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The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

(cheapskatesguide.org)
622 points ColinWright | 5 comments | 25 Jan 22 22:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.627s | source
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kstrauser ◴[25 Jan 22 22:58 UTC] No.30079330[source]▶
I sure hope that's right. It was the best feeling in the world to stand up an Apache server on my Amiga, and later my little FreeBSD server, and see my friends viewing the website I was hosting on my dialup connection. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't elegant, and it certainly wasn't fast, but it was mine. I made that. From installing the server to writing the HTML, I owned that service from end to end and had completely freedom to do whatever I wanted with it.

That's what I want the Internet to look like for my younger family and friends. It'll probably never happen exactly this way, but I can picture someone running an IPv6-only service on their phone to impress their friends. I know what their smile would look like because that was once my smile, too.

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wolpoli ◴[25 Jan 22 23:51 UTC] No.30079823[source]▶
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.

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1. XorNot ◴[26 Jan 22 01:59 UTC] No.30080714[source]▶
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.

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2. zrm ◴[26 Jan 22 02:15 UTC] No.30080835[source]▶
> 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.

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3. zozbot234 ◴[26 Jan 22 02:30 UTC] No.30080936[source]▶
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.
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4. chrisfinazzo ◴[26 Jan 22 03:09 UTC] No.30081187[source]▶
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.

5. chrisfinazzo ◴[26 Jan 22 03:13 UTC] No.30081212[source]▶
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.