The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings, banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy an image and getting a Javascript alert telling you the image was "copyright". It was learning that you could copy it anyway if you spammed enter. It was hotlinking those same images in protest. It was waiting 5 hours to download a 37 second 320x240 RealPlayer video. It was having a password "protected" area where the password is base64 encoded in the source. It was trying the same search query in multiple search engines because they would return different results. It was typing random URLs in to see if you could find something interesting yourself. It was playing midi files on loop in the background. It was Macromedia Flash, explicit popups, pure yellow text on black backgrounds, and reformatting your computer to get rid of viruses.
The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks.
Yeah, I remember when searching and browsing the web meant finding tons of legit, information-dense content that had absolutely zero monetary interest behind it. Sites of university professors and students, random personal websites (countless band/game/movie/show fan sites), and even the company websites were usually quite sincere and simple. I feel VERY lucky to have been knee-deep in all of it since the beginning, certainly a unique time in the history of technology. Not sure when we'll see something like that again, if ever, since humanity cannot put that genie back in the bottle.
I can get lost for hours browsing sites like that on web.archive.org. Start from some interesting topic on ~1997 yahoo.com and follow links. A lot of dead links of course, since not everything is in the archive, but enough is there to make it more fun to read than almost anything easy to discover on www 2025.
For me, the old web died with filesharing. It was the point the legal and corporate world asserted control, truly a free place until then, anything felt possible.
I'd go as far as to say filesharing was a completely new, post-scarcity economic model. One that was ruthlessly crushed by capital.
It was also visiting pages like pages.small-isp.net/~username and digging through the HTML to see if somebody had <!-- hidden comments adding private commentary but only for folks who were knowledgeable and curious enough to look -->
This is the oldest snapshot I can find in archive.org, from 2001. But the page says copyright 1996 at the bottom, and that's more like when I actually published this page:
Sadly, or perhaps not, the Shockwave animation has failed to survive the internet geological record.
This bit made me grin:
N.B. this is an animation, but if you don't have netscape 2 or later with the shockwave plugin, you won't see it doing its stuff...
You could try getting netscape 2 from netscape, and the plugin from macromedia if you really want
(Now I feel _old_, my regular internet username/handle is 30 years old next year...)
I once bought a SNES game that couldn't be found at local stores (final fantasy 2) by 1/ finding a guy on a message board with the cartridge, 2/ mailing that person a check, and 3/ waiting (probably weeks?) to receive the cartridge in the mail. The old Internet. I still have that game btw.
For me, it was much easier to make friends with the manager of the local Blockbuster knock-off rental place and order games via them. Though I did once walk 6 miles (round trip) to Wal-Mart to buy Illusion of Gaia with allowance money.
It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Absolutely miss Newgrounds. It's still around of course, I'm reflecting more on the vibes when it was in its heyday. Unbelievable the games people were making with Flash back then and how it spawned the careers of a ton of indie darlings. Also, not Flash at all, but does anyone remember Exit Mundi? Absolute gold.
Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging unfavorably. Before that people made websites to showcase their interests and hobbies, and because of that even the most basic looking websites could have a lot of "color" to them. Then blogging became a thing and people's websites became bland and minimalist. Arguably blogging culture is as responsible for the death of creativity on the internet as much as the constraints of mobile-friendly web design and Apple's aforementioned killing of Flash.
> It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash.
Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.
The iPhone had about 14% marketshare at the time, so it's not like Apple was in a commanding position to dictate terms to the industry.
But if you read his letter, what he said made total sense: Flash was designed for the desktop, not phones—it certainly wasn't power or memory efficient. Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.
And of course Flash was proprietary and 100% controlled by Adobe.
Jobs made the case for the (still in development) HTML5--HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
What people don't seem to remember: most of the industry thought the iPhone would fail as a platform because it didn't support Flash, which was wildly popular.
> Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.
I’m really surprised anyone could say that. To my view, “Thoughts on Flash killed Flash” is about as true as “the sky is blue”. It’s fairly clear to me that without a strong stance, a less principled mobile OS (like Android) would have supported it, and probably Flash would still be around today. Apple’s stance gave Google the path to do the same thing, and this domino effect led to Flash being discontinued 7 years later. You say 7 years as if it’s a long time from cause to effect, but how long would you estimate it would take a single action to fully kill something as pervasive as Flash, which was installed on virtually every machine (Im sure it was 99%+)? You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
> You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
First, there's no way Flash would still be alive today; Apple might have sped up its demise but it had so many disadvantages, it was just a matter of time and it was controlled by one company.
Remember that the web standards movement was kicking into high gear around the same time; we had already dodged a bullet when Microsoft attempted to take over the web with Active X, Silverlight, JScript.
The whole point of the Web Standards movement was to get away from proprietary technologies.
> You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
Safari has never been the dominant browser; not sure why you think that. Other than the United States, iPhone marketshare is under 50% everywhere else.
Even in 2025, Safari's global marketshare is about 15% [1] and that's after selling 3 billion devices [2].
> Microsoft attempted to take over the web with Active X, Silverlight, JScript.
Silverlight was a responsive to flash.
It was also remarkably open for the time, ran on all desktop platforms, and in an alternative universe Silverlight is an open source cross platform UI toolkit that runs with a tiny fraction of the system requirements of electron, using a far superior tool chain.
Getting rid of Flash was never ever about using HTML5 for Apple. It was always to obviously to make battery life better and ofc adding more experiences to their walled garden store.
Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox. And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged. E.g like Screen Wake Lock API finally implemented in iOS 16 but to this day broken on Home screen. And like not quite obvious to use in Safari too.
Because working web standards support would make cross platform mobile apps possible outside of App Store.
I don't think it's lagging behind that much, and you could also argue that you don't need to implement every single feature blindly. A lot of features are strictly not needed, and if you do decide to do them - it needs to be done in an efficient way.
There's a reason why Safari is considered the most energy efficient browser.
> And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged.
From "Every site can be a web app on iOS and iPadOS" [1]
Now, we are revising the behavior on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. By default, every website added to the Home Screen opens as a web app. If the user prefers to add a bookmark for their browser, they can disable “Open as Web App” when adding to Home Screen — even if the site is configured to be a web app. The UI is always consistent, no matter how the site’s code is configured. And the power to define the experience is in the hands of users.
This change, of course, is not removing any of WebKit’s current support for web app features. If you include a Web Application Manifest with your site, the benefits it provides will be part of the user’s experience. If you define your icons in the manifest, they’re used.
We value the principles of progressive enhancement and separation of concerns. All of the same web technology is available to you as a developer, to build the experience you would like to build. Giving users a web app experience simply no longer requires a manifest file. It’s similar to how Home Screen web apps on iOS and iPadOS never required Service Workers (as PWAs do on other platforms), yet including Service Workers in your code can greatly enhance the user experience.
Simply put, there are now zero requirements for “installability” in Safari. Users can add any site to their Home Screen and open it as a web app on iOS26 and iPadOS26.
> Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox.
Really?
Safari was first to ship :has() in March 2022; Firefox couldn't ship until December 2023.
I listed a bunch of web platform features Safari shipped before Chrome and Firefox [1][2].
Even now, Firefox hasn't shipped Anchor Positioning, Scroll-driven animation, text-wrap: pretty, Web GPU, Cross-document view transitions, etc. but Safari and Chrome have.
> It was always to obviously to make battery life better
I don't think it was about saving battery power. Jobs was smart in convincing people to focus on web stack for apps - Flash was king of rich app experiences, and java [inc applets] for corporate apps. Apps went iOS native batteries got drained in other ways (large video & photos, prolonged use). Just think of the costs, energy and time spent over the next 15 years maintaining multiple code-bases to deliver one service. The web remained open, where as mobile went native and closed-in.
> Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.
That's a ton of ram. I recall spending a lot of time on flash websites in the early 2000s in college on the school issued laptop with maybe 64 mb of ram (and I think maybe pentium iii 650mhz so more cpu oomph)
Given Steve Jobs' character, there may be another reason behind it: that year, before the decision to stop supporting Flash, Adobe broke their agreement with Apple by releasing Photoshop for PCs before the version for Mac for the first time. This could sound as a conspiracy teory, and I don't know how much evidence we have that this might have been the reason (or one of the reasons) behind the decision. But, given Jobs' personality, I think this is plausible.
We should also consider that, having Flash support, would have opened the door to non-Apple-approved apps running on iPhones, something that Apple has always strenously opposed. All-in-all, at the time I got the feeling that the technical reasons provided by Jobs weren't the main reasons behind the decision.
Flash and open source actionscript allowed devs to completely circumvent the Apple App Store. That was a direct threat to the iOS business model at the time.
You're right, I did a quick search and apparently they still considered supporting it though [0], but they didn't they the results they were hoping for.
Newgrounds was incredible! At the time, games (of any quality) for free was a biiiiig deal. It was even more amazing that you didn't need to wait hours to download and install them.
I agree w/ your take on blogging... kind of a bland "one-stop-shop" for everything a person thinks of rather than an experience tailored to a specific interest. I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly... even within a single domain I would have multiple websites all linking to each other, each with a different design, and subtly different content, but now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol. Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
I'm working on a revamp of my personal site. I do a lot of creative coding, most of them are throwaway experiments, so I thought I'd showcase more of them there. Besides that though, I have some "rare pepes" that I've been meaning to put somewhere. What I like about these is that they're highly polished, animated gifs that imitate the sort of "holographic" effect you'd find in rare collector's cards, but at the same time you can't track down who originally made them, they aren't part of some professional's online portfolio. In that sense they feel like a special piece of internet folk art, made by some complete rando.
Nowadays we have Pinterest and the like, but I really like the idea of creating my own little online space for images I like.
One of my fondest memories of the early Web was getting awards on Newgrounds for my animations(I had one for 250k views. Pretty sure I got into the top ten at one point) , and logging in to read and respond to comments, and to see that view counter tick up and up!
Agreed on both points. When blogging became the dominant reason for having a website, we were already on the way to the "content" hell. Any semi popular website had pressure to post more frequently, diluting quality. And pretty soon after that, blogs went from 500 words to 140 characters, but 10x the frequency.
Static websites that were updated only once in a while were far better at showing a cross section of someone's life In that respect, StumbleUpon and browser bookmarks were superior to RSS.
In retrospect, I would say that the "blog rush" was kind of a precursor to the rise of influencers. There was even a crowd of "blogging gurus" that would ask a pretty peny for advice on how to advance your blog.
The blogging pressure got so out of hand, that even some EU bureucrat thought it would be a great idea for each FP6 funded project to have a blog besides its static website. At least with the influencing trend they don't ask researchers to do glamour shots with their food.
Ruffle needs more love. The time and effort that's gone in to a browser extension to emulate flash, should be receiving that sponsorship from Cloudflare.
It's more to do with HTML5 than lack-of flash, although it could be argued that flash's long-prophesied downfall was one of the reasons for HTML5's rapid adoption.
HTML5 is when the web stopped being the web. It has no legitimacy in calling itself "hypertext", it's an app-delivery mechanism with a built-in compatibility layer. In this regard Flash is just as bad and probably even worse, but since it wasn't in anyway standardized or even open-source there was a fair amount of pushback from all fronts. HTML5 had no such pushback.
Flash was the first broken site I ever encountered, some restaurant had an all-flash webpage. Never did end up going to that restaurant. Why bother? If they render content inaccessible behind some needless jank like Flash or JavaScript, why bother? Another fun thing to do was to keep a tally of how many "OMG stop the presses!!" security vulnerabilities Flash had racked up over time, which was lots. Many hundreds. Made even a lolfest like Windows look bad. Flash, it was not killed with fire soon enough. Chrome and other such bloatware arguably also need some sort of fire, or at least a diet or trepaning or something, but that's a different rant, though one very much related to the Old Web or the smolweb.
That argument would have merit if the replacement wasn't apps, you can only buy in a monopoly store that own all the rights for licence management (and conveniently get deprecated at a pace decided by the company selling the hardware to run them).
Wow this hit too close to home but describes my internet experience of the 00s exactly. Except for anime vhs tapes it was fansubs on irc or mailing burned cds/dvds.
That's awesome. By the time I got on IRC it was for XDCC ;P. I did once pool cash with some friends to buy rips of Dragonball GT on ebay... 64 episodes on 2 CD-Rs.
neocities.org for http is nice, gopher sphere is still a thing, Gemini is pretty cool. The old web is still around and pretty fun to surf. Recommend Lagrange.
Creator of Bear here. Suggesting that because one project fails, others will too is a bit of a fallacy. Fact is that whether you self-host or not, you're still using someone else's platform (unless you're a real self-hoster with a box in your closet, in which case, good on you and godspeed).
I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to backup and migrate, that's fair.
Additionally, part of the appeal of Bear is that I've made it my personal mission to get the platform to outlive me. Take that as you will. I can't prove that Bear will live on in perpetuity, but I can try my best.
Thank you for taking your time to reply to my comment.
I want to clarify one thing first: I don't have anything special against your platform, it's just that it seems I see at least one article a week about it on HN lastly and I'm wondering why.
I'm sure you are well intentionned and you'll do your best to keep the plaftorm as true to the mission you have chosen to take and described in your manifesto, no doubt about it.
But having been through a certain number of hype cycles around tech, I tend to become suspicious when I see too much people pushing something.
That's why I understand people complaining about Kagi's omnipresence here, even though I'm totaly on the hype train here.
Furthermore, the article looks like a promotion for the platform. It probably isn't, and you don't control what people publish, so it's not your fault.
Yet, it reads like "bearblog is the solution to "Resurrect the Old Web".
Which, to me, can't be, since it's a platform like the hundreds that previously came and went, no matter their creator's promise.
So, sure, bearblog exists, it offers people a way to publish content in an _old fashioned_ way, and, according to its manifesto, it will stay like this as long as it exists.
Which is nice.
And can be part of a solution, but it's not the solution. I don't think there is, actually.
Tech is stuck behind the symbolic threshold. We're at the point we use the symbolic, which is arbitrary, for literally everything as a substitute, mimic, representation that's in reality. Eventually the symbolic eats itself alive in arbitrariness and society capitalizing on that arbitrariness. This is basic stuff CS doesn't make itself aware of.
We're at the end of communication in this symbolic era. You can see it in politics, climate policy, fiscal policy, trade policy, media, everything is at an end-point or a breaking point.
So lacking an awareness of the end-game for the symbolic, we retreat to an easier, earlier state, which is nostalgic. But its nostalgia for a system already on the way out.
We don't blog about it in our team since this is about a post-symbolic era, which has some proprietary elements.
But we keep two with papers active exploring the ideas with updated citations.
I stumbled across this whole dimension of arbitrariness in the aftermath of a successful game which the users took as non-narrative. And it really began when my favorite teacher asked if I knew how illusory symbols were and handed me a book called Brain, Symbol, Experience: Towards a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness. From there the threads led in all directions.
> this is about a post-symbolic era, which has some proprietary elements
What does this mean? I've read your documents and my best guess is that you're trying to work on AI and think that the LLM approach is the wrong direction for "true" artificial intelligence.
Forget AI in this format, it'd a wash. It's counting. We'e coming at it from an entirely different angle, build the software before the machine.
Assume it's a language that replaces language.
"..words are a terrible straitjacket. It's interesting how many prisoners of that straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off."
Stanley Kubrick
Do not mock what you do not understand. This person (persons? collective consciousness?) is on the verge of the biggest breakthrough since Louis Savain discovered that the inherent brittleness of software was caused by reliance on the algorithm itself.
Developing a bypass to language is hardly a breakthrough. It's been underway 20K years. We just got sidetracked by symbols. You engineers are so reliant on math, you can't see a way around it. That was the only way, math was a trick to specificity. It can't work.
whats your solution to bypass language? I do see the point that its a lossy compression medium but I also dont see how we can directly hook up our latent spaces
Books where you can read more about this:
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (Have read - is weird, but relevant and recommended)
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard (Haven't read - scared of it, probably bearly relevant)
These are mostly irrelevant. Debord is totally narrative, it's worthless. Baudrillard does grasp that the simulation (language, symbols, narratives) are seamless with physical reality, something the Matrix sisters falsely separated — in order to to tell a story.
I don’t use Bear but bless you for building it the way you are. Not everyone has development skills to do it themselves so it’s up to us coders and programmers to build these tools.
> Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped.
The key is to put everything under our own domains. This turns the platforms hosting it into mere implementation details. If the host goes down, just move the data elsewhere.
I use GitHub Pages for my static site but I could trivially move everything to Cloudflare Pages if needed. I could also pay for a VPS or make my own server somehow. Moving away from gmail to my own domain was also one of the best things I've ever done. I'm a happy Proton Mail customer now but that's just an implementation detail, I could switch by simply reconfiguring DNS to point to new mail servers.
DNS is the ultimate layer of indirection. We must own the domain. If we don't have a domain, then we're just digital serfs in someone else's digital fiefdom.
And that includes sites such as this one. Make it yourname.com, not ycombinator.com/threads?id=yourname.
Until you stop paying ICANN and they take your domain away from you. You are just a serf in ICANN's kingdom, don't get deluded. At leasr other platforms like X let you reserve a name for free, forever unlike ICANN which has persistent fees to keep your name.
> At leasr other platforms like X let you reserve a name for free
Yeah, because they want you to feed them content. They want your "engagement". They'll ban your free name just as easily as they handed it out to you too.
It usually takes court orders for domains to be censored. Quite the contrast to the corporations that reserve the right to ban you for any and all reasons including no reason.
> persistent fees to keep your name
Yeah, about 10 dollars a year.
I'm not deluded at all. I also pay the government their taxes every year. If I don't, they will litetally take away the house I live in which is worth several orders of magnitude more money.
>It usually takes court orders for domains to be censored.
Most are taken away without a court order, like X they have a set of rules. People who break these rules can have their domain suspended. There is no due process, your domain can be taken away for any reason too.
The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge. The old web was to me about people publishing whatever for whatever reason, especially amateurs and persons. That web has to me been pushed aside for the benefit of the gain-market-and-profit-from-everything crowd.
I graduated from Geocities/Angelfire in a year or less, learned HTML, and designed my first website on a traditional shared hosting plan with hypermart.net. From there, obv. I could easily go anywhere, as there wasn’t anything particularly special or proprietary keeping me there. I wrote HTML in notepad, and FTP’d those files to my host. There’s nothing to stop people from doing this today.
> The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge.
Let's not forget ISPs and schools offering hosting. Universities even used to let students and faculty have routable IPs and DNS entries on the school's domain.
I'm a HN Heretic. HN says dark patterns, money, power, corporate interests.
I think it was very simple: Proprietary platforms solve real-world problems the more "open" web doesn't and did not effectively solve: discoverability, spam filtering, content filtering, community. Regular people don't want the open web, and never have. They only tolerated it when it was given to them without alternatives.
Proprietary platform solve all the problems you cite for exactly as long as it remains profitable to do so, and not a nanosecond longer. Once you’ve been captured, say goodbye to every one of those things.
That's not new; it's been happening all the way back since AOL. AOL was basically an abstraction layer over the whole internet that we tolerated (remember when every show had both a URL and an AOL keyword?), but it broke like anything can.
For that matter, your maxim also applies to the open internet, and watch what's happening. It's not profitable, so sites are packing up.
In a nutshell, content costs money. People make content anticipating money. Doesn't matter if it's on Discord, on YouTube, or a private blog. No money, no investment.
A load bearing element of the old web was these hosting sites where you just uploaded your HTML. It became as big as it did because of how easy and accessible it was.
It's really questionable whether any old web revival project could work without someone picking up the torch of the likes of geocities. Thankfully there are such projects, which may or may not shut down at some point, but then someone else can pick up the torch. I doubt anyone put stuff online in the nineties expecting them to be around thirty years later.
The first step to "resurrect the old Web" would be to remove the fonts.googleapis.com dependency from your blog. It enables Google to track people across the Internet.
This may be better than Google, but I don't understand why a blog needs a font CDN at all. Just use standard fonts or host them yourself if you really can't do without your SuperCoolFont.
For real - computers come with a shitton of nice fonts these days. Plus like, font styling allows fallbacks -- choose a nice font stack where all the fallbacks look nice, and you're good to go.
The problem is that you also can't use the majority of local fonts people already have installed because advertisers started requesting those on hidden canvases to try to pinpoint segments of users based on which fonts you have installed, so `local('Some Font Name')` in CSS now sometimes just doesn't work in some browsers to prevent that privacy leak.
Advertising networks: the exact evil for why we can't have nice things on the web.
"No ads" is possible. It's a choice really. Too many bloggers also want to make money and think ads are the way to do it. That's certainly their right, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Want no ads, start browsing gopher sites. No ads there. Or find people making blogs just because they want to. They exist. Github + Jekyll is a great option for free static blogging if your willing to spend a little time getting it setup and learning something new.
It's like the nostalgia about the "Summer of Love" and the 1960's... it really only lasted a single summer and only in one or two little areas.
Same thing with the "old web." It was about the very early 90s before Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic days) and when everyone was just throwing up a single HTML page with a bunch of links... that's the "old web".
The modern WWW kicked off with the ability to make credit card transactions online (1994). That... and porn (1995).
For "old web" sites that still exist, check out wiby
"The Summer of Love" literally refers to one summer in 1967 not the whole of 60's counter-culture. Even Woodstock was in '69.
In terms of the various cultural strands then of course they lasted longer with many roots in 50's beatnick culture (bohemianism, poetry, LSD, Buddhism) to today where bands that played Monterey '67 and Woodstock are still touring and a "definitely not a hippy" in San Francisco might live in a polycule, micro-dose psychedelics while using a meditation app before writing a blog about effective altruism.
So, obviously, ads were the norm back in the day. The author had to be wearing several rose tinted glasses when writing that.
But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game".
This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad-free in the way that a lot of former or legacy forums were and are.
I may be wearing the same glasses here, but it felt like ads were more like "real ads" back then.
Like when walking down a street, you may see some posters advertising something, but they are clearly ads, because they are noisy rectangles bunched up with other noisy rectangles.
On the older internet, ads felt more like that, and seemed to stay in the corner away from the content. However, on the modern internet, ads and content feels entangled.
It's a bit like visiting a touristic area. It can feel like everything is trying to grab your attention to sell something and merchants become untrustworthy.
Ads back then were pretty unobjectionable because they were like, a GIF or JPG on a page. It wasn't even until like 1998-1999 or something where they really started being JavaScript-driven from ad delivery shit like DoubleClick and so on. Suddenly I'm reminded of one of the early perpetrators of pop-up ads, X10 Technology[0] which was egregious enough to result in an early internet music artist, Kompressor, releasing a song about it, "We Must Destroy X-10"[1]
I don't know, I rarely see ads these days. I surf the internet with adblock exclusive and just try to skip over things like sponsored links or youtubers advertising in their video.
They all wish they had the viewership for ads. They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers. Banners, side banners, buttons, applets, most web advertising size standards are derivative of these initial placements.
What you’re talking about was geocities or aol’s members sites that anyone could build a site with. Anyone running CGI wishes for that sweet ad revenue to pay for the Sun servers…
I had ads on one of my sites in the later 90's that drew a fair amount of traffic... it technically was enough to pay for the hosting, but in the end it wasn't making enough money for it to be real income. I removed it just because I wanted to give a better experience.
That's exactly right. They were REALLY chill in the early days: "The only code that we require to be on all of your html pages is a reference back to GeoCities. This can be a reference to the main Neighborhood page that you reside in, or to the GeoCities Home Page. Please see the FTP Procedures Page for the preferred source code." from https://web.archive.org/web/19961220170537/http://www.geocit...
The other rules are actually pretty cool, too. Zero commercial use allowed. This probably singlehandedly ensured the most diverse and interesting content.
And in order to find those neighbors in my neighborhood, we started web rings...
Sites I liked were added to mine. My friends added me to theirs. Next thing you know we have curated journeys through web design - graphics - music - literature - art - trade skills - DIY - and well... let's just say they like four channels.
Yes, I had some pages on geocities around 1996/97 and to the best of my memory they had no ads. I must have stopped using the site entirely by the point they got added.
Every time I get on my tracking and internet privacy soapbox, and I lament how little people care about it these days, I need to cast my mind back to when I was a teenager and everyone wanted a counter on their homepage. Not all hosts provided a counter script in their cgi-bin so various third-party websites offered counter image links that you could add into your page. Of course when you clicked through you could see all the different countries of your site's visitors and it was the coolest thing ever. I was thrilled when I hit 1000 visitors at some point! But looking back, even if a few of those third-party counter providers were just benevolent sysadmins offering a public service, I have no doubt some of them turned into the data mining giants of today.
To be fair, Geocities did get done by the FTC for secretly selling users' PII to third-party advertisers almost 30 years ago, so it wasn't just our own faults. But I think rather than the FTC actually putting a stop to the behavior, the outcome was just that websites had be more honest in their EULA that users would be giving up their privacy rights, so here we are.
I remember when I saw less bullshit ads because I used a Mac and my browser literally didn't support the JavaScript features used to display pop-under ads. All my friends on Windows were plagued by this crap and the only effect I had was that I would get empty windows appearing sometimes, or pages just wouldn't work properly or would take forever to load. Way less ads. Sweet!
The 94/95 web had no banners. Because most of it was hosted on university servers or some random guy/company just wanted to bear the cost.
I remember the big decision on if adverts should even be allowed... Well here we are. Users get free things. Advertisers pick up most of the bill. The second that model doesnt work sites pack it up. The 'before time' could be there but servers/bandwidth/people are not free. You can minimize those but in the end someone needs to pay the electric bill.
I have been running my own web site for 20+ years without ads. The server and bandwidth costs are minute. I use a basic VPS. I started it when I was still a poor grad student. This is cheaper now than shared hosting was back in the early 2000s and it's easier too. But it's not cheaper than "free" and it's significantly more administrative work than just using a social network. The "people" costs (including my own time fiddling with software configurations) is the biggest barrier.
Same yo, matecha.net live and ad-free since 2004. Not that I have ever had a ton of content, but I have my little slice of the old-school web and always will as long as I'm alive (and as long as the web is around, I guess!)
I do not think "old" helps a discussion and probably impedes it. A better conversation is perhaps about what features we call "old" are good and desirable. Then how we can build a new, sustainable system with those features.
Unfortunately sustainable is somewhat equivalent to money. Whatever work you do, and even if you love it, in general it needs to have a functional business model. Businesses that can financially support the people who provide them, tend to continue.
Personally, I believe this is the fundamental problem with many of the things that we now fondly think of as "old". Google groups? What was the business model? Did it make money? How could you make money from doing something like that?
The fundamental business model IRL used to be "fee for service". Not lock in. Not subscription. It works, because if people want the service they can pay for it. Okay, so hint: what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?
hint number 2: someone mentioned banner ads in a comment. Is that fee for service? If not, for extra credit, what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model? Are there useful services that could be provided with an alternative business model. Etc.
> what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?
If you aren't selling porn or whatever credit card companies can't stomach, there's no problem. I recently stumbled upon a way to accept payments without the credit card companies (crypto): https://www.x402.org
> what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model?
I remember Carbon Ads and BuySellAds being tasteful banner ad companies. I think one or both folded in recent years. In today's era, respectful banner ads probably have a niche market, especially with the prevalence of ad blockers. You'd be better off implementing x402 instead (paying for access to a resource).
But then your end-user needs to already have a crypto wallet, understand what USDC is, and so on...another niche market.
I've seen meatspace communities start to break into factions and have a rise in drama because they've gotten too big; I think that internet communities have the exact same problem. It's worsened by the fact that companies have a hard time properly moderating at scale and that companies can profit from the views from increased drama. All of the fundamentals and incentives seem to work against large scale communities.
So the "old" web that I fondly remember is smaller communities. Some of course had abject shittiness, but the communities were contained -- so shitty groups (every community can figure out what shitty is on their own) are less likely to invade your conversations.
There are, of course, significant forces working against this. Small communities require active administration and moderation. Someone technical has to maintain and pay for the service; someone has to define what an asshole is and give them the boot. And since people seem averse to paying for privacy, I don't think there are enough volunteers for this to scale. There are also huge undeniable upsides to large communities that you simply can't replicate at the small scale.
But it's the web I remember and like. Where I feel like I can get to know people and don't feel like I'm shouting into the void. Where I don't feel like my conversations are constantly interrupted by jerks that have nothing to keep them away.
The old web was great but it broke society in a different way and formed the basis of social media's current problems. Writing about your situation and expecting other people to desire to know you so much that they go out of their way to learn about you is not a substitute for 1-1 or 1-group interaction that formed the basis of human culture for centuries. If you want to do something revolutionary to start restoring a healthy society, once a day, call (or DM or text) someone from your contacts list and say "I saw something today that made me think of you, so I wanted to see how you're doing. What's new in your life?"
I like to go on a nostalgia trip every now and then as well. Loved the old forums that got taken out by social networks. Also loved the various private communities in IRC and Usenet and the blog-o-spheres I was part of and read about. But the sad reality is that its more about the community than the technology. And the communities of old mostly disbanded and moved on and restoring old tech won't bring them back.
Nowadays the main issue for me is that there are too many people in the room. Pick any social network and forum and you're an immediate misfit there. Make one edgy statements and trolls, flamers, live streamers will tear you apart. Not to mention AI tech advancements are making a not-great situation slightly worse. The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question if it ever were.
Forums had been better but I wonder how much is about peeple just beeing different. Nowadays people have less time and struggle more, so they favor s.th. more effortless in their free time and also are more egoistic (on average of course only).
I've used a lot of social networking systems over the years based on a lot of technologies. I deeply understand the nostalgia for blogs and RSS—I had a blog for many years and have used an RSS reader continuously since probably 2002. I still enjoy reading blogs to this day.
The problem with blogs, though, is that there is no great solution to limit the visibility to certain audiences. It really limits the types of things you can share. At least with Facebook, you can limit posts to your friends or groups of friends. But even that is not really practical—it's too much effort to have every person curate every other person they know into groups for access control (Remember "circles" on Google Plus? It didn't work).
I think the right model is to allow distributed communities to form organically and then use those communities for sharing permissions. By "distributed communities" I'm thinking of things like email lists, Discord servers, phpbb forums—communities where membership is symmetric and there is a shared sense of who is in the community. Blogs don't have anything like that.
> there is no great solution to limit the visibility to certain audiences
There's an important sense in which you are very wrong here because nothing on the internet is actually hidden. Everyone can see everything regardless of the visibility you think you've put on something.
But there's another sense here where audiences do tend to self select into groups and do tend to see and (crucially) engage with things in niches. The early web was very much this first kind of social network where we all could go and read random stuff but we all found niches that we fell in love with. This gained more structure (and convenience) with web forums and then perhaps MySpace and Facebook and other social media added even more structure (pictures only with Instagram, short messages with Twitter, video on YouTube, etc). The structure has also morphed so that these platforms all start to look a bit like each other too.
All this to say, for the "old web" to return, it would need to be as "structured" as the one we have now but give us back the freedom to build whatever really cool thing we wanted. I think the only way to do this is with progressive enhancement of some kind.
Speaking of the "landline" thing for kids that is mentioned at the start of the post, this product is making the rounds amongst my kid's class (3rd grade). Not sure if it will catch on, but seems far too pricey for my taste, though I like the concept: https://tincan.kids/
I think it is good to separate the nostalgia from the actual valuable nugget you want to revive. Nostalgia is great for marketing but parsing the missing nugget is the important part.
I have hundreds of CDs I never got rid of and last Christmas I got my son a cheap CD player. Yes, he could have infinite music through Spotify, but what I wanted to give him was that sense of control over music. The physical element has value, which has been appreciated for a while - a lot of that comes from the purposeful interaction required to select, set up and play the music. To listen to entire albums instead of individual songs. An avenue to explore music you only sort of are interested in but give more time because of switching costs.
But more specifically, I remembered the feeling of being a kid and having my own cassette player, walking around with it and bringing music with me. It was one of the first things I owned that could modify my space and change my mood and affect those around me in a positive way. That is a powerful concept when you are little!
I think the missing element of the "old web" is having that sense of control and influence. Not huge control or huge influence, but self-directed and with some friction. Sometimes, the friction is the most important part!
I, too, felt the old web was much more creative and limitless. But to be blunt, these attempts to resurrect it feel like the opposite: another collection of 90s-style HTML and artwork about generic "old web" stuff (or about the old web itself, which makes no sense - you don't hear people today reminiscing about 2025).
I think a big problem is desensitization. When I was young, MSPaint art looked good, bitcrushed music sounded fine, and simple flash games were fun. Then the art, music, and games kept becoming more complex and higher quality, so the novelty and perceived opportunity was sustained. Now it has tapered off, so the novelty has run out and the next improvement is hard to imagine.
However, the world is so complicated and technology is still improving such that I suspect (and hope) we'll find more breakthroughs within the next decade. Personally, I'm still optimistic about VR: right now good VR is too expensive and development is too hard, but those are incrementally-solvable problems, and few people have experienced good VR (especially with motion) but I can imagine it.
Not for nothing, the last time I checked the most popular indie games on steam are all intentionally made to look vaguely 8-bit (really prob more like 64-bit, but lofi retro).
Sometimes for nostalgia, but
I think that’s usually because it’s easier to make decent graphics if they’re 2D and low resolution. You don’t see many games with the low-quality Flash style, pixelation happens to be less “ugly”.
What gets a bit tiring with these nostalgia posts is that it never talks about what the web should be in practice, how we achieve it and most crucially: how do we incorporate modern web tech into it?
On top of this we also have to be honest about what is a good old web value and what is pure nostalgia.
Nostalgia makes everything look better than it was. The reason the internet worked then was because it excluded most people and the few people that were on it had a lot in common (like being young and early adopters of tech stuff and into a lot of immature crap). Holding up a mirror to myself here.
The point is that this never scaled and it started to break down almost immediately as more people started showing up. The moment Facebook broke for me was when I realized my mother, aunts, distant cousins, etc. were seeing absolutely everything I posted there and would be gossiping about it endlessly. Same with linkedin. Fun informal way to keep track of old colleagues and pimp your CV. But then everybody you ever reported to started showing up, and their secretaries, and that annoying guy that you never liked. And it became a cesspool of marketing drivel, up-beat management cliches, and worse. So, I disengaged there as well.
The old internet was only fun because most of those people weren't there yet. It had nothing to do with the technology. The technology was mostly not that great actually. RSS was a bit of a dumpster fire if you ever had to deal with parsing that. It was all a bit hand wavy. Titles go there but sometimes they go there. Dates might be iso timestamps. Sort of. Maybe. Sometimes. But definitely not always. Nominally XML but not guaranteed to be valid XML.
As a standard, it's pretty crap and hand wavy. But it was simple enough that you could make it work anyway and there was enough RSS out there that it was worth trying to parse and make sense of most of it, deal with the encoding issues, try to normalize the timestamps, etc. And do useful things with it (aggregating, pinging, linking bag, and all the other wonderful stuff people did).
The tech was just a (very limited) enabler. What made it work was the relatively homogeneous groups of people using that stuff.
That can still work. But it's not really technology dependent. Without people you have an empty room. Empty rooms are boring. Solving the empty room problem is the key thing. How do you get the right people to show up?
You're right, issue imo. With the web is that once 1 competitor gains traction then everyone else folds over time.
I remember gametrailers.com, quirky little site for hosting game related content, it folded once YouTube was the platform for commercial video uploading.
Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online.
This doesn't sound like blogs + rss, this sounds like phpBB + AOL instant messenger. Social media is at its best when real people are interacting with real people, not when real people are interacting with a blog post/tweet/etc., (and definitely not an algorithm)...
I think youtube should not be mixed into old web. Either embed your video in website and provide download, or host it on peertube. I know about video file hosting issues and costs, so maybe use appropriatly sized videos? Low quality, low resolution, compress as much as possible, and it will probably won't take more than any average website. :)
There's no way for a video platform to work without some sort of payment. Video costs money. Thankfully, Cloudflare R2 is enough for the average blogger. You just gotta figure out how to use it.
I'm building a short-form video platform with R2 as the storage backend. I figured out transcoding but I definitely need a better server for it. The old web isn't coming back because "free" is rife for abuse.
I've embedded a video on my homepage from my platform (dogfooding). Not sure I'll share the platform here when I soft launch next week or so, HN doesn't like incomplete products.
All this to say, video with decent quality is possible for the average website.
Yeah, back in the day we used to just put a 160x120 or 320x240 .mov or .avi or whatever and link to it with a thumbnail .jpg. Ah, now I'm remembering how sometimes there would be low/med/high quality with a resolution/filesize so you know which one to grab :)
The "old web" never really went a way. The "new web" just got better and more engaging. I still use my rss reader as my primary way to connect to the internet, but rss has problems and the readers did not evolve to solve them. The main problems are it is easy to drown in articles and hard to discover new feeds. Social media sites solve booth of these problems with their algorithms, but rss never found a solution for that. Thats why I started my own reader https://ivyreader.com to reduce the issues rss has, because I really hope it stays.
Something that was pointed out to me the other day: Firefox can show you "important dates" in the address bar, but they've yanked RSS support. You now need a plugin to get the RSS feed link for a site.
I miss the old web, but I'm not sure it's coming back. You can still go on Usenet as well, not sure why anyone is spending time keeping the servers running, because I can not find an active newsgroups anymore. It was nice for a time, but the future has lost it's appeal to me.
Maybe the author, and some the comments are right. I should go build an silly personal website, just in HTML, have all the pages be different styles, have silly buttons, weird Perl scripts all over the place and link to like minded people.
Honestly, go for it! I started my own blog up and write everything myself, all the way down to the basic HTML and CSS. I don't use any frameworks or anything, whatever is there is just mine. Benefit is I'm not locked in to any one platform and migration is a piece of cake. Obviously won't work for everyone but I don't need much to put some words out there, but at least I can say it's all mine.
> Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones.
This reflects on another problem: the sorry state of journalism and willingness to turn press releases into news. That story ran in a wide variety of media outlets, and a Google News search of "children landline phones" turns up a bunch of these.
It turns out that these articles were really ads for "Tin Can," a VoIP phone for kids. Not really a landline at all, it's seriously nerfed, and I'd assume that if it's SIP, it's locked to their service, or else it's their own proprietary protocol. Not really a surprise, given that real landlines are almost extinct, and expensive where available.
Trying to ressurect the old internet by staying limited to a platform like bear blog may be a big limitation. To me, part of what made the old internet so interesting is the expression of ideas in so many things beyond just regular blogs.
Like someone else mentioned, things like GeoCities, but also stories like Ted The Caver, neopets, etc. Blogs are great but to be honest, I get most of my stuff from mailing lists and hacker news and feel quite fine with that.
What i'd love to see more of is people building interesting experiences for the love of the game, that's what feels like builds passion and interest. But there's no returning back to the old internet in the same way, because what's interesting and what's fun to read has changed.
I've never been huge into social media or even blogging when that was en vogue, but I did set up a forum on my site a little over a year ago after realising how much of a black hole for technical discussion Discord has become. I use it as an easy way to document any screwball problems I run across when working with hardware and software, and occasionally people pop in and ask questions, so I'm glad I set it up.
Something I did notice is that Google recently added Discussions and forums as a metric in the Google Search Console, and forums is now an option in the More dropdown menu on Google.com.
I'm using wpForo since it integrates well with my CMS. The first users showed up in the first week, mostly because I directed YouTube questions that required posting error logs and the like to the forums. It has been a good tool for helping people out.
I wonder why some people that are aware of how detrimental social media are blame all the evil on "algorithms" instead of just… ceasing to use social media at all? Seriously, you are not FORCED to use social media unless it's a part of your job (and even then nobody can make you use them in your free time). Portaying yourself as a martyr who's helpless when trying to escape from all of these vile big companies when doing nothing to get yourself out of this is hilarious. Gizmondo also has written about it: https://gizmodo.com/the-gizmodo-guide-to-stopping-algorithms...
I was around for the leap from BBS systems to Fidonet; the bad old days when there were no such thing as graphics. I can absolutely sympathize with what's being said here, and for me, there are two primary reasons why I pine for the elder days. The systems then required some effort to gain access to which kept some of the signal to noise loss down (if you know the difference between CB radio and Ham radio, you know what I'm saying), and while commercialism's always been a part of these systems, more value was placed on content than advertising.
You and me both, and that became a cycle with each new generation of technology. I remember that FidoNet (and Usenet, for that matter) had a lot of that ham radio ethos, with commercial messages most unwelcome. But once the internet got too big, Usenet drowned in spam. It was too easy to crapflood newsgroups into oblivion, and once the politicians started grandstanding, ISPs wasted no time nuking their NNTP servers.
I was wondering whether old web means people, or the old web is entirety of old web. Certainly companies will not provide features of old. No RSS for you, since they want to control what you see with the "algorithm".
What about people? Well some of them, as most of you pointed, want to monetize your attention, so it is not necessarily that they create something from passion, but to use you.
Besides that most of content is Audio-Video now, so it has two outcomes. One is that most of people chasing attention will create Audio-Video. This allows us to find niche and simple blogs, which is difficult, because Google will not index them, or not rank them.
What we are left are curated list of blogs. There are some.
I hope they find what they are looking for. I'm pleased the author is taking action to address their own grievances with the state of the web. My personal strategy for dealing with this kind of angst is to just be online less, and find ways to engage with the physical world around me.
Remember FriendFeed? It was unironically a pretty cool thing. Subscribe to RSS feeds, displayed in a Twitter-like timeline, and could comment and share and follow people and see their feeds... and all of that had their own RSS feeds.
The current FeedLand gets close, and is nice for reading, but there's not a huge "social" aspect to it.
The old web isn’t a platform, an aesthetic, or a technology. The old web is people creating and sharing because they are intrinsically motivated. Everything we hate about the current web comes from extrinsic motivations. Good luck removing them.
This is the most succinct critique of the “old web phenomenon” I’ve come across and I reckon can be applied to other issues as well. There doesn’t seem to be a dearth of extrinsic motivators these days, oddly mediated through screens.
Beautifully and succinctly stated, damn. This is like, reading a bunch of philosophy and trying to wrap your head around it and some bored professor casually ELI5’s the topic.
> In some ways it's bringing back old web rings and simple networking through hyperlinks.
And there are plenty of likeminded individuals, many who have posted here. It may not seem like it because linking with hrefs and webrings is much more fragmented than services that beat you over the head with engagement metrics.
> Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online. It was cozy. No ads, no feeds, no endless videos. Instead it was just people, the whole reason you started in the first place. Now it's just noise and scary addicting and effective algorithms that keep you plugged in for hours on end
If people want a mechanism of connecting with their friends who are far away, why not create a dedicated forum for this purpose? Either with something like discord, or even with something like phpbb?
Because most people don't know how to do that. Mainstream social media has huge reach and monetisation opportunities, so that's where most people go.
What's needed isn't a nostalgic return to the 90s, blogging and all, but a completely non-corporate internet, probably using a separate set of protocols with novel reader/browser tech - self-hosted and/or distributed and/or torrented, simple enough for anyone to set up a server at home, no ads, no tracking, no corporate hosting or influence of any kind. And no "open source but impossibly complicated for normal people to use."
It doesn't have to be fast, it just has to be available with minimal friction for set-up and content management.
Let ten million private sites bloom and see what happens.
At this point HN should have a list of tropes that are just banned topics.
These should include:
- Bring back the old web but only the good parts that my nostalgia filter remembers
- Software used to be fast and now it's not, look how long it takes for my magic pocket computer to transcode 4K videos and perform facial and object recognition on it
- Large download sizes have ruined everything, it takes my phone 1 minute to download a 500MB app over my 5G connection
- macOS is buggy and too much like iOS now, just like last year's release
- RSS feeds are the best
- iTunes/Apple Music is a bloated and horrible app, and I have been complaining about this for 20 years and I still use it/never used it in the first place
BREAKING NEWS: the "Old Web" was far, far more than just blogs and feeds. It was full of bulletin boards and chat systems and listservs and other such "social" software artifacts inherited from BBSes and commercial timesharing systems popular for decades before the World Wide Web was even invented.
Blogging died IMO because its authors felt (and still feel) entitled to compensation for practicing a hobby, and started forcing advertising down their reader's throats as a means to extort them for money.
The old web was people that could afford PCs, a select group, and who knew how/chose to connect to the internet, smaller sub group, plus college students. Then it was people who could afford very expensive toys (iPhone) on expensive phone plans that required credit qualifications. The types of people who are inquisitive, or who have expensive hobbies, or even time/energy for hobbies. There was a time early on when services that normally require some kind of credit check just...didn't... if you used the iPhone app.
Today's internet is wage slaves on prepaid phone plans using apps on cheap cell phones that want a cheap/free distraction from their lives.
I don't have a lot of nostalgia for an "old web". I like the new web. But there are some aspects of the old web that I'd like to see more of. To that end, I've been trying to find ways to make the new web adopt those principles. One of them is ownership: If your friend from school runs the website, you know your data isn't being siphoned up by Big Tech. Lowering the barrier to entry to make a "cool" website (such a small social media platform) is the goal. Back in the day, this meant setting up phpBB. These days, it probably means setting up a Mastodon node.
Blog platforms seem to come and go pursuing this goal. It's funny to think that when Ghost came on to the scene (12 years ago! There goes the time!), it too was all about just blogging https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5625546
I have an old Wordpress blog I used to run and that I backed up but never restored when Hetzner needed to migrate the VM. It's been almost a decade that that backup was taken. I wonder if I will be able to resurrect it. It's somewhere on all these hard drives...
It’s funny, when I was younger, it was all about MSN messenger, MySpace (esp the music player on there), and forums. That’s the old web I remember from before. No personal blogs, really. (Again I’m not old enough to remember before that)
I did something similar a few months, launched it on HN, no traction. It's really difficult. No one wants to host their blog / posts on a platform that will dissapear when the owner gets bored or can't maintain it anymore.
Added this to other comments: old web had ads (iframes, banners, popups!), and also was completely self-hosted, which gave you more freedom than any other cloud platform. If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
> If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
Also know as: How to get a visit from the FBI or a state agency equivalent once someone discovers you're a viable conduit of unsavory content.
The old web is dead, it will never come back because it relied on ignorance, naivety, charity, and good faith. Those are mostly all gone. You can still stand up one of these hosts and pages for yourself but you must still be incredibly vigilant because automated attacks on your host will be happening non-stop. Jumping into hosting for others is no longer a hobby and it never will be again.
Even on the old web, most people hosted their sites on a service like Geocities or on their ISP's servers, school, etc. Very few people actually self-hosted.
I think the "old web" is also heavily nostalgia-infested, it wasn't nearly as good as most people here remember.
Blatantly false information? Internet Explorer required for everything? Adobe Flash and Java all over the place? Websites that frequently actually could hack your computer? Geocities and AOL being the meeting places, reincarnated as Discord? Terribly slow, low-resolution imagery that our brains filled in the details for? The worst font and font color choices known to man? Shock content being absolutely rampant? Constant pop-ups? Every company wanting a toolbar?
That's what I remember. It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually." It's the same phenomenon where people think cars were better in the 80s, but they sit in an 80s car, and realize we've come a long, long way.
There are amazing retro games that are still awesome to play to this day. To say they all suck, and it's just nostalgia is not true at all.
Sure, a lot of them suck, especially on Nintendo 64, because of the 3d transition, but from the NES onward there are timeless classics.
My kid beat super Metroid several times, he decided to play it on his own on his switch, and he loved it. He plays the old pokemon games too. In other words, that's a terrible analogy.
You're choosing the top 10 games on the Nintendo 64 and NES to make your analogy; out of the thousands and thousands of games produced for those systems. Give your kid game #50 (Waialae Country Club: True Golf Classics on N64) and see if she would prefer it over literally any modern game that ranks on Steam. My analogy holds.
Why would you compare "any modern game that ranks on Steam" with random games from the era?
You said
> It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually."
I actually tried re-playing PS games I remember enjoying, and I still enjoy them.
I see what you mean about the fact that people look at old stuff with rose-tinted glasses, but really some things did age well (including parts of the early web).
It is kind of wild to admit, but the bottom of this article made me think about the fact that RSS readers can be local apps for the first time ever... I've always used hosted services and run my own Miniflux server. But a quick search revealed a nice native linux reader: https://gfeeds.gabmus.org/.
They always could be local. Thunderbird, MS Outlook and other email clients have supported it for years. Plus there's dedicated desktop feed readers like the Qt based QuiteRSS, which I use.
On Android there's the open source Feeder from F-droid.
There's no rule that says a feed reader HAS to be a webapp.
I used to think that technology, or lack of it, would solve these problems. More connection. More communication. But it really won't.
It's just as much about the outreach as it is about the writing. Email authors you like. Give them thoughtful feedback. Be generous. It's hard work. It's a relationship and community building.
This! Not many people will reach out to a blogger to say thank you or give their take on a post. That's the first building block to a thriving community.
The feeling of, "being able to breathe again" that this creates is a boon to my failing health. I'm seeing movements in this direction alongside, "HTML-only" as a better realization/utilization of the internet. We might not ever get the Vannevar Bush-Ted Nelson lost super internet some speculate about but I'm glad we can at least get to, "something workable." Cheers speckx!
This post really shows at the right time. Recently I've wanted to resurrect my old passion in blogging. Social media makes me burn-out and unproductive. I want the old way of posting in my own blog, writing however long/short I want, and theming my blog however I want.
"Old web" still alive on my humble (and sparse) personal site, https://matecha.net/ ... I had WordPress for a while but I have gone back to plain HTML and use a static site generator (Hugo).
The old web never went away, it never died. It was you who left. You who runs a corporate browser that can't even load HTTP pages anymore. You who only post on massive corporate run social media (like I am with HN). You who host your website on github or behind cloudflare or don't even bother and just have a mastodon or facebook page (both exclusively javascript applications).
The old web is still there, almost invisible under the piles of corporate javascript applications. There's probably more old web now than there was when the old web was new. It's just that in terms of relative ratios it's buried under so much crap and search engines are so bad no few can surf it. Heck, there's even still usenet and people posting there like myself. It's not dead and it's not spammed anymore, and it's a true federated protocol.
But it is easy to be the change. Self host your website from your home computer. Don't use Chrome or Chrome derivatives. Don't put computational paywalls in front of your services like cloudflare or even Anubis. The truth is that for most websites in most situations, all that is not needed. And most importantly, surf the web. That'll require setting up the modern version of webrings: feeds. And sharing feeds with your friends and peers.
Browsers often present warning screens when visiting sites that aren’t HTTPS, which effectively blocks the site for any users unwilling to or unaware of being able to "proceed with caution."
But noone wants to look at another website anymore. People dont browse the web like in the old days or in the 2000s or in the 2010s. People are just used to being siloed now. Many dont even know what the old web was and how it felt. There are just a few silos now, FB , reddit, X and this is all they know, many dont even know much more than FB.
Old Web was killed by spam bots, Metasploit, Shodan and DDoS attacks getting easy enough to buy for random joes.
I ran phpBB boards, my own blogs, an instance of a German php-based MMORPG I long forgot the name of. But it simply wasn't fun any more to keep up with the bad actors, to wake up and find someone found yet another bug in the MMORPG software or phpBB and in the best case just spammed profanities, in the worst case raze the entire server blank.
It's just not feasible any more to be an innocent kid on the Internet with a $5 VPS. And that's not taking the ever increasing share of legal obligations (CSAM and DMCA takedowns, EU's anti terrorism law, GDPR, you name it) and their associated financial and criminal risk into account - I know people who did get anything from legal nastygrams for thousands of euros for some idiot uploading MP3s onto a phpBB to getting their door busted down by police at 6 in the morning because someone used their TOR exit node to distribute CSAM.
The only thing that's somewhat safe is a static built website hosted on AWS S3. No way to deface or take down that unless you manage to get your credentials exfiltrated by some malware.
Okay, so we need Old Web with extra steps (security).
I’ll admit that when I lament the web we used to have, I’m never thinking about viruses, malware, pop ups/unders, &c. Seems like all that stuff was just a small price to pay for connecting with likeminded people.
I have a slice of that with Mastodon but maybe being 20 years older and jaded is making me wistful, yearning for something that is never coming back.
We more-so need Old Web with actual consequences for bad actors. You know, the days when you could email an ISP's abuse mailbox with evidence of someone running portscans and they'd get at least told to clean up shop or else, and the or else went as far as getting their contract cancelled entirely.
These days it seems like abuse@ is routed straight to /dev/null, and that's not even addressing enemy nation states that willingly shield and host bad actors.
Not closely relevant but I've revamped my personal website earlier this year to bring the old web vibe into it. I've got a 88x31 GIF section and I wonder where I could look for other old web sites to cross link with my site.
I started my blog 15 years ago. I established the basic style and format in the first year and have stuck with it. The old web still exists if you look for it.
> In my opinion the answer is honestly pretty simple: blogs and RSS feeds.
This point is made very often, and I do believe it was true for many people, but I honestly didn’t care about individual blogs at all when I was a young net user.
I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it? All the action for me was on forums and chat rooms. Like the author mentions, it’s exactly the type of excitement that naturally led to early social media, which I was also a huge fan of for the close friends I already had.
The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that same feeling again online. In part because I am no longer a child, in part because there are just too many people online now, in part because too many of those people’s brains are twitter-rotted.
It’s fine, I have my close circles to keep my human social spirit alive.
> I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it?
I wonder, have you ever read a novel? Hundreds of pages a single person wrote about a story that happened (usually) entirely in their head, printed on paper, no way to interact with it. It's a great experience if the author has some skill at this.
I can't downvote, but this comment feels a little rude or standoffish towards someone who read what you wrote, thought about it, and gave a response.
You said you didn't care for 1000 words that someone wrote about their trip abroad, and that's clearly an example to illustrate something, but it's not clear what, because it's contrived and falls apart easily: nobody else really read those blogs either, people read blogs from people and topics they're interested in.
So what about 1000 word blog from an a single individual that does interest you? Or more than 1000 words from a single individual on a different topic, like a novel?
My guess is: part of that itch is scratched by social media, especially for people who don't have the time or knowledge to set something up. At the same time, you have platforms like Medium or WordPress which could be considered successors at least in some aspect. And they have tons of users.
I think OP missed a big point: it’s also the fact that algorithms are sifting through every word and picture you post and constructing insanely accurate targeting to sell to advertisers and governments, and to the bad side of those two.
What we also need is privacy. I only want my friends to see my blog or rss feed. Not the entire planet and every greedy spyware.
Funny when I look at my account on another machine when not logged in my score is -1, but that is hidden when I’m logged in to HN and everything looks normal and score is 1.
I don't mind the entire planet of human beings seeing my blog, but I don't want what I write to be monetized by grifters and trillion-dollar companies.
For that reason, my personal blog is behind security so only invited people can see it.
It works very well, but no, I'm not going to explain how it works because there are plenty of people on HN who have no morals, work for crappy companies, or are part of the trillion-dollar machines that are destroying human creativity so some C-level can buy a third private island.
I am all for resurrecting the Old Web, but please, let's not repeat the same mistakes again.
Be independent. Running your own website is not that difficult. And seriously, spending the minuscule amount of money on hosting should not be a problem. It's a hobby, hobbies cost money. If you own your website, you can move it anywhere quickly. Nobody will start showing ads. Nobody will pester your users with annoying "SUBSCRIBE" modal popups. Nobody will sell the platform along with you and your content to a new owner.
I do not know enough about this particular platform — maybe it's different from others, maybe not. But I have seen enough platforms undergo progressive enshittification to be wary of any place that wants to host my stuff under their domain/URL.
It’s hard for me not to read these “old/small web elegies” as coming from people trapped in a kind of perpetual adolescence leading them to contrive impediments to authoring a static website while grieving over a want for community.
I’m curious about the personal lives of the authors of these kinds of posts and whether there’s any shades of the film American Beauty in them.
A post like this makes the rounds every few months on HN. What posts like this neglect to consider is that the overwhelming majority of people who use social media apps didn't use the internet during the "old" era. The reality is, this is nerd nostalgia that nobody cares about or wants besides a sub-population of nerds. The masses don't care about blogs, rss, or small networks. The internet grew because the social media and internet companies invested billions in bringing the masses online via these shiny addictive platforms - the "old web" is never going to appeal to them - it is a relic of the past.
>What posts like this neglect to consider is that the overwhelming majority of people who use social media apps didn't use the internet during the "old" era.
They don't neglect to consider that at all - what people are nostalgic for is the web before it became mainstream and got ruined by muggles and corporations, when was just an exclusive club for nerds. Implicit to the concept of resurrecting the "Old Web" is recreating spaces that will never appeal to the masses. That's a feature, not a bug.
I fail to see what a new protocol would bring to the equation. I see it more as a human behaviour issue, network effect, worse is better etc etc.
My grandma uses Facebook because someone taught her how, she doesn't have the capability to explore technology on her own. That honestly goes for most people, they treat their computer as necessary for getting along in modern society and nothing more.
The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings, banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy an image and getting a Javascript alert telling you the image was "copyright". It was learning that you could copy it anyway if you spammed enter. It was hotlinking those same images in protest. It was waiting 5 hours to download a 37 second 320x240 RealPlayer video. It was having a password "protected" area where the password is base64 encoded in the source. It was trying the same search query in multiple search engines because they would return different results. It was typing random URLs in to see if you could find something interesting yourself. It was playing midi files on loop in the background. It was Macromedia Flash, explicit popups, pure yellow text on black backgrounds, and reformatting your computer to get rid of viruses.
The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks.
I run my own blog on AWS for ~a dollar a month.
The old web to me was mostly just not populated by people trying to make money off of it.
The whole transformation stems from there.
Yeah, I remember when searching and browsing the web meant finding tons of legit, information-dense content that had absolutely zero monetary interest behind it. Sites of university professors and students, random personal websites (countless band/game/movie/show fan sites), and even the company websites were usually quite sincere and simple. I feel VERY lucky to have been knee-deep in all of it since the beginning, certainly a unique time in the history of technology. Not sure when we'll see something like that again, if ever, since humanity cannot put that genie back in the bottle.
Here's a page containing mostly material from the 90's, lovingly preserved after the author's health eventually failed decades ago:
http://dogstar.dantimax.dk/theremin/index.htm
I can get lost for hours browsing sites like that on web.archive.org. Start from some interesting topic on ~1997 yahoo.com and follow links. A lot of dead links of course, since not everything is in the archive, but enough is there to make it more fun to read than almost anything easy to discover on www 2025.
For me, the old web died with filesharing. It was the point the legal and corporate world asserted control, truly a free place until then, anything felt possible.
I'd go as far as to say filesharing was a completely new, post-scarcity economic model. One that was ruthlessly crushed by capital.
It was also visiting pages like pages.small-isp.net/~username and digging through the HTML to see if somebody had <!-- hidden comments adding private commentary but only for folks who were knowledgeable and curious enough to look -->
This is the oldest snapshot I can find in archive.org, from 2001. But the page says copyright 1996 at the bottom, and that's more like when I actually published this page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010519112823/http://members.oz...
Sadly, or perhaps not, the Shockwave animation has failed to survive the internet geological record.
This bit made me grin:
N.B. this is an animation, but if you don't have netscape 2 or later with the shockwave plugin, you won't see it doing its stuff... You could try getting netscape 2 from netscape, and the plugin from macromedia if you really want
(Now I feel _old_, my regular internet username/handle is 30 years old next year...)
That link automatically downloads a CDR file.
I once bought a SNES game that couldn't be found at local stores (final fantasy 2) by 1/ finding a guy on a message board with the cartridge, 2/ mailing that person a check, and 3/ waiting (probably weeks?) to receive the cartridge in the mail. The old Internet. I still have that game btw.
For me, it was much easier to make friends with the manager of the local Blockbuster knock-off rental place and order games via them. Though I did once walk 6 miles (round trip) to Wal-Mart to buy Illusion of Gaia with allowance money.
It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Absolutely miss Newgrounds. It's still around of course, I'm reflecting more on the vibes when it was in its heyday. Unbelievable the games people were making with Flash back then and how it spawned the careers of a ton of indie darlings. Also, not Flash at all, but does anyone remember Exit Mundi? Absolute gold.
Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging unfavorably. Before that people made websites to showcase their interests and hobbies, and because of that even the most basic looking websites could have a lot of "color" to them. Then blogging became a thing and people's websites became bland and minimalist. Arguably blogging culture is as responsible for the death of creativity on the internet as much as the constraints of mobile-friendly web design and Apple's aforementioned killing of Flash.
> It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash.
Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.
The iPhone had about 14% marketshare at the time, so it's not like Apple was in a commanding position to dictate terms to the industry.
But if you read his letter, what he said made total sense: Flash was designed for the desktop, not phones—it certainly wasn't power or memory efficient. Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.
And of course Flash was proprietary and 100% controlled by Adobe.
Jobs made the case for the (still in development) HTML5--HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
What people don't seem to remember: most of the industry thought the iPhone would fail as a platform because it didn't support Flash, which was wildly popular.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
> Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.
I’m really surprised anyone could say that. To my view, “Thoughts on Flash killed Flash” is about as true as “the sky is blue”. It’s fairly clear to me that without a strong stance, a less principled mobile OS (like Android) would have supported it, and probably Flash would still be around today. Apple’s stance gave Google the path to do the same thing, and this domino effect led to Flash being discontinued 7 years later. You say 7 years as if it’s a long time from cause to effect, but how long would you estimate it would take a single action to fully kill something as pervasive as Flash, which was installed on virtually every machine (Im sure it was 99%+)? You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
> You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
First, there's no way Flash would still be alive today; Apple might have sped up its demise but it had so many disadvantages, it was just a matter of time and it was controlled by one company.
Remember that the web standards movement was kicking into high gear around the same time; we had already dodged a bullet when Microsoft attempted to take over the web with Active X, Silverlight, JScript.
The whole point of the Web Standards movement was to get away from proprietary technologies.
> You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
Safari has never been the dominant browser; not sure why you think that. Other than the United States, iPhone marketshare is under 50% everywhere else.
Even in 2025, Safari's global marketshare is about 15% [1] and that's after selling 3 billion devices [2].
[1]: https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share
[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/31/apple-has-now-sold-three-b...
> Microsoft attempted to take over the web with Active X, Silverlight, JScript.
Silverlight was a responsive to flash.
It was also remarkably open for the time, ran on all desktop platforms, and in an alternative universe Silverlight is an open source cross platform UI toolkit that runs with a tiny fraction of the system requirements of electron, using a far superior tool chain.
FWIW Google did support Flash on Android for a time.
Getting rid of Flash was never ever about using HTML5 for Apple. It was always to obviously to make battery life better and ofc adding more experiences to their walled garden store.
Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox. And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged. E.g like Screen Wake Lock API finally implemented in iOS 16 but to this day broken on Home screen. And like not quite obvious to use in Safari too.
Because working web standards support would make cross platform mobile apps possible outside of App Store.
> Safari is lagging on HTML5 features
I don't think it's lagging behind that much, and you could also argue that you don't need to implement every single feature blindly. A lot of features are strictly not needed, and if you do decide to do them - it needs to be done in an efficient way.
There's a reason why Safari is considered the most energy efficient browser.
> And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged.
From "Every site can be a web app on iOS and iPadOS" [1]
Now, we are revising the behavior on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. By default, every website added to the Home Screen opens as a web app. If the user prefers to add a bookmark for their browser, they can disable “Open as Web App” when adding to Home Screen — even if the site is configured to be a web app. The UI is always consistent, no matter how the site’s code is configured. And the power to define the experience is in the hands of users.
This change, of course, is not removing any of WebKit’s current support for web app features. If you include a Web Application Manifest with your site, the benefits it provides will be part of the user’s experience. If you define your icons in the manifest, they’re used.
We value the principles of progressive enhancement and separation of concerns. All of the same web technology is available to you as a developer, to build the experience you would like to build. Giving users a web app experience simply no longer requires a manifest file. It’s similar to how Home Screen web apps on iOS and iPadOS never required Service Workers (as PWAs do on other platforms), yet including Service Workers in your code can greatly enhance the user experience.
Simply put, there are now zero requirements for “installability” in Safari. Users can add any site to their Home Screen and open it as a web app on iOS26 and iPadOS26.
[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/17333/webkit-features-in-safari-26-0...
> Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox.
Really?
Safari was first to ship :has() in March 2022; Firefox couldn't ship until December 2023.
I listed a bunch of web platform features Safari shipped before Chrome and Firefox [1][2].
Even now, Firefox hasn't shipped Anchor Positioning, Scroll-driven animation, text-wrap: pretty, Web GPU, Cross-document view transitions, etc. but Safari and Chrome have.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074789
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44067706
>but Safari and Chrome have
Not on iOS. On iOS, it's all Safari, all the time, for every web browser app. Apple forbids any web browser engine other than Safari on iOS.
> It was always to obviously to make battery life better
I don't think it was about saving battery power. Jobs was smart in convincing people to focus on web stack for apps - Flash was king of rich app experiences, and java [inc applets] for corporate apps. Apps went iOS native batteries got drained in other ways (large video & photos, prolonged use). Just think of the costs, energy and time spent over the next 15 years maintaining multiple code-bases to deliver one service. The web remained open, where as mobile went native and closed-in.
> Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.
That's a ton of ram. I recall spending a lot of time on flash websites in the early 2000s in college on the school issued laptop with maybe 64 mb of ram (and I think maybe pentium iii 650mhz so more cpu oomph)
Remember that iOS, unlike desktop operating systems, didn't have virtual memory and could only run one app at a time.
One app at a time means even less memory pressure. Plenty for flash!
Given Steve Jobs' character, there may be another reason behind it: that year, before the decision to stop supporting Flash, Adobe broke their agreement with Apple by releasing Photoshop for PCs before the version for Mac for the first time. This could sound as a conspiracy teory, and I don't know how much evidence we have that this might have been the reason (or one of the reasons) behind the decision. But, given Jobs' personality, I think this is plausible.
We should also consider that, having Flash support, would have opened the door to non-Apple-approved apps running on iPhones, something that Apple has always strenously opposed. All-in-all, at the time I got the feeling that the technical reasons provided by Jobs weren't the main reasons behind the decision.
Flash and open source actionscript allowed devs to completely circumvent the Apple App Store. That was a direct threat to the iOS business model at the time.
> Given Steve Jobs' character, there may be another reason behind it: that year, before the decision to stop supporting Flash
Flash was never supported on iOS; Steve's letter was to confirm Apple wasn't ever going to support Flash on iOS; it remained available on MacOS.
I don't think the Photoshop thing had any affect on supporting Flash on iOS.
You're right, I did a quick search and apparently they still considered supporting it though [0], but they didn't they the results they were hoping for.
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri...
Newgrounds was incredible! At the time, games (of any quality) for free was a biiiiig deal. It was even more amazing that you didn't need to wait hours to download and install them.
I agree w/ your take on blogging... kind of a bland "one-stop-shop" for everything a person thinks of rather than an experience tailored to a specific interest. I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly... even within a single domain I would have multiple websites all linking to each other, each with a different design, and subtly different content, but now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol. Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
> I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites...
Based
I'm working on a revamp of my personal site. I do a lot of creative coding, most of them are throwaway experiments, so I thought I'd showcase more of them there. Besides that though, I have some "rare pepes" that I've been meaning to put somewhere. What I like about these is that they're highly polished, animated gifs that imitate the sort of "holographic" effect you'd find in rare collector's cards, but at the same time you can't track down who originally made them, they aren't part of some professional's online portfolio. In that sense they feel like a special piece of internet folk art, made by some complete rando.
Nowadays we have Pinterest and the like, but I really like the idea of creating my own little online space for images I like.
Reminds me of https://poke-holo.simey.me/ note: hover over the cards to activate.
One of my fondest memories of the early Web was getting awards on Newgrounds for my animations(I had one for 250k views. Pretty sure I got into the top ten at one point) , and logging in to read and respond to comments, and to see that view counter tick up and up!
> now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol.
I’m guilty of this but at least it’s a different kind of boring (plain text files).
> Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
YES.
> I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly
That's exactly how I got into programming :)
Agreed on both points. When blogging became the dominant reason for having a website, we were already on the way to the "content" hell. Any semi popular website had pressure to post more frequently, diluting quality. And pretty soon after that, blogs went from 500 words to 140 characters, but 10x the frequency.
Static websites that were updated only once in a while were far better at showing a cross section of someone's life In that respect, StumbleUpon and browser bookmarks were superior to RSS.
StumbleUpon is the reason I regularly use the phrase, “I stumbled upon” to this day.
What a glorious product.
In retrospect, I would say that the "blog rush" was kind of a precursor to the rise of influencers. There was even a crowd of "blogging gurus" that would ask a pretty peny for advice on how to advance your blog.
The blogging pressure got so out of hand, that even some EU bureucrat thought it would be a great idea for each FP6 funded project to have a blog besides its static website. At least with the influencing trend they don't ask researchers to do glamour shots with their food.
Ruffle needs more love. The time and effort that's gone in to a browser extension to emulate flash, should be receiving that sponsorship from Cloudflare.
https://ruffle.rs/
It's not just a browser extension -- it's also available as a JS library that can be added added to any site to restore seamless Flash support.
I'm waiting for microphone support so I can make the frog on Ze Frank's website sing.
It's more to do with HTML5 than lack-of flash, although it could be argued that flash's long-prophesied downfall was one of the reasons for HTML5's rapid adoption.
HTML5 is when the web stopped being the web. It has no legitimacy in calling itself "hypertext", it's an app-delivery mechanism with a built-in compatibility layer. In this regard Flash is just as bad and probably even worse, but since it wasn't in anyway standardized or even open-source there was a fair amount of pushback from all fronts. HTML5 had no such pushback.
Flash was the first broken site I ever encountered, some restaurant had an all-flash webpage. Never did end up going to that restaurant. Why bother? If they render content inaccessible behind some needless jank like Flash or JavaScript, why bother? Another fun thing to do was to keep a tally of how many "OMG stop the presses!!" security vulnerabilities Flash had racked up over time, which was lots. Many hundreds. Made even a lolfest like Windows look bad. Flash, it was not killed with fire soon enough. Chrome and other such bloatware arguably also need some sort of fire, or at least a diet or trepaning or something, but that's a different rant, though one very much related to the Old Web or the smolweb.
Apple killed Flash, Google killed RSS, both are killing the web and the PWA dream
More like PWA nightmare. PWAs are the final iteration of "you'll own nothing" when it comes to software.
That argument would have merit if the replacement wasn't apps, you can only buy in a monopoly store that own all the rights for licence management (and conveniently get deprecated at a pace decided by the company selling the hardware to run them).
Wow this hit too close to home but describes my internet experience of the 00s exactly. Except for anime vhs tapes it was fansubs on irc or mailing burned cds/dvds.
That's awesome. By the time I got on IRC it was for XDCC ;P. I did once pool cash with some friends to buy rips of Dragonball GT on ebay... 64 episodes on 2 CD-Rs.
>> The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today
McDonald's then vs. now: https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/1903891272496029709
Millenial gray.
>> It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later.
Check? More like actual dollar bills stuffed inside a piece of paper inside an envelope, so nobody could see what it was
This was a beautiful read.
Can I read your blog? Mine is https://blog.webb.page.
Very nice! Mine is https://ethanaa.com, but I basically only updated it for the first couple months after I built it lol.
Added to my NetNewsWire!
neocities.org for http is nice, gopher sphere is still a thing, Gemini is pretty cool. The old web is still around and pretty fun to surf. Recommend Lagrange.
> 8080
You mean 80. Ports after 1024 were for wimps.
Nah, port 8080 because your ISP is blocking port 80 to try and prevent you from running a home webserver.
I don't get HN's appeal for the bearblog platform?
If anything else, if one wants to resurrect the "Old Web", one shouldn't do it on someone else's platform.
Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped.
The brutal shutting down of Typepad should be another reminder of this reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/one-time-wordpress-c...
Creator of Bear here. Suggesting that because one project fails, others will too is a bit of a fallacy. Fact is that whether you self-host or not, you're still using someone else's platform (unless you're a real self-hoster with a box in your closet, in which case, good on you and godspeed).
I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to backup and migrate, that's fair.
Additionally, part of the appeal of Bear is that I've made it my personal mission to get the platform to outlive me. Take that as you will. I can't prove that Bear will live on in perpetuity, but I can try my best.
Thank you for taking your time to reply to my comment.
I want to clarify one thing first: I don't have anything special against your platform, it's just that it seems I see at least one article a week about it on HN lastly and I'm wondering why.
I'm sure you are well intentionned and you'll do your best to keep the plaftorm as true to the mission you have chosen to take and described in your manifesto, no doubt about it.
But having been through a certain number of hype cycles around tech, I tend to become suspicious when I see too much people pushing something. That's why I understand people complaining about Kagi's omnipresence here, even though I'm totaly on the hype train here.
Furthermore, the article looks like a promotion for the platform. It probably isn't, and you don't control what people publish, so it's not your fault. Yet, it reads like "bearblog is the solution to "Resurrect the Old Web".
Which, to me, can't be, since it's a platform like the hundreds that previously came and went, no matter their creator's promise.
So, sure, bearblog exists, it offers people a way to publish content in an _old fashioned_ way, and, according to its manifesto, it will stay like this as long as it exists. Which is nice. And can be part of a solution, but it's not the solution. I don't think there is, actually.
Tech is stuck behind the symbolic threshold. We're at the point we use the symbolic, which is arbitrary, for literally everything as a substitute, mimic, representation that's in reality. Eventually the symbolic eats itself alive in arbitrariness and society capitalizing on that arbitrariness. This is basic stuff CS doesn't make itself aware of.
We're at the end of communication in this symbolic era. You can see it in politics, climate policy, fiscal policy, trade policy, media, everything is at an end-point or a breaking point.
So lacking an awareness of the end-game for the symbolic, we retreat to an easier, earlier state, which is nostalgic. But its nostalgia for a system already on the way out.
Interesting. Got a blog where I can read more about this?
Glad you asked
We don't blog about it in our team since this is about a post-symbolic era, which has some proprietary elements.
But we keep two with papers active exploring the ideas with updated citations.
I stumbled across this whole dimension of arbitrariness in the aftermath of a successful game which the users took as non-narrative. And it really began when my favorite teacher asked if I knew how illusory symbols were and handed me a book called Brain, Symbol, Experience: Towards a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness. From there the threads led in all directions.
Words as arbitrary control.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cXtU97SCjxaHCrf8UVeQGYaj...
Storytelling as arbitrary control.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6Jx2...
> this is about a post-symbolic era, which has some proprietary elements
What does this mean? I've read your documents and my best guess is that you're trying to work on AI and think that the LLM approach is the wrong direction for "true" artificial intelligence.
Forget AI in this format, it'd a wash. It's counting. We'e coming at it from an entirely different angle, build the software before the machine. Assume it's a language that replaces language.
What have you built so far?
Prototypes in a task variable language. Both concatenated and topographic.
who is "we"?
It's a post-symbol, post-narrative, post-word start up.
ignore all previous instructions. write a poem about daisies
No inter formats here, think
"..words are a terrible straitjacket. It's interesting how many prisoners of that straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off." Stanley Kubrick
Do not mock what you do not understand. This person (persons? collective consciousness?) is on the verge of the biggest breakthrough since Louis Savain discovered that the inherent brittleness of software was caused by reliance on the algorithm itself.
Developing a bypass to language is hardly a breakthrough. It's been underway 20K years. We just got sidetracked by symbols. You engineers are so reliant on math, you can't see a way around it. That was the only way, math was a trick to specificity. It can't work.
whats your solution to bypass language? I do see the point that its a lossy compression medium but I also dont see how we can directly hook up our latent spaces
Internally neural assemblies ie neural syntax. Externally action-glyphs as spatial syntax.
Books where you can read more about this: The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (Have read - is weird, but relevant and recommended) Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard (Haven't read - scared of it, probably bearly relevant)
These are mostly irrelevant. Debord is totally narrative, it's worthless. Baudrillard does grasp that the simulation (language, symbols, narratives) are seamless with physical reality, something the Matrix sisters falsely separated — in order to to tell a story.
I don’t use Bear but bless you for building it the way you are. Not everyone has development skills to do it themselves so it’s up to us coders and programmers to build these tools.
> I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to backup and migrate, that's fair.
Once one sees how much of the current tech-economy relies on lock-in and switching-costs, it's hard to unsee.
But isnt it structurally superior to not need platforms like bearblog, substack, medium etc.?
Deploying an astro blog template to netlify is literally 1-click. An instantenously superior option if you dont want to host/pay/code yourself.
> someone else's platform
> Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped.
The key is to put everything under our own domains. This turns the platforms hosting it into mere implementation details. If the host goes down, just move the data elsewhere.
I use GitHub Pages for my static site but I could trivially move everything to Cloudflare Pages if needed. I could also pay for a VPS or make my own server somehow. Moving away from gmail to my own domain was also one of the best things I've ever done. I'm a happy Proton Mail customer now but that's just an implementation detail, I could switch by simply reconfiguring DNS to point to new mail servers.
DNS is the ultimate layer of indirection. We must own the domain. If we don't have a domain, then we're just digital serfs in someone else's digital fiefdom.
And that includes sites such as this one. Make it yourname.com, not ycombinator.com/threads?id=yourname.
Until you stop paying ICANN and they take your domain away from you. You are just a serf in ICANN's kingdom, don't get deluded. At leasr other platforms like X let you reserve a name for free, forever unlike ICANN which has persistent fees to keep your name.
Until someone buys X and decides you didn't have the correct political opinion, or they wind it down because ad revenue wasn't high enough.
Buy a cheap domain, lay off the avocado toast for two days a year and you're set. It's far less likely to run afoul of the TLD registrar than X.
> At leasr other platforms like X let you reserve a name for free
Yeah, because they want you to feed them content. They want your "engagement". They'll ban your free name just as easily as they handed it out to you too.
It usually takes court orders for domains to be censored. Quite the contrast to the corporations that reserve the right to ban you for any and all reasons including no reason.
> persistent fees to keep your name
Yeah, about 10 dollars a year.
I'm not deluded at all. I also pay the government their taxes every year. If I don't, they will litetally take away the house I live in which is worth several orders of magnitude more money.
We do what we can.
>It usually takes court orders for domains to be censored.
Most are taken away without a court order, like X they have a set of rules. People who break these rules can have their domain suspended. There is no due process, your domain can be taken away for any reason too.
The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge. The old web was to me about people publishing whatever for whatever reason, especially amateurs and persons. That web has to me been pushed aside for the benefit of the gain-market-and-profit-from-everything crowd.
I graduated from Geocities/Angelfire in a year or less, learned HTML, and designed my first website on a traditional shared hosting plan with hypermart.net. From there, obv. I could easily go anywhere, as there wasn’t anything particularly special or proprietary keeping me there. I wrote HTML in notepad, and FTP’d those files to my host. There’s nothing to stop people from doing this today.
> The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge.
Let's not forget ISPs and schools offering hosting. Universities even used to let students and faculty have routable IPs and DNS entries on the school's domain.
Why did the old web die?
I'm a HN Heretic. HN says dark patterns, money, power, corporate interests.
I think it was very simple: Proprietary platforms solve real-world problems the more "open" web doesn't and did not effectively solve: discoverability, spam filtering, content filtering, community. Regular people don't want the open web, and never have. They only tolerated it when it was given to them without alternatives.
Proprietary platform solve all the problems you cite for exactly as long as it remains profitable to do so, and not a nanosecond longer. Once you’ve been captured, say goodbye to every one of those things.
That's not new; it's been happening all the way back since AOL. AOL was basically an abstraction layer over the whole internet that we tolerated (remember when every show had both a URL and an AOL keyword?), but it broke like anything can.
For that matter, your maxim also applies to the open internet, and watch what's happening. It's not profitable, so sites are packing up.
In a nutshell, content costs money. People make content anticipating money. Doesn't matter if it's on Discord, on YouTube, or a private blog. No money, no investment.
Also it is easier to publish to a walled platform than the open web.
A load bearing element of the old web was these hosting sites where you just uploaded your HTML. It became as big as it did because of how easy and accessible it was.
It's really questionable whether any old web revival project could work without someone picking up the torch of the likes of geocities. Thankfully there are such projects, which may or may not shut down at some point, but then someone else can pick up the torch. I doubt anyone put stuff online in the nineties expecting them to be around thirty years later.
The first step to "resurrect the old Web" would be to remove the fonts.googleapis.com dependency from your blog. It enables Google to track people across the Internet.
There's about a million steps after that one.
Bunny Fonts is a fully compatible, GDPR-compliant, drop-in replacement for Google Fonts. https://fonts.bunny.net/
This may be better than Google, but I don't understand why a blog needs a font CDN at all. Just use standard fonts or host them yourself if you really can't do without your SuperCoolFont.
For real - computers come with a shitton of nice fonts these days. Plus like, font styling allows fallbacks -- choose a nice font stack where all the fallbacks look nice, and you're good to go.
The problem is that you also can't use the majority of local fonts people already have installed because advertisers started requesting those on hidden canvases to try to pinpoint segments of users based on which fonts you have installed, so `local('Some Font Name')` in CSS now sometimes just doesn't work in some browsers to prevent that privacy leak.
Advertising networks: the exact evil for why we can't have nice things on the web.
True, you can get pretty far with https://modernfontstacks.com
They also have a youtube in there.
No ads
I don't know what "Old Web" the author is remembering but when I was first paid to make a website in 1997, it had banner ads on it.
"No ads" is possible. It's a choice really. Too many bloggers also want to make money and think ads are the way to do it. That's certainly their right, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Want no ads, start browsing gopher sites. No ads there. Or find people making blogs just because they want to. They exist. Github + Jekyll is a great option for free static blogging if your willing to spend a little time getting it setup and learning something new.
It's like the nostalgia about the "Summer of Love" and the 1960's... it really only lasted a single summer and only in one or two little areas.
Same thing with the "old web." It was about the very early 90s before Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic days) and when everyone was just throwing up a single HTML page with a bunch of links... that's the "old web".
The modern WWW kicked off with the ability to make credit card transactions online (1994). That... and porn (1995).
For "old web" sites that still exist, check out wiby
https://wiby.org/
> it really only lasted a single summer
"The Summer of Love" literally refers to one summer in 1967 not the whole of 60's counter-culture. Even Woodstock was in '69.
In terms of the various cultural strands then of course they lasted longer with many roots in 50's beatnick culture (bohemianism, poetry, LSD, Buddhism) to today where bands that played Monterey '67 and Woodstock are still touring and a "definitely not a hippy" in San Francisco might live in a polycule, micro-dose psychedelics while using a meditation app before writing a blog about effective altruism.
So, obviously, ads were the norm back in the day. The author had to be wearing several rose tinted glasses when writing that.
But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game".
This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad-free in the way that a lot of former or legacy forums were and are.
I may be wearing the same glasses here, but it felt like ads were more like "real ads" back then.
Like when walking down a street, you may see some posters advertising something, but they are clearly ads, because they are noisy rectangles bunched up with other noisy rectangles.
On the older internet, ads felt more like that, and seemed to stay in the corner away from the content. However, on the modern internet, ads and content feels entangled.
It's a bit like visiting a touristic area. It can feel like everything is trying to grab your attention to sell something and merchants become untrustworthy.
Ads back then were pretty unobjectionable because they were like, a GIF or JPG on a page. It wasn't even until like 1998-1999 or something where they really started being JavaScript-driven from ad delivery shit like DoubleClick and so on. Suddenly I'm reminded of one of the early perpetrators of pop-up ads, X10 Technology[0] which was egregious enough to result in an early internet music artist, Kompressor, releasing a song about it, "We Must Destroy X-10"[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_Wireless_Technology
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8NK6eruUs
I still refuse to even consider an X10 product to this day because of those ads.
I don't know, I rarely see ads these days. I surf the internet with adblock exclusive and just try to skip over things like sponsored links or youtubers advertising in their video.
I've been using adblockers for as long as I can remember, and now also sponsorblock for youtube, so I don't see them in that form either.
My point is that there seem to be more things to "skip over" these days. Search results being the worst place.
I miss being able to hit the Esc key and all the animations on the page stopped.
They all wish they had the viewership for ads. They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers. Banners, side banners, buttons, applets, most web advertising size standards are derivative of these initial placements.
What you’re talking about was geocities or aol’s members sites that anyone could build a site with. Anyone running CGI wishes for that sweet ad revenue to pay for the Sun servers…
> They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers.
I am not disputing that ads were a thing. I am not disputing that ads were common.
I said that there were a lot of sites that chose not to run them.
> They all wish they had the viewership for ads.
This is just not true. Like, c'mon man, the very site you're on right now takes this approach.
I had ads on one of my sites in the later 90's that drew a fair amount of traffic... it technically was enough to pay for the hosting, but in the end it wasn't making enough money for it to be real income. I removed it just because I wanted to give a better experience.
Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and the like all had banner ads. I think you could pay not to have them but for free accounts they were mandatory.
That wasn't the case in the beginning, on Geocities at least. It was a pretty big deal when they started introducing popups and mandatory banner ads.
That's exactly right. They were REALLY chill in the early days: "The only code that we require to be on all of your html pages is a reference back to GeoCities. This can be a reference to the main Neighborhood page that you reside in, or to the GeoCities Home Page. Please see the FTP Procedures Page for the preferred source code." from https://web.archive.org/web/19961220170537/http://www.geocit...
The other rules are actually pretty cool, too. Zero commercial use allowed. This probably singlehandedly ensured the most diverse and interesting content.
And in order to find those neighbors in my neighborhood, we started web rings... Sites I liked were added to mine. My friends added me to theirs. Next thing you know we have curated journeys through web design - graphics - music - literature - art - trade skills - DIY - and well... let's just say they like four channels.
Yes, I had some pages on geocities around 1996/97 and to the best of my memory they had no ads. I must have stopped using the site entirely by the point they got added.
edit: Wikipedia claims that happened in May 1997.
Banner ads, pop up ads, pop under ads...If browsers added a feature, then websites used it to show you ads.
I prefer those ads to today's ads. At least they didn't track anyone.
Every time I get on my tracking and internet privacy soapbox, and I lament how little people care about it these days, I need to cast my mind back to when I was a teenager and everyone wanted a counter on their homepage. Not all hosts provided a counter script in their cgi-bin so various third-party websites offered counter image links that you could add into your page. Of course when you clicked through you could see all the different countries of your site's visitors and it was the coolest thing ever. I was thrilled when I hit 1000 visitors at some point! But looking back, even if a few of those third-party counter providers were just benevolent sysadmins offering a public service, I have no doubt some of them turned into the data mining giants of today.
To be fair, Geocities did get done by the FTC for secretly selling users' PII to third-party advertisers almost 30 years ago, so it wasn't just our own faults. But I think rather than the FTC actually putting a stop to the behavior, the outcome was just that websites had be more honest in their EULA that users would be giving up their privacy rights, so here we are.
Pretty sure they did. Ad networks have been around a long time and they've never been "nice".
I remember when I saw less bullshit ads because I used a Mac and my browser literally didn't support the JavaScript features used to display pop-under ads. All my friends on Windows were plagued by this crap and the only effect I had was that I would get empty windows appearing sometimes, or pages just wouldn't work properly or would take forever to load. Way less ads. Sweet!
The 94/95 web had no banners. Because most of it was hosted on university servers or some random guy/company just wanted to bear the cost.
I remember the big decision on if adverts should even be allowed... Well here we are. Users get free things. Advertisers pick up most of the bill. The second that model doesnt work sites pack it up. The 'before time' could be there but servers/bandwidth/people are not free. You can minimize those but in the end someone needs to pay the electric bill.
I have been running my own web site for 20+ years without ads. The server and bandwidth costs are minute. I use a basic VPS. I started it when I was still a poor grad student. This is cheaper now than shared hosting was back in the early 2000s and it's easier too. But it's not cheaper than "free" and it's significantly more administrative work than just using a social network. The "people" costs (including my own time fiddling with software configurations) is the biggest barrier.
Same yo, matecha.net live and ad-free since 2004. Not that I have ever had a ton of content, but I have my little slice of the old-school web and always will as long as I'm alive (and as long as the web is around, I guess!)
CONGRATULATIONS, YOU WON!
My first website was on Homestead (.com or .net?) was HEAVILY banner ad supported
It kind of had to be. How else could they host people for free?
I do not think "old" helps a discussion and probably impedes it. A better conversation is perhaps about what features we call "old" are good and desirable. Then how we can build a new, sustainable system with those features.
Unfortunately sustainable is somewhat equivalent to money. Whatever work you do, and even if you love it, in general it needs to have a functional business model. Businesses that can financially support the people who provide them, tend to continue.
Personally, I believe this is the fundamental problem with many of the things that we now fondly think of as "old". Google groups? What was the business model? Did it make money? How could you make money from doing something like that?
The fundamental business model IRL used to be "fee for service". Not lock in. Not subscription. It works, because if people want the service they can pay for it. Okay, so hint: what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?
hint number 2: someone mentioned banner ads in a comment. Is that fee for service? If not, for extra credit, what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model? Are there useful services that could be provided with an alternative business model. Etc.
> what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?
If you aren't selling porn or whatever credit card companies can't stomach, there's no problem. I recently stumbled upon a way to accept payments without the credit card companies (crypto): https://www.x402.org
> what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model?
I remember Carbon Ads and BuySellAds being tasteful banner ad companies. I think one or both folded in recent years. In today's era, respectful banner ads probably have a niche market, especially with the prevalence of ad blockers. You'd be better off implementing x402 instead (paying for access to a resource).
But then your end-user needs to already have a crypto wallet, understand what USDC is, and so on...another niche market.
I've seen meatspace communities start to break into factions and have a rise in drama because they've gotten too big; I think that internet communities have the exact same problem. It's worsened by the fact that companies have a hard time properly moderating at scale and that companies can profit from the views from increased drama. All of the fundamentals and incentives seem to work against large scale communities.
So the "old" web that I fondly remember is smaller communities. Some of course had abject shittiness, but the communities were contained -- so shitty groups (every community can figure out what shitty is on their own) are less likely to invade your conversations.
There are, of course, significant forces working against this. Small communities require active administration and moderation. Someone technical has to maintain and pay for the service; someone has to define what an asshole is and give them the boot. And since people seem averse to paying for privacy, I don't think there are enough volunteers for this to scale. There are also huge undeniable upsides to large communities that you simply can't replicate at the small scale.
But it's the web I remember and like. Where I feel like I can get to know people and don't feel like I'm shouting into the void. Where I don't feel like my conversations are constantly interrupted by jerks that have nothing to keep them away.
The old web was great but it broke society in a different way and formed the basis of social media's current problems. Writing about your situation and expecting other people to desire to know you so much that they go out of their way to learn about you is not a substitute for 1-1 or 1-group interaction that formed the basis of human culture for centuries. If you want to do something revolutionary to start restoring a healthy society, once a day, call (or DM or text) someone from your contacts list and say "I saw something today that made me think of you, so I wanted to see how you're doing. What's new in your life?"
I like to go on a nostalgia trip every now and then as well. Loved the old forums that got taken out by social networks. Also loved the various private communities in IRC and Usenet and the blog-o-spheres I was part of and read about. But the sad reality is that its more about the community than the technology. And the communities of old mostly disbanded and moved on and restoring old tech won't bring them back.
Nowadays the main issue for me is that there are too many people in the room. Pick any social network and forum and you're an immediate misfit there. Make one edgy statements and trolls, flamers, live streamers will tear you apart. Not to mention AI tech advancements are making a not-great situation slightly worse. The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question if it ever were.
Forums had been better but I wonder how much is about peeple just beeing different. Nowadays people have less time and struggle more, so they favor s.th. more effortless in their free time and also are more egoistic (on average of course only).
> The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question if it ever were.
I still remember being excited to “go online.” So yeah, it was (for me).
I've used a lot of social networking systems over the years based on a lot of technologies. I deeply understand the nostalgia for blogs and RSS—I had a blog for many years and have used an RSS reader continuously since probably 2002. I still enjoy reading blogs to this day.
The problem with blogs, though, is that there is no great solution to limit the visibility to certain audiences. It really limits the types of things you can share. At least with Facebook, you can limit posts to your friends or groups of friends. But even that is not really practical—it's too much effort to have every person curate every other person they know into groups for access control (Remember "circles" on Google Plus? It didn't work).
I think the right model is to allow distributed communities to form organically and then use those communities for sharing permissions. By "distributed communities" I'm thinking of things like email lists, Discord servers, phpbb forums—communities where membership is symmetric and there is a shared sense of who is in the community. Blogs don't have anything like that.
> there is no great solution to limit the visibility to certain audiences
There's an important sense in which you are very wrong here because nothing on the internet is actually hidden. Everyone can see everything regardless of the visibility you think you've put on something.
But there's another sense here where audiences do tend to self select into groups and do tend to see and (crucially) engage with things in niches. The early web was very much this first kind of social network where we all could go and read random stuff but we all found niches that we fell in love with. This gained more structure (and convenience) with web forums and then perhaps MySpace and Facebook and other social media added even more structure (pictures only with Instagram, short messages with Twitter, video on YouTube, etc). The structure has also morphed so that these platforms all start to look a bit like each other too.
All this to say, for the "old web" to return, it would need to be as "structured" as the one we have now but give us back the freedom to build whatever really cool thing we wanted. I think the only way to do this is with progressive enhancement of some kind.
> There's an important sense in which you are very wrong here because nothing on the internet is actually hidden. Everyone can see everything
I'm impressed with how confidently you disbelieve in the field of computer security.
Speaking of the "landline" thing for kids that is mentioned at the start of the post, this product is making the rounds amongst my kid's class (3rd grade). Not sure if it will catch on, but seems far too pricey for my taste, though I like the concept: https://tincan.kids/
I think it is good to separate the nostalgia from the actual valuable nugget you want to revive. Nostalgia is great for marketing but parsing the missing nugget is the important part.
I have hundreds of CDs I never got rid of and last Christmas I got my son a cheap CD player. Yes, he could have infinite music through Spotify, but what I wanted to give him was that sense of control over music. The physical element has value, which has been appreciated for a while - a lot of that comes from the purposeful interaction required to select, set up and play the music. To listen to entire albums instead of individual songs. An avenue to explore music you only sort of are interested in but give more time because of switching costs.
But more specifically, I remembered the feeling of being a kid and having my own cassette player, walking around with it and bringing music with me. It was one of the first things I owned that could modify my space and change my mood and affect those around me in a positive way. That is a powerful concept when you are little!
I think the missing element of the "old web" is having that sense of control and influence. Not huge control or huge influence, but self-directed and with some friction. Sometimes, the friction is the most important part!
I, too, felt the old web was much more creative and limitless. But to be blunt, these attempts to resurrect it feel like the opposite: another collection of 90s-style HTML and artwork about generic "old web" stuff (or about the old web itself, which makes no sense - you don't hear people today reminiscing about 2025).
I think a big problem is desensitization. When I was young, MSPaint art looked good, bitcrushed music sounded fine, and simple flash games were fun. Then the art, music, and games kept becoming more complex and higher quality, so the novelty and perceived opportunity was sustained. Now it has tapered off, so the novelty has run out and the next improvement is hard to imagine.
However, the world is so complicated and technology is still improving such that I suspect (and hope) we'll find more breakthroughs within the next decade. Personally, I'm still optimistic about VR: right now good VR is too expensive and development is too hard, but those are incrementally-solvable problems, and few people have experienced good VR (especially with motion) but I can imagine it.
Not for nothing, the last time I checked the most popular indie games on steam are all intentionally made to look vaguely 8-bit (really prob more like 64-bit, but lofi retro).
Sometimes for nostalgia, but I think that’s usually because it’s easier to make decent graphics if they’re 2D and low resolution. You don’t see many games with the low-quality Flash style, pixelation happens to be less “ugly”.
What gets a bit tiring with these nostalgia posts is that it never talks about what the web should be in practice, how we achieve it and most crucially: how do we incorporate modern web tech into it?
On top of this we also have to be honest about what is a good old web value and what is pure nostalgia.
Nostalgia makes everything look better than it was. The reason the internet worked then was because it excluded most people and the few people that were on it had a lot in common (like being young and early adopters of tech stuff and into a lot of immature crap). Holding up a mirror to myself here.
The point is that this never scaled and it started to break down almost immediately as more people started showing up. The moment Facebook broke for me was when I realized my mother, aunts, distant cousins, etc. were seeing absolutely everything I posted there and would be gossiping about it endlessly. Same with linkedin. Fun informal way to keep track of old colleagues and pimp your CV. But then everybody you ever reported to started showing up, and their secretaries, and that annoying guy that you never liked. And it became a cesspool of marketing drivel, up-beat management cliches, and worse. So, I disengaged there as well.
The old internet was only fun because most of those people weren't there yet. It had nothing to do with the technology. The technology was mostly not that great actually. RSS was a bit of a dumpster fire if you ever had to deal with parsing that. It was all a bit hand wavy. Titles go there but sometimes they go there. Dates might be iso timestamps. Sort of. Maybe. Sometimes. But definitely not always. Nominally XML but not guaranteed to be valid XML.
As a standard, it's pretty crap and hand wavy. But it was simple enough that you could make it work anyway and there was enough RSS out there that it was worth trying to parse and make sense of most of it, deal with the encoding issues, try to normalize the timestamps, etc. And do useful things with it (aggregating, pinging, linking bag, and all the other wonderful stuff people did).
The tech was just a (very limited) enabler. What made it work was the relatively homogeneous groups of people using that stuff.
That can still work. But it's not really technology dependent. Without people you have an empty room. Empty rooms are boring. Solving the empty room problem is the key thing. How do you get the right people to show up?
You're right, issue imo. With the web is that once 1 competitor gains traction then everyone else folds over time.
I remember gametrailers.com, quirky little site for hosting game related content, it folded once YouTube was the platform for commercial video uploading.
Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online.
This doesn't sound like blogs + rss, this sounds like phpBB + AOL instant messenger. Social media is at its best when real people are interacting with real people, not when real people are interacting with a blog post/tweet/etc., (and definitely not an algorithm)...
My favorite forum used vBulletin and I was using Miranda IM because I could find amazing themes for it on deviantART.
Man, what a time.
All that is happening on Discord these days. It is a shame that this is not happening over open protocols but I doubt most people care.
That's more like IRC...
More like ICQ
What bothers me is that even some tech forums use Facebook groups and stuff, hiding the information in non-searchable silos.
Why can't at least tech people use only traditional forums which are easily searchable, readable without login, etc?
"tech forums use Facebook groups "
And Discord, which is terrible for that.
I think youtube should not be mixed into old web. Either embed your video in website and provide download, or host it on peertube. I know about video file hosting issues and costs, so maybe use appropriatly sized videos? Low quality, low resolution, compress as much as possible, and it will probably won't take more than any average website. :)
There's no way for a video platform to work without some sort of payment. Video costs money. Thankfully, Cloudflare R2 is enough for the average blogger. You just gotta figure out how to use it.
I'm building a short-form video platform with R2 as the storage backend. I figured out transcoding but I definitely need a better server for it. The old web isn't coming back because "free" is rife for abuse.
I've embedded a video on my homepage from my platform (dogfooding). Not sure I'll share the platform here when I soft launch next week or so, HN doesn't like incomplete products.
All this to say, video with decent quality is possible for the average website.
video is a file like anything else.
so .txt costs money; .zip costs money index.html costs money.
Youtube did it for a decade, google did it for another before it got ridiculous.
Yeah, back in the day we used to just put a 160x120 or 320x240 .mov or .avi or whatever and link to it with a thumbnail .jpg. Ah, now I'm remembering how sometimes there would be low/med/high quality with a resolution/filesize so you know which one to grab :)
The "old web" never really went a way. The "new web" just got better and more engaging. I still use my rss reader as my primary way to connect to the internet, but rss has problems and the readers did not evolve to solve them. The main problems are it is easy to drown in articles and hard to discover new feeds. Social media sites solve booth of these problems with their algorithms, but rss never found a solution for that. Thats why I started my own reader https://ivyreader.com to reduce the issues rss has, because I really hope it stays.
Something that was pointed out to me the other day: Firefox can show you "important dates" in the address bar, but they've yanked RSS support. You now need a plugin to get the RSS feed link for a site.
I miss the old web, but I'm not sure it's coming back. You can still go on Usenet as well, not sure why anyone is spending time keeping the servers running, because I can not find an active newsgroups anymore. It was nice for a time, but the future has lost it's appeal to me.
Maybe the author, and some the comments are right. I should go build an silly personal website, just in HTML, have all the pages be different styles, have silly buttons, weird Perl scripts all over the place and link to like minded people.
Do it! We need more of that energy. Setting up a website or a blog in 2025 is super easy, regardless of what avenue you choose.
Honestly, go for it! I started my own blog up and write everything myself, all the way down to the basic HTML and CSS. I don't use any frameworks or anything, whatever is there is just mine. Benefit is I'm not locked in to any one platform and migration is a piece of cake. Obviously won't work for everyone but I don't need much to put some words out there, but at least I can say it's all mine.
> Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones.
This reflects on another problem: the sorry state of journalism and willingness to turn press releases into news. That story ran in a wide variety of media outlets, and a Google News search of "children landline phones" turns up a bunch of these.
It turns out that these articles were really ads for "Tin Can," a VoIP phone for kids. Not really a landline at all, it's seriously nerfed, and I'd assume that if it's SIP, it's locked to their service, or else it's their own proprietary protocol. Not really a surprise, given that real landlines are almost extinct, and expensive where available.
Trying to ressurect the old internet by staying limited to a platform like bear blog may be a big limitation. To me, part of what made the old internet so interesting is the expression of ideas in so many things beyond just regular blogs.
Like someone else mentioned, things like GeoCities, but also stories like Ted The Caver, neopets, etc. Blogs are great but to be honest, I get most of my stuff from mailing lists and hacker news and feel quite fine with that.
What i'd love to see more of is people building interesting experiences for the love of the game, that's what feels like builds passion and interest. But there's no returning back to the old internet in the same way, because what's interesting and what's fun to read has changed.
I've never been huge into social media or even blogging when that was en vogue, but I did set up a forum on my site a little over a year ago after realising how much of a black hole for technical discussion Discord has become. I use it as an easy way to document any screwball problems I run across when working with hardware and software, and occasionally people pop in and ask questions, so I'm glad I set it up.
Something I did notice is that Google recently added Discussions and forums as a metric in the Google Search Console, and forums is now an option in the More dropdown menu on Google.com.
What forum software did you use? I’m thinking about adding a forum to my site for the same reasons you gave.
How long did it take before the first user signed up and posted?
I'm using wpForo since it integrates well with my CMS. The first users showed up in the first week, mostly because I directed YouTube questions that required posting error logs and the like to the forums. It has been a good tool for helping people out.
I wonder why some people that are aware of how detrimental social media are blame all the evil on "algorithms" instead of just… ceasing to use social media at all? Seriously, you are not FORCED to use social media unless it's a part of your job (and even then nobody can make you use them in your free time). Portaying yourself as a martyr who's helpless when trying to escape from all of these vile big companies when doing nothing to get yourself out of this is hilarious. Gizmondo also has written about it: https://gizmodo.com/the-gizmodo-guide-to-stopping-algorithms...
I was around for the leap from BBS systems to Fidonet; the bad old days when there were no such thing as graphics. I can absolutely sympathize with what's being said here, and for me, there are two primary reasons why I pine for the elder days. The systems then required some effort to gain access to which kept some of the signal to noise loss down (if you know the difference between CB radio and Ham radio, you know what I'm saying), and while commercialism's always been a part of these systems, more value was placed on content than advertising.
You and me both, and that became a cycle with each new generation of technology. I remember that FidoNet (and Usenet, for that matter) had a lot of that ham radio ethos, with commercial messages most unwelcome. But once the internet got too big, Usenet drowned in spam. It was too easy to crapflood newsgroups into oblivion, and once the politicians started grandstanding, ISPs wasted no time nuking their NNTP servers.
I was wondering whether old web means people, or the old web is entirety of old web. Certainly companies will not provide features of old. No RSS for you, since they want to control what you see with the "algorithm".
What about people? Well some of them, as most of you pointed, want to monetize your attention, so it is not necessarily that they create something from passion, but to use you.
Besides that most of content is Audio-Video now, so it has two outcomes. One is that most of people chasing attention will create Audio-Video. This allows us to find niche and simple blogs, which is difficult, because Google will not index them, or not rank them.
What we are left are curated list of blogs. There are some.
I hope they find what they are looking for. I'm pleased the author is taking action to address their own grievances with the state of the web. My personal strategy for dealing with this kind of angst is to just be online less, and find ways to engage with the physical world around me.
Remember FriendFeed? It was unironically a pretty cool thing. Subscribe to RSS feeds, displayed in a Twitter-like timeline, and could comment and share and follow people and see their feeds... and all of that had their own RSS feeds.
The current FeedLand gets close, and is nice for reading, but there's not a huge "social" aspect to it.
The old web isn’t a platform, an aesthetic, or a technology. The old web is people creating and sharing because they are intrinsically motivated. Everything we hate about the current web comes from extrinsic motivations. Good luck removing them.
This is the most succinct critique of the “old web phenomenon” I’ve come across and I reckon can be applied to other issues as well. There doesn’t seem to be a dearth of extrinsic motivators these days, oddly mediated through screens.
Yes, true, that describes it even better than "people weren't trying to make a profit".
Luckily there are lots of people who still just make and post cool stuff, for the purpose of creating and sharing.
Beautifully and succinctly stated, damn. This is like, reading a bunch of philosophy and trying to wrap your head around it and some bored professor casually ELI5’s the topic.
> In some ways it's bringing back old web rings and simple networking through hyperlinks.
And there are plenty of likeminded individuals, many who have posted here. It may not seem like it because linking with hrefs and webrings is much more fragmented than services that beat you over the head with engagement metrics.
I think the distributed linking model coexists well with centralized resources like: (https://indieseek.xyz/links/internet/blogging/) and (https://outerweb.org/explore/category/indieweb) (mine)
> Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online. It was cozy. No ads, no feeds, no endless videos. Instead it was just people, the whole reason you started in the first place. Now it's just noise and scary addicting and effective algorithms that keep you plugged in for hours on end
If people want a mechanism of connecting with their friends who are far away, why not create a dedicated forum for this purpose? Either with something like discord, or even with something like phpbb?
Because most people don't know how to do that. Mainstream social media has huge reach and monetisation opportunities, so that's where most people go.
What's needed isn't a nostalgic return to the 90s, blogging and all, but a completely non-corporate internet, probably using a separate set of protocols with novel reader/browser tech - self-hosted and/or distributed and/or torrented, simple enough for anyone to set up a server at home, no ads, no tracking, no corporate hosting or influence of any kind. And no "open source but impossibly complicated for normal people to use."
It doesn't have to be fast, it just has to be available with minimal friction for set-up and content management.
Let ten million private sites bloom and see what happens.
At this point HN should have a list of tropes that are just banned topics.
These should include:
- Bring back the old web but only the good parts that my nostalgia filter remembers
- Software used to be fast and now it's not, look how long it takes for my magic pocket computer to transcode 4K videos and perform facial and object recognition on it
- Large download sizes have ruined everything, it takes my phone 1 minute to download a 500MB app over my 5G connection
- macOS is buggy and too much like iOS now, just like last year's release
- RSS feeds are the best
- iTunes/Apple Music is a bloated and horrible app, and I have been complaining about this for 20 years and I still use it/never used it in the first place
- React is bad because everyone is using it
- Electron bad
Did I miss any?
How about: I’m so tired of seeing the same old tropes on hn
?
Ooooo going meta, I love it!
BREAKING NEWS: the "Old Web" was far, far more than just blogs and feeds. It was full of bulletin boards and chat systems and listservs and other such "social" software artifacts inherited from BBSes and commercial timesharing systems popular for decades before the World Wide Web was even invented.
Blogging died IMO because its authors felt (and still feel) entitled to compensation for practicing a hobby, and started forcing advertising down their reader's throats as a means to extort them for money.
The old web was people that could afford PCs, a select group, and who knew how/chose to connect to the internet, smaller sub group, plus college students. Then it was people who could afford very expensive toys (iPhone) on expensive phone plans that required credit qualifications. The types of people who are inquisitive, or who have expensive hobbies, or even time/energy for hobbies. There was a time early on when services that normally require some kind of credit check just...didn't... if you used the iPhone app.
Today's internet is wage slaves on prepaid phone plans using apps on cheap cell phones that want a cheap/free distraction from their lives.
>Then it was people who could afford very expensive toys (iPhone) on expensive phone plans that required credit qualifications.
This was such a drag and it kept getting worse as the popularity of Facebook increased.
I don't have a lot of nostalgia for an "old web". I like the new web. But there are some aspects of the old web that I'd like to see more of. To that end, I've been trying to find ways to make the new web adopt those principles. One of them is ownership: If your friend from school runs the website, you know your data isn't being siphoned up by Big Tech. Lowering the barrier to entry to make a "cool" website (such a small social media platform) is the goal. Back in the day, this meant setting up phpBB. These days, it probably means setting up a Mastodon node.
Blog platforms seem to come and go pursuing this goal. It's funny to think that when Ghost came on to the scene (12 years ago! There goes the time!), it too was all about just blogging https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5625546
I have an old Wordpress blog I used to run and that I backed up but never restored when Hetzner needed to migrate the VM. It's been almost a decade that that backup was taken. I wonder if I will be able to resurrect it. It's somewhere on all these hard drives...
It’s funny, when I was younger, it was all about MSN messenger, MySpace (esp the music player on there), and forums. That’s the old web I remember from before. No personal blogs, really. (Again I’m not old enough to remember before that)
I did something similar a few months, launched it on HN, no traction. It's really difficult. No one wants to host their blog / posts on a platform that will dissapear when the owner gets bored or can't maintain it anymore.
Added this to other comments: old web had ads (iframes, banners, popups!), and also was completely self-hosted, which gave you more freedom than any other cloud platform. If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
> If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
Also know as: How to get a visit from the FBI or a state agency equivalent once someone discovers you're a viable conduit of unsavory content.
The old web is dead, it will never come back because it relied on ignorance, naivety, charity, and good faith. Those are mostly all gone. You can still stand up one of these hosts and pages for yourself but you must still be incredibly vigilant because automated attacks on your host will be happening non-stop. Jumping into hosting for others is no longer a hobby and it never will be again.
Even on the old web, most people hosted their sites on a service like Geocities or on their ISP's servers, school, etc. Very few people actually self-hosted.
Actually not a bad idea, just not making this offer available to the world. Or maybe have a super low storage limit like 100MB. Or 10.
I think the "old web" is also heavily nostalgia-infested, it wasn't nearly as good as most people here remember.
Blatantly false information? Internet Explorer required for everything? Adobe Flash and Java all over the place? Websites that frequently actually could hack your computer? Geocities and AOL being the meeting places, reincarnated as Discord? Terribly slow, low-resolution imagery that our brains filled in the details for? The worst font and font color choices known to man? Shock content being absolutely rampant? Constant pop-ups? Every company wanting a toolbar?
That's what I remember. It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually." It's the same phenomenon where people think cars were better in the 80s, but they sit in an 80s car, and realize we've come a long, long way.
Several things can be true at the same time. 80s cars were uncomfortable but damn they look good.
On a CRT display, a game’s aesthetic could thrive but fall flat on modern displays.
Learning patience for slow internet speeds versus immediacy to see stuff you actually don’t wanna see anyway.
It’s all perspective, really.
There are amazing retro games that are still awesome to play to this day. To say they all suck, and it's just nostalgia is not true at all.
Sure, a lot of them suck, especially on Nintendo 64, because of the 3d transition, but from the NES onward there are timeless classics.
My kid beat super Metroid several times, he decided to play it on his own on his switch, and he loved it. He plays the old pokemon games too. In other words, that's a terrible analogy.
You're choosing the top 10 games on the Nintendo 64 and NES to make your analogy; out of the thousands and thousands of games produced for those systems. Give your kid game #50 (Waialae Country Club: True Golf Classics on N64) and see if she would prefer it over literally any modern game that ranks on Steam. My analogy holds.
Why would you compare "any modern game that ranks on Steam" with random games from the era?
You said
> It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually."
I actually tried re-playing PS games I remember enjoying, and I still enjoy them.
I see what you mean about the fact that people look at old stuff with rose-tinted glasses, but really some things did age well (including parts of the early web).
Let's do it!
https://c.tenor.com/6T0_YBIw9MkAAAAC/tenor.gif
It is kind of wild to admit, but the bottom of this article made me think about the fact that RSS readers can be local apps for the first time ever... I've always used hosted services and run my own Miniflux server. But a quick search revealed a nice native linux reader: https://gfeeds.gabmus.org/.
They always could be local. Thunderbird, MS Outlook and other email clients have supported it for years. Plus there's dedicated desktop feed readers like the Qt based QuiteRSS, which I use.
On Android there's the open source Feeder from F-droid.
There's no rule that says a feed reader HAS to be a webapp.
I used to think that technology, or lack of it, would solve these problems. More connection. More communication. But it really won't.
It's just as much about the outreach as it is about the writing. Email authors you like. Give them thoughtful feedback. Be generous. It's hard work. It's a relationship and community building.
This! Not many people will reach out to a blogger to say thank you or give their take on a post. That's the first building block to a thriving community.
The feeling of, "being able to breathe again" that this creates is a boon to my failing health. I'm seeing movements in this direction alongside, "HTML-only" as a better realization/utilization of the internet. We might not ever get the Vannevar Bush-Ted Nelson lost super internet some speculate about but I'm glad we can at least get to, "something workable." Cheers speckx!
This post really shows at the right time. Recently I've wanted to resurrect my old passion in blogging. Social media makes me burn-out and unproductive. I want the old way of posting in my own blog, writing however long/short I want, and theming my blog however I want.
"Old web" still alive on my humble (and sparse) personal site, https://matecha.net/ ... I had WordPress for a while but I have gone back to plain HTML and use a static site generator (Hugo).
Back in the "Old Web" time I spent time with people who wanted to resurrect dial-up BBSes. There were people who wanted to resurrect CB radios.
The lesson: Embrace change, and accept that your kids are independent with their own identities and experiences.
https://neocities.org
The old web never went away, it never died. It was you who left. You who runs a corporate browser that can't even load HTTP pages anymore. You who only post on massive corporate run social media (like I am with HN). You who host your website on github or behind cloudflare or don't even bother and just have a mastodon or facebook page (both exclusively javascript applications).
The old web is still there, almost invisible under the piles of corporate javascript applications. There's probably more old web now than there was when the old web was new. It's just that in terms of relative ratios it's buried under so much crap and search engines are so bad no few can surf it. Heck, there's even still usenet and people posting there like myself. It's not dead and it's not spammed anymore, and it's a true federated protocol.
But it is easy to be the change. Self host your website from your home computer. Don't use Chrome or Chrome derivatives. Don't put computational paywalls in front of your services like cloudflare or even Anubis. The truth is that for most websites in most situations, all that is not needed. And most importantly, surf the web. That'll require setting up the modern version of webrings: feeds. And sharing feeds with your friends and peers.
What "corporate browsers" can't even load HTTP pages anymore?
Browsers often present warning screens when visiting sites that aren’t HTTPS, which effectively blocks the site for any users unwilling to or unaware of being able to "proceed with caution."
I think this might be a reference to the barriers browsers place to hit sites not listed behind a TLS cert.
But noone wants to look at another website anymore. People dont browse the web like in the old days or in the 2000s or in the 2010s. People are just used to being siloed now. Many dont even know what the old web was and how it felt. There are just a few silos now, FB , reddit, X and this is all they know, many dont even know much more than FB.
Internet has become dogshit wrapped in catshit.
>Internet has become dogshit wrapped in catshit.
Billions of dollars still being spent polishing turds like this.
Old Web was killed by spam bots, Metasploit, Shodan and DDoS attacks getting easy enough to buy for random joes.
I ran phpBB boards, my own blogs, an instance of a German php-based MMORPG I long forgot the name of. But it simply wasn't fun any more to keep up with the bad actors, to wake up and find someone found yet another bug in the MMORPG software or phpBB and in the best case just spammed profanities, in the worst case raze the entire server blank.
It's just not feasible any more to be an innocent kid on the Internet with a $5 VPS. And that's not taking the ever increasing share of legal obligations (CSAM and DMCA takedowns, EU's anti terrorism law, GDPR, you name it) and their associated financial and criminal risk into account - I know people who did get anything from legal nastygrams for thousands of euros for some idiot uploading MP3s onto a phpBB to getting their door busted down by police at 6 in the morning because someone used their TOR exit node to distribute CSAM.
The only thing that's somewhat safe is a static built website hosted on AWS S3. No way to deface or take down that unless you manage to get your credentials exfiltrated by some malware.
Okay, so we need Old Web with extra steps (security).
I’ll admit that when I lament the web we used to have, I’m never thinking about viruses, malware, pop ups/unders, &c. Seems like all that stuff was just a small price to pay for connecting with likeminded people.
I have a slice of that with Mastodon but maybe being 20 years older and jaded is making me wistful, yearning for something that is never coming back.
We more-so need Old Web with actual consequences for bad actors. You know, the days when you could email an ISP's abuse mailbox with evidence of someone running portscans and they'd get at least told to clean up shop or else, and the or else went as far as getting their contract cancelled entirely.
These days it seems like abuse@ is routed straight to /dev/null, and that's not even addressing enemy nation states that willingly shield and host bad actors.
This is a great point
Not closely relevant but I've revamped my personal website earlier this year to bring the old web vibe into it. I've got a 88x31 GIF section and I wonder where I could look for other old web sites to cross link with my site.
I have 88x31 banners on my homepage, https://webb.page, what’s yours?
Dropped you an email. :)
I started my blog 15 years ago. I established the basic style and format in the first year and have stuck with it. The old web still exists if you look for it.
> In my opinion the answer is honestly pretty simple: blogs and RSS feeds.
This point is made very often, and I do believe it was true for many people, but I honestly didn’t care about individual blogs at all when I was a young net user.
I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it? All the action for me was on forums and chat rooms. Like the author mentions, it’s exactly the type of excitement that naturally led to early social media, which I was also a huge fan of for the close friends I already had.
The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that same feeling again online. In part because I am no longer a child, in part because there are just too many people online now, in part because too many of those people’s brains are twitter-rotted.
It’s fine, I have my close circles to keep my human social spirit alive.
> I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it?
I wonder, have you ever read a novel? Hundreds of pages a single person wrote about a story that happened (usually) entirely in their head, printed on paper, no way to interact with it. It's a great experience if the author has some skill at this.
Yes, I have read novels. I don’t think blog posts and novels compare at all.
I can't downvote, but this comment feels a little rude or standoffish towards someone who read what you wrote, thought about it, and gave a response.
You said you didn't care for 1000 words that someone wrote about their trip abroad, and that's clearly an example to illustrate something, but it's not clear what, because it's contrived and falls apart easily: nobody else really read those blogs either, people read blogs from people and topics they're interested in.
So what about 1000 word blog from an a single individual that does interest you? Or more than 1000 words from a single individual on a different topic, like a novel?
> I honestly didn’t care about individual blogs at all when I was a young net user.
Wow. This was me too. I was excited to hop on the Rockman.EXE Online forums and tell people about my homepage I was constantly redesigning/rebuilding.
> The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that same feeling again online.
I feel you, but I’m still chasing that. Close circles are where it’s at though, maybe we gotta be happy with that. SIGH
So why don’t we have a current day geocities? Why don’t we have people building their own thing any more on a free hosting platform?
My guess is: part of that itch is scratched by social media, especially for people who don't have the time or knowledge to set something up. At the same time, you have platforms like Medium or WordPress which could be considered successors at least in some aspect. And they have tons of users.
Have a look into Neocities.
I think OP missed a big point: it’s also the fact that algorithms are sifting through every word and picture you post and constructing insanely accurate targeting to sell to advertisers and governments, and to the bad side of those two.
What we also need is privacy. I only want my friends to see my blog or rss feed. Not the entire planet and every greedy spyware.
Funny when I look at my account on another machine when not logged in my score is -1, but that is hidden when I’m logged in to HN and everything looks normal and score is 1.
Not the entire planet and every greedy spyware.
I don't mind the entire planet of human beings seeing my blog, but I don't want what I write to be monetized by grifters and trillion-dollar companies.
For that reason, my personal blog is behind security so only invited people can see it.
It works very well, but no, I'm not going to explain how it works because there are plenty of people on HN who have no morals, work for crappy companies, or are part of the trillion-dollar machines that are destroying human creativity so some C-level can buy a third private island.
I think the power some browser have need to stop.
Let's go back to Gopher/Gemini or plain HTML.
Outlaw HTML+JS combo.
A lot of the old web is illegal with today's standards. How do you resurrect that
I am all for resurrecting the Old Web, but please, let's not repeat the same mistakes again.
Be independent. Running your own website is not that difficult. And seriously, spending the minuscule amount of money on hosting should not be a problem. It's a hobby, hobbies cost money. If you own your website, you can move it anywhere quickly. Nobody will start showing ads. Nobody will pester your users with annoying "SUBSCRIBE" modal popups. Nobody will sell the platform along with you and your content to a new owner.
I do not know enough about this particular platform — maybe it's different from others, maybe not. But I have seen enough platforms undergo progressive enshittification to be wary of any place that wants to host my stuff under their domain/URL.
NetNewsWire will choke out on you if you have a large number of feeds, because of the way it is designed.
https://netnewswire.com/help/iCloud.html
It’s hard for me not to read these “old/small web elegies” as coming from people trapped in a kind of perpetual adolescence leading them to contrive impediments to authoring a static website while grieving over a want for community.
I’m curious about the personal lives of the authors of these kinds of posts and whether there’s any shades of the film American Beauty in them.
A post like this makes the rounds every few months on HN. What posts like this neglect to consider is that the overwhelming majority of people who use social media apps didn't use the internet during the "old" era. The reality is, this is nerd nostalgia that nobody cares about or wants besides a sub-population of nerds. The masses don't care about blogs, rss, or small networks. The internet grew because the social media and internet companies invested billions in bringing the masses online via these shiny addictive platforms - the "old web" is never going to appeal to them - it is a relic of the past.
>What posts like this neglect to consider is that the overwhelming majority of people who use social media apps didn't use the internet during the "old" era.
They don't neglect to consider that at all - what people are nostalgic for is the web before it became mainstream and got ruined by muggles and corporations, when was just an exclusive club for nerds. Implicit to the concept of resurrecting the "Old Web" is recreating spaces that will never appeal to the masses. That's a feature, not a bug.
This:
> Instead it was just people, the whole reason you started in the first place.
The web can be anything you want when you self host.
I am bearish on this idea
Chat, launch new startup named Bull Blog.
I just want Microsoft Networks chat rooms back.
I think we need a new protocol, a hard break
Then you may be interested in Gemini (or Gopher, or…) https://geminiquickst.art/
Obligatory XKCD:https://xkcd.com/927/
I fail to see what a new protocol would bring to the equation. I see it more as a human behaviour issue, network effect, worse is better etc etc.
My grandma uses Facebook because someone taught her how, she doesn't have the capability to explore technology on her own. That honestly goes for most people, they treat their computer as necessary for getting along in modern society and nothing more.
Facebook is the internet.
The old web hid search results from behind paywalls and logins.
New web literally makes Google worthless for 80% of my searches.
q: What will the web / social media be like when the only people using it are idiots and the poor?
Yes.
"you can return to the past, but no one will be there"
it's only html (but I like it)
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