I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.)
I think the old internet went away because it was more profitable to create a walled garden distribution channel than it was to develop a syndication protocol like email or rss. I honestly don't see any way around this.
This does exactly what it looks like: search google for whatever you're looking for, but only for reddit pages. You access it by getting into the URL bar, hitting r<tab>, then you should see whatever you named this, then do your search and off you go.
Sadly, this is substantially better than searching reddit for the same string. (I work at reddit, and hope to help fix this sometime in the first half of next year)
reddit's search has been a running joke for as long as I've been using reddit* and I worry that improving it this late in the game might unexpectedly wipe out the entire site and severely damage the surrounding internet.
> I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought.
Same. It's the only place to find the sort of genuine, informed opinion that used to be common on the first page of Google results, on a wide variety of topics, without an awful lot of digging.
I am six months into reddit detox. The amount of time I have back is amazing. Only semi social site I read is this one. I have internet down to BBCNews, NHK, Reuters, HN, a few comics, Ars, next platform, the morning paper, Matt Levine and el reg. I am much happier :)
Maybe the old internet is still there but hidden behind the 100th search result page. I often times wish search result were ranked by how genuine the page seems to be, measured by the ratio of content over ads. Indeed, the less advertisement on a page and the more likely it is written by an actual human being with something to say.
Sadly, I suspect ranking to works exactly the opposite.
Do you not find Reddit to be a bit of a cesspool? I tend to avoid it for that reason, but how true it is probably depends on which subreddit(s) we're talking about.
It has all the ups and downs of humanity as a whole of course, but as other users have said specific subs (usually less popular and well moderated) are where the gold is.
My main problem with Reddit is the repetitive in-culture jokes, memes, and reposts. A lot of content is pandering to the Reddit audience with a flavour that is calculated to win over the crowd (see all the complaints on /r/pics of political signs or weight loss progress pics - it pisses a lot of people off because there's better places for it, but gets upvotes from the masses).
Rule of thumb for reddit: You want a small community or a heavily moderated community and never a (former, I don’t think this concept exists anymore) default subreddit.
Besides some intra-reddit jokes, the site is more like a directory of forums with a unified interface.
The nice thing about google is that it cuts across all subreddits, so if you're looking for something specific there's a good chance you'll find a real, honest opinion about it.
I do and it saddens me. It reminds me of the end days of Slashdot, right before I stopped commenting there entirely after a decade of positive interactions with like-minded people.
More than half of the top-voted content on Reddit is indistinguishable from bot-generated random memes.
Someone please explain to me what "blursed" means and why it's use means that it gets to go straight to the top of "/all" regularly...
The default subreddits for sure. There are however some great interest specific subreddits with good moderation and quality posts/discussions. With that said even those good quality subreddits can suffer from the reddit plague which is minimal effort picture posts with a tangentially related subject.
I find Reddit more healthy than HN, to be honest. At least it seems human compared to HN sterility. But of course, it all depends which subreddits you read.
More than a bit, and quite frankly there's plenty of advertising masquerading as earnest content. Unfortunately it's also got a lot of useful, user-generated content.
Do you prefer discord or slack closed discussion channels that cannot even be searched without being part of their closed community ? There's no sharing there. Reddit shares with the rest of the world.
Just fyi people now say Hackernews is a cesspool and devto is the new hotness. or is it mastodon? all i know is i keep going back to reddit to actually get some meaningful discussion on a topic and not just an echochamber of "yeah that's what i think too!"(if you sort by controversial)
I had a feeling I wasn’t the only one who did this, but I’m glad to know for sure. I do the exact same thing, because otherwise it seems nigh impossible to actually find decent human conversations online that aren’t in some unindexed walled garden.
You may be interested in https://millionshort.com, a search engine that lets you filter out results from the top 100 to 1,000,000 (your choice) sites. Depending on the search and the number you pick, it'll give you lots of personal websites and small forums.
I miss the "discussion" filter that Google used to have. For a while it still worked if you added a parameter to the URL. Now it's often difficult to impossible to search for stuff without 99% blog spam.
Same. I find it very interesting how crude, limited and untrendy (old)reddit was and yet you kept coming back. It wasn't engineered value, it was something else.
Unfortunately that redirects to Reddit's own search engine, which is often worthless for what I'm looking for.
For example, if I'm looking for a comment that refers to my lat 2014 model of some widget, Reddit's search will fail to find it, and try to show me subreddits instead that are tangentially related to what I'm looking for.
Still a good tip, don't get me wrong. But I find that asking the search engine to do the search for me—with "reddit" as one of the search terms—often gives me the result I'm looking for faster than using Reddit's own search.
I've been doing this quite a lot for finding useful opinions or reviews on products. Reddit comments have a surprising consistency when it comes to tone and objectiveness which I've come to appreciate when I need a second opinion on something.
In the classic web forum sense? Culture and all? I haven't been able to find any (but also I haven't looked very hard in the last 2-3 years). How are you finding out, just word of mouth?
Ha! I was just thinking this exact thing last night. There's lots of examples, but the one I experienced was searching for info about a product I am thinking about buying. Nothing but stores and marketing on the first couple pages. Tacking on review to the search brought up nothing but marketing copy and fake blogs from the various retailers. Tacked Reddit onto it and finally found people's actual thoughts and experiences. It's a damn shame and I suspect only a matter of time before Reddit is overwhelmed as well.
Glad that you've found useful sections. I've always found reddit to be this generation's ExpertsExchange, based on quality of content. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places.
If you can find the right set of people, twitter's "people you follow" filter can be a great way to search for things, for similar reasons to those you bring up.
yeah and then your feed gets bombarded by whatever political leaning that person has coz twitter has no way to "follow" someone without seeing retweets/likes
reddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully.
(Teenagers, and yes I was one and I remember, usually have an inflated sense of their own abilities and knowledge, and they write that way.)
What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and sharing knowledge.
> reddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully.
Pot, kettle, etc...
> What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and sharing knowledge.
I think that depends on how you use Reddit. You're right, there are lots of teens on there, but I'm not subscribed to the subreddits they frequent, nor do I browse r/all, which is the equivalent of Youtube's "Trending" tab.
r/webdev for instance is one of the subs I'm subscribed to, and the culture there is not really meme or inside joke-oriented like a lot of the entertainment-type subs are.
The other day I was googling info related to legal review of real estate documents, and my top search results were all keyword-heavy content mill articles that weren't helpful at all. I decided to do the same search with "site:reddit.com" added, and the information was much better, as you're often hearing people's stories of working with lawyers when buying property. It was very helpful to get this kind of 'organic' information instead of the 'corporatized' version that's really a lead-up to their sales pitch.
> What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists.
Let's shoot for a more feasible goal: bring back Gmane.org and let web forums federate to it if they so choose, not just mailing lists. That's the closest we can get to what the old Usenet was like.
The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use any javascript frontends. It's a good time.
As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an article check the site to see if it has an RSS feed. In fact, do this with every web interaction. Pretty soon you can completely decouple yourself from content aggregators and start perceiving the web as a community again.
https://millionshort.com/ lets you exclude that thick layer of corporate shite. Search without the top million (or 100k, 10k etc) sites. !mill from DDG.
Not perfect but often turns up those personal homepages, hobby sites and esoterica the early internet thrived on. Stuff that Google and co forgot existed - or is down on page 200+
I've been missing the old internet. A little while ago I tried to find StumbleUpon and discovered it's transformed into more of a social media thing. I took a couple days to recreate what I thought of as the core StumbleUpon functionality - click button, get random site. And I've been trying to aggregate what feel like unique, individual, not well known sites into my index for it.
I used to love StumbleUpon. I haven't thought about it for years. Thanks so much for making this. Let me know if you need an extra human to moderate submissions or whatever :)
I like that I'm not tracking anyone, it doesn't require UI/UX, I have little to nothing to gain from it - it's just a human connection. Something fun we might have seen in the early years of the internet.
Because getting content on the web is only as difficult as people make it, and beneath all the bloat of "modern front end development practices" there is still a simple set of tools to work with.
If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it. Time and the ability for your coworkers to contribute matters. You don't have to bring these compromises forced on you at work to home.
JavaScript is the first path down a road that leads to tracking and ads and optimization. It's too easy to think, "I'll just serve this JS library off X CDN" and voila, you've enabled someone to track your users. "No JavaScript" keeps you honest.
This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps.
Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.
How many 100k image hits do you get on your personal website you made for fun? In the entire 20 years I've hosted my website on my comcast connection I have never had this issue. If you're going to post an image to reddit (which is kind of going backwards from the point of all this) then just mirror it onto some popular image host (or your VPS). This doesn't prevent you from also serving up a copy from your local disk to visitors.
1 megabit of upstream is plenty for a personal website. I can say this from long experience.
I think most isps also block outgoing traffic on port 80 these days. At least, that's the issue me and some friends found when we tried to host websites on our various ISPs.
We need our personal websites to start linking directly to each other again… friends, coworkers, mentors, related topics, etc…
This trend died out, it used to be on practically every website. Maybe people just figured Google would find and sort everything for them. But now the search engines are packed with SEO garbage and offer no discoverability or serendipity.
So much this. Unfortunately post google reader I never found an rss reader that really clicked with me as much. Part of it is because I followed a mix of text and just pure image sites, and par of it is the sites come and go and I haven’t found new sites. RIP ffffound and the like...
Neocities[1] and tilde servers like tilde.town[2] is a pretty large hub of old-internet sites. It's a free Geocities-like host that's home to a lot of neat, creative sites.
You can also get a VPS for about $5/mo and have your own self-hosted server with whatever servers and web apps you want, like an RSS reader, an IRC client, FTP/Gopher server, etc. (Shameless self plug: this is what I do with my own personal site, https://invisibleup.com)
I don't miss the days when you had to physically send a paper form with a cheque or postal order, go to a bank, wait 28 days for things to be delivered, stand in line at a post office, or phone someone up to get mundane stuff done. Can you imagine sorting out car insurance quotes or booking flights/hotels or doing your tax return without the internet? What a ballache!
The modern internet has been utterly transformative and has made modern life so much easier and simpler. Don't forget about all the useful things you take for granted now that weren't possible then because the internet wasn't commercialised at the time.
The old internet is still there, some if it actually physically still there - i.e. still on the server/URL it was on back in the day (I find this kinda cool in a way - these sort of mary-celeste servers ticking away somewhere, untouched for 20 years but someone still cares enough to pay to keep it running).
Perhaps less people make their own websites these days, but there is still a thriving and still-as-useless ("not much yet - check back soon!") collection of random personal websites on dat, gopher and ipfs. Stumbling onto these things or hearing about them via word of mouth/keyboard was always part of the joy of 90s internet.
These conveniences you cite of the modern internet all feel like they help the other side of the relationship even more than they help you. Imagine how much the airlines, banks, tax collectors, and insurance companies love the modern internet, making it all the more convenient for you to interact with their products and services! And at such scale!
My point here is that, on the intellectual front, the old internet was a lot more transformative for humankind than the state of today's "cable television as a service" internet we endure today.
How does that change anything? The amount of ease of use you get from the internet is not zero-sum; everyone benefits from it.
Calling the internet "cable television as a service" is ignoring the incredible reach and user-friendliness of the modern internet, and all the advantages that come from that. Nostalgia is okay, but that doesn't change the fact that the current internet brings a lot more information to a lot more people, albeit with differing quality. It has absolutely changed humanity for the better, and is orders of magnitude more transformative than what you seem to be calling old internet.
> sorting out car insurance quotes or booking flights/hotels
Due to the limitations of the medium, I think this actually used to be easier (if slower). You certainly didn’t get a different price if you were booking a minute later.
To me, the best "old internet" site is Wikipedia. Although they also partially succumbed to madness of breaking the web (opening images in JavaScript popups?? breaking the "Back" browser button??) it's mostly a well-done clean HMLL/CSS site which has everything you want. I even treat it as "slow news" source [1], instead of MSM.
In a way, they have outperformed Google at Google's vision of organizing the world's information. That's why I try to donate as much as I can every year.
Wikipedia is even pushing further forward on that vision with Wikidata, a general-purpose knowledge base that's perhaps the most successful example of such a thing, succeeding where many other efforts have failed dismally. (Already, Wikidata gets more edits per minute than Wikipedia, albeit much of the activity is performed by bots.) It's also a successful use of Linked-Open-Data and Semantic-Web technologies (the Wikidata site hosts a SPARQL endpoint, for general queries of all sorts), so while it might not be "Old Web" per se, it feels quite retro-futuristic in many ways.
And of course, all the well-known personal assistant AI's rely on it quite a bit, although they're not eager to advertise that fact.
It's all still there, the major search engines are just broken because they've been co-opted by SEO.
Tons of people still own and operate their own websites; BBSes exist; IRC is still here; mailing lists are still here; and so on and so forth.
You just won't find it on the top hit at Google because their business model is based on ad sales wankery.
Whilst we're on the topic, I'm gonna take the chance to write - if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that. Be the change you want to see. Cheers.
>if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that
I once worked for an SEO agency and ended up quitting after 4 months. Everything about it went against my morals. I was disgusted with myself for pushing rubbish sites, snooping on peoples browsing behaviour, and working to squeeze every cent from it all through what I believed to be manipulative practices (despite it all being 'white hat')
Quitting that job was a major relief, though I'm haunted by the fact that there are thousands of other agencies and even more people willing to fill my previous role.
> You just won't find it on the top hit at Google because their business model is based on ad sales wankery.
And neither did you find it through Google in the "early 1990s" like in the article. Or in any other way, except by pure luck, because search was crap back then or simply didn't exist.
> You have to enter the exact name of the website to find it on Google. MayVaneDay is also mirrored on I2P, TOR, and Dat...You have to look really hard for them now, and the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites
Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old Internet was any better, at least in the case of MayVaneDay. In the early 90s, how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"?
> I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks, back when websites like Vane's were the internet. Don't get me wrong, many cool things can be found on the internet today. But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out...
This feels incredibly myopic. The Internet of those days were limited to the extreme minority of people who were aware of the Internet and had access to a connected computer, nevermind took the time to figure out how to create for it. The author derides Facebook and Reddit as being too "easily monitored and controlled" to allow for individual voices but that's utter bullshit. The modern Internet is far from perfect, but the diversity and quantity (and arguably, quality) of voices is far better than when the Internet catered mostly to college-age kids and academics, i.e. people with access to free, high-speed Internet portals.
> how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"?
By browsing Web-Directories such as DMOZ/ODP, mainly. Albeit that's really a late-90s and 2000s thing. We should go back to that kind of curation effort. It would be more of a challenge for politically-sensitive stuff (the Internet overall is a lot more politicized and less free-speech-friendly than it used to be) but for most uncontroversial stuff it would work well enough.
(And no, Wikipedia is not a true replacement even though it might be the closest thing to one we happen to have. They purposefully keep external links to a minimum, for sensible reasons - they're building an encyclopedia, not a Web directory.)
Back in the dawntimes (aka like 1995/96), you got to all sites by starting at the Yahoo! directory, and browsing to the category that you were interested in, and then going through their list of sites. If you made your own site, getting it listed on Yahoo felt like hitting the big time.
Yahoo and then dmoz. Search engines existed (AltaVista was the best of a bad lot) but before Google you needed a curator to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Yahoo! back in 1998 was a web directory, structured like a phone book. Being the age that I was then, my favourite site was something called Maniac Joe's WWF page, which had reviews of the latest Raw episodes, Pay Per View Specials, Midi theme songs and pictures.
I had a 30-min per week time allowance on the INternet-connected family computer, and I pretty much spent it all on that site.
Those are the types of sites I miss. Single-topic with incredible depth of content, and written in a funny, friendly tone without the "content strategist" tone of voice that's all too common on "fun" websites like Vice, Gizmodo etc.
> The Internet of those days were limited to the extreme minority of people who were aware of the Internet and had access to a connected computer, nevermind took the time to figure out how to create for it.
That's disingenuous. Smaller communities are better because they tend to be more focused, on-topic, and familiar for their members. When they grow large they can drift off-topic and fall victim to status-seeking and other obnoxious behaviour. The only way to mitigate this (I don't believe it can be prevented forever) is heavy moderation.
HN has survived due to the tireless efforts of some very smart moderators. It continues to creep away from its sense of community, however, and political flame-wars seem to be becoming increasingly common.
Early sites on the internet had not developed the appropriate tools and social norms to moderate effectively against the deluge.
More precisely, as the sample size approaches the total population size, the mean of any trait in the sample approaches the mean of that trait in the total population.
Specifically, the subset of the population that was on the early Internet had much higher average cognitive ability and creativity than the total population. Now the two groups are virtually identical.
> The modern Internet is far from perfect, but the diversity and quantity (and arguably, quality) of voices is far better than when the Internet catered mostly to college-age kids and academics, i.e. people with access to free, high-speed Internet portals.
Ironically, I could not share this article itself on Facebook, because it apparently violated community guidelines. So yeah...
Ya I noticed that too when I tried to share it. I've been reading through the articles, and even though I am INFP and the author is INTJ, I align very strongly with many of the main points so far.
It's a strange feeling to have (what in my mind is) a very consistent, rational view of reality with all of its beauty and flaws, yet have that considered to be so fringe or even disruptive somehow by society to the point where it is censored.
I actually just posted quite a rant on Facebook about the dangers of censorship and how corporate control can distort the conversation, using links from that site as evidence. It's funny to see the comment count be 6 or whatever and only see 4 comments because the others are blocked. An oversight like that in their code tells me that even Facebook is having a hard time stomaching censorship, so that gives me hope that some enlightenment may come of all this.
The last bit is funny, it would take a lot of words to explain. The most important mechanisms are filters that exclude topics from your friends feed, self-moderation and 3rd party monetization. You are a guest, it isn't your place, you should and shall behave as such.
I dont know who your fb "friends" are but mine are diverse enough not to bother them with stuff they dont find interesting. You should post a picture of your lunch not some 1000 word article.
Also, if you wrote the above on your own site i would return to read more. Here i dont bother.
"I Miss the Old Internet" - an article about another website WITHOUT LINKING THERE. Congratulations, you've played yourself.
What's murdering the old internet is the lack of links. Everyone is posting screenshots, twitter/facebook/etc all hijack links, and we're surprised we can't find the sites.
Even Firefox dropped it's built-in RSS support by now, so for the current September generation, this is meaningless, unfortunately. Still, as infrastructure, it's very important, because it's simple to transform RSS into other formats: JSON feed, h-feed[^1], etc.
As for how to "follow" (I'd prefer to use subscribe instead) a personal site these days, it's a hard problem, reasonably well documented here: https://indieweb.org/follow
There is a current effort, called microsub[^2] to tackle the problem, but it's new, and is not user friendly enough at all.
Alternatively you can make your site compatible with services like https://fed.brid.gy/ and people on fediverse[^3] instances will be able to follow it.
Trouble with these: all of them require some (ranging from install wordpress plugins to write your own service) technical knowledge, and therefore contributions to solving them and making them more accessible, are more, than welcome.
Not the point; typing the quoted text in duckduckgo gave me the url. The problem that what makes the web a web is glue between the components: the links. Without that, there's no web or net.
This sort of post is a recurring theme here on HN, and in some ways I do sympathize with the sentiment. But I seriously believe that today that "independent" web is actually much bigger than it was in the olden days. It only seems small because of the illusion created by the hugeness of the non-independent web. And of course it is not clean binary option of independent or not, instead it really is more of a spectrum of independence, which further confuses the matters.
It is also relatively easy now for independent individuals to create "professional" websites that look and behave like commercial ones - professional templates on some hosted CRM system with dynamic features (ads, shopping baskets, comment systems etc) just a few clicks away. Wix, wordpress, shopify to a certain extent, disqus etc all make things pretty easy and decent looking.
They may not be as "kooky" it as "characterful" as they used to be any more which I guess is part of what people are missing.
It's much easier today for someone who isn't a technologist to go and set up a website on wordpress or whatever or create a podcast or do whatever they'd like. Or put up videos on Youtube. Not to mention being able to easily self-publish a book.
My RSS reader (inoreader) is full of things like that. Even inoreader itself is independent. Lots of the podcasts I listen to are like that too. Physical Attraction, The Internet History Podcast and all sorts of things are just set up by one person who wants to do it. A friend of mine who is a writer has an amazingly professional sounding podcast.
There is just so much more stuff out there that this can be swamped. Also people who do it well often get pulled into larger organisations and are less independent.
I'd arguably divide history into a pre-Bootstrap and a post-Bootstrap internet. Bootstrap made it easy for anybody to have a decent looking website, replacing the raw and chaotic and wonderful mess that came before, and bringing down an echoing sameness across huge swathes of the internet.
Another bright line is the Flash internet and the no-Flash internet. So much experimentation and uniqueness bloomed, and then died.
Readit News
I think the old internet went away because it was more profitable to create a walled garden distribution channel than it was to develop a syndication protocol like email or rss. I honestly don't see any way around this.
open chrome://settings/searchEngines
add a new search engine, called anything you want, with a convenient shortcut. I use "r". The important bit is the search string this expands to: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s
This does exactly what it looks like: search google for whatever you're looking for, but only for reddit pages. You access it by getting into the URL bar, hitting r<tab>, then you should see whatever you named this, then do your search and off you go.
Sadly, this is substantially better than searching reddit for the same string. (I work at reddit, and hope to help fix this sometime in the first half of next year)
*Just checked. 9 years. Gulp.
Same. It's the only place to find the sort of genuine, informed opinion that used to be common on the first page of Google results, on a wide variety of topics, without an awful lot of digging.
https://millionshort.com/
My main problem with Reddit is the repetitive in-culture jokes, memes, and reposts. A lot of content is pandering to the Reddit audience with a flavour that is calculated to win over the crowd (see all the complaints on /r/pics of political signs or weight loss progress pics - it pisses a lot of people off because there's better places for it, but gets upvotes from the masses).
Besides some intra-reddit jokes, the site is more like a directory of forums with a unified interface.
And 4chan isn't even that bad in terms of bad or illegal content so that goes to show how relative it all is.
More than half of the top-voted content on Reddit is indistinguishable from bot-generated random memes.
Someone please explain to me what "blursed" means and why it's use means that it gets to go straight to the top of "/all" regularly...
More than a bit, and quite frankly there's plenty of advertising masquerading as earnest content. Unfortunately it's also got a lot of useful, user-generated content.
I also just found https://boardreader.com, which searches forums exclusively.
It is remarkable how many of the top domain that show up on search (amazon, ebay, others) have little or nothing to do with long-tail search terms.
A defined purpose? monitization?
I suppose it would be a hard fight to get google to specifically favour non-adsensed sites.
On duck duck go you can use !r to search reddit if you're so inclined.
For example, if I'm looking for a comment that refers to my lat 2014 model of some widget, Reddit's search will fail to find it, and try to show me subreddits instead that are tangentially related to what I'm looking for.
Still a good tip, don't get me wrong. But I find that asking the search engine to do the search for me—with "reddit" as one of the search terms—often gives me the result I'm looking for faster than using Reddit's own search.
For example if I search “best vpn” I’ll get loads of VPN review blog spam who are just pushing the provider with the highest affiliate commission.
If I search “best vpn reddit” I should get discussion from real people about services they have used.
(Teenagers, and yes I was one and I remember, usually have an inflated sense of their own abilities and knowledge, and they write that way.)
What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and sharing knowledge.
Pot, kettle, etc...
> What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and sharing knowledge.
You are describing the non default subreddits.
r/webdev for instance is one of the subs I'm subscribed to, and the culture there is not really meme or inside joke-oriented like a lot of the entertainment-type subs are.
The other day I was googling info related to legal review of real estate documents, and my top search results were all keyword-heavy content mill articles that weren't helpful at all. I decided to do the same search with "site:reddit.com" added, and the information was much better, as you're often hearing people's stories of working with lawyers when buying property. It was very helpful to get this kind of 'organic' information instead of the 'corporatized' version that's really a lead-up to their sales pitch.
Let's shoot for a more feasible goal: bring back Gmane.org and let web forums federate to it if they so choose, not just mailing lists. That's the closest we can get to what the old Usenet was like.
Check out P2P Reddit: https://notabug.io/ (Warning! Beware of content!)
It runs on the GUN protocol (mine), which is running in production with about 8M monthly active users.
So yes, Old Internet is making a comeback with #dWeb!
As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an article check the site to see if it has an RSS feed. In fact, do this with every web interaction. Pretty soon you can completely decouple yourself from content aggregators and start perceiving the web as a community again.
Not perfect but often turns up those personal homepages, hobby sites and esoterica the early internet thrived on. Stuff that Google and co forgot existed - or is down on page 200+
https://stumblingon.com
It currently gets about ten unique visitors and one or two submissions a day.
It would be cool if you made the button linkable, so you can bookmark it and get a random URL each time.
http://iwillansweryouremails.com
I like that I'm not tracking anyone, it doesn't require UI/UX, I have little to nothing to gain from it - it's just a human connection. Something fun we might have seen in the early years of the internet.
I'm struggling to find the connection between a Javascript front end and content that has (to quote the article posted) "the voice of individuals"
This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a pitiful 10 mbps.
Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home internet gets hugged to death.
1 megabit of upstream is plenty for a personal website. I can say this from long experience.
Back in my day...
That's your 100K image 10 times a second, or 600 times a minute.
You could also just like, run a caching server on a 5$ VPS.
This trend died out, it used to be on practically every website. Maybe people just figured Google would find and sort everything for them. But now the search engines are packed with SEO garbage and offer no discoverability or serendipity.
Time to start sharing homemade link lists again.
Better even since it has plugins to inline some comic strips where the RSS feeds are just links to the pages.
You can also get a VPS for about $5/mo and have your own self-hosted server with whatever servers and web apps you want, like an RSS reader, an IRC client, FTP/Gopher server, etc. (Shameless self plug: this is what I do with my own personal site, https://invisibleup.com)
[1] https://neocities.org [2] https://tilde.town
The modern internet has been utterly transformative and has made modern life so much easier and simpler. Don't forget about all the useful things you take for granted now that weren't possible then because the internet wasn't commercialised at the time.
The old internet is still there, some if it actually physically still there - i.e. still on the server/URL it was on back in the day (I find this kinda cool in a way - these sort of mary-celeste servers ticking away somewhere, untouched for 20 years but someone still cares enough to pay to keep it running).
Perhaps less people make their own websites these days, but there is still a thriving and still-as-useless ("not much yet - check back soon!") collection of random personal websites on dat, gopher and ipfs. Stumbling onto these things or hearing about them via word of mouth/keyboard was always part of the joy of 90s internet.
>a bank
>stand in line at a post office
>car insurance quotes
>booking flights/hotels
>tax return
These conveniences you cite of the modern internet all feel like they help the other side of the relationship even more than they help you. Imagine how much the airlines, banks, tax collectors, and insurance companies love the modern internet, making it all the more convenient for you to interact with their products and services! And at such scale!
My point here is that, on the intellectual front, the old internet was a lot more transformative for humankind than the state of today's "cable television as a service" internet we endure today.
Calling the internet "cable television as a service" is ignoring the incredible reach and user-friendliness of the modern internet, and all the advantages that come from that. Nostalgia is okay, but that doesn't change the fact that the current internet brings a lot more information to a lot more people, albeit with differing quality. It has absolutely changed humanity for the better, and is orders of magnitude more transformative than what you seem to be calling old internet.
Due to the limitations of the medium, I think this actually used to be easier (if slower). You certainly didn’t get a different price if you were booking a minute later.
That is a wonderful term for it, and a delicious mental image.
In a way, they have outperformed Google at Google's vision of organizing the world's information. That's why I try to donate as much as I can every year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincade_Fire
Wikipedia is even pushing further forward on that vision with Wikidata, a general-purpose knowledge base that's perhaps the most successful example of such a thing, succeeding where many other efforts have failed dismally. (Already, Wikidata gets more edits per minute than Wikipedia, albeit much of the activity is performed by bots.) It's also a successful use of Linked-Open-Data and Semantic-Web technologies (the Wikidata site hosts a SPARQL endpoint, for general queries of all sorts), so while it might not be "Old Web" per se, it feels quite retro-futuristic in many ways.
And of course, all the well-known personal assistant AI's rely on it quite a bit, although they're not eager to advertise that fact.
Thanks for making me feel old.
I really think of Wikipedia as part of the "new" internet, not the old one. Now, get off of my lawn, you whippersnappers!
Tons of people still own and operate their own websites; BBSes exist; IRC is still here; mailing lists are still here; and so on and so forth.
You just won't find it on the top hit at Google because their business model is based on ad sales wankery.
Whilst we're on the topic, I'm gonna take the chance to write - if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that. Be the change you want to see. Cheers.
I once worked for an SEO agency and ended up quitting after 4 months. Everything about it went against my morals. I was disgusted with myself for pushing rubbish sites, snooping on peoples browsing behaviour, and working to squeeze every cent from it all through what I believed to be manipulative practices (despite it all being 'white hat')
Quitting that job was a major relief, though I'm haunted by the fact that there are thousands of other agencies and even more people willing to fill my previous role.
I'd be curious if you know of any industry blogs or forums that you'd read to stay current on techniques.
I haven't followed SEO since the early days of link trading and keyword stuffing.
And neither did you find it through Google in the "early 1990s" like in the article. Or in any other way, except by pure luck, because search was crap back then or simply didn't exist.
Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old Internet was any better, at least in the case of MayVaneDay. In the early 90s, how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"?
> I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks, back when websites like Vane's were the internet. Don't get me wrong, many cool things can be found on the internet today. But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out...
This feels incredibly myopic. The Internet of those days were limited to the extreme minority of people who were aware of the Internet and had access to a connected computer, nevermind took the time to figure out how to create for it. The author derides Facebook and Reddit as being too "easily monitored and controlled" to allow for individual voices but that's utter bullshit. The modern Internet is far from perfect, but the diversity and quantity (and arguably, quality) of voices is far better than when the Internet catered mostly to college-age kids and academics, i.e. people with access to free, high-speed Internet portals.
By browsing Web-Directories such as DMOZ/ODP, mainly. Albeit that's really a late-90s and 2000s thing. We should go back to that kind of curation effort. It would be more of a challenge for politically-sensitive stuff (the Internet overall is a lot more politicized and less free-speech-friendly than it used to be) but for most uncontroversial stuff it would work well enough.
(And no, Wikipedia is not a true replacement even though it might be the closest thing to one we happen to have. They purposefully keep external links to a minimum, for sensible reasons - they're building an encyclopedia, not a Web directory.)
Dead Comment
I had a 30-min per week time allowance on the INternet-connected family computer, and I pretty much spent it all on that site.
Those are the types of sites I miss. Single-topic with incredible depth of content, and written in a funny, friendly tone without the "content strategist" tone of voice that's all too common on "fun" websites like Vice, Gizmodo etc.
Exclusivity makes things cool.
HN has survived due to the tireless efforts of some very smart moderators. It continues to creep away from its sense of community, however, and political flame-wars seem to be becoming increasingly common.
Early sites on the internet had not developed the appropriate tools and social norms to moderate effectively against the deluge.
Specifically, the subset of the population that was on the early Internet had much higher average cognitive ability and creativity than the total population. Now the two groups are virtually identical.
Ironically, I could not share this article itself on Facebook, because it apparently violated community guidelines. So yeah...
It's a strange feeling to have (what in my mind is) a very consistent, rational view of reality with all of its beauty and flaws, yet have that considered to be so fringe or even disruptive somehow by society to the point where it is censored.
I actually just posted quite a rant on Facebook about the dangers of censorship and how corporate control can distort the conversation, using links from that site as evidence. It's funny to see the comment count be 6 or whatever and only see 4 comments because the others are blocked. An oversight like that in their code tells me that even Facebook is having a hard time stomaching censorship, so that gives me hope that some enlightenment may come of all this.
I dont know who your fb "friends" are but mine are diverse enough not to bother them with stuff they dont find interesting. You should post a picture of your lunch not some 1000 word article.
Also, if you wrote the above on your own site i would return to read more. Here i dont bother.
What's murdering the old internet is the lack of links. Everyone is posting screenshots, twitter/facebook/etc all hijack links, and we're surprised we can't find the sites.
Link to eachother. That's why it used to work.
As for how to "follow" (I'd prefer to use subscribe instead) a personal site these days, it's a hard problem, reasonably well documented here: https://indieweb.org/follow
There is a current effort, called microsub[^2] to tackle the problem, but it's new, and is not user friendly enough at all.
Alternatively you can make your site compatible with services like https://fed.brid.gy/ and people on fediverse[^3] instances will be able to follow it.
Trouble with these: all of them require some (ranging from install wordpress plugins to write your own service) technical knowledge, and therefore contributions to solving them and making them more accessible, are more, than welcome.
[^1]: http://www.unmung.com/
[^2]: https://indieweb.org/Microsub
[^3]: https://fediverse.network/
They may not be as "kooky" it as "characterful" as they used to be any more which I guess is part of what people are missing.
It's much easier today for someone who isn't a technologist to go and set up a website on wordpress or whatever or create a podcast or do whatever they'd like. Or put up videos on Youtube. Not to mention being able to easily self-publish a book.
My RSS reader (inoreader) is full of things like that. Even inoreader itself is independent. Lots of the podcasts I listen to are like that too. Physical Attraction, The Internet History Podcast and all sorts of things are just set up by one person who wants to do it. A friend of mine who is a writer has an amazingly professional sounding podcast.
There is just so much more stuff out there that this can be swamped. Also people who do it well often get pulled into larger organisations and are less independent.
Another bright line is the Flash internet and the no-Flash internet. So much experimentation and uniqueness bloomed, and then died.