I'm not disagreeing with any of this. But I think there's additional perspective to be had.
I see a lot of conversation about early Internet and the health of the Internet. I think some of this is just because those of us who remember it, are starting to ache over it a bit for all kinds of reasons, one of which is because that's what old people do.
Today I got lunch with my 17 year old nephew. I asked him about what he does on the Internet and if he misses the "old Internet". First off, he has no context of what the old Internet is. He doesn't really care nor seem to feel like he's missing out. Second, he showed me what he mainly does. Basically it was a handful of group chats via Signal and WhatsApp, a whole bunch of web comic websites, and some YouTube series.
I felt like a dad of a teenager for a fleeting moment and my generalized conclusion was that he's consuming a ton of independently developed creative content. I was actually pretty proud of what the Internet looks like for him.
I asked him about curation and the ability to hold on to his favourites. How does he ensure that something he loves isn't gone in 10 years? This concept really didn't seem to matter to him. His perspective seemed to be that there's so many webcomics and the "memes" and conversations he has with his friends are ever evolving, there's not really a lot of time to care about the old stuff. Made me wonder if attachment to nostalgia may be fleeting as well.
Is this the full story? Of course not. But it made me feel a bit better about things and a bit more skeptical of the doomsaying I often hear and sometimes take part in.
Not caring about the future is something a 17 year old would do. Not worrying about whether the stuff he loves now will endure tomorrow is typical of that age. He simply hasn't lived long enough and matured enough to feel nostalgic about stuff. I promise you he will miss things when he's 30 or 40.
I think this reflects more on teenagers and grownups than on the internet :)
> His perspective seemed to be that there's so many webcomics and the "memes" and conversations he has with his friends are ever evolving, there's not really a lot of time to care about the old stuff.
He's missing on old stuff like Calvin & Hobbes, to name just one example.
I cared about the future a lot when I was a teenager/early 20's, and was a bit of a digital hoarder. When I was a freshman in college a million years ago (2001) it was common to meet people and trade binders of burned Divx's. I had hundreds, because I might want to watch them someday. My Mp3 collection, tiny by some standards, was still tens or hundreds of gb - and this in an age when a 20GB hard drive was a decent size. I saved every photo I took and curated the folders of them.
Then three things happened
1) Almost everything became easily available (or reasonably easily)
2) Of the things that aren't easily available (personal photos), I realized I never look at it, with very little exception.
3) I realized I am going to die someday, and at the rate I consume media I will _never_ get to even a sizeable fraction of it.
So I try to print the pictures I care about, I have a folder of just a few photos and videos I really care about (mostly my kid), and that's about it really.
Media used to be somewhat scarce, but now basically everything is available everywhere all the time (rights issues notwithstanding). We take a thousand photos on a vacation, not a few rolls of film (72-108 images) It's overwhelming.
I think there really is something to an abundance mentality.
My dad used to hoard, of all things, toilet paper. Why? He grew up in WW2 Philippines, had his house bombed and had to hike up into the mountains where they would shit in the river and wipe their butt with stones.
The idea seems crazy to me and my wife, as does my Taiwanese-born in-laws' predilection toward hoarding food. But we grew up in a world where you can always go to Costco and get more. That wasn't the case even as recently as our parents' generation.
Similarly, today's teens are growing up in a world where you can always go to YouTube or Netflix and get more media, or Google and get more information. The idea that these might be scarce resources and you might need a personal collection, just in case the Internet gets shut off, is as foreign to them as the idea of running out of toilet paper is to me.
This is a really great analogy. I've never thought about this before and I think it explains some of my data hoarding tendencies and maybe this will help me let go of some things a little more. Thanks for sharing this!
Older dude checking in. I threw out my Divx collection about 10 years ago. I have precious little time to spend watching 2-hour films, and I recognize that the number of films I will watch before I die is on the order of maybe 300. When I do get a chance to watch a film, I want the experience to be as great as it possibly can be. I want as high a resolution as I can get with the best color. Compared to 4k HDR stuff available today, the Divx stuff looks like total shit. I have grown to despise my fellow human beings in groups larger than about 7, so I've built a home theater where I can watch a movie without having to deal with the bullshit that is the general public. I'll invite 4 or 5 of my friends over on occasion. Specifically, the ones who respect my rules of watching a movie. No talking, no phones, that sort of thing. I'll buy a Blu-ray disc brand new so I don't have to worry about random scratches or whatever from previous renters. I don't stream because I no longer tolerate any of the bullshit that happens half the time, like random degradation from the service resulting in pixelation or pauses.
For music, I just subscribe to a streaming music service where I can download ("pin") stuff to my phone. Mainly because it's ridiculously cheap and convenient. I don't care about "owning" music, like it could somehow forever "go away" and I'd be sitting in the corner of my basement crying about how I can't listen to such-and-such a song any more. But honestly I'm more likely to listen to audiobooks these days, which I do immediately strip the DRM from and store separately on my phone.
When I go on vacation, I take a pathologically small number of photos, and I only take them on my phone. I can't be bothered with lugging around a huge lens and camera body everywhere I go when I'm trying to experience some place new. Whenever I show the photos to people, they often say, "Wow! What camera did you take these with??" And I say, "A used Pixel 2."
and I recognize that the number of films I will watch before I die is on the order of maybe 300
This kind of thing seems morbid, but as I tiptoe into my 40s I find it hilarious. Got my home's roof redone lately. Allegedly has a 50 year warranty. Mentally added 50 to my current age and was like... well, yep, that oughta do it. hahaha.
When my colleagues say "I worked on this over the weekend" I get pretty upset because
1) Dude you're in your 40's. If you're lucky you've got ~2100 lazy Sunday afternoons left. Probably a third to half of those in decent health. That's not very many. How many of those do you want to spend doing stupid shit (aka most jobs) for somebody else for free?
2) Don't normalize that behaviour so I have to do it too.
The fancy camera is for people that enjoy photography as a hobby in itself, and use trips as an opportunity to practice their skills. But I definitely agree with your "living in the moment" stance. For me, I never take pictures because I can't ever tell in the moment that this would be a good picture that I'd want to show people (that, and pictures never are as good as actually being there).
I tend to take pictures that tend towards the surreal, such as a life sized plastic cow as a lawn ornament [1] or a bear dressed as Goldilocks serving a human skull [2]. Or a human sized teddy bear just chilling out on a park bench [3].
>>I have grown to despise my fellow human beings in groups larger than about 7, so I've built a home theater where I can watch a movie without having to deal with the bullshit that is the general public
To each their own of course. A lot of us go to the theater to enjoy a film with a large crowd.
Concerts and festivals are made more enjoyable by the shared energy. Other than concert movies and maybe Rocky Horror Picture Show, I struggle to think of movies where I’d rather walk on sticky floors to see it with 100 other coughing, talking, texting, etc humans than at home in a decent home theater.
True, but also laughing, cheering, and applauding (on occasion). For a big midnight release a lot of the fun is waiting with other fans - I loved going to openings of movies like Return of the King (LOTR), even the last awful Star Wars prequel, etc. and waiting with hundreds of other excited people at the Fremont Theater - a grand old theater seating 1100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fremont_Theater
If you haven't seen Rocky Horror in a theater instead of at home, you ought to give it a try. Or The Room - bring spoons.
I'd rather be in the theatre, with a giant screen. Sharing in the appreciation with all the other people there when there's a particularly poignant line, or moment.
Often, it's only slightly better than a home theatre, but I don't want a giant screen I don't use 999% of the time taking up a large part of the wall.
And very rarely, you'll have spectacular moments, where the entire audience shares in a powerful emotion, moments you'll remember for the rest of your life. That you won't get at home.
While not a status statement as it used to be, one element is the "I was there" thing: being able to tell others later that you were there for the opening session of X blockbuster/defining movie...
I watch movies at an accelerated speed, usually around 1.5 to 1.7x speed. That means I can easily watch 2 movies in the span of a couple hours. So basically I'm pretty well caught up on all the obviously good movies. I have some trouble finding hidden gems, mainly because netflix/prime video are so horrible at recommendations.
Because of my accelerated watching I'm actually more selective about movies & tv shows especially TV shows, because only the good ones are tolerable when watching episodes back to back.
I'm guessing you don't like introspective, moody or slow paced movies? I shudder at the thought of watching Wong Kar Wai's "In The Mood For Love" at 1.7x speed...
I have a large and ever-growing (> 100,000) photo collection that isn’t particularly well curated, and I have worried for years that I’m accumulating too many pictures at too low a signal:noise ratio. But now I actually think that I’ll be able to hold out for machine learning to come along and help me get more value out of it. Apple and Google are now good at finding faces, and soon enough I imagine they’ll have pretty good algorithms from sorting good photos from bad ones.
Sometimes you really can just ignore a problem long enough until someone else solves it for you.
I had a hard time letting go of my old digital packrat stuff too. In fact I never fully let go.
Fortunately, thanks to modern storage capacities, I was able to compromise with myself. I stopped packratting new stuff. And the old stuff fits on a single hard drive now. I have a copy of that drive at my brother's place in case something happens to this one.
I'm 99% sure I'll never watch any of that stuff, but a single offline HDD isn't expensive and isn't really taking up much space in my life, so it was a good compromise for me.
I save all my photos and videos I take, I don't feel like it's that much, but still a good 700gb. I personally love having it, and look at it at least a couple of times a year. I just love having access to all this footage. Last week for example we were talking about how our backyard used to look like with my daughter. I was able to pull out old footage of our backyard, and even a video of a tractor cleaning up our backyard. It's nothing vital, but it was very nice for me to be able to look at it again. I'll keep organizing and keeping old photos and videos.
I do agree that mp3 and movies are a bit useless. I still have a 1TB or 500gb drive somewhere full of movies. I probably didn't boot it up in the past 5 years.
The one thing I regret not keeping, is all my projects since I was a kid. I programmed a lot of things between age 10-15. Video games, created art on paint and photoshop. All that is gone. I wish I could access it even if I know it wouldn't be good quality stuff.
As far as pictures go, I've learned to be ruthless with the delete button and only keep photos that I really care about. Mostly, those are the ones with people in them, that record a meaningful moment in history, or with actually interesting subjects. Photography is somewhat of a hobby for me, so I still take a lot of photos, but I'm quick to delete them.
This has the side effect that I can store my entire photo collection (10 years/60 GB) on my phone's SD card where they are easily accessible. This has been valuable, because I refer back to photos I've taken years ago surprisingly often.
I threw out my huge binder of burned CDs (and later DVDs) too. I also threw out all my VHS tapes of my favorite shows that I recorded off the TV in the 90s.
I realized I really don't need to hoard bad video quality anime series'; there's more media that I can realistically consume in a lifetime.
I made the mistake of tossing my whole CD collection and now find that there were albums I once enjoyed that don't exist in Spotify that I can casually jump into on a nostalgic whim.
I also am finding the longer I'm on Spotify the more gaps appear in my playlists as songs are removed from their collection.
Fortunately I digitised a few ultra rare CDs 20 years back as OGG files, but not all of them.
>He's missing on old stuff like Calvin & Hobbes, to name just one example.
But Calvin and Hobbes is even more accessible now than it was when I was a teenager in the mid to late 80s. Back then I had no concept that some day it would be available online (on what?) or in books, so each day I would cut each comic out and tape it into a notebook I kept. Now I have the softbound book for my kids to read and the hardbound books on acid free paper for myself. But I still look at C&H online.
> But Calvin and Hobbes is even more accessible now than it was when I was a teenager in the mid to late 80s.
Not if, like the teenager in the original post, you don't have "a lot of time to care about the old stuff" because of ever evolving memes and conversations.
For people who simply don't have the time or don't care, it doesn't matter whether Calving & Hobbes is readily available or not.
...so? New things are being created. You enjoy(ed) C&H, now future generations might enjoy new things. It's just a fact of growing older and having cultural changes.
Also a counterpoint: I (22) know people my age or younger who enjoy C&H. Things are absolutely more accessible now, full stop. Being accessible does not mean one is forced to choose that particular thing! Please let people enjoy what they enjoy. Just because I like tom and jerry cartoons and think they're a classic doesn't mean I gripe about newer generations who have different cartoons/etc that they like.
Nobody is griping, calm down! It was just a reflection on the attitude of the typical teenager, and how he'll grow out of it.
> "Things are absolutely more accessible now, full stop."
Not if you don't "have the time" because of all the "memes" and "evolving conversations". Overexposure to constant new stuff is actually an impediment.
You know people who enjoy Calvin & Hobbes? Good for them. They managed to overcome the distractions of the latest stuff to focus on the good ;)
> Not if you don't "have the time" because of all the "memes" and "evolving conversations".
This is not related to something being accessible whatsoever. C&H is widely available, and someone choosing to not access it does not make it not accessible. People can choose different things to look at.
> Overexposure to constant new stuff
"Overexposure" is subjective. We live in an era where new stuff constantly comes out, yes. More so than ever before.
> is actually an impediment.
Subjective. Just because someone chooses to look at memes instead of C&H is nothing of an impediment. Please do not admonish others for not liking exactly what you like.
So that you don't reply to things I'm not saying, here's a summary:
I replied to someone saying his/her teenaged relative didn't have time for old stuff and didn't care about it by saying that living in the present, without caring about past or future or how long things will endure is typical teenage thinking. It's what they are known for. This teenager will grow up and eventually mature and care about old stuff and feel nostalgic about stuff.
Things I'm NOT saying:
- Everything old is better.
- Calving & Hobbes (or insert your favorite comic here) is not readily available.
- Teenagers should like old comics or music.
- Teenage thought is wrong (it's only abnormal if you're a grown up and still think and behave as if you were 15). Otherwise, it's an absolutely normal part of growing up.
- That there is anything to complain about, instead of this simply being an observation about life, youth and aging.
> "This is not related to something being accessible whatsoever. C&H is widely available, and someone choosing to not access it does not make it not accessible."
I never said it wasn't accessible. I just said teenagers who don't have the time for "old stuff" because of "evolving memes and conversations" are missing out on this, and that not caring about the past or the future is typical teenage thinking.
To be honest I don't understand what you're objecting to anymore. Some imaginary version of something whiney you believe I said, I guess.
Agreed that it's no great crime. And of course, I'm missing out on all kinds of stuff. Not because I'm too busy with ever evolving memes to pay attention, I hope.
The mentality that only today matters, that the past is old and boring, that only the "ever evolving" should grasp your attention, and that who cares if what interests you today will exist tomorrow is distinctly a teenager's mentality.
It's something adults usually -- but not always, of course -- grow out of.
This is no criticism, by the way. It's ok that teenagers think and feel this way. It's also expected that they grow out of it as they mature and become adults.
You missed the point. I'm not saying that the past is old and boring, or that teenagers even believe it is (not all of them do!). I'm saying that every generation produces outstanding media and art (somewhere among the clutter), and that it's ridiculous for older people or younger people to dismiss the art that does not belong to their generation.
You'll notice this is what I've been saying all along, so I don't think I've missed your point at all. Every generation indeed produces outstanding art!
Teenagers typically -- but not always -- focus on the present, disregarding both the past and the future (which we've both agreed is a symptom of lack of maturity). In fact, the word for teenager in Spanish is "adolescente", meaning "they who lack" (maturity, judgment).
> "I'm not saying that the past is old and boring"
I didn't say you did.
> "[...] or that teenagers even believe it is (not all of them do!)
A lot of comic strips are a product of their time, as they are a commentary on current events. Some are more timeless than others, but I've found that many things that were funny at the time I saw them just aren't now. Or, they are only entertaining because I lived through the events they refer to.
A good example is going back to old SNL episodes, or Tonight Show monologues. Stuff that I remember laughing about back in the day, feels like when someone tells you a joke that you don't get, then explains the context. You then "get" the joke, but it isn't as funny.
I get what you're saying - Doonesbury is maybe a good example of one that you really had to be there. On the other hand a lot of the classics that do have a time based cultural context can still be very funny.
Take Asterix where a lot of characters wore the faces of contemporary celebrities or politicians, but that was a secondary joke so they still maintain their appeal. The Simpsons and South Park also have a lot of cultural references but the early seasons are every bit as funny now. Classics like Marge vs the Monorail still hold up as the core theme is one that keeps repeating every generation, but a guest appearance by Leonard Nimoy wont mean anything to a new audience.
As an aside, I loved Asterix as a kid and wasn't aware of any contemporary personalities! It has stuck as one of the favorite comics of my childhood -- along with Lucky Luke -- to the point me and my brothers can quote randomly from almost any issue. As an adult, I noticed the modern world references, but maybe because of the ties to my childhood, they remain secondary. Asterix and Lucky Luke are timeless and a beloved part of my youth :)
I'm 26 and still don't care about the past. Not old by any means, but I've matured past the point of teenage epherism I like to think. I just believe that nostalgia is one of the banes of humanity as a species that holds us back. We should learn from the past, not pine for it. My first experiences with computers was at the age of four on a Windows 95 machine and while there's little things I fondly remember from the early days, there's nothing I yearn for. I certainly don't care to preserve it beyond fleeting recollections in history books. As long as we aren't discarding the past completely and repeating mistakes previously solved I see no reason to hold on to it. I don't care about Geocities or meticulously crafted Myspace profiles anymore than I care about the stagecoach or telegraph.
Is there anything you deeply care about currently? Are you optimistic everything in the future brings improvement?
While it may seem irrational for people to pine for past things like internet sites/services, it is not the service itself, but the experience and environment it was consumed in.
I guarantee you will pine for some things in your future, because some experiences or parts of your environment now are likely better than similar things at a future point.
It's somehow funny to see waves of nostalgia pop up. I remember seeing comments about LoTR from kids who grew up with it. "they dont make movie like that anymore".. it was their <starwars>
Consider instead of YouTube though broadcast TV in the old days. If you were sitting in front of the TV at the right time, you could watch the latest episode of Star Trek. (OK. I'm dating myself. Work with me here.) You might have been aware that repeats would probably air on some unknown schedule some day. But, really, maybe you'd never be able to watch that particular show again.
And because of it, entire television writing styles have changed, morphing into strong season-long narratives instead of loosely related miniplots. Before, writers always had to take into account the fact that a viewer may not have seen the previous episode, or even any episodes at all.
I much prefer what TV has become, to the point where I now prefer the medium over feature length films...something I never would have expected 20 years ago.
In all fairness, only some TV is like that and TBH I have a pretty limited appetite for highly-serialized complex shows that require a lot of attention and focus. The ones I like I really like. They're just not a daily diet for me.
The were miniseries back in the day. But they were an exception that required really driving a big audience to TV on a schedule.
I used to watch TV a bit when I still lived with my parents. I've never owned one since. I watch shows online when I want to, but there's no "just put the telly on" function. Makes it pretty easy...
From my perspective upthread, when I wrote day to day I didn't actually mean that literally. I guess I've never really had an addiction. I've never been one to turn on the TV as background. I did used to watch more than I do now but it was still maybe 1 hr. a day on average.
I can answer for my own situation -- I broke my addiction when I started attending a couple night classes at local community college in the late 80's / early 90's. Then I started hanging out with friends at places on thursday / friday nights, and realized that I really didn't miss the new fall seasons.
>>I much prefer what TV has become, to the point where I now prefer the medium over feature length films...something I never would have expected 20 years ago.
Same here (Although, I'm not sure we should continue to call it TV since a lot of us are no longer consuming this content on a TV but rather via streaming services on a computer device. Also, a lot of new serialized content is created specifically for streaming services and not TV. TV, the way we knew it, is dead , in my opinion.)
It is way more enjoyable to watch a long sci-fi series in one go than to watch a single two hour film. The plots and characters have more time to develop in a series. It is in essence a really long film. Almost like reading a really good book.
I've never once questioned the etymology of "dial" before now. Funny how you just accept certain facts as fundamental because you're taught them at a young age.
Oh my god, this. There was a cartoon on air when I was young (Star Blazers) and it used a fully serial format.
There were about 52 episodes, but I could only watch them in the summer because of conflict with school time.
I knew when my favorite episodes were coming and it was really rough to miss one. Generally I had to wait until the next year to see it, which is effectively forever when you're like seven years old.
VCRs existed, of course, but were far from ubiquitous in the early 80s. They were still sort of a rich person toy at that point. Home video was expensive. Late 80s, early 90s is when video rental joints and cheap VCRs flourished and at that point you pretty much could assume every home had one.
Its early use of the serial format is one of the big reasons Star Blazers is still a notable anime. That, and the excellent remake _Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2199_.
Yeah, that looks pretty good! I've been "saving" it, so to speak - I'll watch it someday as a treat. =)
By the way, I met Amy Howard (American voice of Yuki/Nova) some years ago and she's a very sweet and friendly lady. Also shared an airport shuttle with Ken Messerol (Kodai/Wildstar) and said hello, but declined to pester him beyond that out of respect. Didn't want to bug him.
Unfortunately a lot of old TV shows were still lost. It can be similarly difficult to find old youtube videos that aren't there anymore. It can take some archeology on archive.org to find a working copy of a video.
Good example of this: a channel I subscribe to was recently banned from YouTube for no apparent reason, at least according to its proprietor (Jeff Quitney):
This channel was a treasury of carefully-curated public-domain films from the 1930s onward, many of them restored by Quitney. Most of the films were originally for government and military training purposes. If you needed to know how to do a preflight check on a B-29, or if you wanted to catch up on Armed Forces Network newsreels from Korea, this was a good place to look. Neither copyright nor content issues should have been a problem as far as I can imagine, yet one day a couple of weeks ago Google dropped the axe. No appeal, no redress, and no way forward, since the channel wasn't popular enough to generate a big stink on social media.
As far as I can tell, leaving Google in charge of this stuff is like inviting Great White to play at the Library of Alexandria.
Can't say I'm surprised. I've had public domain videos on my channel taken down for copyright issues. All it takes is one jerk to spam takedown requests.
I've seen this play out outside of the internet too, in a way that didn't immediately connect with nostalgia.
There's often a time where a startup takes investment and then ramps up the hiring. They take on more people, move to a brand new office, and start adding in things to help deal with the sudden scaling.
This will push many of the early employees away or at least contribute to a feeling that they're no longer working for the same company. Meanwhile, all of the new hires are coming in and they've only seen the sparkly new office and the adjusted culture, and they love it! They have no notion of what the business was like when it was smaller and more intimate.
I remind myself of this when I start comparing the present to the past, because I feel like that longing for what once was is a source of great misery if you leave it unchecked. Things might actually be better, yet still you yearn for the old and the familiar.
Even moreso than "caring about preserving content for the future" versus "not caring about it" there's another interesting perspective shift here.
Second, he showed me what he mainly does. Basically it
was a handful of group chats via Signal and WhatsApp, a
whole bunch of web comic websites, and some YouTube series.
The "early internet" was in part based around those lofty ideas baked into the original World Wide Web: a giant, ever-growing hyperlinked network of information.
It wasn't just a way to communicate; you were contributing to something larger than yourself. Even if you merely made blog posts about your favorite breakfast cereals, you felt as though you were adding to this public, global network of knowledge.
Everything on the web was public by default. And even if your content was bad, or simply banal, you were still doing something positive by adding to this giant mass of information. Bad or banal content wasn't inherently a problem, because others would simply choose not to link to it. Maybe somebody would find your cereal musings useful some day and if not, no harm done.
Now, for better or worse, people view the internet "only" as a publishing and/or communication and/or shopping tool. Nothing wrong with that but it is definitely a paradigm shift back to something a little less ambitious than we aimed for in the 90s.
When I look at the camera-equipped billboard we've created in its place, I miss the pre-commercial internet. Thanks for reminding me that we hoped for something better.
if I ever needed to show proof of my time there it would only be a Google search away
On that topic, has anyone discovered why Google deep-six'd Usenet archives it acquired with Deja News?
You used to be able to find specific posts from specific posters with by: and other operators. Sometime in the aughts it degraded quickly to the point where I can't find threads from which I have explicit excerpts and full author names.
Does someone high up in Google have an embarrassing usenet history? Did it just fall in disrepair?
> Does someone high up in Google have an embarrassing usenet history?
I don't know if that's true (it probably is), but personally I am glad that almost all of my old Usenet posts have vanished. I was horrified when Deja News started up. That was the moment I realized the internet is forever and decided to never use my real name or to upload any pictures of myself to anything connected to the internet.
Of course, I'm still screwed because I use a smart phone and probably several entities have that data and could connect the dots, but the average person I encounter can find out very little about me with just my name.
> I don't know if that's true (it probably is), but personally I am glad that almost all of my old Usenet posts have vanished.
Same. If I could go back I wouldn't share any details about my life. Best case scenario, nothing happens. But everything can (and will) be used against you by the court of public opinion. The last few years shredded any '90s idealism I had about the internet.
> The internet is forever
That must be scary for upcoming generations. Now many of our early screw ups and thoughts are recorded in some form or another and there's little way to move on. There's no time/distance element that allows you to grow out of whatever you – or others – uploaded. In the worst cases (revenge porn, false accusations, lolcows) you can't put your old life behind at all.
It's a lot better now. In the past we had usenet, public forever. Now our wall gardens give ability to share semi privately and hide most info that hasn't been leaked yet.
I take the opposite approach: I always use my name on the basis I never need to be worried about being deanonymized. Also keeps me from posting something I might regret.
I take an entirely different approach: My name is basically a globally-unique identifier to me, and most of my aliases are probably easily traced back to me, so I am forced to conduct all of my online business with the threat of being "found out"
I have been thinking about that these past few months and asking myself when and why I started using my real name online even though I was raised in the pseudonym era of the 90's. I think it's around when Skype was introduced and it made sense to use real name for discoverability.
I split the difference.
My name namrog84
Looks like a pseudonym and number from previous era.
However it's my last name backwards. Gorman. And I was born in 84 so it's not just a random throw away. Also namrog without number is often taken.
So i still use it professionally because it's still closely related to my identity. Yet majority of people would never know if they didn't know my name.
Google allowed you to request your posts be deindexed. I helped somebody get some particularly embarrassing messages deindexed. It’s been more than a few years, so I forget the process, but I do remember that verifying their authorship was somewhat cumbersome.
I've mentioned on multiple occasions that the current post-Snowden security and privacy movement is creating a serious threat to the Internet history preservation, and to some extents, threat the understanding/insights of the human civilization in the digital age.
My personal interest is Internet culture and communities. And I'm not amused by this comment, let me talk about the problem briefly.
Online communication from 1970 to 1995 was almost completely public, archived indefinitely. You can still read every single comment by every hacker from the late 80s in Usenet archives, sometimes even back to the ARPAnet era. There are a million posts to read and no spam and low-effort posting at all (by modern standards, even many flame wars seem to be high-quality). You can easily lost days, months or even years in the Usenet archive.
Records like these are often the only remaining records of the online communities, a snapshot of great historical and cultural value. To me, even the controversial political flamewars are interesting as they reveal parts of the history I would not know otherwise (I guess if someone rereads Reddit threads about Donald Trump today in 2055, he/she may have a similar feeling).
On the other hand, you also have names, addresses, and even phone numbers of almost everyone posted on Usenet. It was not a big problem when the access to Usenet/Internet was exclusive to members of the academia, and at a time when there was almost no systematic, organized abuses of the personal information. But today's different, we have big and little brothers who have "Collect Them All" as their slogan, and they are actively trying to exploit the information available to the maximum extents.
What is the response then? People (at least many in the hacking community) start to prefer private, semi-private, or in-group communities over public communication, often protected by cryptography. Some people also actively erases/purges their footprints, for example, some would delete every single post when they left a community, no matter how insightful they are, others may even deliberately insert misleading or false information. And we have something roughly similar to Vernor Vinge's True Name (describes an underground hacking community in the cyberspace). Good, now personal privacy and security is more or less protected by using the cryptographic barrier.
But what is it doing then? We are now creating a unprecedented, HUGE GAP of information in history, within our life time, we are now entering a new digital Dark Age where no one has seen before.
Centralized and/or proprietary services often delete information when they go out-of-service, too, so we need to archive them, desperately. You can't imagine how many resources/memories that are extremely valuable to members of some communities exist solely on a single web server/service provider. I remember reading a post from Schneier's blog that says a website contains numerous posts of wine culture were gone forever when the hard drive failed, and one commenter said that he uses w3m/lynx CLI browsers, and records everything he reads to his hard drive so he would never lost a single piece of information he has seen.
Is it an act of little brother surveillance? Arguably, it can be seen as one. But is it justified? I would say yes, and even say we need more people doing this, systematically. Naturally, archive.org was born in this way.
But then it faces the same issue. On one hand, many archived information can be abused, on the other hand, the more archive-refusing people we have, the more damage to historical records is made.
I don't know how to solve this problem.
The only way I can think of, is (1) Cypherpunks were correct. Anonymity is crucial in the information age, and we should have more of it: never use True Name and reveal personal information unless absolutely necessary, use an anonymous network (e.g Tor) if possible, discard identities periodically (but if you delete posts, it still reverts to the original problem...), (2) Encourages further developments and applications of anonymity, and (3) Training people to assume every piece of information published publicly cannot be removed, may be abused, and they should be able to withstand all possible consequences of it. But now, "life" and "information" simply become inseparable, if you are active in a community you have to post something...
I don't know the solution.
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Appendix 1: what you can see in an Usenet archive.
You can see people's reactions to the rumors that Apple would release new 68000-based machines, how Larry Wall was releasing patch-2.0, the debates about the audio fidelity of vacuum tube/transistor amplifier, how /bin/sh on System V was having a problem with "CFLAGS=-g make", the first hand perspective on the impact of Great Renaming, Richard Stallman announcing the GNU project and Linus's flamewar on microkernel with Tanenbaum, early Sci-Fi fandom culture posted from a 4.3-BSD machine (beta version!) and how it influenced the hacker culture, how the anti-spam movement gained momentum due to its intellectual challenges, raw discussions of fringe political movements (some interesting ones related to tech include the Cypherpunk movement, and Exopian, an early sect of transhumanism), FAQs on almost every subjects written by the active participants of the community who have probably spent hundreds of hours, some weird "emergent" memes/phenomena created out-of-nothing from the collective community, and also have a laugh on thousands of forgotten Internet memes, like alt.religion.kibology, Usenet Oracle.
The only downsize is: no external resources is accessible, and nobody is going to reply you. It feels like Otomo Katsuhiro's animation Memories, the protagonists in trapping inside a 3D Hologram simulation of the past, created by the supercomputer in the abandoned space station.
Most communication throughout history has been ephemeral, and lost as soon as the people relevant died without relaying it to someone else.
Consider the 1800s, where much of our understanding of the attitudes of the day comes from newspapers and archived letters. Then consider how many more were discarded once they had served their purpose.
Today it's possible to archive all of that ephemeral information, but it has never been necessary.
Usenet, for example, was thought to be ephemeral because at best you had a few months worth of posts archived on your server and maybe your local machine, so if you said something boneheaded, it was going to naturally fall off the internet sooner rather than later. As it turns out, that was an incorrect view of the world.
Most forums are treated by their users the same way; a place for people to meet and talk about things in quasi-realtime, but not to archive those discussions for all time. Of course, as it turns out, those discussions are archived for all time, or until the forum closes or has a catastrophic data loss (e.g. this one we're on now).
Consider the 1800s, where much of our understanding of the attitudes of the day comes from newspapers and archived letters. Then consider how many more were discarded once they had served their purpose.
Don't you think the world would be a somewhat better place if we had more records, and therefore more understanding, of what people thought in these times?
Also consider the class implications here. Letter-writing (and archiving) was something more often practiced by folks who were "elite" in terms of wealth and/or education. The thoughts and opinions of these classes have disproportionate representation in our understanding, and those of people in lower classes are underrepresented or erased entirely.
Just wanted to say that I agree with your sentiment. It's supremely aggravating to browse eg. Reddit and find some potentially interesting posts wiped out by some memory-erasing bot. And it is amazing how much we managed to preserve from historical periods, despite (as siblings point out) the theoretical ephemerality of information. I think it is important for subsequent generations to be able to study social phenomena of the past, and at least have a chance to be wiser. We could move beyond anecdotes, speculation and quasi-historical garbage, as "decline of America mimics decline of the Roman empire" meme regularly popping out in newspapers and such.
From my experience people are fascinated when they find some saved communication/memorabilia from years back, and the only downside for them is the fear of being judged. The best dream situation would be where you can have changable identities, but there is an incentive to build respect for them over time (like on HN or Reddit), and there is a strong social convention that you could not be in any way harassed for what you said with such identity. You can also change it, like a mask (maybe in some minimal intervals), and it will be respected. Maybe also you can't refer to anyone's extra-online identity, and it concerns also people from the outside unless they're public figures.
Or, that you can freely say anything under your real name under some online circumstances. It would be similar to carnival in traditional culture, with role reversal, rule suspension and all that. Although for this to work it should have an aura of unseriousness and inherent lack of consequence for the normal reality.
I know what total anonymity with no continual identity leads to (vide *chans), but it is not even what we are talking about here. We could do better with some better social conventions, I think. Ie. have good amounts of both freedom and historical preservation.
> 99.999+% of history has been lost, and that's OK. The modern fetish of archiving everything is not necessary or healthy.
There are people who spend their lives trying to read between the lines of what survived, in order attempt to answer some question that could have been easily answered from some of the lost material.
The "modern fetish" of archiving everything is an attempt to avoid culling material that may later turn out to have been valuable. All but 1% of what's saved will always be worthless, it's just impossible to know for certain which 1% that will turn out to be.
Even if you leave out email, IRC, etc. I'm sure the volume of discussions that took place on commercial online services like Compuserve and the thousands upon thousands of BBS systems far outweighed Usenet--and almost all of that is long gone (for better or worse). Personally I sort of wish I had more archives from my BBS days but so it goes.
I'd be really interested to hear some of your techniques for finding these interesting things in the actual archive. How do you find stuff, do you have to know what your looking for and search by exact text match?
Interesting perspective. With regard to the historical value, though, I think that the volume of information cheapens the value of most of it. The kinds of things that move people and events so that future generations can understand what happened are still preserved -- maybe not all the details, but enough. Of course, there could be some great catastrophe that wipes out most of the collective memory, but the broad outlines are still there and will continue to be there in some form, because ultimately the really important memories are preserved in the minds of those who were affected by them and passed along in some form to the next generation.
So, the burning of the library at Alexandria was a catastrophe for our understanding of ancient civilization, but enough was preserved that we still have what is essentially a Greco-Roman understanding and practice of government, philosophy, history, etc.
Closer to our day, I remember things that were told to me about events that happened over 100 years ago by people who lived through them or who knew people who lived through them. For example, my mom has told me about how her Uncle Henry wheezed when she was a kid in the 30s because he was exposed to chemical warfare in the trenches of France during the Great War. My dad's stories of growing up on a farm during the Depression and World War II likewise tie in nicely with things I have read about the larger events at the time; e.g., he once mentioned how they received extra gas ration stamps once they bought a tractor because they were farmers producing food needed for the war effort. (They farmed with horses until 1942.)
So I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of what life was like for my parents and grandparents because of what they told me. Do I have anything like a complete record of it? No, but I don't need it. Do my children need it? Sure, but they don't really understand what actual Nazis were because that word has been misused and misapplied ever since Gore Vidal used that tactic to "win" an argument with William F. Buckley 50 years ago. And I can tell them about that and why it's important, but it doesn't seem to register because they were never taught any details of what happened in the 30s in Europe, and don't really have a sense of what that generation suffered through as a consequence of the toxic ideologies that flourished during that era.
So please forgive me, but while long posts like this on the internet might be interesting to a tiny percentage of us, for most of the people who live in the future they will at the very best be reduced to a one-sentence quote by some future Ken Burns-like documentarian read by some future Morgan Freeman-like actor.
> So, the burning of the library at Alexandria was a catastrophe for our understanding of ancient civilization, but enough was preserved that we still have what is essentially a Greco-Roman understanding and practice of government, philosophy, history, etc.
I think that's a bold statement. This is circular reasoning: since we know resources that we have, obviously we know what they do contain. I remember university lectures on ancient Roman history, conducted by a serious researcher in the field, where he said how our general understanding of Roman political system could be changed if we had a couple inches less (or more) of papyrus of Festus: an author who lived way after the interesting stuff but managed to survive. In fact historical writings that are preserved for us seem to have seriously warped our understanding (in a pro-Senate & optimates, conservative way). Only relatively recently we are trying to correct that by reaching for some more obscure sources and reading more closely. Many important things we will never know.
Obviously people caring about history will be always a small portion of the population, just as with many other pursuits.
I don't know. We've got a lot of the main writers, and we've got references to some of the books that were lost forever in the fire. I agree that there was some valuable information lost in the fire. But in the main, I think the broad outlines were preserved, or we probably would't even have the concept of circular reasoning.
Obviously there was a period where much of that was irrelevant anyway, after the barbarian hordes overran the weak and degenerate remnants of the Roman empire. When the revival came over half a millenium later, did they get it all right? Probably not, but it was a definite change from what existed in the interim. And some of that culture was preserved through the Roman church, though in a muted way.
More to the point of the original discussion, are you really concerned that anything of lasting value would be lost if the entire internet were deleted? Maybe technical information, sure, but culturally not so much imo.
TBH internetization of reality is still very much an ongoing process, likely to expand much further in the future. At least if we want to extrapolate, there might be a backlash, who knows (I can imagine internet gaining a boring, authoritarian image like television around the turn of milennium). "Big" political events had an important online aspect in recent years. New cultural phenomena, art genres etc. emerge here.
I have to admit, imagining nuking the entire internet is funny intellectually. It would leave us with a low connectivity, low-res "slow" version of history, something more resembling "long 1990s" or what a stubborn pre-milennial person may still be experiencing now. Would it be warped beyond recognition? Probably not, not yet. You could still reconstruct Western societies in broad strokes. But I think the cultural history at least would suffer significantly.
Or don't post things that you'd be embarrassed to be associated with? Easy for me to say of course. My digitized articles from an undergrad newspaper at least went through editors. And anything from my BBS days is almost assuredly lost to the ages. But I've always used my True Name and don't have any problem with that.
Well, sure, but I was still pretty immature 25 years ago. And for younger people, the norms are shifting so rapidly that it's not certain that something posted in jest today won't be considered career-ending heresy in five years.
This is the real reason the internet isn't nearly as interesting as it once was. The concept of 'thinking out loud' that I grew up with is nearly dead.
That's certainly fair. TBH I'm glad there isn't a public record of everything I might have written on a chat board or other public forum as a teenager or college student. At a minimum, there would be things that would require explanations along the lines of "Times were different."
That said, I'm generally pro-True Name unless there's some strong reason for anonymity.
True to a degree. There are still some places left. I think it fascinating that people often wish for more content moderation...
I don't know why they don't just go to work or something like that. Anything that provides a rigid cage for anything that could be deemed controversial. But why force it on places that are optional to visit?
I think it fascinating that people often wish for more content moderation...
It's very easy for overmoderation to prevent useful/enjoyable discussion.
It's equally easy for a lack of moderation to prevent useful/enjoyable discussion.
Restaurants are optional places to visit, too, but I'd find it hard to enjoy my meal if people were shouting threats at me or showing me images of child porn.
> Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think what you're told[....]
> The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts.
>Or don't post things that you'd be embarrassed to be associated with?
I can't predict what will be embarrassing or harmful for me to be associated with in ten years. The only way to be (sort of) sure would be to censor everything I say on the internet to be as inoffensive as possible to everyone, which would suck.
Google used to have a timeline showing key points in Usenet history. The first mention of Madonna. The first reference to AIDS. The first mention of the Gulf war. There were articles in Wired on how they recovered this stuff from long-lost tapes. This was such an important piece of internet history and they just abandoned it.
My best guess is the company just doesn't see much value in doing the work. It's a niche community and by definition 20+ year old information. It's important historically maybe but not to Google's business. No one's going to buy or see ads on 1990s rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5 content.
archive.org has several significant Usenet collections. Henry Spencer's UTZOO collection, stuff from Giganews, and some sort of dump for Google Groups / Deja itself. I don't think anyone's built a useful interface for them yet.
I think that's about right. For better or worse, at least the Google of today does not see itself in a historical archivist role to any significant degree.
"Does someone high up in Google have an embarrassing usenet history?"
To me it's a lot simpler than that: on Usenet one could find people exchanging opinions about a product while on today's web searches all we find is companies selling that product. Just try searching for anything and see how deep you need to go until you get something that resembles a legit conversation about something rather than people selling it.
It was about monetizing every search results page, and that goal became clear to me when they removed the discussion search option from the search engine; that was the final nail in the coffin for the Internet as we knew it.
I hated Google Groups, the interface seemed so overengineered compared to the simplicity of Usenet. I believe you couldn't even view the (plaintext) posts with Javascript disabled.
I have a suspicion that Stack Overflow's success can be attributed at least somewhat to the experience that was browsing comp.lang.* using Google Groups.
I haven't looked in a while, but for a long time, the single most-voted-for bug in Google's public bug tracker was "give me some API access to the message content in Google Groups."
Ironically, there is already a very simple API mechanism that could have been used to provide exactly all the information people wanted... NNTP. All Google would have to do is provide an NNTP server endpoint to Google Groups (even beyond its Usenet mirror). It's not even that hard to write an NNTP server: it's probably the easiest server to implement of POP3, SMTP, IMAP, and NNTP.
As soon as spam started hitting USENET there really was no way to shut it down. The entire system was held together by "netiqette" and when that died off during the Eternal September, it was only a matter of time before it collapsed.
In an article by the Atlantic it's stated that the books at least are kept around.
> it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up.
They invested non-trivial amounts of money in scanning those books, deleting them would throw that money away. As for Usenet, it's similar: storing the data is cheap, and acquiring it again is probably next to impossible, so unlikely they threw it away unless idk it contains proof that sergey and larry have stolen their ideas from some usenet post or something.
but yes, I agree the search results are not nearly as good as they once were. the search engineers who were keen on getting this running years ago have moved on to other things.
I think it's kind of insulting to say that. More realistically, maintaining things in the Google environment has a cost- the products are always changing, so just keeping an existing system running well takes a ton of time, and that time comes at the cost of launching new features. Realistically, usenet search results never represented a huge amount of traffic, and traffic is what gets attention at google.
That reeks of incompetence though. Systems shouldn’t be in so much flux that existing products keep breaking. Poor abstraction and tight coupling.
>and traffic is what gets attention at google.
This is likely what resulted in the huge collapse in engineering quality. People that spew out shit with flashy features for product managers get rewarded and move up while people who stabilize and maintain products are cast aside.
The size of the engineering group at google is more than 10x what it was back in the glory days of stuff like gmail, reader, maps, etc. Google now just makes incremental worse changes to existing products (look how slow maps and gmail are) and kills off things that the terrible engineering org can’t keep up with.
There are definitely great engineers at google, but the ratio of garbage to them has become untenable and Google is well on its path to mediocrity. A great example of this is that you have to do an interview again if you want to work on something actually innovative like self driving cars.
In the early days Google wanted to make information accessible to anyone and that fit right into that strategy and goal.
Unfortunately priorities at Google have changed significantly, and the focus is on things that can help sell more targeted ads at scale. Actually providing value is not that important anymore I'm afraid.
I'm imagining Jason Scott/textfiles on an Indiana Jones-like mission, where he finds a hard drive containing all of this, but then has to run to escape, including running from a boulder and jumping over snakes.
The reality is not far from this - AIUI, the Internet Archive does have a fairly sizable archive of very early Usenet that was extracted from backup tapes stored at a random zoology department somewhere in Canada. So dangerous snakes were very likely involved, at least.
One of the interesting points the story brings up is that you never know what future people will care about. In this case cultural and political discussions are typically more interesting than arcana about bug fixes in long ago systems.
Before I left a website I was writing for (in amicable terms), I asked if I could have a db dump of the posts authored by me. It's in my archive now, so that I know I can get back to years of writing even if the website won't be there anymore in the future.
PSA: If you write for pubs, especially ones that have paywalls of some sort, it's definitely worth keeping your own copies of anything you've written. Fortunately I either kept direct copies of most things I wrote (or they were mirrored on a tech news site) at one job over the course of about 8 years or it would all pretty much be gone.
Even if your pieces are still online and/or backed up on the Internet Archive, they can still be very hard to track down in a systematic way.
I have pretty much everything I care about from the past 20 years or so but a lot of it would be effectively gone had I not specifically saved it.
> I have pretty much everything I care about from the past 20 years or so but a lot of it would be effectively gone had I not specifically saved it.
While you have it - for "us" it is "effectively gone" - unless you uploaded it somewhere.
In the future, after you die, it may become "absolutely gone" - as your relatives or whomever likely won't care, and will discard it.
Unless you make some effort to preserve it. Most people don't - they never did; it was always left up to future people to do so.
For instance, my mom and dad saved a ton of old photos and letters between them, many while he was in the service during the Vietnam War. My mom saved them - but not in a great way. She basically put them all in a box, then that inside a trash bag, and we found it in my old childhood home after both she and my had passed away. So I saved them.
But - unless I scan them - they will be gone forever. In a sense, though, that's ok - because they were never meant to be public anyhow.
But for stuff on the internet - it was public; it was most likely meant to be public. But if you save it personally, then the site or whatever goes away, what the public had is gone. Things like that didn't really happen in the past - I mean, they did - but there was always the possibility of recovery in the future.
More than a few times was something thought "lost forever" - only to be recovered; it found hidden away somewhere, or buried in some dusty archive in a back room of a basement storage area at a university or something. Sometimes found inside a wall.
But the digital? That is rare indeed. Even precious artifacts like tapes and manuals from times past get thrown out all the time, usually by relatives of some passed on engineer, often by their widows, as "so much of this old junk".
Occasionally, though, it gets saved (usually by bitsavers) - and if we are really lucky, it gets scanned or pulled from the tapes - old archives of code, sometimes of other stuff...
But we lose more than we save.
I'm just rambling now - this kind of thing, this loss of our computing history in general (it's more than just "the early internet" - we've lost and thrown away so much of our "early computing" history, it's not funny)...
Think about the inventions that have changed humanity in radical ways, that have altered our society greatly: The steam engine, the automobile, the airplane, etc. How many museums and such are there that celebrate, archive, and curate information about them?
The computer?
How many museums are there for it in comparison?
The difference is stark. A thought I just now had is that I wonder if it is like this, because the computer represents such a different "threat" to humans - that is, it's the closest we've come to a representation of "us" - our minds. And - as it becomes more tightly integrated into our society, if not our body collective (and literal) - if we unconsciously seek to marginalize it due to fear in some manner; fear of the other? fear of the artificial? fear of the usurper? Maybe we seek to forget what we have wrought?
>While you have it - for "us" it is "effectively gone" - unless you uploaded it somewhere.
The stuff I have that I considered still relevant and interesting, I put on my website and it is presumably mirrored in The Wayback Machine by now although I have not actually checked.
I agree with your basic points. I have a lot of stuff that's scanned and online but it's a job.
For example, I have a large format book chronicling a year in product development at Data General in the mid-80s. It's really a fascinating snapshot of the time. I'm guessing it's not the only copy still around but it's probably one of a relatively few and should really be online.
You may or may not have the rights to post it yourself online, but very few pubs are going to have a problem with you keeping your own copies for personal use.
Because they're Google. One might think that Google would see preserving the world's information as part of their mission. I believe they once said something along those lines. But that's pretty much gone by the wayside. And it's probably a reflection of the way Google is managed that even projects with absolutely trivial costs relating to things like RSS and Usenet just fade away because no one wants to be associated with such non-strategic things. Scholar and Books also pretty much went by the wayside though that wasn't really Google's fault.
I agree they're not really faithful to it.
I mean don't get me wrong. Google Search and Maps are two inventions that are so insanely useful, they may standalone be responsible for decades of faster progress. But I do think that if they were really true to the mission statement, they'd take things such as archival more seriously.
(If you explained the entire internet to an alien, and then told them that Google aren't the ones running the Internet Archive, they'd say "Seriously?")
>(If you explained the entire internet to an alien, and then told them that Google aren't the ones running the Internet Archive, they'd say "Seriously?")
+1000
Mind you. At some level, I'm happier that it's a non-profit pursuing this as its mission rather than Google. But, given the vast amounts of money that Google spends on all sorts of things, I don't really grok the mindset that doesn't really prioritize the preservation of information--and the organization of that information--as at least a sideline.
There are admittedly growing headwinds, especially in the case of Europe, about what information can be preserved, but that hasn't really been a big issue until recently.
It might be that they figure the Internet Archive is doing a great job, and there's no use to do the same job twice. They do contribute, being on of the largest (the largest?) book sponsor.
I suspect that at least part of it is that mirroring copyrighted content is a gray area of law. The fact that the Internet Archive is a non-profit archive may give them some leeway and, in any case, they're a less tempting target than Google would be. Look at the ongoing issues that Google has around news sites for example.
Ideally the Internet Archive stays out of jurisdictions that can force them to remove most types of content. The non-profit aspect won't help them in the least.
Being all over the planet in terms of business, infrastructure and physical presence is where Google acting as archive would fail very badly. They might be the absolute last organization you want serving as that entity.
The IA in theory could operate all of its infrastructure and organization out of a preferential jurisdiction (or a few, so as to have backups in case one favorable location goes bad legally/politically), and archive anything it wants to from around the world while entirely ignoring the local laws from a given place (eg the EU, or China, or Brazil, New Zealand, or Turkey, or wherever).
>The non-profit aspect won't help them in the least. //
AIUI one of the tests for Fair Use [in USA] looks at whether use is non-commercial (not the same as non-profit; commercial use can be free-gratis, for example; nor is it a sufficient condition in itself), so it could be a key element in a court decision I feel; what's more important perhaps is that people are less inclined to sue non-profits because of the potential harm to their own public image.
Google are pretty canny, I'd expect them to let IA lead - eg assumed consent with old books - in order to set a non-binding precedent so that they can go to the press should they be challenged and say "well we just followed what the noble souls of IA are doing, and this court decision will harm the IA".
Last I looked, IIRC, Papua New Guinea wasn't signatory to copyright treaties, but I think they were planning on signing. There's probably a country in a similar circumstances that would be a reasonable place for holding a backup archive that includes the stuff less liberal regimes want you to ditch.
Though the legal situation is a bit murky even in the US. After all, I can't set up a "Comics Archive" and start populating it with all sorts of copyrighted comic strips and expect not to hear from the publishers. But as a non-profit who isn't making money off the content it mirrors, respects robots.txt even retroactively, and will generally honor takedown requests that are remotely legit, it gets cut a lot of slack that a corporation doing this for profit-making purposes wouldn't.
As far as I know, there's no such registry. There are exceptions under Section 108 for institutions that fit a certain definition of library, but from what I can tell as a non-laywer, they don't allow the kind of indiscriminate reproduction that the IA engages on: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/108
From Wikimopedia: "The Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and was officially designated as a library by the state of California in 2007."
The short answer is that libraries do not get a magical exemption to make copies of copyrighted works although they have some limited exemptions (that seem to have mostly been written with physical artifacts in mind). For example, a library cannot rip a DVD and make it available to the public with no usage restrictions.
IANAL but there is maybe an argument to be made that the IA can mirror web sites for preservation purposes but then could only make it available to one researcher at a time.
Ideally, any archive respects the wishes of copyright holders and we don't need to rely on legislation. I certainly want control over my data, and thankfully most legal systems are on my side. My rights over my data trump other peoples need to preserve absolutely everything, no matter how trivial. Like the collection of personal letters my grandparents wanted destroyed after their death, which did not end up in a library vault and the historical significance of which is lost to time.
I pity future historians who will need to wade through the petabytes of crap like so much landfill because we outsourced curating it to the future. Because just maybe the rubbish I spout on my personal blog will be of interest to future generations (hint, it isn't, and I'll be spinning in my grave from embarrassment if it is). I doubt they will wade through it, since we have the ability to leave future generations actual historic records and not force them to learn about us from fragments decoded by archaeologists.
Checking left and right are two jobs. And how often do you test each of your backups? It might get corrupted at any moment - is perpetual validation the answer?
Sure, why not? I do regular automated validation of my backups against each other using "rsync --checksum --dry-run" and get notified if anything beyond a tiny threshold is out of whack. (The threshold being due to small files updated between the two backup runs)
Yeah, their new motto might more accurately be stated as "to organize the world's information, to feed it into our machine learning models, and to throw away anything we deem unprofitable."
> I mean don't get me wrong. Google Search and Maps are two inventions that are so insanely useful, they may standalone be responsible for decades of faster progress
I'm wondering if I'm the only one finding Google Search lacking lately. Increasingly, its search results are seriously out of date and linking to dead and/or ad-heavy sites. I've come to use DDG and, recently, Startpage.com more than Google Search.
> To "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"
They still do a few things like that, very occasionally. When they got rid of Freebase (notice a pattern?) they did preserve that data and it was used to seed Wikidata, which now in turn feeds their "SERP boxes". But I absolutely agree that there's zero focus otherwise on that core enabler of their business-- they're just coasting on their earlier (very substantial) efforts, and managing to stay afloat somehow.
> If you explained the entire internet to an alien, and then told them that Google aren't the ones running the Internet Archive, they'd say "Seriously?"
They are running an internet archive. That's what their cache is. There's more than one internet archive; why would Google necessarily be running all of them?
> Google Search and Maps are two inventions that are so insanely useful, they may standalone be responsible for decades of faster progress.
I don't know about this. Google Search was a great improvement in ranking by relevance, but an important invention itself?
As for maps: as far as I'm aware, Google Maps was "just" a combination of two existing technologies - online maps and car navigation systems. They launched Maps in 2005, even Germany had online maps by 2000. Granted, they didn't look as good as Google's and the UX was inferior, but it wasn't a horses vs cars situation imho.
And the iPhone is "just" a more expensive version of its predecessors with a slightly better touchscreen and UX, and Dropbox is "just" a ftp mount with svn on top of it.
Also cars are just faster horses so that works too :)
Honestly I find it hard to argue that Maps and Search haven't been some of the internet's biggest worldwide productivity boosts.
> ...but the wave of full-screen smartphones had already started.
I’ve heard it argued that someone would have gotten there eventually, but my suspicion is that without a big player committing all their resources to marketing and selling it a similar device would have failed to make headway. Phone manufacturers would never have pushed like Apple did against the headwinds of physical keyboards and flash and operator-managed app distribution (and phone crippling).
But I’ve never heard someone argue that the design was already established and going to become a tidal wave. There were a few devices which vaguely resembled a few superficial elements. What examples can you provide to illustrate a wave was already underway?
The first of its kind was the LG Prada, which came out slightly before the iPhone and sold a million units. The technology had all come together just enough to make devices like this possible, and they were starting out at barely good enough.
Batteries, screens, CPUs, all of those were advancing rapidly whether phones used them or not. And 3G was spreading rapidly. Even if it took two more iterations of moore's law, the market was growing more and more feasible every month. Even half-baked attempts 2-3 years down the line could easily have been more compelling than the original iPhone.
I guess a chunk depends on how critical the operator-independent apps were, but let's not forget that the iPhone was ATT-only for years.
> Maps... had much better scrolling than competitors? Being pretty isn't revolutionary.
It's a combination of being always immediately available and having so much useful information about every place, all presented in a UI that is accessible.
The digital maps we had in our country pale in comparison to current day Google Maps. It even has graphs showing working hours and crowding level and reviews, and picture-perfect 3D simulation. That surely wasn't possible for any GPS or phone maps of that period.
Started by who? Early pre-iPhone Android prototypes were modeled after the BlackBerry and RIM was preaching the need for keyboards long after the iPhone was introduced. Microsoft was also aiming phones at businesses.
I agree with you insofar that "inventions" seem to imply that they invented the concept of Search Engines and Mapping Software from scratch, which is obviously not true (both existed for a long time before Google entered the market) but in both cases Google managed to offer a superior service for free (for the end user at least). I wouldn't call them inventions, but they're better implementations of an existing concept.
Compare Google maps to the mapping and GPS services of yore, you'd have to pay a fortune to get the same feature set. I remember when you had to pay to add regions to your GPS and then pay again to update them later.
The word "disruption" is quite a buzzword these days but in this case Google truly disrupted both these markets. Everybody had to play catch-up after that. I remember how all other search engines started copying Google's slick interface when they realized they were losing badly.
I do agree that they were vastly superior, but I believe that the new and disruptive thing that Google brought to the table in those markets was the monetization model. They offer valuable services without any visible price tag because the data those services generate are driving the profits from ads. I don't know if they were the first to do this, but that's an invention in my book..
The big innovation with Google Maps was the interactive zooming/panning interface, and it was a huge improvement over any other mapping site of the time. The popular map service of the time, MapQuest, had clunky scroll and zoom buttons around the sides of the map image, and moving around or zooming would reload the entire page. The GMaps interface wasn't just a marginal improvement over the existing pages, it was a completely new way of doing it that was 100x easier to use.
That's a gross misrepresentation of what I'm saying.
My point is: the technology was there. Better UX, nicer integration into other services etc, those are valuable and good, and they alone can be enough to win a huge market share, but they are not innovations as in "introducing new concepts". A smartphone capable of using GPS to show your position on a map is great and way more accessible than a Magellen NAV 1000, but it's the GPS itself that is the actual breakthrough, the big innovation.
>One might think that Google would see OWNING the world's information as part of their mission
FTFY
But also, I do like the theory that early high level Google hires, across the org likely have embarrassing Usenet histories -- I mean, c'mon - I've bee 'online' since the early 90s...
I've said some cringeworthy stuff: for example - I used to actively participate in the Haiku thread on Craigslist in the early 2000s -- and I thought I was /r/IamReallySmart
It was fun at the time - but I put way to much time into writing long Haikus, and once spent a ton of time attempting to write my masterpiece, a palindromatic senryu...
((HAHAH I just went back to CL and read some of my Haiku I wrote on there... from 2003!))
EDIT: for self deprecation, here is what I wrote on 9/11/2003 ABOUT 9/11/2001:
This makes me think that if any company has a mission to digitize/preserve the world's information, they should now be required to setup a proper non-profit organization/foundation around that. That way this prevents the company from later on exploiting it or killing it off due to a conflict of interest.
As I recall it, they tried to incorporate Usenet into Google Groups. It was a mess, and instead of fixing it, they probably discovered that adoption of not-Usenet functions was more used and abandoned it.
This is a feature of development based on sprints vs. a bigger vision. That design/development model has alot going for it, but it only works well when the scope of the system is narrow.
The web has nothing built-in for archiving and versioning. It's a gaping hole in this technological platform, one that has been noted and criticized for a very long time. The reality of this problem, however, is vehemently denied by the current generation of "technologists". Of course, those are the same people who get six-digit salaries for managing complexity they themselves create - partly through hyper-centralization. Good and resilient archival, on the other hand, necessarily implies some level of decentralization.
I singlehandedly maintain a 14-year-old website that used to be a modestly popular web magazine. It's not very expensive, but it's a pain. DNS system is horrible and it's easy to loose domain names to some nonsense. (I lost one that used to be a free 2nd level domain when it was converted to a paid-for zone. Not a matter of money, just paperwork.) Server management is a time drain. Stuff like adding SSL certificate to a legacy VPS can lead to a cascade of updates and config changes that can take days to make and test.
BTW, everyone sings praises to archive.org (and it's well-deserved), but most people here do not seem to realize that they are also a centralized platform that can collapse and take everything down with them. Who archives the archives, etc. Fortunately, they are not the only one of the sort. Unfortunately, it's all very ad-hoc.
If W3C weren't a bunch of corporate shills, there would be a standard for creating versioned web archives, like, 10 years ago. It's obvious that we need one.
I'm interested in IPFS for allowing sites to be archivable. If a site I was interested in was hosted with IPFS, then I could mirror their content and help serve them their content on IPFS. If the original host goes down, I'll still be able to help host the content at its original URL, and the URL will still work for anyone else in the world who tries to follow it. And then maybe people will re-host my own content in the same way, even to long after I'm gone if my content is good enough.
Interesting post. So are you saying that if there was a good standard for versioned web archives, then you could stop maintaining your website and just point people to the archives?
I would still maintain the website, but it would be much easier, because I could lean on archival features when that makes sense, instead of trying to keep everything "stable" manually.
Nobody could have predicted the global growth of internet users and the sheer quantities of data being created on a per second scale. Exabytes when? And then what?
There were plenty of people predicting it, pointing out its deficiencies and explaining what needs to be done. In terms of very high level ideas, Alan Kay comes to mind.
Ted Nelson was complaining constantly about the deficiencies. Pretty much nailed the issues too. Unfortunately his solutions were difficult to implement.
I looked into this awhile ago and came to a similar conclusion about the web. Here's the examples of pre 1996 websites I know of (some are recreations):
Websites got a lot less fun at some point too. A lot of the designs seem dated now, but I really miss the days when websites had brightly colored text over load backgrounds. Obviously modern sites are more usable, but I want <blink> tags back.
That and 2/3rds of websites are just Shopify templates, etc.
I suppose this is the natural progression as a given thing becomes more accessible, that the things themselves lose personality and flair because literally anybody can do it now. It reminds of cars, actually, how back in the early days every car was unique because when you bought a "car" what you received was a chassis, engine, wheels, etc. and then you'd take that to a coach builder who'd finish the job to your liking. Then as time went on, things got standardized (for cars, it was manufacturers and models, for websites, it's companies like Shopify, Wordpress, Joomla, etc. and then slowly everything gets paired down into what is generally agreed upon as the "correct" set of features, and they all just look a bit the same.
And then of course you occasionally have a teenager who fits a great stereo to a Mazda or something, but by and large, everything is pretty much standardized.
I know it's more efficient, but it's terribly boring.
> things themselves lose personality and flair because literally anybody can do it now.
I'd argue that fewer people can do it now (relative to the Internet population) than previously, because free webspace is dead, the desktop is dead (the laptop close behind it), ftp is dead, DMCA, GDPR, hackers are scary, HTML is much more complex (e.g. responsive design).
The web is a playing field for larger corporations now and most people and small entities have given up and just maintain a FB/IG presence.
Nope, it's better than ever. You have non-profit providers like https://neocities.org/, regular shared hosting with free plans, and stuff like Github pages and Netlify for those with a bit more tech skills.
Way better than the times when you had Geocities and such injecting ads into your site.
> the desktop is dead (the laptop close behind it)
No need for those to build a website. Any cheap Android phone can do it.
> ftp is dead
Nope, the previously mentioned shared hosting providers still offer it.
> HTML is much more complex (e.g. responsive design)
Old-school HTML pretty much works the same, and is actually quite fine on both desktop and mobile screens.
--
Frankly, I don't think the problem is that making your own site has gotten any harder, it's that there was no FB/IG back then. Had there been FB pages from the start of the web, you'd probably would have never seen so many custom sites in the first place.
> Had there been FB pages from the start of the web, you'd probably would have never seen so many custom sites in the first place.
I’m not sure about this. AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe all had vibrant online communities. However, what you could do was much more limited than the federated web, and they were silos.
Without the competition of “I’ll host my own server, and search engines will index it”, I wonder if FB and it’s predecessors would have been able to figure out what to build.
Well Facebook was built on the failures of MySpace which in turn was built on the failures of Friendster, and so on. People who wanted their own space were always making their own space, and the rest would go to whichever social network was the most relevant at the time.
Facebook wasn't built on MySpace's failures, they were both operating at the same time. People moved to Facebook because it was more intimate and less commercialized while MySpace turned into a dodgy spam heap.
The devices are still sold. However, they're increasingly just used as browsers. I was just saying to someone that it's something of an irony that Chromebooks seem to have settled into something primarily for the K-12 education market when they're really all the PC that most people need.
I actually travel on business with one a lot of the time but will probably replace it because no one really makes the hardware I want.
Yep. The browser + web has effectively evolved into what all the deliberate attempts to create thin clients mostly failed at. (Just as app stores largely do what application virtualization was supposed to.)
Historically, when people have talked about desktops and laptops they have generally been thinking in terms of a stateful device that ran applications locally. Increasingly they're just a convenient form-factor to run a browser. They're effectively functioning as a modern-day thin client.
When people say the desktop/laptop is largely dead. That's what they mean. [ADDED: That, and that web access is increasingly through a phone.]
Half of those you call dead (desktop, ftp, simple html) are things i use all the time :-P. And i'm sure free webspace isn't dead as i used one about 3 years ago which was the first hit on google among many and i doubt all of them vanished so fast.
If I could only have one consumer computing device to make a movie, or a drawing, or a anything involving photos, I'd pick one of those "consumption" devices over a desktop or laptop without hesitation. Even a phone, for anything involving the camera. The form factor and extra/better sensors make them great for all kinds of things.
I'd also rather have an iPhone helping me out in the workshop than a laptop or desktop, for a bunch of reasons. I can use it as a measuring device, a level, a note-taking/shopping-list machine (hands free, even!), a youtube how-to player, an instruction manual finder, and so on, and it fits in my pocket and reasonable amounts of sawdust and liquid won't hurt it. That's creation.
People spend most of their time on "real" computers consuming, too, by a huge margin. I still wouldn't say their (computers') primary focus is consumption. Anyway, the premise is kind of nonsense as consumption is a major part of many creative processes.
This is all true. But the barrier to go from consuming to creating is a lot higher now.
Making silly little programs in BASIC or Perl is a lot tougher on an iphone, and that's what sparked the interest for a lot of people (though maybe I'm wrong and it's getting easier?)
For the specific case of creating software, then? I'd say the Swift Playground is (much) easier to get started with and also more compelling than hacking around with Perl on (at first) Win98 was.
This was my point, though you put it much more articulately. People used to make websites because they were enthusiastic about The Smashing Pumpkins, Fight Club, or their EverQuest guild. Now they make sites for a business. Business ruined eBay, and then it spread to the rest of the web. If you have a passion you want to building for, you have to accept a terms of service of a big platform and build with their tools. It might be easier, but it sure has been less fun to view.
All the people getting online around the developing world overwhelmingly own only phones. Their phones are the only electronic device they have. Even in developed countries it is becoming extremely common now for people whose don't create much text content to only use a phone or tablet. Desktops and tablets are something they maybe only see at work.
In the early days aka pre 1990 very few people where online or had access to computers worldwide. In the 90’s access kept increasing but mostly in the developed world which is ~1/6 of global population.
New PC sales makes it look like access is dropping, but the reality is people simply use older Computers on average. A 10 year old desktop in 1998 is relatively ancient, but in 2018 it’s not that far behind the curve. On top of that tablets and smartphones often replace secondary computers. If you have a powerful gaming desktop and a tablet then a laptop is less useful.
This is going to vary by area. In various locations I've lived, all in the developing world, phones are used for mindless social media and games, desktops are used for everything else. There are some cultural things that might make the numbers look misleading or just generally be very difficult to measure. For instance internet cafes tend to be ubiquitous in many parts of the world which provide easy and extremely comfortable access to high end computers which people in many cases use effectively as their own. With prices that start at some pennies per hour, it also often makes more economic sense in many cases.
Another big issue is that 'computer malls' are also still a thing. Think something like Fry's, but 6 stories tall and full of nothing but independent shops. These places drive two confounding issues. The first is that they build [lots] of computers a la carte. PC sales figures only come from major distributors like Dell, HP, etc. So even though there are millions of PCs sold at these malls, it'd count as 0 by most metrics. And another factor is that people tend to repair/refurbish/upgrade their computers rather than buy new ones. These malls again facilitate such things at very affordable prices.
I can count the number of tablets I've seen on one hand.
An aside but surely this must be positive in terms of environmental impact. Imagine the millions (billions?) of desktops and laptops that have not been manufactured or powered because of the widespread availability of phones.
Conversely, desktops and laptops can be upgraded much easier than phones, so I'm not sure the long-term environmental impact is necessarily positive, once all those millions of phones end up in landfills.
It has something like 40% of web traffic now, despite those with desktop PCs being more likely professionals in the field, so normal people simply don't really use a desktop/laptop anymore to browse the web.
I'm not going to say you're wrong, but I can't make sense of your post and it seems contrary to my experience.
> It has something like 40% of web traffic now
I'm not sure what your metric is here so I've assumed volume.
40% of web traffic now is an order of magnitude more traffic than all web traffic a decade ago. I'm not sure how something which has an increased volume and still has 40% of the total pie can be 'dead'. I might buy 'dying' if it was accompanied with more data.
> ...despite those with desktop PCs being more likely professionals in the field...
I'm not sure what you are saying. It seems like you're saying outside of tech, businesses don't use desktops. That does not jibe with my experience. I have seen an increase in POS systems using tablets, but those are primarily replacing cash registers, bespoke POS systems, etc.
> ...so normal people simply don't really use a desktop/laptop anymore to browse the web.
With the exception of the people I know who own a laptop but not a television, it seems that all normal people do with their laptops is browse the web.
I miss the times when websites weren't being designed by designers, and even when they were the practice of web-design was in its infancy so the well-trodden tropes of today's internet were not established yet.
It was creatively speaking a very exciting space - there were almost no rules yet, and you could do whatever and people wouldn't be turned off because your site looked weird or unusable, because all sites looked weird and were equally unusable.
There are many upsides to the web we have today: accessibility, ease of use, ease of discovery, rich content, but that creative space has gone and something with that fresh creative scope combined with massive, new audience may not exist again in my lifetime (or even ever - the internet was the first time you could throw up a page and have people all over the World see it - a larger network of eyeballs can never exist).
I agree with everything you said except the part about rich content today. Maybe I'm nostalgic, but I think there's a much lower percentage of that today. Unless celebrity gossip and political self-promotion is considered rich content.
I know exactly what you mean - when I said rich content though I was talking more about images, animations, video, games. In the early web over a 28.8k (or slower!) modem you'd have to make every non-text asset count and compress it (3-phase loading jpegs, anyone?), now you can put 10Mb of javascript executable in there and no one bats an eye.
I misread your comment, of course! Yes, pictures were a calculated luxury. If you asked me to click to download a picture and it wasn't worth the five minute wait, you went on a certain list.
I think back in the day people created websites really for fun and can do whatever they want. Now you are judged against the best websites.
Probably the only remnants of the old web are professors who publish academic websites and are based on content rather than design. I do remember when I was about to graduate there was talk of standardizing all the professor websites. I would agree all websites would need accessibility, mobility etc but like you I miss the old web where you could just explore.
Nice. Captain Marvel's website wouldn't load without enabling javascript for three domains, and then wanted four more after it loaded. It looks retro, but it's the same modern web crap.
As bad as many sites were in the 90s, modern sites somehow manage to be worse. Just yesterday I visited somewhere on my phone and about 2/3rds of the screen was occupied by slide-in banners (top and bottom!) informing and or asking me for some shit I of course didn't read because I went there to see the actual content.
I'd take spinning flaming guitar gifs, gaudy tiled backgrounds, and <blink> over that crap any day.
Perhaps the novelty of the Internet faded away and access is now viewed in the same light as "dial-tone" was in the decades before--it's just there when you need it.
The web platform evolved into a much more complex space. In the early days (late 90's) you could spend an hour in "HotDog Web Editor" and build a page that looked somewhat close to a mainstream website. Those days are long gone and most people now opt for platforms, templates and/or site builders, which make total business sense and are the right decision for most, but they lack the fun and excitement experienced by the early Internet "webmasters".
I think the word you're looking for is "personality". Sure half the sites were blinding and had background music and blinking crap and were pretty terrible, but it perfectly reflected the person that built it, however shoddily.
Now, everything is sterilized. Run through a million filters to be picture-perfect, work on everything beautifully, etc. This is great for the bulk of the web (businesses and web apps and what-not), but personal websites disappearing was a _huge_ blow to the personality of the internet. Heck, MySpace pages were a disaster, letting users run arbitrary HTML and CSS everywhere, and when Facebook came along everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief that _finally_ we'd be free of those horrendous MySpace pages.
Now, looking back, I miss the crap out of those pages. I also ditched social media entirely but I consider everything I just mentioned as playing a large role in that. No charm, no personality. Rigid. Walled gardens. It's like a microcosm of the state of technology in 2019.
And I mentioned personal sites disappearing, and I still stand by it - yes, of course there are blogs and what-not, but they're not the same. They're hosted, fast, efficient, and typically use approved themes. If you want to get down and dirty and actually make your own site, it'd be looked at as a gigantic waste of time. Technology has come too far for it to be practical to build a fancy site out of pure flat HTML files that looks like the worst 90s sites. Why do that, when you could just have an out-of-the-box Wordpress or Tumblr site?
Plus, no one would visit it anyway. If it's not spammed or marketing, no one's visiting anything these days. It's just too saturated.
The average internet user visits a tiny fraction of the number of websites they used to. Typically, aggregators. Reddit and Facebook and whatever. Worse yet, aggregators that pull in only things they agree with, shared by people they agree with. And that is their version of the internet, and not to mention, the world. No dissenting opinions, nothing original. It's depressing and I hate it.
I grew up learning to build websites from copying source code into Notepad and running it locally. It was a hot mess, but so much fun and super rewarding. The 90s web, even early 2000s until ~2006 or so (when I personally consider it went "too mainstream" to put on my hipster hat, and everyone was suddenly on it), I miss it all.
Sorry for the rant but this all hits close to home and, as a web developer who got started in the mid-90s, I'm subjected to the "modern web" for many hours a day, and I'd give anything to see it regress.
>And I mentioned personal sites disappearing, and I still stand by it - yes, of course there are blogs and what-not, but they're not the same. They're hosted, fast, efficient, and typically use approved themes. If you want to get down and dirty and actually make your own site, it'd be looked at as a gigantic waste of time. Technology has come too far for it to be practical to build a fancy site out of pure flat HTML files that looks like the worst 90s sites. Why do that, when you could just have an out-of-the-box Wordpress or Tumblr site?
I still write my website by hand. I use a static site generator to do things like make a blog index and stuff, but I don't use any templates. Everything you see is designed by me.
Note that a lot of people in the 90s used WYSIWYG editors, both Netscape Gold (later Communicator) and Internet Explorer (as of Windows 98) came with WYSIWYG editors (Composer and Frontpage Express respectively). Personally i had my own site since the mid-90s (initially on Geocities, later on Tripod) and always used WYSIWYG editors (initially Netscape Composer, later Frontpage Express and after that Mozilla Composer) and AFAIK most people i know used and most oldschool sites i remember were made using such editors.
TBH i never understood, even at the time, the point of writing static pages by hand (i remember even proud web buttons like "Made in Notepad" :-P) - the main explanation i was given was that the WYSIWYG editors created messy code, but to me that never sounded like a good reason since the entire purpose of such an editor is to not have to bother with the code.
I only started making sites by hand when i got into (classic) ASP (i made single pages before, but mostly for javascript demos or learning HTML and the like) and later PHP. Even then, the first time i used ASP was for a hobby site i worked on with some friends over the net about (point and click) adventure games where we'd put articles and such and the articles themselves were written in Frontpage Express for formatting and such (with the code just copy/pasted into a textarea i had in the "admin" section :-P).
I'm still using Seamonkey Composer and Frontpage Express (well, more the latter than the former since i'm not using Seamonkey much anymore whereas the latter is just a 1.5MB zip file i carry on my external hard disk that works out of the box anywhere) for very simple pages like [0], [1] and [2]. Although my "bigger" sites (that is, sites with more than a couple of pages and a need for a theme) are made using custom generators (usually in Free Pascal or Python).
And FWIW one of my favorite software that isn't developed anymore is Apple's iWeb - i haven't seen a tool as easy to use for making static sites as this one. Sadly Apple cares much less than Microsoft ever did about backwards compatibility and i'm certain my copy of iWeb will stop working soon (and there isn't any Wine equivalent to fall back on whereas in the unlikely even that old Windows programs stop working, i can still use them via Wine) so after Apple abandoned it, i stopped using it myself.
I see a lot of conversation about early Internet and the health of the Internet. I think some of this is just because those of us who remember it, are starting to ache over it a bit for all kinds of reasons, one of which is because that's what old people do.
Today I got lunch with my 17 year old nephew. I asked him about what he does on the Internet and if he misses the "old Internet". First off, he has no context of what the old Internet is. He doesn't really care nor seem to feel like he's missing out. Second, he showed me what he mainly does. Basically it was a handful of group chats via Signal and WhatsApp, a whole bunch of web comic websites, and some YouTube series.
I felt like a dad of a teenager for a fleeting moment and my generalized conclusion was that he's consuming a ton of independently developed creative content. I was actually pretty proud of what the Internet looks like for him.
I asked him about curation and the ability to hold on to his favourites. How does he ensure that something he loves isn't gone in 10 years? This concept really didn't seem to matter to him. His perspective seemed to be that there's so many webcomics and the "memes" and conversations he has with his friends are ever evolving, there's not really a lot of time to care about the old stuff. Made me wonder if attachment to nostalgia may be fleeting as well.
Is this the full story? Of course not. But it made me feel a bit better about things and a bit more skeptical of the doomsaying I often hear and sometimes take part in.