Web 1.0 sites had a different set of UI idioms, which seem unintuitive to us, as we're too set in our new ways now. If you get past the fact they're ugly by modern standards, you'll see these sites accomplishing amazing results through startlingly simple means.
It's an excellent source of inspiration, and if you combine those ideas with modern design, but keep it minimal, I believe there's a lot of potential to create something compelling.
This is the same reason for which I like reviewing old OS GUIs, old apps and even UIs in movies sometimes (but not the modern take which just slaps animated circles and gradients on everything, I mean actual UIs showing something readable/usable).
I think a lot of modern web design suffers from the same AB testing failures that got Pepsi into trouble back in the coke/pepsi days of the 80's. I may be misremembering the details, but the gist was that Pepsi was a bit sweeter, and so in the tiny amounts that people tasted during taste tests, they usually prefer the sweeter drink. In normal use, however, that flavor of Pepsi was too sweet, and sales tanked.
I see the same problem with user tests. People almost always pick the simpler of two options, because at the time they have no reason to pick anything else, and that looks easier. But then you start trying to get actual work done, and the Fisher Priced interface is too simplified.
And I know it's not just you or me that prefer information dense websites. Look at how well-known McMaster's site is, among people who actually need to use it to get work done.
Even in general public terms, things have gone too far. I set up a lot of iPads for elderly folks for use in assistive communication, and I have to go out of my way to use ones that have buttons. The modern ones without a home button are just too complicated for a whole swath of our population, and I am not exaggerating.
> But then you start trying to get actual work done, and the Fisher Priced interface is too simplified.
That's exactly my thinking as well. To give another example:
This week I tried to use an iPad and an Apple Pencil for day-to-day note taking. If you handwrite 100% plain English prose like, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, it instantly converts it to text and corrects any typos. For simple stuff, it seems perfect.
But it's insufferable once you start on real work. It doesn't understand a lot of punctuation, tries to correct foreign words (likes names and locations) I mix in with English, tries to spell correct serial numbers (N07 becomes NOT). Having to go back and correct each conversion error turned out to be much slower -- and frustrating. I went back to a keyboard.
The most notorious example I remember was an update to data entry software in the medical field. The old one ran on some Unix iirc, had a text mode interface, and was entirely controlled by keyboard. Staff could use it in their sleep, enter text, tab, enter more text, tab tab, and so on.
The new version ran on Windows, had a lot more features for sure, but suddenly staff was entering data into a field, grabbed the mouse to move to the next field, entered data, and so on. The process became way slower. So I asked why they don't just ignore the mouse and keep using tab. They were surprised this even works, because it was never mentioned by the folks who trained them on the new software. It was all about how modern and slick it looks and how it has so many more features.
So then staff tried to use the tab key again, but got frustrated very quickly since the software was smart enough so enable and disable controls in the entry form depending on selections you made in earlier fields. So tabbing through the form would require different number of key presses all the time, making it hard to build muscle memory. I think they raised their complaints to management but whether that feedback ever reached the software vendor I have no idea. I guess they did get faster again over time because any new system takes time to get used to, but I'd be very surprised if it ever matched the ancient, simple system again.
I would add to that what I call "fractioning" of data (on multiple screens).
We used for years (decades) a DOS based tool, where in a "conventional" 80x25 mask there was enough space for all the data we had to input (navigating with TAB/Enter, etc.) before passing to the next (with F8).
On the new software the same data (in windows, on a modern screen) goes inside a teeny-tiny window that has not enough fields, so it is spread on three tabs and this breaks the flow.
The same happens a lot on forms on the web, fill one or two fields, click next, repeat.
This explains a tendency I've long had which I always assumed was just a look and feel thing. So back in 2021 I got myself a (relatively new) Blackberry. I loved it. Hardware buttons. Lots of them. I've had to upgrade to a newer Android for work reasons, and it has so many default settings I've had to turn off because they are infuriating. Pixel 7. Gestures. No standard bottom bar with the three buttons. Power button does something else. Why???? Even with all these turned off, the three button bar disappears if an app is full screen, and you have to do a gesture to get it back. Seems mad to me.
This was very jarring at first, but over time I've actually gotten used to the gestures and they feel more consistent than various makers of phones having the software buttons in different positions. It's almost like muscle memory at this point.
If you don't like gestures, however, you should be able to go to the system settings and enable the old style navigation. If they had removed it entirely, then I'd probably be more critical (a la Windows 11 vertical taskbar).
That's my experience with doing basically anything that's vaguely complex on mobile devices.
The iPhone camera is usually excellent, but there are some situations (for me it's autumn forests and funnily enough Disneyland at night) in which the auto white balance fails miserably. On my DSLM it's a simple question of just using manual white balance, but on the iPhone the only way to do it with the stock camera app is to do in post.
On that note, the Photos Mac app has a neat feature where you can fix white balance by calibrating on a neutral grey area, but that feature is missing on the mobile apps which just have a color temperature slider which does not give as good results.
That isn’t how AB tests work. In a (properly-run) AB test, a user will only see one variant. AB tests have shortcomings, but the Pepsi critique isn’t one of them.
Combine A/B testing with exponential growth of the user-base and you will only measure newcomers. Medium, advanced, and expert user simply won't matter in your test results. Whether that is what you need depends on the situation.
The Pepsi critique can also happen with AB testing depending on what you're measuring. The problem that Pepsi had is that they measured user satisfaction after a small sample not a full can. This would show up even if you only present drinkers with one sample.
By ”the Pepsi critique” I specifically meant the exposure of both variants to a single user.
I agree with you that having users take a single sip is also a problem for construct validity. But it’s not clear from your post how this would this would happen in a properly run AB test.
Are you thinking of the case in which we ship a change that confers short term wins in user spend or churn, but comes at a long term cost that isn’t visible within the window of the test? This is a common problem, but it’s not clear to me that it’s the same problem Pepsi had. Here the problem is with choice of response variable, whereas Pepsi’s problem is choice of treatment.
My point about the Pepsi challenge is that it would have produced the same erroneous results if they ran it in a way that only exposed consumers to one or the other. This is because the flaw was that they were measuring satisfaction after a sip or whatever opposed to a full can.
It's about what you actually measure versus what you think you are measuring. In this case, the can satisfaction vs versus the sip.
Short term spend or churn could be examples. For an information serving website, examples might be mistaking time on the site or pages viewed for user satisfaction and finding the information they want.
That was a thought that I had when writing my post too. Test AB testing a focus group based on a 5 Second page view Bank of radically different answer than if you sat people down and asked them to perform a typical or moderately difficult task.
If this is indeed the case, I'm just shocked that developers and companies haven't figured it out. I suppose a lot of the time the performance impact simply isn't measured in their kpis
My other hypothesis is that once you move away from an orderly website architecture, organizations and devs are just as lost as the users and no one has an idea where information should reside. Without holistic architecture or vision, the best that people can do is throw a third or fourth hamburger on the home page, add a new page 10 links deep, or not linked at all and pray that a search engine will solve the problem.
I think at the end of the day, it's because the modern way of designing things is just easier for developers.
I remember when that started taking off; it was honestly kind of a godsend because one of the laziest way of doing things suddenly became associated with professionalism. On the other hand, it's getting pretty bland as a consumer now that every site is doing it.
Compared to images as buttons of the 2000s, something adjacent to material design seriously cuts down on the number of graphical assets necessary for develop anything. Even games seem to follow that trend: compare Crusader Kings 2 vs Crusader Kings 3, with image buttons vs a general UI toolkit in the two games.
The fact that the back button is completely useless now (at least on mobile) because every website wants to refresh every time you go back is probably one of the worst things to happen to web navigation in a long time.
Horrendous experience and it leaves me fumbling with opening everything in new tabs which can get super messy/annoying on a phone.
As far as easy access to tabs goes, Sleipnir browse (by Fenrir, a Japanese company) works. I do change some of the other default settings. Gestures, user-agent string, button layout, long-tap behaviour… It's fairly configurable. Uses its own extensions system, though.
Also, the desktop version of Sleipnir is…not recommended: quirky and buggy.
The modern web has been taken over by what you may call simulacrum driven design. It’s design by mimicry instead of design by fundamentals. I mentored a few design groups in SF before leaving the industry. The decision making I saw and were ridiculous, and were even being argued against usability. Oh well!
"Modern" websites aren't designed for the masses. It's not a matter of preference, the masses have little input into how the websites they visit are designed... These sites are designed to track the masses to serve ads or to trick the masses to sign up for some service, buy something, etc.
Try Unix, bro. Ubuntu is arguably a decent start coming from Windows. It gives you easiness of use, intuitive visual interface, simple software installation process, decent compatibility with hardware...
Then you can gradually get familiar with Linux and doing things on the command line. Once mature enough, you can explore pretty much any other distro.
Modern design is fueled by ego. The developer and all peripheral participants want to feel smart, it is no longer about the user and it hasn't been for a long time.
They don't seem unintuitive to me, maybe because I grew up with 1.0. these youngsters are creating buttons without outlines, links that are grey and not underlined, checkboxes that slide and sometimes have no other indication that they're on or off, and many other unholy idioms. Web 1.0 was glorious.
To clarify, by unintuitive I mean we don't think of doing things in a simple way today as we're used to more complicated interaction patterns and layouts.
When we open a Web 1.0 it's intuitive to see and browse. In fact, often more intuitive than modern Web. It reminds us... that it's "OK" to keep it simple. And this is a reminder we need frequently in a world of excess.
Oh.. well I guess it's just me then :) I always try to use a simple native component before replacing it with something more complex if the old thing genuinely doesn't work for some use cases.
Fun fact: you're commenting on a site that uses tables for layout. It's not an unholy mess though, as it doesn't have sidebars or other really complicated stuff.
"heavy use of tables". I ran into a script once that took a picture as input and output a massive HTML table with a cell for each pixel and a background color. "Pure html" images without CSS or base64.
You can fully use amazon still with javascript disabled. The site even looks nearly the same but it doesn’t spin your laptops fans rendering kindle unlimited ads on the home page.
And those little chirp sounds that go with the movie UIs. More than onKeyPress, they happen on every interface event. Text comes into view? chirp-bleep. Our real interfaces aren't that noisy. I wonder who drives these UI design decisions in movies, the sound people, editors, writers?
"Noisy" UI have been made before. Possibly a few times, though the only one that comes to mind right now is the "Audio Finder" experiment at Apple. It did things like play sounds for drag events or the mouse pointer crossing a window boundary. Reportedly, after the beta test users had to give it up, they missed the feedback.
Many years back I played one of the final fantasy PlayStation games on Connectix VirtualStation. There was a bug in the emulation that prevented the cursor for the menus from being drawn on screen. It was surprisingly usable just by audio cues once you got used to it.
Old OS UIs pursued fascinating directions ours didn't keep up with, like Plan9's Acme, a 3-button-mouse-based terminal where any text in a file becomes a button and you can just type directly into toolbars, or the amazing wholesomeness of smalltalk repls. Of course, they aren't quite GUIs - but they had fascinating power.
9 front it's still alive, and if you hate the three button mice setup, you can use shift/ctrl-click to simulate the different clicks for chords. For some users using a keyboard might be easier.
It's awesome how you can stumble upon sites that are so funny or interesting (in multiple ways) that you just want to share them immediately forward. Everyone says it but it's true: something just got lost in translation when social media pages ate the whole internet.
My theory is that it's that on many of these sites there's no easy way to comment, like or otherwise publicly interact. Sure you could try and email the person but that takes effort and you have to talk directly to them, not to a crowd.
When you don't have to worry about a mob of negativity, you can write far more freely.
Yup, social media is a one-to-many relationship, and sometimes the messy many-to-many relationship. Web 1.0 sites have more have a one-to-one posture (unless they become exceedingly popular at least)
They didn’t eat the entire Internet. They didn’t even eat the web. They set up parallel walled gardens. The web is still there. Personal websites just don’t scale to the masses. This is fine and probably for the best.
If you've missed all the HN love for it over the past while, there's a search engine here: https://search.marginalia.nu/
which is trying to achieve just that
I get this metric but at what point is the cutoff? If a small home run website has good info and gets popular, and has to add more advertisements, do they then get deranked on the search engine that led people there?
> If a small home run website has good info and gets popular, and has to add more advertisements
More advertisements? Any advertisements make the site worse. More makes it more worse.
It's so inexpensive to have a website these days, even one that pulls in a substantial number of visitors, that it's hard to make an argument that ads are necessary to pay for hosting.
Oh for sure, just a hypothetical lol. And idk maybe you write software or something that you want to keep as free as you can, so ads make it doable to sustain that. There’s any number of valid reasons to advertise, and if it’s a site for content I support I’ll probably turn of ublock so long as the ads aren’t overwhelming or obstructing
That's kind of the point of wiby (the site that's doing the randomization in this post). They only index web 1.0 stuff.
Not quite sure what their definition of that is, since I've seen recently updated things. Without CSS? Without JS? Maybe just websites that never make a JS fetch request once they're loaded.
That speaks more to the gentrification of search engines and their results rather than the loss of small, independent websites.
Once upon a time, I could search for something on Yahoo or Google and get nothing but those kinds of websites in search results, even when some central repository sites like Wikipedia were starting to take root.
Everything changed when the SEO nation attacked, and nobody expected the social media inquisition.
It's both. Loss of discoverability leads to ecological collapse of personal website. There's little point when the only reader is destined to be its own author.
Period true search methods (webrings, curated indexes, portals and early search engines) are gone and so is the fighting chance for this kind of projects.
What I've found consistently scarier this past decade+ is the casualness and seeming inevitability with which vast swathes of the population can be captured by unfavorable technology and social spaces or narratives.
And yeah, what you and others here often enough describe(d) are the shadows on the wall. Keeping civilization and culture on track really is a constant struggle.
Vast swaths of the population are uninteresting rubes. Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter are all doing us a favor by keeping those people occupied and their drivel contained.
Isn’t hacker news doing the same thing for the most parts? This is a little rude but I went through your history and maybe you should be more careful who you call “uninteresting rubes” and “drivel”.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think you're in the category. I don't think anyone is. I'm just poking a little at your self awareness and your lack of respect toward your fellow people. I do think there is an issue with the walled gardens, but I don't think it's the people who use them. It's the psychological effect of having affirmation systems tied to everything you post. I'm sure most people would post waaaaaaaay less "uninteresting" content if it wasn't because of the dopamine chase. I'm guilty of it myself. I try to ask myself if I'm really trying to contribute or if I'm just posting to get likes, and sometimes it prevents me from posting things to social media sites. There are a lot of time where it doesn't though. You may not put much value in Reddits karma system, but what value do you put into your hacker news account? I know from my own experience that it's been fairly healthy for me to create a new account every time I reach a 1000 points. I hope that I'll eventually get to the point where I don't have to do that, but I'm not sure I'm there yet.
It's obviously up to you, but I'd encourage you to not so blatantly disregard other people for what they post on social media. Because social media is a game for our attention, and most of us chase that sweet dopamine rush, even though everything we post on social media sort of disappears after a day and is frankly invisible in the sea of sameness posted by our peers.
Speaking as someone else, I go on reddit because there are occasional domain experts. It's 99% repetitive drivel (I myself am guilty of the same) and 1% person who actually knows what they're talking about.
That number is proportional to %experts/%non-experts, and is inversely correlated with the size of a subreddit (though the AskHistorians subreddit remains an excellent exception), and is the reason why the NonCredibleDefense is usually more credible than the CredibleDefense.
I personally drifted to hackernews from reddit as a general "reddit", but I find it's probably wise to take with a grain of salt the legal/maths/physics/economics/"anything not related to computer science" opinions of the people here. It's probably a good general rule of thumb to only take advice from experts in their domains.
I’m a Reddit expat, the only app that made it usable is dead now so here I am. I know I won’t find talk on Dead Cells tips or Rocket League coaching, but at least there’s lots of good tech discussion and occasional political shitposting that feeds that part of my soul
That’s incredibly reductive and shows you maybe don’t spend time in these spaces based on your perceptions? Many of my friends are talented makers who use social media to communicate about what they do with friends and fans. I’ve learned a lot about knitting and crochet through finding people with those skills on social media. I’ve made strong personal connections with strangers far far from me. I’ve found groups to share and debate and discuss topics important to me.
And acting like “quarantining” people to keep them out of your other online spaces is a good thing? Gross. More access and spread of information helps everyone become more interesting, it spurs innovation, it fosters creativity.
I came to HN after the Reddit API stuff killed Apollo, and though I’ve been here before from search engines, I’m now really getting into the community. It’s been great to see different things and feel inspired to look at how I do thinks in my profession. I wish I had really spent more time here sooner, but fortunately for you I was relegated to my drivel on Reddit until now.
The MSM/MEM as population control vehicle/idiot honeypot is a salient angle though you quickly get into self-fulfilling prophecy stuff there. Perhaps it's me being overly pessimistic, but I too might have been captured by the mind-rot matrix if I had grown up with that shit, never knowing what was or could be.
I'm not and yet the fate of a population is not arbitrary. MSM is society-level technology and it's clearly doing something to it that would not have happened in its absence.
I'm seeing it in personal acquaintances, who get lost in the information garbage sphere and struggle to contextualize the places that unfavorably shape their belief system (not talking about niche crackpot sites, but trash media here).
This is the polar opposite of what I had hoped would happen with this technology before it got captured by economic incentives. And it's also not what would have happened, had this mold not proliferated, and slower but curated systems prevailed.
It's not all terrible, there's resilience and adaptation. And yet I cannot stop feeling we're dealing with a quite unwelcome phenomenon that weakens a sizable part of us who would profit from a more controlled information environment the most (the dumb get dumber, the smart get smarter, and everyone gets more distracted and fickle).
Mainstream social (or entertainment) media, by which I mean all the content consumption apps your typical non-tech parents or acquaintances in that age group know about (in my case Instagram, Facebook and ragebait meme groups but luckily not yet TikTok; the wider web outside news sites is pretty much unknown).
Reddit or Mastodon for instance I would not call mainstream from my standpoint, but I left the former site many years ago and have no idea about its current popularity (my only contemporary use is when it pops up in my searches as a sort of wildcard forum).
MSM usually means "Main Stream Media". So like broadcast and cable news and conventional newspapers. Overloading it to refer to social media is really confusing because social media is pretty much the opposite thing.
"Entertainment news" is a sub-genre of MSM, typically you see this on the cable news channels or the "opinion" section of a newspaper.
If you get your news from Facebook you aren't getting it from "the MSM" as that term is generally understood. I guess you could coin MSSM for "Main Stream Social Media" to differentiate Twitter from Mastodon (or Reddit from HN?) but honestly I think you can just type out "social media" and not die of fatigue.
These sites only get shared via some sort of centralized (or not) type of social media. AIM and MSN was the craze back then, you either saw web 1.0 stuff from your friends there, or coworkers via email.
Another aspect is that you could actually find these sites in the past. I have vague recollections of spending hours going through a bunch of garbage to find some goldmine Web 1.0 site. I don’t remember the last time I found an old site like these
This is reminiscent of StumbleUpon, which I used to spend hours on finding interesting sites in the aughts. Reddit later filled that void, but it was always a good time stumbling upon some obscure gem of a site.
Now it's some app abomination, but I still think there's a place for such a service.
Thanks. I loved that site. Modern-day generative art tools like MJ inspire the same sense of exploration, anticipation & inspiration.
On-topic: I'm starting to see a trend. Digg was big before Reddit. VC-imposed 2010 "upgrades" ruined Digg's simple interface and 60% fled to Reddit (as did I). StumbleUpon had it's own redesign disaster in 2011. Both replace a simple, fast, efficient interface, ideal for content consumption, with "design" and room for advertising.
Reddit made the same mistake in 2018, but was smart enough to retain old.reddit.com
Third party reddit apps saved it from a swift demise, but the API charges and associated forced closure of "competitors" must have had a detrimental effect on their traffic as well.
Stumbleupon literally built me as a person. All of my hobbies besides programming (came from Runescape, that classmates showed me) come from forums etc. Stumbleupon showed me, like conlangs via Tolkien's languages.
It took me here https://greem.co.uk/otherbits/jelly.html Nailing jelly to a wall: is it possible? Which I think is HN worthy in its own right. Also the author of that page and I have the same toaster.
> This page is copyright 2005 by Graeme Cole. What are you allowed to do with it? Pfft. Anything within the realms of common sense, really. I don't want to prescribe rigidly what people can and can't do with it, so I've decided on a benchmark. It's this: you're allowed to do with this page anything you wouldn't mind me doing with your cat. So yes, you can photoshop it for comedy effect, you can copy bits of it for illustrative purposes and so on, but you can't steal it and pass it off as your own.
Pretty sure the value of the CC licenses isn't that they invented any particular set of restrictions and freedoms, but that they applied enough lawyer energy so that the wording of those sets would be compatible with law systems.
> I conducted this experiment as a little diversion in the lazy few weeks between finishing my final year exams at university and graduating, back in June 2005.
Everything about that page screamed "I'm bored in a dorm." Nice to know my college-dar is still accurate.
Also, it would have been nice to test with flat masonry nails. I.e. not round shank.
Focus DIY, one of the stores that the author states his materials were sourced from, has been defunct since July 2011. Just to add some context to when this experiment might have taken place.
Edit: I see the page's copyright date is 2005, so it's probably safe to assume that's when the original experiment took place.
> Further research into the area might involve the nailing to the wall of a stronger jelly mix. Alternatively, the "wall" could be placed, nails first, into the jelly while it's setting, to allow the jelly to set around the nails. Then in the morning the bowl can be removed, leaving the jelly nailed to the wall.
Ahaha, but also, hmmm... thinking would it actually work if you allowed the jelly to set around the nails?
If you read further some commenters tried that and failed, along with setting straws into the jelly and nailing them and mixing solids into the jelly to improve the structural integrity. The results are only noted as mixed, so I assume they didn’t work out reliably.
I definitely have a few ideas: try smoother and surfaces to adhere to (does jelly suction to the surface?), set the jelly vertically in a box against the wall, try mixing cool whip into the jelly to thicken it…
> The fact that this page is now old enough to vote hasn't stopped the internet rediscovering it. Much as I would like keep everything preserved exactly as it was as an example of the older, simpler web, some of the links above had become dead or worse, so they've been removed.
> For those asking about the toaster: as I recall, it was better at toasting the middle and bottom of the bread than the top.
You had to ask and apparently I have nothing to better to do on a Saturday night. It's a Russell Hobbs Model 5569, it says it has a "microchip" inside. If I was to hazard a guess it's at least 25 years old (the post is 18 so sounds reasonable). It actually fits a piece of toast, even thick pieces or crumpets which a lot of modern toasters don't. It does require the toast flipping since it does one side more than the other but that's not a hardship. A single flip on about "2" does a nice golden brown.
Toasters that cannot fit crumpets should be a violation of some aspect of the UN Charter on Human Rights.
I used to also have that toaster with the "microchip." It sounded impressive at the time. Now I want to tear one open and see what sort of "microchip" it uses. A 555?
A cheap toaster these days will use a toaster ASIC rather than a general purpose microcontroller or timer. PT8A2514 [1] is one example. Another surprising type of ASICs I've come across are vape ASICS [2].
Maybe that's what I could have done with Butterfly Labs[1] Jalapeno (sic, no ñ) devices I was given, all laser-etched with "WARRANTY VOID". They could only do SHA256(SHA256(x)), and man did they put out a lot of heat. Reportedly, the chip was unusually dense and took a long time to validate. I'd have needed to alter the thermal throttling behaviour in the firmware, I suppose.
[1] Yes, the one that was seized be the FTC after some of the company officers (and a "not an officer, but functionally an officer") decided to do things that got most of them busted.
My grandmother has a toaster from 1958 that has the smoothest glide function I have ever witnessed on a toaster.
The toast doesn't pop up, it floats up, quietly. You have to pay attention to is so your toast doesn't go cold because it is so stealthy.
It broke after a few years of use way back in the day, roughly 1960 or so, as the story goes) and my granddad fixed it, losing a few screws from the toaster in the process, but it has worked for 63 years since its repair without a single fault or flaw.
I can guarantee that this is an entirely mechanical toaster, analogue only, no chips or ASICs involved, and no toaster you can get your hands on in the great wild world will toast better toast more elegantly than this one.
How long before I can buy a toaster that includes an LLM? That way I can describe the toast to it that I want, thusly:
Dear enchanting toaster, I beseech thee to weave a symphony of flavor and texture, guided by the poetic brushstrokes of my desires. Listen, oh marvelous appliance, as I unfold a tale of toast that shall stir the heart and captivate the senses.
In this culinary journey, I yearn for a slice of bread transformed into a work of edible art — a toast that embodies the very essence of ethereal romance. Picture, if you will, my slice of pristine bread within you, its delicate countenance kissed by the gentle touch of dawn's first light. Let it bask in the warmth of your toasting chamber, embracing the fiery caress that will awaken its hidden splendor.
With tender patience, allow your heat to coax forth a golden radiance upon the bread's surface, reminiscent of sun-kissed fields at twilight. Let the transformation be a gradual dance, like the opening petals of a blossoming rose, revealing a spectrum of hues that shall ignite the senses. Let the crust turn into a testament of commitment, a delicate mosaic of crispness that hints at the harmony of opposites.
But, dear toaster, I implore you to preserve the heart of the bread, the very core that holds the promise of softness and tenderness. Let it retain its supple embrace, reminiscent of a lover's touch, inviting and yielding. May its very essence exude warmth, like an embrace shared under a starlit sky, a comforting sanctuary to nourish both body and soul.
And as the toast emerges from your magical realm, dear toaster, let it carry with it a captivating aroma—an olfactory sonnet that weaves itself delicately into the air, whispering of grains toasted to perfection. Let it permeate the senses, inviting the beholder to partake in a communion of flavors, a delicate dance upon the taste buds.
Oh, wondrous toaster with an AI's soul, may you manifest this vision of toast, a masterpiece created from mere bread and heat. As I entrust my desires to your intelligence, I await with eager anticipation, ready to indulge in a moment of pure culinary enchantment.
The “old web” is still there, as evidenced by this page and the submission. We didn’t lose anything. New things just came and made more noise. You can still set up a static HTML site in an afternoon.
> jelly (from the French gelée)[29] is a clear or translucent fruit spread made by a process similar to that used for making jam, with the additional step of filtering out the fruit pulp after the initial cooking.
When making them we (UK) tend to use pectin as the thickening agent for jams/marmalades and gelatin for jelly. You can buy sugar with pectin added marketed as 'jam sugar'.
I really can't comprehend how web 1.0 and 2.0 are two completely different Earths. The new web makes me hate people to the point of misanthropy while the old web makes me love people and see the potential in the world all over again. We've got to do something about this. Well, I guess OP already is.
I concur with your statement. Going through random sites for an hour, it gave me thinking back 25 years ago, when going from rings to rings of websites, look at them, reading the interesting ones and finally bookmarking them to be able to come back to them.
A complete different way to present a personal topic and/or interest than the current one. Right now, it is blogs that trying to gather an audience for whatever purposes, commercial websites, social medias etc. This compared to websites that gathered personal interests, or one specific topic that tries to be self-contained.
I don't know maybe it is the nostalgia, or how I have first interacted with the web, that brings back those contrasts.
There was Web 1.0. Then there was Web 2.0. Now we find ourselves in the era of Web Pi (3.14159). This humorous term comes from one of my favourite comments that I once found on HN. Quoting the comment from <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30139081> below:
> Nice read. Firm supporter of Web Pi (3.1415). When it comes to building for the web today, I'm always amazed that "so much can be done with so little" and yet the default is the opposite - "so much is needed to deliver so little" - so irrational! Where did we go wrong? I wonder what Web Euler (2.71828) would have looked like?
In that same thread, I made a comment that my favourite phase of the web was Web Golden (1.61803). That was my attempt at extending their humour. Web Golden refers to the very short-lived sweet spot between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. If you're looking for a moderate dose of nostalgia, I have elaborated that golden phase a little more in my blog post here: <https://susam.net/maze/web-golden.html>.
By the way, the Wiby link on this HN story took me to this website: <https://www.evanmiller.org/>. Really neat website with an interesting collection of articles.
Wow, I was not expecting to be taken to such an interesting website on my first click: http://www.goodearthgraphics.com/ This site has an underground cave directory by state, cave virtual tours with photos, cave type descriptions, cave photography tips and much more. I may just use this website to plan my next road trip and explore some caves.
The brutalist/undesigned style is an interesting vibe, but there are very simple things that could be done to radically improve information architecture and readability without sacrificing minimalism.
They had their charm, sure, but messy table-based layouts, fluorescent color schemes, scrolling text and flashing gifs aren't exactly what I would call readable. Give me Web 0.1 instead (black text, white background, maybe 5 lines of styling).
I was about to comment how bad Web 1.0 design works on mobile and then I remembered that Safari was originally designed with affordances to deal with the pre-responsive web.
Uh oh. I watched the TikTok video first, and thought "haha, that's stupid, pretty funny", but then clicked on the rosemary link. The woman, from prescribed medicine containing silver, considers her life permanently ruined/diminished such that she wrote a book warning others.
> We are well-liked by Black people so we're psyched (since lots of Black people don't like lots of White people)!! We thought it'd be cool to honor our exceptional status with a ROCKIN' domain name and a killer website!!
I was curious who would pay to keep a joke domain name and website up for 20+ years, and it turns out it’s Chelsea Peretti (Brooklyn 99) and her brother Jonah Peretti (Buzzfeed and HuffPo).
He has also a Twitter presence. All in all it seems, he was determened to stick with his self fullfilling prophecy.
The only update on this site on this is:
"Update (2000-04-01): My sarcastic pleas for some e-mail have finally been answered. Take a look at this letter from a hysterical female reader, which I think perfectly demonstrates the point of this entire essay. "
That’s interesting, I got roped into this man’s website which is similar. I felt very sad about him and tried to find out if he ever found love. He was very conflicted about it and on his website he states he was 50 when it was written.
His personal criteria for attractiveness is pretty funny (emphasis mine): "Without going into the specifics of precisely which traits I admire, I will say that for a girl to be considered really beautiful to me, she should fall *at least two* standard deviations above the norm".
His homepage has a link to his mastodon, and it's mostly about work, but there's a picture of a broken egg on a kitchen floor, and 2 ferrets around it. The text says "Our little kitchen assistants are always happy to help clean up after accidents.". So... maybe yes? In theory he could also be living in a flatshare.
Just the other day I was thinking that 99% of things is in echochaimer; same dozen of companies pushing same dozen of narratives over then same dozen of apps and the internet is boring and hopeless and everything is the same now.
There was a site before, that would randomly show you different websites based on the category of interest. But it got purchased by another company and turned into shit.
It is really fascinating that the first website I went to is exactly named "Why bkuhn's Website Looks Like Crap", where someone explains why he is sticking to Web 1.0.
Conworlding is a big thing, although people mostly work out the politics and history of invented nations, or their languages, fauna is a very honorable pursuit too!
Remember stumbling into amateur written sci-fi stories with layouts like that. Downloading them to read on CRT monitor till late in the night, and losing them forever the next time windows would destroy itself.
The art of ninja as expounded upon by a master ninja. I mean, my brain says it's a joke, but it's so extensive and has books for sale.
The site is filled with gems, like this piece of advice on tailoring your training: "If I were in the Ring ... I'd have to regulate my diet and do a lot of running for stamina. When I'm a bouncer, I practice drinking and smoking."
Ashida Kim is a rabbit hole. He was very serious about being a Ninja. He also wrote a terrible book about all of his supposed sexual exploits. Real narcissist.
As a kid, I found windows to be extremely intuitive - no matter what I was doing, if I thought something was possible, the feature would always be exactly where I’d expect to be.
And by windows I mean windows and the desktop applications of the time. They worked well and adhered to the same ui principles, vs every saas tool now that does its own thing. Even the fabled UX of macs never compared to me, I always thought their design was overrated. (Not today, of course).
Something about UI designers back then was just different - they really seemed to prioritize putting everything in its place vs trying to make everything wow you/look good. Everything was organized very logically.
Today, a lot of websites are terrible. I’m not being overly dramatic, there are still a lot that are fine or even good, but so many are garbage. They hijack/break standard browser functionality (cut/paste, scroll bars/behavior, right click, etc.) and the UI itself can be frustrating. You might be able to quickly tell what’s clickable vs not, what’s expandable/collapsible vs not, bad text/contrast, etc etc.
> As a kid, I found windows to be extremely intuitive - no matter what I was doing, if I thought something was possible, the feature would always be exactly where I’d expect to be.
This. People had computer problems and asked me for help. I didn't know the answer. But I knew how to quickly find the most likely place where I could diagnose/fix things. And most of the time I was right.
> And by windows I mean windows and the desktop applications of the time. They worked well and adhered to the same ui principles, vs every saas tool now that does its own thing.
And even when these saas tools try to emulate the Windows experience, they fail miserably. What you get is a cursed hodgepodge of double-clicking on links and key bindings that don't work.
The web has a simple but powerful UI. But casual users have trouble learning it, because a significant fraction of websites don't follow that UI. And then there is also the madness of advertisements on the web which makes everything even more confusing.
Ha, sounds like we had a similar experiences, especially with helping others.
Interesting the impact that can have, years later I work in tech in large part because I was actually able to use and configure the computer I had back then.
I have no relation to this site, but as a kid it helped get me into custom electronics to scratch itches I had when building Lego Mindstorms robots - namely when you wanted to sense something Lego didn't have a sensor for.
1.0 was mostly static web pages with content changes largely driven by manual page updates to static web resources. This was the era where most sites were powered by an httpd host.
2.0 was when databases and ajax (JavaScript async) started to take over as a web content delivery form. Often content delivery moved from semantic page navigation flows to "single page applications" where the client state was often held client side and pushed to the server when asking for new content.
3.0 is the marketing term for crypto based projects that are trying to sell "a brand new web" where there are no longer centralized services providing content, and somewhere it all gets glued together with crypto forgetting that most of the modern web users are running on cell phones with limited cpu and more importantly battery constraints. It's also part of a proud group of technologies that garnered a catchy marketing term to describe the movement before the practical implementations emerged (much unlike web 1.0, 2.0 before it).
I fully agree that 3.0 is the marketing term for decentralized cryptobro stuff, but isn't it also a term that tentatively belonged to a more generic idea of a regular web that iterates beyond web 2.0?
Right, that's what I mean. Of course it won't stop people, people who are evidently even less acquainted with the subject of than me before I asked my question, from giving confidently incorrect responses.
I don't believe that their version of the term web 3.0 really took off the way that the web 2.0 buzzword did, but I vaguely understand the term having a meaning independent of the meaning given to it by crypto enthusiasts.
Oh it definitely had a meaning before the crypto people started using it. When I think of Web3 I think of "never really got clearly defined, those semantic web guys got close" and then being used for crypto.
Wikipedia backs me up too[0].
> 08:27, 24 October 2006 Lumos3 talk contribs 18,470 bytes +36 Web 3 redirects here so should be shown as a synonym
So at the end of 06 Wikipedia was referring to semantic web already as Web 3. The first release of bitcoin wasn't until 09.
Web 1.0 is any website with the doctag <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//SoftQuad Software//DTD HoTMetaL PRO 6.0::19990601::extensions to HTML 4.0//EN">; it's frames based designs, table based layouts, blink tags and under construction gifs.
Web 2.0 is the transition from homepages and webmasters to content and platforms, users are producing the content and platform owners get rich off ads. It also coincides with the shift to AJAX and web applications that had logic in the front-end, but this isn't really part of the actual definition.
Web 3.0 was briefly the semantic web. It didn't really take off and was largely forgotten when the cryptobros relaunched the term. New Web 3 is all about using decentralization, blockchains and cryptocurrencies and NFTs to somehow solve the problems with Web 2.0.
Today it’s primarily a load of nonsense that cryptocurrency promoters use to make people want to buy tokens related to some useless website which has no users except the other token holders.
Back in 2005, “web 2.0” was a marketing term meant to indicate optimism that dynamic web applications could transcend the economic disappointments of the dot-com boom and bust. It was always nebulous and poorly defined, and the only reason we’re talking about “web 2.0” almost two decades later is the aforementioned crypto promoters.
The boundary is fuzzy, as others have pointed out. If there's one specific technology that serves as a definite boundary it's the use of XMLHttpRequest in javascript running on the browser, later dubbed "AJAX", which is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
It was first implemented (non-standard) around 2001 in Windows 2000, Outlook and IE 5. Subsequently other browsers (Mozilla in particular) adopted it and it became a def facto standard.
Not every site the uses/used Ajax is fully Web 2.0, but they are definitely not 1.0. The affect on web development was transformative, resulting in "DHTML", or Dynamic HTML. Webmail, for example, in the gmail, first released in 2004, you see a fully Web 2.0 site. You might say it's the beginning of what's called the Single Page Application. At a time when the average home internet connection was still pretty slow over dial-up, eliminating most round-trips was a game-changer.
As far as I understand, web 1.0 is browser makes a request -> backend delivers some html, with subsequent requests just for css/images/iframes. This also had a characteristic style with layouts made from tables and simple but busy designs. Web 2.0 is many of the web apps you see today, where you don’t need to load a page to fetch new content, but instead asynchronous JavaScript grabs it and edits the html — think gmail or Google maps. Web 3.0 is unclear to me, but it seems like most people who use it refer to decentralized or peer to peer applications and crypto.
I don't think there is, because even here there is disagreement about whether a web server that returns html and css without using NodeJS is 1.0 or 2.0.
It’s prone to MITM attacks and it allows snooping for what pages are visited. Some US ISPs use(d) this vulnerability to inject ads into pages. On a public/shared network you might be vulnerable to automated attacks.
*A random website from a curated list of what one thinks represents “Web 1.0”. A lot of these go beyond plain HTML/CSS websites; for example I got one with a Flash game (emulated using Ruffle [1]).
I love this. Does anyone know how the list was compiled? I would suspect a custom web crawler that only indexes sites using certain tags. Which makes me wonder if there are any sites that would qualify with the exception of a modern js advertisement someone slapped on. I
The metrics for websites are flawed. For instance, time-on-site. If a user spends more time on a site before clicking back, maybe that site is more useful. Or maybe that site has made it purposely difficult to find the key information, such as recipe websites that place lots of unnecessary text and ads before to actual recipe. But that strategy gets the site better search engine rankings, which in turn ranks them higher and drives more traffic, which drives more ad revenue.
When I encounter a site where the first thing I see is a pop up to subscribe, or prompt about opting out of cookies, or 60 second ad to watch a 30 second video, I just leave the site.
You cannot apply directly for our Aloha Award. It is only granted to the top websites which win our Pau Hana Award. (Only about 5% of Pau Hana Award-winning sites go on to win the coveted "Aloha Award").
Pretty rigorous for a website that specializes in the history of breakfast food spokestoons.
When google was launched, you'd have some curiosity about any random topic, or a specific question, and google would very likely give you some hobbyist website like is common among these that answers your question and more. The introduction of google was a completely mindblowing demonstration of how big the web already was back when it was a niche thing.
The web is much bigger now but in many ways feels much smaller. Everything is so samey, and there's so much consolidation that you don't really need to leave the top few sites.
Interesting comment about the focus on the "info".
I wonder if, in some subtle way, Wikipedia is somewhat responsible for the decline of these kinds of sites. If you want to quickly get some (probable) facts and information on a given topic, wikipedia is where you go.
The first time I found and read wikipedia was after discovering warhammer 40k. There was a single page with fluff about everything up to that point. It took me a few days to read through after school. The effort in that article could have made 10+ sites.
Thanks for that. I like it very much. Great retrospective in times, when even a daily newspaper HTML page queries dozens of Websites via JS in the background - unnoticed by most. Actually, my last system kept me thinking that HTML5+CSS plus GET/POST and a reasonable Template-"Engine" (think velocity) should be enough. No script, no SPA. Enough for content-oriented stuff, even for simple web apps.
I landed at http://www.lunarsight.com/ and scrolled to the end, where I saw a flashing advertisement. That felt a bit out of place, so I checked the URL was safe and clicked it. It was a joke.
Those little touches of personality just seem almost entirely absent from the new platform-based web.
Found this great tale which led me down further down rabbit holes in the aftermath of reading it. It also dawned on me how long ago 2001 is: the dates on these events were prior to Sept 11 2001. https://www.angelfire.com/trek/caver/
There's something indescribably magical about visiting a site that's only been visited by ~8k people max and hasn't been updated since 1998. Like landing on a secret world.
Browsing these has made me realize the main benefits of modern web design is probably responsive layout. Some of these site hold up, but some really don't depending on how you browse them (ultra wide desktop vs smaller window vs mobile). Certainly you could fix some of the worst issues with classic html tricks but you'd have to made tradeoffs.
I really hate it when web sites deliberately constrain their content to a tiny vertical column down the middle of the browser window. I have a 27 inch wide screen display. I paid for the whole 27 inches of the thing. When I stretch my browser window across it, I expect the web site content to fill it. I don’t expect the site to fill 2/3 of it with white space.
Yea, I have heard the whole “research shows, people can’t read long horizontal lines of text” excuse. Blah blah blah. Don’t care. If I find myself having trouble reading a long horizontal line of text, I can easily… [brace yourself for this one] resize my browser window! Let the user decide.
If you (the web developer) really feel like you just have to do something different when the browser window is too wide for your sensibilities… maybe divide the content into columns or something. Anything but useless white space.
Hit a few clicks and start getting some random, nostalgic, fast, and straight-to-the-point sites.
All of the sites are quite calm; subconsciously, my brain was waiting for the Accept Cookies banner and/or the Hi, How can I help you robot popup, but nothing appeared to distract you. What a lost era! I miss those old days :(
I learned a lot about drugs today, thanks to this site. I’m not quite sure that all the info was correct (a statement that crystal meth doesn't create physical addiction was quite surprising), but still, I learned a lot of new drug names today.
Thanks for this, wiby and many of the results work great on 2G GSM with my Sony Ericsson W810i. It's getting tough to find sites that support old SSL or non-SSL. It can't handle the newer standards as it was made in 2005.
What is really fascinating about these old websites is that they are still up and running. The content in the link you posted is over two decades old. But they are still paying the money for the domain name and keeping the website alive!
Anyhoo this is fun, thanks for sharing this, OP. I miss the old days sometimes.
I didn't have access to BBS or MUD or whatever in my country, so web 1.0 is what remember most from browsing the windows 95 machine in my dad's office. I think the first website I ever opened was yahoo, I think.
my father is deceased now, the world has changed so much since then.
The first link is a satire Christian website. It looks promising from the homepage. "Armed Churchgoers Slaughter Thousands of Endangered Species in Rousing Show of Support for President Trump!" "Kristian Kids Korner" "Why Did Jesus Have Long Hair Like a Homo?...
Another way to find web 1.0 websites is to browse with Javascript on temporary whitelist only. Any JS dependent modern site will fail to display and you can safely close the tab knowing it was commercial crap anyway.
I got a link celebrating Uncle Tom's Cabin. Although to be fair to the page, it does feature an 'African-American Responses' section, right next to the 'Pro-Slavery Responses'.
I much prefer the era of thoughtful (or at least deliberate) updates to static websites in the earlier Web rather than the firehose stream of hot takes (90% BS) we have today with social media
> I much prefer the era of thoughtful (or at least deliberate) updates to static websites in the earlier Web rather than the firehose stream of hot takes (90% BS) we have today with social media
There are probably a lot more thoughtful updates to static websites today than in the earlier Web; I doubt that the people who had static websites in the earlier Web are the same who post hot takes on social media.
Hey is there any way to bookmark this on my iPad? I cant find a way to create a favorite, it seems Safari doesnt allow to edit the url, and it is bookmarking the redirected page.
This is so nostalgic. And if you collected these websites it will be nice, if you could share the url's of all those web 1.0 websites on a google sheet or pastebin.
Did, you know? Html table for layout are not harmful (screen reader can go thru them). HTML 2D document instead of 1D document.
You add basic (x)html forms on top of that, you can do wonders, without a big tech web engine (no surprise from them pushing the web to work only in their engines...).
import flask
import random
app=flask.Flask()
@app.route('/')
def random_redir():
with open('urls.txt') as of:
return flask.redirect(random.choice(of.readlines()))
Premature optimization may sometimes be unadvisable, but in this case the optimized version uses half the memory, is two orders of magnitude faster, and doesn't let your users DOS you by triggering huge file reads on each request.
> doesn't let your users DOS you by triggering huge file reads on each request.
I understood what you were trying to do on your first reply – "Prolly don't want to read the file on every request though" – no need to repeat yourself.
plese remember:
1. it's pseudo code, the optimisation is superfluous
Why? Not just because of nostalgia.
Web 1.0 sites had a different set of UI idioms, which seem unintuitive to us, as we're too set in our new ways now. If you get past the fact they're ugly by modern standards, you'll see these sites accomplishing amazing results through startlingly simple means.
It's an excellent source of inspiration, and if you combine those ideas with modern design, but keep it minimal, I believe there's a lot of potential to create something compelling.
This is the same reason for which I like reviewing old OS GUIs, old apps and even UIs in movies sometimes (but not the modern take which just slaps animated circles and gradients on everything, I mean actual UIs showing something readable/usable).