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 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.
Some sites were fast. Some sites had pictures and it took long enough to load that I would sometimes make a sandwich while waiting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections
and 1MB is "small" for the modern web!
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
Hey Kyle! Neocities is great
<3
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.
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.
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!
OpenAI will love this article, noM nom nom
The best was the FTP search feature from alltheweb.com. You could find almost any software you needed.
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.