We Need to Rewild the Internet
May 2, 2024 5:19 AM Subscribe
People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. (Noema sl)
I will say I am not fond of the use of the word "plantation" in regards to how online spaces are seen. But for all that, I mostly agree with this despite the impossibility.
I will say I am not fond of the use of the word "plantation" in regards to how online spaces are seen. But for all that, I mostly agree with this despite the impossibility.
Yeah, there have been a few pieces on this topic lately...and I am glad to see it, too, though some specifics on what we should be doing (as opposed to just "don't do that") would be helpful.
Like, I would be happy to share what I figured out during a recent electronics project, but where should I post about it that is "good"? On the bulletin board that the vendor sponsors? On Reddit (probably not)? Anywhere else, it will be seen much less and help/inspire fewer people.
At the same time, I am manually transcribing a WWII-era document that I know isn't available anywhere except as hard copy in maybe two physical libraries. It will be added to a project that I already have online at ibiblio.org, which I am pretty sure is a very good, old-school kind of place. :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 6:07 AM on May 2 [14 favorites]
Like, I would be happy to share what I figured out during a recent electronics project, but where should I post about it that is "good"? On the bulletin board that the vendor sponsors? On Reddit (probably not)? Anywhere else, it will be seen much less and help/inspire fewer people.
At the same time, I am manually transcribing a WWII-era document that I know isn't available anywhere except as hard copy in maybe two physical libraries. It will be added to a project that I already have online at ibiblio.org, which I am pretty sure is a very good, old-school kind of place. :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 6:07 AM on May 2 [14 favorites]
White cites the Noema piece in her related reading at the bottom of the post, and some other relevant pieces too!
posted by Wretch729 at 6:10 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
posted by Wretch729 at 6:10 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
In place of “plantation” I would suggest “company town.” As in “I owe my soul to the company store.”
posted by njohnson23 at 6:27 AM on May 2 [14 favorites]
posted by njohnson23 at 6:27 AM on May 2 [14 favorites]
Every time I read something on this theme (and this one is a very good exemplar!) I think of that Billy Joel song, "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant," specifically these lines near the end:
They lived for a while in a
Very nice style
But it's always the same in the end
They got a divorce as a matter
Of course
And they parted the closest
Of friends
Then the king and the queen went
Back to the green
But you can never go back
There again
posted by chavenet at 6:34 AM on May 2 [5 favorites]
They lived for a while in a
Very nice style
But it's always the same in the end
They got a divorce as a matter
Of course
And they parted the closest
Of friends
Then the king and the queen went
Back to the green
But you can never go back
There again
posted by chavenet at 6:34 AM on May 2 [5 favorites]
As someone who had one of those "other" operating systems - specifically AmigaOS - I eventually realized that it was better to have a commodity operating system like Windows / DOS so I could focus on actually just using my computer and doing things and not, like, trying to hunt down bespoke printer drivers written by some dude in West Virginia so that I could actually use the Canon BJ300 I just bought.
Do we also want a bunch of competing music compression algorithms so that certain formats only work on certain players? We already have iMessage not playing nice with Android and cheer when that barrier is broken. We want standardization and cross-platform compatibility but also Geocities and the weird internet.
This is a genie you can't put back in the bottle. Look, I have very fond memories of the dial-up days of BBSing, and have thought about running a BBS server over Telnet or whatever the bring that vibe back, but the truth is nobody would use it. We used modems and phone lines back then because that's what was available - we wanted to connect with other people and would jump through lots of hoops to do it. We don't need to do that now! Everyone can be connected, all of the time. And that has been made possible by centralizing our forms and forums of communication.
Re: browsers, does nobody remember the Bad Old Days of Javascript and CSS incompatibility between browsers? The main reason people hated JavaScript back in the day was that things that worked on one browser wouldn't work on another. So code was littered with "if IE8 then ie8_function() else if Firefox then firefox_function()" etc all over the place. It was awful and made the internet worse. Now everything is standardized and sites look and feel the same across all browsers, which is a net good. The chromium engine allows people to create new browsers that don't have to worry about all of the rendering stuff and can focus on delivering on higher-level goals like privacy. A quick Google (sorry) search indicates 19 available browsers at the moment. 19!
There is absolutely nothing stopping people from doing what they want on the internet. I host a trivia app on a dedicated VPS and run a bi-weekly trivia with friends, and nobody - not Google, not FB, not X - can stop me. The thing is, though, that it costs money. Just like it cost money to run a BBS - phone line, hardware, etc. Neocities is a prime example of this sort of e-RETVRN aesthetic - and it is great! - but it also stays afloat at the mercy of its donor base. The reason we have a limited selection of operating systems, MP3 players and phone form factors is because that's the way new technologies become established technologies - lots of innovation and cool / weird ideas, then eventually a set of two or maybe three options that have emerged as the most successful. People can still use the weird / cool options (hello, Amiga!) but it becomes more and more difficult to do so as the surrounding ecosystem will logically favor the dominant technologies. Eventually your Amiga decides not to turn on one day and you say "fuck it, I'm getting a Gateway."
Anyway, I have lots of thoughts on this kind of thing. And I do hope that regulators break up Amazon / Meta / Alphabet and force Apple to stop excluding Android users and put much better privacy protections in place. But the internet is what we make it. It always has been and always will be. It is just really, really hard to get people to pay attention on such an enormous stage.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:55 AM on May 2 [37 favorites]
Do we also want a bunch of competing music compression algorithms so that certain formats only work on certain players? We already have iMessage not playing nice with Android and cheer when that barrier is broken. We want standardization and cross-platform compatibility but also Geocities and the weird internet.
This is a genie you can't put back in the bottle. Look, I have very fond memories of the dial-up days of BBSing, and have thought about running a BBS server over Telnet or whatever the bring that vibe back, but the truth is nobody would use it. We used modems and phone lines back then because that's what was available - we wanted to connect with other people and would jump through lots of hoops to do it. We don't need to do that now! Everyone can be connected, all of the time. And that has been made possible by centralizing our forms and forums of communication.
Re: browsers, does nobody remember the Bad Old Days of Javascript and CSS incompatibility between browsers? The main reason people hated JavaScript back in the day was that things that worked on one browser wouldn't work on another. So code was littered with "if IE8 then ie8_function() else if Firefox then firefox_function()" etc all over the place. It was awful and made the internet worse. Now everything is standardized and sites look and feel the same across all browsers, which is a net good. The chromium engine allows people to create new browsers that don't have to worry about all of the rendering stuff and can focus on delivering on higher-level goals like privacy. A quick Google (sorry) search indicates 19 available browsers at the moment. 19!
There is absolutely nothing stopping people from doing what they want on the internet. I host a trivia app on a dedicated VPS and run a bi-weekly trivia with friends, and nobody - not Google, not FB, not X - can stop me. The thing is, though, that it costs money. Just like it cost money to run a BBS - phone line, hardware, etc. Neocities is a prime example of this sort of e-RETVRN aesthetic - and it is great! - but it also stays afloat at the mercy of its donor base. The reason we have a limited selection of operating systems, MP3 players and phone form factors is because that's the way new technologies become established technologies - lots of innovation and cool / weird ideas, then eventually a set of two or maybe three options that have emerged as the most successful. People can still use the weird / cool options (hello, Amiga!) but it becomes more and more difficult to do so as the surrounding ecosystem will logically favor the dominant technologies. Eventually your Amiga decides not to turn on one day and you say "fuck it, I'm getting a Gateway."
Anyway, I have lots of thoughts on this kind of thing. And I do hope that regulators break up Amazon / Meta / Alphabet and force Apple to stop excluding Android users and put much better privacy protections in place. But the internet is what we make it. It always has been and always will be. It is just really, really hard to get people to pay attention on such an enormous stage.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:55 AM on May 2 [37 favorites]
Related: The Internet Is Like a City (But Not in the Way You'd Think)
posted by chavenet at 7:05 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
posted by chavenet at 7:05 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
The wild internet is a complete cesspool of spam. The other day I was searching for how to remove water stains from fabric. The top hit was a long article clearly generated by AI. It ran more than 2000 words and hit all the usual methods but was interspersed with bizarre tangents. I think hope is lost for anything but walled gardens.
posted by simra at 7:09 AM on May 2 [8 favorites]
posted by simra at 7:09 AM on May 2 [8 favorites]
See also: The Internet Used to Be Fun.
I’ve been meaning to write some kind of Important Thinkpiece™ on the glory days of the early internet, but every time I sit down to do it, I find another, better piece that someone else has already written. So for now, here’s a collection of articles that to some degree answer the question “Why have a personal website?” with “Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun.”posted by pollytropos at 7:10 AM on May 2 [5 favorites]
And I do hope that regulators break up Amazon / Meta / Alphabet and force Apple to stop excluding Android users and put much better privacy protections in place.
Are those three separate clauses:
Are those three separate clauses:
- break up Amazon / Meta / Alphabet
- force Apple to stop excluding Android users
- put much better privacy protections in place
- break up Amazon / Meta / Alphabet
- force Apple to stop excluding Android users and put much better privacy protections in place
It was a poorly formed run-on sentence, but yes, all of those things.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:15 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:15 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]
For what it's worth: if you're looking to plot out a small part of the web yourself, there's GitHub Pages. I recently moved my personal website from decommissioned university servers to that.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 7:15 AM on May 2 [4 favorites]
posted by JoeXIII007 at 7:15 AM on May 2 [4 favorites]
It was a poorly formed run-on sentence, but yes, all of those things.
Can you expand on the improvements in privacy protection you'd like Apple to implement?
posted by zamboni at 7:17 AM on May 2
Can you expand on the improvements in privacy protection you'd like Apple to implement?
posted by zamboni at 7:17 AM on May 2
Two recent finds in my "rewild" folder, trailheads to lots of other places:
posted by german_bight at 7:17 AM on May 2 [4 favorites]
I’m doing my part to “rewild” the internet by running a Mastodon server for me and my friends. I consider “microblogging” to be harmful so I’ve upped its character limit to about 700k, which does a great job at removing that mental straitjacket a character limit imposes. It’s not commercial, it will vanish someday when I can no longer afford to keep it running or when I die. And that’s fine.
posted by egypturnash at 7:22 AM on May 2 [11 favorites]
posted by egypturnash at 7:22 AM on May 2 [11 favorites]
Molly White had posted on Blue Sky this comment: "If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?"
This post, plus the Noema piece, prompted me to make an FPP.
posted by Kitteh at 7:22 AM on May 2 [9 favorites]
This post, plus the Noema piece, prompted me to make an FPP.
posted by Kitteh at 7:22 AM on May 2 [9 favorites]
It’s not commercial, it will vanish someday when I can no longer afford to keep it running or when I die. And that’s fine.
I think this aptly sums up the spirit of things, tbh.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:28 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
I think this aptly sums up the spirit of things, tbh.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:28 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
If you want part of the experience of old school internet, I recommend trying the darknet. It's definitely wild, awkward to navigate, and not overrun by corporations.
(this is not an endorsement of the darknet or corporations as an alternative)
posted by slimepuppy at 7:29 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]
(this is not an endorsement of the darknet or corporations as an alternative)
posted by slimepuppy at 7:29 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]
There are certain bits of the 'old' internet I miss:
Mr T Ate my Balls, which was a dumb comedy site.
OLGA -online guitar archive, which was an incredibly broad set of guitar tabulature for playing songs. It doesn't exist anymore - you can still find tabs, but it's far different now.
One of the first things I looked up in 1995 was Red Dwarf tv show scripts, which I see are still available.
Lyrics to songs - we have lost some of that, though I have to admit google is pretty good.
blogs - I don't recall any names, but they were great 1995-2010 or so.
When Deadspin (sports blog) was actually good - and only tangentially about sports.
I actually have a ton of complaints about the old internet - but I agree that between the spam and viruses and incompatibility, it had some good stuff.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:32 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
Mr T Ate my Balls, which was a dumb comedy site.
OLGA -online guitar archive, which was an incredibly broad set of guitar tabulature for playing songs. It doesn't exist anymore - you can still find tabs, but it's far different now.
One of the first things I looked up in 1995 was Red Dwarf tv show scripts, which I see are still available.
Lyrics to songs - we have lost some of that, though I have to admit google is pretty good.
blogs - I don't recall any names, but they were great 1995-2010 or so.
When Deadspin (sports blog) was actually good - and only tangentially about sports.
I actually have a ton of complaints about the old internet - but I agree that between the spam and viruses and incompatibility, it had some good stuff.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:32 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
Lyrics to songs - we have lost some of that, though I have to admit google is pretty good.
Genius is your friend.
posted by chavenet at 7:36 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]
Genius is your friend.
posted by chavenet at 7:36 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]
grumpybear, i sorta feel like you're muddling the difference between standards and platforms when the article seems to be speaking more towards the latter?
while i do remember other operating systems, we did end up, mostly, with two-ish standards: windows-compliant and posix-compliant (macOS, linux varietals, denominations, and spawn) which leave us with many somewhat compatible platforms (macos, windows, ios, android, gentoo, chromeos, arch, fedora, mint)
we do have competing audio and video compression containers and algorithms (standards like mp3, aac, ogg, mp4, mov, h.264, h.265, vp8, av1, mkv), but these days it's invisible to most users because they're watching them on platforms like youtube, vimeo, or the streaming services.
even javascript and css are standards, but it's the platforms that make them weird: back in the day it was netscape vs. ie, and then it became firefox vs. chrome vs. safari, but for all the different browsers you have, the vast majority of them are on a few specific platforms: google's blink (which powers chrome, chromium, opera, brave, edge), apple's webkit (a cousin to blink), and firefox's gecko--and all the while, developer tooling has made it so differences are more easily fixed.
the article, however, are speaking to the platforms themselves: safari vs. chrome, which are their own environments; imessage vs. everyone else is a question of messaging platform and ingroup-outgroup; and aws vs. azure all use the same fundamental technologies but present them in ways that serve their developer ecosystem.
i don't disagree that there needs to be a balance struck between the wild west of web1 and early web2, but i think the problem is less about standards and more the fact that venture capital's insistence on roi and sheer market dominance coupled with big tech's varied successes with the walled garden model led to platforms strangling things in the way chaebols strangle the mittlelstand. (i also don't think it's helped that apple's insistence (with everyone else following suit) on apps and abstracting everything away leading genz to have less technical competency/literacy than millennials)
posted by i used to be someone else at 8:01 AM on May 2 [15 favorites]
while i do remember other operating systems, we did end up, mostly, with two-ish standards: windows-compliant and posix-compliant (macOS, linux varietals, denominations, and spawn) which leave us with many somewhat compatible platforms (macos, windows, ios, android, gentoo, chromeos, arch, fedora, mint)
we do have competing audio and video compression containers and algorithms (standards like mp3, aac, ogg, mp4, mov, h.264, h.265, vp8, av1, mkv), but these days it's invisible to most users because they're watching them on platforms like youtube, vimeo, or the streaming services.
even javascript and css are standards, but it's the platforms that make them weird: back in the day it was netscape vs. ie, and then it became firefox vs. chrome vs. safari, but for all the different browsers you have, the vast majority of them are on a few specific platforms: google's blink (which powers chrome, chromium, opera, brave, edge), apple's webkit (a cousin to blink), and firefox's gecko--and all the while, developer tooling has made it so differences are more easily fixed.
the article, however, are speaking to the platforms themselves: safari vs. chrome, which are their own environments; imessage vs. everyone else is a question of messaging platform and ingroup-outgroup; and aws vs. azure all use the same fundamental technologies but present them in ways that serve their developer ecosystem.
i don't disagree that there needs to be a balance struck between the wild west of web1 and early web2, but i think the problem is less about standards and more the fact that venture capital's insistence on roi and sheer market dominance coupled with big tech's varied successes with the walled garden model led to platforms strangling things in the way chaebols strangle the mittlelstand. (i also don't think it's helped that apple's insistence (with everyone else following suit) on apps and abstracting everything away leading genz to have less technical competency/literacy than millennials)
posted by i used to be someone else at 8:01 AM on May 2 [15 favorites]
on a less serious note, perhaps what we need is a kwisatz techderach that will force a unification of all platforms into one single, stagnant monoculture, have them deposed somehow, and unleashing a scattering
a golden path, if you will, but for tech
posted by i used to be someone else at 8:08 AM on May 2 [4 favorites]
a golden path, if you will, but for tech
posted by i used to be someone else at 8:08 AM on May 2 [4 favorites]
I miss the age of one-off weird blogs. Heck, I also miss the regular bloggers I used to follow. They all seem to have shut shop around 2012 and later. I mean, I can follow them on Instagram or what not if they are on there, but it isn't the same. Oh, and of course, I miss my personal gold standard webforum, Barbelith. Barbelith is directly responsible for my marriage and a group of weirdos I've been lucky to call friends for twenty years or more. I miss it.
posted by Kitteh at 8:14 AM on May 2 [4 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 8:14 AM on May 2 [4 favorites]
There are still some of us that occasionally blog and maintain our own websites to host weird projects. Coincidently, I wrote (self-link warning) Save the Web by Being Nice a few days ago.
To save you the click, the gist is that the best way to help build an interesting internet is to write something yourself. But the second best way is to encourage an existing creator by either publicly commenting something Nice or even just emailing them directly to say that you enjoyed their work. Maybe share a link with your friends.
This is what your favorite website maintainers/podcasters secretly crave and if you do it perhaps they produce more of what you like.
posted by AndrewStephens at 8:25 AM on May 2 [9 favorites]
To save you the click, the gist is that the best way to help build an interesting internet is to write something yourself. But the second best way is to encourage an existing creator by either publicly commenting something Nice or even just emailing them directly to say that you enjoyed their work. Maybe share a link with your friends.
This is what your favorite website maintainers/podcasters secretly crave and if you do it perhaps they produce more of what you like.
posted by AndrewStephens at 8:25 AM on May 2 [9 favorites]
For those who enjoy a terminal environment and like to get their hands dirty, I can recommend sdf.org. I have been messing around there for several decades . They have multiple tiers of membership and many rare and special goodies. My MetaARPA membership costs me the lordly sum of $36 US annually. They host my poor excuse for a website. YMMV...
posted by jim in austin at 8:35 AM on May 2 [5 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 8:35 AM on May 2 [5 favorites]
Metafilter: interspersed with bizarre tangents
posted by genpfault at 8:53 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]
posted by genpfault at 8:53 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]
I should add to my thesis above that Metafilter is close to being my ideal site of Niceness. This site makes it easy to be Nice - favoriting a comment or post takes very little effort, adding a constructive comment takes only a minute more. Posting a link is perhaps the Nicest thing to do here for a site you enjoy.
You don't have to do any of these things but it would be Nice.
posted by AndrewStephens at 9:02 AM on May 2 [14 favorites]
You don't have to do any of these things but it would be Nice.
posted by AndrewStephens at 9:02 AM on May 2 [14 favorites]
I don't see that platforms have strangled anything, i used to be someone else. They've just outlived and outgrown other competing platforms. Platform dominance is a war of attrition - it takes tons of effort and human capital to keep plaftorms up to date and secure. And with things like GCP/AWS/Azure, an absolute galaxy of money and hardware. There are plenty of hosting providers from whom you can lease a VPS - nobody is forced to use the cloud services - but the flexibility and interoperability of all of the parts of stuff like AWS makes it a far higher value proposition for anyone who wants to do something more than just run a WordPress site with MySQL. You can do a lot on a VPS if you have the requisite technical skills - I managed to set up a Jitsi server when everyone was suddenly mad at Zoom for not being e2e encrypted - but part of the deal with lowering the barrier to entry to internet participation is also lowering the required amount of technical knowledge. So there's a trade-off. The utopia where everyone can code and knows how to harden their Linux-on-the-desktop boxes against intruders using fail2ban did not come to pass and never will.
All of these various cloud services and individual servers all all talk to each other, anyhow, thanks to those standards - REST, gRPC etc. That's the beauty of the internet!
We all hate FB and X/Twitter for being monocultural megaplatforms, but the flipside is that everyone being there meant that they had enormous social utility, with all of the attendant risks. Mastodon and BlueSky are... not that. They are niche communities for people who care deeply about being part of niche communities. IMO Reddit has done a pretty amazing job of being a megaplatform for niche communities. It is just kind of boring to look at.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:05 AM on May 2 [5 favorites]
All of these various cloud services and individual servers all all talk to each other, anyhow, thanks to those standards - REST, gRPC etc. That's the beauty of the internet!
We all hate FB and X/Twitter for being monocultural megaplatforms, but the flipside is that everyone being there meant that they had enormous social utility, with all of the attendant risks. Mastodon and BlueSky are... not that. They are niche communities for people who care deeply about being part of niche communities. IMO Reddit has done a pretty amazing job of being a megaplatform for niche communities. It is just kind of boring to look at.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:05 AM on May 2 [5 favorites]
"If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.)
Anime fan webrings with warning images of an angry Sailor Jupiter saying “This site is hentai free. Lookin for it? Leave.” Isn’t that we all mean?
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:01 AM on May 2 [8 favorites]
Anime fan webrings with warning images of an angry Sailor Jupiter saying “This site is hentai free. Lookin for it? Leave.” Isn’t that we all mean?
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:01 AM on May 2 [8 favorites]
back in the day it was netscape vs. ie, and then it became firefox vs. chrome vs. safari, but for all the different browsers you have, the vast majority of them are on a few specific platforms: google's blink (which powers chrome, chromium, opera, brave, edge), apple's webkit (a cousin to blink), and firefox's gecko
a history that illustrates that browsers have pretty much always been an -opoly (and frequently basically a loss leader to sell computers, operating systems or web services). I think the shift in the balance of power towards the last of those has some potentially bad implications for web openness but it would be hard to say that browser consolidation in itself has been the major driver of the consolidation of web services and content.
posted by atoxyl at 10:09 AM on May 2
a history that illustrates that browsers have pretty much always been an -opoly (and frequently basically a loss leader to sell computers, operating systems or web services). I think the shift in the balance of power towards the last of those has some potentially bad implications for web openness but it would be hard to say that browser consolidation in itself has been the major driver of the consolidation of web services and content.
posted by atoxyl at 10:09 AM on May 2
Smartphones made the internet more homogenous, like cars made cities more homogenous by pushing certain land use patterns and road designs.
A lot more web designs are possible when you can assume your visitors have a biggish screen, a keyboard, and a mouse/trackpad/etc. than when they're on a tiny touchscreen. Browser games and quirky interaction designs don't really work too well, unless they're point and click with big elements like Wordle. Interactive maps and data visualizations where you could drill down by pointing and clicking were a staple of the internet until a decade ago. You don't see them much any more, because they don't work very well on a touchscreen. Anything where the user has to type in a lot of text—like old OKCupid or Facebook profiles—doesn't really work well unless it's an office tool. Pages with tons of links in sidebars used to be great for discovering other interesting sites, but they don't work on phones. Really any kind of storytelling or discovery that relies on users opening other links in new tabs—the hypertext of HTML and HTTP, the building blocks of the web—isn't really practical on a phone.
And the margin of error is a lot smaller. Mildly broken websites on a desktop browser are either annoying or amusing, but on a phone they're often pretty much unusable. That means amateur coders are going to have a hard time building a website they can even show their friends without resorting to a generic template. Things like obviously broken links —like metafilte.com instead of metafilter—are a pain to find and fix in the URL bar on a phone. And overly aggressive ads or sticky toolbars can be enough to drive people away, which is a problem for people trying to monetize a site.
We think of smartphones as these incredible pieces of technology, and they are, but as interfaces to the web—and as tools that web developers must work with—they're really much clumsier than a laptop. It's like replacing an artist's pens and pencils with a four pack of magic markers. The big tech companies can afford to pay someone to make it work, but the designs are still pretty basic, and everyone else just kind of builds around pre-existing templates or presses big buttons on Instagram.
You can still build a website that's designed for someone with a keyboard and mouse and nice big browser windows with visible tabs, but for most purposes you probably don't want to, because people will visit it on a phone, declare it broken, and never come back.
posted by smelendez at 10:17 AM on May 2 [29 favorites]
A lot more web designs are possible when you can assume your visitors have a biggish screen, a keyboard, and a mouse/trackpad/etc. than when they're on a tiny touchscreen. Browser games and quirky interaction designs don't really work too well, unless they're point and click with big elements like Wordle. Interactive maps and data visualizations where you could drill down by pointing and clicking were a staple of the internet until a decade ago. You don't see them much any more, because they don't work very well on a touchscreen. Anything where the user has to type in a lot of text—like old OKCupid or Facebook profiles—doesn't really work well unless it's an office tool. Pages with tons of links in sidebars used to be great for discovering other interesting sites, but they don't work on phones. Really any kind of storytelling or discovery that relies on users opening other links in new tabs—the hypertext of HTML and HTTP, the building blocks of the web—isn't really practical on a phone.
And the margin of error is a lot smaller. Mildly broken websites on a desktop browser are either annoying or amusing, but on a phone they're often pretty much unusable. That means amateur coders are going to have a hard time building a website they can even show their friends without resorting to a generic template. Things like obviously broken links —like metafilte.com instead of metafilter—are a pain to find and fix in the URL bar on a phone. And overly aggressive ads or sticky toolbars can be enough to drive people away, which is a problem for people trying to monetize a site.
We think of smartphones as these incredible pieces of technology, and they are, but as interfaces to the web—and as tools that web developers must work with—they're really much clumsier than a laptop. It's like replacing an artist's pens and pencils with a four pack of magic markers. The big tech companies can afford to pay someone to make it work, but the designs are still pretty basic, and everyone else just kind of builds around pre-existing templates or presses big buttons on Instagram.
You can still build a website that's designed for someone with a keyboard and mouse and nice big browser windows with visible tabs, but for most purposes you probably don't want to, because people will visit it on a phone, declare it broken, and never come back.
posted by smelendez at 10:17 AM on May 2 [29 favorites]
When Deadspin (sports blog) was actually good - and only tangentially about sports.
Have I got some great news for you!
posted by Huggiesbear at 11:18 AM on May 2 [3 favorites]
Have I got some great news for you!
posted by Huggiesbear at 11:18 AM on May 2 [3 favorites]
I don't see that platforms have strangled anything, i used to be someone else. They've just outlived and outgrown other competing platforms. Platform dominance is a war of attrition - it takes tons of effort and human capital to keep plaftorms up to date and secure.
sure, but... i think the article linked is speaking more to platforms than standards and muddling the two concepts together muddies the water? you're entirely right that nobody needs to use wordpress.com, wpengine, or pantheon to host their sites (themselves built atop gcp/aws/azure), but the issues that the article points out is that people experience massive shutdowns because, say, one company or one platform has become the single point of failure (dyn, fastly, worldcom). it's the concentration.
to extend the metaphor of the article, your first comment basically spoke to standards like methods of propagation and dna (javascript/css, or music compression algorithms), but the article itself, to me, seems to speak more to massive corporate farms having clearcut a vibrant forest with lots of diversity to plant... a single varietal of apple trees (meta, aws, red delicious, etc).
you're right in that that nobody is prevented from hosting their own sites or using tools that aren't common, but i do think there is a risk of platforms doing the strangling, sometimes literally: facebook is seen in some parts of the world as synonymous with the internet; whatsapp is the only way to chat. and this leads to situations like the rohingya genocide precisely because for a lot of people in northwestern myanmar, there was no alternative digital source to counterbalance the genocidal hate, and facebook was not capable of moderating that hate speech. i'm sure there were many in myanmar who did have the chops to set up a small blog on wordpress but when unfettered internet is expensive and facebook is free, people aren't going to sign up for the former.
posted by i used to be someone else at 11:59 AM on May 2 [5 favorites]
sure, but... i think the article linked is speaking more to platforms than standards and muddling the two concepts together muddies the water? you're entirely right that nobody needs to use wordpress.com, wpengine, or pantheon to host their sites (themselves built atop gcp/aws/azure), but the issues that the article points out is that people experience massive shutdowns because, say, one company or one platform has become the single point of failure (dyn, fastly, worldcom). it's the concentration.
to extend the metaphor of the article, your first comment basically spoke to standards like methods of propagation and dna (javascript/css, or music compression algorithms), but the article itself, to me, seems to speak more to massive corporate farms having clearcut a vibrant forest with lots of diversity to plant... a single varietal of apple trees (meta, aws, red delicious, etc).
you're right in that that nobody is prevented from hosting their own sites or using tools that aren't common, but i do think there is a risk of platforms doing the strangling, sometimes literally: facebook is seen in some parts of the world as synonymous with the internet; whatsapp is the only way to chat. and this leads to situations like the rohingya genocide precisely because for a lot of people in northwestern myanmar, there was no alternative digital source to counterbalance the genocidal hate, and facebook was not capable of moderating that hate speech. i'm sure there were many in myanmar who did have the chops to set up a small blog on wordpress but when unfettered internet is expensive and facebook is free, people aren't going to sign up for the former.
posted by i used to be someone else at 11:59 AM on May 2 [5 favorites]
i dunno. there's value, like you say, to having platforms with network effects. but maybe there needs to be a sort of square-cube law for platforms so it doesn't end up as mostly megafauna with nothing but bugs being trod upon underneath, but with a necessary openness so those platforms don't become isolated dead ends
posted by i used to be someone else at 12:06 PM on May 2 [1 favorite]
posted by i used to be someone else at 12:06 PM on May 2 [1 favorite]
the internet doesn't scale
posted by lescour at 12:16 PM on May 2 [2 favorites]
posted by lescour at 12:16 PM on May 2 [2 favorites]
Just imagine, for a moment, how many Taylor Swift fansites on Geocities would exist right now.
posted by credulous at 12:24 PM on May 2 [8 favorites]
posted by credulous at 12:24 PM on May 2 [8 favorites]
Remember the bad old days of "platforms" like AOL, Compuserv, and Prodigy? Remember when they all had their own exclusive content and non-interoperable chatrooms, message boards and electronic mail?
And remember how liberating the World Wide Web and the "real" Internet was in contrast to those walled gardens?
That's the issue here.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:24 PM on May 2 [5 favorites]
And remember how liberating the World Wide Web and the "real" Internet was in contrast to those walled gardens?
That's the issue here.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:24 PM on May 2 [5 favorites]
Just imagine, for a moment, how many Taylor Swift fansites on Geocities would exist right now.
I am, and frankly, a Taylor Swift fansite webring would crush it. I mean, a lot of those Geocities sites were sparkly and glittery so it would have been perfect.
posted by Kitteh at 1:20 PM on May 2 [5 favorites]
I am, and frankly, a Taylor Swift fansite webring would crush it. I mean, a lot of those Geocities sites were sparkly and glittery so it would have been perfect.
posted by Kitteh at 1:20 PM on May 2 [5 favorites]
Like, I would be happy to share what I figured out during a recent electronics project, but where should I post about it that is "good"?
POSSE: Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. That's how you make sure you don't lose your stuff when Amazon shuts down the forum, but you still have feedback from people that you don't know.
Everyone should have a vaguely tech-savvy friend with an unlimited Dream host account or whatever that they can use to have a place of their own, even if they can't afford their own. (I use "should" in an aspirational rather than prescriptive sense).
posted by novalis_dt at 1:43 PM on May 2 [9 favorites]
POSSE: Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. That's how you make sure you don't lose your stuff when Amazon shuts down the forum, but you still have feedback from people that you don't know.
Everyone should have a vaguely tech-savvy friend with an unlimited Dream host account or whatever that they can use to have a place of their own, even if they can't afford their own. (I use "should" in an aspirational rather than prescriptive sense).
posted by novalis_dt at 1:43 PM on May 2 [9 favorites]
POSSE: Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
Pretty much this. For something to stay up on the web indefinitely, somebody has to pay for it. And if you're not willing to pay for it, you have to accept that at some point it might vanish. Everything is ephemeral that is not funded.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:12 PM on May 2 [1 favorite]
Pretty much this. For something to stay up on the web indefinitely, somebody has to pay for it. And if you're not willing to pay for it, you have to accept that at some point it might vanish. Everything is ephemeral that is not funded.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:12 PM on May 2 [1 favorite]
i feel like the role of search in all this should probably be addressed by someone
no cap
posted by slappy_pinchbottom at 2:18 PM on May 2
no cap
posted by slappy_pinchbottom at 2:18 PM on May 2
I like the POSSE principle, novalis_dt.
I keep waiting for the Solid project to take off because I think it’ll help realise a broader uptake of POSSE, but either not enough people care about controlling their data/content, or it's not at the appliance stage that most people are comfortable using yet.
posted by d-no at 2:22 PM on May 2
I keep waiting for the Solid project to take off because I think it’ll help realise a broader uptake of POSSE, but either not enough people care about controlling their data/content, or it's not at the appliance stage that most people are comfortable using yet.
posted by d-no at 2:22 PM on May 2
I really love the introduction here..
At present, government agencies despreately want more internet control, ala recent further weakenning of privacy in the US section 702 renewal, and the EU moves against end-to-end encrpytion by the US.
Independent internet is slowly migrating into encrypted messaging programs.
Also d-no, Solid was designed by the anti-privacy pro-corporate nimrods at W3C. First TBL blew all W3C cash on the Semantic Web, which failed because even understading privacy lies beyond their capabilities. Next TBL & friends raised more money by screwing over internet video by pushing through EME, which now funds Semantic Web 2 aka Solid.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:38 PM on May 2 [3 favorites]
“The word for world is forest” — Ursula K. Le GuinWe never abandonded the “pathology of command and control” though, but instead we convert fossil fuels into fertilizers. It now crashes us into the "biochemical flows" planetary boundary, supposedly bringing risks of a similar scale to climate change.
All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered.
The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.
That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.”
At present, government agencies despreately want more internet control, ala recent further weakenning of privacy in the US section 702 renewal, and the EU moves against end-to-end encrpytion by the US.
Independent internet is slowly migrating into encrypted messaging programs.
Also d-no, Solid was designed by the anti-privacy pro-corporate nimrods at W3C. First TBL blew all W3C cash on the Semantic Web, which failed because even understading privacy lies beyond their capabilities. Next TBL & friends raised more money by screwing over internet video by pushing through EME, which now funds Semantic Web 2 aka Solid.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:38 PM on May 2 [3 favorites]
People smarter than me have posited that the explosion in podcasting is due to it conforming to an older idea of the internet that, despite many well-funded attempts, is still pretty wild.
posted by rhymedirective at 3:41 PM on May 2 [3 favorites]
posted by rhymedirective at 3:41 PM on May 2 [3 favorites]
I definitely do not understand Solid. How is it different from plain old HTML (with the usual set of media types) over plain old HTTPS, stored on whatever sort of server you like?
posted by novalis_dt at 4:39 PM on May 2
posted by novalis_dt at 4:39 PM on May 2
the explosion in podcasting is due to it conforming to an older idea of the internet that, despite many well-funded attempts, is still pretty wild.
Podcasting resists some of the toxic tendencies of the Internet because it's harder to search than text and harder to share in a clickbaity way than video. You can't easily find ragebait quotes and you can't put a screenshot on Twitter that will get people to click as they're browsing.
Pretty much you have to search out a particular podcaster and listen to their whole show, and even when you do, there's no easy comments section to be a jerk where other listeners are likely hear or see you.
posted by straight at 6:30 PM on May 2 [3 favorites]
Podcasting resists some of the toxic tendencies of the Internet because it's harder to search than text and harder to share in a clickbaity way than video. You can't easily find ragebait quotes and you can't put a screenshot on Twitter that will get people to click as they're browsing.
Pretty much you have to search out a particular podcaster and listen to their whole show, and even when you do, there's no easy comments section to be a jerk where other listeners are likely hear or see you.
posted by straight at 6:30 PM on May 2 [3 favorites]
At a high level, Solid (Social Linked Data) and Semantic Web envision somewhat more direct database access, but like everyone who moves this direction, they're not careful what this means. You hear phrases like "true data ownership" from both Solid and DID/SSI folk, but under the hood this means, not merely giving your data away all the time, but proving or certifying your data all the time.
Among other features, Solid wants users to be authenticated by OIDC, meaning anything anyone does gets tracked, and by someone the service trusts, aka Google or maybe Apple or Facebook. Ain't even a fig leaf there.
At W3C, there was a seperate Verifiable Credentials effort, meaning diverse cryptographic certificates for end users. After they noticed out GDPR complicates their plans, Jan Camenisch told them attribute-based signatures would permit revealing only part of a certificate, like say a birthday, so they added this as an optional fig leaf.
Attribute-based signatures sound handy, except we should not require cerificates or identity proofs for typical online activities, and usually there should exist some duty of care when user identification matters, like employers, banks, landlord, etc. In reality, if users can easily prove attributes about themselves, then they'll blindly click approve, and services would request or require more attributes.
I'll give one example of proofs making things worse: "New bank account from home" example had long mentioned the users proving they were employed, because banks prefer employed customers. An average person applies for jobs much more often than they apply for bank accounts, so what happens if HR departments ask/require information about whether you're currently employed? Voila, cryptographically enforced discrimination against unemployed people.
Instead, we should adopt abuse & spam prevention protocols that work, not by proving attributes of the user, but by zk proving some pseudo-random function of the user's secret key and the requester's identity, so then users automatically have different unlinkable identities with different services. I learned these ideas first from Bryan Ford long ago, but I recently massive optimized the crypto and handled more corner cases.
Anyways, W3C exists to organize the HTML & CSS standards, which they fucked up. They think in XML schemas. They do not think about social problems caused by abuse of technology. They do not think about privacy. And they lack the relevant cryptogaphy background.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:25 PM on May 2 [6 favorites]
Among other features, Solid wants users to be authenticated by OIDC, meaning anything anyone does gets tracked, and by someone the service trusts, aka Google or maybe Apple or Facebook. Ain't even a fig leaf there.
At W3C, there was a seperate Verifiable Credentials effort, meaning diverse cryptographic certificates for end users. After they noticed out GDPR complicates their plans, Jan Camenisch told them attribute-based signatures would permit revealing only part of a certificate, like say a birthday, so they added this as an optional fig leaf.
Attribute-based signatures sound handy, except we should not require cerificates or identity proofs for typical online activities, and usually there should exist some duty of care when user identification matters, like employers, banks, landlord, etc. In reality, if users can easily prove attributes about themselves, then they'll blindly click approve, and services would request or require more attributes.
I'll give one example of proofs making things worse: "New bank account from home" example had long mentioned the users proving they were employed, because banks prefer employed customers. An average person applies for jobs much more often than they apply for bank accounts, so what happens if HR departments ask/require information about whether you're currently employed? Voila, cryptographically enforced discrimination against unemployed people.
Instead, we should adopt abuse & spam prevention protocols that work, not by proving attributes of the user, but by zk proving some pseudo-random function of the user's secret key and the requester's identity, so then users automatically have different unlinkable identities with different services. I learned these ideas first from Bryan Ford long ago, but I recently massive optimized the crypto and handled more corner cases.
Anyways, W3C exists to organize the HTML & CSS standards, which they fucked up. They think in XML schemas. They do not think about social problems caused by abuse of technology. They do not think about privacy. And they lack the relevant cryptogaphy background.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:25 PM on May 2 [6 favorites]
People smarter than me have posited that the explosion in podcasting is due to it conforming to an older idea of the internet that, despite many well-funded attempts, is still pretty wild.
I'd posit that podcasting is basically talk-radio but about topics that the podcaster people want to hear instead of religion and only far-right politics. IMO it's nothing with the old internet - from the slow talking gait to the internal ads to the desire to build to crescendo. That's talk radio.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:16 AM on May 3 [3 favorites]
I'd posit that podcasting is basically talk-radio but about topics that the podcaster people want to hear instead of religion and only far-right politics. IMO it's nothing with the old internet - from the slow talking gait to the internal ads to the desire to build to crescendo. That's talk radio.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:16 AM on May 3 [3 favorites]
"The Internet Used To Be Fun" because early on, as it emerged from university basements into public use, it was an apparently limitless plain of fertile soil, and the early adopters were gardeners. We liked putting things into this new soil, and discovering each others' plantings.
But gardeners will always be in the minority, and like most open land, the Internet has been exploited and developed commercially to attract and monetize as many people as possible. In actual numbers, there are likely more "gardeners" - creators and small publishers - than ever before, but the little gardens are lost in the din of commerce and exploitation.
Rewilding is naive; we need some sort of evolution or change. Monopoly-busting might be the single best course of action.
posted by Artful Codger at 9:41 AM on May 3 [4 favorites]
But gardeners will always be in the minority, and like most open land, the Internet has been exploited and developed commercially to attract and monetize as many people as possible. In actual numbers, there are likely more "gardeners" - creators and small publishers - than ever before, but the little gardens are lost in the din of commerce and exploitation.
Rewilding is naive; we need some sort of evolution or change. Monopoly-busting might be the single best course of action.
posted by Artful Codger at 9:41 AM on May 3 [4 favorites]
“The digital revolution has failed,” Paris Marx, Disconnect, 08 March 2024
posted by ob1quixote at 1:21 PM on May 3 [1 favorite]
posted by ob1quixote at 1:21 PM on May 3 [1 favorite]
“How 2014 Changed the Internet Forever,” Steffi Cao , The Ringer, 01 May 2024
posted by ob1quixote at 1:20 PM on May 4
posted by ob1quixote at 1:20 PM on May 4
Mod note: [btw, this post has been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog!]
posted by taz (staff) at 3:04 AM on May 7
posted by taz (staff) at 3:04 AM on May 7
Yes, you can still do what you always could do, pay for a webstead somewhere, or else maybe make a small free site on a tilde or Neocities or some similar place. But will anyone read what you've written? How will they even find it?
The biggest difficulty with the internet has always been discovery. In a sense, it's why we're all here on Metafilter: we have things we've found that we want to share, and it's a convenient place both to tell people about it and to come to to find new things. If there weren't a need for it, MeFi wouldn't exist. The coolest sites on the internet, when they were great, were always places to go to find things: Memepool (RIP), BoingBoing (now in spammy decline), Waxy (still great) and others gone, decaying, and obscure.
If you wanted to find out about something specific, Google was there for you, for well over a decade. Now, if what you really want is to find something on Wikipedia, Reddit or Stack Overflow, it's still pretty acceptable. But now Reddit has taken a severe turn for the evil, and now Stack Overflow too wants to sell everyone out to AI companies, so it's a good idea to avoid them. And without them, Google is nearly useless for many purposes.
Further, what if you don't know what you're looking for? What if you want to be surprised, or find something in a general topic? Google was never real helpful there, it always tried to take you somewhere direct, without intervening stops. Yahoo Directory was pretty good for undirected exploration, but there's no real equivalent for it now. DMOZ is gone, and its successor Curlie is pretty obscure. Plus, directories require editors, lots of them. to keep them current and relatively spam free, and I don't think a volunteer staff can cut it there. There used to be StumbleUpon, but truthfully it was too scattershot.
Is it possible for Google Search to recover? Absolutely! But the only real way to fix it in the long term is human-powered editing. Google, with their massive coffers, is one of the few companies in a position that they could afford to hire dedicated search editors to sift through the spam. But it would cost them a lot of money, money they don't yet see the need to spend, they're still in denial as to how much trust they've lost among power users.
There's a steadily growing field of independent search, but without Google's spidering capability they can't hope to come close to a comprehensive view of the entire web, not the least reason for which being that they have the same problem that you or I have: without at least a starting link, their spider will be just as ignorant of small websites as anyone else would be.
Ultimately, I think it's up to tinysite creators themselves to tell other people they exist. Of course, anything they do, a SEO outfit can do too, so it's really up to human editors to differentiate them, and that's going to require... subjective judgement. (orchestra sting)
posted by JHarris at 11:36 PM on May 7 [3 favorites]
The biggest difficulty with the internet has always been discovery. In a sense, it's why we're all here on Metafilter: we have things we've found that we want to share, and it's a convenient place both to tell people about it and to come to to find new things. If there weren't a need for it, MeFi wouldn't exist. The coolest sites on the internet, when they were great, were always places to go to find things: Memepool (RIP), BoingBoing (now in spammy decline), Waxy (still great) and others gone, decaying, and obscure.
If you wanted to find out about something specific, Google was there for you, for well over a decade. Now, if what you really want is to find something on Wikipedia, Reddit or Stack Overflow, it's still pretty acceptable. But now Reddit has taken a severe turn for the evil, and now Stack Overflow too wants to sell everyone out to AI companies, so it's a good idea to avoid them. And without them, Google is nearly useless for many purposes.
Further, what if you don't know what you're looking for? What if you want to be surprised, or find something in a general topic? Google was never real helpful there, it always tried to take you somewhere direct, without intervening stops. Yahoo Directory was pretty good for undirected exploration, but there's no real equivalent for it now. DMOZ is gone, and its successor Curlie is pretty obscure. Plus, directories require editors, lots of them. to keep them current and relatively spam free, and I don't think a volunteer staff can cut it there. There used to be StumbleUpon, but truthfully it was too scattershot.
Is it possible for Google Search to recover? Absolutely! But the only real way to fix it in the long term is human-powered editing. Google, with their massive coffers, is one of the few companies in a position that they could afford to hire dedicated search editors to sift through the spam. But it would cost them a lot of money, money they don't yet see the need to spend, they're still in denial as to how much trust they've lost among power users.
There's a steadily growing field of independent search, but without Google's spidering capability they can't hope to come close to a comprehensive view of the entire web, not the least reason for which being that they have the same problem that you or I have: without at least a starting link, their spider will be just as ignorant of small websites as anyone else would be.
Ultimately, I think it's up to tinysite creators themselves to tell other people they exist. Of course, anything they do, a SEO outfit can do too, so it's really up to human editors to differentiate them, and that's going to require... subjective judgement. (orchestra sting)
posted by JHarris at 11:36 PM on May 7 [3 favorites]
I keep meaning to resurrect my blog at some point. I know there are many engines out there that'll do it but I'll likely retry blosxom at some stage for static-rendering goodness.
One thing that put paid to my blogging back in the day, dealing with vulnerabilities became a nightmare if you were hosting this stuff yourself so the ability to spit out a static site is now a must because putting a CMS behind the scenes and maintaining it is a head-ache.
I also remember sites like Mefi, Memepool and Slashdot hi-lighting all sorts of cool stuff in the late 90's and early 00's but also remember sites being 'slashdotted' - if you weren't prepared for the load and the ability to scale you could cripple your host or rack up some big bills inadvertently. Probably a lot less likely to occur in this day and age (I wonder how many articles point to solitary web-servers sitting under a desk these days versus a cloud-hosts system?)
As mentioned upthread, I don't think there are actually too many obstacles to bringing back the 'old-web' other than time. Fire-up Frontpage or Hotdog or Dreamweaver (if you were fancy) and upload some files to a web-server...
posted by phigmov at 6:57 PM on May 11 [1 favorite]
One thing that put paid to my blogging back in the day, dealing with vulnerabilities became a nightmare if you were hosting this stuff yourself so the ability to spit out a static site is now a must because putting a CMS behind the scenes and maintaining it is a head-ache.
I also remember sites like Mefi, Memepool and Slashdot hi-lighting all sorts of cool stuff in the late 90's and early 00's but also remember sites being 'slashdotted' - if you weren't prepared for the load and the ability to scale you could cripple your host or rack up some big bills inadvertently. Probably a lot less likely to occur in this day and age (I wonder how many articles point to solitary web-servers sitting under a desk these days versus a cloud-hosts system?)
As mentioned upthread, I don't think there are actually too many obstacles to bringing back the 'old-web' other than time. Fire-up Frontpage or Hotdog or Dreamweaver (if you were fancy) and upload some files to a web-server...
posted by phigmov at 6:57 PM on May 11 [1 favorite]
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posted by adamrice at 5:31 AM on May 2 [19 favorites]