
Why there’s so little left of the early internet (2019) - ElectronShak
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190401-why-theres-so-little-left-of-the-early-internet
======
drawkbox
The best thing left on the internet is Wikipedia and archive.org, and they
nearly got that with the .ORG takeover attempt which they would take down
those sites with excessive fees, cuts and slashes from copyright/corporate
attacks veiling the authoritarian aims.

The web was once anti-authoritarian and decentralized, it is now more
authoritarian and centralized, and where it isn't authoritarian it is big fish
corporate owned.

There is so much propaganda, marketing and astroturfing, even the places set
aside for real people have been steamrolled. I don't know what the solution
is, it was a nice Wild Wild West of the web from 1992-2012-ish.

Mobile/apps also did a number on the web in terms of viability and longevity.
The sites that are successful are locked and walled gardens and highly
centralized in moderation. Moderation is also something that has been abused,
almost censorship level now, it has created shrouded content contained with
moderation moats.

~~~
rglover
The solution as I see it is to encourage independent creators who want things
that represent that 1992-2012 spirit to create them. The cost and time
required to do that now is really cheap and seeing as how a lot of people
lament their absence, some level of success is guaranteed.

Ultimately I think it comes down to personal desire and long-term goals. It
seems like a lot of great, ambitious ideas that could/should have stayed one-
person or small team operations get looped into the VC/growth thing
(effectively destroying their original intent).

~~~
tachyonbeam
I'd be tempted to create something like a reddit clone with less moderation,
but I'm wondering:

1\. How many unsuccessful reddit clones are out there already?

2\. How much would regulations be a problem nowadays? You can be held liable
for the content you host, and there's things like GPDR. Would that make it
much harder to start a new social media platform?

~~~
claudiawerner
In what way would less moderation prevent the causes of the loss of the early
web: propaganda and astroturfing? If anything, that would seem to make it
worse.

~~~
tachyonbeam
Yeah, actually not opposed to moderation, but opposed to some forms of
censorship. There's a balance to be struck, but right now, you can get kicked
off Facebook for politically-incorrect memes, for instance.

------
rpeden
I'm fighting the good fight by keeping my thoroughly embarrassing personal
website from the 90s online. Neither the URL nor the pages have changed since
1999!

[http://boglin.iwarp.com/](http://boglin.iwarp.com/)

~~~
Apocryphon
On one hand, I love finding pristine pre-Web 2.0 websites untouched by
modernity. On the other hand, I love finding such sites that are actually
being updated semi-regularly while keeping that older aesthetic. Shows that
they can still live on into the future.

~~~
btrettel
What are some good examples of web-1.0-style sites (from that era) that are
still being updated semi-regularly?

I can find a lot of web-1.0- _style_ sites that are updated regularly, but few
originally from that time.

Daniel J. Bernstein's site is one example I remembered off the top of my head:
[https://cr.yp.to/djb.html](https://cr.yp.to/djb.html)

~~~
PJDK
If you ever need to do any bike repair's the late Sheldon Brown's website is a
godsend. Looks like someone is still updating it too!

[https://www.sheldonbrown.com/](https://www.sheldonbrown.com/)

------
dexen
A good example of a website that stood the test of time: the C2 Wiki, aka
Portland Pattern Repository:

[https://wiki.c2.com/](https://wiki.c2.com/)

Sadly it's been recently made read-only, and development shifted to a
convoluted "Web 2.0" JS app.

~~~
garbagetime
Is there any benefit to having the content stick to the left side of the
screen and not sit in the middle?

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Macuyiko
Typical article of the sort these days:

1) pretentious journalist wanting to link it to politics. Picks 2 or 3 "good"
examples (like the MDH) to make their point

2) commentors on HN or elsewhere jumping on everything with a notion of
nostalgia

3) smarter pundits trying to explain why the older "solutions" aren't
"perfect"

My personal conclusion is that Google has been heavily down-scoring content
which is more than a couple months old. Try installing a blacklist extension
and blacklist all news sites and take a look at what remains. I have no doubt
this is algorithmically driven. This is what's wrong with the Internet today.
And Neocities or whatever else ain't gonna fix it.

~~~
Swizec
Google’s algorithm is weird when it comes to this.

Yes they downscore anything old. But sometimes they decide an old thing is
_the_ perfect answer for all time.

And so if you google 60*60 my article about newbie programming mistakes with
time shows up above even the google calculator. It’s been unchanged for almost
5 years.

~~~
codetrotter
On mobile I get only the calculator in the result, and a button with “more
results”.

But when I press the button and the results from the web are shown, then your
site with the article you mentioned is the first result indeed.

So contrary to what the sibling suggested, it’s not just you that it is
showing this for. And I probably live in a different country than you even. I
live in Norway.

------
softwaredoug
There's a good argument to be made for the Internet as _not_ the sum total of
human knowledge. But rather a very temporal view influenced by search engines
and social media.

Content business models are temporary. Why would anyone keep high-quality, non
spammy knowledge freely available? Ad revenue is drying up more and more,
there has to be another angle? And who's to say whatever business model they
think of won't change in 5 years, the company acquired, or something else...

~~~
Threeve303
> Why would anyone keep high-quality, non spammy knowledge freely available?

This is really the crux of the issue. To understand the original purpose of
the internet, you have to look at it as a space devoid of any business model.
It was primarily about sharing. Commercialization drove the current state of
ad dollars and fake news.

There was a time, long ago, when it was just about community. And because you
cared about your community, each member was an arbiter of truth of sorts. We
lost that connection.

Facebook likes to call itself a community too, but the two are not very
similar.

------
TwoBit
Title says "internet" when it should say "world wide web."

~~~
com2kid
I also miss the old FTPs, and the days when you could list all website
directory contents. I miss the early days when BBSes tried to migrate to
telnet online. I miss P2P sharing apps that had chat rooms and communities
build around them (anyone reading this remember VNN2000?).

alt.tasteless, principa discordia, and I remember reading about was the 3rd
(or 4th) burning man long before it was "a thing".

Back when "The New Hacker's Dictionary" used to provide a common lexicon and
even people who didn't read 1960s Sci-Fi knew what "grok" meant.

~~~
johnchristopher
> I miss P2P sharing apps that had chat rooms and communities build around
> them (anyone reading this remember VNN2000?).

Nah. But I really did dig WASTE !

~~~
com2kid
I never used WASTE, I was a fan of Direct Connect though.

It is weird how technological limitations forced tiny servers and users to
talk in order to swap files.

IRC of course being the precursor to all this.

Bit torrent has everything, but I don't get to stumble on someones shared
files know they like somethings I like, and then explore organically.

What I miss most from the earlier web is mp3.com. To this day I am angry at
the founder for screwing over countless independent artists so he could try
and prove a point against the RIAA. The market _still_ hasn't consolidated on
a similar product that does everything MP3.com used to do:

1\. Bands Organized by Genre

2\. Streaming of the band's songs

3\. Ability to order a band's music

4\. Social discovery of new music

If I cobble together Sound Cloud and Bandcamp I'm still stuck with a discovery
problem that Spotify only kinda helps. Mp3.com was a directory like the old
Yahoo, so browsing around was a great way to discover new music and then BUY
it.

(I still haven't been able to find a replacement for an album I ordered off
mp3.com, the band up and vanished as most bands do and I lost the CD.)

~~~
johnchristopher
> (I still haven't been able to find a replacement for an album I ordered off
> mp3.com, the band up and vanished as most bands do and I lost the CD.)

I feel you. There a tons of bands (and other works such as books) that aren't
and likely won't ever be accessible. This grinds my gears when I read comments
about how the Internet/Piracy has everything. It has everything that is
mainstream enough and even then the ephemeral nature of some technology used
to share it (torrent, emule, etc.) don't necessarily mean it's available years
later. In the sense that torrent networks aren't for storage but for sharing.

It's an error to believe piracy makes everything available.

------
autokad
I was doing an ml thing trying to teach the algorithm how to sort trash:
recycling, compost, trash.

I wanted to add some additional labeled data so I thought I would start out
with an item like 'strawberry' and google image search the item. I realized it
was nearly impossible to find an actual image of a strawberry. If you google
search something as simple as strawberry, all you get is page after page of
stock photos and images of strawberries on various forms of eCommerce sites.

No actual image of someone taking a picture of a strawberry.

------
CarbyAu
I find it hard to believe that Reddit effectively replaced BBS. The Reddit
interface is woeful for exploring the comments on any given thread. I don't
know how Reddit so popular...

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19562650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19562650)

------
linsomniac
... you mean besides our iron-fisted grip on IPv4?

------
bfuclusion
If you compute storage cost vs content creation rate, you would expect that
not much would get saved.

------
peter303
Good! I made more troll posts in usenet days.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Me too. And under my real name.

Edit: I'm not asking to be doxxed. It wouldn't be that hard, but just having
some sort of online pseudonym makes me feel better.

------
xtiansimon
Superbad.com

