6 ms·

Rediscovering the Small Web

472 points by livatlantis 6y ago

chris_f 6y ago
When I picture it in my head I think of the early web as more of a library. Over time it has transitioned into a shopping mall. If I continue with this thought exercise, a lot of the big indoor shopping malls around me have been knocked down and replaced with standalone outdoor stores (walled gardens?). I'm not sure where things are going next.
- livatlantis 6y ago
  Author here. That's an interesting analogy — especially given that small book stores and libraries (to a lesser extent) still do exist, albeit in much smaller numbers, attracting fewer patrons. A lot of web traffic today transits through applications and platforms. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; although I'd hate to see even more walled gardens. My hope is only that the small and independent web not go forgotten/ignored.
- ebertx 6y ago
  I thought the exact same thing about the web as being a library. It's nice hearing someone else say it, it's validating. However, I feel like it's moved more in the direction of being like broadcast television: lots of content that's designed to be consumed once and then forgotten. Maybe the television analogy oversimplifies the matter. Still, I think the more that content creators view their content as going into a permanent library, the better the quality.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  I think there have been two main changes that have hurt the web: 1) The shift from spammy shit content as something to squash to something to allow and even promote over better content, provided it follows certain (Google's) rules. This shift (in terms of Google's behavior) happened ~2008-2010 and we haven't seen a period of spammy crap content getting heavily downranked since then, like we used to when they were still trying to stay ahead of it rather than give it a "legitimate" avenue as a method of control. Google's still being the most important search provider to appease has left the rest unable to direct behavior toward anything better than what does well on Google, so their results aren't much better. 2) A move away from actual or de facto open systems & protocols to deliberately carved up communities. The only thing keeping chat, Twitter-like services, and other social media—hell, even Youtube, so far as some kind of format for hosting video with metadata—from being standards or protocols is that business incentives reward "owning" a userbase (so you can better spy on them, and to keep anyone from providing a better, perhaps less-spying-laden client and "stealing" ad-viewing eyeballs) Both of these are fundamentally problems of the spyvertising economy taking over the Web and I think a lot of the issues would go away if we could (legally—I don't think tech will do it) permanently and completely break that. More specifically a big part of the problem is Google, though of course the rest of the Web giants are gleefully following similar bad incentives.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    I don't think search engines are promoting spammy $#!+ content per se; what they're doing is heavily promoting newer content that's relevant to the most common search queries, as this gives them the only real hope of staying ahead of the spam. Of course the "small", long-lasting, independent Web is heavily disadvantaged by this shift. One development that would be good for small web sites to look into is schema.org linked-data formats. Those might simply be too effort-intensive for the spammers to adopt (at a high level of detail) and perhaps too much of a commitment to quality and transparency (they would have to actively forge the info, which would leave them open to bans given the lack of plausible deniability), so they might become a viable signal of quality and lead to higher visibility in SERP. (Similar for things like proper separation of style from content, that have always been advocated for in the web-standards community but are not really commercially viable.) I'm not quite sure if others have experimented with this stuff already, but it seems worth trying.
- userbinator 6y ago
  It's still mostly a library, except with commissioned salespeople everywhere and books full of vapid content that scream, fly at you from the shelves, and turn their pages as you try to read them.
  - EmilioMartinez 6y ago
    Don't forget the infinite pages books that expand as you read them. Until you drop them that is, and have to start again.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  > We thought the Internet was going to be a global library but then it turned out to be a global bookstore instead. Nice coffee tho. https://twitter.com/earthboundkid/status/1095385048008798208 https://twitter.com/earthboundkid/status/1095385048008798208
lxe 6y ago
I just got into ham radio. The websites related to the hobby are basically what the web was like before everything coalesced around search and social networks.
- snazz 6y ago
  In my experience, that's true of many specific hobbies--bicycling, sailing, gardening, etc. It's especially true of hobbies where purchasing ever-more-expensive things isn't so important. Hobbies like cars have more magazine-like and shopping-mall-like sites compared to less consumerist ones (although bikes can be like that too).
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    I wouldn't say that this is still true of bicycling, at least not bicycle touring. The amount of standalone blogs in that hobby have plunged drastically now that people choose to simply upload photos to Instagram, and what few blogs exist are often buried in Google search results. One can see that standalone forums are emptying out, reduced to mainly middle-aged members, as younger generations turn to Reddit or Facebook for all their discussion of the hobby. Within the bikepacking segment, Bikepacking.com (which presents itself as a community resource but is essentially just one big advertisement for its sponsors) has a chokehold on the community. I was fortunate to get into bicycle touring at a time when standalone blogs were easy to find, some of them were masterfully written, and there was not yet the mercenary desire to monetize one’s content and become an "influencer". The web of 2020 is very different, and because Google deranks older content, a lot of newbies in the hobby today won't even become aware of the former state of affairs even if much of that content remains just as relevant today.
    - snazz 6y ago
      I can see that. At the same time, sites like Sheldon Brown's and some of the older MTB forums still rank well in Google searches.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
bovermyer 6y ago
My own website is starting to "revert" to this concept. A few years ago, it was primarily an about page and a resume. Now it has a blog, a links page, and a "knowledge base" that's mostly just notes for myself. I'm too burnt out on web "best practices" to care about that for my personal sites anymore. If you're curious: https://benovermyer.com https://benovermyer.com
- livatlantis 6y ago
  Indeed! It's so much more interesting to learn about what people are interested in, beyond just their professional competencies. I really like that you have your guiding philosophies, hobbies, languages and even Hogwarts house on your about me page. Kinda makes me want to make a more detailed about me page. If I enjoy these kinds of details, surely some other people will too. Might do it this weekend.
  - bovermyer 6y ago
    That'd be cool to see!
- derg 6y ago
  I really really like this approach. Something like this has been sitting in the back of my mind but I've been so burnt out on, well, everything, to do anything about it, constantly worrying about it not being perfect or not adhering to whatever is _the_ standard of the hour blah blah blah. It's reassuring to see that I'm being a fool and that I should just do it, "best" practices be damned. Thanks for sharing!
StavrosK 6y ago
I've been thinking about this for ages, and I want my own contribution to this to be a simple webring service. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, a webring was a simple circular linked list. You had a link on your knitting-themed site to the "next knitting-themed site", that site had a link to the next one, etc. To join the ring, you just emailed someone and said "hey, I, too, have a knitting-themed site, can you add me to your webring?", they looked at your site, and changed their link to your site, you added the link they previously had, and the ring continued. I want to build something simple that'll serve a small widget with previous/next/random site buttons, it'll work like the webrings of old regarding the curation aspect, so to get added you'll need to be referred to by someone. Would you use something like that? You'd basically just drop a bit of HTML on your page and it wouldn't load heavy JS/analytics/crap, just whatever was necessary to paint a few links.
- nmg 6y ago
  Absolutely. Working on this for a rural area near me with many local artisans. A simple "Our Friends" section that rotates and encourages users to explore artisans in the area.
- kickscondor 6y ago
  There was a small resurgence of webrings in last year: Hotline Webring: https://hotlinewebring.club https://hotlinewebring.club XXIIVV Webring: https://webring.xxiivv.com https://webring.xxiivv.com Weird Wide Webring: https://weirdwidewebring.net https://weirdwidewebring.net I'm personally more into personal directories and blogrolls than these random clicks - but they still seem to be a good way to put together a small community. (And this post isn't meant to discourage you - but rather to encourage you to form your own.)
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Hmm, that's very useful information, thank you! Personal directories seem more useful and easier to put together, I think you're right.
    - 6y ago
kickscondor 6y ago
If you're interested in recent innovations on this front: (rather than just retreading the same Web as before) * Beaker (https://beakerbrowser.com https://beakerbrowser.com) the peer-to-peer browser just released their beta release - and it has some exciting features. Particularly the built-in editor, meaning you can edit, serve and read your pages all from the browser. (Blogging in Beaker is as simple as visiting: hyper://a8e9bd0f4df60ed5246a1b1f53d51a1feaeb1315266f769ac218436f12fda830/. And the posts are stored locally.) * https://special.fish/ https://special.fish/ This completely low-tech social network has taken off. The innovation here is that it's all just focused on profile pages - not feeds of random posts. * There's a growing subculture of public Tiddlywikis (philosopher.life, sphygm.us, etc) - rather than focusing on protocols and APIs, they are much more focused on how to organize and style personal hypertext. * As for RSS, well, as HN custom insists, I am also commenting to plug my own fraidyc.at. See, you knew it was here. * On a related note, I've also been working on an RSS/Atom extension to handle ephemeral posts: live streams, "stories", pinned posts, etc. https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Extensions https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Exten... * There's also a forum on tiny personal link directories that's been forming at https://forum.indieseek.xyz https://forum.indieseek.xyz. The idea here is to use Yahoo! or DMOZ style link directories at a smaller scale, to catalog corners of the Web. (Note that this whole comment itself is a kind of small 'directory'. Rather than an algorithm stepping in to show you 'related' stuff, I have.)
- gambler 6y ago
  >Beaker (https://beakerbrowser.com https://beakerbrowser.com) the peer-to-peer browser just released their beta release I just tried downloading the Windows executable. Initially it said it will take 1.5 hours, but then the download just failed. Tried a few more times with the same result. This is ironic on so many levels.
  - pfraze 6y ago
    Yikes. We host our binaries via GitHub so that... sucks
    - 6y ago
lukehack 6y ago
Not to be too spammy, but discovery of such sites is why I'm making Feldot, a social domain aggregation site. There are so many sites available out there like this to browse, but we never see them when using existing search engines. https://feldot.com https://feldot.com
pcmaffey 6y ago
The word is niche. There are 2 major factors that will power a resurgence, that could use better tools: 1. Discoverability - self-reinforcing webrings, blogrolls, directories, ad free-search etc. 2. Creation - next-gen Dreamweaver. A low-code site creator app that exports a static website as a folder of readable CSS/HTML that people can tinker with by hand (and learn), instead of being locked into one of these cloud WYSIWYG site generators. Hosting is solved. No need to tie the one to the other...
- marc_io 6y ago
  Number two could be Publii? It seems to met all the requirements you mentioned.
fossuser 6y ago
This is a great post and makes me miss this type of content. I created a subreddit recently to help with the discovery problem and posted it on HN earlier this week. Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23287286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23287286 Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ It’s been going well so far, only a small solution to a big problem, but it’s been fun to discover a lot of interesting blogs from people in this community. If you missed the initial post feel free to join and add yours too.
- derg 6y ago
  Oh good, I was actually looking for something like this. I joined, thanks for sharing!
- livatlantis 6y ago
  Excellent! Joined, thank you!
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Thanks! I think your site is awesome, it's exactly the kind of thing I think of, when I think of the best of what the internet can be. I'm a fan. [Edit]: I also caught a tiny typo: > "But the web is not always "profit-oriented" and it certainly does not need be "user-centric" (and I say this as a UX consultant)." I think you wanted "does not need to be" I created a PR for you: https://github.com/parimalsatyal/neu/pull/2 https://github.com/parimalsatyal/neu/pull/2
    - livatlantis 6y ago
      Thank you, merged!
- lappet 6y ago
  Thank you for making this! I joined as well.
ferzul 6y ago
there's also pubnix (public unix-like servers), gopher, and a new protocol called gemini (which adds simple links and viewer-owned formatting to to gopher). i think there's certainly something to the idea behind more restrictions, with just enough rather than plenty. i almost want to give myself nothing but wikipedia, api docs, and “small web” and pubnix. i'm not sure that i can give up hn or its ilk (but the ratio of interesting content to poor content is terrible)
- livatlantis 6y ago
  Yes, I'm discovering the newer pubnix now (only knew of sdf.org previously). Looks interesting, if a little overkill for what I'm looking for. Glad they exist though. You can perhaps try a week of _mostly_ limiting yourself to those and see how it goes? I personally do a mix of the "normal" web and more niche stuff out there.
  - gindely 6y ago
    Yes, I just signed up on the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic earlier this week. I intended to keep my gemini/gopher pages updated daily but now is a good time to update them some more!
zargon 6y ago
Somewhat related is https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ It's a search engine that removes the top million domains from your search results (or top 100,000 or 10,000, etc). I find it useful sometimes to discover things on more obscure sites.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  Just tried that for a C error I have, that... was super helpful. I've seen a lot of alternative search engines but this something else. Good link.
x3blah 6y ago
"The Commercial Web (of Marketing) There has always been a place for commerce and marketing on the web." Not really true as I remember it. The web opened up to the public in 1993. There was no commerce and marketing in the beginning. Even by 1996 while commerce and marketing may have existed, e.g., Amazon founded in 1995, its place was in the background. As I rememember the early web, the foreground, the "starting point" or "portal", was something like Yahoo! You had to pick a topic (direction) that you wanted to go in. For example, if you were after music, you might end up browsing the Internet Underground Music Archive. The "front page" of the portal was predominantly non-commercial, mostly generic headings for topics. If you wanted to search out something commercial, no doubt you could but the initial starting point was intellectual curiosity. This is IMO what has been lost over time with regard to web use: intellectual curiosity and the ability to actually satisfy it. (A fun tangent here is the collections of inane queries that people type into Google. These are simultaneously hilarious and disturbing.) As an experiment have a look at the Yahoo! page today. It is full of low quality mainstream "news". There is zero attention to intellectual curiosity. Nothing to see here, folks, but here is the latest news. For part 2 of the experiment, run a Google search for the term "music". The results are dominated by YouTube. Every result is directly or indirectly commercial (either selling something or conducting surveillance and serving ads), except one: Wikipedia. The chances of someone new to the web not following a link to YouTube or some other Google-controlled domain would seem almost nil. The "onboarding" process for new web users is very different today than it was in the early 1990's. Perhaps it is still possible to approach the web with a sense of awe and wonder, pondering "What is out there?" However a new web user is scant likely to end up on a non-commercial website besides Wikipedia. What is out there? Surveillance, ads and an endless supply of soon-to-be-obsolete Javascript du jour.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  The old Web directories had a "Business" section where everything commercial or sale-related was listed. Then sub-levels of any other section, e.g. "Music", would include a cross-reference to the same topic in the "Business" hierarchy. But the default assumption was that you were looking for non-commercial, or at most ad-supported sites.
- deleted 6y ago
the_af 6y ago
This is a great article, the kind of stuff I find interesting on HN. Some of the "old school" web style clashes with my aesthetic sensibilities these days -- a lot of words to say I find it somewhat ugly! -- but I miss its hobbyist, non-commercial aspect. A lot of hobby style content I find interesting has moved to YouTube or Facebook these days, and everyone who's been reading HN is aware of the lack of control authors have over those platforms... I found myself nodding in agreement to a lot of what the author was saying. I don't miss the "geocities look" though!
- livatlantis 6y ago
  Indeed, I enjoy that æsthetic in certain contexts, admittedly because it makes me nostalgic more than anything else. I had to exercise restraint! :) I wanted the site to remain readable and accessible in text mode/lynx/screen readers and respect basic typograhical conventions. But I agree with you that the thing that I miss the most is the hobby-ist, non-commercial aspect. But I'm discovering a lot of great links on this HN thread!
- lstodd 6y ago
  try http://danyk.cz/index_en.html http://danyk.cz/index_en.html that is it
z3t4 6y ago
I like this article, and I also like hand typing HTML and CSS. But coding is not for everyone. What we need is a better Wordpress, so ordinary people can publish their own website. It has to look good, perform well and be secure, but most importantly publishing content should be quick and easy.
- livatlantis 6y ago
  Indeed, my first homepage was on Homestead IIRC, using the online WYSIWYG builder. It was terribly hard to get consistent results, but it worked. And got me into learning HTML4. I don't think they're too common now — it's usually things like Wix that have a more "pick a theme and enter content" + automagic website creation. An opportunity, perhaps...
- godot 6y ago
  I think writing some basic HTML is not hard, what's hard is everything else around hosting a web site properly nowadays. (and is where Wordpress wins users, I think) I have non-tech-savvy family who has started content web sites over 20 years ago, by writing some basic HTML, and uses FTP to upload HTML files. It's a mental model that's easily understood by someone who can operate Windows. He went on to maintain the site for the next 20 years and it worked fine. In the last couple of years I did a big migration for his site and moved it to a markdown based CMS (PicoCMS in PHP) and he's been happy with it -- having a web editor (and learning markdown, which was easy) and not have to FTP. The thing is, it took work to set all that up (on my end, that he doesn't see). I got a Digital Ocean server, installed a bunch of stuff around PHP, wrote some custom plugins for the CMS, etc. After having done that 3-4 years ago, I realized the more modern, ideal, alternative is to have a Git repo of markdown files, and a Netlify setup (or another similar service to Netlify) where check-ins are automatically deployed. The problem then is this -- Git workflows are way, way too difficult for non-tech folks to understand. We're not even talking about command line or desktop git clients; even asking someone to use Github (or Gitlab) to edit markdown files to update their site is not an easy mental model to wrap around (if you're not a coder). I think the most ideal setup, this "better Wordpress" you mention, would be to have a web UI to edit markdown files, backed by a git repo, hooked up with a Netlify-like service. I thought about working on that as a project; but it would be one that relies on using Github and Netlify as key pieces and I'm not even sure Netlify allows a 3rd party to develop apps that end up creating Netlify sites on behalf of other customers, which means I'd have to build out the full Netlify deploy flow and I'm really not in the business of doing that.
jamesjyu 6y ago
J.K. Rowling is releasing a new novel chapter by chapter called "The Ickabog" on a website [1]. I went there, fully expecting some over-engineered and productized site, and was pleasantly surprised that it's a very clean, static site: webmobile optimized, light svg graphics, clean markup. No bullshit, just focused on the text and reading. Hoping that more authors take this route when releasing stuff for the web. [1] https://www.theickabog.com/home/ https://www.theickabog.com/home/
- livatlantis 6y ago
  Indeed! This is a very pleasant site. And very happy to see no analytics/tracking. Excellent example, thanks.
pea 6y ago
I had this the other day when I was reading about the origin of the word 'bear'. I found this page: https://charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html https://charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html This is anecdotal, and I'm not making a "then vs. now" argument - but there was something about the exchange that I found reminicent of this 'old web', and totally devoid from the way people communicate nowadays. I can't put my finger on it - but on what social platform where would this exchange live now?
- jack1243star 6y ago
  Hacker News perhaps.
divbzero 6y ago
I like the use of human navigation and curation in discovering the small web. It feels more organic, more transparent, and less prone to manipulation than AI driven search engines (Google) or aggregators (Facebook).
jll29 6y ago
altavista.com now redirects to Verizon (Yahoo!). Is there a Web search engine that only indexes non-commercial content?
- livatlantis 6y ago
  There's https://wiby.me https://wiby.me that's worked quite well for me so far, for finding very niche/specific things and when I wanted to be surprised.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Related: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/ > It isn’t a particularly sophisticated way to show emotions or manifest an attitude, but still so much more interesting and expressive than what is available now: > First of all, because it is an expression of a dislike, when today there is only an opportunity to like. > Second, the statement lays outside of any scale or dualism: the dislike is not the opposite of a like. > Third: it is not a button or function, it works only in combination with another graphic or word. Such a graphic needed to be made or found and collected, then placed in the right context on the page—all done manually. > I am mainly interested in early web amateurs because I strongly believe that the web in that state was the culmination of the Digital Revolution.
exabrial 6y ago
What about we make a tor, but limited to dial-up speed and no protocols invented after 2000 are allowed?
treelovinhippie 6y ago
These folks have a brilliant philosophy on small tech: https://small-tech.org https://small-tech.org
asaibx 6y ago
My favourite portal for discovering sites like this is something I discovered just recently here on HN: https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ It never fails to amaze me how much amazing stuff is out there online, hidden by a thick layer of top search results, and even more than that, the sheer amount of individual and collective effort that has been put into each of these sites. Someone mentioned the word "niche" and there is certainly some weirdly (or wonderfully) specific content you will find in the Wiby.me index. Lots of sites that haven't been updated since 1998, but still have an enormous and encyclopedic list of everything related to some topic (like the characteristics of different types of tomatoes, or how to build a motorcycle from spare parts or whatever). Some of it may be a little out of date, but a lot of it has been submitted for indexing precisely because of its timelessness or continued usefulness. Whenever I feel hopeless about the current state of the web, I find this is the perfect antidote!
- _sbrk 6y ago
  Thank you for reposting this treasure. Oh, how I miss pages that don't need a scroll wheel to read!
- hattori31 6y ago
  This is absolutely awesome. For example, searching for pokemon gives blogs from 2000 about the "new movie". Far too nostalgic.
ekez 6y ago
The author makes a distinction between the "commercial web" and "small web" but I can't help but wonder if some overlap is possible. I've recently been tasked with building a website for a small organic food distributor in Oregon. I don't think the traditional image heavy "commercial web" fits well with their company culture and image but am struggling to find examples of "small web" commercial websites to show them as examples of a different way. It would be nice to see another post discussing how we might bring the small web to the commercial one.
- caribousoup 6y ago
  https://www.lingscars.com https://www.lingscars.com
  - 1bc29b36f623ba8 6y ago
    http://www.arngren.net/ http://www.arngren.net/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
totalizator 6y ago
I would love to see some kind of a proxy to parse modern websites so they can be viewed via 56K modem on a 386/486 era computers. Any ideas? Some Squid Cache wizardry maybe?
fudged71 6y ago
Digital Gardens
gregoire 6y ago
Related: http://tilde.club/ http://tilde.club/ > tilde.club is not a social network it is one tiny totally standard unix computer that people respectfully use together in their shared quest to build awesome web pages And the story behind it: https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
wickerman 6y ago
I've been actually posting in a few telnet BBS, as well as some SSH forums as of late. I love the small web. I love the freedom of anonymity. I grew up in the 2000s and also got into web design through notepad and hand written HTML. I do have a squarespace website but I'm thinking of just going to neocities and start over with some plain HTML one.
entha_saava 6y ago
I used Opera mini on a J2ME phone on a 2G GPRS connection in Rural India (when studying in High school). The average speed was 5-10 KiB/s. Opera Mini is one awesome browser for such connections. Average page sizes were around __20 KiB__ (They use some compression proxy). No Javascript was loaded. (Simple JS tasks were delegated to server side. I guess with some optimizations they could save on those full page reloads, but maybe it was computationally expensive for those phones). There was a vibrant ecosystem for those phones. Till this day, those websites that host pirated music from Indian movies work with simplest of WWW browsers. That's nostalgia. I remember a Modded version of opera mini which had tonnes of other features that worked on those phones with 4-8 MiB of memory (I don't know exact specs though, they were not mentioned for those phones). Even today, with my paranoid no-js no-web-fonts browsing (UBlock origin), there are parts of web that are efficient. Hacker news or i.reddit.com, for example.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
autorun 6y ago
I have friends who ask me to design theirs websites because I'm a web developer, and it's not their fault, but what's explained here. I wish there were more tools on the same page as Frontpage/Dreamweaver, so anyone could make their own website, and publish it with a single click.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

472 points by livatlantis 6y ago

When I picture it in my head I think of the early web as more of a library. Over time it has transitioned into a shopping mall. If I continue with this thought exercise, a lot of the big indoor shopping malls around me have been knocked down and replaced with standalone outdoor stores (walled gardens?). I'm not sure where things are going next.

livatlantis 6y ago
Author here. That's an interesting analogy — especially given that small book stores and libraries (to a lesser extent) still do exist, albeit in much smaller numbers, attracting fewer patrons. A lot of web traffic today transits through applications and platforms. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; although I'd hate to see even more walled gardens. My hope is only that the small and independent web not go forgotten/ignored.
ebertx 6y ago
I thought the exact same thing about the web as being a library. It's nice hearing someone else say it, it's validating. However, I feel like it's moved more in the direction of being like broadcast television: lots of content that's designed to be consumed once and then forgotten. Maybe the television analogy oversimplifies the matter. Still, I think the more that content creators view their content as going into a permanent library, the better the quality.
karatestomp 6y ago
I think there have been two main changes that have hurt the web: 1) The shift from spammy shit content as something to squash to something to allow and even promote over better content, provided it follows certain (Google's) rules. This shift (in terms of Google's behavior) happened ~2008-2010 and we haven't seen a period of spammy crap content getting heavily downranked since then, like we used to when they were still trying to stay ahead of it rather than give it a "legitimate" avenue as a method of control. Google's still being the most important search provider to appease has left the rest unable to direct behavior toward anything better than what does well on Google, so their results aren't much better. 2) A move away from actual or de facto open systems & protocols to deliberately carved up communities. The only thing keeping chat, Twitter-like services, and other social media—hell, even Youtube, so far as some kind of format for hosting video with metadata—from being standards or protocols is that business incentives reward "owning" a userbase (so you can better spy on them, and to keep anyone from providing a better, perhaps less-spying-laden client and "stealing" ad-viewing eyeballs) Both of these are fundamentally problems of the spyvertising economy taking over the Web and I think a lot of the issues would go away if we could (legally—I don't think tech will do it) permanently and completely break that. More specifically a big part of the problem is Google, though of course the rest of the Web giants are gleefully following similar bad incentives.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  I don't think search engines are promoting spammy $#!+ content per se; what they're doing is heavily promoting newer content that's relevant to the most common search queries, as this gives them the only real hope of staying ahead of the spam. Of course the "small", long-lasting, independent Web is heavily disadvantaged by this shift. One development that would be good for small web sites to look into is schema.org linked-data formats. Those might simply be too effort-intensive for the spammers to adopt (at a high level of detail) and perhaps too much of a commitment to quality and transparency (they would have to actively forge the info, which would leave them open to bans given the lack of plausible deniability), so they might become a viable signal of quality and lead to higher visibility in SERP. (Similar for things like proper separation of style from content, that have always been advocated for in the web-standards community but are not really commercially viable.) I'm not quite sure if others have experimented with this stuff already, but it seems worth trying.
userbinator 6y ago
It's still mostly a library, except with commissioned salespeople everywhere and books full of vapid content that scream, fly at you from the shelves, and turn their pages as you try to read them.
- EmilioMartinez 6y ago
  Don't forget the infinite pages books that expand as you read them. Until you drop them that is, and have to start again.
earthboundkid 6y ago
> We thought the Internet was going to be a global library but then it turned out to be a global bookstore instead. Nice coffee tho. https://twitter.com/earthboundkid/status/1095385048008798208 https://twitter.com/earthboundkid/status/1095385048008798208

lxe 6y ago

I just got into ham radio. The websites related to the hobby are basically what the web was like before everything coalesced around search and social networks.

snazz 6y ago
In my experience, that's true of many specific hobbies--bicycling, sailing, gardening, etc. It's especially true of hobbies where purchasing ever-more-expensive things isn't so important. Hobbies like cars have more magazine-like and shopping-mall-like sites compared to less consumerist ones (although bikes can be like that too).
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  I wouldn't say that this is still true of bicycling, at least not bicycle touring. The amount of standalone blogs in that hobby have plunged drastically now that people choose to simply upload photos to Instagram, and what few blogs exist are often buried in Google search results. One can see that standalone forums are emptying out, reduced to mainly middle-aged members, as younger generations turn to Reddit or Facebook for all their discussion of the hobby. Within the bikepacking segment, Bikepacking.com (which presents itself as a community resource but is essentially just one big advertisement for its sponsors) has a chokehold on the community. I was fortunate to get into bicycle touring at a time when standalone blogs were easy to find, some of them were masterfully written, and there was not yet the mercenary desire to monetize one’s content and become an "influencer". The web of 2020 is very different, and because Google deranks older content, a lot of newbies in the hobby today won't even become aware of the former state of affairs even if much of that content remains just as relevant today.
  - snazz 6y ago
    I can see that. At the same time, sites like Sheldon Brown's and some of the older MTB forums still rank well in Google searches.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

bovermyer 6y ago

My own website is starting to "revert" to this concept. A few years ago, it was primarily an about page and a resume. Now it has a blog, a links page, and a "knowledge base" that's mostly just notes for myself. I'm too burnt out on web "best practices" to care about that for my personal sites anymore. If you're curious: https://benovermyer.com https://benovermyer.com

livatlantis 6y ago
Indeed! It's so much more interesting to learn about what people are interested in, beyond just their professional competencies. I really like that you have your guiding philosophies, hobbies, languages and even Hogwarts house on your about me page. Kinda makes me want to make a more detailed about me page. If I enjoy these kinds of details, surely some other people will too. Might do it this weekend.
- bovermyer 6y ago
  That'd be cool to see!
derg 6y ago
I really really like this approach. Something like this has been sitting in the back of my mind but I've been so burnt out on, well, everything, to do anything about it, constantly worrying about it not being perfect or not adhering to whatever is _the_ standard of the hour blah blah blah. It's reassuring to see that I'm being a fool and that I should just do it, "best" practices be damned. Thanks for sharing!

StavrosK 6y ago

I've been thinking about this for ages, and I want my own contribution to this to be a simple webring service. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, a webring was a simple circular linked list. You had a link on your knitting-themed site to the "next knitting-themed site", that site had a link to the next one, etc. To join the ring, you just emailed someone and said "hey, I, too, have a knitting-themed site, can you add me to your webring?", they looked at your site, and changed their link to your site, you added the link they previously had, and the ring continued. I want to build something simple that'll serve a small widget with previous/next/random site buttons, it'll work like the webrings of old regarding the curation aspect, so to get added you'll need to be referred to by someone. Would you use something like that? You'd basically just drop a bit of HTML on your page and it wouldn't load heavy JS/analytics/crap, just whatever was necessary to paint a few links.

nmg 6y ago
Absolutely. Working on this for a rural area near me with many local artisans. A simple "Our Friends" section that rotates and encourages users to explore artisans in the area.
kickscondor 6y ago
There was a small resurgence of webrings in last year: Hotline Webring: https://hotlinewebring.club https://hotlinewebring.club XXIIVV Webring: https://webring.xxiivv.com https://webring.xxiivv.com Weird Wide Webring: https://weirdwidewebring.net https://weirdwidewebring.net I'm personally more into personal directories and blogrolls than these random clicks - but they still seem to be a good way to put together a small community. (And this post isn't meant to discourage you - but rather to encourage you to form your own.)
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Hmm, that's very useful information, thank you! Personal directories seem more useful and easier to put together, I think you're right.
  - 6y ago

kickscondor 6y ago

If you're interested in recent innovations on this front: (rather than just retreading the same Web as before) * Beaker (https://beakerbrowser.com https://beakerbrowser.com) the peer-to-peer browser just released their beta release - and it has some exciting features. Particularly the built-in editor, meaning you can edit, serve and read your pages all from the browser. (Blogging in Beaker is as simple as visiting: hyper://a8e9bd0f4df60ed5246a1b1f53d51a1feaeb1315266f769ac218436f12fda830/. And the posts are stored locally.) * https://special.fish/ https://special.fish/ This completely low-tech social network has taken off. The innovation here is that it's all just focused on profile pages - not feeds of random posts. * There's a growing subculture of public Tiddlywikis (philosopher.life, sphygm.us, etc) - rather than focusing on protocols and APIs, they are much more focused on how to organize and style personal hypertext. * As for RSS, well, as HN custom insists, I am also commenting to plug my own fraidyc.at. See, you knew it was here. * On a related note, I've also been working on an RSS/Atom extension to handle ephemeral posts: live streams, "stories", pinned posts, etc. https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Extensions https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Exten... * There's also a forum on tiny personal link directories that's been forming at https://forum.indieseek.xyz https://forum.indieseek.xyz. The idea here is to use Yahoo! or DMOZ style link directories at a smaller scale, to catalog corners of the Web. (Note that this whole comment itself is a kind of small 'directory'. Rather than an algorithm stepping in to show you 'related' stuff, I have.)

gambler 6y ago
>Beaker (https://beakerbrowser.com https://beakerbrowser.com) the peer-to-peer browser just released their beta release I just tried downloading the Windows executable. Initially it said it will take 1.5 hours, but then the download just failed. Tried a few more times with the same result. This is ironic on so many levels.
- pfraze 6y ago
  Yikes. We host our binaries via GitHub so that... sucks
  - 6y ago

lukehack 6y ago

Not to be too spammy, but discovery of such sites is why I'm making Feldot, a social domain aggregation site. There are so many sites available out there like this to browse, but we never see them when using existing search engines. https://feldot.com https://feldot.com

pcmaffey 6y ago

The word is niche. There are 2 major factors that will power a resurgence, that could use better tools: 1. Discoverability - self-reinforcing webrings, blogrolls, directories, ad free-search etc. 2. Creation - next-gen Dreamweaver. A low-code site creator app that exports a static website as a folder of readable CSS/HTML that people can tinker with by hand (and learn), instead of being locked into one of these cloud WYSIWYG site generators. Hosting is solved. No need to tie the one to the other...

marc_io 6y ago
Number two could be Publii? It seems to met all the requirements you mentioned.

fossuser 6y ago

This is a great post and makes me miss this type of content. I created a subreddit recently to help with the discovery problem and posted it on HN earlier this week. Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23287286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23287286 Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ It’s been going well so far, only a small solution to a big problem, but it’s been fun to discover a lot of interesting blogs from people in this community. If you missed the initial post feel free to join and add yours too.

derg 6y ago
Oh good, I was actually looking for something like this. I joined, thanks for sharing!
livatlantis 6y ago
Excellent! Joined, thank you!
- fossuser 6y ago
  Thanks! I think your site is awesome, it's exactly the kind of thing I think of, when I think of the best of what the internet can be. I'm a fan. [Edit]: I also caught a tiny typo: > "But the web is not always "profit-oriented" and it certainly does not need be "user-centric" (and I say this as a UX consultant)." I think you wanted "does not need to be" I created a PR for you: https://github.com/parimalsatyal/neu/pull/2 https://github.com/parimalsatyal/neu/pull/2
  - livatlantis 6y ago
    Thank you, merged!
lappet 6y ago
Thank you for making this! I joined as well.

ferzul 6y ago

there's also pubnix (public unix-like servers), gopher, and a new protocol called gemini (which adds simple links and viewer-owned formatting to to gopher). i think there's certainly something to the idea behind more restrictions, with just enough rather than plenty. i almost want to give myself nothing but wikipedia, api docs, and “small web” and pubnix. i'm not sure that i can give up hn or its ilk (but the ratio of interesting content to poor content is terrible)

livatlantis 6y ago
Yes, I'm discovering the newer pubnix now (only knew of sdf.org previously). Looks interesting, if a little overkill for what I'm looking for. Glad they exist though. You can perhaps try a week of _mostly_ limiting yourself to those and see how it goes? I personally do a mix of the "normal" web and more niche stuff out there.
- gindely 6y ago
  Yes, I just signed up on the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic earlier this week. I intended to keep my gemini/gopher pages updated daily but now is a good time to update them some more!

zargon 6y ago

Somewhat related is https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ It's a search engine that removes the top million domains from your search results (or top 100,000 or 10,000, etc). I find it useful sometimes to discover things on more obscure sites.

SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
Just tried that for a C error I have, that... was super helpful. I've seen a lot of alternative search engines but this something else. Good link.

x3blah 6y ago

"The Commercial Web (of Marketing) There has always been a place for commerce and marketing on the web." Not really true as I remember it. The web opened up to the public in 1993. There was no commerce and marketing in the beginning. Even by 1996 while commerce and marketing may have existed, e.g., Amazon founded in 1995, its place was in the background. As I rememember the early web, the foreground, the "starting point" or "portal", was something like Yahoo! You had to pick a topic (direction) that you wanted to go in. For example, if you were after music, you might end up browsing the Internet Underground Music Archive. The "front page" of the portal was predominantly non-commercial, mostly generic headings for topics. If you wanted to search out something commercial, no doubt you could but the initial starting point was intellectual curiosity. This is IMO what has been lost over time with regard to web use: intellectual curiosity and the ability to actually satisfy it. (A fun tangent here is the collections of inane queries that people type into Google. These are simultaneously hilarious and disturbing.) As an experiment have a look at the Yahoo! page today. It is full of low quality mainstream "news". There is zero attention to intellectual curiosity. Nothing to see here, folks, but here is the latest news. For part 2 of the experiment, run a Google search for the term "music". The results are dominated by YouTube. Every result is directly or indirectly commercial (either selling something or conducting surveillance and serving ads), except one: Wikipedia. The chances of someone new to the web not following a link to YouTube or some other Google-controlled domain would seem almost nil. The "onboarding" process for new web users is very different today than it was in the early 1990's. Perhaps it is still possible to approach the web with a sense of awe and wonder, pondering "What is out there?" However a new web user is scant likely to end up on a non-commercial website besides Wikipedia. What is out there? Surveillance, ads and an endless supply of soon-to-be-obsolete Javascript du jour.

zozbot234 6y ago
The old Web directories had a "Business" section where everything commercial or sale-related was listed. Then sub-levels of any other section, e.g. "Music", would include a cross-reference to the same topic in the "Business" hierarchy. But the default assumption was that you were looking for non-commercial, or at most ad-supported sites.
deleted 6y ago

the_af 6y ago

This is a great article, the kind of stuff I find interesting on HN. Some of the "old school" web style clashes with my aesthetic sensibilities these days -- a lot of words to say I find it somewhat ugly! -- but I miss its hobbyist, non-commercial aspect. A lot of hobby style content I find interesting has moved to YouTube or Facebook these days, and everyone who's been reading HN is aware of the lack of control authors have over those platforms... I found myself nodding in agreement to a lot of what the author was saying. I don't miss the "geocities look" though!

livatlantis 6y ago
Indeed, I enjoy that æsthetic in certain contexts, admittedly because it makes me nostalgic more than anything else. I had to exercise restraint! :) I wanted the site to remain readable and accessible in text mode/lynx/screen readers and respect basic typograhical conventions. But I agree with you that the thing that I miss the most is the hobby-ist, non-commercial aspect. But I'm discovering a lot of great links on this HN thread!
lstodd 6y ago
try http://danyk.cz/index_en.html http://danyk.cz/index_en.html that is it

z3t4 6y ago

I like this article, and I also like hand typing HTML and CSS. But coding is not for everyone. What we need is a better Wordpress, so ordinary people can publish their own website. It has to look good, perform well and be secure, but most importantly publishing content should be quick and easy.

livatlantis 6y ago
Indeed, my first homepage was on Homestead IIRC, using the online WYSIWYG builder. It was terribly hard to get consistent results, but it worked. And got me into learning HTML4. I don't think they're too common now — it's usually things like Wix that have a more "pick a theme and enter content" + automagic website creation. An opportunity, perhaps...
godot 6y ago
I think writing some basic HTML is not hard, what's hard is everything else around hosting a web site properly nowadays. (and is where Wordpress wins users, I think) I have non-tech-savvy family who has started content web sites over 20 years ago, by writing some basic HTML, and uses FTP to upload HTML files. It's a mental model that's easily understood by someone who can operate Windows. He went on to maintain the site for the next 20 years and it worked fine. In the last couple of years I did a big migration for his site and moved it to a markdown based CMS (PicoCMS in PHP) and he's been happy with it -- having a web editor (and learning markdown, which was easy) and not have to FTP. The thing is, it took work to set all that up (on my end, that he doesn't see). I got a Digital Ocean server, installed a bunch of stuff around PHP, wrote some custom plugins for the CMS, etc. After having done that 3-4 years ago, I realized the more modern, ideal, alternative is to have a Git repo of markdown files, and a Netlify setup (or another similar service to Netlify) where check-ins are automatically deployed. The problem then is this -- Git workflows are way, way too difficult for non-tech folks to understand. We're not even talking about command line or desktop git clients; even asking someone to use Github (or Gitlab) to edit markdown files to update their site is not an easy mental model to wrap around (if you're not a coder). I think the most ideal setup, this "better Wordpress" you mention, would be to have a web UI to edit markdown files, backed by a git repo, hooked up with a Netlify-like service. I thought about working on that as a project; but it would be one that relies on using Github and Netlify as key pieces and I'm not even sure Netlify allows a 3rd party to develop apps that end up creating Netlify sites on behalf of other customers, which means I'd have to build out the full Netlify deploy flow and I'm really not in the business of doing that.

jamesjyu 6y ago

J.K. Rowling is releasing a new novel chapter by chapter called "The Ickabog" on a website [1]. I went there, fully expecting some over-engineered and productized site, and was pleasantly surprised that it's a very clean, static site: webmobile optimized, light svg graphics, clean markup. No bullshit, just focused on the text and reading. Hoping that more authors take this route when releasing stuff for the web. [1] https://www.theickabog.com/home/ https://www.theickabog.com/home/

livatlantis 6y ago
Indeed! This is a very pleasant site. And very happy to see no analytics/tracking. Excellent example, thanks.

pea 6y ago

I had this the other day when I was reading about the origin of the word 'bear'. I found this page: https://charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html https://charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html This is anecdotal, and I'm not making a "then vs. now" argument - but there was something about the exchange that I found reminicent of this 'old web', and totally devoid from the way people communicate nowadays. I can't put my finger on it - but on what social platform where would this exchange live now?

jack1243star 6y ago
Hacker News perhaps.

divbzero 6y ago

I like the use of human navigation and curation in discovering the small web. It feels more organic, more transparent, and less prone to manipulation than AI driven search engines (Google) or aggregators (Facebook).

jll29 6y ago

altavista.com now redirects to Verizon (Yahoo!). Is there a Web search engine that only indexes non-commercial content?

livatlantis 6y ago
There's https://wiby.me https://wiby.me that's worked quite well for me so far, for finding very niche/specific things and when I wanted to be surprised.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Related: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/ > It isn’t a particularly sophisticated way to show emotions or manifest an attitude, but still so much more interesting and expressive than what is available now: > First of all, because it is an expression of a dislike, when today there is only an opportunity to like. > Second, the statement lays outside of any scale or dualism: the dislike is not the opposite of a like. > Third: it is not a button or function, it works only in combination with another graphic or word. Such a graphic needed to be made or found and collected, then placed in the right context on the page—all done manually. > I am mainly interested in early web amateurs because I strongly believe that the web in that state was the culmination of the Digital Revolution.

exabrial 6y ago

What about we make a tor, but limited to dial-up speed and no protocols invented after 2000 are allowed?

treelovinhippie 6y ago

These folks have a brilliant philosophy on small tech: https://small-tech.org https://small-tech.org

asaibx 6y ago

My favourite portal for discovering sites like this is something I discovered just recently here on HN: https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ It never fails to amaze me how much amazing stuff is out there online, hidden by a thick layer of top search results, and even more than that, the sheer amount of individual and collective effort that has been put into each of these sites. Someone mentioned the word "niche" and there is certainly some weirdly (or wonderfully) specific content you will find in the Wiby.me index. Lots of sites that haven't been updated since 1998, but still have an enormous and encyclopedic list of everything related to some topic (like the characteristics of different types of tomatoes, or how to build a motorcycle from spare parts or whatever). Some of it may be a little out of date, but a lot of it has been submitted for indexing precisely because of its timelessness or continued usefulness. Whenever I feel hopeless about the current state of the web, I find this is the perfect antidote!

_sbrk 6y ago
Thank you for reposting this treasure. Oh, how I miss pages that don't need a scroll wheel to read!
hattori31 6y ago
This is absolutely awesome. For example, searching for pokemon gives blogs from 2000 about the "new movie". Far too nostalgic.

ekez 6y ago

The author makes a distinction between the "commercial web" and "small web" but I can't help but wonder if some overlap is possible. I've recently been tasked with building a website for a small organic food distributor in Oregon. I don't think the traditional image heavy "commercial web" fits well with their company culture and image but am struggling to find examples of "small web" commercial websites to show them as examples of a different way. It would be nice to see another post discussing how we might bring the small web to the commercial one.

caribousoup 6y ago
https://www.lingscars.com https://www.lingscars.com
- 1bc29b36f623ba8 6y ago
  http://www.arngren.net/ http://www.arngren.net/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

totalizator 6y ago

I would love to see some kind of a proxy to parse modern websites so they can be viewed via 56K modem on a 386/486 era computers. Any ideas? Some Squid Cache wizardry maybe?

fudged71 6y ago

Digital Gardens

gregoire 6y ago

Related: http://tilde.club/ http://tilde.club/ > tilde.club is not a social network it is one tiny totally standard unix computer that people respectfully use together in their shared quest to build awesome web pages And the story behind it: https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...

wickerman 6y ago

I've been actually posting in a few telnet BBS, as well as some SSH forums as of late. I love the small web. I love the freedom of anonymity. I grew up in the 2000s and also got into web design through notepad and hand written HTML. I do have a squarespace website but I'm thinking of just going to neocities and start over with some plain HTML one.

entha_saava 6y ago

I used Opera mini on a J2ME phone on a 2G GPRS connection in Rural India (when studying in High school). The average speed was 5-10 KiB/s. Opera Mini is one awesome browser for such connections. Average page sizes were around __20 KiB__ (They use some compression proxy). No Javascript was loaded. (Simple JS tasks were delegated to server side. I guess with some optimizations they could save on those full page reloads, but maybe it was computationally expensive for those phones). There was a vibrant ecosystem for those phones. Till this day, those websites that host pirated music from Indian movies work with simplest of WWW browsers. That's nostalgia. I remember a Modded version of opera mini which had tonnes of other features that worked on those phones with 4-8 MiB of memory (I don't know exact specs though, they were not mentioned for those phones). Even today, with my paranoid no-js no-web-fonts browsing (UBlock origin), there are parts of web that are efficient. Hacker news or i.reddit.com, for example.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

autorun 6y ago

I have friends who ask me to design theirs websites because I'm a web developer, and it's not their fault, but what's explained here. I wish there were more tools on the same page as Frontpage/Dreamweaver, so anyone could make their own website, and publish it with a single click.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]