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.

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.

"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?

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.