HN

Comments (104)

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  Aurornis
  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.
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  yakattak
  These are some ways I’ve been using the web in a way that keeps me free.- 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
• subdavis
  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).
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  Robin_Patterson
  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.
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  IvanK_net
  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.
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  markus_zhang
  I'll counter propose a website to destroy all websites:https://bellard.org/That's all we need. Maybe throw in a few images:http://www.candlekeep.com/
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  doug_durham
  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.
• talkingtab
  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.
• ghusto
  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.
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  SonnyTark
  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.
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  kristianc
  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.
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  abetusk
  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:1. Start small2. Reduce friction to publishing3. Don't worry about design4. Use the IndieWeb5. Join us in sharing what you've made
• ggillas
  Bookmarked. Called me to get back to reading and writing again.A joy to read and loved the artwork on mobile.
• ramon156
  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.
• killa_kyle
  I'm inspired to write more in 2026 and publish more of the things I just make for myself.
• dwa3592
  Wait, this was a nice article. why are people complaining?
• econ
  The only issue I have is that there are only 6 parts to this. I've installed the homepage on my telephone just to be sure.
• theturtletalks
  >> 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.
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  johnfn
  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?
• Levitz
  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?
• anon
  undefined
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  dinobones
  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.
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  mattsears
  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.
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  sandeepkd
  Not sure if its by design/intent, the font is too small to skim through it
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  GaryBluto
  > it wasn’t always like this.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/
• ltbarcly3
  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.
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  pwg
  And it fails to render anything with Javascript disabled.
• panny
  >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.
• lisbbb
  Delusion. The only thing that will make dead Internet come back alive is another technological leap forward. Big Tech has total control.