
Does anyone remember websites? - dfps
http://tttthis.com/rememberwebsites.php/
======
dogcow
Check out the search engine at [http://wiby.me](http://wiby.me)

From their about page:

 _Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of
your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost.
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists,
academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in.
Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded
everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of
commercial pages. Google isn 't great at finding those gems, its focus is on
finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things
you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no
longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated
scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content
available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier
days of the internet._

~~~
Zhenya
My favorite website: [http://www.otherhand.org/](http://www.otherhand.org/)

And my favorite article on it: [http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-
rescue/the-hun...](http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-
hunt-for-the-death-valley-germans/)

(No association)

~~~
martinpw
That article was a fascinating read. Thank you.

~~~
livatlantis
Ah yes, I remember stumbling into this page when looking for cold-case/solved
mystery stories. I got through all 13 pages in one afternoon! Excellent story
and writing.

------
ambrosite
I do remember those websites. For me, the difference is that now the Web is
much more useful, but back then it was a lot more fun. True, you could
sometimes waste hours following random links hoping to find something good,
but the thrill of discovery when you stumbled across a gold mine of
information was a huge part of the appeal.

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost
anything they want within seconds. That makes the Web on the whole much more
useful, but the thrill of the hunt is gone -- that's what Jakob Nielsen was
referring to all those years ago when he talked about "information scent".

[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-
scent/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/)

~~~
userbinator
_Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost
anything they want within seconds._

Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed
information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search
engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content,
making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at all.

To add insult to injury, if you do try very hard to seek the latter by
carefully repeating similar search queries with slight word tweaks, quotes,
and trying to dig through all the pages of results to see if you've found what
you're looking for, Google will quickly decide that you're a bot and either
give you a CAPTCHA or just ban you for a little while entirely.

~~~
rayiner
Google is not great for finding stuff. I’ve complained at length about how bad
it is for doing research, but recently I’ve also found it’s totally useless
for finding things like reviews of products (unless it’s something like the
new iPhone). It’s like legitimate reviews are a casualty in the war between
Google and clickbait SEO crap.

~~~
JohnBooty
This is true. The only way I can find product buying advice is:

1\. To find a community of enthusiasts and see what they have to say about
products in that space. This works pretty well for products that actually have
enthusiasts.

2\. Go to Amazon and read a product's _bad_ reviews. The good reviews are
nearly useless. But, with bad reviews, you have to weigh the number of bad
reviews against the product's popularity. If something has twelve negative
reviews, that means _very_ different things for a product that sells 10 units
a month versus a product that sells 50K units a month.

3\. Read the tiny handful of reliable product recommendation sites. Cool
Tools, Wirecutter, annnnnnnd.... I'll let you know when I find another one.

~~~
q845712
I bought a subscription to Consumer Reports and have been happy with the two
purchases I made on their recommendation (headphones in the $100 range, and a
new food processor). Do you consider them compromised? It's actually just
about time to renew my subscription and i've been wondering whether I should.

I've also used your strategy of reading the bad reviews on Amazon!

~~~
r00fus
The appliances I bought using their advice has been hit/miss - ranges are
decent but the fridges and dishwasher I bought are noisy and required service
barely outside warranty period. These are big name brands too.

I don't necessarily fault CR but I with the hundreds of models released all
slightly similar but different (I hear partly to prevent price-matching across
stores) it must be as impossible to review for CR as it is for consumers to
keep track of.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I wouldn't count the appliance reliability against CR as this great article
shows appliance industry is doing it on purpose:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909365)

Typical cartel-like, profit-boosting activity of oligopolies which appliance
market seems to be with a handful of companies owning most brands.

------
kaoD
> This article can be discussed on r/TTTThis.

Oh the irony.

The web has changed: in some ways for the worse, and in others for the better.
I remember websites being like a lottery: sometimes you'd hit jackpot but most
of them were "Under construction" GIFs over ugly tiled backgrounds.

There is still ton of content and much more than what I would've dreamt on the
90s. Platforms like Reddit allow _everyone_ , whether they know HTML or not,
to publish their own content and even comment on others'.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter suck, but that's mostly it. I'm very, very grateful
for everything else on modern internet.

This smells like 'memberberries.

~~~
dfps
I didn't put discussion on the page in order to keep it as code-light as
possible. Reddit is a good option for discussion (at the time of writing),
especially considering I didn't want to clutter HN up with a discussion page
for each article (no problem on a subreddit).

I agree with you on the value of reddit and platforms (and I actually value
Facebook-type platforms as well, with the obvious qualifications), but the old
html sites I write about here have a different type of construction, material,
and value.

(- The author)

~~~
kaoD
> the old html sites I write about here have a different type of construction,
> material, and value.

These still exist. They are prettier and more content packed than the 90s ones
you're reminiscing about, and there are many, many more than there used to. I
honestly think you're seeing the early web with rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.

Unless you liked the DIY amateurish hacker feel of it (which I agree has its
value on its own) I think they've changed mostly for the better.

Just to be on the same page: what's exactly that type of construction,
material and value you miss? What did you like of it?

EDIT: After re-reading your original post I think I get your point. It's
just... #RememberWebsites, _of course_ it's nostalgia-fueled! And that was the
point of the post, right? Celebrating it (which I completely misunderstood as
a celebration of websites themselves).

There are still many. Here's one that might fulfill your oldschool needs:
[https://www.justinguitar.com/](https://www.justinguitar.com/)

~~~
wolco
Mobile changed websites into displaying less content. Are we better off?
Scrolling forever vs clicking next page / last page. I think scrolling is
worse if you ever want to find that piece of content again.

~~~
dualogy
For developers, information breadth and quality was excellent when I first
onlined in '98, and has improved by leaps and bounds year by year.

For other stuff, I agree with that OP article, that was a uniquely rich
caleidoscope that got "blandened" (now lost/gone/fully-transitioned) as the
types of folks who'd craft such little labour-of-love sites mostly did so for
lack of easier / more-convenient options that soon popped up first with prefab
forums and prefab Wordpress / Blogger, then Tumblr/Medium/social-media.

------
themodelplumber
This is pretty harsh critique. I first got on the web in 1992 and what we have
now is a paradise compared to what we had then. Sure, you may have to look
with intent for what you want, but freely coasting around the web has always
carried liabilities. It used to be "you'll find lots of junk" and the junk has
simply diversified since then.

I also noticed the author doesn't even use a single hyperlink in his own
article. Be the change you want to see.

I was just checking out Project Rho. Before that I was building a link page of
my own because I'm getting into ham radio. The old web we love is still here
and it'll always be around in some form.

~~~
outsidetheparty
> what we have now is a paradise compared to what we had then

Here's how I recall it:

Back in the day, you'd search for subject {$foo} and you would find mostly
websites written by some cranky bearded weirdo who is obsessed with {$foo},
who has devoted weeks of his time to personally collating his every thought
about {$foo} into one ghastly-looking site.

Nowadays, you search for {$foo} and find mostly beautifully template-designed
pages of text written by indifferent fiverr freelancers who had about 20
minutes to stuff in as many keywords into as many column inches wrapped around
as many ad slots as possible before moving on to the next subject.

I know which one I prefer.

(I may exaggerate. But only slightly.)

~~~
always_good
> Nowadays, you search for {$foo} and find mostly beautifully template-
> designed pages of text written by indifferent fiverr freelancers who had
> about 20 minutes to stuff in as many keywords into as many column inches
> wrapped around as many ad slots as possible before moving on to the next
> subject.

Yeesh, does anyone else have this opinion?

I sure don't. It's never been more trivial to find good, enriching content.

How many of these posts are just HNers getting more crotchety in their old
age? Sometimes it just seems like a pissing contest for who can be most
cynical. ;)

~~~
outsidetheparty
> more crotchety in their old age

I will willingly cop to this. But seriously, genuinely yes, the internet is
full of a lot more content-free clickbait than it used to be. Because
clickbait didn't used to be a thing that existed.

------
jancsika
I've never been particularly nostalgic for websites.

I'm _slightly_ nostalgic for shared Windows folders on LANs at college dorms.
I remember seeing the first South Park short from such a folder as it was
going viral.

I'm _extremely_ nostalgic for the original Napster. I don't ever remember
searching for a piece of music and coming up short. And I remember it being a
very sudden shift-- one month you're making a mental note to search for a CD
you misplaced somewhere back home, the next month you're getting on Napster to
check if the theme to Ghostbuster's 2 has lyrics that recount the plot of the
movie. It does.

A few weeks ago I typed "Battlestar Galactica" into Netflix, and guess what?
It showed me lots and lots of results, _none of which were Battlestar
Galactica_. And this isn't your run of the mill entitlement of a fool addicted
to his Iphone apps. That is entitlement of a person yearning for modern
functionality to match a shitty piece of software that saw its last stable
release _15 years ago_.

I'm having a hard time finding any numbers for the actual amount of music that
was available on the original Napster at the time. Can anyone put some hard
data to my rose colored glasses?

~~~
tomduncalf
Check out Soulseek, it is very similar to how I remember the original Napster.
Lots of obscure rarities on there music-wise, I've not tried it for anything
else.

The one P2P thing I am nostalgic for is Audio Galaxy - it had an awesome
system where it they indexed everyone's content on their website, so you could
see every file that had ever been on the network and add it to your "want
list", then when that person came online, it would start downloading. To be
fair "wish list searches" in Soulseek serve a similar purpose, but I loved
that ability to browse every file that had ever been online!

~~~
sixstringtheory
Soulseek is incredible, discovered all sorts of smaller-time musicians that
never wouldve been sold at the Best Buy in the suburban wasteland of my youth.

I can’t believe it’s under active maintenance after all these years!

------
schnevets
10 years from now, we'll be waxing nostalgia about entrepreneurs who made a
living off Instagram, Amazon, WordPress, and other platforms. 'There was a kid
who used to "rate dogs" and he was hilarious! And he did it for free without
any corporate backing! Made a killing on T-Shirts and stuff as well!'

------
tonyarkles
Last night I ended up, for some weird nostalgic reason, installing a Gopher
client, just to see if there was anything still around. Amazingly, there's a
bunch of blogs (called phlogs in Gopherspace) that people are updating
regularly! Pretty amazing!

~~~
tree_of_item
How did you find these Gopher sites? Is there a Gopher search engine, or is it
just a hand-updated list?

~~~
dogcow
Gopher is a great protocol. I never really used it back in its heyday; I'm not
sure I knew it existed at the time (I didn't really get "real" Internet access
until 1995 or so). I recently discovered it after having similar sentiments as
the author of this article concerning the state of the WWW.

After you get your Gopher client set up (lynx in the terminal works great), a
good starting point is gopher://sdf.org

There are many active "phlogs" published on SDF.org; there is also an
aggregator that tracks some 20-odd phlogs at:
gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/bongusta (though it seems to be down at the time of
this posting).

The "Gopherspace" is a refreshing wormhole -- with a surprising amount of
present-day activity -- into the Internet of yesteryear. I highly recommend
checking it out and perhaps publishing your own content on Gopher if you're
tired of the dumpster fire that is the WWW.

~~~
fasquoika
On gopher://sdf.org:

"Many people think the http protocol deprecated gopher, but that just isn't
true. Where do you think gophers live? underground"

Edit: more gold

"After dumping linux and x86 in favour of return to real computers, we have
not had any major security issues"

------
fiala__
> Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique.

Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with
various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised
proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by
making it more usable and accessible.

I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by
`<marquee>`s, poorly-laid out flashing gifs and bright yellow text on a white
background.

~~~
Latty
I saw a lot of people trying to avoid HTML in their websites in the past.

The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an
entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and
links worked weirdly.

That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each
page.

~~~
fiala__
Oh yes, totally forgot about flash and `<map>`s – but one could argue even
those were originally designed to solve the problems of 'vanilla' HTML. They
of course failed and HTML kind of prevailed, but only by being coupled with a
massive set of APIs on the Web Platform. If it wasn't for those JS APIs, we
might be stuck with Flash forever.

------
qznc
They are still out there. Probably even more than ever. You just don't find
them because the SEO-sites drain away all traffic.

I believe my own site would qualify?
[http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/)

~~~
sgt
That would be interesting - a search engine that was resistant to most SEO
techniques and allowed one to find these types of sites. Would be a great
alternative to Google sometimes.

~~~
taftster
The only search engine that is resistant to SEO is one that doesn't have
enough traffic for any SEO to matter. If it's popular, it will be gamed.

------
clydethefrog
See also the analysis (from 2015) of an Iranian blogger who got arrested in
2008 and got free in 2015 - he did not recognize the new web. (Ironically also
posted on Medium...) According to him, hyperlinks turned into a social media
stream.

[https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-
save-2eb1fe15a4...](https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-
save-2eb1fe15a426)

~~~
username223
After blocking all the JavaScript and hiding the position=fixed garbage, that
was an interesting article.

> So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out
> Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad.
> No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it.

I write a blog, and publish links to posts on Facebook because doing so costs
me nothing. It also gets me next to nothing. People click on those links about
as often as Facebook asks me for my credit card to "boost" them.

~~~
gboudrias
> hiding the position=fixed garbage

Oh wow, I literally never want this behavior! Do you have a generic trick?
"Inspect element" is tedious.

~~~
mabcat
I have a "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet to do that job, as the first thing on my
bookmarks toolbar. I'm clicking that thing all the time, it works great. So
long stupid sliding navbars, enter-your-email popups, fixed video autoplayers,
etc. I think I got it from here: [https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-
headers/](https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/)

------
pers0n
Another thing is people often just go to Wikipedia, Wikipedia replaced the
need for many fan sites. I had things copied from my sites and put on
Wikipedia and tired to get a link back or a source mentioned and it was
removed each time. So I lost motivation to even update fan sites, since
whatever I type is going to get pasted onto Wikipedia with no link back.

~~~
cheschire
And wikia. That replaced much of the need for fictional fan sites. I visit
memory alpha weekly.

~~~
djur
Unfortunately, Wikia looks like it's in the process of becoming a cautionary
tale, with its recent move to start injecting its own video content into
certain high-traffic wikis and a general decline in customizability and
independence.

~~~
CM30
Wikia seems to be gradually being replaced by self hosted wikis, at least
where larger fandoms are concerned. The Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance
(Mario Wiki, Zelda Wiki, Bulbapedia, etc) are one example, the Square Enix
Wiki Alliance are another, and I'm sure the likes of the Simpsons Wiki have
moved away from the service as well.

~~~
Hedja
Zelda Wiki is hosted on Gamepedia. It's like Wikia but specifically for Video
Games and less obstrusive.

~~~
CM30
Well it used to be self hosted. Not sure I like the move much, feels like
they're betraying the organisation they're supposedly part of.

------
Illniyar
"it was largely a collection of websites made by people who were interested in
some subject enough to write about it and put it online. "

Oh,you mean like blogs?

Seriously, this sounds like being nostalgic for it's own sake. I fail to see
how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the
cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a
good idea - now everyone can have their own website.

I really don't miss the "glorious 90's" type of websites - with the thousand
of animated images, weird background images and marquee everywhere. Sure it
made every site unique - every site was terrible to the eyes in it's own
special way.

Also the idea that all sites now look the same is quite preposterous - sure a
lot of sites are cookiecutter websites - especially marketing websites, but
there are tons of unique designs - especially for blogs and personal websites.

~~~
fphilipe
> Oh,you mean like blogs?

Yes, but before they all looked the same and were hosted on the same platform.

I miss the days where you would encounter a blog filled with great content and
with a unique look and feel. It's as if it almost burned in in my memory. I
still remember how the website looked of some great articles that resonated
with me.

That's one of the reasons I dislike Medium et al.

~~~
Illniyar
I don't think it matters where they are hosted, but I think it's disingenuous
to say that all blogs look the same.

Sure everything on medium looks the same, but there are many many blogs not on
medium.

Here, just after a simple search, a list of personal websites/blogs that look
nothing alike:

[https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-35-best-personal-
websites...](https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-35-best-personal-websites-
weve-ever-seen)

------
disconnected
> Does anyone remember when you they stumbled on a new website written by some
> guy and read his first article, then clicked back to his homepage and saw he
> had a list of similar articles that looked like they'd be just as
> interesting.

Or, more likely, you clicked "back" on the "navigation bar" and it would 404
because the author messed up the links, since it was all hand crafted HTML.

Funny stuff aside, there are still loads of "websites" out there. If I
understand the criteria here, we are looking for mostly hand crafted pages
maintained by individuals (or small groups) that have interesting content.
Something, should I say, very "web 1.0"?

Here's a good one. Make sure to check the GUI Gallery section:

[http://toastytech.com](http://toastytech.com)

User Friendly is always hilarious (unfortunately, updates stopped ages ago,
but going through the archive is sill fun):

[http://www.userfriendly.org/](http://www.userfriendly.org/)

And here's something random, the best page in the universe:

[http://maddox.xmission.com/](http://maddox.xmission.com/)

Like I said, there are TONS of these out there. You just have to, you know,
look for them.

~~~
Jaruzel
We need a good search index of these and all the other sites likes them.
Something that deliberately doesn't include pages from bigger sites or sites
full of cruft.

~~~
discreditable
It could probably be easily accomplished by filtering out sites that use JS
libraries like jquery, etc.

~~~
fenwick67
"best viewed with" followed by your query (ex: "best viewed with" dragons)
gets you lots of great old results in a regular search engine. It will grab
any sites that said "best viewed with truetype fonts", "best viewed with
Netscape" et cetera from the internet's heyday.

------
adrianratnapala
It's clever of the author to use "website" in this more specific sense.
Technically a "website" roughly means anything served as HTML over HTTP. But
all us fogeys know what his title meant anyway.

But I still think he protests too much. The style subject-oriented websites
which the author is referring to evolved slightly and got the new name
"blogs". The blogosphere might not be as popular as social networking, but it
is still huger than the web of the '90s.

~~~
gfodor
Eh, I don't think blogs are really that equivalent to old school websites.
Blog, being short for "web log" implies a temporal-based feed of posts. Old
school sites were often much more varied, webs of pages broken up by subject
or topic with links scattered everywhere to the rest of the web.

------
p4bl0
This is why I really love initiatives such as
[https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/) :). I don't have a use for it
myself as I have my own servers, but I'm glad this kind of service exists!

------
ggambetta
> Does anyone remember websites? These might be unfamiliar to anyone unexposed
> to the internet before 2005 or so [...] it was largely a collection of
> websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write
> about it and put it online.

Does the author mean web rings? I do remember these :)

~~~
dfps
I wasn't exactly talking about webrings, but now I'd like to see one. Can you
link me to one please?

(- the author)

~~~
jacquesm
[http://www.homebrewcpu.com/](http://www.homebrewcpu.com/)

Bottom of the page.

------
dwheeler
I understand the sarcasm, but really, there are a lot of "real" websites,
directly controlled by individuals who post what they want. I point you to my
own website, [https://www.dwheeler.com](https://www.dwheeler.com) .... it's
not the latest in CSS, no Megabytes of JavaScript, and no cross-site tracking
either.

------
minikomi
I've found amateur ham radio stations are a good thread to tug on to find that
older weird-internet.

\- Look for the sites with 4-5 letter callsigns on them

\- Go to their links page

\- Keep going down the rabbit hole.

EG. here's a few I just found googling:

[http://www.qsl.net/kp4md/](http://www.qsl.net/kp4md/)

[https://k7nv.com/](https://k7nv.com/)

[http://www.w8ji.com/](http://www.w8ji.com/)

------
joeblau
I thought about this a few weeks ago. I remember the late 90's actually
searching around the web. Now there are so many walled gardens that individual
creation is limited to posting a Medium blog or Facebook post. Today, I only
visit a handful of sites and developer documentation.

------
shams93
I was a part of the Geocities team in 1998. Part of the reason a large part of
the early web no longer exists is that many of these web pages were hosted for
free by Geocities. Tragically when they were purchased by Yahoo, Yahoo decided
to simply shred the early web, they decided it was not worth it to keep
supporting the service and simply hit delete on a huge chunk of the content of
the early web.

~~~
astura
In fairness, Yahoo ran geocities for an entire decade before shutting it down.

------
arca_vorago
I do, which is why many years ago I told myself I was going to make my
websites as js free as possible. Pure, simple, readable html5+css is my long
term goal.

The thing is, this part of the web still exists, it's actually just simply
harder to find due to the control on the filter big corps have these days. You
just have to search. I am regularly adding hackers blogs to my bookmarks.
Sometimes they stopped updating in 2012, but their writing still looks
worthwhile. The real democratization of knowledge the internet offers to us is
there for the taking if people would break free from their self-forged filter-
bubble shackles.

~~~
acuozzo
> I am regularly adding hackers blogs to my bookmarks. Sometimes they stopped
> updating in 2012, but their writing still looks worthwhile.

Can we start sharing these somewhere? I have several I'd like to contribute.

------
osteele
I remember the NCSA Web Site of the Day, circa 1993. It was a page that listed
new web sites that had appeared on the web, with a brief summary and link to
each one.

Many days there wasn't a new web site. Some days there were _two_.

------
davesque
Unfortunately, a large part of the reason the web used to be fun is that there
didn't used to be anything like it. The only way we can get that again is by
inventing the next world-changing communications technology, not by trying to
dig up the old web. It pains me as much as anyone else to say this since I got
started on the web back in 1994 and experienced its early magic first-hand.

------
joosters
_Another thing was that there was no dross, because everything had to be
written and uploaded by a person._

Some rose-tinted glasses right there!

~~~
Semiapies
Yeah, I've been on the web since NCSA Mosaic, and there was a lot of dross.

------
DamnInteresting
As the operator of a website old enough to still have a "webmaster" email
address, it can be hard to remain relevant in the age of Google's search
monopoly. Their algorithm has become the de facto gatekeeper to the entire
Internet, and it happens to favor newer content over old. Consequently it
favors those crappy flip-shop[1] sites where "writers" find quality content,
perform a mild thesaurus modification, and re-post it. The original source,
where the actual research and writing occurred, is stomped into
insignificance.

Yes, perhaps I'm slightly bitter, why do you ask?

Between that and the "Wikipedia wall," boutique websites have been an
endangered species for some time.

[1]
[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flip%20shop](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flip%20shop)

------
halr9000
I'm "old" and I remember websites, and Bulletin Board Systems too, for that
matter. But technology changes, and you gotta keep up, man. Don't let the kids
bother you--they're just running through your yard to the next house over.
It's a cool house, maybe check it out someone.

------
exabrial
No. Even basic documentation sites now has to be a fricken enriched browser
experience

------
zapperdapper
Couldn't agree with you more!

Now sites seem to be spread out across the behemoth sites like Medium and of
course all the social media platforms. A lot of the fun and sense of adventure
that was present in the early days of the web is gone. Now it's "just
business" \- that blows! When did everyone get so obsessed with boosting their
"online presence" in order to make a quick buck?

I will also give a big thumbs up to Neocities. It's brilliant. There's a great
retro feel to many of the sites there. People are having fun creating sites
with HTML and a dash of CSS - for free.

------
mpetrovich
One of the few websites I can still lose hours on:
[https://waitbutwhy.com/](https://waitbutwhy.com/)

------
mdhughes
As the former perpetrator of several hand-coded sites and blogs full of text
organized by 52-card-pickup principles, going back to '80s BBS's, online
services, USENET, and then Gopher and WWW on a University shared network…

Switching to Wordpress (obLink:
[https://mdhughes.tech/](https://mdhughes.tech/) ) and slowly reposting the
stuff I want visible in an organized, searchable format with a consistent
style and a nice CMS is the best possible improvement.

My latest change is a "Starred posts" category, so I can surface the longer,
more thought-out pieces and still have ephemeral content like semi-daily music
links and status updates.

Manton Reece's [http://micro.blog/](http://micro.blog/) is putting Twitter-
like interaction under a blog framework, hosted on m.b or on your own site.

Discovery of these things is still hard, and Google's ad-searching site
unsurprisingly only surfaces ads, but [http://duck.go](http://duck.go) and
social media (like HN) can point you at content you want to see. [ed: sp]

------
dickclucas
Shameless plug but what he describes was partly my inspiration for building
[https://nogradient.com/](https://nogradient.com/). It is very stripped down
and minimal. Would love some feedback on it.

------
galfarragem
That's just Capitalism.

Once Capitalism takes over a system, everything is optimized for profit. Some
diehard _hobbyists_ might remain but most convert. I'm still keeping 2 niche
blogs.. let's see till when.

------
Chiba-City
Early business Web was Decision Support and not ad distraction based. There
were cool "calculators" that would match relocation zip codes in Tulsa most
like my favorite DC zip code or pick optimum breed/age/weight dog food.

Product Selection Engines (PSE's) were a different value proposition than
product or brand promotion. They are fun to write for engineers because they
correct purchase errors with IT good deeds like Consumer Reports but with user
variables on priorities or constraints.

The Consumer Web threw out a great deal of baby with the .com era bathwater.

------
HaoZeke
For me the web is more alive than ever... Just look at the way static websites
are taking over..

However JS is the real threat to websites, react and its ilk are not amenable
to being stored long term.. Too many things break.

------
indigochill
Does [http://3564020356.org](http://3564020356.org) count? It does appear to
use Alexa for tracking now, but otherwise it looks pretty "home-grown".

------
citruscomputing
I wrote a little program that does the "follow links and see if I find
anything interesting" thing. It takes seed links, pulls all links that don't
go back to the same domain, and then chooses 50 and repeats. Then there's
another program to find the uncommon sites from everything gathered. Check it
out at [https://github.com/riley-
martine/water_skimmer](https://github.com/riley-martine/water_skimmer)

------
jumpkickhit
Can't say I miss Geocities inundating the search engines.

Still though, it was pretty fun when there were more than 5 or so websites to
go to, like a lot of people tend to only do these days.

------
anthk
[http://neoticies.org](http://neoticies.org) Welcome back :) I am currently
doing a minimal OpenBSD site in Spanish :D

------
zacvivo
I have been thinking on this idea lately and trying to build a tool to filter
out the crap. What I have found is operators help, but the only things I have
found to work are EDU sites, pre-2010 operator, and intext: welcome to my
site. Beyond that, nothing seems to work to find complex content. I also
thought about maybe making a tool to filter out content from the top million
sites or so, but for now I am going to just use operators.

------
edflsafoiewq
The site I remember feeling that way about was the Robot Wisdom Homepage, now
preserved only on the WayBack Machine:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130409045156/http://www.robotw...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130409045156/http://www.robotwisdom.com/home.html)

------
scroot
Ian Milligan has done some interesting work [1] on the history of GeoCities,
including some archives I think

[1] [http://www.ieee-
tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers/milligan.pdf](http://www.ieee-
tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers/milligan.pdf)

------
ForFreedom
I started my career as a web designer back in the 1998-2000 which was fun
then. People wanted gifs like crazy.

------
thallukrish
This is what I wrote years ago in this blog
[http://productionjava.blogspot.sg/2014/07/the-broken-
web.htm...](http://productionjava.blogspot.sg/2014/07/the-broken-web.html) and
I have been working since then to fix it.

------
jwm4
Steve den Beste's original website, USS Clueless, was a perfect example of
early website/blog.

------
somberi
I would like to add photo.net and particularly Philip Greenspun's "Travel with
Samantha".

------
dredmorbius
Joseph Wood Krutch: "bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people,
good roads bring bad people".

[http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm](http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm)

------
alkonaut
Wait, we don't call websites "websites" anymore? What do we call them now?

~~~
Semiapies
This is a variation of the "RSS is dead (but everything provides RSS feeds)"
thing.

------
woodbot
How about this for a website:
[https://beakerbrowser.com/](https://beakerbrowser.com/)

The Beaker Browser! P2P browser, bringing back (the web and) websites since
2017

------
chewz
I remember that spending time on a web was actually interesting back then.

Interesting like discovering and learning something new not like browsing
shopping sites and FB, Instagram because there is nothing else to do...

------
i6Respawns
Yes I think I know how you feel. You might like reading books haha.

------
mamcx
Something close today, Go to:

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/randomitem.php?p=1](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/randomitem.php?p=1)

------
dbshapco
The Internet has become a carrier signal for advertising.

------
pythonist
A very fine example of such site
[http://www.jeffbridges.com/](http://www.jeffbridges.com/).

------
canoebuilder
[http://fusionanomaly.net/nodebase.html](http://fusionanomaly.net/nodebase.html)

------
vinsingh0289
I have so many websites but never got much traffic on any one of them, so i
forgot all domain name of the website i created long back.

------
bluetwo
Remember when the Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" button was interesting and took
you to one of these random sites?

------
ashtube
The hit counter is what makes this website.

------
albeebe1
My website still uses tables

[http://albeebe.com/](http://albeebe.com/)

~~~
DamonHD
Here is my '90s vintage still alive and kicking (we were one of the first UK
ISPs):

[http://www.exnet.com/](http://www.exnet.com/)

and a new old site also built with hand-crafted HTML but CSS rather than
tables!

[http://m.earth.org.uk/](http://m.earth.org.uk/)

It's nonsense to say that such things no longer exist.

------
superkuh
The web of the 90s is alive on .onion.

------
rch
I think Ward's Federated Wiki approach could help bring some personality back
to the web.

------
peterburkimsher
The most ironic part to me is that the page is PHP, not static HTML.

Although this type of style isn't common with the online web these days, it's
still visible in offline caches of popular websites (e.g. offline Wikipedia).
Pages load so fast, and the total file size is much smaller because of the
lack of JS/jQuery/React/etc bloat.

------
starboy1996
Sure. If it's really worth visiting. You remember them somehow and never
forget

------
tutuca
It even has got a broken hit counter and all... 000020083 at time of reading
:)

------
agumonkey
resonnates with my previous comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586839)

------
agumonkey
recent re-found
[http://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/](http://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/)

great example of dense cool passion driven site

------
mfukar
Things change, nostalgia happens. Nothing to see here.

------
EngineerBetter
I remember websites, and I remember that some were made by women, too. The
author seems to have only read websites made by men.

------
rogerweissman77
I have to bookmark everything.

------
blue100
I remember all those websites.

------
epigramx
They are called home pages.

------
robertdicabrio
i remember a website letmewatch.ch have any one heard it.

------
jimmeyotoole
Member websites??

------
tek-cyb-org
is that a new app?

------
frik
MySpace, Tripod, GeoCities, LiveJournal, and similar free hosted/services had
a lot of interesting, weird, etc pages. It was easy and friction free to
create a new site. Everyone had a copy of
Frontpage/Dreamweaver/GoLive/HomeSite/iWeb/Composer on his PC and uploading
worked with a browser form, one file at a time.

------
igorgue
I miss them, they were a great example of how creative everyone can be, now
doing "awesome" things on the internet is so cookie cuttered.

~~~
astura
And "welcome to my website it is still under construction please sign my
guestbook" isn't cookie cutter?

------
lovemetwotimes
Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost
anything they want within seconds.

~~~
vog
That's simply not true:

Case in point:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15634089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15634089)

(Unless, of course, you mean by "almost anything" everything of your personal
interest.)

------
koancone
The problem is the advertising model for content monetization. This is the
same reason TV is mostly crap.

------
SimpleLogin
It really is interesting how incredibly niche everything was once upon a time.

------
keerthivar
very interesting website, and easy time pass

------
keerthivar
easy identify methode

