The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

The barrier of entry was actually lower than that. We didn't need to stand up an Apache server. We could just sign up for a Geocities/Xoom/Tripod account and upload HTML or use the built in site editor to create content.

Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. These chronologically organized articles and content have dominated web content and social media ever since.

Yeah, I found it weird that the article called blogs "Web 1.0", I'm pretty sure that it was them that were first hailed as the new "Web 2.0" ?

> The barrier of entry was actually lower than that. We didn't need to stand up an Apache server. We could just sign up for a Geocities/Xoom/Tripod account and upload HTML or use the built in site editor to create content.

Reading this thread feels like everyone is anchored to whatever methods were popular at the time they entered the internet as being the peak. The BBS people think it was all downhill after BBS declined. The self-hosting people think it was all downhill after sites like Geocities/Tripod/Xoom became popular. The Geocities people think it was all downhill after blogging platforms became popular. The blogging people think it was all downhill when social media became popular.

I think there's a heavy dose of nostalgia coloring the opinions in this thread. What people really yearn for isn't Geocities or Usenet or whatever. It's the feeling of excitement that came from first getting immersed in the internet when it was all new to you.

> Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. These chronologically organized articles and content have dominated web content and social media ever since.

I don't see the problem with chronological ordering. Most of those platforms and sites make it easy to search for related posts. Worst case, the author can just drop some hyperlinks into the posts to tie them together.

Curated and organized websites tend to fall out relevancy and decay very rapidly. Might as well just let people post as they see fit and then we can find it by searching.

The barrier to entry may have been lower if you were willing to host on someone else's hardware, but from my reading that's not truly decentralized or owned by the user such as in the spirit of the parent comment.

"I think there's a heavy dose of nostalgia coloring the opinions in this thread. What people really yearn for isn't Geocities or Usenet or whatever. It's the feeling of excitement that came from first getting immersed in the internet when it was all new to you."

Certainly there is nostalgia.

But back then the web was not controlled by add financed mega companies - and the dreams of the teens using it, were not mainly to become a influencer. Meaning getting somehow famous and then sell that attention for - advertisement.

I agree with this. You can still do all those things! And there are still people doing all those things. It's just not novel or exciting to us anymore. And I might be more disappointed now that my Geocities about a comic book never gets any hits, while there are influencers on Instagram and TikTok making $$$$, than I was in 1999 when that wasn't really conceivable. (And then there are the neat things that weren't even possible back then - Roblox gets a lot of shit for its financial model these days, but 1999 me would've eaten up an easy-to-use game programming interface to show off cool shit to my friends back then.)

However, I do think there is a lot of lost value due to today's "search for it" attitude replacing curation. Yes, curation takes a lot of work, but that also makes it more robust against SEO spam and such. But I also don't think it added enough value that people would pay for it - original web companies were benefiting from wildly optimistic funding numbers for "eyeballs" and display ad rates that are never coming back.

> But I also don't think it added enough value that people would pay for it

There was non-commercial curation back in the day, DMOZ was the most prominent example. In general, commercialism was very rare on the early Internet. "Business" sites were thought of as somewhat exceptional, not the norm.

Nah, I'm a BBS person and I think it's been all downhill since social media.

(Specifically, Livejournal was the tipping-point between blogging platforms and social media, Myspace was unquestionably downward, Facebook is the antichrist pure and simple.)

I have no problem with chronological or hierarchical content. Whatever the author wants to put out, is their prerogative.

What I have a problem with is walled gardens, stalking-as-a-business-model, and arbitrary automated deplatforming with no recourse.

I agree that nostalgia plays a part, but one could argue that it was at its "peak" in the "early days" and "declining" since (quoted words by whatever definitions as it is all quite subjective). Such that chronologically no matter what time a given person first experienced the Internet, they established the peak at that point since they didn't experience what was before, but they could universally agree that it became worst since their own relative point, and that can be true agnostic of nostalgia. If a given system is reliably getting worse over time for any attribute, the relative peak for a given observer will always be when their first measurement is taken.

You could also work backwards from what you stated. For someone who first experienced digital connectivity via BBSes, would they also state the Geocities "era" was better than the blogging platforms era? Perhaps?

The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines has reduced the value of "well organized".

Consider that one of the premier features of the Jetbrains IDE is "search everywhere" which will search command help text for you as well and then return the command as a possible result - much easier to describe what you're trying to do and be led to the exact command, then try to understand the mind of the person who did the categorization.

> The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines has reduced the value of "well organized".

I wonder how much of this is still true.

Google results from a few years ago were much better than they are now. That's a combination of SEO ruining the results by Google assuming anything not hosted on a megaplatform is suspect and not showing it plus SEO ruining results by still being there in them despite that, but it happened.

If someone made a curated list of interesting small sites by category, it would be a lot more useful now than it was before that happened.

> Curated and organized websites tend to fall out relevancy and decay very rapidly. Might as well just let people post as they see fit and then we can find it by searching.

Your points about nostalgia I sort of agree with but this part I take issue with. Many sites use blog software which does the whole chronological ordering. Unless the site's particular blog theme exposes archives, a sitemap, or the author meticulously tags (and the theme shows tags) it can be stupid hard to navigate around blog-like sites.

Blog-like sites also tend to have a partial chronological list of posts at the root of the site. If you're writing some personal journal or topical things that makes sense. For someone writing about some particular topic(s) this is a navigation anti-pattern. It doesn't matter if the latest post on Topic A was posted on Monday. As a reader interested in Topic A you want all of the posts on it. Most blog-like sites make this challenging to find or don't expose it.

I don't really like "just search" as a replacement for categorical organization because most search sucks anymore. That might have been ok for Old Google, before the DoubleClicking, but now it's just another navigation anti-pattern.

Interestingly, had Web 2.0 concepts been implemented a bit better by CMSes, navigation of sites could be ably handled by user agents. A site with an OPML/Sitemap XML pointed to with an "alternative" meta tag could let a user agent (or service) build nice navigation for sites automatically no matter how the blog-like CMS organized the HTML.

It was the rise of tagging and folksonomies (now known as #hashtags) which made the blogs halfway usable. Because they allow you to search within the archived posts for the sub-topic you're interested in.

> Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content.

For news or personal diary-format blogs, it makes sense, but I agree. Why did the blog become the default way to present a page on the internet? Aside from serving as an indicator of 'freshness,' publication date usually has no relation to the content I read. It's weird that most content is organized around publication date by default.

I like reading old bike websites with stories about touring and such published around the 90s [1][2][3]. Most sites back then had a small section called "News" with short blurbs letting readers know about the status of the author, or new content added to the site, but it was not the main content itself. Content was usually organized in a way that makes sense to humans, rather than feed aggregators and content recommender systems.

It's so much better to explore a site by navigation through a few index pages. Ken's site [1] is especially a pleasure to browse. Right on the home page he lists his directories along with straightforward descriptions of what you'll find in them. On a directory page will be a list of pages organized under subheadings, and each one has a brief description. To me, this may be peak internet. It's easy to get a sense of what's there, how to get to the part of it that interests me, and doesn't keep me on a treadmill searching for something I want to read co-mingled with everything else.

I can't help but think that if WordPress was the default when Ken decided to make a website, it would be much worse. Each page does have a tiny 'last updated' date at the bottom, but as a reader 30 years later, the publication date has no relevancy to me any of the content here. It would be a pity to center everything on the site around that minor detail. And adding tags or category labels to blog pages usually doesn't help. It still squishes is all into a feed, just a subset feed.

[1]: https://www.phred.org/~alex/kenkifer/www.kenkifer.com/bikepa...

[2]: https://web.stanford.edu/~jcolwell/

[3]: https://sheldonbrown.com/

I have to wonder if the degrading of search results came solely from SEO dark patterns that do more harm than good, or if Google actively believed that small sites were becoming less relevant as social took off. Objectively, looking at PageRank might convince them that Facebook and Twitter were where people were spending time, but that particular firehose is so big it can - and eventually did - dilute nearly all the other relevant results.

Pipe dream: If someone wishes hard enough, maybe we can convince the Apollo guys to leave Yahoo alone so it can return to its roots as (surprise!) a directory.

But wasn't the raison d'etre of Google links to other sites, thereby giving some sense of how popular a given page was?

This helps individual sites, but says little about why the overall quality of links has nosedived. Who they link to continues to matter, except that now there is so much noise this is very difficult to get right unless you are extremely clever, lucky, or probably both.

I joined in the mid-00s and have to agree.

Big social media and especially recommendation algorithms have ruined much of what made the old Internet fun.

There's no longer the discovery or organic sharing; everything is just shoved down your throat by a soulless algorithm.

Almost everything I read on the internet is informed by the publish date. One of my biggest frustrations is sites that don't include publish dates because it makes the content 'evergreen'. Really frustrating.

You can still make a Neocities account and upload HTML.

Agree.

As far as I remember web 2.0 was all about user generated content spruced up with Ajax experiences:

Blogs (chronological as opposed to more freeform web sites) were arguably the first.

The comments, follows ("blog rolls"), tagging, ratings and third party sites providing the same like del.ico.us and digg.

RSS also was a web 2.0 thing in my mind at least.

I think most people classify Facebook as web 2.0 as well but in my mind they aren't as much web as a silo built on web technology.

Ban algorithmic recommendation. It's the only way people actually start organizing and curating content. You know, like libraries do.

Hah yes if I can't see a publish date on something I often look for something else. Not saying things need to be formatted/sorted by publish date (which I think is grandparent's actual point) but definitely it helps with contextualising content.

You got my point. I do appreciate the created/modified date on pages, I just prefer content to be organize by something pertinent to the content itself. Sometimes that is the publication date, sometimes it’s something else.

It's all been downhill ever since the eternal September started.

Interesting thought I hadn't considered before. Without algorithms, all aggregated content was curated by humans. With the advent of algorithms, a lot of this has probably stopped because humans just can't keep up.

Sometimes that's a good and useful thing, like with search engines. Clearly not always though.

Works well with static generators.

What stops you signing up for a boring webhosting package and uploading HTML today?

I was one of those humans, and it's more that the algorithms were initially designed under the assumption that we would keep doing that work for free, forever, but once the communities we were doing it for were destroyed, why bother?

Also there was a lot of pushback and poo-pooing the human element; lots of well-regarded (at the time) people saying that there was no future in human-curated content, and I know that I (as a young person) believed them. Look at the cool stuff they were making; they have to be right! They're smart adults, they would know, right?

It just stopped being fun to curate.