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.
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 don't think the parent meant that it doesn't need moderation, but we've always had that in IRC/boards etc.
But there's nothing akin to personalised algorithms, resharing posts, multimedia content etc. I mean even text formatting is very lean :)
that's absolutely true, it's also the fastest website i use daily, by a large margin
> I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the need for human moderation here
Bingo. As anyone that’s tried to run a Mastodon instance for more than just family and friends will tell you.
Even family can be challenging ...
Agreed… yet I meant "needs" in terms of product features, not maintenance or moderation
The only thing not "old" about it is upvoting, which is one of those YMMV features.
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.
Same but, I think "funny" killed /.
It gradually became a comedy website and at that point I stopped visiting it.
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.
Upvoted your post. Muhahaha!
It has the entire web 2.0 neophillia. Discussions stay for a day or so in focus, then they are gone.
This one is almost gone already.
Were you even here?
I made my account here in 2011, I don't know how it was before.
But I understand the OP was talking about how HN is today.
(Score:3, Insightful)
I love how great this "takedown" is, but also how it'll only be apparent to people over 35 or so.
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.
> I didn't live long enough to see...
Whoa, careful with your verb tenses! You just wrote a ghost story :)
Have seen. Too late to edit it now...
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.
We like that you are still here with us.
> 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).
The tail end of HN hearkens to the good old days of the Sun as it aimlessly courses the void in a pod metaphorical to itself. He'll be fine.
Try "I am not old enough to have seen"
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.
Talking with other humans actually has real world effects.
HN these days is like the tech chat-rooms of old internet.
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.
A simple website controlled by VCs, lol
agreed
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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
> before that there was no non-old web to compare to.
BBS / FidoNet, Usenet, IRC, and MUCKs would like a word!
> 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.
I agree the web-of-trust model is a good idea for the future. Lobsters has something sort of like it in that you can see a tree of who invited who. I don't think it has a fully fleshed-out system for reputation flow on that basis though.
I don't think the old web was really a walled garden, though. It was just a sort of isolated garden that was harder to get to. There was nothing outside it threatening it. Now the garden needs walls because there are a lot of dangerous things outside.
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.
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.
The old web relies on people thinking "I'm going to make a website about X" and following through, not relying on visitors, income, validation, etc.
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.
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.
I think the audience could absolutely shrink back to something resembling the old web. I'm less sure the old web itself comes back
Allow me to switch to asshole mode for a minute:
"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.
For me that's not the old web.
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.
Btw I consider HN part of the old web.
I loved Diaryland since it was fully customizable. It was my intro into templating! It was very crude, but it worked.
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
I guess that's what I was getting at, I think that (as usual) there is more nuance here past "people pretending to care" (which I think is extremely uncharitable, btw).
Back then there was a forcing factor to making your own website. Not just personal sites, but bands, artists, interest groups, etc. Now everyone just uses facebook because (or whatever) because it's easy and everyone is there. Even during the transition was better as myspace allowed you to customize the crap out of it with CSS and, as we were just discussing, DiaryLand gave you full access to do almost whatever you wanted (in the confines of static pages).
It has a LOT to do with billion dollar companies throwing their weight around and influencing politics. Tom never did that shit! (although given time, who knows... he did sell out).
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.
> The old web culture can't exist because advertisers won't let it exist on modern platforms.
Again, what's preventing you from buying a domain name and putting up your own website? bypass the advertisers?
"Not enough people will see it", you say? So you want the reach provided by "modern platforms" but you don't want their rules?
Nice strawman you're attacking. Kinda weird that you're arguing with yourself at this point.
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.
Three. Three big supermarkets.
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.
and that can change again
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.
There is plenty of discussion on Gaza or Luigi. If you find youself being "censored" consider that your views and "solutions" are far outside what is accepted on the platform. On the old web you could also get banned if your views did not align with the platform.
Dont compare wanting a pro terrorism fourm with niche interests its so disingenuous.
> What exactly WAS the "old web" anyway?
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.
> 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.
this comment brings up a good concrete example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293553
This is a better comment on the same page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49296018
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.
> 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?
> ads, scams, anal mods, trolls, low-effort content
and don't forget Big Billy's "no more tears" guarantee on all anal mods purchased from the official BBAM shop!
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I like your quote formatting, I'll steal it. And no, yes I do like butt stuff :)
Seems like most of your whinge is "AI → anti-AI measures → net bad for everyone"
Like guy, as if you didn't notice all the enshittification happening for decades before that. All this AI shit is barely 1-2 years old at most.