I wish the web was still like that. No advertising, no tracking, there's not 5 mb of CSS and javascript, just information presented in a readable format.
Every time I say something like that, someone tells me that we're better off the way things are. Tracking is BS. Ads are a great way to make my computer fetch data that I neither need nor want, and to run programs that work against my best interests using my own CPU cycles. I'm not completely convinced that we wouldn't be better off dumping the current state of the art and re-designing from first principles.
I agree with the sentiment, but with a slightly different angle. I think one of the things that made the early Internet interesting was that it was populated almost exclusively by enthusiasts (geeks, artists, etc) with little commercial motivation. Stuff was quirky and interesting. Today's Internet is a fantastic platform for commerce. I'd be very sad to see it go, but I also think there's a need for the weird old quirky net we had before marketing took over. What I'd like to see is the emergence of a new enthusiast network that's inherently difficult and inconvenient to commercialize alongside the existing net. One is good for getting eyes on content and marketing stuff, which is important, and the other is good for just putting up whatever you find interesting simply because you want to. When I want to buy something I'll use what we have now, but the other net would be more interesting to just browse around and share stuff on.
I think IPFS [1] or something similar might have the potential to resurrect the geek net. IPFS with a distributed mesh network infrastructure seems like it would be slow, inconvenient for commerce, and probably attractive only to the kind of people that made the early net interesting, especially with the current net as competition.
I think to a certain extent Bruce Sterling anticipated your thoughts in his classic cypher punk novels: all the elite hackers met in areas they controlled and that had to be broken into... I've often wished for a place with a higher bae to entry but then privately wonder if that's one of the /r/iamverysmart thoughts I should just quietly strangle before sharing it with others.
There's nothing wrong with having a filter. If I want to have a deeply technical discussion that requires a decade+ of speciality knowledge to understand, then so be it, that discussion isn't for everyone. Being on the edge of a knowledge domain is difficult enough as it is. Pushing the boundaries of my own knowledge requires like-minded individuals, and stopping to explain kills the flow.
There are plenty of other times when a more open, informal setting is appropriate, and beginners and journeymen are welcome. But not every time.
The old 2600 website was organized in circles with innoquous hacking challenges to enter, it could still be done somewhat, if one can solve the issue of simply googling solutions
That's the other half of the challenge: preventing the solutions showing up on stackoverflow. Hell maybe you use a few easily googled solutions as a way to mark the script kiddies and shuffle them into their own swamp.
I like that idea, though it seems the best way to 'make that happen' is to explicitly form a community that agrees to only put their content in IPFS. And there would have to be enough popular members that others would be motivated to join and access what's there. Otherwise I don't see it as more than a toy.
Yeah, that's a good point. One of the things that I think could help would be to make the basic technology stack somehow different from html/css/js, so that different (not necessarily more or less) things are possible in the new medium. I don't know what that should look like, because my own preference is strongly toward text-oriented content which is well-served by the current stack, but having a different kind of toys in the playground might be enough to entice people to contribute all by itself.
> Otherwise I don't see it as more than a toy.
I was a kid so I could well be wrong, but my memory of the early net was that most 'regular' people kind of saw it as a toy. It wasn't until the start of the .com boom that it really became something different. Being seen as a toy might actually be good in this case.
I love text based content, too. Maybe this is a chance to return to using the terminal by default (I learned about the Bloomberg terminal recently; I guess people still use text-based interfaces a lot).
I like the idea of using a different tech stack, though it would have to be very simple to keep up with (and surpass) current levels of innovation. Hence, the terminal?
> my memory of the early net was that most 'regular' people kind of saw it as a toy
I think you're a few years ahead of me, then. I don't remember much of that time. But the difference might be (and I hope not) that the general web was a much more unique tool back then, and people knew about it from sheer novelty. I think the chicken/egg problem of users is harder to solve in this case. Not saying it can't be done, just saying it has to be solved intentionally and with effort.
Well, it seems there are two of us on the Internet. I do almost everything except browsing the web straight from the terminal.
> people knew about it from sheer novelty
This is a really good point. The essence of the question probably boils down to how many people like us there are out there, who want an alternative badly enough to work on it (and in it) while it's small and sparse. The only real feature I can think of that might seriously set it apart from today's net for everyone else is privacy protection, which could be built in from the ground up.
> the other net would be more interesting to just browse around and share stuff on.
What if that was the focus of the system? Make it super easy to publish and find Information. Webpages are honestly kind of hard to work with, and the tendency is to make them way too flashy. Remake the incentives of the system based on what was learned from the first version, and something really cool, and super useful, might be the result. I imagine that a terminal-interface focus might be instrumental.
I like that idea; like a separate com-net and pub-net, or something. IPFS seems like a great way to spread the cost among the users; it reminds me of an even more decentralized version of Usenet, or something.
We're better off the way things are, when compared to before. I'm not saying things are perfect, or even good, but we're definitely better than before.
You complain about ads, but think about what they enable. How many times do you use google per day? It lives off ads. Do you use any social network? They live off ads.
Ads are certainly not the best way for us to obtain those kind of commodities, but between having them and not having anything I still choose them.
> You complain about ads, but think about what they enable.
Saying that the ends justify the means certainly simplifies things. It's not a compelling argument to me; I suppose that I'm too much of an idealist.
> Do you use any social network? They live off ads.
Indeed, they do. And I use the benefit of my education to block them every way that I can, pushing the cost onto others. Without ads, or at least some kind of financial support, networks like that would fall apart. Necessity being the mother of invention, and interpersonal connections being necessary, we'd invent another solution. I like the idea of small, independent, federated social networks, but I don't know that they'd actually be practical.
The great thing about the modern web is that ads are centralized (for various values of centralization) on ad networks. So it's damn easy to have an ad-free experience by dumping them to 0.0.0.0 in hosts.
It doesn't get rid of silly css and "too clever by half" javascript for the "content site" but dumping the ad networks makes a difference.
Every time I suggest this some ... person... says "but the ads pay for the Internet!" I just look at them as if they're wearing a suit made of dead kittens.
Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic.
The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism.
> Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic.
That's simply not true. By the mid-90s academics were already a small minority on the web. The OP's sample links are biased because it's a somewhat academic topic.
There was plenty of free and cheap hosting around back then, and for those types of pages bare-bones shared hosting works just fine. For the longest time I paid about $60 a year to host a static site, and it worked great. Hardly the type of money that I needed sell out to advertisers to recoup my costs.
Even GeoCities, while mostly crap, hosted its fair share of useful content.
> The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism.
Nowadays there is technically a lot more information available, but there's significantly more crap to dig through to find it.
And FWIW, I disagree that StackOverflow is "better" than the old style internet. Most StackOverflow answers are shallow - they answer the question, but there's no researching or learning, it's usually just an answer handed to you. It's like the old "teach a man to fish..." thing.
I think it's interesting to note that (anecdotally, at least) things that are "less practical" attract far more in-depth SO answers than those that are more "useful in the real world" (insert connection to capitalism) - Haskell/"help me push this into the typesystem" questions tend to attract very well-thought-out answers oftentimes, and usually multiple answers at different levels of abstraction.
(Not that I'm discounting things like the excellent low-level questions on things like cache misses/alignment/"why are sorted lists faster to process", but I think they're rarer.)
If anyone here knows their way around the StackOverflow API and has some time, I think it could lead to an interesting couple of hours.
The issue is that there's more and more information put online by someone wanting to get something out of it - and for the absolute minority who are putting stuff up without expectation of direct return, it's easier to use a proprietary service than learn HTML.
