I think the comments here are a great example of why this idea always sounds better in nostalgic reminiscence than in practice: As I write this, nearly half of the comments here are complaining about this website. There are complaints about requiring JavaScript, the font size, the design, the color choices, the animations. Complaints about everything the designer did to make this site unique and personal, which was the entire point of the exercise. This is coming from a site that supposedly attracts the target audience for this type of page.
I think that social networks are not meant to be moderated at scale. We are meant to have what I call 'overlay networks': we occupy the same infrastructure but see content filtered to the style that befits us. Most social networks have the notion of friend symmetry, but I think that read-time filtering needn't be like that.
To that end, I made a trivial Chrome extension and an equivalent CRUD backend that just helps me store lists of users I like and dislike. The former are highlighted, and the latter are simply removed from comments.
My personal tool is particularly idiosyncratic but I think information sieving is particularly important these days, so I recommend everyone build something like this for themselves. One thing I've found it particularly helpful with is the usual outrage bait.
Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place. It has become political (toward the left), sclerotic, and bitterly nostalgic. It's bad and no longer represents the future. I notice it every time I visit. It's sad.
> Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place. It has become political (toward the left), sclerotic, and bitterly nostalgic. It's bad and no longer represents the future. I notice it every time I visit. It's sad.
An easy way to help with the negativity is to stop leaving bait comments
Reminds me of on interaction a few months ago where I mentioned the left-right spectrum in passing and someone accused me of making HN a worse place, only to call me a "snowflake" in their very next response! As usual, "things shouldn't be so political" is often uttered from a highly-political sense of discomfort. The quintessential example for me was its usage in US anti-desegregation rhetoric in the 1960s, alongside its resurgence in the anti-DEI movement today -- demanding that no one discuss our shared institutions is too often an endorsement of them, rather than an honest effort to focus on something else.
"toward the left" aside, it's always a little frustrating to read the ubiquitous "this place sucks" comments on here and Reddit. I have tons of problems with HN--both petty (markdown when??) and fundamental (SV/PE has metastasized in a discomforting way...)--but I'm still here because I love it, and think it's one of the best communities the internet has to offer.
Specific critiques of specific people or ideas are always welcome, but comments like "everyone here is curmudgeonly" just makes me wonder why they bother to log on in the first place...
That's true of the US population in general too. Their quality of life has been decreasing due to accelerated globalization (sans the top ~10% of asset holders).
HN is so depressing, but at the same time so Im addicted to it. It’s like tiktok but for people who enjoy plain text and hacking related stuff. When I first visited HN more than 10 years ago (without account) like, 90% of the content was exciting and you got to learn something. Nowadays it’s about 40-50%, and the rest is crap (including comments). I have been trying to leave HN, let’s see if I can do it in 2026.
I do feel like 40-50% signal ratio is still good compared to 90%
HN did give me some leads in the start of just cool things to follow and I have been able to make an understanding of what things interest me and what don't due to it. And this has also been the reason I read a lot of comments etc. and content here, maybe more than I should.
I don't know to me, building my own website and forum etc. are possible but they feel complicated and I still can't seem to get eye balls. On Hackernews Comments its easier personally to write something, get feedback on it, (improve?/learn?)
Of course if one wants to optimize for eyeballs, they can probably go for reddit or twitter maxxing or similar because cmon this is exactly the stuff the article is talking about from what I see.
Hackernews does indeed sit on the perfect spot. I feel like if you want more informationally dense topics, perhaps lobsters can be good for ya.
While the first half might be true[1], I would argue the second half definitely isn’t. It’s more nuanced than that.
Depends on how you define left and right. To a large degree it’s issue specific. I have seen this site being described as a “equivalent of a nazi bar” in some place. Now I don’t agree with that, just pointing out people seem to have a very different view of this site depending on what they see.
I have definitely observed an increase in Skepticism and that mostly can be traced to the real world events. Open source rug pulls, the way Tesla as a brand turned out, the libertarian ethos not panning out, the startup darlings like airbnb, Uber…etc., ending up with negative impacts in people’s lives all have drained the optimism to a certain degree.
In that way it does represent the future - people are running into issues which are societal and can’t be resolved with just hacker ethos and technology and they actively discuss it here. This place wouldn’t represent the future if it was still hyping the next tech solution without any critical commentary
1 - I haven’t visited the site over long enough to make the judgement.
Constantly? As if it were a psychological compulsion? So often that dang had to make a guideline about it, which no one even attempts to follow?
Two actually - the guideline against being "curmudgeonly" is separate from the guideline against going on a tilt because you get triggered by any website that doesn't look and act as much like plaintext as possible.
And yet if someone so much as cracks a joke they get rapped across the knuckles and lectured about a rule that doesn't actually exist (no humor allowed)?
Yes, that's negative. That's a culture of performative misanthropy.
Once you understand this, you realize maybe it's not that something is wrong with LLMs, crypto, Google, Apple, Windows, Amazon, the US, Rust, not-rust, JavaScript, Israel, copyright & VCs. It's just a negative place.
I am not sure, I would say I just joined hackernews for a year so I don't know the whole situation.
but the way I see it, If I assume you are correct, hackernews is in a bit of rough spot because there was this one comment which did some analysis and it feels like hackernews is definitely saturating a bit/(peaked?)
From my personal experience, I feel like we all just use reddit (as the article says) and so we just deal with the annoyances with it and not look for anything else. Or perhaps we join some discord communities.
If people who are within Hackernews are resonating this statement, its in a tough spot because people say such things.
Perhaps, its that Hackernews grew too big for some people and its too small for others. Perhaps one side's currently on reddit not even knowing about it and the other's complaining it on hackernews
And perhaps there's also a middle sweet spot where people aren't complaining but nobody hears them either because they got nothing to complain.
But from the outside what people see are other people complaining about hackernews on hackernews. Same goes for redditors too I guess.
I checked your comment and it says 5 months, I had been assuming you were here for years from the tone but perhaps I was wrong.
I don't know but to me hackernews felt like an information arbitrage of sorts which had these tid-bits of info which made me feel better if I ever were to do somethings like this or gave me confidence in myself in finding the right tool for the right job
If you are tired of hackernews, I would suggest you to open up a fediverse lemmy instance about anything related to hackernews because of the masses perhaps, then you would have less people but more signal since clearly someone would be interested if you create a lemmy instance about similar topics to hackernews but the problem then becomes is if that thing stays idle.
I see your concerns but do you have any suggestions, I see dang and others around here, I am sure if they could do something about it, they probably would?
The real trend is toward personalization on the user’s side of things. Instead of interacting directly with a website, your web-browsing agent will extract the parts of the website you actually care about and present them to you in whatever format, medium and design style you prefer.
Where is that a trend? It really doesn’t work in most cases because often the information and the design are not separable. One needs the other to convey the intended meaning.
Yup. Pretty much everything seems better when you're being nostalgic. And that is singularly due to the human tendency to forget the bad parts and remember only the good ones (it's a solid self care strategy).
I had fond memories of programming my CP/M machine back in the day, built a re-creation and was painfully aware of how limiting a 25 line by 80 character display could be. Nostalgia, remembering the good times, reality some things really sucked too.
Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
Back in the early days of the web and SGML, the focus was reversed, which is to say "web" sites would just publish content and the "user" could apply what ever style they liked to get a presentation that worked for them. This infuriated web site authors who had their own idea about how their web site should look and act on your display. You were the consumer and they presented and if you didn't like it go somewhere else. You can still see vestiges of that with things like "use this font to show things" Etc.
So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
Y'know, the thing which you did is probably the best way to make use out of nostalgia.
Like of course you had your CP/M machine and it had its restrictions but you are seeing them now with the added information of the current stage
There were also things that you liked too and still like and they may be better than somethings in current time
So you can then take things that you like and add it to modern or remove previous restrictions by taking access to modern upgrades.
> So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
I think the problem's more so spiritual. The social contract is sort of falling off in most countries. So there is a nostalgia for the previous social contracts and the things which were with them like the old internet because to be honest the current monopolistic internet does influence with things like lobbying and chrony capitalism to actively break that social contract via corrupt schemes.
People want to do something about it, but speaking as a young guy, we didn't witness the old era so we ourselves are frustrated too but most don't create manifesto's due to it and try to find hobbies or similar things as we try to find the meaning of our life and role in the world
But for the people who have witnessed the old internet, they have that nostalgia to end up to and that's partially why they end up creating a manifesto of sorts themselves.
The reality of the situation to me feels like things are slipping up in multiple areas and others.
Do you really feel that the govt. has best interests for you, the average citizen?
Chances are no, So this is probably why liberterian philosophy is really spreading and the idea of freedom itself.
Heck I joined linux and the journey behind it all because I played a game and it had root level kernel access and I realized that there really was no way to effectively prove that it wasn't gone (it was chinese company [riot] so I wasn't sure if I wanted it)
I ended up looking at linux and then just watched enough videos until I convinced myself to use it one day and just switched. But Most people are really land-locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, even tiny nuances can be enough for some.
using Linux was the reason why I switched from trying to go from finance to computer science. I already knew CS but I loved finance too but In the end I ended up picking CS because I felt like there were chances of making real impact myself which were more unique to me than say chartered accountant.
So my point is, I am not sure if I would even be here if I had even the slightest of nuances. Heck, I am not even much of a gamer but my first distro was nobara linux which focused on gaming because I was worried about gaming or worried about wine or smth. So I had switched to nobara.
Looking now, I say to others oh just use this or that and other things and see it as the most obvious decisions sometimes but by writing this comment, I just wanted to say that change can be scary sometimes.
> Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
I would say let the man have his freedom. I would consider having more choices to be less of a burden than few choices in most occasions. Of course one's mind feels that there is a sweet spot but in longevity I feel like its the evolution of ideas and more ideas means more the competition and we will see more innovation as such.
You can only be blind for things you cannot notice.
What you cannot notice is what shapes your "noticement" ability.
The best design is the shape of your perception.
The best design is already implemented in your reception of reality.
The quest for "good design" is a game.
On the other hand, your aesthetical culture and the shape of your perception create a system in which elements are more or less "understandable", "readable", "accessible".
The game of design does not have stable rules and is inconsistent among world populations.
"No design" is impossible, the nature of reality is such that entities are embodied. To be embodied is to be rendered in the game of design.
Ideas are not embodied OR their apparent embodiment in the game of design (electrical information ?) does not contain their content for the observer.
Sure, the medium is the message. But if the medium distracts from the message it means they are not aligned well
(side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology.
That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)
The site indeed is trying to be an artistic treatise, as opposed to being a clear, easy-to-read manifesto. It touches many themes I have read about many times, so I skimmed most of the content. It came to the expected indie-web conclusions and recommendations.
Indie Web, while nice and fascinating, lacks the large audience. You write things down, and nobody cares. Well, maybe a few friends who keep an eye, and a hiring manager when your candidacy is considered for another job.
Some people are fine with that, and just enjoy the process of producing content, and seeing it published. They are a minority. Most people come to consume more than to produce, and to get quick feedback.
The most efficient way for an indie website to gain an audience is to be briefly featured on one of these bad, terrifying behemoths of the current Web, like Reddit, or Xitter, or, well, HN. A few dozen people will bookmark it, or subscribe to the RSS feed. Sites that are true works of art and craft, like https://ciechanow.ski/, will get remembered more widely, but true works of art are rare.
It is, definitely, very possible to build a rhizome of small indie sites, along the lines of Web 1.0. But they would also benefit from a thoughtful symbiosis with the "big bad" giants of the modern Web.
Welcome to the web. It’s this behavior that has led me to pursue more analog endeavors. I still need it to work but when I’m not working, I’m not online.
I'm quite enthusiastic about my FreshRSS instance. I got to this article/these comments from there, and I've even worked out how to add YouTube subscription feeds, and comics. Just a straightforward, chronological list of the things I've chosen to follow--no ads, no BS. It's quite refreshing, I think it's had a material impact to improve my mental health. Of course, the things that the people I follow create, and the timing of their publications is inherently influenced by algorithms, removing my direct exposure to algorithmically-defined infinite feeds has been significant.
On the newsletter front, I really don't keep up with them and have thought about reducing the number I have showing up every week. I mostly just mass delete a lot of the mail in my personal inbox a couple times a week.
I wouldn't mind getting back to reading more from RSS over aggregators, even though I often appreciate the comments on HN. Aside: it's a shame that so many sites removed comment sections, and any attempt to create a comment extension for any site turns into a cesspool.
Webmentions in particular are a totally unserious hobbiest technology that will never reach anything like mass adoption. That the author was willing to offer this as any kind of solution really colored my view of the rest of piece.
It’s like suggesting that everyone become HAM radio operators or join Gemini (the protocol).
I've read most of this page and am surprised that nobody has (either positively or negatively) mentioned fandom.com, a wiki-farm founded over 20 years ago by one of Wikipedia's founders and another Wikipedia enthusiast. Formerly "Wikicities" then "Wikia", now "Fandom". Hosts about a third of a million communities. Supported by ads at top and side of pages, but logged-in users see very little advertising. Very secure, rarely exploited by malicious bots or other hackers. Numerically dominated by game, TV, and film sites, but many non-entertainment communities as well. The biggest English-languages sites are listed at https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Hub:Big_wikis but numerous other languages are included.
Internet is amazing, it is the best invention of humanity, and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
Those who enjoy saying "I do not learn enough, I do not improve myself enough, I do not work hard enough" (but you say "the humanity" instead of "I"), that is just your own fault. Let people use the internet the way they want to use it.
> each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?
You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.
It also could happen because tech companies have optimized their products to maximize the amount of time that people spend on them, often in ways that directly result in a worse user experience (by showing ads instead of the most relevant search results, for example).
The original poster said “more useful”, not “better”, so you’re already arguing something different than what was said. I might spend more time with something less useful because its time efficiency is one of the things that makes it less useful now.
Regarding your argument of “better” you seem to be arguing by definition.
Edit: I now realize you are the original poster who said “more useful”, so why did you change it?
When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much every freedom that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to drugs, it scares me quite a lot.
I think the arguments you're currently having with people come down to: To what extent do I control what I myself do?
People have a tendency to push blame to external forces rather than take responsibility for their own actions. But personal responsibility cannot be the full story, because (almost) everyone acknowledges that drug addiction is something over which people have starkly reduced control.
So the question remains: What about other things "in the middle" like social media or porn "addiction"? Is it the fault of the person, the external force (which you must admit is consciously organised with the goal in mind of promoting the addictive behaviour, since their bottom line depends on it), or some mixture?
Each year, I spend more time in my car during my commute (on average) than a year before, which shows that being stuck in traffic is getting more and more useful to me.
When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much everything that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to gambling, it scares me quite a lot.
Nah, no bans. People should be free to spend their money and time as they please, but let's not pretend that 2000 calories of M&Ms a day is a healthy diet, either.
Back when I first got on the net I remember spending a lot more time on sites like Bellard's, where "like" means "no style (or would it be transparent style? brutalist style?) but tons of substance."
Yeah really love the density of information, and also love the discussion boards and irc. Back then we gathered together on those boards or in the channels to wait for the new year.
The open web needs to be preserved. And bespoke web pages are great. However it isn’t 1998 anymore. The second you expose anything to the public internet it is going to be flooded by malicious bots looking for things to exploit. Unless you are putting up static HTML the learning curve to have a website that runs will continue to run immediately slopes to the point where it is not worth it. Despite OP saying they aren’t invoking nostalgia, they are.
There's no reason _not_ to use static sites for types of sites he's talking about (learning sites for hobbies, blogs, general sharing of information), created with things like Hugo, or even a simple script to generate pages with your own templating. There's nothing to exploit, because it's just HTML.
If you don't feel like keeping a server secure, there are free and easy hosting solutions (Cloudflare pages publishes at a press of a button, for example).
There are a myriad of ways to host small websites without dynamic code that are easy to secure.
You’re also the one that is being a little nostalgic for the past. Even 15 years ago bots would immediately hit sites looking for vulnerabilities in things like phpmyadmin, Wordpress, etc
The issue is good, the thought is good. But things happen for reasons. Those reasons are often how systems work. Unless we understand how those complex systems work, we cannot change anything. We end up with cargo cult thinking. You need to understand the function that produces the result.
Why does the internet function the way it does? It is really pretty simple. The internet is primarily characterized by very-high-volume-very-low-value transactions.
How much does it cost to send an email? When I send a real letter, I buy a stamp $0.78. So if I can send an email instead, it will save me a lot of money. You can try to calculate how many email transactions you can provide on one VPS costing $5.00 per month.
Here is a great business opportunity! You sell people email stamps at $0.01 per letter for 10k bytes. Cool. And 1,000,000 people each buy 10 stamps. Wow. That is a lot of money for your $5/month VPS, right?
But how do you get the money? You need to find a way for the one million people to each send you a dime. You cannot do it. If they put a dime in envelope and mail it to you, it will cost them $0.78. Etc.
So you have another idea. Why not let scammers include details of their scam in all emails send and they pay for the email. Oops, I should have used the term "advertisers". Now the people who email pay nothing and the scamm.... oops advertisers pay for the cost.
And you surprisingly find many, many people and corporations from all over the world are eager to exploit, oops target with advertising users. Especially if you can identify what kind of target they are.
At the risk of sounding trite; things that haven't hit the mainstream yet are good, until they hit the mainstream. Once there's money to be made (and the giants have finally started to slowly move in your direction) it's done for.
Move on, and find the next thing before it hits mainstream.
IMO things never go back to what they used to be, but they will certainly never stop changing.
I do not for a second believe that the doom-scrolling brain-rot phase will not pass. It will pass like the many before it, the important question is what will replace it..
Effort should not be put into pulling us backwards as that's a fools errand. Instead it should be invested in asserting some control over current trajectories so we get something closer to what we like and further from what we hate during the next cycles.
As far as web is concerned, I would really like to see more decentralized services in every facet of our online usage. Mastodon to me is exactly what I wished things become.
Lovely design - but also shows the inherent problem. Not everyone can create a design like this. Medium and Substack mean that not everyone needs to. When everyone is able to publish, you invariably end up with a lot more crap, and it has to hosted by someone else.
From what I can tell, their solution is to personalize the web by creating personal websites. Here are the 5 steps at the end that they list to construct a personal website:
The weakest part is the last one - and it's a big one. Personalsit.es is just a flat single-page directory (of thumbnails, even, not content - so the emphasis is design.) To be part of the conversation, you'd list there and hope someone comes along. Compare with Reddit where you start commenting and you're close-to-an-equal with every other comment.
Webmentions do get you there - because it's a commenting system. But for finding the center of a community, it seems like you're still reliant on Bluesky or Mastodon or something. (Which doesn't "destroy all websites.") Love the sentiment ofc.
Yet no mention of the real friction: buying a domain and getting hosting set up. There are a number of free alternatives out there but they are not well known by the public.
Neocities is fairly well known and often listed in present-day personal website tutorials. Wordpress.com is also still there. Even if you get your own domain & hosting you usually have a nice web interface to drop the htmls into unlike in the old days when you had to FTP into the server and all that.
Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.
First 80%: "le web is le better" (sure, ok, it's a statement that u can make)
then it's an instant jump to "Let's write down what we want", which skips so many steps in between. why is the current internet bad, what are the reasons and causes that go along with it?
I'm saying this because, if I add these steps, I always conclude that it's just the past talking to me. The old internet also sucked, but for different reasons. You were yearning for things you take for granted now.
>> The advent and development of tools & methodologies like POSSE (Publish On your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), ActivityPub, microformats, and ATProto, it’s becoming quite achievable to generate your own social network, interoperable with other networks like Bluesky or Mastodon. That network, designed for ownership and decentralization, is durable, designed around storytelling instead of engagement, and free of the whims of weird tech billionaires.
Don’t just stop at social networks, this paradigm can be used to disrupt every marketplace!
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace. Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
I hear clamoring to go back to "the old web" frequently, I never really understood the perspective. The old web still exists. I use it every day. I'm a member of a number of tiny community websites with old web charm, and there are certainly millions more out there, for any random niche or interest. In fact, I almost consider Hacker News to be in that category (though it might be a tad too large these days; you can't really get to know everyone's name).
> But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.
No one is making you do any of these things. If you don't like it... stop? And go use the sites that you do like instead?
> Now, Learning On The Internet often means fighting ads and endless assaults on one’s attention — it means watching part-1-part-2-part-3 short-form video clips, taped together by action movie psychology hacks, narrated gracelessly by TTS AI voices. We’re down from a thousand and one websites to three, and each of those remaining monolith websites is just a soullessly-regurgitated, compression-down-scaled, AI-up-scaled version of the next.
Not really? There is an absurd amount of high quality content on the Internet to learn from - now more than ever. Yes, there is also poor quality AI slop garbage. But, again, if you don't like it... stop? And go watch the good stuff instead?
I don't get it either. It's all still there. There's just also a lot more.
It always sounds to me like "life was great when it was just me and a few dozen people exactly like me". Now it's got stuff for other people, too, and people seem to resent that.
This felt so detached from reality to me that I attempted to check if the author was even old enough to have experienced the old web.
The current state of things is not something that spawned out of nowhere. It's not some random trend. 2008 happened and normal people got online. That is basically the whole story. It is not coming back because people are not going to log off, as a matter of fact it's only going to get worse and worse as people from worse-off countries progressively get online.(Don't take that to mean that I think that's bad)
You can tell people to build personal sites and such, sure, go at it, I'm all for personal expression. Where are they going to find them? Whoops, back to social networks. But that wasn't the case before I hear you say? Yes, because we didn't have colossal enterprises which entire purpose is to vacuum as much data as they could, you see, those didn't make sense before, but they do now since normal people use the internet. Google is dead and the only old-school forums still running generally either have political inclinations that would induce a heart attack to someone that still thinks Brendan Eich resigning over a thousand bucks was good or are established niche places in their communities.
>With some basic HTML knowledge and getting-stuff-online knowledge, a handful of scrappy protocols, and a free afternoon or two, one can build their own home to post bangers for the tight homies, make friends, and snipe those new friends with those hits of dopamine they so fiendishly rely on.
My brother in Christ people today are not even trusted to choose their font when messaging their friends, what in the world makes one think that there's a desire to build whole websites? Like who is this for? It's definitely not for laymen, it's not for the majority of web developers, it's not for programmers either, is it for the fraction of designers who are also developers? Does that really make sense?
I used the early web. I miss forums, I miss the small webmaster, I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.
And while you could make the argument that these forms of media were superior to TikTok, I’d also argue that this is mostly just taste.
While we have closed ecosystems now, they’re much easier to make and share content to than the web of the past. It’s much easier to get distribution and go viral. There’s also a well trodden path to monetization so that if you craft great content people love, you can make a living from it.
Yeah quirky designs, guestbooks, affiliate badges, page counters, all that stuff. I miss it. But only ever a very small fraction of society was going to be able to make and consume that stuff.
This new internet is much more accessible and it occasionally produces diamonds of culture, you just have to know where to look.
So no, I don’t think any amount of decentralized protocols or tooling or any technology really can change this. I think this trend is set and will continue, and I’ve had to learn to be more open minded to how I perceive internet content.
No one is going to make personal websites or change their behavior in a major way.
Look, you can still sign up for free web hosting and make an HTML page and tell your friends. There are still people that do this. But it’s naturally eclipsed by these other methods of much easier content sharing.
The point is the content itself, not the packaging. Just get over the shape of the packaging and enjoy.
This is one of the most difficult articles my eyes could read. The font is so small and my eyes jumped all over the place. The web I want: One that's easy to read.
Pretty successful in terms of the content representing the intent. Which is in part, don't skim, don't scroll, read something if you want to actually read something, or go elsewhere for doom-scrolling and skimming.
I also found half-skimming it worked pretty well, using the images as markers to find what I really wanted.
Also it looks like it works pretty good on mobile, I thought it was small on my laptop too, but hey, thanks the heavens for built-in-browser zoom...
I agree. I remember when you could read pages without requiring JavaScript enabled, and when enabled it was enabled it wouldn't cause things to constantly float about as you scroll.
One of the biggest reasons you'll never get the "old web" back, is because the culture of the "independent" world wide web morphed into something entirely different from what it was (or more aptly was outright replaced with general "weirdos" rather than model train hobbyists and the like[1]). Ironically all of the people complaining about "capitalism and corporations killing the internet" as they scroll their federated social media feeds and start their "indie" initiatives[2] don't realize that they are part of the problem.
The internet was never good. The feeling that it used to be good is just the creation of a golden age myth, it's just nostalgia. It was exciting because you were young and it was new, but the reality is the internet was almost useless. If you had to log into the internet circa 1997 or even 2002 right now you would have fun for about 2 hours, but it would be the "hey remember this?" kind of fun, then you would realize there was nothing worth doing and go do something else.
> I disagree with a notion that a page needs to work without javascript. It is only design choice of author.
Sure, I guess, but if a site that's primarily text doesn't work without Javascript then that's a design failure. I sometimes use a browser like links2 because eliminating everything but text can sometimes help me focus. If the site displays nothing, I'm probably not going to bother reloading it in a different browser just so I can render the text.
(It's a nonissue for this site, which appears to render fine in links2.)
If you disable CSS as well then it works. (This is true of some web pages that allegedly require JavaScripts, while others will not work with JavaScripts disabled whether or not you disable CSS as well.)
>JavaScript is more progressively-ehanceable than ever, and enables interfacing with a rapidly-growing number of exciting browser APIs (still fuck Brendan Eich though).
I think the author should take a step back. He's complaining about politicized brain rot while engaging in politicized brain rot. He ruined his entire plea in one sentence. I was skimming to see if I could find anything useful in his words before reading, saw this, and closed the page.
To that end, I made a trivial Chrome extension and an equivalent CRUD backend that just helps me store lists of users I like and dislike. The former are highlighted, and the latter are simply removed from comments.
As an example, the user I'm responding to is someone whose comments I like so I have had them in my highlight list for two months now and not regretted it https://overmod.org/lists/view?pk=ELpqNsanTYP9_wZXNjdF-FcEOc...
My personal tool is particularly idiosyncratic but I think information sieving is particularly important these days, so I recommend everyone build something like this for themselves. One thing I've found it particularly helpful with is the usual outrage bait.
An easy way to help with the negativity is to stop leaving bait comments
"toward the left" aside, it's always a little frustrating to read the ubiquitous "this place sucks" comments on here and Reddit. I have tons of problems with HN--both petty (markdown when??) and fundamental (SV/PE has metastasized in a discomforting way...)--but I'm still here because I love it, and think it's one of the best communities the internet has to offer.
Specific critiques of specific people or ideas are always welcome, but comments like "everyone here is curmudgeonly" just makes me wonder why they bother to log on in the first place...
HN did give me some leads in the start of just cool things to follow and I have been able to make an understanding of what things interest me and what don't due to it. And this has also been the reason I read a lot of comments etc. and content here, maybe more than I should.
I don't know to me, building my own website and forum etc. are possible but they feel complicated and I still can't seem to get eye balls. On Hackernews Comments its easier personally to write something, get feedback on it, (improve?/learn?)
Of course if one wants to optimize for eyeballs, they can probably go for reddit or twitter maxxing or similar because cmon this is exactly the stuff the article is talking about from what I see.
Hackernews does indeed sit on the perfect spot. I feel like if you want more informationally dense topics, perhaps lobsters can be good for ya.
https://lobste.rs/
No it hasn't.
I'm sorry, is it a 5 minute argument, or the full half-hour?
While the first half might be true[1], I would argue the second half definitely isn’t. It’s more nuanced than that.
Depends on how you define left and right. To a large degree it’s issue specific. I have seen this site being described as a “equivalent of a nazi bar” in some place. Now I don’t agree with that, just pointing out people seem to have a very different view of this site depending on what they see.
I have definitely observed an increase in Skepticism and that mostly can be traced to the real world events. Open source rug pulls, the way Tesla as a brand turned out, the libertarian ethos not panning out, the startup darlings like airbnb, Uber…etc., ending up with negative impacts in people’s lives all have drained the optimism to a certain degree.
In that way it does represent the future - people are running into issues which are societal and can’t be resolved with just hacker ethos and technology and they actively discuss it here. This place wouldn’t represent the future if it was still hyping the next tech solution without any critical commentary
1 - I haven’t visited the site over long enough to make the judgement.
Two actually - the guideline against being "curmudgeonly" is separate from the guideline against going on a tilt because you get triggered by any website that doesn't look and act as much like plaintext as possible.
And yet if someone so much as cracks a joke they get rapped across the knuckles and lectured about a rule that doesn't actually exist (no humor allowed)?
Yes, that's negative. That's a culture of performative misanthropy.
What distinguishes so much of the right wing and left wing politics is that so much of it is angry and zero sum.
I've also been looking for greener pastures. Lobsters has better technical signal/noise but is much more bitter, zero sum, and political.
but the way I see it, If I assume you are correct, hackernews is in a bit of rough spot because there was this one comment which did some analysis and it feels like hackernews is definitely saturating a bit/(peaked?)
From my personal experience, I feel like we all just use reddit (as the article says) and so we just deal with the annoyances with it and not look for anything else. Or perhaps we join some discord communities.
If people who are within Hackernews are resonating this statement, its in a tough spot because people say such things.
Perhaps, its that Hackernews grew too big for some people and its too small for others. Perhaps one side's currently on reddit not even knowing about it and the other's complaining it on hackernews
And perhaps there's also a middle sweet spot where people aren't complaining but nobody hears them either because they got nothing to complain.
But from the outside what people see are other people complaining about hackernews on hackernews. Same goes for redditors too I guess.
I checked your comment and it says 5 months, I had been assuming you were here for years from the tone but perhaps I was wrong.
I don't know but to me hackernews felt like an information arbitrage of sorts which had these tid-bits of info which made me feel better if I ever were to do somethings like this or gave me confidence in myself in finding the right tool for the right job
If you are tired of hackernews, I would suggest you to open up a fediverse lemmy instance about anything related to hackernews because of the masses perhaps, then you would have less people but more signal since clearly someone would be interested if you create a lemmy instance about similar topics to hackernews but the problem then becomes is if that thing stays idle.
I see your concerns but do you have any suggestions, I see dang and others around here, I am sure if they could do something about it, they probably would?
I had fond memories of programming my CP/M machine back in the day, built a re-creation and was painfully aware of how limiting a 25 line by 80 character display could be. Nostalgia, remembering the good times, reality some things really sucked too.
Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
Back in the early days of the web and SGML, the focus was reversed, which is to say "web" sites would just publish content and the "user" could apply what ever style they liked to get a presentation that worked for them. This infuriated web site authors who had their own idea about how their web site should look and act on your display. You were the consumer and they presented and if you didn't like it go somewhere else. You can still see vestiges of that with things like "use this font to show things" Etc.
So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
Like of course you had your CP/M machine and it had its restrictions but you are seeing them now with the added information of the current stage
There were also things that you liked too and still like and they may be better than somethings in current time
So you can then take things that you like and add it to modern or remove previous restrictions by taking access to modern upgrades.
> So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
I think the problem's more so spiritual. The social contract is sort of falling off in most countries. So there is a nostalgia for the previous social contracts and the things which were with them like the old internet because to be honest the current monopolistic internet does influence with things like lobbying and chrony capitalism to actively break that social contract via corrupt schemes.
People want to do something about it, but speaking as a young guy, we didn't witness the old era so we ourselves are frustrated too but most don't create manifesto's due to it and try to find hobbies or similar things as we try to find the meaning of our life and role in the world
But for the people who have witnessed the old internet, they have that nostalgia to end up to and that's partially why they end up creating a manifesto of sorts themselves.
The reality of the situation to me feels like things are slipping up in multiple areas and others.
Do you really feel that the govt. has best interests for you, the average citizen?
Chances are no, So this is probably why liberterian philosophy is really spreading and the idea of freedom itself.
Heck I joined linux and the journey behind it all because I played a game and it had root level kernel access and I realized that there really was no way to effectively prove that it wasn't gone (it was chinese company [riot] so I wasn't sure if I wanted it)
I ended up looking at linux and then just watched enough videos until I convinced myself to use it one day and just switched. But Most people are really land-locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, even tiny nuances can be enough for some.
using Linux was the reason why I switched from trying to go from finance to computer science. I already knew CS but I loved finance too but In the end I ended up picking CS because I felt like there were chances of making real impact myself which were more unique to me than say chartered accountant.
So my point is, I am not sure if I would even be here if I had even the slightest of nuances. Heck, I am not even much of a gamer but my first distro was nobara linux which focused on gaming because I was worried about gaming or worried about wine or smth. So I had switched to nobara.
Looking now, I say to others oh just use this or that and other things and see it as the most obvious decisions sometimes but by writing this comment, I just wanted to say that change can be scary sometimes.
> Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
I would say let the man have his freedom. I would consider having more choices to be less of a burden than few choices in most occasions. Of course one's mind feels that there is a sweet spot but in longevity I feel like its the evolution of ideas and more ideas means more the competition and we will see more innovation as such.
half of dancing hampsters.
De da dee dee doh!
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20000301193204/http://www.hamste... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampster_Dance
I do miss "memepool" and snarky curation from ye olde web days
https://web.archive.org/web/20050225005911/http://memepool.c...
What you cannot notice is what shapes your "noticement" ability.
The best design is the shape of your perception.
The best design is already implemented in your reception of reality.
The quest for "good design" is a game.
On the other hand, your aesthetical culture and the shape of your perception create a system in which elements are more or less "understandable", "readable", "accessible".
The game of design does not have stable rules and is inconsistent among world populations.
"No design" is impossible, the nature of reality is such that entities are embodied. To be embodied is to be rendered in the game of design.
Ideas are not embodied OR their apparent embodiment in the game of design (electrical information ?) does not contain their content for the observer.
"No design" is perceptually inintelligible.
(side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology. That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)
Indie Web, while nice and fascinating, lacks the large audience. You write things down, and nobody cares. Well, maybe a few friends who keep an eye, and a hiring manager when your candidacy is considered for another job.
Some people are fine with that, and just enjoy the process of producing content, and seeing it published. They are a minority. Most people come to consume more than to produce, and to get quick feedback.
The most efficient way for an indie website to gain an audience is to be briefly featured on one of these bad, terrifying behemoths of the current Web, like Reddit, or Xitter, or, well, HN. A few dozen people will bookmark it, or subscribe to the RSS feed. Sites that are true works of art and craft, like https://ciechanow.ski/, will get remembered more widely, but true works of art are rare.
It is, definitely, very possible to build a rhizome of small indie sites, along the lines of Web 1.0. But they would also benefit from a thoughtful symbiosis with the "big bad" giants of the modern Web.
This is a really nifty website.
- Run my own site (not much there yet)
- Use RSS Feeds instead of Reddit
- If a YouTube creator you like has a newsletter, SIGN UP!
- If a short form content creator makes long form content, watch that instead
- Post on forums, instead of their subreddit/Discord (lots of Linux distros have all three)
- Invest in my cozy web communities[1]
Speaking of the last one there, newsletters, RSS feeds and forums are the best way to be in control of the hose of content.
Will these ever be as “big” as the monolithic platforms? No. That’s okay.
1: https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest
I wouldn't mind getting back to reading more from RSS over aggregators, even though I often appreciate the comments on HN. Aside: it's a shame that so many sites removed comment sections, and any attempt to create a comment extension for any site turns into a cesspool.
It’s like suggesting that everyone become HAM radio operators or join Gemini (the protocol).
Those who enjoy saying "I do not learn enough, I do not improve myself enough, I do not work hard enough" (but you say "the humanity" instead of "I"), that is just your own fault. Let people use the internet the way they want to use it.
How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?
Regarding your argument of “better” you seem to be arguing by definition.
Edit: I now realize you are the original poster who said “more useful”, so why did you change it?
People have a tendency to push blame to external forces rather than take responsibility for their own actions. But personal responsibility cannot be the full story, because (almost) everyone acknowledges that drug addiction is something over which people have starkly reduced control.
So the question remains: What about other things "in the middle" like social media or porn "addiction"? Is it the fault of the person, the external force (which you must admit is consciously organised with the goal in mind of promoting the addictive behaviour, since their bottom line depends on it), or some mixture?
A lot of these arguments are really arguments about an unstated "baseline" that we feel we deserve.
https://bellard.org/
That's all we need. Maybe throw in a few images:
http://www.candlekeep.com/
If you don't feel like keeping a server secure, there are free and easy hosting solutions (Cloudflare pages publishes at a press of a button, for example).
You’re also the one that is being a little nostalgic for the past. Even 15 years ago bots would immediately hit sites looking for vulnerabilities in things like phpmyadmin, Wordpress, etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities
Why does the internet function the way it does? It is really pretty simple. The internet is primarily characterized by very-high-volume-very-low-value transactions.
How much does it cost to send an email? When I send a real letter, I buy a stamp $0.78. So if I can send an email instead, it will save me a lot of money. You can try to calculate how many email transactions you can provide on one VPS costing $5.00 per month.
Here is a great business opportunity! You sell people email stamps at $0.01 per letter for 10k bytes. Cool. And 1,000,000 people each buy 10 stamps. Wow. That is a lot of money for your $5/month VPS, right?
But how do you get the money? You need to find a way for the one million people to each send you a dime. You cannot do it. If they put a dime in envelope and mail it to you, it will cost them $0.78. Etc.
So you have another idea. Why not let scammers include details of their scam in all emails send and they pay for the email. Oops, I should have used the term "advertisers". Now the people who email pay nothing and the scamm.... oops advertisers pay for the cost.
And you surprisingly find many, many people and corporations from all over the world are eager to exploit, oops target with advertising users. Especially if you can identify what kind of target they are.
Move on, and find the next thing before it hits mainstream.
I do not for a second believe that the doom-scrolling brain-rot phase will not pass. It will pass like the many before it, the important question is what will replace it..
Effort should not be put into pulling us backwards as that's a fools errand. Instead it should be invested in asserting some control over current trajectories so we get something closer to what we like and further from what we hate during the next cycles.
As far as web is concerned, I would really like to see more decentralized services in every facet of our online usage. Mastodon to me is exactly what I wished things become.
1. Start small
2. Reduce friction to publishing
3. Don't worry about design
4. Use the IndieWeb
5. Join us in sharing what you've made
Webmentions do get you there - because it's a commenting system. But for finding the center of a community, it seems like you're still reliant on Bluesky or Mastodon or something. (Which doesn't "destroy all websites.") Love the sentiment ofc.
Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.
A joy to read and loved the artwork on mobile.
then it's an instant jump to "Let's write down what we want", which skips so many steps in between. why is the current internet bad, what are the reasons and causes that go along with it?
I'm saying this because, if I add these steps, I always conclude that it's just the past talking to me. The old internet also sucked, but for different reasons. You were yearning for things you take for granted now.
Don’t just stop at social networks, this paradigm can be used to disrupt every marketplace!
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace. Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
> But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.
No one is making you do any of these things. If you don't like it... stop? And go use the sites that you do like instead?
> Now, Learning On The Internet often means fighting ads and endless assaults on one’s attention — it means watching part-1-part-2-part-3 short-form video clips, taped together by action movie psychology hacks, narrated gracelessly by TTS AI voices. We’re down from a thousand and one websites to three, and each of those remaining monolith websites is just a soullessly-regurgitated, compression-down-scaled, AI-up-scaled version of the next.
Not really? There is an absurd amount of high quality content on the Internet to learn from - now more than ever. Yes, there is also poor quality AI slop garbage. But, again, if you don't like it... stop? And go watch the good stuff instead?
It always sounds to me like "life was great when it was just me and a few dozen people exactly like me". Now it's got stuff for other people, too, and people seem to resent that.
This is why people created alternatives like the gemini protocol - explicitly designed to never grow and never become mainstream.
The current state of things is not something that spawned out of nowhere. It's not some random trend. 2008 happened and normal people got online. That is basically the whole story. It is not coming back because people are not going to log off, as a matter of fact it's only going to get worse and worse as people from worse-off countries progressively get online.(Don't take that to mean that I think that's bad)
You can tell people to build personal sites and such, sure, go at it, I'm all for personal expression. Where are they going to find them? Whoops, back to social networks. But that wasn't the case before I hear you say? Yes, because we didn't have colossal enterprises which entire purpose is to vacuum as much data as they could, you see, those didn't make sense before, but they do now since normal people use the internet. Google is dead and the only old-school forums still running generally either have political inclinations that would induce a heart attack to someone that still thinks Brendan Eich resigning over a thousand bucks was good or are established niche places in their communities.
>With some basic HTML knowledge and getting-stuff-online knowledge, a handful of scrappy protocols, and a free afternoon or two, one can build their own home to post bangers for the tight homies, make friends, and snipe those new friends with those hits of dopamine they so fiendishly rely on.
My brother in Christ people today are not even trusted to choose their font when messaging their friends, what in the world makes one think that there's a desire to build whole websites? Like who is this for? It's definitely not for laymen, it's not for the majority of web developers, it's not for programmers either, is it for the fraction of designers who are also developers? Does that really make sense?
And while you could make the argument that these forms of media were superior to TikTok, I’d also argue that this is mostly just taste.
While we have closed ecosystems now, they’re much easier to make and share content to than the web of the past. It’s much easier to get distribution and go viral. There’s also a well trodden path to monetization so that if you craft great content people love, you can make a living from it.
Yeah quirky designs, guestbooks, affiliate badges, page counters, all that stuff. I miss it. But only ever a very small fraction of society was going to be able to make and consume that stuff.
This new internet is much more accessible and it occasionally produces diamonds of culture, you just have to know where to look.
So no, I don’t think any amount of decentralized protocols or tooling or any technology really can change this. I think this trend is set and will continue, and I’ve had to learn to be more open minded to how I perceive internet content.
No one is going to make personal websites or change their behavior in a major way.
Look, you can still sign up for free web hosting and make an HTML page and tell your friends. There are still people that do this. But it’s naturally eclipsed by these other methods of much easier content sharing.
The point is the content itself, not the packaging. Just get over the shape of the packaging and enjoy.
You can still do that right now. I highly recommend it.
It is quite nice on iPhone, while I agree font is smaller in iPad for readability.
Although, they didn't block zooming/pinching (I hate when they do) therefore I was satisfied with the overall design.
I also found half-skimming it worked pretty well, using the images as markers to find what I really wanted.
Also it looks like it works pretty good on mobile, I thought it was small on my laptop too, but hey, thanks the heavens for built-in-browser zoom...
I agree. I remember when you could read pages without requiring JavaScript enabled, and when enabled it was enabled it wouldn't cause things to constantly float about as you scroll.
One of the biggest reasons you'll never get the "old web" back, is because the culture of the "independent" world wide web morphed into something entirely different from what it was (or more aptly was outright replaced with general "weirdos" rather than model train hobbyists and the like[1]). Ironically all of the people complaining about "capitalism and corporations killing the internet" as they scroll their federated social media feeds and start their "indie" initiatives[2] don't realize that they are part of the problem.
[1] https://www.girr.org/girr/
[2] https://indieweb.org/
Sure, I guess, but if a site that's primarily text doesn't work without Javascript then that's a design failure. I sometimes use a browser like links2 because eliminating everything but text can sometimes help me focus. If the site displays nothing, I'm probably not going to bother reloading it in a different browser just so I can render the text.
(It's a nonissue for this site, which appears to render fine in links2.)
I think the author should take a step back. He's complaining about politicized brain rot while engaging in politicized brain rot. He ruined his entire plea in one sentence. I was skimming to see if I could find anything useful in his words before reading, saw this, and closed the page.