Browsing vs. searching. We don't seem to do much browsing anymore. We search and selectively pick what we consume.
It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon.
Now, I search a term and click on the first few results, at most. Sure, there are exceptions but they are rare. As you say, it's much more useful.
> We don't seem to do much browsing anymore. We search and selectively pick what we consume. It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun.
Dunno, how much of this is also just getting older and set in our life routine? When was the last time I explored my own city on a bike like I would as a kid? Our interests and patience for browsing change.
How old are you now vs in this "golden era of the web"?
Most of those stories just sound like nostalgia to me. Like suggesting that games these days aren't as good as they used to be because look how less time you spend gaming these days.
When I first used networked computers, you paid someone to do searches for you and got a reply in 3 to 7 days.
It pretty much sucked, honestly. Translation was obscenely expensive and not much better than Google can do today. You paid by the minute or, in my case, the university did.
It was pretty terrible.
Then, this fancy world wide web came about, only it had been world wide before that, albeit at a different scale. It was pretty great.
Now? It's much better in that it is much more useful. I can still make discoveries of novel content, but I seldom do. I search, rather than browse, when I seek information on a subject.
It's not nostalgia, I don't think. It's much more useful today. It was pretty terrible the first times I used it. In fact, it wouldn't improve for like a decade, maybe longer.
If it helps, I also hated computers back then. They were slow, unintuitive, and I had to learn to program to actually have a functional (well, useful to me) device. They clanged, beeped, and whirled. They made dreadful noises and did exactly what you told them to do, even if what you told them to do was stupid. They didn't have things like a recycle bin. Hell, they didn't even have internal storage.
One computer was so horrible that I had to buy 'memory chips' (RAM) just so I could use lowercase letters. All told, it cost me more than a brand new car. You know what I did with it? I played Zork.
Edit: that translation was done by a human, by the way. It could take a week, or more, to get something translated.
As for games, in the 80s, no one knew what worked or didn't work as far as computer games went, so everybody was pretty much throwing everything against the wall and seeing what stuck. And you ended up with some memorable games [1][2]. But over time, people learn, genres develop, budgets rise and you get less original and more homogeneous games.
It's the same with the web. When it went big in 1994, no one knew what they were doing, so everybody was pretty much throwing everything against the wall and seeing what stuck. But over time, people learn, genres develop, budgets rise and you get less original and more homogeneous pages, only this time with so many ads that it takes 500 requests to download your typical page these days.
What I think people are missing is this original, outrageous and anything goes type of experience. But I suspect the Cambrian explosion of web expression is dead for the time being.
[1] Qix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix). An abstract game that was mainstream and quite popular at the time. Haven't seen much like it sense.
[2] "The Earth Dies Screaming", a game I've never seen but the name alone is so evocative that I still remember it to this day. I think it was in the "alien invasion" genre popular back then.
>> I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon.
Yep, that's exactly what I used to do. That's really what "surfing the web" meant back in those days -- that you would spend hours just clicking links, seeing where they would take you. And of course, they would quite often take you to completely unexpected but cool things that you never would have found or even thought to look for otherwise.
People don't seem to build personal websites in the same way anymore - back then they weren't doing it to generate clicks, page views, passive income, build their profile etc, and everything wasn't all slickly styled and presented on a modern blogging platform. As a result websites were more amateurish, idiosyncratic, original, and sometimes charming, and I think the essence of the creator's motivation or interests often came across more strongly. The web doesn't have the same magic it used to for me. My god though some things were crap about it back in the day. If only we could have have kept the old web preserved alongside the new.
The thing is, people do build personal websites, and that old web still exists. Do you really believe that, with (according to Quora) ~140,000 new sites being created per day, no one is putting amateur, personal stuff on the web anymore?
It's just that the web has gotten bigger and more mainstream, and most of us now limit our browsing to a few silos and then act as if everything that no longer bubbles up the filter must have ceased to exist.
But so many personal websites are just self promotion of one kind or another, and that's fine, we all have to make a living, but I'd far rather read something where someone just wants to share what they know/love. And everything looks like the same set of off the shelf web design templates. I liked the weirdness of the old web. Kind of like games on the Amiga, every site was different, and that was part of the charm.
But perhaps you are right. Any tips on how to find the new gems?
That's a good question - I don't know. Discovery of anything not SEO optimized is difficult, and a lot of that content was on Geocities and Tripod, so the modern equivalent might just as likely be on Wordpress or a service like Wix, making the design homogeneous even if the content isn't. Ironically, I've found most off the beaten path sites through references in Youtube videos and Reddit. When I was getting my CS degree, the web design class involved building a quick personal site, so URLs connected to colleges might also be a good place to look.
But what's more likely, that no one is writing their own custom HTML sites anymore, or that some people are, but we just can't see them because they exist in their own ecosystems beyond the Googlesphere (and possibly even the Anglosphere?)
...I just realized I'm vaguely arguing for (but not defining the parameters of) a Drake Equation for the web, where N is new personal content. Even if the parameters are low, the scale of the web means N should be significant.
My recollection is that for every interesting personal website with carefully compiled albeit idiosyncratic information, there were 10 sites along the lines of "Mikey's Ultimate Web Site!!!" with animated "under construction" GIFs, marquee tags, a guestbook script, and about ten webrings.
For better or worse, the closest thing today to the feeling of the old personal webpage era is Tumblr. The kids get up to some crazy stuff over there.
It was/is different: folks who are excited enough about something to build a website to share it have more interesting and deep content than you typically find on social media.
These days The same goes for people with personal blogs (or website) as opposed to medium and other one design blogging platforms.
The stuff I submit to HN or comment on that wows people often came from me digging into websites you dont find with a quick Google. Esp academic web sites or just those made by smart folks with odd little organization schemes. Im guessing same was true for some of the more obscure, but valuable, stuff I see others submit or bring up.
Some websites used to have a "webring" where they would link to each other and you could just click on "next" and it would take you to another site on the same topic.
> I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon.
I sometimes still do that with Wikipedia articles and their sources, it's a fun way to kill a couple of hours and can lead down some really interesting rabbit-holes.
I remember 10+ years ago we designed websites so that important content was "above the fold". Today people are addicted to scrolling their Facebook feed.
Sites that cared about "above the fold" were part of the problem, not part of the solution. The primary reason one would be actively interested in putting content "above the fold" was if one wanted to "capture audience", which is generally not the first thing on the mind of a person posting deep information as a labour of love.
i don't think browsing's that rare, actually, it's just different, having been centralized by facebook, tumblr, wikipedia, reddit, and the like. it's less like going out and exploring the web and more like just living there.
It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon.
Now, I search a term and click on the first few results, at most. Sure, there are exceptions but they are rare. As you say, it's much more useful.