
Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? - firloop
https://jarredsumner.com/codeblog/
======
skrebbel
_Lots_ of the internet is fun and weird.

[https://pouet.net](https://pouet.net) is the unofficial home of the
demoscene, even though it's much weirder than the demoscene itself.

[https://dwitter.net](https://dwitter.net) needs no comment

Stack Overflow has answers like:
[https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454)

Half of tumblr is totally out there.

I personally wouldn't call 4chan and its relatives fun, but they sure are
weird.

There's dedicated, active, shitty phpbb forums for every single weird sexual
fetish you can imagine.

And that's just the fun and weird patches of the internet that _I_ happen to
know about. There must be 3 orders of magnitude more. I'd wager that if you
think the internet isn't fun and weird anymore, then you're just looking in
the wrong places. The problem is with you and not the internet.

~~~
jacoblambda
I would pitch in [https://lainchan.org/](https://lainchan.org/) and
[https://arisuchan.jp/](https://arisuchan.jp/) which are nice little tech
image boards. They are that lovely blend of out there and slightly off kilter
that I remember from the image boards of old.

~~~
rc-1140
I would not merely because the denizens of those kinds of boards are in some
state of obnoxious wallowing in self-pity (not clinical depression outside of
the actual one or two posters who actually might have it), unless you consider
that "off kilter". Reading people incessantly moan about the "good ol' days"
of everything is negative content. The discussion is all fueled by that
wallowing and none of it is constructive or interesting.

~~~
threwawasy1228
I would argue that smaller *chan boards are much different from larger boards
you are referencing in this post. Smaller chan boards are more akin to single
topic forums with a distinct community. Lainchan for instance has a large lisp
and functional programming community on it, and lots of positivity. You should
try clicking links before you judge them.

~~~
rc-1140
I am not referencing larger imageboards, I am responding specifically about
lainchan as I've lurked there for some time and sometimes posted there.
Lainchan is nothing more than a hyper-focused /g/ with "cyberpunk" theme. In
fact, lainchan _split_ some two years ago into two different sites that are,
content-wise, exactly the same because some of its members threw a hissy fit
over a new administrator for childish and inane reasons - as if its old one
was any better. Maybe one out of every half-dozen posts on /lambda/ is worth
reading - most others are noncommittal sound bytes, wordy demonstrations of
vocabulary, or nostalgia-chasing about the "good ol' days" of imageboards like
4chan.

It is not a good community, jacoblambda.

~~~
jacoblambda
I agree that the split was for a dumb reason (however it was inevitable with
the prior issues) but that's why I listed both sites. Besides that though,
communities split all the time and often for dumb reasons.

Also, on your comment that it's just a cyberpunk focused /g/, well ya that's
kind of the point. It's a cyberpunk board. It's centred around a lot of the
themes from its namesake. As for the value of the threads on /λ/, most of them
are either fairly focused discussions of various topics in Computer Science or
language discussions. There's obviously some noise in the posts but the
moderation results in fairly reasonable quality levels compared to the larger
chans.

As for your final comment, I respectfully disagree. It's not for everyone but
that's expected.

Also in case there was a misconception, I am not threwawasy1228 and they are
not me.

------
cal5k
Jarred was probably young when the internet was first taking shape, and every
generation shares the feeling that things were better in their youth (aka the
Golden Age Fallacy).

The internet was a lot smaller and inhabited by curious nerds - to find
similar fun and weirdness, just find a community today that shares those
properties. Packet radio, infosec, crypto, gaming, music production, etc. -
there's plenty of weird and fun to be found if you look for it.

~~~
beezischillin
A lot of online communities today are unbearable tho as everything's become so
politicised. It started really wildly happening around 2013-2014 where no
community was to remain a zone without some minority of users politicising it
for attention. It was probably something that also happened before that but it
somehow became really prevalent, at least. And often that took the fun out of
it. I kind of think fondly of those times. Now of course this is just
anecdotal, but that's what I've experienced in most communities I used to
frequent and perhaps lots of other people here did too.

In fact, it's something I really appreciate here on HN, the tone of
discussions is rather pleasant and on topic and it's very rare to see people
intentionally driving it into the ground, although in contrast to something
like a Facebook group it's a lot less personal.

~~~
tenpies
I distinctly remember a discussion about Something Awful's slogan ("the
internet makes you stupid") and how it was actually a keen observation about
the internet. Pre-internet you would have people with really bad ideas. These
people were so obvious to any normal person that bad thinkers generally shut
up because sharing their bad ideas meant being socially ostracized or at least
getting shunned.

But then you add the internet, and all these radically bad thinkers find each
other and their ideas almost seem normal amongst their type. They not only
normalize bad thinking, but they also push for even more radically bad
thinking in an effort to out-do each other. End result, you end up with a
vociferous contingent of town idiots who don't realize they are town idiots
because they only listen to fellow town idiots. Add advertising companies who
function on a metrics-first approach, and those town idiots dictate how
companies act.

~~~
Baeocystin
This SMBC from 2013 illustrates the issue as well as anything. And all joking
aside, I think it is 100% accurate, and a real problem that we don't yet have
a solution for.

[https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07](https://www.smbc-
comics.com/comic/2013-04-07)

~~~
bargl
So true.

We need more people to be loud in the center.

~~~
sparkie
There are people being loud in the center who are still incorrectly labelled
as "far right" or some other meaningless label and targeted for deplatforming.

Unfortunately, politicization is inevitable when double standards exist in
moderation. If you're going to have rules, they need to be applied evenly.
We've seen that several of the internet giants are incredibly inconsistent in
their approaches to banning content or users from the two sides of the
political spectrum. Nowhere seems to be safe, including HN.

~~~
ardy42
> There are people being loud in the center who are still incorrectly labelled
> as "far right" or some other meaningless label and targeted for
> deplatforming.

Could you give some examples?

~~~
Sacho
Tim Pool
([https://twitter.com/igd_news/status/871794622439313409](https://twitter.com/igd_news/status/871794622439313409))

Dave Rubin([https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/9/24/17883330/d...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/9/24/17883330/dave-rubin-ben-shapiro-youtube-reactionary-right-
peterson))

Jordan
Peterson([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCGewQc9ktA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCGewQc9ktA))

And so on. But are these meaningful examples? I would argue both yes and no.
No, because it's difficult to argue that the people calling them out are not a
minority of activists who are just pushing their own political agenda.

Yes, because even if it's a minority viewpoint, it's effective - people
apathetic to the given issue are likely to take the word of the activists as
gospel, which leads to deplatforming.

A very visible example of the effectiveness of this tactic is Charles Murray
and The Bell Curve. Regardless of the validity of more sophisticated criticism
of his work, he has been effectively denounced as a racist and deplatformed.

This also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their
ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X. As X
step up silencing/deplatforming efforts, either the speaker fades into
obscurity, or receives enough support from anti-X to continue their work, but
now they can reliably be demonized via guilt by association(Jordan Peterson
and the NBC news piece is an example).

~~~
claudiawerner
They are not far-right or alt-right but they continually show sympathies with
such ideas, and defend the same status quo that the right-wing wants to
support. They are continually invited and supported by right-wing speakers.
It's not as though these people are exactly centrists, and even if they were,
there's a reason for a left-wing individual to critique them too.

>Charles Murray

Is a member of a right-wing think tank and the serious criticism of his work
often alleges him of using _scientific racism_. Is it a far stretch to say
that a proponent of scientific racism is himself a racist? Is it wrong to
denounce people on such matters? Perhaps the critique can stretch beyond the
mere empirical validity of the results and into the philosophy of what the
authors are arguing. These methodological issues are in the purview of
critical theory too.

>his also leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where speakers presenting their
ideas find themselves shunned by group X, and supported by group anti-X.

I'm skeptical of the idea that the only reason why such people are supported
by anti-X is because they have been shunned by X.

------
soneca
Today we have things like: [https://glitch.com/](https://glitch.com/)

That Glitch is not as popular as My Space was tells something about what
people that use internet want; and shows that the internet is still fun and
weird for people that like fun and weird.

~~~
roywiggins
Glitch sounds amazing, and way better than the tools that existed back then.

But back then, Geocities was popular and loads of people had heard of it. I
have never heard of Glitch. It seems like there's become a re-division between
"people who like to tinker" and "literally everyone else". On the one hand
that's great but it kind of feels like everything is AOL again now.

The last vestige of fun, weird and popular is probably Tumblr, which everyone
agrees has the absolute worst user interface. But you can theme your Tumblr
page to your absolute heart's desire.

~~~
lawn
There is also [https://neocities.org](https://neocities.org) with free static
web hosting and zero ads. Many features and tools.

~~~
avarun
Seems to be down.

------
zackmorris
I submit that the reason the internet is boring is that these causes are all
obvious to us, and this comment won't get upvoted:

1) apps created niche proprietary software everywhere that used to be free and
open media

2) the declarative, idempotent roots of the world wide web have been replaced
by imperative, brittle Javascriptified spaghetti code

3) Javascript build systems have largely obfuscated any code that can be seen

4) Web 2.0 introduced private social networks in walled gardens that in many
ways offer fewer privacy guarantees than before (due to the profit motive of
exploiting user info)

5) Monopolies and duopolies now receive the lion's share of funding for
research (which tends to aim for increasing profits and attracting eyeballs
instead of fundamentally advancing the state of the art)

I'll stop there. It's hard to say how many of these are fundamental impasses
to having an open internet again..

~~~
noir_lord
I was on the internet in the mid-90's (I was 15 in 95 which I think is the
year I got on the net, I'd been on BBS's for about 5-6 years before that) and
it did used to be much more weird _as a percentage of sites_ than now (though
the number of sites was tiny).

As the grownups came along and commercialised everything a lot of that went
away and back then if you wanted to say something online you _had_ to learn
HTML and what FTP was as a minimum.

So things were weird because quite a few early adopters were not techies by
nature.

It's different now.

It's one of the reasons I don't use facebook, instagram, snap etc, they just
don't stick for me.

I do use twitter but that is because it's a nice way to follow projects and
programmers I admire so it has some utility to me.

I was an early user of reddit but since the redesign (on the back of cleaning
up the community) the trend towards _just another social network_ (EDIT:
speaking of which
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571))
is pretty clear at this point, it's utility is going down as is the quality of
the average posts in the subreddit's I cared about.

HN has been fairly consistent since I join over the last 5 years, a testament
to the effectiveness of decent moderation.

It used to be I checked HN after reddit but that switched over the last year
or two.

~~~
mysterydip
I wonder if there is a way to combine the weird fun that was
geocities/tripod/etc with the connections of a social network and modern ease
of updating. Like how you use twitter, but for following webpages about
butterflies or a shrine to the 6502 processor.

~~~
noir_lord
RSS - (partially) Google killed it.

My first website was about about TNG and why DS9 sucked balls.

Ironic since I now consider DS9 the better series (but TNG still has the truly
stand out episodes, I think young me was just oblivious to a lot of the
subtler stuff but I digress), it was shockingly bad (and I'd been programming
since the 80's, HTML was just weird).

I spent about five years hating the crap out of it and never even considered
web development as a career, if you'd have asked me back then I'd have said
you'd claw the compiler out of my cold dead hands.

20 odd-years later and I do enterprise web dev (and C#/WPF and Java)

~~~
JetSpiegel
RSS is alive, and for dumb sites there are hacks such as
[https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/-](https://github.com/RSS-
Bridge/rss-bridge/-)

~~~
taborj
I love RSS-Bridge. I have a local instance running, and it saves me from
having to sign up with Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Also, tt-rss is an excellent reader.

~~~
brokenmachine
I was interested in tt-rss until I tried it out and there was a problem with
the Android app. I checked the forums for a solution...

If you do check out the forums for it you will very quickly see that the
developer is a massive asshole.

I wouldn't trust any code that a person like that writes to run on my machine.

~~~
EvanAnderson
I forked tt-rss back in 2005 for my personal use after I tried to submit a few
patches that didn't "align well" w/ the developer. I wouldn't go so far as to
say "massive asshole", but he did seem to be a challenge to deal with. I
decided it wasn't worth the effort to try to contribute back my changes.

------
jerf
The answer is simple: Security.

Allowing arbitrary HTML allows hackers to use your site to impersonate login
pages, using your trusted SSL certificate to make the page appear authorized
in the browser header.

Allowing arbitrary content allowed hackers to exploit browsers to run
arbitrary code and go wild from there with user permissions.

Allowing arbitrary HTML mixes poorly with having more than one user doing it
on a page.

Allowing arbitrary content to be uploaded and served out means that if you're
lucky, you'll go bankrupt serving people pirated movies, and if you're not
lucky, you'll go bankrupt and to prison for serving child porn.

This is just a _sample_ of the problems.

You have to sandbox this stuff, and the crazier the line you try to draw with
the sandbox around what is safe to do, the harder it is to secure.

~~~
jedberg
> The answer is simple: Security.

That's only half the answer. The real answer is that no one wants to spend the
time to offer those features securely.

It's perfectly cromulent to allow users to upload CSS and html and even
javascript. You just have to put a lot of effort into making it safe.

Look what we did on reddit -- we allowed users to make almost any CSS they
want, and look at the beautiful creations that have come from that (like all
the sports reddits). It was a lot of work figuring out how to make it safe,
but we did it.

And now they're putting in a ton of effort to make it work on mobile too.
Because reddit still values user creativity.

It's totally possible to allow all that creativity, it just takes time and
consideration to make it safe.

~~~
iotatron
wasn't reddit considering getting rid of custom css themes not too long ago?

~~~
simple_phrases
If I'm not wrong, the redesign and app do away with custom CSS altogether.

------
weberc2
Man, this really resonates with me. I learned how to program because I wanted
a website for my Halo 2 team back in late HS early college. I started with a
MySpace and learned some basic HTML and CSS (a minute after I learned that
making a website was not just dragging things around in MS office and saving
the file as "www.my-cool-website.com"). It was ugly and it was hard. Then a
friend told me he had some hosting we could use and I learned to hack together
some PHP in notepad.exe with just enough MySQL to add and remove things. I
used for loops and that was it. No functions or classes. One big file, similar
things were copied and pasted all over. No version control, just a handful of
different copies of the PHP file on my computer, and deploying was uploading
via FTP. I got a bootleg version of photoshop and learned how to make fancy
web 2.0 graphics, and I installed PHPBB and integrated it into our site. The
forum was actually pretty successful for a hot minute (a hundred or so active
users) and I learned a little bit about community management.

I do disagree that "coding is now a privilege" or at least that it's more a
privilege because of the demise of MySpace. It's easier than ever to learn how
to program; it just takes time and motivation. The only thing that's harder is
figuring out which technologies you actually need to learn to realize your
vision (because there are so many more ways of doing things than there were in
2006); however, people are also generally nicer now than in 2006 (when I would
ask people for help, they often would expect me to have read certain textbooks
or know C before they would send me the link on standing up a LAMP stack). The
toxic bits of StackOverflow culture were just normal--if you didn't already
know the answer, _you didn 't deserve to know it_.

Anyway, that's my 5 minute stream of recollection.

~~~
FactolSarin
Yeah, I think the issue is there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit anymore. No
one hacks together some PHP scripts to create a community website anymore,
they just make a Facebook group, or use Discord or whatever.

~~~
weberc2
Agreed. I think it's a deficiency of imagination. If I had the time I'd
reinvent wheels all day. I'd especially love to figure out how to make some of
the cool open source cloud native projects feasible for use by some college
kid who wants to run a distributed ecosystem on a cluster of old laptops and
raspberry pis without 10 years of devops or sysadmin experience.

------
abraae
Would have been nice to know this was borderline astroturfing for CodeBlog
before investing time.

~~~
hoorayimhelping
This is why the internet isn't fun. Because assholes write useless press
releases for yet another product that's not new or interesting and disguise it
as someone putting their thoughts out there.

~~~
ShorsHammer
And then others get paid to Sybil attack voting systems on various platforms
in order to promote that useless content.

Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Reddit likes are good value from a marketing
perspective.

It's the circle of life.

------
raesene9
I'd suggest that if you don't think the Internet is "fun" or "weird" you're
just not looking hard enough.

I've been a regular net user since 1995 and there's every bit (in fact more)
weird unusual content than there's ever been.

You want creativity, look at today's meme culture. Sure there's a lot of "hit
or miss" content out there, but there's no shortage of weird.

Deviantart, tumblr, LNI on imgur, a huge section of subreddits and that's just
the easily accessible stuff. If you like video content, tiktok and similar
have no shortage of fairly odd stuff.

You can head off into far weirder territory than that with a little effort
(*chans, or ToR based content)

Is it MySpace, I guess not, but there's nothing stopping anyone putting up
flashy HTML content easily, Netlify or GH pages aren't that difficult to get
started with.

~~~
aasasd
Exactly, the web became less weird because it got bigger. Back then, the
entire web consisted of early adopters, so obviously they were trying out
whatever they could.

One “simply” needs to look for communities where this happens now. But of
course, these days it's a pure game of chance and/or years-long riding on the
edge to find oneself in such a community. Just like in any other saturated
creative field.

------
avar
So many commentators in this thread seemingly only read the title of the
article, and are (somewhat rightly) decrying the increased commercialization
of the Internet as one cause, without realizing that they're commenting on an
article that's just a thinly veiled advertisement for a blogging product.

~~~
preommr
Also, there's no way the people here would support the monstrosity that was
the average self-designed myspace page. People here complain constantly about
small usability issues like scroll hijacking or overall bloat from minor
animations; just imagine sites wantonly abusing things like flashing headers
or an entire page full of glitter.

------
sramsay
But the author (vendor?) seems to miss what was actually fun and weird about
the "old days." When you screwed around with MySpace like that, you got that
pleasurable _frisson_ borne of thinking that you were doing something you
weren't supposed to do -- or that you were doing something the developers of
MySpace hadn't foreseen.

Creating a tightly circumscribed environment in which "glitter" is one of your
built-in affordances is hardly the same thing. It's the difference between
discovering rocket jumping in Doom and having rocket jumping become an
intentional mechanic in Quake. The latter might still be fun, but it's no
longer weird (and certainly not fun because it is weird).

------
elorant
The Internet is not fun and weird anymore because it was used to be a hobby.
Nowadays content creators do it for the money. When you create content for
your hobby you're more relaxed. You can say stupid things, make mistakes,
interact with your visitors, try and build a community because relationships
is all there is. The moment advertising comes into play everything has to look
professional. You start asking for emails to send newsletters and you shove
advertisements into the visitor's face in order to get a click. Your site
becomes impersonal after a while.

~~~
davidy123
I agree, along with a corresponding point, production values. Now, everyone
who makes a video has to have theme music, an intro, and use specific cues.
Podcasts all tend to sound the same too. Do these aspects really add anything
or are they just gatekeepers about who can conform? I've seen plenty of slick
videos on Youtube that have little content, while less produced videos may
have way more useful content but they don't take off because they don't have
support.

Maybe the slick presentations put people in a headspace, but that on its own
is the start of the slippery slope of not being original because then
everything has to be streamlined to those expectations, and productions aren't
recognized unless they have these features.

It will probably take another leap before the internet moves past this, where
presentations aren't videos with one view and one soundtrack focused on
particular personality types, where text and charts aren't pictures but rather
mixable data used to render arbitrary views. I guess ironically if Flash had
taken over the Web in the early days we might be closer to that vision now
since it was more the focus to create an interactive work rather than using a
desktop application to generate a video, or the generally harder slog to
create interactives in Web technologies.

------
habosa
I have a feeling most of the commenters here did not read the article and are
just arguing the headline.

After some brief discussion on the topic a hand, the author gets to the point
and introduces their new product, Codeblog:
[https://codeblog.app/](https://codeblog.app/)

It's like Medium and MySpace and Markdown and React had a baby. I don't know
what I think about it but I am sad nobody here is discussing it.

~~~
bradlys
It could be that few read it. But the product itself doesn't exist yet.

I think the more interesting discussion isn't about the product itself anyway.
More interesting discussions would be about why have such a product and why
such a product doesn't exist in high amounts like it used to.

------
LeoPanthera
I don't see this opinion very often, so I might just be insane, but I firmly
believe that the fun was removed from the internet with the invention of NAT.

Without the ability to receive connections on your home computer, the list of
"fun" things you can build is hugely reduced.

~~~
cr0sh
What makes you think NAT prevents you from receiving connections on your home
PC? You can "easily" set up a server:

[https://blog.mindorks.com/how-to-convert-your-laptop-
desktop...](https://blog.mindorks.com/how-to-convert-your-laptop-desktop-into-
a-server-and-host-internet-accessible-website-on-it-part-2-cdb4b3633fa9)

Ok - it isn't something for the faint of heart - but it can be done. If your
public IP changes often - you'll have to use a service like this:

[https://freedns.afraid.org/](https://freedns.afraid.org/)

Many if not most home router/firewalls have some provision to allow you to
resolve thru NAT to a server at home.

Please note that this -may- violate TOS with your ISP; most officially don't
allow servers, but some turn a blind eye to it as long as you aren't hosting
something nefarious or popular (and if you are hosting something popular, it's
better to just bite the bullet and get actual server hosting somewhere, given
how cheap and easy it is today).

~~~
LeoPanthera
You're kinda proving my point. You have to jump through all these hoops. Most
people never will.

~~~
nsgi
It's only one more hoop compared to doing it with a static IP. Pretty trivial
to anyone capable of setting up a server.

~~~
notatcomputer68
Trivial for anyone who can click "host server" button in a multiplayer game /
file sharing program / voice chat?

------
mey
[https://itch.io/](https://itch.io/) is an interesting community of people
doing hello world to full indie games. There is weird and wonderful stuff in
that messy pile.

[https://asmb.itch.io/dmcas-sky](https://asmb.itch.io/dmcas-sky)

[NSFW] [https://radiatoryang.itch.io/the-
tearoom](https://radiatoryang.itch.io/the-tearoom) [NSFW]

[https://captaingames.itch.io/enviro-
bear-2000](https://captaingames.itch.io/enviro-bear-2000)

For a sampling of the fun and weird

------
tpaschalis
A phrase that I read, and sums up my feelings went like "In the early 2000's,
in the internet you went to _places_ , but now you just go to the mall".

Many parts of the internet _are_ weird and fun, but you gotta look for them.
You need to decide to get past the over-designed mall, which is meant to
capture your time to sell ads, and support your run of the mill mom-and-pop
shops.

------
dasil003
It’s commercialized, that’s it. You still have the same weird stuff, probably
even with some growth but it doesn’t get visibility relative to all the
commercialism.

Having been on BBSes and the internet since the mid 80s I’m as sad and
nostalgic about it as anyone but you can’t turn back the clock. Instead we
need to fight today’s battle—big tech company hegemony.

------
stcredzero
_The internet is the great equalizer (1996). People used to believe that.
Today, it sounds sarcastic._

 _We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that
users don 't deserve the right to code in everyday products. Users are too
stupid. They'd break stuff. Coding is too complicated for ordinary people.
Besides, we can just do the coding...so why does it matter?_

As a programmer, let me say that when I've switched over to the role of user:
As for our bedside manner, we programmers xxxxcould stand to improve a bit!
(Not all. But on average.) Remember to treat users as people you're supposed
to serve, not as an underclass that needs to be kept in line.

------
logfromblammo
It stopped being a hobby, or art, and started being a platform for making
money.

With the money came the scammers and other malicious actors, and so now,
everything that used to be fun is also a security vulnerability. Everything
even remotely interesting has to be sandboxed and sanitized, to contain the
damage when someone inevitably figures out how to weaponize a toy and upload
the resulting bomb to your site.

And the moneymaking parts also had to be simplified, so that users without a
lot of technical knowledge could still figure out how to enter their payment
information. All clicks; no command lines.

I suspect fun and weird is still out there, but their signal is drowned by the
noise. You have to already know where it is to get to it. An army of fun-
finders could constantly troll through the dark waters of the out-of-
mainstream net, looking for new and interesting, and then recommend whatever
they may find to their social networks. Otherwise, the best site you will
never see might be on page 200 for the nearest search term you will ever enter
that matches it--ranked well behind all the disturbing rule 34 interpretations
of it.

The niche-dwellers just can't find each other easily any more. The crowd
standing between them is too vast and noisy. And if you don't have a strong
community already, your tentative steps into forming one can easily be
annihilated by spammers advertising boner pills and 419 scams, sometimes in a
language you can't understand, or someone renting a DDoS botnet just to kill
your server, or any of a dozen other ways to pave over your paradise.

------
dfischer
I am looking forward to a fully decentralized internet. I know that carries a
bit of “hype” right now but I’ve been playing with it lately and I think it’s
exacty what a lot of people are thirsting for. The original feeling of
geocities, bbs, forums. Actual sense of community and discovery without worry.

It’s definitely too early / the projects I’ve played with have a lot of
progress to go on.

Things that need to be improved for a real Dapp to exist:

1\. Storage layer with encryption / p2p / access control. Allows “back-end”
logic to be distributed amongst peers.

2\. UX tooling that makes it extremely easy to sign in with identities and
manage encryption.

3\. Developer tooling to easily package app code and deploy to users.

4\. Absolutely no 3rd party dependencies outside of the app itself. It must be
self sustaining.

5\. Open source for a true Dapp. If value is being provided at a cost of a
company/dev team then monetize it by selling access to a client or data within
the app. This can be done easier with wallet integrations and crypto.

------
alanlamm
1\. Based on personal experience, I don't really buy the many comments here
that say the web is boring bc most people are boring vs some fun geeky outlier
elite. I remember IT class 20 years ago and everybody - including the most
mainstream jocks if one were to stereotype - had great fun making colorful
html, watching sheep walk around the windows desktop, chatting on icq, etc.
Even orkut several years later was zany. 2\. It is ironic that in the age of
google, many responses here are lists of cool urls - almost like mini
directories. reminds me of the physical Guide To The Internet (or some similar
name) book we had (and which was great). 3\. It is a little ironic that the OP
is a rant about an uncool internet that proceeds to plug a product, which is
typical of the uncool internet. I dont mean to criticize, though, bc refering
to a problem and proposing a solution is legitimate. But u have to smile. 4\.
FWIW strongly share the feeling that the web is less fun. 5\. No data, but I
have a gut feel that as powerful as the big cos may be, it is not an
inevitable process - just a matter of going out there and building
alternatives (not that they'd necessarily be as profitable or big as the
googles and facebooks) - [in my country] we've switched from icq to msn to
orkut to fb to ig+whatsapp. Who is to say there won't be another 5 switches
over the next 20 years?

------
sonaltr
The internet always has been (and is) whatever we make it to be.

I do really mean that - in fact, it's more accessible than ever.

For example, personally for me, it means that I can go online and access vast
resources of knowledge to make myself better at my job, my business etc. It
provides me with hours of entertainment - both free and paid. It also has
enabled be to in touch with friends and family across the world.

For my mom, it means she gets to see videos and tv shows she had given up on
decades ago (Indian tv drama - 1 ep / day, it adds up quite quickly). It also
means, I can send her stuff that I know she'll find funny. She can keep in
touch with her family, friends etc.

For my dad, it means he can see places online that he's never been to. He
loves maps and the internet has enabled him to see detailed maps he'd never
even dream of.

For others, it could a dark place of business - a place to sell drugs, or
organs or others. For some it's a glimmer of hope that their stories /
struggles could be put out there for the world to see and empathize.

The internet is what you make of it. For those looking for what the author
mentioned - those still exist - you have to know where to look. But for the
"normies" \- Those that are not concerned about programming, internet etc. -
it's something totally different and they've moulded what internet is for
them.

------
swah
I had this flash of "old internet" the other day, when this little guy
([https://twitter.com/andrezadelgado/status/108974537661637427...](https://twitter.com/andrezadelgado/status/1089745376616374272))
had his drawings displayed on a Facebook page by his older brother, and
everyone supported.

This pure feeling of "let me show you what I did", with no business involved,
not trying to get a job, just happy with this thing he made. Reminds me of
_why as well, which I miss for some reason.

One could argue that this is simply nostalgia of a time when _I_ would do
things just for fun... I might agree.

------
lucideer
For once I'm glad most comments here seem to ignore the article content and
instead are responding to the (much more interesting) headline, because the
article is really pretty terrible, and very much misses the point of what
made/makes the internet "fun".

For anyone who hadn't read: it's a marketing piece for a React-based blogging
platform that posits that the reason the "old" internet was fun was because
websites didn't sanitize inputs, and that we can somehow bring that back by
using a platform with a limited set of sanitized "fun" components...

~~~
Izkata
It's kinda funny how their "fun" components totally miss the point of what
made the unsanitized inputs fun: Not having limitations.

------
sailfast
Mainstream things are almost never fun or weird.

Most of the "big websites" are now serving mainstream customers. As a result,
they're not fun or weird. When the internet was younger, it was mostly early
adopters creating their own culture, so it was weirder.

The great thing about the internet is that there's a bunch of stuff on it that
is not in the main stream.

It's harder to FIND that stuff now because, as a percentage, it is not as
prevalent, but it's definitely out there and it can be located.

If the internet were a city then yes, we'd be struggling to "Keep it weird"
but since it's an ever-expanding universe there will always be weird corners
and cultures, just like here on earth.

Stay weird, internet.

------
_trampeltier
It's not just the internet, it is the whole life.

For ex. in Switzerland, almost almost all citys did forbid cheap (plastic)
chairs in street restaurants.

We used to have very old cars, when we started to drive a car. Today they
start with a new leased car. We could do funny things and if the car broke it
was an easy fix (one door has a different color, who cares). Today if you do
just a little bit something forbidden,10 people make a picture with a
cellphone and send it to a newspaper.

Also just on the street, people dress much nicer than a couple of years ago,
allways ready for a selfie ..

Jokes are not allowed about anything, because somebody could get a bad
feeling, etc...

------
mikekchar
I think the old internet is still there. It's just buried under the new
internet. There are billions of people who think it's a good idea to
communicate with proprietary platforms and use SaaS. But software freedom and
communities that encourage users to become producers are also flourishing --
you just have to know where to look.

------
AtlasBarfed
The kooky internet starts on the second or third page.

Most of the main entry points for the internet have been intercepted and
squatted by "big internet". Google is where you go, and the top searches are
all squatted throughout the front page and the ranking algorithm biases the
bigger companies.

Even the "long tail" went through a period of ad revenue
extraction/industrialization. So even those corners are wrapped by crappy
aggregators and SEO spammers/interceptors. If there was a dime to be made,
someone has tried it.

Actually, I'm wrong about my first statement. After the big companies/adwords
spenders comes all the SEO spammers.

Google stopped caring about how SEO spammers drown out small corners of the
internet since all their revenue is first page results/adwords.

Your best shot for kooky stuff is finding a kooky site that is pretty good,
and doing a manual walkback of the google algorithm: find other pages that
link/reference that kooky page and see what non-spam links are on those pages.

Hopefully you'll find some subreddits or discussion boards or other stuff that
also centers around that kookiness.

I almost think that the old categories/directory/yellowpages style that is
manually maintained used to hold good results for kooky subjects. But those
all got closed off.

~~~
code_duck
This isn’t really about eccentric topics as much as expressing personality
through personalization.

------
lokedhs
I'd say the weirdness is still there. There is probably even more weirdness
than in the old days, but these days it's dwarfed by the boring stuff.

Remember that weird stuff is only weird when you have something boring to
compare it with. Did we even think of the old stuff as weird back then? I
don't really remember, but I don't think so.

Today you can go to Mastodon to find funny and weird stuff. I'm having fun on
there, and I really like weird stuff.

------
edoo
I think we are in a funk part where there are now so many people and so much
info available it kind of washes everything out with no personal touch. The
natural response to this will be to form ever and ever more specific
communities.

I had an idea for social site. You can only belong to a single group of
traditional common evolutionary size, say 30-50 people. All these groups self
organize and people can leave or be voted in/out. The groups form goals and
plans to get stuff done, like testing recipes or anything they have fun doing.
Groups could communicate if they wanted, and based on the abilities of each
group you'd form these abstract chains of interdisciplinary volunteerism.
Inter group communication would be more meaningful as each communication could
represent the knowledge of the entire group.

Our brains are pretty much designed for a close knit group of that size. Our
current way of living is kind of nuts. By keeping the group to a size that the
mind can actually grasp and form relationships within I think is the powerful
part. A lot of people are living lives now where that might add serious long
term value with meaningful relationships, as well as crazy efficiency on
hobbies.

------
dbg31415
Man... fundamentally because we aren't all trying to invent things ourselves
any more. We inherit so much. And it gets us to production faster, but it also
locks us in on how things work.

One toaster... you can adjust all the dials, but as a result you get burnt
toast. One toaster... it's locked in, but makes near-perfect toast every time
(assuming you like toast that way). Which do you use?

~~~
miluge
The dialed toaster! I have one and probably had one of the funniest nights
with my girlfriend being drunk and doing "burning" test with different bread,
etc...I own that toaster for years and yet still burn a few slices once in a
while.

A lot of people nowadays just want a streamlined experience or doesnt bother
to look/experience.

------
phs318u
I was on the internet before http - a time when nntp and gopher ruled the
waves. At that time and in the decade that followed, the net was populated
with geeks, nerds and people who could be considered on the edges of the
distribution of societal/behavioural norms in some way. This population was
responsible for the overwhelming majority of "content" \- said content being
published directly by the "content creators". Hence the weird and wacky world
of oddball websites that the early www was comprised of. As the skew of
netizens changed to reflect that of wider society, so too did the
inclination/ability to self-publish content without some help, creating the
demand that gave rise to Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. As for the content,
its variety came to reflect that of broader society i.e. overwhelmingly
vanilla, inane, mundane. The gems are still out there - just like needles in
the proverbial haystack.

My 2c.

------
roadkillon101
The internet these days is alot more accessible than it use to be. Back in the
90's you had to be more tech savy and you needed to be able to code because no
one has written the software that could do _that_ thing and there was even
less documentation. Now these days, you get a web hosting account. run C-panel
and install WordPress in just one click (Wix if you know even less). Heck, you
don't even have to code the HTML, just select a template you like. Probably
50% of the static sites are CMS. The point is, as the software and platforms
become _standardized commodities_ where you don't have to learn anything to
use it, the less innovation you will see from individuals as most people don't
want to learn, they want the benefits without paying their dues.

------
danso
I humbly submit that if you haven’t found fun and weird stuff on today’s
Internet, you haven’t tried TikTok, or checking out subreddits outside of your
bubble.

------
1337shadow
I don't see enough spoonerism in technical papers (except mine obviously).

Let's face it: computers are boring (for most people).

Once we face it, we can do something about it.

------
Reedx
This is a pretty clever way to introduce a new service.

------
dammod
While it's true that platforms on the internet become more and more similar to
each other, both in terms of functionality, lack of customizability, and
design, it's not possible to allow unsanitized input anymore. There are too
many ways to exploit input, not only with JS, but also with CSS, and trying to
allow custom styles while preventing exploits is an arms race.

That said, social platforms not allowing users to express themselves through
canvas and styles could be a matter of consistency and usability, while the
myspace pages were a form of expression; they were certainly a pain to use and
navigate through.

------
roywiggins
I've been saying that MySpace was the last time the internet was at all good
for... years now. Of course most of it was annoying, but if you don't let
people be annoying you're also restricting the range of everyone's speech. 99%
of everything is crap, but if you don't allow the crap, the 1% of good stuff
will evaporate, too.

Between the sanitized Facebook and the siloing of people into apps, there's
fewer obvious social on-ramps to coding on the internet, especially now that
so much is mediated by apps.

------
robbrown451
As annoying as MySpace tended to be, I fully appreciate what the article is
getting at.

I miss the days where people who wanted to have an online presence could
create a website, and it was actually a comparatively good experience.

Facebook is the defacto standard now, and you have to do things their way. Yes
it is by far the easiest way for most people to share their photos and
thoughts if they want their friends to see them. Unless they are twitterers or
whatever.

But I really wish the internet had continued to progress as....it could have.

------
chasing
Because people want what they create to be seen by other people.

And today that means they have to use Instagram or Twitter. Or maybe Medium.
Or something else very highly constrained.

So you see a fucktonne of creativity within the very narrow bounds of those
formats: Our level of innovation when it comes to the 280-character format is
through the goddamn roof.

Otherwise, the perceived effort required to create something innovating and
fun/weird simply isn't worth the result. Unless you're doing it for a client.

------
Zenst
Standards - In the early days of any technology, you have an open playing
field in innervation, with this you get some quirky and diverse solutions
forward. Take the early days of computing, every one was unique and today,
standards give you a narrower choice. Sure, you will always have the option to
innovate, but the market will be more standard and less openly receptive to
such change. But to advance, you need to draw lines in the sand, and standards
are just that.

So in the early days of the web, each page was unique and crafted with minimum
standards and lots of opportunity to innovate. Today, much of those early
layers of innovation have become templated, and the majority of what you get
are just that and less quirky. But there will be exceptions, just less of them
than the pioneering days, proportionally.

Not saying standards are bad, and indeed without them, we end up stuck at one
point in advancement and there is that point when a line in the sand has to be
drawn. Hence a focus shift from hardware towards software.

But then, anybody today looking at yesteryears solutions will call them weird,
amongst other things. That's progress for you and for that, lots of small
lines in the sand moving forwards tend to happen over big leaps. Though they
do happen, mostly in new advancements of technology, the early days when the
foundation standards are written, which we still have.

Though I'm sure in a decade or two when people have phototic processors with
optical memory coils or whatever the future holds for computing. They will
look back upon today's computers as...fun and weird.

------
fixermark
It's weird to me when people bring up MySpace as a positive example.

MySpace gave people headaches. Pulling all the stops on CSS manipulation
without any associated training on design, color, or style gave us precisely
what we got: an often-unreadable mess that bordered on the physiologically
unpleasant.

I think we have seen few recapitulations of that style of system today (in
spite of the fact that the tools to allow it never vanished) because most
people don't want it, end of story.

~~~
Andrex
People may forget, but everybody was _excited_ to switch from MySpace to
Facebook almost exactly for this reason. It just felt cooler and more grown
up.

------
mc32
Why? Because people with bad intentions discovered its potential and took
advantage. It’s the iconic example of the lament “That’s why we can’t have
good things”

~~~
dwringer
Are you referring to Zuckerberg capitalizing on the ideas of others, or Rupert
Murdoch buying out MySpace and making everyone jump ship to Facebook?

------
alpb
It's great, but won't sign up for another blogging platform because it makes
it fun and weird. I've been successfully running my own blog for the past 15+
years while I've seen many blogging services come and go. Remind yourself that
Medium, Blogger, Twitter will all be gone in some years from now, it's only a
matter of time. Anything you self host, even a WordPress blog has higher
chances of surviving.

~~~
colecut
Codeblog can be self-hosted.

------
jackcosgrove
Along with the points others have made about a more representative user base
making the internet lamer, there was also a change in behavior by users within
the last 10 years which I myself have undergone. Instead of going on web
safaris like I used to, I eventually found a trusted shortlist of sites and
aggregators which scratched my itch, and I return to those fewer sites rather
than going hunting for new information like I used to. My slice of the web has
shrunk, which either means the boringness of the web is my own confirmation
bias, or a lot of other people are behaving the same and the web is being
winnowed into a few portals rather than a constellation of sites. I tend to
think I'm not alone in this.

Also just as a vignette, a classmate of mine in high school in the late 90s
had a personal web site (which was very well done at the time) with a GIF of
an aerial shot of our high school with a targeting crosshairs superimposed on
it, and flickering red. Naturally he did not fit in, but that sort of early
web freedom would get you a visit by a police officer nowadays. There are
many, many more restrictions on content than there used to be.

------
rehevkor5
As a student developer working for my University, I would occasionally add
ASCII art to my coworker's (also students) branches in SVN as a lighthearted
way to encourage code reviews. If I saw an ASCII art in the main branch, it
was a poke in the ribs that they hadn't gotten it reviewed. I agree that we've
lost a lot of the character that used to make things more fun.

------
lazyjones
Historically, it all went downhill with iterations of the W3C specs,
particularly the strict HTML/XHTML fad. As browsers began to sloppily
implement the rapidly changing specs and sometimes add their own nonstandard
elements, it was no longer feasible to make single static webpages look the
same for all users.

JavaScript and its potential for nasty security issues also played a major
role.

------
overgard
I think things really changed about 2007 or so when AJAX and mobile really
took off, and the web went from being document centric to being more of an
application platform. That raised the barrier to entry because things did
legitimately get better, but you needed specialist knowledge to do anything
respectable.

I don’t think specialised markdown languages really changes anything though.

------
uptownfunk
The truth is pretty much no one cares. As long as instagram still works the
under 30s are happy, as long as FB still works the 30+ers are happy. As long
as WhatsApp still works, most everyone outside of US is happy.

At the same time, I understand the sentiment. But who is going to bother
maintaining this functionality which if done wrong exposes you to Bobby');
DROP TABLE STUDENTS

------
skybrian
It's as weird as it ever was but the format has changed. It's all in animated
gifs and YouTube videos for easy sharing.

------
ggggtez
>Nobody ever talks about why this was bad for the world.

Stop just a minute there. Who says that random people copy pasting CSS and
HTML they don't understand is even a good thing? Let's be clear, 99% of people
don't understand that stuff, it's just copy pasting.

If you want a glitter blog, then launch a blog with that option. But letting
people do it themselves just adds risk to themselves they'll never understand.

Edit: to be clear, if you said pasting <script>alert(911)</script> can be used
to call the cops from your computer, then 99% of people would assume that's
what it did until they tried it. 99% of people are not coders and it might as
well be a foreign language they are pasting into a Google Translate to see
what it means. If it happened to contain JS, well, too late. See the warnings
in the FB JS console for a reminder that people are gullible and will copy
paste anything they are told to.

~~~
newen
How is CSS and HTML with no JavaScript and okay, no frames, risky?

~~~
ggggtez
>no JavaScript >no frames

I think you are remembering. In the blog screenshot of myspace, when it says
"Javascript is not allowed", it was acting as "a sign, not a cop" [0]. Most
websites were riddled with security flaws, to the point that you'll find there
wasn't really any comprehensive listing of major vulnerabilities in websites
because people didn't really understand that an XSS was a problem until
someone actually used it in an attack. This example from 2005 shows that their
security to prevent JS was sorely lacking.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_\(computer_worm\))

------
jaabe
I think the article has a point, but I'm not convinced the fun and weird stuff
really went away. Social media probably had a pretty big impact on people
losing ownership over their online presence, but often I think it's just
harder to find the cool stuff.

A few years ago I attended a 60th birthday, and I was seated next to a retired
biologist. He was a wonderful man, full gray unkept beard, and, the only man
attending who wasn't wearing a suit. Instead he wore a striped shirt, some
green work pants, suspenders and a green hat that he only reluctantly took off
as his wife shot him a look. A real character, and a great conversationalist.
When he found out that I worked with EDB he enthusiastically told me about his
blog about the fauna of Bornholm (one of our islands). I looked it up when I
got home, and it was exactly what I had expected. He obviously build it
himself, without the use of any form of blogging engine or framework, and it
was this really nerdy thing full of stories and pictures of the fauna of
Bornholm along with his journals of discovery. Sadly I didn't keep the link,
and I haven't been able to find it since.

I have another great gem though, it's the webpage of my psychologist:
[http://psykoweb.dk](http://psykoweb.dk) (please don't crash it). I think it
certainly lives up to what the article is about, but it's actually also full
of useful information and science done, found and tested in a long life of
psychology. Most of the other places I follow aren't like this. They look more
akin to [https://www.valdemarsro.dk](https://www.valdemarsro.dk) , but unlike
the article, I don't think the uglyness was really the true value, I think it
was the content, and you can certainly have that in a nice package.

I personally hope a lot more people start taking ownership, and start building
their own little places on the internet and I wish it wasn't so hard to find
these days. I don't think they need to look like Geocites, I really don't. But
I do miss the bravery in the openness and honesty of the early internet,
because that stuff was just more interesting. As I write that, I know I'm a
bit of a hypocrite, because I'm completely guilty of being uninteresting
myself. My main socialmedia is linkedin, and it's where I put most of my
musings, and as such they're marketed to represent exactly the sort of message
you'd expect to find on linkedin. They're informative, but they're also
selling either myself or my points. Which is fine for linkedin, but it's also
a lot less interesting than the authentic interent where things were actually
fun, weird and entirely geninue.

------
miguelmota
That was a fun blog article to read because it had interactive components to
it; particularly the 'Confetti me' button which I pressed more times than I
should have.

One of my favorite fun and weird website is The Useless Web:
[https://theuselessweb.com/](https://theuselessweb.com/)

------
_pmf_
"Fun and weird" is hate speech. Humor does no longer have to be funny,
according to the Huffington Post.

------
jbhatab
I don't know what internet this person is on, but the internet I'm on can get
pretty fun and weird.

------
Medox
Is you want fun and weird then maybe check out the sites where teenagers get
creative: [https://9gag.com](https://9gag.com) and Reddit. Although Reddit is
more serious compared to 9gag while 9gag users often just "steal" from Reddit.

------
sodosopa
It was. The early 90’s-2000 had a hugely creative backbone which ultimately
was crushed by businesses.

------
bfuller
The internet IS fun and weird

there are tons of niche communities doing crazy stuff

[http://reddit.com/r/reptiliandude](http://reddit.com/r/reptiliandude)
[http://reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle](http://reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle)
[http://reddit.com/r/sarahai](http://reddit.com/r/sarahai)
[http://reddit.com/r/echerdex](http://reddit.com/r/echerdex)
[http://reddit.com/r/tao_of_calculus](http://reddit.com/r/tao_of_calculus)

------
intrasight
I've a daughter who is now 23. Growing up she dabbled extensively in the
evolving Internet - through the transitions it has made over the last 15
years. Seeing the sites and apps that she has used over those years has, as a
techie, been an oustanding experience. I say "Don't trust anyone over 25 to
make the Internet fun and weird".

I've not doubt that in 15 years we will look back at the current internet as
tame or simplistic - like I look back at the computers I used in the early
80s. We might still be carrying "smartphones" but I doubt it.

Lastly, I am more concerned about us users controlling the internet than I am
about it being fun or weird.

------
jacebot
My jam used to be to go to alta vista or hotbot and search "weird shit" and
see what came up. Boy howdy...but nowadays I can agree with a lot of the
comments. It is about monetization (thanks Mitch) and the user base. Also the
rise of what I will call super social sites like Reddit, FaceBook, etc.
Allowing users to tailor their content into a funneled feed, where before you
had to search for it. Literally. Then bookmark it/rss feed, hopes it stays up.
Save some websites/data to a zip drive.... ohhh I did, I did. <3 me some
iomega zips. Thanks for a walk down internet history lane. Enjoyed it!

------
8bitsrule
Appreciate the point, and that ads ruin everything. But get away from the
endless promotion of 'big name' sites and there is still a lot of fun&weird
going on on the net.

Just one example: 'Tumbler' isn't mentioned a lot anymore. But fun abides.

It's not hard to get caught up in the big names, all echo'd by all the
wannabees. It's a lot like the rest of mainstream culture. Fun's in the
subcultures. As true now as all thru the rock era.

EDIT: Wanna try a fun experiment? Limit all profitable enterprises (including
advertising) to one or two domains, say .com or .biz . Watch what happens to
those over time.

------
franciscop
IMHO the reason MySpace got so big is different:

It targeted a community of musicians in a moment when indie music on the web
was blowing up. It _also_ allowed those naturally creative people to style
their profiles. And then it brought the fans and everyone else.

It would not be a stretch to say that, had myspace not existed, I wouldn't
have played in 2 music bands in my teens. And I also started programming
there! Even though I didn't know I was programming.

I just wish I knew about archive.org back then to keep my profile somewhere
with my cool hair and horrible design xD

------
Kamogo
If anyone is interested, I made a site to show all the fun and weird things
developers are making.

[https://justforfun.io/](https://justforfun.io/)

------
duxup
I think the question maybe is why users in social media spaces can't .... be
more creative?

I used to use Geocities and yeah the internet and HTML were sort of
synonymous. As users my friends and I all had pages we'd do things on and show
each other.

I suspect the issue is that long term that doesn't bring in users who DO NOT
want to do that and thus your user base is limited, and once you make a place
that does appeal to the folks who don't want to dip their toes in code.... you
just stick everyone there.

~~~
LinuxBender
If you miss Geocities, there is always its open source successor NeoCities [1]
:-)

[1] - [https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/)

~~~
duxup
Oh that's super cool.

~~~
cr0sh
Be sure to check this out, too:

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

...and no, it all wasn't able to be saved - but a massive amount was managed
to be preserved (it used to be available as a torrent - assuming it is still
being seeded, you might be able to download a copy if you really want it - but
it ain't small).

~~~
duxup
Oh man I bet I have stuff in there ;)

------
mettamage
I hope that my explorable explanation on neural nets will be a bit more fun
and weird [1]. It is still very much in the early drafting phase but I already
have cats! Neural nets shouldn't be scary, they should be fun.

I will do a more formal submission once I'm done.

If anyone has an idea how I can make it more fun and weird, please let me
know!

[1] [https://mettamage.github.io/Interactive-Neural-
Networks/](https://mettamage.github.io/Interactive-Neural-Networks/)

------
aembleton
Lings Cars is fun, weird and actually a profitable leasing company
[https://www.lingscars.com/](https://www.lingscars.com/)

------
jungletime
I watched a 45 minute video "Web Development In 2019 - A Practical Guide"

Its him just listing off upto date technologies you need to learn to call your
self full stack in 2019 for 45 minute.

It's really ridiculous, how complicated web development is. The technology is
broken. No one wants to admit it. They just keep building on top of a rotten
core.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnTQVlqmDQ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnTQVlqmDQ0)

------
antibland
People keep bringing up existing "weird" websites as a sort of proof that life
on the web is as fun and weird as ever. What's really missing on the web is a
sense of raw discovery and wonder. I can't recall the last time the web really
surprised me. We're so connected we stopped changing. I had no idea what
today's web might have looked like back in 1997. Tomorrow's web feels a lot
easier to predict.

------
njharman
Wat?

The internet is great. The absolute best. It is or can be the superset of
everything else. All of everything is just a post, one upload away from being
part of internet.

I'm sure the top 1 or 80% is cheap but that is always the case. Pop stuff is
lowest comm denominator. The interest, the unique, the original is in tiny
niches. And that is where internet shines. Niches are cheap to publish and
have frictionless audience of the world.

------
rglover
Because the majority of people are not fun and weird. Every fringe thing that
becomes mainstream inevitably drifts toward the mean in one way or another.

------
x3tm
Maybe the author of the article is simply growing older? This is the geeky
equivalent of "modern music is crap, unlike the one of my youth".

------
sambf
Actually, some subreddits are deeply customized and bring back that web 1.0
feeling. Two of them on my mind:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating),
[https://www.reddit.com/r/jungle](https://www.reddit.com/r/jungle)

------
muzani
It seems to be a phase. Things are fun and weird when they are new and fresh.
Remember early Facebook and Stack Overflow?

After a while, they attract more serious types and evolve to be more... well
dressed. When people start to put Stack Overflow and Facebook branding on
their resume, they start to take it real seriously.

------
rutierut
I completely agree with the author and love the idea, however I'm more of a
Vue guy. The system the author is describing already exists for Vue.js, it's
called VuePress[0]. I think it's amazing, not only for docs but also for
blogs, portfolios, etc.

Shameless plug but for an example you can check out how it's used in one of
the tutorials about VuePress I'm writing. This link will take you to a Vue
component used inside a markdown file:

[https://willwillems.com/posts/building-a-website-with-
vuepre...](https://willwillems.com/posts/building-a-website-with-
vuepress.html#command-generator)

And naturally the source[1] is available online.

[0] [https://http://vuepress.vuejs.org/](https://http://vuepress.vuejs.org/)

[1]
[https://github.com/NickolasBoyer/willwillems/blob/master/pos...](https://github.com/NickolasBoyer/willwillems/blob/master/posts/building-
a-website-with-vuepress.md)

------
d_white
A few years ago, I saw @r0ml touch on this in his linux.conf.au keynote. It
had some really interesting ideas around how software could be democratized.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3nJR7PNgI4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3nJR7PNgI4)

------
SN76477
I suffer from a strange sexual fetish and I will not soon forget the feelings
I had in the 90s when I realized I wasn’t the only one.

It was a surreal feeling to know that not only was I not alone I wasn’t the
weirdest person anymore. Some were much more into it and much weirder than I
was.

------
empath75
I think the reason the internet isn't as fun and weird as it used to be is
that it's now Important and it's been weaponized by powerful interests in
pursuit of political ends. It's just non-stop ideological warfare, which is
both stressful and boring.

------
modernerd
The Internet is still fun and weird!

You just need to know where to look.

Dig into [https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/) to recapture the
feel of those home-spun web playgrounds of old.

Look at the amazing things the [https://glitch.com/](https://glitch.com/) and
[https://repl.it](https://repl.it) and
[https://codepen.io/](https://codepen.io/) communities create.

Check out the buzz and creativity in the communities gathered around YouTube
creators like Daniel Shiffman on The Coding Train:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw)

Discover amazing indie game creators doing wacky things at
[https://itch.io/](https://itch.io/).

Visit the front pages of [http://giphy.com](http://giphy.com) and
[https://imgur.com/](https://imgur.com/) for a dose of silliness and
creativity.

Hack around on a hundred different coding challenge sites like
[https://www.codewars.com/](https://www.codewars.com/) and
[https://www.codingame.com/](https://www.codingame.com/) and
[https://exercism.io/](https://exercism.io/).

Get free education and meet other learners on
[https://www.freecodecamp.org/](https://www.freecodecamp.org/) or
[https://www.khanacademy.org/](https://www.khanacademy.org/).

Browse new and interesting projects to contribute to at
[https://github.com/explore](https://github.com/explore).

And these are just fun nerdy tech sites — there is something fun or weird for
every walk of life.

It's easy to get nostalgic about the internet of old (and I appreciate the OP
is writing to promote their own neat creative coding/blogging playground), but
the premise that the Internet is no longer as fun somehow because you can't
inject crazy JavaScript into your Facebook pages seems misguided.

Outside of those strictly controlled communities, it has never been easier to
join a group of people who like to make and break weird shit online.

------
Adamantcheese
The internet isn't fun and weird because you don't actively seek it out.
You're content with what you're given and what everyone else uses and put no
effort into getting what you want because you can't bring yourself to care
enough for it.

------
icedchai
It's pretty simple: The Internet is mainstream now. The original users of the
Internet were academics, techies, and nerds. Now everyone and their mother,
literally, is online.

Do you remember Wired magazine in the 90's? It was wayyyy weirder... How about
Mondo 2000?

------
Aissen
The "source available" part kind of reminds me of MarkDeep (though in
markdeep, the source is the document itself):

[https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/](https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/)

------
kirillzubovsky
Want weird internet? My friends made [http://newhive.com](http://newhive.com)
a while back, and that site is as weird internet as it gets, with glitter,
gifs, code, and anything your heart might desire.

------
gbaygon
It's nice to try to recover the spirit of it, but also for this to work it
should be also lightweight (or at least usable).

I'm getting:

"This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it may improve the
responsiveness of your Mac."

That's Safari on my 15" mbp 17 2018.

edit: formatting

------
jancsika
Oh, that Dark Mode Toggle!

1\. the widget has a _secret toggling hotspot_ that is only discovered when
the user clicks the circle and observes that the action _failed_ to toggle the
widget.

2\. widget looks like it should behave like a mobile widget (where touching
any part of the widget will trigger a toggle) but behaves differently

3\. dragging the little circle to the other side of the widget generates a
dragging animation, _but does not update the toggle_. Instead, upon releasing
the pointer the little circle will animate _back to its original position_ ,
defeating the user's expectations.

4\. attempting to drag the circle _past its own widget boundaries_ will _fail_
to drag the circle to that distance. However, it will _succeed_ in toggling
the widget! So the obvious analogic behavior in #3 fails to trigger the
desired widget behavior, where this fantasy-world interaction does (e.g., like
sliding a penny with one's finger past the edge of a borderless table to get
the penny to stop right at the edge, yet moving the penny right to the edge
will cause it to travel back to its original position).

5\. the cursor icon changes from the "move" icon to some other icon when
attempting to drag outside the widget bounds. But remember that #4 requires a
drag to the outside of the bounds to trigger the toggle. This means that the
user is likely to see the _wrong_ cursor icon the moment before a successful
toggle event occurs. I.e., "cursor change to reflect a concern other than this
widget" likely means "this widget is about to do its thing!"

I'd like to suggest the following additional feature to the Dark Mode Toggle:

* when user drags the toggle with the pointer outside the bounds of the widget and then releases, immediately show a dialog that reads: "Ok to Cancel Toggle? [Ok] [Cancel]"

Edit: clarification

------
tanilama
Well the internet is military project to begin with, it is not born to be fun
and weird.

------
noobermin
So this is an ad for the author's publishing tool "codeblog"? Worst, when you
click on the link in the article, it only has a form to put your email in. I
have no idea what this tool does or what it's used for.

------
kavalec
The internet is like sex: if it isn't fun and weird, you're doing it wrong.

------
gnuking
There is a search engine ([https://wiby.me](https://wiby.me)) that is pretty
good for finding old/weird websites. Feels like I'm browsing the web in 1997
again.

------
ranman
[https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/1090723836209872897?s=...](https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/1090723836209872897?s=21)

------
antepodius
There's plenty of weirdness to be found. The *chan websites, for a start- the
more obscure, the more idiosyncratic and possibly pure. Trawling through IRC
channels is mysterious experience for me.

~~~
cr0sh
What little is left of news servers can also be interesting to troll thru -
but there's more noise than anything out there on those today, so it can be
frustrating at best.

There are also small pockets of gopherspace if you dare to look for 'em.

For more "mainstream", you can also still find old-school style ANSI BBS
systems (I know, redundancy) on certain IP addresses; most are simple hobby
projects, or focused on certain niche things (retro computing, for instance).

------
retail101
Here is my question.

Why isn't there a new social networking site using the old myspace layout as
their template where you can just choose your theme song, your top friends,
post weird stuff and have it just be fun?

------
itsfun10213123
You're not looking hard enough. Even flat-earthers find their own niche on the
internet.

[http://platelets.fun](http://platelets.fun) (You're supposed to click)

------
stevewilhelm
I think the internet is still fun and weird. I think the flaw is equating "the
internet" to html encoded content.

Much of the internet's creativity is encoded in audio, video, and photography.

------
quickthrower2
Wow, markdown with markup ... and imports! inside it. I'm dizzy.

------
youdontknowtho
When this is used to create a worm of some kind that puts obscene pictures in
emails to people's mothers...it will then make more sense why people stopped
taking code in inputs.

------
0db532a0
If you're looking for another dose of nostalgia:
[https://www.cameronsworld.net/](https://www.cameronsworld.net/).

------
leowoo91
Because it's normalized? Until next thing invents itself..

------
kriro
One of my favorite sites of all time is searchlores.org I still visit it
sometimes. I'd say it qualifies as fun and probably a little weird as well.
RIP Francesco.

------
rijoja
It is it's just that you don't know where to look.

[http://sigma.eruditenow.com/](http://sigma.eruditenow.com/)

------
davidork
it used to be. Then the internet became a product. It became a storefront, and
home to the advertising apocalypse that will probably wind up being the
catalyst for the downfall of the human species.

there's still funny/weird shit out there, but you have to dig pretty deep,
sift through the ads, copypasta, and general crap content to find it...
eventually it'll all be banned/deleted for some reason or another.

------
sudovancity
I assume that his version of the internet is boring. I will say the majority
of the popular internet or applications are similar in some regard.

------
sjs382
Every time I see an article like this, I feel the need to pour one out for
Kuro5hin. Man, how do I wish the archives were accessible somewhere!

------
asdfman123
Because there was money to be made, and thus it was taken over by large
corporations.

Everything becomes less fun and weird when taken over by large corporations.

------
danschumann
Role playing... you used to have usernames and you could be whoever you
wanted.. now you're expected to be yourself. Thanks facebook.

------
canadaduane
Beaker Browser is quite interesting. It allows anyone to fork a page and
create their own version, all using decentralized file storage.

------
Agnosco
This post is good marketing. Not overly complicated, but it gets a lot of
reads and the reader is gently forwarded to a call-to-action.

------
mitchtbaum
Take a look and you'll see into your imagination

We'll begin with a spin, trav'ling in the world of my creation

What we'll see will defy explanation

If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it

Anything you want to, do it.

Want to change the world, there's nothing to it

There is no life I know, to compare with pure imagination

Living there, you'll be free, if you truly wish to be.

[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/TheWonka](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/TheWonka)

------
virtuexru
That confetti button is addicting! Well done. I also totally agree that the
MySpace era was one of the funnest on the internet.

------
hiccuphippo
So how long until someone writes a codeblog post that steals your cookies when
you open it? Or do they not really allow code?

------
cwkoss
The internet has literally everything on it now. Thus, what you think about
the content is more a reflection of yourself.

------
omarforgotpwd
Funny that MySpace’s famous design was essentially created by mistake due to a
code injection vulnerability.

------
Semiapies
It's weird to look at nearly 400 comments and realize how few people actually
finished the article.

------
oarabbus_
If you don't think the internet is fun and weird, you're visiting the wrong
sites. Period.

------
dekhn
it used to be (i "grew up" on usenet and muds) but then it got popular and
emasculated.

~~~
cimmanom
emasculated?

~~~
dekhn
it had its balls cut off. What made it edgy and fun was removed as it was
promoted to normal people who just wanted to read movie listings, or whatever.

~~~
cimmanom
Well, I sort of agree with that, and I was with you until you used the term.
But I don’t see anything less masculine about the internet now than as it was
in 1993. Perhaps “sanitized” would be more applicable?

~~~
dekhn
sure, I agree the term definitely has a masculinity implication. but, I
actually think the term is roughly correct given that at the time, the net was
95% male while now it's much closer to 50-50.

Sanitized is also appropriate.

~~~
cimmanom
The way you put it seems to suggest you're disappointed it isn't still male-
dominated.

As one of the women who was online back then, I didn't perceive it as
"masculine", fwiw.

~~~
dekhn
Understood. And I MUDded with some women. Am I disappointed that the net is
less masculine? Not particularly. I certainly felt more welcome, and more
comfortable with the net before when it was a more masculine environment, and
in some sense I miss that. But I'm not the deciding user, and as a parent with
kids... my feelings are complicated.

------
wolco
The darkweb is weird and can be fun but is mostly nothing just like the
earlier weird internet.

------
jonplackett
I blame the death of Flash. Flash let a whole bunch of people make stuff who
can't now. Artists, kids, people just dicking around. You could make something
fun in a day and it didn't even need testing. Now you need to code properly
and use git and libraries. A vast swathe of fun people have been cut off from
making weird shit.

~~~
mattlondon
Hmm not sure on this - if I recall correctly, you needed super-expensive Adobe
software to make Flash applications (or were they called "animations"?) which
I am guessing most people did not have - IIRC the price of the software was
several hundred GBP (£200+) in a time when a mid-range desktop PC was like
£600-800. I think it also only ran on Windows and Mac OS? Its all half-
forgotten memories no though so those figures may be incorrect.

HTML, Javascript and CSS is free and openly available in _any_ browser on open
source OSes as well as Windows & OSX these days. You can still make some weird
stuff on the web platform if you want to, although I would agree that there
are not nice WYSIWYG editors (that I am aware of anyway) that makes this easy.

------
Waterluvian
If you can wade through the slime, 4chan has some pockets of weird/fun
original stuff.

------
randomacct3847
The internet has definitely gotten more annoying. Autoplay video should be
illegal.

------
screenhole
internet can still be super fun & weird. Screenhole is a fun community with
their own currency instead of likes, buttcoin:
[https://screenhole.net](https://screenhole.net)

------
evesprini
This is a perfect sales pitch.

------
SketchySeaBeast
> It was a beautiful mess. As the internet grew up, consumer products stopped
> trusting their users, and the internet lost its soul.

I think that's the wrong assumption to make - we figured out the language of
the internet, and developed a design methodology that worked, though it
continues to evolve.

~~~
vokep
Its the removal of user-designed anything.

Got a facebook page? Same format for everyone. Just another brick in the wall

Got a MySpace page back then? You have a playground to express yourself, you
are a human being.

------
auiya
Because most of the Internet is controlled by four or five big companies now.

------
bfuller
The internet is fun and weird but all my links got caught in the spam filter.

------
RickSanchez2600
Corporate takeover, and censorship as the Internet becomes commercialized.
Takeover of payment systems that can ban anyone's account for political
reasons.

It brought on the neoliberal trolls on 4Chan and Reddit. In some areas anyway.

The Internet is like working a job now, all fun is blocked by management.

------
amelius
Why isn't fashion more fun and weird? Everybody is wearing jeans ...

------
debt
idk bro, I think you're hanging out in the wrong parts of the internet. the
weirdness and funnest is out there. the internet is global, you sure you
looking in all the right places?

------
rammy1234
Internet is no more fun cause, people are making money out of it DOT

------
honkycat
Should probably be a Show HN, but a fun idea otherwise.

------
otabdeveloper2
Because it's owned by Google and Facebook.

\- Always yours, your Cap.

------
bb88
Fun is awesome, it just doesn't pay the bills.

------
Krasnol
People who liked X liked Y. That's why.

------
binarymax
Great post. I started reading it thinking it was just a nice nostalgic rant.
Then he goes all twist ending and announces he actually did something about
it. Bravo.

------
pryelluw
Lose yourself in neocities.org for a night.

------
willart4food
you want fun & werid? Here's fun & weird:

* [https://www.reddit.com/r/ImGoingToHellForThis/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ImGoingToHellForThis/)

* [https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/)

P.S.: there's also 4chan, if you so dare!

~~~
citrusui
Each of these subreddits has more than 800K subscribers -- it's possible, but
highly unlikely you'll see something truly strange from there.

A good place to start is a smaller subreddit. Here, I'll link two of my
favorites just for the hell of it:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/bruhmoment](https://www.reddit.com/r/bruhmoment)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/arabfunny](https://www.reddit.com/r/arabfunny)

Side note: I think the article meant weird as in "obscure".

Personally, I'd describe weird internet content as something you wouldn't show
to your friends (except if you're close, of course.)

------
ethanpil
And of course, the amazing
[https://www.lingscars.com/](https://www.lingscars.com/)

------
nyfresh
Reddit

------
EADGBE
Not one mention of <marquee>

/sad

------
danmg
A lot of stupid rules.

------
slackfan
Because you broke it.

------
kingkawn
because we are all tired of looking at our screens

------
delblues
It use to be...

------
arcaster
People who get offended all the time ruined the fun?

------
benkarst
Because of clickbait fake news...like this.

------
buboard
because the millenials had kids

------
epistemology
Ego

------
porpoisely
I thought about this as well. The internet was very fun and very weird from
the late nineties to 2012 or so. Then something changed and it became very
boring, very stale and very censored.

Then corporations, journalists and politics happened. Now those with the
megaphones complain day and night about anything and everything they disagree
with and demand everything be censored. Every day there is a new list of words
you can't stay, sites you can't visit or content that is going to be filtered.

Somehow, the most annoying and prudish people were given the role of internet
hall monitor and we are suffering for it.

------
sayno3
Because it is more dangerous. When the internet was treated as just images on
a screen that one could turn off, it wasn't taken seriously and people weren't
afraid to put up stuff on textfiles. Now some trash people would dox you and
it is easy because your entire personal network is ubiquitously connected. So
all it takes is persistence from a malicious actor and they will have a lot of
influence on your real life.

------
oskkejdjdkjd
The answer is really simple. It’s because most people who use the internet are
not fun and weird. Trying to blame it on anything else is wrong.

------
faissaloo
This still exists you just have to dig quite deeply for it. I created
[https://ratwires.space](https://ratwires.space) (NSFW) specifically to try
and bring back some of the things that made the internet weird and wonderful
when I was growing up but within a more modern framework rather than simply
trying to make another GeoCities clone.

------
the_other_guy
in an era where the internet is controlled by a handful of internet monopoly
businesses and where any fun can easily be seen as offense by someone
somewhere, then fun has to disappear or relabeled to not hurt businesses sole
raison d'etre which is profit. It's not 2007 anymore, sadly.

------
rebornshellfish
Oh wow, even just trying to read the "Internet is the great equalizer (1996)"
article runs into a paywall. That's where we've come.

------
KangLi
How can I post a question on Hacker News?

~~~
Jaruzel
You prefix your post[1] title with 'Ask HN:', although unless it's a _really_
good question, you probably wont get any answers.

\---

[1] Via the submit button at the top.

------
Romanulus
Evidently, the OP conflates "fun and weird" with "annoying and stupid."

~~~
PhasmaFelis
It's impossible to block "annoying and stupid" without also blocking "fun and
weird". You wind up with identical beige blandness.

~~~
Romanulus
No, you're left with content the content which hopefully isn't terrible.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Well, we don't know what the content would be like with a modern "fun/weird"
internet, but the content we have right now is mostly shit, so...

------
the-pigeon
I see we have different definitions of "fun" and "weird".

------
franze
The internet of 2006 was not fun. We saw what we could do - but could not do
it because of creating workarounds for IE6.

A typical case of retroactive romantecism. picking one aspect, romantecising
it, ignoring everything else.

~~~
noja
Sure it was fun, despite the IE part. Don't over-simplify.

~~~
paulgb
I made pocket change in high school by debugging IE CSS issues for strangers
on the internet, which was absolutely fun and occasionally also quite weird :)

