Here's a contrarian timeline: maybe the old web will return? My reasoning: when the "old web" was great, most people thought the internet was for nerds. Sure even casual users would forward funny emails to their friends, but when it came time for news most people would read the paper or watch the nightly broadcast. When they paid for their Big Mac they'd lay down cash. There were plenty of people using the internet, but again, they were nerds or nerd-adjacent. So, maybe the LLM-ification of everything could end up being like a huge filter, where all the non-nerds no longer see the point of anything and move on to gardens with even higher walls. And then what you have left will be a small subset of people who know how to reach their desired corners of the internet, just like before.
We're participating in it right now. HN is a living example of a simple website facilitating discussion between humans with a shared interest. That's why I come here more than any other news/social site now.
Isn't there a vested interest here for bots though to communicate here though?
HN is a certainly a smaller but more targeted market but there's no reason to assume we're communicating with other humans here necessarily especially given HN demographics.
Does it matter? A 3rd world getting paid to post content, the bot that replaces the shill, and a first world office worker that's been indoctrinated by and is parroting either of the former are functionally equivalent as far as the next user cares because the text they put bore that next user's eyes is the same.
I didn't live long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN, but it's definitely part of the old web in my book. Its functionality is the same it's always been, it's rock solid, lightweight and simple. No personalization or engagement maximizing, no modern-style ads. Being spun off from something as big as Y Combinator meant they can run this site almost indefinitely.
HN is a good example of how little a website actually needs once you remove the requirement to constantly squeeze more engagement out of it. Though to be fair, its audience is unusually self-selecting :)
I don't know much about how HN is run but I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the need for human moderation here, and I assume that is a lot of work.
A message forum is simple, old technology. Keeping it usable and useful for humans is not.
I have fond memories of Slashdot in 1998. It was the spiritual forerunner to HN, and had upvoting, and in a more complex form as there were categories of votes. I got lots of +5 Funny comments. Hard to imagine, isn't it.
I've only seen the ./ category moderation style in one other place and it's really a shame as I think it has great value if it can be linked up with filters besides raw thresholds, of course balanced against how it would be used in reality by a large group of people. Voting incentivizes populism, and that means a lot of topics degrade into "everyone's a comedian" or virtue signalling whatever is acceptable in that particular forum, mostly retreading old ground instead of moving the discussion forwards.
Ya, sorry, I never read Slashdot back in the day (even though I'm well old enough to have had), so I'm very wrong here. I'm just generally annoyed how every forum now a days has it. But of course one of the reasons I dislike it is because I fall victim to its dopamine effects.
Naw, it's my bad, I'm 45 but never spent any time on Slashdot as I didn't really care about tech at large back then. None of the forums I spent my time on back then had voting systems and now all the ones I use do and I'm not the biggest fan.
I've really soured on votes in recent years. They promised a sort of crowdsourced moderation and I appreciated the cleverness of the idea back around the time reddit first came out.
But now I think that downvotes have just kinda become a sort of digital tomato for people to throw, a means of burying a post without putting any thought into an argument as to why the post is illegitimate.
And that's the best case. In the worst case it's a really easy system for bots to game. You don't even need AI. All it takes is a bunch of accounts "legitimate" enough to not get flagged by whatever botting heuristics the site implemented and you can produce a false consensus.
havent lived. “I didnt live long enough” means your life ended! past tense. hasn’t means its still going “have not (yet)”. I don’t know the formal rules behind it all though.
its interesting because it sounds more correct to use have not yet because your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state. So you could say its not right, but the sentence sounds/feels more right to preserve that your life is still going on.
> your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state
Wouldn't the proper tense be "I won't have lived long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN" then?
> We like that you are still here with us.
Same here, and it feels like a very "old web" kind of feeling, as we're expressing this empathy towards an anonymous stranger with a very deemphasized username.
I find it surprising how much empathy has seemingly been on a decline as the Web went from anonymity to pseudonymity to everyone's full name and face being attached to their online presence.
"I won't have lived long enough" implies you will be missing out on the tail end of HN, "I haven't lived long enough" implies you have missed the start (head end?) of HN (as I understand it).
This is the way! The old web never went away. It is still there for the people who care to look. If you are curious, good places to start is here, gopher/gemini, mailinglists, usenet, irc, webrings/blogs, mastodon/pleroma instance etc.
Basically every area that is either forgotten by the mainstream, or completely unknown, and make sure the author is a person and not a company and you'll be on your way to way more interesting discussions, texts, content and interaction, that the B.S. of facebook, twitter and commercial web sites.
what would be amazing would be a resurgence of the old style forums, but where users could choose to see a flat or tree view of a discussion (and even customize those views, e.g. the tree could be reddit style without subject lines, or slashdot style with them)
SwedeSpeed has this. It is a forum, posts have threads. It isn’t always nice because the threading/three view also breaks the sense of time and makes it harder to see new posts.
I actually prefer a linear view with posts that quote what they want to reply to. This also allows a single post to reply and combine multiple remarks. So it allows more for convergence instead of divergence as with a tree.
right, i agree with you - there's no one size fits all. that's why the best thing would be to let the reader toggle views on any given post/thread. one could even experiment with fancier views like a flat layout but with a git tree like sidebar that shows the perhaps multiple parents for any post and support for clicking on a post and popping up a mini thread with just the posts it's replying to.
I don't believe the old web was filled with people pining about how the current web is awful and them participating in recreating the web they inhabit is better. People on the old web just posted things, because before that there was no non-old web to compare to. But that in itself is what makes the old web so appealing to people wanting it to return. Back then there was no other web necessary to escape from.
So when people construct versions of the old web today, they make a conscious decision to do something most people would not, and by doing so it sometimes comes off as indicating what they think of the other design decisions they chose not to make. It's not a bad thing, but it's not quite the same as it was anymore. That is why some of the spark is gone, in my eyes. It's kind of like counterculture being mistaken as the opposite of culture.
It is even more pronounced when people talk about "the old web" on old web websites all day.
> I don't believe the old web was filled with people pining about how the current web is awful and them participating in recreating the web they inhabit is better
TBH I do recall a lot of gloating over how AOL was full of clueless lusers who were inferior to the Internet
I haven't checked it out personally, but this is my impression of all of the webs that aren't the world wide web. Like the meshtastics, the new freenet, some web 3.0
It being harder to join has the effect of their being a smaller more engaged user base. Less likely that there will be pressure from corporate interests, more likely that every user has a vested interest in both production and consumption.
edit: And of course, you'll see the same in dedicated niche forms and spaces like HAM radio. I imagine the folks TXing EME have a particular flavor that is well maintained.
Old Web was extremely self-selecting. If you were in that group or adjacent to that group, it was for you. The sort of person that would read about that crazy guy making Unix from scratch and then download a bunch of floppy disk images.
The new Web is for the median human. The median human is very ordinary.
> And then what you have left will be a small subset of people who know how to reach their desired corners of the internet, just like before.
Blue skies mentality. The old web was good because it wasn't crowded or accessible to most, and everything was new. That, great filter, was unique and will never happen again; Pandora's box is open and cannot be shut.
Pretty much akin to one's childhood being yearned at old age...
Just connecting to other people all over the globe was novel. At least for me as a kid, my window to the world in the 90s was TV and a satellite dish, and maybe a local library.
Speaking to relatives in other european countries meant a long distance phone call over a landline and it was expensive. My view of the world was shaped by physical books like encyclopedias or comic books, magazines, TV shows and documentaries. But everything was filtered through translations and choices made by local editors (a famous example is a local TV editor who spent decades at the national broadcasting service selecting foreign documentaries for broadcast, so his name in the credits meant a quality choice). A similar shift happened when we got the satellite dish and could get hundreds of new programs (mostly german, but some english) after having only a handful on terrestrial channels. And then suddenly with dial up, I could connect to the internet and find various web pages from all over the world and join forums and download images and later on videos, join discussions on forums. I would say this lasted from the late 90s to maybe 2010s or even before, things changed with wider facebook adoption and when youtube started streaming high definition videos and you could just watch it like it was TV.
the article already lists one positive - the LLM assistance made the engineering effort to keep their site up and running feasible again. insofar as spam killed the remnants of old web, that is a promising sign.
> There were plenty of people using the internet, but again, they were nerds or nerd-adjacent. So, maybe the LLM-ification of everything could end up being like a huge filter, where all the non-nerds no longer see the point of anything and move on to gardens with even higher walls.
One difference I see is that in the (so-called) "old web" era, if you were not nerdy enough to navigate certain technical issues, the path of least resistance was to not participate. As you say, those people stuck to phone books and newspapers and TV. That meant that entering the world of the internet was adding something; you could still read the newspaper and watch TV (and most people did), but you had the internet also.
The insidious achievement of the Facebooks and TikToks of the world is to make things smooth enough and make participation widespread enough that nowadays its harder to not participate, somehow, in some facet of online interaction, than it is to participate. By doing that they created a flood of junky stuff, and now AI has come along to amplify that approach many times.
This means that now, what the nerds are trying to do is not to add, but to subtract. In the old web, you went to the web to get something you couldn't get from traditional media or communications. But now, if a "new old web" is created, it will largely be to not get things you are effectively being forced to get from the flood of social media and AI content. That doesn't mean it can't be done, and in a way I hope it is done, but it means it's going to have to be qualitatively different. Before, the walls kept you in and you hopped over to get out, but now we're all out in the wilderness, and if people build walls, it will be to keep the wild world out and keep yourself safe inside.
As far as I remember, huge portion of the "old web" web was self-curated list of human-to-human channels: be it blogs, BBs, rss, news/usenet, heck even irc, or whatever personal oddities. I will never forgive Google for killing Reader to promote g+.
The facebooks of today make it effectively impossible to self-curate attention. Social media is the publishers early internauts tried to get away from.
I disagree with your last paragraph, though. The "old web" was a small walled garden. The "post slop" web is going to be very similar small walled garden, that is chased to get away from uninspiring everyday.
Here's a free idea for anyone hoping to launch anything like this: implement a MLM style transitive web of trust. The forum is invite-only. x strikes - you are out, but the strikes on invitees transitively decay over the invitation chain. If you invite someone who then invites all the normies who get striked out - eventually that strikes you out too. Invite yourself to shitpost - eventually you will get punished for that. Yes, it's bad as it can exacerbate bubbles as much as the current facebooks do. Simple updoot mechanism suffers from brigading, but something can be worked out.
No dooting. Let it be simple chronological, or unread first. Dooting creates an echo chamber because the most dooted thing is the most viewed thing so it gets more doots.
Dooting does not have to be contribution ranking mechanism, it can be contributor ranking mechanism, which is a bit less likely to succumb to bubbling. Otherwise, yes, dooting is one of the core pillars of facebookization.
Your misjudgement comes from not seeing the economic incentive here. The web as a surveillance mechanism is just way too juicy to let go. As of now, pretty much all economies depend on it, just from an economic numbers calculation.
Mind you, 200 years later, we still live in cities built for cars, not people. Rockefeller, Shell, BP and the like are still not dead, and still use everything they got to not go extinct while corrupting every politician that will accept their money. Just for a couple more years at a time, and a couple more, and a couple more...while destroying our planet like a cancer.
In 200 years we'll still have the web built for surveillance capitalism, not people.
There is no old web to go back to. Meanwhile state surveillance depends on its existence. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, three letter agencies, Palantir, and now the AI companies depend on it, and they're selling to nation states at a time. Again, it's just too juicy not to.
Back then we called them trusts, but now those big tech companies are seemingly worth more than actual countries. That's too much power without legislation, as they can effectively abandon the rule of law. Remember what happened with the Enron scandal? That was about billions, not trillions.
If we want a human web again, we need to build a new one, with privacy and secrecy first and not as an afterthought. No CA, and with mutual cryptography that acts like both a ledger and as a privacy shield for the users. No cookies, no tracking, no degenerate google controlling it all through owning the source code.
"Things used to be so good" is mostly rose-tinted glasses: What exactly WAS the "old web" anyway?
100s of half-baked sites hosted on Geocities, Yahoo, about pointless stuff? Epilepsy simulator websites splattered with gif-vomit? Everyone and their grandmother asking you to install their 10 toolbars?
Honest, serious question: What actually was of objective substance on the old internet that's nowhere to be found now?
You can find random pointless stuff now too, just that except Geocities/Yahoo it's Intsagram/TikTok/Twitter etc.
If you mean self-hosted websites, they're still here, and nothing's stopping you from creating your own.
If you loved all the Flash toons on Newgrounds etc there's unironically a lot more shorts and animations on YouTube or even Vimeo now, if you but search for them (the old gods like Weebl, David Firth are still there, and I suggest Sechi, DoodletmeGo, Nondescript Video Club, and からめる to start with then let the algorithm soak up the weirdness)
Just as the "internet" supplanted newspapers, magazines, and broadcast television for many people,
and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them,
why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium?
There's so much crap on the "old" and "middle age" internet: ads, scams, anal mods, trolls, bandwagons, vote wars, low-effort content and other repetitive noise that could be bypassed by just asking AI about something and make better use of your limited mortal lifetime, like watching that anime you've been putting off for years.
The old web was local forum created by gamers for gamers who hosted real life events. You could post asking for super specific advice to your locale. It was eaten by reddit.
There were cool IRC servers for all sorts of niche projects and topics. This still exists of course but a lot of it was eaten by Discord or Slack.
While I never participated, sites like LiveJournal provided both a unique outlet and view into other people's lives. I think a lot of social media like Instagram and Facebook eat this up.
I'm sure everyone has their own versions. And this is the old web that was gobbled up by mega sites which aim to commericalise the crap out of everything.
Oh my gosh I loved Diaryland, and how you could customize your shit with some simple HTML, but I think they went through enshittification while they were still around anyway
But..what says something like Diaryland can't be brought back now?
Did they? I think it was LiveJournal that enshittified. Diaryland is actually still around. I just checked it out and it now "Diaryland v2!" I actually last checked it out in the past year and it still looked exactly like it did back then!
Well there you go: The "old web" is still here or can be, but most of the people complaining about the "new web" don't really care about it anymore, they just pretend to
The best way I can explain it is that the old web was like going to thousands of individual boutiques, and the new web is like going to a dozen or so big supermarkets. Even if the boutiques were sometimes bad, at least they were unique and you could feel there was a real person behind each of them. The supermarkets sell everything, but they feel sterile and bland.
Yes you can still find roughly all the same stuff. No it's not the same.
You can still buy a domain name, host your website somewhere, and tell people about it, no?
When was the last time you actually visited any of the Old Web websites? I just found that Diaryland and Halfbakery are still around, over 20 years old, but it's been years since I visited them
Even though there was a lot of forced enshittification, the tech did not really force people to change: it's that fewer people feel the need to be the way they used to be.
Newer websites are filtered through what is acceptable from a corporate lens.
The old web culture can't exist because advertisers won't let it exist on modern platforms.
Additionally the spread of information is significantly less organic because of relentless pushes to use algorithmic feeds along with far worse distractions from content than there used to be.
I think it is a case of, it is easier to find those niches nowadays but when you do it is a more shallow and controlled version of said thing.
On the old web, you would just stumble onto something deep but the barrier to get to it was fairly high. It could also just be total nonsense but at least you could see the passion behind it.
I agree with your general take. People talk about the old web as 'the good old days' but it really wasn't that great. I do have some fond memories of the mid 2000's when it was all starting to mature but also before corporate capture took hold. Even then, you would just end up stumbling around blindly most of the time.
Niches nowdays are far deeper and more vibrant than they were 20 years ago. Instead of 1 guys website or 1 fourm with 30 users you now have many discord servers with 1000s of users talking in real time, youtube channels putting out videos and making money, reddit/lemmy aggregating content, the community interacting in real time and building what it needs.
And they have to self censor so they don't get banned off those platforms.
There are so many piracy discords where you can't ask how to pirate something because that's against discord rules. I mean really? Why are you using it then?
Most niches dont have to self censor. Even the ones that do still have no trouble communicating their message. I follow a lot of military channels and they post uncensored versions of their videos off yt but there is little reason to go because seeing the gore is not why im watching the video. I still get the entire value of the video from youtube even though you might argue its self censoring.
There's a lot of people who want to talk about things like Gaza or Luigi Mangione more, but can't because of platform rules. The new web has been successful at changing society at large by preventing discussion of these things. Even here on HN I have to be careful how I describe this effect, because an account that is flagged a few times in quick succession is automatically rate-limited, which is effectively a ban.
Edit: it's not just about a niche being forced to censor, it's also about everyone being forced to censor talk about that niche. In a video games discord you couldn't talk about piracy, no matter what the owner thinks about piracy, he'd be forced to ban you for talking about piracy or else he would be banned.
Pre-Google, specifically, pre-PageRank, and even more specifically, pre-SEO.
Your post is oddly hyper-focused on pointing out the negatives, probably due to the asshole hat you put on. There were lots of good sites with tons of good, free information, and because the main way people searched was using directories, we weren't inundated with 1,000s of results on the same topic, vying for a top-placement. The writing itself was much more laid back because SEO-optimization didn't exist. Also, those "half-baked GeoCities sites" were awesome! Of course there were a lot of junk ones, but again, it was just a bunch of people writing about themselves, their interests, and generally being creative. And again, NO ONE WAS TRYING TO MAKE MONEY, they were just doing it. No "like and subscribe." No gaming an algorithm. I used to love finding guitar tabs on those sites and I had a couple of sites with lots of tabs I did on my own for two different bands.
> There's so much crap on the "old" and "middle age" internet: ads, scams, anal mods, trolls, low-effort content, that could be bypassed by just asking AI about something and make better use of your limited mortal lifetime.
I feel like this was GP's point, no? Because people are just using AI for search now (this is the main reason I use it) that there will be no point in making these spamming sites anymore, which "opens up" the internet a bit for those of us who enjoyed the old way. Yes, it's all still out there, but it's kind of hard to find, and it would be kinda neat if more people discovered making their websites outside of walled gardens.
> Because people are just using AI for search now (this is the main reason I use it) that there will be no point in making these spamming sites anymore
Or: because people are just using AI for search now, the only websites left will be spamming sites trying to rank in/influence AI results.
Think about it: if human traffic is no longer optimized for, and the entire focus was catering to bot traffic, how amazing are you imagining that those bot-optimized sites will be?
> Your post is oddly hyper-focused on pointing out the negatives
because people are hyper-focused on the negatives of the "current" web, or acting like the sites they used to love can't be recreated anymore..
> it was just a bunch of people writing about themselves, their interests, and generally being creative.
There still are. on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, 5ch and other Japanese subcommunities.. the fact that they're all "silo'ed" into these less-than-benign corpoctopuses is another matter, but people are still people'ing
> because people are hyper-focused on the negatives of the "current" web, or acting like the sites they used to love can't be recreated anymore..
Fair!
> There still are. on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, 5ch and other Japanese subcommunities.. the fact that they're all "silo'ed" into these less-than-benign corpoctopuses is another matter, but people are still people'ing
I know there are, but as per my comment, it's just harder to find and you used to almost not be able to avoid it. I don't think platforms like YouTube and Instagram are great examples due to the monotization... everyone is trying to "make it." But ya, I mean, I do know it's out there. But I think the whole point wasn't that this stuff doesn't still exist, just that maybe it will become the more prevalent thing again. At least that's how I read GP's comment. But who knows.
it's not "another thing", it means that your community forum lives on reddit (or whoever's) sufferance, and is subject to some corporation's capricious and arbitrary whims.
Basically: "everyone has a different idea about what the Old Web™ was depending on when they first started using the internet, and when the community they liked was discontinued or changed"
that's a good comment for sure, but it doesn't address what I was talking about - specifically, in the "old internet" it was a lot commoner for a community to own its online spaces, usually by virtue of having one or two technically minded members who volunteered to run the infrastructure, and thanks to a lot of the required software being open source. sure, it's nice that anyone can just create a subreddit or facebook group now with no technical knowledge required, but there are definite ways in which living in someone else's space shapes your experience for the worse.
Ya know a while back I intentionally locked myself out of my HN account so I'd stop egnaging with the drivel. But you have such a delightfully awful take I had to respond. I can't tell if you're trying to gaslight folks, you're too young to have used the "old internet", or if you're just a true believer but here goes.
Honest, serious question: What actually was of objective substance on the old internet that's nowhere to be found now?
Ah yes the time honored tradition of JAQing off. What's missing? Fast load times. Everyone's hiding behind anti-bot crap now. Either because AI DDoS bots are making hosting unbearably expensive or because folks don't want their content being poorly repackaged for a profit. So now you have to go through some nonsense proof-of-life crap that takes a few seconds before you can even start to load the content. Anonymity. Used to be you could browse sites without having to log in. But in an attempt to thwart greedy AI companies all sorts of public sites like Reddit, Github, and Youtube require you to log in before doing much of anything. Accurate search results. I've yet to see Google or DDG return a remotely relevant AI response and actual search results are absolute garbage now. DDG in particular is putting drek like "DeepWiki" at the top of its results.
If you mean self-hosted websites, they're still here, and nothing's stopped you from creating your own.
Except now you have to contend with AI DDoS bots which leaves people to either stop putting up small self-hosted sites or put them behind centralized anti-bot protective services.
If you loved all the Flash toons on Newgrounds etc there's unironically a lot more shorts and animations on YouTube now
Except it's all buried underneath an avalanche of AI slop. If it's there you're going to have to put in a ton of effort to find it. For the most part I've stopped searching for things on Youtube and instead check in on known/trusted creators periodically. Discoverability on YT is terrible these days.
Honestly I loved having domain specific forums that weren't beholden to a unified shareholder friendly content policy. Now they've been supplanted by a Reddit that's trying desperately to monetize content.
why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium?
AI makes things less accessible because it centralizes power and increases the cost of publishing content.
There's so much crap on the "old" and "middle age" internet: ads, scams, anal mods, trolls, low-effort content, that could be bypassed by just asking AI about something and make better use of your limited mortal lifetime.
Anal mods is oddly specific, if you don't like butt stuff you could theoretically just ignore it. But okay. My time is better spent reading and understanding than waiting for some anti-bot crap to finish before I pick through largely irrelevant AI slop masquerading as an accurate summary.
Those scams and that "crap" largely still exist on the "new" internet. Only now you're going to have to prove you're a human to view them. Where things have evolved is that instead of human written SEO drivel you've now got AI generated SEO drivel. It's to the point that I have to add "-deepwiki -ai" to pretty much every DDG search.
The problem is that AI companies are going full scorched earth. AI provides dog shit answers while ruining traditional search results. Or if you'd like a physical example they're physically destroying rare books to come up with poor, largely irrelevant AI drivel for the masses.
I'd define it as the web until the time that Facebook truly took off and conquered the hearts and minds of so many (that was the first huge shot in the losing war of the old web). For example, a key part of the old web was what used to be called the "blogosphere", and the blog's height was those final years before FB (in the ascendancy) and the first years of the FB era (descendancy).
For me the new web came about when if you wanted a website, you hired a web developer. As soon as it become DIY, without your own domain and didn't involve looking at HTML, the new web was born.
Today, if you own your own domain and fiddle with HTML then basically you're still part of the old web.
So basically, the old web required experts to help people get online, the new web negated them through homogenization.
The real experts from the old web basically became startup founders to monetize the homogenization and automation of their worldviews for the less tech-savvy (or specialized) folks.
People pine for the old web, but it was a churning, friggin' mess too. Search results were good though, but only when Google arrived. The standardization and ease-of-use from the new web has been a massive boon. I think things will change as people yearn for a wild-west, where there are new opportunities. The promise of a better life, seeing that the grass is greener, avoiding pain - those things always create golden ages.
Once AI favours people who can afford to pay for the best results.. or surveillance becomes too burdensome or dangerous, then watch this space.
The spirit of freedom always runs into trouble, when considering the notion of:
"Cut off the heads of others to make oneself appear taller."
Surveillance enables this. Decentralize again, but how?
ISPs - help or hindrance? Why/how can ISP charges be diverted to content creators?
I agree with you. When I was a freshman, the school paper assigned me to cover a professor talking about the blogosphere. That was a year before Facebook released its newsfeed. My story did not age well.
Yeah, I'd say "old web" is early '90s up through about mid-2000s or so. Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, lots of standalone web forums, the early blogosphere, no social media, etc.
It's time for trust busters to mandate the gardens have open standards based authentication-less protocols for scraping and viewing the content behind their walls. If that bankrupts them then so what? That's what they get for being web-destroying walled gardens!
‘09-‘14 is hilariously not the “old web.” With that said, those of us who participated in what I consider the “old web” are likely “old” now, so… shrug?
Two of my favorite sites [0][1] still online—Lurkers Guide to Babylon 5 and ex-astris-scientia—were started in ‘92 and ‘98 respectively.
Yeah, I took a shortcut by just grabbing the copyright on page, but Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 has a slightly more storied history than being a www site. It started on Usenet before the pilot even aired iirc. I assume the ‘92 date encompasses the early content that evolved into the site it became.
With that said, its domain has changed a few times iirc… so maybe not the best example given the nature of the article.
I've just gotten used to this at this point. My first time on the web was somewhere around 1995 I think, although my first time on the Internet was earlier (it was a proxy through some ancient BBS and I'm pretty sure it was using gopher). Even though I was just a kid back then, clearly that makes me old now.
My first grandchild was born in 2000. And the COBOL panic for Y2K is probably partly my fault because 4 characters were too computational expensive when I wrote code that probably still powers your Igloo ice containers and GEICO insurance policies. 80's tech still persists!
Ha, people who didn't live it will have a hard time believing AJAX was as strong a buzzword as AI is today. Crazy to think asynchronous requests were peak innovation at the time
I'd consider the facebook and mega era to be relatively new, the "old web" for me would be the one without centralization around a few giants, the era of random phpbb forums, private websites with "this site is under construction" banners and internet directories to find stuff.
Oh good golly miss molly. I had my first email address at an .edu in 1980, first website in my own real name since 1993. the 2000's are just new kids on the block
I'm not sure I miss the web as it was but miss the feeling of it all being novel and exciting. You can still get glimpses of it nowadays but it isn't often.
I remember the naive implication/expectation that a URL would be permanent. That once a file is identified by its URL, you could bookmark it and it would always be there. And absolute worst case, if someone really, really, really had to change a file's URL, they would politely return 301 Moved Permanently, and feel very bad about it.
Now people don't give a shit about URLs. Webmasters casually move files around all the time because they feel like it, and if links get broken, who cares, that's the referring site's problem! Their beautiful file hierarchy is more important than the web staying connected!
Yep, it's Murphy's law of online content. Anything you want to reference later will be gone, with no archive copies. Anything you want deleted will be available forever.
Interesting blog post comparing the culture and incentives of CEOs in different countries? Completely gone, tried to search it up multiple times to no avail. It's barely 3 years old.
That random 20 year old video of some middle schoolers doing a flying kick and breaking a vending machine? Yeah, just popped up on my feed yesterday.
It seemed reasonable, because keeping things up on the internet was becoming cheaper. We failed to see that capitalism would even demand payment for such trivial things.
What I find really interesting is that people can heavily disagree what and when the old internet was. It may have ended anywhere from 1989 to 2023, brought by the introduction of the www, mass accessibility, social media, or Ai.
For me, this doesn't indicate that those young folks don't know what they are talking about. Rather, that missing the "old web" is more a cultural thing in itself. We got introduced to the web and discovered these communities we became part of, but something changed and our community died.
There had to be a cutoff that changed something! That killed our community. In reality the change, destruction of communities happened all the time. Some survived, some changed that returning to them wouldn't feel the same, some moved. If you don't feel part of that community anymore, it is destroyed, even if someone else thinks it is still alive and just moved to new-forum/teanspeak3/dig/reddit/discord/tumblr/facebook/tiktok/next thing.
The small Ultima online private server I used to be part of died, because a few people moved on with life, even though it was still there for a long time. Not because of WoW. My WoW guild suffered the same fate, despite Wow still being there. Now the few people I became close friends with are still left, wearing the guild name as a server name on discord, but that's a very different community.
Even if the exact people suddenly came back, it wouldn't be my community anymore.
My old web can't come back, because it is not a matter of technology.
I am sure the people that join the web today will lament the death of the old web of today in a decade.
The plot features two American men who stumble upon Brigadoon, a mysterious Scottish village that appears for only one day every 100 years; one man soon falls in love with a young woman from Brigadoon. The show's song "Almost Like Being in Love" subsequently became a standard.
The interesting number here isn't 76.7% dead, it's that 23.3% alive is an upper bound. A server answering HTTP doesn't mean the thing somebody shared in 2011 still exists
Am I getting old? 09-14 is not even close to the old web for me. The old web, to me, was back when people still published physical 'phone' books for websites.
The old web doesn't necessarily mean the oldest web. 12-17 years ago was very much an older fairly different era of the web that's worth analyzing even if it's on the younger side of the old web. I can definitively sympathize with your reaction though, it doesn't feel like that era was that long ago yet.
I vaguely recall those, but they were more for normies trying to get online. For me the old web is what I saw when I logged into my university gopher server and saw the advertisement for something called the World Wide Web which I could browse via lynx. Soon enough I got a PPP connection and then Mosaic/Netscape 1.0. However everything after javascript shipped (let alone CSS) is new new new. I'd almost go as far as saying if it doesn't have a tilde in the URL it's not old web... almost...
Correct. Don't get me started on Fidonet, as a young computer nerd in the 80s before even dial-up internet was available, that was a portal to the global internet that my adolescent shit-posting self definitely didn't deserve.
Old web was more vulnerable because people didn't know many things. Nowadays, everyone is using AI, and you often don't know whether the person you're talking to is a human or an AI. For a normal, non-technical user, the internet is no longer a completely safe place.
Websites always have been shopping windows. They change with the seasons, they come and go. The idea that websites are forever and archived like newspapers might be laudable, but it really applies only to… online newspapers.
The ENTIRE thing is AI generated. I'm not talking about the article. I'm talking about the entire website, the entire "product". https://0.mk/blog/zero-humans
Also it's super easy to tell by looking at it, way too many LLM-isms. No need for a AI checker tool.
> The name was registered in 2009 because it was the shortest URL possible: a zero, a dot, two letters. Seventeen years later the zero means something else.
Did the zero ever mean anything? It's still a 3 character domain regardless if the first character is a zero.
Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web.
I am not saying old content needs to be preserved forever, but so much content has factually been lost over time. Old logs from text-based MUDs for instance, even for MUDs that still exist today.
It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving.
We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing.
Archive.org had incredible foresight and if it didn't already exist, I'd call such a project a pipe dream.
Even Archive.org is rather limited in what it keeps. I know of a very large site that recently disappeared. archive only has part of the web html part of the site. Everything else is either gone or non accessible.
Most of the time it isnt mine either. But here and there there will be large swaths of some site that are just not archived. At one point if someone put up a robots text file history would just vanish. Have not checked lately if that still holds. But one company I worked for was just 'gone'. Because a webpage squatter put up a robots.txt.
There needs to be some kind of "murphy's law" for this style of comment. "For any comment on the internet where someone points out an issue they've encountered with technology, there will inevitably be a reply from someone else sharing that they haven't personally experienced it."
...and I had fun replacing images people directly linked from my server with less-- ahem-- savory images.
I enjoyed the emails I got from a couple people who were adamant I "hacked" their site because their "web developer" linked to images on my server... images that now said stuff like "I'm a loser bandwidth thief!", etc. (I never did use really nasty "shock" images-- just taunting stuff.)
> It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving.
This is a bit idealized. In practice copying data is not quite accurate (especially in bulk) and bit-rot is a very real phenomenon, both in flight and in storage.
You sometimes encounter it when dealing with files from the early '00s, it's very common to discover a few of them are corrupt, even if they've only ever been copied between harddrives.
Content-addressed storage and error correcting codes mean that one can make bitrot astronomically unlikely with honestly minimal infra investment.
It's copyright that causes anything to disappear from the web IMO -- torrents never die.
EDIT: I am aware that unseeded torrents do in fact die. But it really doesn't take much to seed a whole hard drive's worth of rarely requested data -- this also detects bitrot and so corrects errors automatically if you're not the only copy.
If you are, there's ECC, as well as making another copy.
There are mitigations in both software and hardware, but most consumer machines, by default, do almost none of that. No ECC RAM, no error correction in the filesystem.
There are many TinyMUD logs that were posted on Usenet, still to be found on Google Groups.
However, logging was controversial amongst mudders. It was almost always rude to log a private conversation without knowledge or consent; it was tacky to indiscriminately log while everyone was in the "hangout room" or Rec Room, as it were, and it was also bad form to post logs to Usenet or share them without redacting player names and other things.
But logging was built-in to most clients, and it was possible for server administrators to log (and hypothetically any malware-in-the-middle could log the cleartext, unencrypted TinyMUD TCP streams.) And many nefarious deeds by nasty players were exposed to the light when their logs were posted.
The technology is still in its infancy unfortunately, so there's no way the web could have been based on it, but I think content-addressing is the long-term play. If I click a link, there are some cases where I want the server to respond with a fresh response just for me (e.g. a website showing the weather). But often I just want whatever content was linked to (e.g. a webpage explaining a math content). In the latter case, it would be nice if the link had a hash of the content in it, and 3rd parties could host copies to keep the link working even if the original operator stopped existing.
But who would? Anyone can run an archive.org style site but it takes a lot of work and money, so hardly anyone does. Not even Google does that anymore.
It's pretty difficult to avoid without very significant tradeoffs, though. The closest is content-addressable peer-to-peer networks, but these still rely on someone keeping the information around, and they struggle to scale anywhere near as much.
> Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web.
Let me introduce you to the alternatives: print media, film, stone engravings. That stuff tends to get burned and shattered and it takes FOREVER to make copies.
I'm being cheeky but I don't know what design change you could possible make to the web to make webpages not die.
> Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web.
I'd say it's one of the biggest design flaws of the current web, what with more and more content hidden behind paywalls, increasingly restricted WAFs, and rendered client-side via convoluted JavaScript.
Archiving and mirroring of old-style websites, delivered as static HTML, is simple and straightforward. 20 years from now, most web content from ~1996 to ~2015 will still be accessible, but much of today's web content probably won't.
The blog mentions "0.mk's revenue did not cover hosting" but then goes on to implement expensive AI integration. Not counting cost for tokens to do the development.
Also:
> Reply to any 0.mk email and the message lands in a feedback queue the AI reads, triages, and acts on
Is this dangerous? What about jailbreaking AIs and having it delete everyone's account?
> The blog mentions "0.mk's revenue did not cover hosting" but then goes on to implement expensive AI integration.
The article doesn't seem to describe the cost of the AI solution. It does imply that it is lower than the cost of maintaining and supporting their service manually.
I found an old database backup of 0.mk on a disk I had kept.
0.mk started in 2009 as a passion project built by three of us. We worked on it for a few hours each week around our regular jobs. We eventually closed it in 2014 because the revenue (hint: no revenue) could not cover hosting, development, and the constant work of fighting spam and reviewing abuse.
The recovered historical corpus contains 657,607 links. For this analysis, we followed every one of them.
Of the 655,178 links with safe, crawlable targets, 76.7% no longer returned a loading page. After removing repeated destinations, 78.7% of the 492,620 distinct crawlable URLs still did not load. So duplicate links are not creating the result.
I use “did not load” rather than “gone” deliberately. Some URLs returned 403 or 429 and may have blocked the crawler. Pages that returned 2xx or 3xx count as loading even when they now lead to parked domains, login walls, or removed-content notices.
There is one large distortion in the yearly data. A single account created 83,398 URLs pointing to one hostname in 2011. At URL level, 92.5% of that year did not load. Count each hostname once and the result becomes 61.7%, almost identical to 2010 and 2012.
A few things I did not expect:
- 835 restored links point at Facebook’s old photo CDN. None loaded.
- The first link ever shortened was a CSS stylesheet on a WordPress blog.
- Someone shortened localhost on the second day.
- The longest stored URL is 38,753 characters and repeatedly says TRYING_THE_MAXIMUM_URL.
Most users came from one regional online community, so this is not a census of the whole web. It is a record of what that community shared between 2009 and 2014.
I brought 0.mk back to test whether AI can now handle enough development, spam filtering, abuse review, monitoring, and support to make the service sustainable where the original economics failed.
Happy to answer questions about the crawl, the old data, or the rebuild.
Intriguingly, the current Republic of North Macedonia (and its neighbors/constituent parts) has undergone a protracted and contentious naming dispute of its own.
The deep web,[1] also known as the invisible web[2] or the hidden web,[3] is the parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard web search-engine programs.[4] This is in contrast to the surface web, which is accessible to anyone using the Internet.[5] Computer scientist Michael K. Bergman is credited with inventing the term in 2001 as a search-indexing term.[6]
Old web was kind of dumb anyway. You can put on the rose tinted glasses and feel elite about browsing some shitty site 20 years ago or enjoy the fruits of modern design.
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