraphs with tile-crap that is rects within rects with acres of white space, and less context.
If only the whole Internet was built like Hacker News.
And the Twitter embed system is hilarious at times. There is nothing as face-palmy as a controversial tweet that gets embedded in a news article describing it and then the owner deletes it, leaving a news article with a tweet-not-available hole.
Facebook, where you are 10 narrow screens and 1500 back-end js-directed cloud bloat loads loads away from something you saw yesterday? The Modern Web where even scroll keys do not really work anymore?
Or for that matter Youtube, whose text comments are designed to explode into illiterate mush with no hint or hope of proper spaces or paragraph breaks if copied to clipboard? Predatory.
Here we are in the 21st century where people take SCREENSHOTS of things rather than copy information. This is regression, devolution.
Back in the dark ages of 2000 it was considered bad manners to design a system that appeared to scroll endlessly until the web browser simply gummed up and crashed. Search engines wouldn't bother to render any of that. Now it's the preferred way to do it.
And now Google is replacing their results page text stream paragraphs with tile-crap that is rects within rects with acres of white space, and less context.
If only the whole Internet was built like Hacker News.
> There is nothing as face-palmy as a controversial tweet that gets embedded in a news article describing it and then the owner deletes it, leaving a news article with a tweet-not-available hole.
There is something more face-palmy: when the owner spots that they've been embedded in a news article, and change the post accordingly. The latest issue of Private Eye gives an example of this happening, where the Mail Online embedded a Facebook post about a mis-spelled party banner; the poster (Simon Harris) saw it was being embedded and changed the text:
> For a while, until someone noticed and replaced the linked post with a screenshot, the article proudly stated: "The Daily Mail is an utter shiterag that is only read by Middle England tossbags who voted Leave because some Polish guy called Piotr served them in Tesco, once."
There is something more face-palmy: when the owner spots that they've been embedded in a news article, and change the post accordingly. The latest issue of Private Eye gives an example of this happening, where the Mail Online embedded a Facebook post about a mis-spelled party banner; the poster (Simon Harris) saw it was being embedded and changed the text:
> For a while, until someone noticed and replaced the linked post with a screenshot, the article proudly stated: "The Daily Mail is an utter shiterag that is only read by Middle England tossbags who voted Leave because some Polish guy called Piotr served them in Tesco, once."
Am I so out of touch?
No, it's everyone else who is wrong.
No, it's everyone else who is wrong.
Gotta love the implicit ageism in the first para's assumption that the web already existed when current web developers first got interested in coding. I wrote my first code on a ZX81, or possibly an Apple II, and I'm still getting paid to build web applications today!
same - i had a class in middle school where we programmed animations in hplot on apple IIe
> I still run a personal blog on a custom website I built, but every year it feels a bit stranger, and a little rarer. Many people default to Facebook Pages or cookie-cutter Squarespace designs, if they have their own website at all.
Posted on Medium, which is nearly the Facebook equivalent of a blogging site. The author mentions Glitch, for which the first step to getting started is either "clone a project" or start with React, Vue, Ember, Angular, or any other number of nontrivial frameworks. Is this really the same as HTML/CSS into Geocities?
For better or worse (feels like worse), Internet users are becoming consumers of content rather than producers. When this was all still newer (say, 1997-2005), the novelty of having an online presence was still a dominant factor. As that process has become more homogenized and simplified with the rise of social media platforms, there's much less incentive to bother with learning HTML, CSS, and possibly JS just to put some information on a page. Modern social media platforms walk you through profile creation, posting interests and having those lead to like-minded people, contact management, and so on. Everything's just there. I think it's a hard sell to try and walk that back to "just do it yourself" for someone without that mentality, and it's amusing to see people keep trying. For those of us who value personal expression over ease-of-use, personal websites will continue to be preferable.
Posted on Medium, which is nearly the Facebook equivalent of a blogging site. The author mentions Glitch, for which the first step to getting started is either "clone a project" or start with React, Vue, Ember, Angular, or any other number of nontrivial frameworks. Is this really the same as HTML/CSS into Geocities?
For better or worse (feels like worse), Internet users are becoming consumers of content rather than producers. When this was all still newer (say, 1997-2005), the novelty of having an online presence was still a dominant factor. As that process has become more homogenized and simplified with the rise of social media platforms, there's much less incentive to bother with learning HTML, CSS, and possibly JS just to put some information on a page. Modern social media platforms walk you through profile creation, posting interests and having those lead to like-minded people, contact management, and so on. Everything's just there. I think it's a hard sell to try and walk that back to "just do it yourself" for someone without that mentality, and it's amusing to see people keep trying. For those of us who value personal expression over ease-of-use, personal websites will continue to be preferable.
> The internet was weirder back then — full of quirky ideas, personal pages, custom blogs, and far more viable platforms to build on than we have on the streamlined web of today.
The Internet is not the Web, also what platforms? Sure besides Geocities, many ISP's gave a few MBs for personal html files but for the most part you didn't had your own URL, now you can have that for a few pennies a month. But we're not playing web pages game anymore, it's interactivity bit times otherwise we feel bored without infinite scroll and even a regular forum doesn't cut it anymore (no one wants no register for yet another one).
> In the last two decades, custom stylesheets have become a dying breed.
I'm not so sure about it, at least not for the regular personal pages, you just don't find those as often with "the search engine". Try https://wiby.me/ to get a feel for it. Maybe we need to resurrect the gopher protocol and make the search unbiased again, hell yeah, Make the Search Great Again!
The Internet is not the Web, also what platforms? Sure besides Geocities, many ISP's gave a few MBs for personal html files but for the most part you didn't had your own URL, now you can have that for a few pennies a month. But we're not playing web pages game anymore, it's interactivity bit times otherwise we feel bored without infinite scroll and even a regular forum doesn't cut it anymore (no one wants no register for yet another one).
> In the last two decades, custom stylesheets have become a dying breed.
I'm not so sure about it, at least not for the regular personal pages, you just don't find those as often with "the search engine". Try https://wiby.me/ to get a feel for it. Maybe we need to resurrect the gopher protocol and make the search unbiased again, hell yeah, Make the Search Great Again!
It's strange to say this, since I'm a gopher user and everyone else seems interested in popularizing or resurrecting the protocol, but I hope that never happens. Gopher today is a cool, thoughtful, and quirky place. I think that's because it is a niche. Add the masses and it would be bland-ified.
Thanks for reminding me of https://wiby.me! I can't recall where i first heard of this search engine...but it made me smile then, and now that you mentioned it (and after i clicked around a bit today), made me smile again; thanks for that!
The article mentions the rise of smart phones as a factor but fails to grasp the real reason for their impact. Smart phones made making web pages much harder.
Before Smart Phones a user could slap together some HTML and perhaps some simple CSS with underconstruction.gif and have an OK looking page. That same page would look terrible on a cell phone because the simple table-based layouts that people could understand do not render well on small screens.
Sure they could rewrite the site but that was a lot of effort. Plus HTML was very much a moving target back then. Much easier to move your "I like potatoes" or whatever page to Facebook, which takes care of everything for you and provides a nice network effect.
If we want the weird web back then we are going to have to provide tools to make websites look good on all screens while still being expressive enough that a child can pick them up but also provide the kind of instant feedback of Facebook likes and comments.
Perhaps Indyweb or Mastodon will be the key but right now they are still to complex for random-j-blogger to deal with.
Before Smart Phones a user could slap together some HTML and perhaps some simple CSS with underconstruction.gif and have an OK looking page. That same page would look terrible on a cell phone because the simple table-based layouts that people could understand do not render well on small screens.
Sure they could rewrite the site but that was a lot of effort. Plus HTML was very much a moving target back then. Much easier to move your "I like potatoes" or whatever page to Facebook, which takes care of everything for you and provides a nice network effect.
If we want the weird web back then we are going to have to provide tools to make websites look good on all screens while still being expressive enough that a child can pick them up but also provide the kind of instant feedback of Facebook likes and comments.
Perhaps Indyweb or Mastodon will be the key but right now they are still to complex for random-j-blogger to deal with.
simple table-based layouts
Back in those days, websites would regularly specify a minimum screen size (800x600 and 1024x768 were popular) and woe to anybody with a smaller display...
Back in the day to get things like "nice rounded corners" required hacks in your tables like 1px empty spacer gifs and rounded corner gifs. CSS may seem less "simple" to learn, but compare it to "borrowing" a copy of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and learning that tool just to get something as boringly nice as "rounded corners" that you had control over.
(Source: I rebuilt my blog a few years back mostly specifically to make my 90's kid self envious that I could actually do the LCARS things I had wanted to do back then with no corner gifs or spacer gifs, and in a way that responsively reflows content that TABLEs never could.)
(Source: I rebuilt my blog a few years back mostly specifically to make my 90's kid self envious that I could actually do the LCARS things I had wanted to do back then with no corner gifs or spacer gifs, and in a way that responsively reflows content that TABLEs never could.)
I skimmed the article. It’s reasonable, but can someone please tell how it explains the “had to die” part of the title or is that just clickbait?
Also to add to what another poster said: after Eternal September (if there was ever a milestone for this) most people on the internet become just regular users. Therefore the internet’s offerings evolved to cater to this majority. That’s ok (I guess). In my opinion the biggest issue is centralization. Ex: want to have a video channel about guns or hacking? Best pound sand because you don’t have a spot on the biggest video platform that currently exists.
Also to add to what another poster said: after Eternal September (if there was ever a milestone for this) most people on the internet become just regular users. Therefore the internet’s offerings evolved to cater to this majority. That’s ok (I guess). In my opinion the biggest issue is centralization. Ex: want to have a video channel about guns or hacking? Best pound sand because you don’t have a spot on the biggest video platform that currently exists.
Some kind of fad of writing to end your title with "... had to die", to me it just indicates that such articles have this sloppy writing style.
One of the subtitles was "Growing up". The Web didn't "grew up" it just became old and we still can't figure out how to use it, hopefully when WASM becomes the standard everyone can live happily.
Centralization is what everyone is familiar with. All those giant social media channels are like tv channels of the past, the Web has never gotten to it's true potential and who knows if it ever will.
One of the subtitles was "Growing up". The Web didn't "grew up" it just became old and we still can't figure out how to use it, hopefully when WASM becomes the standard everyone can live happily.
Centralization is what everyone is familiar with. All those giant social media channels are like tv channels of the past, the Web has never gotten to it's true potential and who knows if it ever will.
I don't know if WASM, of all things, will help the web evolve. WASM comes straight from a programmer's/nerd's desire for portability, performance, and "optimal" programming languages (eg choice of PL, reuse of code) above all, but doesn't do anything for content. In fact, it makes browsers and web development even more complex and certainly doesn't take the web into the direction of GeoCities of old.
Sorry, my mentioning of WASM wasn't intended to be taken seriously *(should have used /s). I know equal number of people who would be happy as well unhappy about it.
TikTok is the weird internet for kids today the way GeoCities was for those of us who were kids in the 90s.
The internet is still weird. It’s just shifted to apps and other communities.
The internet is still weird. It’s just shifted to apps and other communities.
> The internet is still weird. It’s just shifted to apps and other communities.
Nah. It's wannabe weird.
Nah. It's wannabe weird.
The Internet's still pretty weird. It's possible that it's just weird in a way that's not nostalgic for those of us who cut our teeth on the late-90s / early-00s Internet.
Yes. I think many in their 30s and older have missed the new reality.
That more culture is being created on the internet on mobile platforms and apps they've never heard of (and in languages they don't speak) than ever before.
The weird web is alive but it lives in TikTok and WeChat etc.
That more culture is being created on the internet on mobile platforms and apps they've never heard of (and in languages they don't speak) than ever before.
The weird web is alive but it lives in TikTok and WeChat etc.
I think what's missing in discussions over the death of the old web, is that people fundamentally want their work to be seen, or discovered. The weird web thrived when there weren't many websites out there, and discovery was as easy as being listed in a web directory like what Yahoo! had. You could "surf" them one by one like you can with cable TV.
That ended in the early 2000s as search engines prioritized their own news, sports and entertainment content (Yahoo and MSN especially) and the explosion of blogs made keeping sites in a directory totally un-scalable.
As others have said, the weird web exists on channels like Vine (rip), Youtube, TikTok etc, but the discovery UX is bad because there are so many people trying to show up on your home screen. So the result is most of the content is very standardized, because people want to be seen, and doing what's popular is the 'reliable' way of achieving it.
That ended in the early 2000s as search engines prioritized their own news, sports and entertainment content (Yahoo and MSN especially) and the explosion of blogs made keeping sites in a directory totally un-scalable.
As others have said, the weird web exists on channels like Vine (rip), Youtube, TikTok etc, but the discovery UX is bad because there are so many people trying to show up on your home screen. So the result is most of the content is very standardized, because people want to be seen, and doing what's popular is the 'reliable' way of achieving it.
I misread this quote at first:
"For many developers, figuring out how to do something cool on their Myspace page or building a GeoCities site full of animated “under construction” GIFs was the genesis of their tech careers."
I read it as "apex of (my) tech career." It felt like everything since then has been a slow decent into disappointment.
Everything feels so rigid now. Back then it was just fun. Feels like every thing I make now is loaded with anxiety about future changes and scalability and code rot. Tragic that this is gone for me.
"For many developers, figuring out how to do something cool on their Myspace page or building a GeoCities site full of animated “under construction” GIFs was the genesis of their tech careers."
I read it as "apex of (my) tech career." It felt like everything since then has been a slow decent into disappointment.
Everything feels so rigid now. Back then it was just fun. Feels like every thing I make now is loaded with anxiety about future changes and scalability and code rot. Tragic that this is gone for me.
The weird part of the web still exists. neocities.org is a more modern geocities with the same ability to experiment and modify a static page that geocities had.
You just need to dig deeper and promote parts of the weird web on the new gateways like reddit, facebook, etc.
You just need to dig deeper and promote parts of the weird web on the new gateways like reddit, facebook, etc.
the internet and computer now is much too important to let bug/glitch/exploits/hacks gets away.
I dont think there will ever be bug that will become accidental feature like how Myspace was.
I dont think there will ever be bug that will become accidental feature like how Myspace was.
And we've traded it for a sea of advertising and astroturfing.
Love to see someone trying hard to say "capitalism sucks" but not knowing how.