part of the problem is that most people don't own a pc or personal laptop - they use their phone and apps. None of my friends (35 years +) use laptops other than for work and openly say how much they have regressed technically. Some of these guys grew up with the internet in the early 00's and would be setting up switches for lan partys, using torrents and usenxt, limewire etc. These days they can barely open up microsoft word - but on instagram/twitter they're all over it. Sad really. I would always reach for my laptop first before my phone and I tend to very rarely visit social media sites (other than reddit) on laptop/desktop.
I use glance - https://github.com/glanceapp/glance to parse my rss feeds - it's pretty good.
Yeah, I don't think the true scale of the "war on general computation" is apparent for many technical people: It's good to think about alternative distribution models for the internet, better use of protocols, etc - but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.
The "cognitive control" of tech companies is underpinned by a much more concrete technical control of the devices.
>but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.
would those users have had devices over which they had administrative control in the past though? Perhaps for software to eat the world, and for hardware to get distributed far enough that it could, a percentage of the world had to forego administrative rights when getting that hardware.
I suppose those who miss it can still get it, although yes, for how much longer is a question.
That's what they are by now, though. The websites of social media sites are crippled and bug-ridden - try using Instagram in a browser, for example. They want to coerce you into using their apps, because that gives them better tracking opportunities.
That's just what I've been doing after deleting Instagram from my. phone. I can't trust my evening dopamine-seeking behaviour with the phone app, but there's much much less stickiness in the browser.
Does anyone remember that Pokédex game that the original Pokemon website had in the late 90s where you could collect/unlock Pokémon? I feel like you could trade them too but maybe not. I tried to ask ChatGPT but it doesn’t seem to know exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe this is a Mandela effect thing.
This is going to come off glib, but I don't think you can believe any of this having actually used the Internet of 1999. As is so often the case, there are lots of real annoyances and offenses behind the sentiment, but still, the Internet of 2026 is vastly better than that of 1999. The amount of things you're just one quick search away from right now would break the brains of a 1999 netizen. We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.
Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions.
And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
I respectfully respect the premise that the choices are "paper books" or "Youtube influencers", though I'll note we didn't have Gilbert Strang's 18.06 course back in 1999 either.
I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.
Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.
Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
I'm not opposed to the message but it perplexes me the amount of people who bemoan the loss of the "old web" and then use a web page comprised of massive modern frameworks to deliver said message.
Having used the internet in 1999, it's mostly cookie cutter stuff mixed with some intellectually lazy generalizations, especially of specialist use cases.
You gotta love the subtle religious hooks leading to Christian apologetics elsewhere on the site; back in '99, and especially these days, that stuff was often enough more overt. But maybe renaming the piece to Using the internet like a Born-Again Worshipper is both more honest and accurate. ;)
Now, I think the author would consider it "solutionism", but the other day I spent a bunch of time browsing Reticulum's NomadNet sites (using the Columba mobile app).
And while aesthetically it was more early 90s than 1999, it filled me not only with nostalgia, but also with some optimism for the future of the Internet. Something I haven't felt in a while...
We should also also embrace offline mode more. Disable all network connections until you make a conscious choice to go online. Heck, make a Windows 3.1-esque GUI for it and call it Trombone Winsock just for fun.
If any program complains it needs network connectivity for offline features, it goes into the Recycle Bin.
I found myself doing a particularly intense stint of work the other day, finally had all the source documents and the destination program all lined up, happily finding and comparing and synthesizing and entering, and I realized it was going to take all night. Or realistically until the middle of the next day.
I put the laptop into airplane mode, to block any updates that might unceremoniously reboot it and wreck my layout. Figure if I needed to be on Teams in the meantime, I've still got a phone for that.
Airplane mode already exists, it's _wonderful_ for this, and I should use it more often. If I'm not actively internetting, just toggle that and the distractions can wait.
Offline mode, and self-hostable apps. I'm very happy with my self-hosted and open source apps; e.g. photo library, media centres, etc; the convenience of cloud, but my cloud that I fully control.
How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past? This has been on my mind for a while. The layer of trash some companies have built over the internet has been ruinous.
I think the current web is sick and will never get better.
I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.
Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.
Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to have any web content behind a registration wall.
So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.
Your statement of ‘hardly anyone considered facebook part of the web’ is incorrect. Facebook became popular a bit after the Web had become quite mainstream. The idea of signing up for online services was not foreign to most of these folks. Now, AOL/Compuserve and such were more considered as non web.
Yeah, those didn't count either. AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties. With AOL I'm quite sure nobody considered them to be a part of the web. Their pages didn't have URLs early on but AOL "keywords" instead. Compuserve also weren't using http I believe. It was some kind of commercial WAN that was pitched as a competitor to the internet, no?
Similarly Twitter; I signed up in I think 2007 and only used SMS for the next several years until they finally stopped it. Once I switched to the web/app version I was frankly appalled.
A movement where some sites are only accessible by a specific browser or class of browsers, much more simplified than now? Where a site could put an agreeable browser into a no-JS, lo-fi mode?
1999 was Dialup for me. The modem said "56k" but didn't actually connect at that speed, it was more like 4.4KB/sec max.
The biggest thing I grabbed then was an overnight bulk-downloading session from animewallpapers.com, made possible by using GetRight. It had a download queue, as well as the "GetRight Browser" which presented the links on a html page as files to select, or other html pages as directories to view.
"56k" meant 7 kilobytes per second as a theoretical max.
So 4.4 was ok. Everything with networks is done as bits, I think honestly for marketing reasons now
I remember a few years prior to that - I have faint recollections of dialling into BBSes or paying by the hour, so you'd want to plan in advance for what you might do on the internet while connected. A BBS often tracked what you uploaded vs downloaded, so unless you had something to share, you needed to be mindful of what you grabbed.
I feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.
I've been to several retro LAN parties recently. They're wonderful, and they cost nothing to run. 10/100 switches are free, and cat5 nearly so, and the people attending can probably bring plenty of both.
Today is Friday. Send out a group text right now. Saturday evening. Bring whatever. We'll order pizza, it'll be a good time. Make it happen.
Logistically: One was specifically focused on the CDROM era. Any game that shipped on CD or came out roughly 1995-2005 was fair game, and the organizers mentioned a few by name that you might want to pre-install. The other was anything-goes, networking optional; I brought a TI 99/4A and a handful of cartridges, and it was very popular, apparently that grabbed a bunch of folks right in the childhood, in between rounds of Quake.
If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.
No tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information
Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.
But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
I was raised by cheap boomers that would never pay more than the absolute minimum for anything, no matter how shitty the option, and most of my friends lived way out in the country. Paying $40/month for DSL or cable internet was off the table, because the library ran a free dialup ISP, so thats what we used even though their line was almost always busy. The cheap ass modem wouldn't reset the line correctly either, requiring someone to physically pull the phone cord out and back in the modem, otherwise the line wouldn't hang up, so redialling on a busy signal required physical intervention. (At some point, I recall my mom's friend/neighbor convincing her to pay $99/year for a dialup ISP that connected the first time.) I moved off dialup when I got a fast food job in 2005.
I lived on a suburban street a mile from the Stanford campus that didn't get broadband until 2003. I would go to the local copy center to rent an hour of computer time to edit my blog.
Ok.. so broadband in 1996, route-able (unique) IPv4 broadband in 1997 (177.1..), route-able satellite internet in Nigeria in 2002 (it sucked when it rained). Your Stanford proximity apparently didn't help.
Luckily, we had web accelerating proxies like OnSpeed[1] back in the day that would compress web pages (including lossy image compression) so if you were one of the poor sods still on dialup (like I was), it was a lot more bearable.
Oh neat, I'd never heard of them. Almost feels like a spiritual predecessor of CDNs, serving optimized assets from existing websites via their servers.
I was a lot more careful about clicking things when it took a full minute to load. Now I know that it'll be open in less than a second and I can leave immediately if I need to, so there's WAY less thinking beforehand.
It's funny to think back, as I've just recently installed a browser extension to do the opposite (i.e. to prevent "open in new tab" tabs from doing any work until I foreground them.)
Today, my computer's memory is far more constrained than its network bandwidth. I find it very easy to accidentally open tons of tabs very quickly (esp. from the HN front page!) until suddenly the browser is swapping and everything's slowing to a crawl trying to process all those new page DOMs.
And yet, even when it doesn't choke the computer, I find no real benefit to preloading pages in the background any more. At least on my connection, the page load time after I focus a tab is almost imperceptible.
Also, tabbed browsing was still a couple years off for most people, although some browsers got there earlier than others:
> In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.[citation needed] That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by several others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although an MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on April 1st, 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[11]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
Also, Opera had a Multiple-Document Interface from the start, so 1995 or so. That's not "tabs" per se but multiple mini-windows inside the main window; much the same "Hey, I can have multiple things open!" deal
I just opened multiple copies of the browser; I'd have 5 or 10 running most of the time on my 98se box. It's where I got my habit which I still use today, of opening outlinks as I read the page, so they can load in the background, then once I finish the content of this page, I'll go skim those to fill in context.
It meant I cared _less_ about page load time, even on dialup, because they were happening in other windows. I could happily tolerate a 2-minute load time as long as the first page took more than 2 minutes to read.
We used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.
Questioning this, because I worked with a sysadmin who was in an @Home/CableLabs DOCSIS beta region at about that same time, and we all envied him of course. That was in San Jose, CA.
So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)
Nice! We were one of the first families on the block to have a 33.6 kbps modem, and were the envy of every filthy peasant who still had a 28.8 back in the day.
My first dialup modem was 1200 baud, back in 1987! I remember it taking an hour to download a game from a local warez BBS. My first modem to establish an Internet connection (SLIP) was 9600, sometime around 1993! Time flies...
And if the sysop had upgraded to 28.8 while you were still on 2400, you were probably persona non grata for tying up the line for so long!
Some of the most popular boards had minimum connect speeds; if you couldn't connect at at least 9600 or 14.4k, it would immediately hang up on you, for this reason.
This comment reminded me of the early days of Ultima Online. I was on a high speed campus connection with a ping time of ~5ms to my server. Given most players were on a 28.8/56k modem with ping times ~300ms, it was an amazing speed difference. I could walk, not run, faster than other people riding horses at full speed.
Needless to say, I got accused of cheating quite a bit.
No shade! I went and checked out of curiosity, since it looks like we’re both using Astro as a static site generator.
Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.
To be fair, it's different. The order is important. If he would have written "It is not LLM slop what I want, is real people, real creators, and real content no my feed", it would have sound like AI. But not in the way he wrote it.
A lot of these recommendations seem prudent. I especially like the idea of POSSE for using social media without actually using it (every time you open a site to post is an opportunity to be ensnared). Completely stripping the browser from your smartphone is a bit extreme and excessive for me, but doesn't invalidate the other reccomendations.
To me the what we wanted/got distinction is something like:
1. A kind of capital that is widely available, so that people could exercise control and agency with machines that do what you want them to do for your own needs.
2. A distribution tool controlled by mega-corporations as they decide what you should be able to see or have.
> On your router, you can and should setup blocklists for various malicious and nefarious domains, advertisements, adult content, etc. This is not “1999-esque” in practice, but is a requirement for the modern web.
I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet.
If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.
It's worth keeping in mind how much more fringe the web used to be. You were almost by definition a bit of a deviant if you spent significant time online in the '90s and early '00s ("nerd" was a pejorative). People who found no acceptance in the physical world many times found like minded people online, which sometimes was a good thing and sometimes unfortunate.
> If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
No argument there. That said, I think the big difference between the 1990's and today is that everyone knew the nefarious places and people existed but, for the most part, you actually had to seek it out. I am not suggesting that it was hard to find. Perhaps the worse of the worse was easier to find. On the other hand, it wasn't quite the same thing as algorithmic feeds. For example: I absolutely refuse to view anything remotely political on some sites (including reputable news sources or material that is clearly satire) since that is the surest way to be fed extremist crap. How far those feeds will 5ake me, I simply do not want to know.
Did not even consider encrypted IRC as an alternative to Matrix or Signal. Or even running my own search engine. Good writeup! Very much for the 1%ers in tech skills.
Thanks for the bit of nostalgia today OP. I remember the first time that I saw that browser screen. Pure discovery back in those early days of the web. I can still hear the dial-up modem crackling...
> We took a wrong turn by locking ourselves into content silos and embracing comfort instead of seeking truth, and it will not end well unless we do a hard u-turn to authenticity and sovereignty.
One minor 'gripe' for lack of a better term, is that I feel like a push to go backwards in technology is a bit misguided. I feel like a lot if people see ads and trackers, then look to older protocols like Gopher/Gemini/IRC (or at least 'inspired' by older stuff like Gemini).
The issue isn't javascript, it's ads/trackers/algos/slop. I feel like tracker/ad/algorithm free static site on the status quo of http, or something newer like IPFS, is worlds better than trying to use arbitrary restrictions on something like a Gemini capsule.
What made the old web cool, is that it was the first time we can communicate with so many random people in far away places digitally and share information through cool web pages.
That novelty has mostly died now. Communicating with people in distant lands is mundane now. And there is little new things to share that we haven’t already seen or heard before.
So what’s the point of the web now? Maybe the internet will become purely a utility for exchanging data for infrastructural and business purposes, and the idea of using the internet as a source of entertainment or recreation will fade away.
It would be nice to retreat back to an analog world, where the internet still exists, but only as a layer of glue in the background that orchestrates multiple technologies that power our world, and nothing more.
It's a matter of focus, we cannot stop the internet adoption to the current business needs.
The reason you are posting here is an example of how people from all over the world are still can benefit from the internet to share their optinions and communicate regardless to the internet changes.
Tons of people still use the internet as a source of entertainment and recreation. Just because you're too jaded to care doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
I don't know if I'm crazy but I think social media is pretty okay at the like, core building and enhancing social networks thing.
Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise.
I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.
part of the problem is that most people don't own a pc or personal laptop - they use their phone and apps. None of my friends (35 years +) use laptops other than for work and openly say how much they have regressed technically. Some of these guys grew up with the internet in the early 00's and would be setting up switches for lan partys, using torrents and usenxt, limewire etc. These days they can barely open up microsoft word - but on instagram/twitter they're all over it. Sad really. I would always reach for my laptop first before my phone and I tend to very rarely visit social media sites (other than reddit) on laptop/desktop. I use glance - https://github.com/glanceapp/glance to parse my rss feeds - it's pretty good.
Yeah, I don't think the true scale of the "war on general computation" is apparent for many technical people: It's good to think about alternative distribution models for the internet, better use of protocols, etc - but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.
The "cognitive control" of tech companies is underpinned by a much more concrete technical control of the devices.
>but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.
would those users have had devices over which they had administrative control in the past though? Perhaps for software to eat the world, and for hardware to get distributed far enough that it could, a percentage of the world had to forego administrative rights when getting that hardware.
I suppose those who miss it can still get it, although yes, for how much longer is a question.
I always find it strange when people refer to twitter and YouTube etc as apps rather than websites.
That's what they are by now, though. The websites of social media sites are crippled and bug-ridden - try using Instagram in a browser, for example. They want to coerce you into using their apps, because that gives them better tracking opportunities.
That's just what I've been doing after deleting Instagram from my. phone. I can't trust my evening dopamine-seeking behaviour with the phone app, but there's much much less stickiness in the browser.
Tried greyscale yet?
Sometimes. YouTube (and Google Maps, and old.reddit.com but not default reddit) I find to be better on the website than the app.
Does anyone remember that Pokédex game that the original Pokemon website had in the late 90s where you could collect/unlock Pokémon? I feel like you could trade them too but maybe not. I tried to ask ChatGPT but it doesn’t seem to know exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe this is a Mandela effect thing.
This is going to come off glib, but I don't think you can believe any of this having actually used the Internet of 1999. As is so often the case, there are lots of real annoyances and offenses behind the sentiment, but still, the Internet of 2026 is vastly better than that of 1999. The amount of things you're just one quick search away from right now would break the brains of a 1999 netizen. We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.
Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions.
And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
I respectfully respect the premise that the choices are "paper books" or "Youtube influencers", though I'll note we didn't have Gilbert Strang's 18.06 course back in 1999 either.
I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.
>Id also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it...
[gestures wildly at all the bots in 2026]
You can still email people! A genuinely interesting email will probably get at least a 20% success rate
Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.
Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
Fark is farking great! Though its old-school HTML doesn't flow so well on mobile.
Can we get the best of 1999 with the best of 2026? Probably not...
There is slashdot.org also
Just a stylesheet away.
m.fark.com looks pretty good on my phone.
I would like to relive my fark memories but I only get endless captcha loops on it now :(
I'm not opposed to the message but it perplexes me the amount of people who bemoan the loss of the "old web" and then use a web page comprised of massive modern frameworks to deliver said message.
People clamoring for the old web are almost never talking about slow speeds or XHTML, they're talking about the FEELING of being on the web.
Having used the internet in 1999, it's mostly cookie cutter stuff mixed with some intellectually lazy generalizations, especially of specialist use cases.
You gotta love the subtle religious hooks leading to Christian apologetics elsewhere on the site; back in '99, and especially these days, that stuff was often enough more overt. But maybe renaming the piece to Using the internet like a Born-Again Worshipper is both more honest and accurate. ;)
Now, I think the author would consider it "solutionism", but the other day I spent a bunch of time browsing Reticulum's NomadNet sites (using the Columba mobile app).
And while aesthetically it was more early 90s than 1999, it filled me not only with nostalgia, but also with some optimism for the future of the Internet. Something I haven't felt in a while...
We should also also embrace offline mode more. Disable all network connections until you make a conscious choice to go online. Heck, make a Windows 3.1-esque GUI for it and call it Trombone Winsock just for fun.
If any program complains it needs network connectivity for offline features, it goes into the Recycle Bin.
I found myself doing a particularly intense stint of work the other day, finally had all the source documents and the destination program all lined up, happily finding and comparing and synthesizing and entering, and I realized it was going to take all night. Or realistically until the middle of the next day.
I put the laptop into airplane mode, to block any updates that might unceremoniously reboot it and wreck my layout. Figure if I needed to be on Teams in the meantime, I've still got a phone for that.
Airplane mode already exists, it's _wonderful_ for this, and I should use it more often. If I'm not actively internetting, just toggle that and the distractions can wait.
Offline mode, and self-hostable apps. I'm very happy with my self-hosted and open source apps; e.g. photo library, media centres, etc; the convenience of cloud, but my cloud that I fully control.
Not to discourage you from these things, but the cloud wasn't a thing in 1999. Storage space was also an issue.
How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past? This has been on my mind for a while. The layer of trash some companies have built over the internet has been ruinous.
>How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past?
In order to actually have and maintain a healthy balance of life and technology, such compromises are required.
I theorize it is going back to the protocol layer. The "web" for most people is a bunch of social media frontends.
I think the current web is sick and will never get better.
I propose building a new stack, without ICANN and friends (Verisign is raising .com prices yet again). I'm planning to build it[1] at some point, just working on other foundational stuff at the moment.
Cozy corners, webrings, and Gemini/Gopher is where I see the spirit of the old web alive and well.
---
[1]: https://dap.sh
Yggdrasil works like that. No bitcoin, no bullshit, your own tunneled ipv6.
Yeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to have any web content behind a registration wall.
So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.
Your statement of ‘hardly anyone considered facebook part of the web’ is incorrect. Facebook became popular a bit after the Web had become quite mainstream. The idea of signing up for online services was not foreign to most of these folks. Now, AOL/Compuserve and such were more considered as non web.
That applies to aol, msn, compuserve etc, not to Facebook which you only ever accessed via http from a browser.
Yeah, those didn't count either. AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties. With AOL I'm quite sure nobody considered them to be a part of the web. Their pages didn't have URLs early on but AOL "keywords" instead. Compuserve also weren't using http I believe. It was some kind of commercial WAN that was pitched as a competitor to the internet, no?
> AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties
yes, they were, in the UK at least. speaking as a compuserve user.
Ids like 102615,1320, with pay per minute for compuserve and for the phone call
Personally I never used cix but one of the magazines (pc pro?) has columnists on it at least.
Similarly Twitter; I signed up in I think 2007 and only used SMS for the next several years until they finally stopped it. Once I switched to the web/app version I was frankly appalled.
A movement where some sites are only accessible by a specific browser or class of browsers, much more simplified than now? Where a site could put an agreeable browser into a no-JS, lo-fi mode?
That is pretty much the definition of Gopher
1999 was Dialup for me. The modem said "56k" but didn't actually connect at that speed, it was more like 4.4KB/sec max.
The biggest thing I grabbed then was an overnight bulk-downloading session from animewallpapers.com, made possible by using GetRight. It had a download queue, as well as the "GetRight Browser" which presented the links on a html page as files to select, or other html pages as directories to view.
"56k" meant 7 kilobytes per second as a theoretical max. So 4.4 was ok. Everything with networks is done as bits, I think honestly for marketing reasons now
56k was bits, your 4.4KB was bytes, which is 36k bits. That was a pretty typical real world speed for dialup around 2000.
I remember a few years prior to that - I have faint recollections of dialling into BBSes or paying by the hour, so you'd want to plan in advance for what you might do on the internet while connected. A BBS often tracked what you uploaded vs downloaded, so unless you had something to share, you needed to be mindful of what you grabbed.
I feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.
It even comes pre-packaged with a theme song.
I confess that I had this in mind. Is it time to start running LAN parties again?
I've been to several retro LAN parties recently. They're wonderful, and they cost nothing to run. 10/100 switches are free, and cat5 nearly so, and the people attending can probably bring plenty of both.
Today is Friday. Send out a group text right now. Saturday evening. Bring whatever. We'll order pizza, it'll be a good time. Make it happen.
Logistically: One was specifically focused on the CDROM era. Any game that shipped on CD or came out roughly 1995-2005 was fair game, and the organizers mentioned a few by name that you might want to pre-install. The other was anything-goes, networking optional; I brought a TI 99/4A and a handful of cartridges, and it was very popular, apparently that grabbed a bunch of folks right in the childhood, in between rounds of Quake.
The only thing missing was the Josta. RIP.
Electrical panels and air conditioning have not kept pace with graphics cards.
I hear you. Topless Quake LAN sweatathon, the sport of gentlemen.
If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.
I had cable internet in 1997; it was wonderful in it's unmetered¹ symmetric 10Mbs glory.
1) wasn't supposed to be unlimited but the ISP didn't bother to mesure it until sometime in 2000
No tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information
Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.
But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
I lived in rural North Dakota and had dial up until 2005. It really sucked the last couple of years.
I was raised by cheap boomers that would never pay more than the absolute minimum for anything, no matter how shitty the option, and most of my friends lived way out in the country. Paying $40/month for DSL or cable internet was off the table, because the library ran a free dialup ISP, so thats what we used even though their line was almost always busy. The cheap ass modem wouldn't reset the line correctly either, requiring someone to physically pull the phone cord out and back in the modem, otherwise the line wouldn't hang up, so redialling on a busy signal required physical intervention. (At some point, I recall my mom's friend/neighbor convincing her to pay $99/year for a dialup ISP that connected the first time.) I moved off dialup when I got a fast food job in 2005.
I lived on a suburban street a mile from the Stanford campus that didn't get broadband until 2003. I would go to the local copy center to rent an hour of computer time to edit my blog.
Ok.. so broadband in 1996, route-able (unique) IPv4 broadband in 1997 (177.1..), route-able satellite internet in Nigeria in 2002 (it sucked when it rained). Your Stanford proximity apparently didn't help.
Luckily, we had web accelerating proxies like OnSpeed[1] back in the day that would compress web pages (including lossy image compression) so if you were one of the poor sods still on dialup (like I was), it was a lot more bearable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnSpeed
Oh neat, I'd never heard of them. Almost feels like a spiritual predecessor of CDNs, serving optimized assets from existing websites via their servers.
Closer to 2 as it was rarelly running at full 56kb/s.
Although, being patient was part of the experience as well
I was a lot more careful about clicking things when it took a full minute to load. Now I know that it'll be open in less than a second and I can leave immediately if I need to, so there's WAY less thinking beforehand.
There are quite a few sites that take more than a second to load even now. Should be a war crime, but alas
When I found my first tabbed browser. Netcaptor. It changed everything. Open in new tab. Open in new tab. Open in new tab.
Go back to the first tab which has finally finished loading. Consume.
I would open links in new windows instead. By the time I got done reading one forum thread, the 5 others would be loaded.
It's funny to think back, as I've just recently installed a browser extension to do the opposite (i.e. to prevent "open in new tab" tabs from doing any work until I foreground them.)
Today, my computer's memory is far more constrained than its network bandwidth. I find it very easy to accidentally open tons of tabs very quickly (esp. from the HN front page!) until suddenly the browser is swapping and everything's slowing to a crawl trying to process all those new page DOMs.
And yet, even when it doesn't choke the computer, I find no real benefit to preloading pages in the background any more. At least on my connection, the page load time after I focus a tab is almost imperceptible.
How things have changed!
Also, tabbed browsing was still a couple years off for most people, although some browsers got there earlier than others:
> In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.[citation needed] That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by several others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although an MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on April 1st, 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[11]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_%28interface%29
Also, Opera had a Multiple-Document Interface from the start, so 1995 or so. That's not "tabs" per se but multiple mini-windows inside the main window; much the same "Hey, I can have multiple things open!" deal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_brows...
My point is, you think more about clicking a link when it'll monopolize your whole UI and you can't just stash it in a background tab or mini-window.
I just opened multiple copies of the browser; I'd have 5 or 10 running most of the time on my 98se box. It's where I got my habit which I still use today, of opening outlinks as I read the page, so they can load in the background, then once I finish the content of this page, I'll go skim those to fill in context.
It meant I cared _less_ about page load time, even on dialup, because they were happening in other windows. I could happily tolerate a 2-minute load time as long as the first page took more than 2 minutes to read.
so true, re: patience
I was just thinking back the other day about BBS days and how frustrating a busy signal could be, or connection time limits, etc.
I knew dial up for a little while but I was lucky to have been on broadband for a couple of years already in 1999.
This early access + a 4x SCSI CD burner made me one of the 2 official warez provider at school. I was even taking orders from parents of friends.
We used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.
Questioning this, because I worked with a sysadmin who was in an @Home/CableLabs DOCSIS beta region at about that same time, and we all envied him of course. That was in San Jose, CA.
So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)
Firstly, you’ve spelled “megabits” wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate
Secondly, that 10 Mbps was only your downstream signaling rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_signaling_rate
Was your upstream via analog dialup?
"This page is about 1 MB of assets".
And it could easily have been 10 KB.
Now now. Don't be so tightfisted with the bandwidth. You know what they say, "People will hate you Steve, if you're too sting-ee!"
https://www.audioatrocities.com/games/lastalert/index.html
I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.
Nice! We were one of the first families on the block to have a 33.6 kbps modem, and were the envy of every filthy peasant who still had a 28.8 back in the day.
My first dialup modem was 1200 baud, back in 1987! I remember it taking an hour to download a game from a local warez BBS. My first modem to establish an Internet connection (SLIP) was 9600, sometime around 1993! Time flies...
And if the sysop had upgraded to 28.8 while you were still on 2400, you were probably persona non grata for tying up the line for so long!
Some of the most popular boards had minimum connect speeds; if you couldn't connect at at least 9600 or 14.4k, it would immediately hang up on you, for this reason.
This comment reminded me of the early days of Ultima Online. I was on a high speed campus connection with a ping time of ~5ms to my server. Given most players were on a 28.8/56k modem with ping times ~300ms, it was an amazing speed difference. I could walk, not run, faster than other people riding horses at full speed.
Needless to say, I got accused of cheating quite a bit.
Some sites were fast. Some sites had pictures and it took long enough to load that I would sometimes make a sandwich while waiting.
Not with cable (3 megabits down, 128kbits up!) Almost everything was fast.
I literally remember watching images load line by line.
I know nostalgia for the old days is de rigueur especially on HN but I definitely do not want to go back to that.
I told a coworker born in 2001 about this and he could not believe his ears
We dither on the shoulders of giants.
Same! I got called “LPB” in Quake 2 a lot.
and 1MB is "small" for the modern web!
No shade! I went and checked out of curiosity, since it looks like we’re both using Astro as a static site generator.
Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.
Yeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections
I know flash had its downsides - but messing around with Macromedia Flash to make stupid little animations back in the day was so fun.
Plus Silverlight made Flash seem like a dream.
Albeit I agree with the general thesis, I find it funny that the very next sentence after the author say:
> the moment I find something that crosses my desk which starts with “it’s not this, it’s THIS”, I immediately click off and move on.
He follows it by his very own "It's THIS, not this" statement:
> I want real people, real creators, and real content in my feed, not LLM slop.
The Machine must have learn it somewhere I guess.
To be fair, it's different. The order is important. If he would have written "It is not LLM slop what I want, is real people, real creators, and real content no my feed", it would have sound like AI. But not in the way he wrote it.
A lot of these recommendations seem prudent. I especially like the idea of POSSE for using social media without actually using it (every time you open a site to post is an opportunity to be ensnared). Completely stripping the browser from your smartphone is a bit extreme and excessive for me, but doesn't invalidate the other reccomendations.
To me the what we wanted/got distinction is something like:
1. A kind of capital that is widely available, so that people could exercise control and agency with machines that do what you want them to do for your own needs.
2. A distribution tool controlled by mega-corporations as they decide what you should be able to see or have.
> On your router, you can and should setup blocklists for various malicious and nefarious domains, advertisements, adult content, etc. This is not “1999-esque” in practice, but is a requirement for the modern web.
I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet.
If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.
It's worth keeping in mind how much more fringe the web used to be. You were almost by definition a bit of a deviant if you spent significant time online in the '90s and early '00s ("nerd" was a pejorative). People who found no acceptance in the physical world many times found like minded people online, which sometimes was a good thing and sometimes unfortunate.
Parrot Ass Club is a classic clip I like to return to when discussing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lx-17OV8g
> If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.
No argument there. That said, I think the big difference between the 1990's and today is that everyone knew the nefarious places and people existed but, for the most part, you actually had to seek it out. I am not suggesting that it was hard to find. Perhaps the worse of the worse was easier to find. On the other hand, it wasn't quite the same thing as algorithmic feeds. For example: I absolutely refuse to view anything remotely political on some sites (including reputable news sources or material that is clearly satire) since that is the surest way to be fed extremist crap. How far those feeds will 5ake me, I simply do not want to know.
Hey Kyle! Neocities is great
<3
Did not even consider encrypted IRC as an alternative to Matrix or Signal. Or even running my own search engine. Good writeup! Very much for the 1%ers in tech skills.
Thanks for the bit of nostalgia today OP. I remember the first time that I saw that browser screen. Pure discovery back in those early days of the web. I can still hear the dial-up modem crackling...
The best was the FTP search feature from alltheweb.com. You could find almost any software you needed.
Lemmy is the closest thing to internet in 1990s.
No. IRC, EMail lists, Usenet and webs like https://deadnet.se are closer.
Also, everything from https://wiby.me.
> We took a wrong turn by locking ourselves into content silos and embracing comfort instead of seeking truth, and it will not end well unless we do a hard u-turn to authenticity and sovereignty.
We didn't do that: capitalist interests did.
Pretty sure we still chose the silos. We voted with our wallets.
One minor 'gripe' for lack of a better term, is that I feel like a push to go backwards in technology is a bit misguided. I feel like a lot if people see ads and trackers, then look to older protocols like Gopher/Gemini/IRC (or at least 'inspired' by older stuff like Gemini).
The issue isn't javascript, it's ads/trackers/algos/slop. I feel like tracker/ad/algorithm free static site on the status quo of http, or something newer like IPFS, is worlds better than trying to use arbitrary restrictions on something like a Gemini capsule.
OpenAI will love this article, noM nom nom
Turn off javascript and use a text based browser? What? May as well not use the internet.
Internet in 1999 was like democracy in 1791. An elite club for the few percents of best people. Good days indeed.
Are there any decent webrings left, or newly existing?
Decent is a matter of opinion but there are active ones. There've been a few HN posts on the subject in the last few months.
I compiled some old web meta links here: https://outerweb.org/blog/web-discovery.html
I think it’s time to give up on the old web.
What made the old web cool, is that it was the first time we can communicate with so many random people in far away places digitally and share information through cool web pages.
That novelty has mostly died now. Communicating with people in distant lands is mundane now. And there is little new things to share that we haven’t already seen or heard before.
So what’s the point of the web now? Maybe the internet will become purely a utility for exchanging data for infrastructural and business purposes, and the idea of using the internet as a source of entertainment or recreation will fade away.
It would be nice to retreat back to an analog world, where the internet still exists, but only as a layer of glue in the background that orchestrates multiple technologies that power our world, and nothing more.
It's a matter of focus, we cannot stop the internet adoption to the current business needs. The reason you are posting here is an example of how people from all over the world are still can benefit from the internet to share their optinions and communicate regardless to the internet changes.
Tons of people still use the internet as a source of entertainment and recreation. Just because you're too jaded to care doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
I don't know if I'm crazy but I think social media is pretty okay at the like, core building and enhancing social networks thing.
Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise.
I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.