I personally wouldn't call 4chan and its relatives fun, but they sure are weird.
There's dedicated, active, shitty phpbb forums for every single weird sexual fetish you can imagine.
And that's just the fun and weird patches of the internet that I happen to know about. There must be 3 orders of magnitude more. I'd wager that if you think the internet isn't fun and weird anymore, then you're just looking in the wrong places. The problem is with you and not the internet.
Nowadays heavily discouraged, and would probably be deleted as unconstructive; that one still exists because of historical significance/was grandfathered in.
To be fair it is unconstructive. If you read the question carefully, it is clear is can be solved using a regex because it is about identifying tokens, not about parsing them into a tree. Parsers typically use regexes for the tokenization stage - indeed, what else would you use?
The answers are ridiculing the OP for asking a totally reasonable question.
Totally agreed. Weird, as always, persists in small communities. Not large. Weird is still alive and kicking, but it's just as hard as ever to find, and e.g. Google prioritizes large (normal) results over small (weird) so the normal tools are unlikely to find them without effort.
In the Good Old Days, you were weird simply by being on the internet, so as an internet user you found it a bit more easily. That's unlikely to return. Improvise, adapt, be weird.
Point well made, however I'd like to consider shedding some light on "The problem is with you and not the internet. " -
For many people "the internet" is fbook. To some the net is what google says it is.
With F and B decided that some things should not exist at all, and other things should be downranked to basically never be seen, while promoting certain sets of sites -
I think the problem is more than the individual not really looking. It's more of an education problem where people don't understand the amount of censorship and how the down ranking and upranking is actually affecting the way most are using 'the internet' - which of course has the network effects of people only sharing what they (have been allowed to) see (and allowed to share) - sadly.
The time of web rings, less spam and less censorship made it more fun finding random things imho.
Times when tumblrs and torrents and geocities and others showed up in search results, along with click at the bottom to do a similar search with alta vista, lycos, etc..
was in some ways less weird, but more fun to surf and discover. at least for me.
Titled: How sex censorship killed the internet we love
I enjoyed here headings including:
When was the last time the internet made you feel good?
When was the last time the internet gave you hope?
When was the last time you felt free on the internet?
When was the last time you thought of the internet as a weird and wonderful place?
Glad to see others thinking of these issues. I worry that most people who connect online don't even realize the homogenized over pasteurized censored endless scroll publication is hiding stuff that multiple groups don't want to show - making so much basically not exist.
I think you're right. Two main reasons: the number of sites grew exponentially, and the ratio of "fun/weird" people seems higher to anyone that has been on the Internet long enough.
Why is that? Basically: because not everyone had access. So if you were there, you belonged to some sort of minority (privileged artsy, IT student, etc).
The Internet nowadays is a commonplace thing. Billions more are online. It's not surprising that the stuff you used to trip over everywhere is now not as prominent - that just reflects the ratio of like-minded individuals in the real world better.
But that doesn't mean weird/funny doesn't exist anymore. It just means that - just like in the real world - you'll need to know where to go to find it.
I think the reason is simple. Previously, the internet didn't have a real purpose, so everyone on it was mostly for the weird/fun stuff. Nowadays, as mentioned in the blog, it also has legitimate serious uses, so by definition the ratio of weird to serious is lower.
But I think expecting the internet to only be one way is not only naive but also unrealistic. You may enjoy it being that way, but not everyone does, and the internet is for everyone. There's something for anyone, you just need to find your corner of the web.
Agreed. The Internet is just as fun and weird as it always was, if not more so.
However, some of that weirdness has moved a level of abstraction "up" into mass platforms like YouTube, Reddit or Minecraft which some people might accuse of not being that under the radar.. yet the oddest subcommunities exist on such sites that few people are aware of. Amusingly, there are actually subreddits dedicated to unearthing such things on other sites, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube/ :-)
True. But another issue I feel with today's internet and apps is that it has lower rate of serendipity
Most of our experience is controlled by an all-knowing black-box algorithms. The game is to converge all experience into a small set of patterns
An Example - youtube
Earlier I could spend hours on youtube and discover everything from new music to weird funny videos.
Today you literally get boxed into a list comprising of your history and recommendations that have hardly 1 degree of separation from your history
Every ML recommender driven website should have a control so you can adjust Straight <> Weird. People would love cranking the weirdness up. Instant dopamine hit (unpredictable reward function) and it would bust them out of their filter bubbles.
I would pitch in https://lainchan.org/ and https://arisuchan.jp/ which are nice little tech image boards. They are that lovely blend of out there and slightly off kilter that I remember from the image boards of old.
I would not merely because the denizens of those kinds of boards are in some state of obnoxious wallowing in self-pity (not clinical depression outside of the actual one or two posters who actually might have it), unless you consider that "off kilter". Reading people incessantly moan about the "good ol' days" of everything is negative content. The discussion is all fueled by that wallowing and none of it is constructive or interesting.
I second this, these are some of my favorite places to go on the internet today. They are a bit slow in terms of posting speed but I like the slowness.
There’s a footnote giving context to the erratic design:
> This website is a wiki. All School of Art grad students, faculty, staff, and alums have the ability to change most of this site’s content (with some exceptions); and to add new content and pages.
The author seems to have totally missed Tumblr which allows for editing of theme htmls and is easy to share which fosters and exploring creative community.
Kids these days have significantly stronger design aesthetic and coding ability so it's less haphazard; though it still has a very personal style.
I completely concur. Some of the weird stuff I have stumbled upon in my internet explorations have defied description; many of those places have evaporated into the ether since then. I think when that happens, humanity has lost a bit of itself.
Demoscene is totally alive and kicking, but I don't think it has the same following as during the PC / Amiga era. Many of the old demogroups are defunct (obviously!), but not many new ones have replaced them.
There are still many jaw dropping demos and I recommend that people check them out and give some appreciation and respect to those absolutely l33t guyz
The feeds of the internet, Facebook, Twitter and such don't tend to be weird because of course they are selective, by upvotes, follows and friendships, and reach a normalcy between the influences. So it won't be fed to you unless you have weird friends.
So, you need to search for it. Be active about your intetests and seek them out.
I dunno, there's plenty of twitter that is just plain weird. Full of bizarre dadaist humor and all sorts of super referential jokes that require like a bibliography unless you are up to speed in the relevant sub-communities where the original jokes circulated.
I think the OP doesn't think the Internet is fun and weird anymore because he's looking at it in relative terms, whereas you're looking at it in absolute terms (so both of you are probably right). It is true that increasingly more and more of the time one spends on the Internet is spent on a few key websites, but it is also true that the number of weird places one can check out on the Internet is much higher now than in the past. If you're looking for these weird pockets of the Internet, a good place to start is this collection: https://find.xyz/map/weird-corners-of-the-internet
Agreed - I appreciate the sheer variance in comment quality and the threads are easy to consume. To take something like /ck/ (cooking), you have a mix of some generally good advice, along with a fair amount of madness and absurdity. The mix works for me. I am glad they split off the "work-safe" boards to 4channel.
But that stuff isn't mainstream. SO is but not answers like that.
All this fun and weird stuff lives on separate disconnected islands from a practical point of view. Maybe it really has to do with coding becoming more elite - although by all rational means it got easier. On the other hand hardly anyone would dare to upload static html websites anymore without non-trivial css/js. That's a shame.
Maybe this also has to do with the general obsession for super clean and lean code. This design has to be like that as well, same goes for the whole gist of the endeavor.
FWIW shitty forums always have been there, but there used to be a lot actually useful forums. Now those have been eaten up by streamlined and polished high quality web or native apps.
There is probably even more weird stuff than ever however search engines are not the neutral tool they used to be, there is quite a lot of censorship at the search level. But this could present a great business opportunity.
I remember seeing a piece of code on dwitter where someone was trying to see if they can inject any code in the page. And it was working. So yeah, I'd very much rather avoid that website. Trying to allow users to put their own code on a page someone else is seeing is perfectly ripe for exploitation. Sure, it might be fun initially, for most people, but not anymore when someone uses that power to harm your website and other users.
And I agree you could work hard to try and somehow verify their code, but I doubt it's possible to let them do something useful and at the same time prevent any possible attack.
I went to visit dtwitter and first comment seen was ‘Yeah fuck off u goddam pollack piece of trash’. That is not the fun internet I am looking for, where ‘anonymous’ 12 year old write comments of this kind. What is good in FB which I do not use is that thay required real names so you would not hide behind a nick name to write comments like the one i pasted above.
Well, if the comment section (powered by facebook) on a number of national newspapers can be a sample, having real names associated with a comment doesn't do a lot to prevent nasty comments.
But few people know about any of that stuff. There are new subcultures on Mastodon/Pleroma, tons of small self hosted projects people are now trying out .. sure .. but the average user isn't going to find any of that.
Where once we had Lycos, Hotbot, Dogpile, Excite, Yahoo, et. al., we have a fraction of the various search engines today and most people just know and use the big-G.
Reddit use to have all sorts of communities. Then they started banning everything, a CEO edited comments and didn't step down and now it's all 'safe' and single opinionated (Even /r/unpopularopinions went away).
This is a cute project and I hope it's self-hostable, because I might give it a shot. So far it doesn't seem like there's any code released.
I think the future of the Internet needs to be distributed. We need more things like Sandstorm, PeerTube, Pixelfed; thinks that make it easier for people to pay to host their own content and have control over it.
Jarred was probably young when the internet was first taking shape, and every generation shares the feeling that things were better in their youth (aka the Golden Age Fallacy).
The internet was a lot smaller and inhabited by curious nerds - to find similar fun and weirdness, just find a community today that shares those properties. Packet radio, infosec, crypto, gaming, music production, etc. - there's plenty of weird and fun to be found if you look for it.
...and sometimes, things really were better, too. Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
This does not mean that there aren't wonderful things available in today's web environment, too. There is no one to blame other than the natural evolution of a system. But something was lost, and it is ok to miss it.
>Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
Is that a regression, though? I mean the state pre-ES was basically that the unwashed masses weren't able to use a special service for their more-refined betters.
To me, it's essentially the difference between a country club and a public park. Certainly, the country club is better maintained and more pleasant for its members than a public park. But there's, at minimum, a strong case to be made that a park that all may use is a greater social good than a country club limited to a few.
But 'Eternal September' describes what happens to a particular platform, as something moves from niche to mainstream. There are new niche things that take their place, but people are often at a point in their lives where they aren't seeking out the new niche stuff anymore.
> Regressions happen, and the Eternal September is real.
Now that UUCP time has come and gone, I wonder if Usenet might have returned to its once former glory. It would be a really good place for technical conversation.
A lot of online communities today are unbearable tho as everything's become so politicised. It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention. It was probably something that also happened before that but it somehow became really prevalent, at least. And often that took the fun out of it. I kind of think fondly of those times. Now of course this is just anecdotal, but that's what I've experienced in most communities I used to frequent and perhaps lots of other people here did too.
In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic and it's very rare to see people intentionally driving it into the ground, although in contrast to something like a Facebook group it's a lot less personal.
I distinctly remember a discussion about Something Awful's slogan ("the internet makes you stupid") and how it was actually a keen observation about the internet. Pre-internet you would have people with really bad ideas. These people were so obvious to any normal person that bad thinkers generally shut up because sharing their bad ideas meant being socially ostracized or at least getting shunned.
But then you add the internet, and all these radically bad thinkers find each other and their ideas almost seem normal amongst their type. They not only normalize bad thinking, but they also push for even more radically bad thinking in an effort to out-do each other. End result, you end up with a vociferous contingent of town idiots who don't realize they are town idiots because they only listen to fellow town idiots. Add advertising companies who function on a metrics-first approach, and those town idiots dictate how companies act.
As someone who has been interacting online since FidoNet was a thing, I have to say ... this is a problem as old as humans. There were plenty of politicized discussions back then, plenty of contentious people, plenty of trolls. In some ways the vibe was different, but really, it wasn't better. Or worse, to be honest.
>It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention.
It was actually in September 2013 when it started ... or was it September 1993 ...? Uh, oh, how time flies, never mind.
I remember it always being political. Back in 2002 most of the posts in the Command and Conquer Generals forums where various views on if Bush should invade Iraq or not. That community died the day EA banned political discussions.
> In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic
I've been a member here since 2008, 10 odd years! It has been quite consistent, and an almost daily visit for me since joining. I don't know how they do it but I am glad that they do.
>A lot of online communities today are unbearable tho as everything's become so politicised. It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it for attention
Can you help me understand your argument by giving examples of what this means? What is "politicising" and what communities have you seened ruined by "some minority of users politicising it for attention?"
>without some minority of users politicising it for attention
What does "politicising" mean, and how do you know their motives? If you mean what I think you mean, i.e. women for example standing up for their right to be included in historically male-led organizations (say, a SDR club), I must admit skepticism - perhaps what you are witnessing isn't "doing something for attention," but instead "demanding to be treated as an equal?"
This is the most obvious Golden Age Fallacy I saw in Jarred's text:
> MySpace showed the world that if you make powerful and complicated tools (like coding) accessible to anyone, people are smart enough to figure out how to use them.
My own experience with MySpace was that every page I landed on looked like a dumpster fire. I can't recall a single person who exhibited competence in using the tools MySpace gave you. Everything was always poor contrast with a cockeyed layout.
That's their whole point - each page was individualistic, people were trying crazy things and showcasing their own personal style. The one thing that it wasn't was bland.
> My own experience with MySpace was that every page I landed on looked like a dumpster fire.
Reading this, I finally get what people mean when they say "But Snapchat is supposed to have an unintuitive UI".
I was big into editing Myspace HTML back in the day. There were simply so many possibilities. The design was an extension of your style, howrver crude and unfinished it might have been.
I think, weirdly, I have a harder time finding communities around that sort of thing now. I mostly read HN. Where would I go to find something like HN for, say, sustainable living? woodworking? cycling infrastructure? A lot of it is, if nothing else, subsumed in to a Facebook group, or a slack group, etc.
The best I've found is small subreddits. Which is not ideal, because discovery is a giant PITA. Much like the split between /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts (the /trees subreddit was first founded by people who were talking about weed, and people who wanted to talk about actual trees were a little nonplussed at the whole thing, thus creating /marijuanaenthusiasts and using it for tree-talk) most of the better communities are using a name that is not immediately obvious, so that they aren't oversaturated from the get-go.
> just find a community today that shares those properties
How? I can't even search for shit anymore without being drowned in results that have nothing to do with what I searched for, but are kinda-sorta similar and get visited a lot more often.
- no regulations (yet)
- lots of unknowns
- very few hidden motives
That said, the duration of this state is probably quantifiable. Everything has these traits at first, until human stay for a while, then organization naturally takes place, taking the virginial beauty off at the same time.
I've read that some antique cultures believed in burning things to the ground. I wonder if that's not a useful thing.
I think this is closer to what I think has happened. The internet is used by such a large percentage of the population that "weird" sites now are going to be smaller in relation to sites that appeal to "the masses." The ratio of "weirdos to non-weirdos" on the internet today is significantly smaller than the mid 90s. "The masses" were very underrepresented online back then. :)
There's been a real qualitative change too. It was October 27th, 1994, and it was Wired's fault. The same year those bottom feeding lawyers decided to bombard Usenet with their green card spam. The first banner advertiser was AT&T:
The Internet was better because it was not yet another way to spoonfeed culture to a complacent populace. The Internet was for interested people, now it's for everyone. It is not better now. I mean sure the video is HD but the content is usually garbage.
Maybe the internet was just new. And then it got old. Then your mom started using it. The first album is always the best. By the fifth album the band just sucks.
That Glitch is not as popular as My Space was tells something about what people that use internet want; and shows that the internet is still fun and weird for people that like fun and weird.
Glitch sounds amazing, and way better than the tools that existed back then.
But back then, Geocities was popular and loads of people had heard of it. I have never heard of Glitch. It seems like there's become a re-division between "people who like to tinker" and "literally everyone else". On the one hand that's great but it kind of feels like everything is AOL again now.
The last vestige of fun, weird and popular is probably Tumblr, which everyone agrees has the absolute worst user interface. But you can theme your Tumblr page to your absolute heart's desire.
The tinkerers were a larger proportion of web users in the 90's and hence had more visibility with their larger share of available content. Now they're drowned by the sea of services for norms to consume.
> [this] shows that the internet is still fun and weird for people that like fun and weird
Does it, though? Google used to give search results, now it gives Google Search Results™ and most navigation is dictated by what appears in social media feeds. The behemoths are able to enforce a sense of legitimacy in their own products while marginalizing any threats to their dominance. If they really can't stop a rising star that is pulling away users by squashing or copying them then it is no issue to throw some money at the problem and buy them out.
But Glitch isn't a way for a normal person to express themselves, is it? Sure, you can write code which can be viewed by everyone, but you can do the same with github, Glitch is mostly only used by programmers, and you can't express yourself through code like you can express yourself through styling your own social media profile.
They put a really strong emphasis on lowering the barrier to entry. While you're right that it still requires you to write code, so did the MySpace weirdness of olde. I think the difference is it allowed you to only write the code, and they would handle the rest.
Normal people already express themselves on mainstream social media, about normal things. Normal people aren't the ones wishing the web was weird and quirky again, and they couldn't care less that Facebook or Twitter doesn't let them customize their CSS.
Honestly, I can't fathom how you could make such a statement. Granted, most people can't express themselves through code - but that doesn't mean in general you can't.
Sites like Glitch assume that you already have a good grasp of tech/software engineering.
The big appeal of the early internet was that anyone could make something neat with simple HTML shenanigans, and learn to code by hacking the HTML templates to their needs. Many coders got their start by hacking Neopets storefronts. (there were actual coding puzzles on Neopets too for their events!)
I think it is much easier for a non-technical person to put up a website today than in the 90s. Today you need absolutely zero coding knowledge, not even HTML.
Well, we've only been at this for a little while, and we don't even have a way to follow other people or invite your friends yet. :) Rest assured, we're planning to keep going. And probably with fewer Tila Tequilas, of either the MySpace or neo-nazi variety.
I submit that the reason the internet is boring is that these causes are all obvious to us, and this comment won't get upvoted:
1) apps created niche proprietary software everywhere that used to be free and open media
2) the declarative, idempotent roots of the world wide web have been replaced by imperative, brittle Javascriptified spaghetti code
3) Javascript build systems have largely obfuscated any code that can be seen
4) Web 2.0 introduced private social networks in walled gardens that in many ways offer fewer privacy guarantees than before (due to the profit motive of exploiting user info)
5) Monopolies and duopolies now receive the lion's share of funding for research (which tends to aim for increasing profits and attracting eyeballs instead of fundamentally advancing the state of the art)
I'll stop there. It's hard to say how many of these are fundamental impasses to having an open internet again..
I was on the internet in the mid-90's (I was 15 in 95 which I think is the year I got on the net, I'd been on BBS's for about 5-6 years before that) and it did used to be much more weird as a percentage of sites than now (though the number of sites was tiny).
As the grownups came along and commercialised everything a lot of that went away and back then if you wanted to say something online you had to learn HTML and what FTP was as a minimum.
So things were weird because quite a few early adopters were not techies by nature.
It's different now.
It's one of the reasons I don't use facebook, instagram, snap etc, they just don't stick for me.
I do use twitter but that is because it's a nice way to follow projects and programmers I admire so it has some utility to me.
I was an early user of reddit but since the redesign (on the back of cleaning up the community) the trend towards just another social network (EDIT: speaking of which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571) is pretty clear at this point, it's utility is going down as is the quality of the average posts in the subreddit's I cared about.
HN has been fairly consistent since I join over the last 5 years, a testament to the effectiveness of decent moderation.
It used to be I checked HN after reddit but that switched over the last year or two.
I have been doing internet things since the early 2000s. I learned HTML and FTP and many other technologies back then precisely to say something online. I disagree that things are less weird now.
Things are more weird. Where there was one weird place, there are now thousands. Even if only 1% of today’s sites are “weird” that’s bigger than all of the internet of 1995 combined. Rising tide lifts all ships.
Want to talk on a BBS? Head on over to SDF. They got you covered. IRC is still alive and kicking, though now with far greater capabilities. GitHub. Think about what people used to have before GitHub. I uploaded things to SourceForge back when it was one of the few choices. Oof. Think about the kind of weird shit you can find on GitHub/GitLab/etc. today.
The thing is that the apparent problem is that non-nerds are now allowed online. The horror. I have found plenty of strange, weird, niche, 1337, whatever communities now and they are made better by the fact that you don’t always have to have a magnetized needle and a steady hand to use them. All you gotta do to find them is to look just beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Hell, some subreddits are microcosms onto themselves.
But this nostalgia for the “good old days” when you couldn’t have a web page in Russian and Korean at the same time is just that, nostalgia. What has actually been lost that we used to have but don’t today?
Also a testament to the sustainability of usefulness of having a business model that isn't directly about monetization, which means it's probably really hard to copy.
HN is a PR project for an accelerator/venture capital firm. Since its purpose is to make ycombinator look awesome and generate leads for them (providing indirect monetary value), we all get a fun place to hang out and discuss stuff so they can project that image, but I have no doubt that without that fairly unique situation it would quickly devolve into some variation of what we commonly see with social networks that have to find a way to pay for the services they provide.
> I was on the internet in the mid-90's (I was 15 in 95 which I think is the year I got on the net, I'd been on BBS's for about 5-6 years before that) and it did used to be much more weird as a percentage of sites than now (though the number of sites was tiny).
I agree with your basic observation but I have a slightly different response:
Most people aren't all that fun or weird, at least not in a way which translates to text or graphical arts or music or anything else you can transmit over the Internet. Most people are the majority, and you'll never find the majority you're currently steeped in to be especially fun or weird. (Example: A great way to make a living as a comedian is to rephrase normality to make people see it as fun and weird. Observational comedy takes a keen eye for the obvious.)
During that same period, we were building up the concept of UX and one of the things drilled into people's heads was that 9 times out of 10 (at least), what you are doing is not so unique that you deserve to use a new UI metaphor to present it.
When in doubt, use the same mechanisms to accomplish things that everybody else uses.
That sort of peer pressure is intended to reduce the variability between web sites. I think for better or worse we are seeing the dividends of that effort.
Interesting wording, that reddit "cleaned up the community", and that this caused a decline in the quality of content. I had this worry at the time, and was, under doubt, opposing this decision. Could you say a few words about what specifically changed after this?
I don't personally agree, as far as I know, with any of the communities that were banned, apart from the communities for buying and selling stuff, which no one should really have a problem with. And some of the communities that were banned, I vehemently disagree with, and would probably strongly oppose if they formed a political platform. The "involuntary porn" subreddits were probably breaking the law and in some cases causing great emotional distress. This latter case I think clearly crosses the line, but there were plenty that were in a gray area at worst.
There's something to having free speech readily available for criticism and scrutiny that feels very valuable. These people are around whether you want them to or not, and there's value in being able to scrutinize their views. Also, I feel there's a chilling effect when you've seen examples that saying certain things leads to explulsion.
I wonder if there is a way to combine the weird fun that was geocities/tripod/etc with the connections of a social network and modern ease of updating. Like how you use twitter, but for following webpages about butterflies or a shrine to the 6502 processor.
I think a bigger reason than any of those is that the web became a corporate advertising tool, run by bean counters and marketing people who don't like "weird" content because it may scare some people away. Just like TV, web content now targets the lowest common denominator and anything confrontational or "weird" gets put on niche sites or self hosting out of the limelight.
I think there are still a ton of "fun and weird" sites out there, they're just not on highly promoted, corporate backed platforms. And they're now a much smaller percentage of the entire web.
Actually, they're not that much scared that weird content will scare people off, they just don't like weird content exactly because it's weird and therefore unpredictable and hard to put into Excel planning charts.
This is an amusing comment. You're trying to attribute social problems to underlying technological "problems". This is something an engineer would try to do, but I think the social problems of the internet have nothing to do with what framework a website was written in or whether or not software is proprietary.
I think this has made a huge difference, not so much if it is open source our not but how much things have become locked down. Before if you made a cool program you could hand it out to your friends on a usb stick and run it. These days you have to pay $100 to apple and go through a long approval process before you get listed on the app store. Its the same with all the platforms people use now. They have become more and more locked down pushing the regular user in to simply consuming content and only the corporations with large dev teams are able to make anything.
I came here to say the same thing. This reads like a list of technical issues that bother HN users the most. As such it's understandably a very popular comment with the HN crowd, but it has almost nothing to do with why we rarely encounter fun/weird things on the internet.
I don’t think it’s how we build websites per se, I think it has to do with how just a few websites have made themselves so phenomenally useful that they’ve eliminated the need for what I’ll call the “discoverabilty infrastructure” we used to have.
The first is Google. Google was such a phenomenally good search engine that you rarely needed to “surf” the web to accomplish a task. You could search “order a hand powered woodworking drill” and likely be taken to a page that let you do just that. Much of the discoverability of “fun, weird” stuff came from the “surfing” aspect of the web, Google vastly reduced that.
The second is Wikipedia (and the Wikia networks). Much of the wonderful weirdness of the early web was passionate amateurs compiling information, wrapped in their own design aesthetic (or lack thirst of.). Wikipedia as amazing and wonderful as it is, gets rid of the need to find these sites to answer a question about the world (again, reducing surfing behavior, at least outside of Wikipedia.)
The last is Facebook. So much of geo cities and the early web was the “personal website”- a Sort of combination of Facebook profile, blog, and experiment in web art. These sometimes grew into impressive little gems of content, but mostly they were terrible quips and “under construction” banners. Then came the Friendster->MySpace-> Facebook and LinkedIn transition, and the need for these personal sites dropped away. They still exist, but the interaction patterns for using fbook and LinkedIn are so much easier.
I feel like YouTube still has the early web experience to it. Much of the content remains the domain of passionate amateurs and the “up next” algorithm regularly takes me in serendipitous locations (and sometimes down some darker paths).
The fun and weird communities now seem like “islands in the net” if you will, they are there and probably larger than ever, but much harder to get to (or at least stumble upon), due to tooling that allows use to accomplish tasks without detours.
Much of the discoverability of “fun, weird” stuff came from the “surfing” aspect of the web, Google vastly reduced that.
One must not forget that Google is actively optimising search results away from the "weird stuff" and blocking users that try to dig deeper into the results to find it, insulting them with the accusation that they're a bot (a bit ironic, considering that if you behave "like the billion other mindless drones" you don't get singled out...) and presenting them with endless CAPTCHAs.
On the other hand, Bing still feels a bit like the "old school" search engines, and I've had better success finding the rare and niche "weird stuff" with it; apparently you can even find stuff horribly beyond legality, which is not surprising given how "dumb" it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18876361
I'd say the "fun and weird" Internet is definitely still alive; but the efforts of search engines to "clean up" their results have basically resulted in censorship and hiding of the less popular parts.
I think the de-anonymization of online users is another shift that (among many other things) caused the Internet to be less fun and weird.
You can see a very different tone in YouTube video comments, for example, before they switched to using real names.
Now, people are afraid to risk damaging their own personal reputation by posting "weird" things (I don't mean extremely weird either -- people are extremely self-conscious in general of saying things that MIGHT be considered weird in front of others, so they don't be themselves as much as they did when they were anonymous). And often, "fun" is synonymous with "weird".
It's not ALL bad -- people also say FAR less offensive things to each other when their real names are attached (but it still happens), but if you're looking for reasons for the shift, user de-anonymization is definitely one of them.
Show me a declarative, idempotent API that will render MAME games and run old OSes inside a browser window.
Even show me a declarative, idempotent API that can generate an arbitrarily long scroll of user-generated content.
If your answer is that users shouldn't expect to be able to do these things, then you have aliased the word "web" to mean something that 99% of web users will not recognize.
You bring up a good point, and I've had similar conversations with my friend who is an avid Unity developer, which has a mostly imperative programming (IP) runtime with a declarative GUI.
Since functional programming (FP) and declarative programming (DP) have many similarities, the same issue of hardness (for lack of a better term) exists in languages like Elixer/Clojure/Julia/Haskell/Scala/F# etc etc.
This all comes down to one of the most poorly understood concepts in FP, the monad:
Honestly, I'm still not sure I understand internally how monads work, or if there are related terms for how I think of them. But monads (and related devices) are a way to deal with imperative logic and side effects when pure FP can't.
Imagine you're writing Tetris in a spreadsheet. It's easy to visualize how you might enter a piece's (x,y) coordinate in 2 cells and then pipe that through a series of cells containing logic that examines the blocks and outputs the next (x,y) coordinate for the following main loop.
But the actual main loop (that grabs input events) is very hard to visualize as a spreadsheet. This "glue" with the imperative stuff is where the monad comes in. Another way to think of it is, how to represent exceptions in a spreadsheet or a pure functional implementation of a promise chain (you can't without monads).
To write Tetris in HTML/CSS with no Javascript, we'd probably have to write a ton of CSS rules to show/hide/move DOM elements based on the state. That's an intractable problem for humans, so we'd probably compile the CSS from another language, which defeats the whole purpose. Maybe someone has tried it, I can't tell:
But if we had something like a CSS monad, then we could write rules that are based on dynamic state from other rules. Writing this all out now, something like this might be useful, if anyone knows of such a thing.
Anyway, from what I understand, languages like Clojurescript get around this by suspending execution via a monad and then entering again with new input. Here is an almost purely functional Tetris clone written in Clojurescript:
I know that code looks a little strange. But conceptually it's orders of magnitude simpler than that equivalent imperative code. Note that this is different from easy:
TL;DR; you bring up a really good point. FP and DP probably shouldn't be considered proven techniques until they can be used in the same problem domains as IP.
>Monopolies and duopolies now receive the lion's share of funding for research
This for me is especially soul-crushing. Some of the biggest minds of our time are working, devoting their talents and their ful attention, to the noble goal of... making us click more ads.
These people could be trying to research diseases, to come up with solutions for the big problems that affect us -- in short, working to to improve our lives. Instead, we reward those that make our lives even more miserable/erode democracy/help concentrate power even more. In our economic system, those are the ones that get rewarded.
I'd agree with #1 and #4, combined— "regular" people are very much siloed into apps that narrow the kind of media that get to them. Sure, the videos and photos are better than before, but that's just two types of content.
In my mind, weird/interesting internet died with the phrase "link in bio."
MySpace was a centralized for-profit site that owned your data, no different than any other, they just happened to allow more advanced design editing than similar sites today (which we look back on nostalgically, but I promise you they were ugly and crappy and fb an amazing breath of fresh air at the time). They do not, however, represent any sort of utopian free internet.
The problem is our wants have become too complex. A blog site that used to be simple self-hosted markup, now requires commenting, moderation, voting, recommendations, authentication, backup, performance, media, analytics, seo, and more. How much coding skill can we expect from people? And even if they had it, should everyone use their time re-implementing or deploying and maintaining tens of individual platforms to participate on the web? There doesn't seem to be a feasible way but to centralize. And now you need to monetize and people have shown they are not willing to pay money, leaving the only other possibility we know: monetizing the data - which, of course, only encourages even more centralization and data capture.
None of this is new, but these are the fundamental natural forces that need to be addressed.
This is 100% correct. The only thing I can add is that the profit seeking and consolidation is now hurting the remaining enclaves of weird fun on the Internet. For instance, many of niche subcultures that once thrived on Geocities still thrive on Tumblr, but the leadership of Tumblr is not happy about this fact.
When Marissa Mayer was in control of Yahoo (which included Tumblr) she used to brag about how she was using a "data driven" approach to maximize the revenue from Yahoo. This seems to have been abysmal for the actual users. Engagement on Tumblr stagnated, then declined. The great business guru Peter Drucker has pointed out that entrepreneurs often ruin their own products because they are uncomfortable with the type of success they end up with. Marissa Mayer would be an example of this. She had one of the great gems of the Internet, but she was uncomfortable with how weird it was. And it is difficult for leadership to really lead when the leadership is uncomfortable with the product they have.
I tried to capture how destructive her rhetoric about "data driven decision making" can be when I wrote the essay "When companies make a fetish of being data driven they reward a passive aggressive style":
"I’m especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on “data”. I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I’ve worked at that supposedly valued “data” in meetings actually valued something darker. The use of “data” in meetings tends to be a passive aggressive negotiating tactic for a group of people who for cultural or emotional reasons don’t think it is reasonable to express strong disagreement or actual anger. Instead of expressing strong emotion, people are taught to quote data — they then cherry pick whatever statistics back up their beliefs."
As far as I know, there has never been a company that said “We want the worst informed people to make the decisions” so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn’t make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be “data driven” they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics.
Trust your instincts. Over the years, we often condense many years of learning to a few simple rules. If you asked me from what peer-reviewed study I learned to value minimalist design, I would not be able to answer you — it comes from dozens of books, hundreds of articles, thousands of conversations, and countless observations, and if the accumulated wisdom of my years of experience is of no value to you, then why did you hire me?
Obviously I am not advocating that meetings should be abusive. No one should be allowed to talk over another person, as that would be disrespectful, but when one has a chance to speak, often the most effective kind of communication is one where people show how strongly they feel about an issue. If you are an experienced professional, then presumably you’ve been hired because the company wants to know the lessons you’ve learned over the years. If your instincts tell you that a given policy will be a disaster, don’t let anyone silence you with their demands for “data.” Speak the truth that you know."
This is completely on point ^. I remember those times, and I also long for a weirder, more creative and more frontier-like internet! The combination of a strong reaction to Flash, which had begun to dominate the web around 2001, and the well-intended, but simultaneous push for web standards created an insurmountable course over-correction. Then the iPhone's non-support for Flash in 2007 was the final nail in the coffin. The web was never the same. We got standards (yay), but we made it unfashionable to be really CREATIVE with code. It was no longer cool to do something totally different and unique with code. There was no longer any point in putting information on the web if it wasn't cross-browser, cross-device, and future-proof. While standards have been a boon to our profession, they completely zapped the old internet. I am hopeful the pendulum will swing the other way.
To take a simple example, HTML was originally a pure markup language, so if you wanted to make text bold you <b>would do it like this</b>; simple, declaritive
But then it was decided that there was no semantic purpose to the <b> tag, <span style="font-weight:bold">so it became this</span>.
Now, with the ubiquity of js, it's more like
<span id="bold-text">this</span> (along with something like
getElementById("bold-text").setAttribute("style", "font-weight:bold") in the background).
It should be pointed out that things come full-circle: frameworks like Bootstrap define the <strong> tag which, via similar JS to above, all-but-duplicate the functionality of the original <b> tag. I think the OP's point though is that you have to add a JS framework to do this.
state machine/brittle long running process/fear of manual retry->idempotent request/response
Always, always, always work towards the rightmost side if you want the least side effects and highest reliability (critical for a distributed system built on unreliable parts!)
I'd like to say that declarative idempotency was an immediately obvious thing to the architects of the www, but what really happened is more like Darwinian evolution where each solution's fitness was measured by reliability. Declarative idempotency was also cheaper because requests/responses could be cached and scaled.
If we flip it around for a moment, imagine a web without these things. Every site would have a complex tangle of brittle code to do even the most trivial operations, and it wouldn't be able to pass data on to other sites (it would be an app). Without idempotency, users would have to be really careful to only click the send button once when they were transferring money (thankfully this hasn't happened much).
The one thing that I wish the web had though was a layer to make unreliable communication reliable. It would look something like a promise or future with no exceptional logic. That way we could think in terms of wiring up the inputs and outputs of many websites and then "load" it to execute the logic. Kind of like Ansible, where internally the logic is imperative but on the surface is declarative.
I'd also like to see declarative idempotence replace imperative code (especially object-oriented programming) at the developer level.
Incorrect. I was there the moment this flipped. It was actually with a bang, not a whimper.
The iPhone came out. Before the iPhone DSL was a thing, making big-ish pages was a thing.
Suddenly your pages had to be downloaded on a 2g connection. Eventually 3g, and 3g today is seen as insanity, but back then was the best we can get and still only few could get that.
We started to minify the hell out of our code. Every byte was critical. CDNs were used to speed every bit of our site up. Google came out with their research that you have ~150ms to serve content before it stops feeling instantaneous.
Boom.
Eventually tools came out to make all this so easy, why wouldn't you do it.
And thus here we are today.
I was using the internet when AltaVista was a thing. Searching was SLOW! If you wanted to find something online, grab a cup of tea, because its gonna be a while.
And ad companies like Google who have become so big that they can basically crush their competition. If you said 10 years ago that the most popular web browser right now is made by an ad company, people would have thought you're nuts but here we are. They basically control the very code that fetch and render those ads right at the end-user level.
Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
This is just a sample of the problems.
You have to sandbox this stuff, and the crazier the line you try to draw with the sandbox around what is safe to do, the harder it is to secure.
That's only half the answer. The real answer is that no one wants to spend the time to offer those features securely.
It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
Look what we did on reddit -- we allowed users to make almost any CSS they want, and look at the beautiful creations that have come from that (like all the sports reddits). It was a lot of work figuring out how to make it safe, but we did it.
And now they're putting in a ton of effort to make it work on mobile too. Because reddit still values user creativity.
It's totally possible to allow all that creativity, it just takes time and consideration to make it safe.
> Look what we did on reddit -- we allowed users to make almost any CSS they want, and look at the beautiful creations that have come from that (like all the sports reddits).
The main reason I have a reddit account is so I can turn off custom CSS for subreddits because otherwise it's almost as garish as MySpace. When they finally eliminate the "old" reddit, I'm gone (unless they hire a competent UX person before then).
> That's only half the answer. The real answer is that no one wants to spend the time to offer those features securely.
>It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
I work in an online payment company. Custom CSS is one of the features we hate the most implementing. It is very difficult to get it right and the cost of maintenance is quite high.
I actually agree with you, but on topic, I can't help but think the original author does not consider reddit "fun and weird", or the objection being made would make little sense.
Most of these things I think are pretty easy to mitigate.
>Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Make each user have their own custom virtual host (yourname.example.com).
>Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Arbitrary does not mean you can't sanitize it. You can specifically restrict javascript for example.
>Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
You don't necessarily need more than one person doing it on a page. Each person can have their own page.
>Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
You could say the same thing about Facebook. We have the safe harbor act and we have the ability to monitor these systems for misuse.
I never claimed the problems were hard to solve. (It's probably harder than you think, but there's off-the-shelf solutions for them now, as long as you've got a developer smart enough to reach for them, or one skilled and experienced enough to know how to build them in a pinch.)
But by the time you've solved them all, you're pretty much back to where Reddit, HN, Facebook, etc. are. I assume the author does not consider those "fun and weird".
I mean, I remember when Slashdot was having trouble with user abuse of <pre> tags. A simple <pre> tag of all things! When you scale up, you have to close all the little holes, and what's left is not "fun and weird".
You can have fun and weird. It's out there, if you look, and worst case, you can always deploy your own site and do anything you want. But you can't have fun and weird at scale.
Then you strip out interactivity. Which is a pretty huge component of making the internet interesting and weird.
For its many sins, Flash was actually a pretty great sandbox for people to play with that way (as long as it didn't have one of its many security issues at the time)
The other problem that bedeviled sites that allowed arbitrary HTML back in the day was crude phishing attempts: convert your user profile into a fake login page with CSS and HTML. Blocking this entirely is probably impossible. I suppose some machine learning could be used to detect pages styled as phishing attempts.
There were also all sorts of ways to sneak JavaScript back in. I remember embedding a javascript: protocol link inside a Flash applet would do it (flash eventually blocked that though).
Is it technically possible to completely strip out javascript but still retain full html + css compatibility? I had the impression that somebody always finds a way to outsmart any filter using UTF arcanes or some other method.
Man, this really resonates with me. I learned how to program because I wanted a website for my Halo 2 team back in late HS early college. I started with a MySpace and learned some basic HTML and CSS (a minute after I learned that making a website was not just dragging things around in MS office and saving the file as "www.my-cool-website.com"). It was ugly and it was hard. Then a friend told me he had some hosting we could use and I learned to hack together some PHP in notepad.exe with just enough MySQL to add and remove things. I used for loops and that was it. No functions or classes. One big file, similar things were copied and pasted all over. No version control, just a handful of different copies of the PHP file on my computer, and deploying was uploading via FTP. I got a bootleg version of photoshop and learned how to make fancy web 2.0 graphics, and I installed PHPBB and integrated it into our site. The forum was actually pretty successful for a hot minute (a hundred or so active users) and I learned a little bit about community management.
I do disagree that "coding is now a privilege" or at least that it's more a privilege because of the demise of MySpace. It's easier than ever to learn how to program; it just takes time and motivation. The only thing that's harder is figuring out which technologies you actually need to learn to realize your vision (because there are so many more ways of doing things than there were in 2006); however, people are also generally nicer now than in 2006 (when I would ask people for help, they often would expect me to have read certain textbooks or know C before they would send me the link on standing up a LAMP stack). The toxic bits of StackOverflow culture were just normal--if you didn't already know the answer, you didn't deserve to know it.
Anyway, that's my 5 minute stream of recollection.
Yeah, I think the issue is there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit anymore. No one hacks together some PHP scripts to create a community website anymore, they just make a Facebook group, or use Discord or whatever.
Agreed. I think it's a deficiency of imagination. If I had the time I'd reinvent wheels all day. I'd especially love to figure out how to make some of the cool open source cloud native projects feasible for use by some college kid who wants to run a distributed ecosystem on a cluster of old laptops and raspberry pis without 10 years of devops or sysadmin experience.
This is why the internet isn't fun. Because assholes write useless press releases for yet another product that's not new or interesting and disguise it as someone putting their thoughts out there.
I'd suggest that if you don't think the Internet is "fun" or "weird" you're just not looking hard enough.
I've been a regular net user since 1995 and there's every bit (in fact more) weird unusual content than there's ever been.
You want creativity, look at today's meme culture. Sure there's a lot of "hit or miss" content out there, but there's no shortage of weird.
Deviantart, tumblr, LNI on imgur, a huge section of subreddits and that's just the easily accessible stuff. If you like video content, tiktok and similar have no shortage of fairly odd stuff.
You can head off into far weirder territory than that with a little effort (*chans, or ToR based content)
Is it MySpace, I guess not, but there's nothing stopping anyone putting up flashy HTML content easily, Netlify or GH pages aren't that difficult to get started with.
Exactly, the web became less weird because it got bigger. Back then, the entire web consisted of early adopters, so obviously they were trying out whatever they could.
One “simply” needs to look for communities where this happens now. But of course, these days it's a pure game of chance and/or years-long riding on the edge to find oneself in such a community. Just like in any other saturated creative field.
Readit News
https://pouet.net is the unofficial home of the demoscene, even though it's much weirder than the demoscene itself.
https://dwitter.net needs no comment
Stack Overflow has answers like: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
Half of tumblr is totally out there.
I personally wouldn't call 4chan and its relatives fun, but they sure are weird.
There's dedicated, active, shitty phpbb forums for every single weird sexual fetish you can imagine.
And that's just the fun and weird patches of the internet that I happen to know about. There must be 3 orders of magnitude more. I'd wager that if you think the internet isn't fun and weird anymore, then you're just looking in the wrong places. The problem is with you and not the internet.
Nowadays heavily discouraged, and would probably be deleted as unconstructive; that one still exists because of historical significance/was grandfathered in.
The answers are ridiculing the OP for asking a totally reasonable question.
In the Good Old Days, you were weird simply by being on the internet, so as an internet user you found it a bit more easily. That's unlikely to return. Improvise, adapt, be weird.
For many people "the internet" is fbook. To some the net is what google says it is.
With F and B decided that some things should not exist at all, and other things should be downranked to basically never be seen, while promoting certain sets of sites -
I think the problem is more than the individual not really looking. It's more of an education problem where people don't understand the amount of censorship and how the down ranking and upranking is actually affecting the way most are using 'the internet' - which of course has the network effects of people only sharing what they (have been allowed to) see (and allowed to share) - sadly.
The time of web rings, less spam and less censorship made it more fun finding random things imho.
Times when tumblrs and torrents and geocities and others showed up in search results, along with click at the bottom to do a similar search with alta vista, lycos, etc..
was in some ways less weird, but more fun to surf and discover. at least for me.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/31/sex-censorship-killed-in...
Titled: How sex censorship killed the internet we love
I enjoyed here headings including: When was the last time the internet made you feel good? When was the last time the internet gave you hope? When was the last time you felt free on the internet? When was the last time you thought of the internet as a weird and wonderful place?
Glad to see others thinking of these issues. I worry that most people who connect online don't even realize the homogenized over pasteurized censored endless scroll publication is hiding stuff that multiple groups don't want to show - making so much basically not exist.
Why is that? Basically: because not everyone had access. So if you were there, you belonged to some sort of minority (privileged artsy, IT student, etc).
The Internet nowadays is a commonplace thing. Billions more are online. It's not surprising that the stuff you used to trip over everywhere is now not as prominent - that just reflects the ratio of like-minded individuals in the real world better.
But that doesn't mean weird/funny doesn't exist anymore. It just means that - just like in the real world - you'll need to know where to go to find it.
But I think expecting the internet to only be one way is not only naive but also unrealistic. You may enjoy it being that way, but not everyone does, and the internet is for everyone. There's something for anyone, you just need to find your corner of the web.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17690852
However, some of that weirdness has moved a level of abstraction "up" into mass platforms like YouTube, Reddit or Minecraft which some people might accuse of not being that under the radar.. yet the oddest subcommunities exist on such sites that few people are aware of. Amusingly, there are actually subreddits dedicated to unearthing such things on other sites, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube/ :-)
Most of our experience is controlled by an all-knowing black-box algorithms. The game is to converge all experience into a small set of patterns
An Example - youtube Earlier I could spend hours on youtube and discover everything from new music to weird funny videos. Today you literally get boxed into a list comprising of your history and recommendations that have hardly 1 degree of separation from your history
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> This website is a wiki. All School of Art grad students, faculty, staff, and alums have the ability to change most of this site’s content (with some exceptions); and to add new content and pages.
Kids these days have significantly stronger design aesthetic and coding ability so it's less haphazard; though it still has a very personal style.
see: http://soda-slosher.tumblr.com/http://forcomfort.tumblr.com/http://undeveloped-future.tumblr.com/
Like a browser that records every page you see, exactly as you saw it.
Unfortunately it's probably just too difficult with Web 2.0 and its dynamically generated pages and needless flashing lights.
NeoCities is an attempt to revive the GeoCities days
There are still many jaw dropping demos and I recommend that people check them out and give some appreciation and respect to those absolutely l33t guyz
So, you need to search for it. Be active about your intetests and seek them out.
All this fun and weird stuff lives on separate disconnected islands from a practical point of view. Maybe it really has to do with coding becoming more elite - although by all rational means it got easier. On the other hand hardly anyone would dare to upload static html websites anymore without non-trivial css/js. That's a shame.
Maybe this also has to do with the general obsession for super clean and lean code. This design has to be like that as well, same goes for the whole gist of the endeavor.
FWIW shitty forums always have been there, but there used to be a lot actually useful forums. Now those have been eaten up by streamlined and polished high quality web or native apps.
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Wow. That's one of the funniest things I've seen on the Internet. Do you have any more like this?
And I agree you could work hard to try and somehow verify their code, but I doubt it's possible to let them do something useful and at the same time prevent any possible attack.
Where once we had Lycos, Hotbot, Dogpile, Excite, Yahoo, et. al., we have a fraction of the various search engines today and most people just know and use the big-G.
Reddit use to have all sorts of communities. Then they started banning everything, a CEO edited comments and didn't step down and now it's all 'safe' and single opinionated (Even /r/unpopularopinions went away).
This is a cute project and I hope it's self-hostable, because I might give it a shot. So far it doesn't seem like there's any code released.
I think the future of the Internet needs to be distributed. We need more things like Sandstorm, PeerTube, Pixelfed; thinks that make it easier for people to pay to host their own content and have control over it.
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The internet was a lot smaller and inhabited by curious nerds - to find similar fun and weirdness, just find a community today that shares those properties. Packet radio, infosec, crypto, gaming, music production, etc. - there's plenty of weird and fun to be found if you look for it.
This does not mean that there aren't wonderful things available in today's web environment, too. There is no one to blame other than the natural evolution of a system. But something was lost, and it is ok to miss it.
Is that a regression, though? I mean the state pre-ES was basically that the unwashed masses weren't able to use a special service for their more-refined betters.
To me, it's essentially the difference between a country club and a public park. Certainly, the country club is better maintained and more pleasant for its members than a public park. But there's, at minimum, a strong case to be made that a park that all may use is a greater social good than a country club limited to a few.
Now that UUCP time has come and gone, I wonder if Usenet might have returned to its once former glory. It would be a really good place for technical conversation.
In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of discussions is rather pleasant and on topic and it's very rare to see people intentionally driving it into the ground, although in contrast to something like a Facebook group it's a lot less personal.
But then you add the internet, and all these radically bad thinkers find each other and their ideas almost seem normal amongst their type. They not only normalize bad thinking, but they also push for even more radically bad thinking in an effort to out-do each other. End result, you end up with a vociferous contingent of town idiots who don't realize they are town idiots because they only listen to fellow town idiots. Add advertising companies who function on a metrics-first approach, and those town idiots dictate how companies act.
It was actually in September 2013 when it started ... or was it September 1993 ...? Uh, oh, how time flies, never mind.
I've been a member here since 2008, 10 odd years! It has been quite consistent, and an almost daily visit for me since joining. I don't know how they do it but I am glad that they do.
Can you help me understand your argument by giving examples of what this means? What is "politicising" and what communities have you seened ruined by "some minority of users politicising it for attention?"
What does "politicising" mean, and how do you know their motives? If you mean what I think you mean, i.e. women for example standing up for their right to be included in historically male-led organizations (say, a SDR club), I must admit skepticism - perhaps what you are witnessing isn't "doing something for attention," but instead "demanding to be treated as an equal?"
> MySpace showed the world that if you make powerful and complicated tools (like coding) accessible to anyone, people are smart enough to figure out how to use them.
My own experience with MySpace was that every page I landed on looked like a dumpster fire. I can't recall a single person who exhibited competence in using the tools MySpace gave you. Everything was always poor contrast with a cockeyed layout.
Reading this, I finally get what people mean when they say "But Snapchat is supposed to have an unintuitive UI".
I was big into editing Myspace HTML back in the day. There were simply so many possibilities. The design was an extension of your style, howrver crude and unfinished it might have been.
Do you have any advice on finding it?
It's a difficult problem to solve.
How? I can't even search for shit anymore without being drowned in results that have nothing to do with what I searched for, but are kinda-sorta similar and get visited a lot more often.
new ~lands have:
That said, the duration of this state is probably quantifiable. Everything has these traits at first, until human stay for a while, then organization naturally takes place, taking the virginial beauty off at the same time.I've read that some antique cultures believed in burning things to the ground. I wonder if that's not a useful thing.
http://thefirstbannerad.com/
Less room for fun, more room for tracking and click through rates.
Anyone tiktok-ing around couldn't care less about MySpace and the codeblog rant.
The real fun is, that you can make the internet fun. So the codeblog's shoot was a nice PR stunt, but that's it.
That Glitch is not as popular as My Space was tells something about what people that use internet want; and shows that the internet is still fun and weird for people that like fun and weird.
But back then, Geocities was popular and loads of people had heard of it. I have never heard of Glitch. It seems like there's become a re-division between "people who like to tinker" and "literally everyone else". On the one hand that's great but it kind of feels like everything is AOL again now.
The last vestige of fun, weird and popular is probably Tumblr, which everyone agrees has the absolute worst user interface. But you can theme your Tumblr page to your absolute heart's desire.
Does it, though? Google used to give search results, now it gives Google Search Results™ and most navigation is dictated by what appears in social media feeds. The behemoths are able to enforce a sense of legitimacy in their own products while marginalizing any threats to their dominance. If they really can't stop a rising star that is pulling away users by squashing or copying them then it is no issue to throw some money at the problem and buy them out.
...Bro, do you even code?
Honestly, I can't fathom how you could make such a statement. Granted, most people can't express themselves through code - but that doesn't mean in general you can't.
The big appeal of the early internet was that anyone could make something neat with simple HTML shenanigans, and learn to code by hacking the HTML templates to their needs. Many coders got their start by hacking Neopets storefronts. (there were actual coding puzzles on Neopets too for their events!)
Well, we've only been at this for a little while, and we don't even have a way to follow other people or invite your friends yet. :) Rest assured, we're planning to keep going. And probably with fewer Tila Tequilas, of either the MySpace or neo-nazi variety.
1) apps created niche proprietary software everywhere that used to be free and open media
2) the declarative, idempotent roots of the world wide web have been replaced by imperative, brittle Javascriptified spaghetti code
3) Javascript build systems have largely obfuscated any code that can be seen
4) Web 2.0 introduced private social networks in walled gardens that in many ways offer fewer privacy guarantees than before (due to the profit motive of exploiting user info)
5) Monopolies and duopolies now receive the lion's share of funding for research (which tends to aim for increasing profits and attracting eyeballs instead of fundamentally advancing the state of the art)
I'll stop there. It's hard to say how many of these are fundamental impasses to having an open internet again..
As the grownups came along and commercialised everything a lot of that went away and back then if you wanted to say something online you had to learn HTML and what FTP was as a minimum.
So things were weird because quite a few early adopters were not techies by nature.
It's different now.
It's one of the reasons I don't use facebook, instagram, snap etc, they just don't stick for me.
I do use twitter but that is because it's a nice way to follow projects and programmers I admire so it has some utility to me.
I was an early user of reddit but since the redesign (on the back of cleaning up the community) the trend towards just another social network (EDIT: speaking of which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571) is pretty clear at this point, it's utility is going down as is the quality of the average posts in the subreddit's I cared about.
HN has been fairly consistent since I join over the last 5 years, a testament to the effectiveness of decent moderation.
It used to be I checked HN after reddit but that switched over the last year or two.
Things are more weird. Where there was one weird place, there are now thousands. Even if only 1% of today’s sites are “weird” that’s bigger than all of the internet of 1995 combined. Rising tide lifts all ships.
Want to talk on a BBS? Head on over to SDF. They got you covered. IRC is still alive and kicking, though now with far greater capabilities. GitHub. Think about what people used to have before GitHub. I uploaded things to SourceForge back when it was one of the few choices. Oof. Think about the kind of weird shit you can find on GitHub/GitLab/etc. today.
The thing is that the apparent problem is that non-nerds are now allowed online. The horror. I have found plenty of strange, weird, niche, 1337, whatever communities now and they are made better by the fact that you don’t always have to have a magnetized needle and a steady hand to use them. All you gotta do to find them is to look just beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Hell, some subreddits are microcosms onto themselves.
But this nostalgia for the “good old days” when you couldn’t have a web page in Russian and Korean at the same time is just that, nostalgia. What has actually been lost that we used to have but don’t today?
HN is a PR project for an accelerator/venture capital firm. Since its purpose is to make ycombinator look awesome and generate leads for them (providing indirect monetary value), we all get a fun place to hang out and discuss stuff so they can project that image, but I have no doubt that without that fairly unique situation it would quickly devolve into some variation of what we commonly see with social networks that have to find a way to pay for the services they provide.
I agree with your basic observation but I have a slightly different response:
Most people aren't all that fun or weird, at least not in a way which translates to text or graphical arts or music or anything else you can transmit over the Internet. Most people are the majority, and you'll never find the majority you're currently steeped in to be especially fun or weird. (Example: A great way to make a living as a comedian is to rephrase normality to make people see it as fun and weird. Observational comedy takes a keen eye for the obvious.)
When in doubt, use the same mechanisms to accomplish things that everybody else uses.
That sort of peer pressure is intended to reduce the variability between web sites. I think for better or worse we are seeing the dividends of that effort.
I don't personally agree, as far as I know, with any of the communities that were banned, apart from the communities for buying and selling stuff, which no one should really have a problem with. And some of the communities that were banned, I vehemently disagree with, and would probably strongly oppose if they formed a political platform. The "involuntary porn" subreddits were probably breaking the law and in some cases causing great emotional distress. This latter case I think clearly crosses the line, but there were plenty that were in a gray area at worst.
There's something to having free speech readily available for criticism and scrutiny that feels very valuable. These people are around whether you want them to or not, and there's value in being able to scrutinize their views. Also, I feel there's a chilling effect when you've seen examples that saying certain things leads to explulsion.
Bingo.
There are still weird sites now. But back then, that's all there were.
I think there are still a ton of "fun and weird" sites out there, they're just not on highly promoted, corporate backed platforms. And they're now a much smaller percentage of the entire web.
Marketing people like boring and predictable.
I think this has made a huge difference, not so much if it is open source our not but how much things have become locked down. Before if you made a cool program you could hand it out to your friends on a usb stick and run it. These days you have to pay $100 to apple and go through a long approval process before you get listed on the app store. Its the same with all the platforms people use now. They have become more and more locked down pushing the regular user in to simply consuming content and only the corporations with large dev teams are able to make anything.
The first is Google. Google was such a phenomenally good search engine that you rarely needed to “surf” the web to accomplish a task. You could search “order a hand powered woodworking drill” and likely be taken to a page that let you do just that. Much of the discoverability of “fun, weird” stuff came from the “surfing” aspect of the web, Google vastly reduced that.
The second is Wikipedia (and the Wikia networks). Much of the wonderful weirdness of the early web was passionate amateurs compiling information, wrapped in their own design aesthetic (or lack thirst of.). Wikipedia as amazing and wonderful as it is, gets rid of the need to find these sites to answer a question about the world (again, reducing surfing behavior, at least outside of Wikipedia.)
The last is Facebook. So much of geo cities and the early web was the “personal website”- a Sort of combination of Facebook profile, blog, and experiment in web art. These sometimes grew into impressive little gems of content, but mostly they were terrible quips and “under construction” banners. Then came the Friendster->MySpace-> Facebook and LinkedIn transition, and the need for these personal sites dropped away. They still exist, but the interaction patterns for using fbook and LinkedIn are so much easier.
I feel like YouTube still has the early web experience to it. Much of the content remains the domain of passionate amateurs and the “up next” algorithm regularly takes me in serendipitous locations (and sometimes down some darker paths).
The fun and weird communities now seem like “islands in the net” if you will, they are there and probably larger than ever, but much harder to get to (or at least stumble upon), due to tooling that allows use to accomplish tasks without detours.
One must not forget that Google is actively optimising search results away from the "weird stuff" and blocking users that try to dig deeper into the results to find it, insulting them with the accusation that they're a bot (a bit ironic, considering that if you behave "like the billion other mindless drones" you don't get singled out...) and presenting them with endless CAPTCHAs.
On the other hand, Bing still feels a bit like the "old school" search engines, and I've had better success finding the rare and niche "weird stuff" with it; apparently you can even find stuff horribly beyond legality, which is not surprising given how "dumb" it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18876361
I'd say the "fun and weird" Internet is definitely still alive; but the efforts of search engines to "clean up" their results have basically resulted in censorship and hiding of the less popular parts.
You can see a very different tone in YouTube video comments, for example, before they switched to using real names.
Now, people are afraid to risk damaging their own personal reputation by posting "weird" things (I don't mean extremely weird either -- people are extremely self-conscious in general of saying things that MIGHT be considered weird in front of others, so they don't be themselves as much as they did when they were anonymous). And often, "fun" is synonymous with "weird".
It's not ALL bad -- people also say FAR less offensive things to each other when their real names are attached (but it still happens), but if you're looking for reasons for the shift, user de-anonymization is definitely one of them.
Even show me a declarative, idempotent API that can generate an arbitrarily long scroll of user-generated content.
If your answer is that users shouldn't expect to be able to do these things, then you have aliased the word "web" to mean something that 99% of web users will not recognize.
RSS. With a good reader software.
Since functional programming (FP) and declarative programming (DP) have many similarities, the same issue of hardness (for lack of a better term) exists in languages like Elixer/Clojure/Julia/Haskell/Scala/F# etc etc.
This all comes down to one of the most poorly understood concepts in FP, the monad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming)...
Honestly, I'm still not sure I understand internally how monads work, or if there are related terms for how I think of them. But monads (and related devices) are a way to deal with imperative logic and side effects when pure FP can't.
Imagine you're writing Tetris in a spreadsheet. It's easy to visualize how you might enter a piece's (x,y) coordinate in 2 cells and then pipe that through a series of cells containing logic that examines the blocks and outputs the next (x,y) coordinate for the following main loop.
But the actual main loop (that grabs input events) is very hard to visualize as a spreadsheet. This "glue" with the imperative stuff is where the monad comes in. Another way to think of it is, how to represent exceptions in a spreadsheet or a pure functional implementation of a promise chain (you can't without monads).
To write Tetris in HTML/CSS with no Javascript, we'd probably have to write a ton of CSS rules to show/hide/move DOM elements based on the state. That's an intractable problem for humans, so we'd probably compile the CSS from another language, which defeats the whole purpose. Maybe someone has tried it, I can't tell:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709466
https://codepen.io/alexdevp/pen/pgdKf
But if we had something like a CSS monad, then we could write rules that are based on dynamic state from other rules. Writing this all out now, something like this might be useful, if anyone knows of such a thing.
Anyway, from what I understand, languages like Clojurescript get around this by suspending execution via a monad and then entering again with new input. Here is an almost purely functional Tetris clone written in Clojurescript:
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris
Piece definitions, with code to offset/rotate the matrices and check for collisions by counting the number of cells to see if any have overlapped:
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris...
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris...
What I assume to be a thread sleep and JS setTimeout monads:
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris...
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris...
https://github.com/yogthos/clj-tetris/blob/master/src/tetris...
I know that code looks a little strange. But conceptually it's orders of magnitude simpler than that equivalent imperative code. Note that this is different from easy:
https://medium.com/@kiksdium/simple-vs-easy-bfd897ab293c
TL;DR; you bring up a really good point. FP and DP probably shouldn't be considered proven techniques until they can be used in the same problem domains as IP.
This for me is especially soul-crushing. Some of the biggest minds of our time are working, devoting their talents and their ful attention, to the noble goal of... making us click more ads.
These people could be trying to research diseases, to come up with solutions for the big problems that affect us -- in short, working to to improve our lives. Instead, we reward those that make our lives even more miserable/erode democracy/help concentrate power even more. In our economic system, those are the ones that get rewarded.
Sigh.
In my mind, weird/interesting internet died with the phrase "link in bio."
"I'm going to get downvoted, but..." - proceeds to get upvoted
"Unpopular opinion: " - is actually a popular opinion
The problem is our wants have become too complex. A blog site that used to be simple self-hosted markup, now requires commenting, moderation, voting, recommendations, authentication, backup, performance, media, analytics, seo, and more. How much coding skill can we expect from people? And even if they had it, should everyone use their time re-implementing or deploying and maintaining tens of individual platforms to participate on the web? There doesn't seem to be a feasible way but to centralize. And now you need to monetize and people have shown they are not willing to pay money, leaving the only other possibility we know: monetizing the data - which, of course, only encourages even more centralization and data capture.
None of this is new, but these are the fundamental natural forces that need to be addressed.
When Marissa Mayer was in control of Yahoo (which included Tumblr) she used to brag about how she was using a "data driven" approach to maximize the revenue from Yahoo. This seems to have been abysmal for the actual users. Engagement on Tumblr stagnated, then declined. The great business guru Peter Drucker has pointed out that entrepreneurs often ruin their own products because they are uncomfortable with the type of success they end up with. Marissa Mayer would be an example of this. She had one of the great gems of the Internet, but she was uncomfortable with how weird it was. And it is difficult for leadership to really lead when the leadership is uncomfortable with the product they have.
I tried to capture how destructive her rhetoric about "data driven decision making" can be when I wrote the essay "When companies make a fetish of being data driven they reward a passive aggressive style":
"I’m especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on “data”. I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I’ve worked at that supposedly valued “data” in meetings actually valued something darker. The use of “data” in meetings tends to be a passive aggressive negotiating tactic for a group of people who for cultural or emotional reasons don’t think it is reasonable to express strong disagreement or actual anger. Instead of expressing strong emotion, people are taught to quote data — they then cherry pick whatever statistics back up their beliefs."
As far as I know, there has never been a company that said “We want the worst informed people to make the decisions” so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn’t make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be “data driven” they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics.
Trust your instincts. Over the years, we often condense many years of learning to a few simple rules. If you asked me from what peer-reviewed study I learned to value minimalist design, I would not be able to answer you — it comes from dozens of books, hundreds of articles, thousands of conversations, and countless observations, and if the accumulated wisdom of my years of experience is of no value to you, then why did you hire me?
Obviously I am not advocating that meetings should be abusive. No one should be allowed to talk over another person, as that would be disrespectful, but when one has a chance to speak, often the most effective kind of communication is one where people show how strongly they feel about an issue. If you are an experienced professional, then presumably you’ve been hired because the company wants to know the lessons you’ve learned over the years. If your instincts tell you that a given policy will be a disaster, don’t let anyone silence you with their demands for “data.” Speak the truth that you know."
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/when-companies-make-a-f...
But then it was decided that there was no semantic purpose to the <b> tag, <span style="font-weight:bold">so it became this</span>.
Now, with the ubiquity of js, it's more like <span id="bold-text">this</span> (along with something like getElementById("bold-text").setAttribute("style", "font-weight:bold") in the background).
It should be pointed out that things come full-circle: frameworks like Bootstrap define the <strong> tag which, via similar JS to above, all-but-duplicate the functionality of the original <b> tag. I think the OP's point though is that you have to add a JS framework to do this.
http://latentflip.com/imperative-vs-declarative
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45016234/what-is-idempot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_effect_(computer_science)
The early goal of the web was to create a longterm available, reliable, discoverable network of media over an inherently unreliable transport.
I keep trying to write a concise explanation of these but I can't fit it in a comment. Let's do it DECLARATIVELY haha:
imperative->functional->declarative
for()->foreach()->map()->executables+pipes->spreadsheet
C/BBS->perl/cgi-bin->Apache->HTML/CSS
manual network config->DNS
state machine/brittle long running process/fear of manual retry->idempotent request/response
Always, always, always work towards the rightmost side if you want the least side effects and highest reliability (critical for a distributed system built on unreliable parts!)
I'd like to say that declarative idempotency was an immediately obvious thing to the architects of the www, but what really happened is more like Darwinian evolution where each solution's fitness was measured by reliability. Declarative idempotency was also cheaper because requests/responses could be cached and scaled.
If we flip it around for a moment, imagine a web without these things. Every site would have a complex tangle of brittle code to do even the most trivial operations, and it wouldn't be able to pass data on to other sites (it would be an app). Without idempotency, users would have to be really careful to only click the send button once when they were transferring money (thankfully this hasn't happened much).
The one thing that I wish the web had though was a layer to make unreliable communication reliable. It would look something like a promise or future with no exceptional logic. That way we could think in terms of wiring up the inputs and outputs of many websites and then "load" it to execute the logic. Kind of like Ansible, where internally the logic is imperative but on the surface is declarative.
I'd also like to see declarative idempotence replace imperative code (especially object-oriented programming) at the developer level.
The iPhone came out. Before the iPhone DSL was a thing, making big-ish pages was a thing.
Suddenly your pages had to be downloaded on a 2g connection. Eventually 3g, and 3g today is seen as insanity, but back then was the best we can get and still only few could get that.
We started to minify the hell out of our code. Every byte was critical. CDNs were used to speed every bit of our site up. Google came out with their research that you have ~150ms to serve content before it stops feeling instantaneous.
Boom.
Eventually tools came out to make all this so easy, why wouldn't you do it.
And thus here we are today.
I was using the internet when AltaVista was a thing. Searching was SLOW! If you wanted to find something online, grab a cup of tea, because its gonna be a while.
Dead Comment
Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
This is just a sample of the problems.
You have to sandbox this stuff, and the crazier the line you try to draw with the sandbox around what is safe to do, the harder it is to secure.
That's only half the answer. The real answer is that no one wants to spend the time to offer those features securely.
It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
Look what we did on reddit -- we allowed users to make almost any CSS they want, and look at the beautiful creations that have come from that (like all the sports reddits). It was a lot of work figuring out how to make it safe, but we did it.
And now they're putting in a ton of effort to make it work on mobile too. Because reddit still values user creativity.
It's totally possible to allow all that creativity, it just takes time and consideration to make it safe.
The main reason I have a reddit account is so I can turn off custom CSS for subreddits because otherwise it's almost as garish as MySpace. When they finally eliminate the "old" reddit, I'm gone (unless they hire a competent UX person before then).
>It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.
I work in an online payment company. Custom CSS is one of the features we hate the most implementing. It is very difficult to get it right and the cost of maintenance is quite high.
And locking down gets really hard, unfortunately,
Deleted Comment
>Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized in the browser header.
Make each user have their own custom virtual host (yourname.example.com).
>Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.
Arbitrary does not mean you can't sanitize it. You can specifically restrict javascript for example.
>Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it on a page.
You don't necessarily need more than one person doing it on a page. Each person can have their own page.
>Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.
You could say the same thing about Facebook. We have the safe harbor act and we have the ability to monitor these systems for misuse.
As I said in a cousin reply, of course all the problems are solvable. But you end up back at not "fun and weird" by the author's definition.
But by the time you've solved them all, you're pretty much back to where Reddit, HN, Facebook, etc. are. I assume the author does not consider those "fun and weird".
I mean, I remember when Slashdot was having trouble with user abuse of <pre> tags. A simple <pre> tag of all things! When you scale up, you have to close all the little holes, and what's left is not "fun and weird".
You can have fun and weird. It's out there, if you look, and worst case, you can always deploy your own site and do anything you want. But you can't have fun and weird at scale.
For its many sins, Flash was actually a pretty great sandbox for people to play with that way (as long as it didn't have one of its many security issues at the time)
There were also all sorts of ways to sneak JavaScript back in. I remember embedding a javascript: protocol link inside a Flash applet would do it (flash eventually blocked that though).
I do disagree that "coding is now a privilege" or at least that it's more a privilege because of the demise of MySpace. It's easier than ever to learn how to program; it just takes time and motivation. The only thing that's harder is figuring out which technologies you actually need to learn to realize your vision (because there are so many more ways of doing things than there were in 2006); however, people are also generally nicer now than in 2006 (when I would ask people for help, they often would expect me to have read certain textbooks or know C before they would send me the link on standing up a LAMP stack). The toxic bits of StackOverflow culture were just normal--if you didn't already know the answer, you didn't deserve to know it.
Anyway, that's my 5 minute stream of recollection.
My other favorite response was when you would google a question, then you find a forum where someone says to google the question
Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Reddit likes are good value from a marketing perspective.
It's the circle of life.
I think the initial observation is interesting.
Deleted Comment
I've been a regular net user since 1995 and there's every bit (in fact more) weird unusual content than there's ever been.
You want creativity, look at today's meme culture. Sure there's a lot of "hit or miss" content out there, but there's no shortage of weird.
Deviantart, tumblr, LNI on imgur, a huge section of subreddits and that's just the easily accessible stuff. If you like video content, tiktok and similar have no shortage of fairly odd stuff.
You can head off into far weirder territory than that with a little effort (*chans, or ToR based content)
Is it MySpace, I guess not, but there's nothing stopping anyone putting up flashy HTML content easily, Netlify or GH pages aren't that difficult to get started with.
One “simply” needs to look for communities where this happens now. But of course, these days it's a pure game of chance and/or years-long riding on the edge to find oneself in such a community. Just like in any other saturated creative field.
http://superbad.com
but world new york /memepool/ suck/ are all memories. Its hard to keep up the content creation.