To give it a different light: by using an indie web approach (i.e. self host), there is an intrinsic guarantee that a publisher has put at least some effort and resources to make their materials public.
This ensures that the published materials have certain authenticity and inherent amount of quality. Publishing them "the indie way" functions as a kind of proof of work: not a guarantee of excellence, but evidence that something meaningful was at stake in producing and sharing it.
By contrast, the corporate web has driven the cost of publishing effectively to 0. This single fact opens the floodgates to noise, spam, and irrelevance at an unprecedented scale.
The core problem is that the average consumer cannot easily distinguish between these two fundamentally different universes. Loud, low-effort content often masquerades as significance, while quiet, honest, and carefully produced work is overlooked. As a result, authenticity is drowned out by volume, and signal is mistaken for noise.
To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
> To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
This is very true. I've found that there's more good content than there ever was before, but that there's also much more bad content, too, so the good is harder to find.
RSS helps me, curated newsletters help me. What else helps build this discernment?
I recently did a deep dive of an (allegedly) human-curated selection of 40K blogs containing 600K posts. I got the list from Kagi’s Small Web Index [1]. I haven’t published anything about it yet, but the takeaway is that nostalgia for the IndieWeb is largely misplaced.
The overwhelming majority of was 2010s era “content marketing” SEO slop.
The next largest slice was esoteric nostalgia content. Like, “Look at these antique toys/books/movies/etc!”. You’d be shocked at the volume of this still being written by retirees on Blogger (no shade, it’s good to have a hobby, but goddamn there are a lot of you).
The slice of “things an average person might plausibly care to look at” was vanishingly small.
There are no spam filters, mods, or ways to report abuse when you run your content mill on your own domain.
Like you, I was somewhat surprised by this result. I have to assume this is little more than a marketing ploy by Kagi to turn content producers who want clicks into Kagi customers. That list is not suited for any other purpose I can discern.
I once spend half a day or so gathering RSS feeds from fortune 500 companies press releases. I expected it to be mostly bullshit but was pleasantly surprised. Apparently if one spends enough millions on doing something there is no room for bullshit in the publication.
Pleasantly surprised? I would think that these feeds would consist of product and company announcements and this would be the expected/appropriate content. Did you find something less sterile?
To convince you I would really need to rebuild this thing and show it side by side with blogs and news outlets.
To give one example, at the time I gathered f500 feeds my other feed sets (tens of thousands) suffered horribly from echo chamber effect. I had endless headlines announcing that David Bowie died. Something like half of it. I don't find that a particularly interesting topic. I have my own memories of his work and have little need for more. Perhaps you would like to read 20 of those? Surely not thousands? It isn't that it isn't a noteworthy event but it drowns out everything else.
Meanwhile Walmart is talking about donating returned Lego to charities.
Exon is talking about a giant ammonia deal to make carbon neutral hydrogen
and GM talks about their next generation software platform to help bring long term continuous innovation to customers through over-the-air updates.
They apparently have tons of diagnostic data and are looking to make it more practical complete with remote tuning for old clunkers.
This to me is quite a lot more interesting than say cbnc talking about war with iran, if bitcoin will survive and that Tesla stock is down???? I really needed more articles about those topics? I thought I already got a million of those. No way in hell I will open those links.
Do you intend to write it up? It would be interesting to get your take on how the classification works. And personally, as I know my feed is on the index as well, into which category my writing would be sorted.
Fair enough, I've added your site to my reader just in case you change your mind ;). The mechanics of your process actually sound more interesting than the results.
Probably a part of it, but I did not submit my site there directly at least. I think they used different sources to seed the list. There was a very active thread on HN about two or three years ago where very many folks shared their personal websites and from that several OPML lists where compiled. I noticed quite an uptick in feed subscribers around that time.
Also by the way, Henry Desroches, the author of the article we are discussing in this thread, also maintains a web directory personalsit.es, where I had submitted my site as well, so that might have also been a source for the kagi small web index.
This comment is an excellent example of low quality content. It's all wrong and hallucinated to point out a conflict between things that do not exist. An AI can generate this crap, but only if you ask it the wrong way.
I've come to think something is deeply wrong with the assumption that digital participation must mean audience acquisition. Whenever people talk about leaving platforms, the immediate rebuttal is "discoverability" or "reach" as if it's self-evident that pursuing an audience is inherently good. It's rarely defended; it's just presumed.
This is often smuggled in under the language of "network effects," as though the relationship were mutual. But "audience" is fundamentally one-directional. It turns participation into performance.
I think a lot of internet nostalgia is really grief for a time when you could participate without being on stage. Sure, you wanted lots of people to read your blog, but we did have an era when posting didn't implicitly ask: how big is your following, how well did this travel, did it work.
Today, the "successful" participants (the successful audience-builders) are called "creators", while everyone else (who is also creating, just without large-scale traction) is categorized as lesser or invisible. You can write a blog post, a tweet, a Reddit thread; you have undeniably created something. Yet without an audience, you haven't achieved the status that now defines digital legitimacy.
What I miss is a participation model that didn't say: audience or perish.
Sadly, attention is all you need these days. If you get attention, you will be “set” in part because ads=money but mainly because human attention really is that valuable outside of advertising. Survival is still what matters and so most people judge “creatives” by big number because that means status.
I think people see the very western culture of haves and have nots where all that matters is big number dominating the digital landscape the way it does in the physical world. It is gross but not remotely new. You put the audience or perish pressure on yourself when you value big number go up opinions. Dont be friends with those opinions. They change nothing and have no real power if you dont depend on them for survival.
This isn't the first post I read on HN about this topic. While the content differs, the core ideas tend to be similar. The problem isn't about knowing that we can do it, the problem is actually getting around doing it.
I have two blogs, one with a specific topic [1], another I created to share everything else that I feel like writing about [2]. Plus a personal "profile" page [3]. Both blogs only have one post, the first one perhaps a couple of drafts I never got around polishing to publish them. The personal page I still have to update after quitting a PhD months ago.
Why is this? Is it due to some lack of self discipline? Is it because, if I write why I quit a PhD, I would end up complaining about the current status of academia, and this could be at odds with my current employer's guidelines about posting on social media? Or is it because, if I stop and list all the things I have in the back of my mind that would require "just half an hour a day", I would end up filling a whole day? What are your thoughts on this?
Yeah, a blog isn't just a place to quickly jot things down, it's actually work. And because it's work, and it's optional, you sort of have to feel like it's "the work you should be doing," or at least part of or ancillary to, "the work you should be doing," or else it will just feel like busywork, and/or get postponed indefinitely. Posting on an existing platform is lower-stakes. But then again, if you end up putting lots of effort into posts on an existing platform, you're still doing most of the work, and one could infer that you care about it at least that much. In those cases I would recommend doing the initial setup of an actual blog etc., which is just a one-time operation pretty much.
Just out of curiosity, do you happen to have or have had a blog?
Also, I think part of the problem for me is that I think no-one would would read it anyway, which, depending on how you look at it, can both be an incentive or a disincentive. But sometimes I also think about it as some sort of conversation starter or tool to help me foster conversations. The idea would be to write about some things I happen to talk about with different people every now and then, so that when I happen to talk about it again, I can point them to what I wrote as a summary of my opinions as some sort of starting point for the discussion.
Yep, you can put me in the "used to have a blog" category! Toward the end I just got busy on other things and drifted away from it. Been thinking about starting up again lately though, which is why all of this stuff is top-of-mind. I definitely hear you on the "no-one would read it" fears. There's an awful lot of chatter out there, an ocean of it. So it helps (just to flog my earlier point again) if it's part of what you think of as your life's work. But even if only a few friends read it, maybe that's okay too. I never really thought of my own blog as being super important, but it did connect me with a few people.
The solution offered is pretty weak. I don't think it addresses why the internet took the shape that it did. Publishing without centralized services is too much work for people. And even if you publish, it's not the whole solution. People want distribution with their publication. Centralized services offer ease of publication and ease of distribution. So unless the decentralized internet can offer a better solution to both, this story will play out again and again.
The title is all bluster. Nothing wrong with going off to play in your own corner but I don't think it does this movement any good to play-act at some grand conflict.
Personally, I believe it would be better if we had more technological self-direction and sovereignty, but this kind of essay, which downplays and denigrates the progress and value of our modern systems, is a perspective from which the insights necessary for such a transformation cannot possibly take root.
When asking such questions seriously, we must look at youtube, not twitter. Mountains of innovations in media publishing, delivery, curation, navigation, supplementation via auto-generated captions and dubbing, all accreted over 20 years, enabling a density and breadth of open-ended human communication that is to me truly staggering.
I'm not saying we should view centralized control over human comms infra as positive, or that we'll be "stuck" with it (I don't think we will be), just that we need to appreciate the nature and scale of the "internet" properly if we're to stand a chance of seeing some way through to a future of decentralized information technology
Agree with a lot that you’re saying here but with a rather large asterisk (*). I think that ecosystems like YT are useless to the wider web and collective tech stack unless those innovations become open (which Alphabet has a vested interest in preventing).
If YT shut down tomorrow morning, we’d see in a heartbeat why considering them a net benefit in their current form is folly. It is inherently transitory if one group controls it.
The OP article is correct about the problem, but is proposing throwing
mugs of coffee on a forest fire.
This conversation on YT reminds me intimately of all the competition Twitch got over time. By all accounts, Mixer was more technologically advanced than Twitch is right now, and Mixer died 5 years ago.
Even Valve of all people made a streaming apparatus that was more advanced than Twitch's which had then innovative features such letting you rewind with visible categories and automated replays of moments of heightened chat activity, and even synchronized metadata such as in-game stats - and they did it as a side thing for CSGO and Dota 2. That got reworked in the streaming framework Steam has now which is only really used by Remote play and annoying publisher streams above games, so basically nothing came of it.
That's how it always goes. Twitch lags and adds useless fake engagement fluff like bits and thrives, while competitors try their damnest and neither find any success nor do they have a positive impact anywhere. The one sitting at the throne gets to pick what tech stack improvements are done, and if they don't feel like it, well, though luck, rough love.
The one sitting at the throne is the one with the content, not the one with the tech. People don’t care about frivolous features. There are like 20 different streaming services, I’m sure some have better tech than others but ultimately people are only paying attention to what shows they have
Mmm yeah I think I know what you mean. IDK if "If they stopped existing, we'd realize we shouldn't have relied on their existence" is plausible, but we have plenty of bitter lessons in centralized comms being acquired and reworked towards... particular ends, and will see more.
Also the collective capability of our IT is inhibited in some ways by the silo-ing of particular content and domain knowledge+tech, no question
Appreciate the nature and scale of the internet... and also how it's changing though, yeah?
While I agree with much of the article's thesis, it sadly appears to ignore the current impact of LLMs ...
> it’s never been easier to read new ideas, experiment with ideas, and build upon & grow those ideas with other strong thinkers on the web, owning that content all along.
But, "ownership" ? Today if you publish a blog, you don't really own the content at all. An LLM will come scrape the site and regenerate a copyright-free version to the majority of eyeballs who might otherwise land on your page. Without major changes to Fair Use, posting a blog is (now more than ever) a release of your rights to your content.
I believe a missing component here might be DRM for common bloggers. Most of the model of the "old" web envisions a system that is moving copies of content-- typically verbatim copies-- from machine to machine. But in the era of generative AI, there's the chance that the majority of content that reaches the reader is never a verbatim copy of the original.
The thing that I got stuck on most in 2025 is how often we complain about these centralized behemoths but only rarely distill them to the actual value they provide. Its only if you go through the exercise of understanding why people use them, and what it would take to replicate them, that you can understand what it would actually take to improve them. For example, the fundamental feature of facebook is the network. And layered on, the ability to publish short-stories on the internet and have some control over who gets to read it. The technological part is hard but possible, and the network part well - think about how they did it originally. They physically targeted small social groups and systematically built it over time. It was a big deal when Facebook was open to my university, everyone got on about the same time, and so instantly you were all connecting with each other.
I believe we can build something better. But I'm also now equally convinced that it's possible the next step isn't technological at all, but social. Regulation, breaking up the monopolies, whatever. We treat roads and all manner of other infrastructure as government provided; maybe a social platform is part of it. We always lean these thoughts dystopian, but also which of us technologically inclined readers and creators is spending as much time on policy documents, lobbying, etc, as we are schlepping code around hoping it will be a factor in this process. This is only a half thought but, at least these days I'm thinking more about not only is it time to build, but perhaps its time to be building non-code related things, to achieve what we previously thought were purely technological outcomes.
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 second you expose anything to the public internet it is going to be flooded by malicious bots looking for things to exploit.
I've been running VPS's since at least 2010 and this has always been the case for me, getting "scanned" all the time. Yet what I also noticed is that default installations of most modern software are not as insecure as most "cloud devs" nowadays have fearmongered us into believing. You can run your own MySQL or the likes. Or use SQLite. Use stable, secure software and use publickey auth. Look into scripts that block repeated and invalid requests. Hell, use Docker or jails to run most things.
Perhaps it's true that no one is unhackable, but that definitely doesn't mean you'll 100% get hacked within a day of running your own server.
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.
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.
> 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.
In the same way heroin proves itself more useful for everyone year after year.
> 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?
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.
I chose to give that nice man my wallet instead of taking a bullet, but that doesn’t actually reveal as much about my preferences as you seem to think it does.
No, you chose to be able to go back to your loved ones in one piece. That very much reveals your preferences. Do you think someone who was in depression, who had a terminal illness might do differently?
It doesnt mean that it getting more and more useful though. The alternatives could be getting worse and worse. Or there just aren't alternatives.
Maybe this is just a disagreement of what it means for something to "become more useful"? As an example, If I need a bank account and every bank goes online only and shutters their physical locations, that is not online banking becoming more useful to me. I was perfectly happy going to the physical location, but i am now spending more time doing banking on the internet.
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?
You vote with your feet. If you can only follow the world would be exactly as simple as you make it out to be.
If you write things for your own website you would make more of an effort and it would ideally find an audience that enjoys your world view or insights into your topics.
It would be great to lure you into that experience. HN is a terrible dating agency. Gathering down votes here is the opposite of making friends. It is however great for discovering authors like Henry.
He could have spend his time complaining on x how bad it is.
If you’re arguing that there are different ways of being better than your argument falls even further apart since you might choose a worse option because it is better in some way…
No, this is not at all a given. There could be switching costs that cause people to stay on a product that is actually worse. Users also simply might be unaware of alternatives or that they are better. It's not hard to imagine any number of other reasons why in our imperfect world there is not perfectly elastic competition.
Correct. When I spend more time in the bar and fewer time at work and with my family then this is a sign that the bar is more useful and better for me than work and family.
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?
It’s absolutely not the case that people are good enough in general at optimising their time and lives that the things they spend the most time on are the “best” they could have done.
Most people will readily admit to this, especially when it comes to the internet, and it’s well documented that many people are not happy with how much time they spend on the internet or how it impacts their lives.
> 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.
Your logic seems to be wanting.
I choose to spend more time at work than on vacation. Do you think I like it better, or can you imagine one reason explaining why I work?
I'm sympathetic to that view, but I'm also aware of a particular way it doesn't explain the world. Often I make local choices that I enjoy while nonetheless regretting them later. Text social networks are the most common way this happens to me. But the other common failure mode was with food.
Without the retatrutide dose I'm on I frequently consume large amounts of food. I love apples, and blueberries, and chicken and rice. I can easily eat an entire Costco bag of Envy Apples at a stretch. Inevitably, I regret this once I have exited my fugue state of food consumption. So why do I do it? My behaviour on retatrutide is far superior at getting me both total content and joy (in the sense of area-under-the-curve rather than point-in-time).
This concept has been explored for a long time[0]. The earliest documented I know of is the concept of Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia from the Greek philosophers. But I think any notion of utility must build in the notion of regret and perhaps the bicameral mind and perhaps also the notion of non-rationality. My utility functions for the things I do are not time-translation invariant, therefore I think any model that optimizes for greater content and greater joy must necessarily involve temporally non-local terms. I don't yet have a strong model of this.
But we know this is common to many mental disorders. Part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an interruption of some mental pattern. My wife and I have a game we find amusing to play when we want to overrule the other's temporally local preferences: we challenge the other to a game of rock-paper-scissors to see whether the countermanding applies. When she exercises it, I frequently find that even if I win the momentary desire has passed.
tl;dr: Utility functions have different values depending on the temporal stride they take
0: Recently, Elon Musk claimed that the aim for Twitter should be "unregretted user minutes". Sadly, despite this stated aim, I found that his changes decreased these and increased regret so I had to stop using his platform. I agree with the notion of maximizing (value - regret) expressed in some abstract form, however.
Except social media feeds are designed to addict. A smoker will spend their time smoking instead of not smoking. Does that mean that smoking is good? Why else would they do it, if not smoking was better? It's not that simple. When we blame the users, we forget tech monopolies are spending billions to engineer systems which are stealing our time.
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.
Your comparison may be apt for Tiktok. The OP talks about the Internet. Researching, learning, communicating, paying, shopping, entertaining, via the Internet, have steadily increased.
Year over year, we eat more junk food and get more overweight than the previous year. This demonstrates that junk food and fat are becoming increasingly useful and beneficial.
Love the idea but it still isn’t easy enough for normies to host a blog or a website.
I think there’s a way though.
Modern self-hosted open source is easy to run for semi-experts, so what if communities banded together to host stuff at the local library?
A bunch of enthusiastic teens could form a volunteer core that runs a bunch of services for their community and teaches anyone interested, giving kids a chance to learn how to host stuff online. There’d be high trust if it’s all locals providing services to locals. Host it on a cheap VPS so the library doesn’t even need infra; just a very small budget for the initiative.
It’d be super decentralized. And the teams running these services would provide high quality feedback to the developers on features & operating of their services.
> Love the idea but it still isn’t easy enough for normies to host a blog or a website.
I have a hunch that normies are increasingly unaware of what a website is. Newer generations are growing up with apps, on their phone/tablet, some being basically "illiterate" when it comes to using a laptop/desktop beyond the top 10 webites corresponding to the apps on their phone.
Thinking about it. There are some things which can be done to better sooth the private forums.
Like to me especially signing up to each and every forum and then waiting to be accepted by a person feels good but has tons of friction and has some stress attached because you never know how strict the community is as well, it might take a day or two, perhaps this is the reason why we got the dumpster fire of mega internet forums called reddit or twitter of sorts
To me, federation feels better in this context since I can still have a single identity of sorts across multiple forums and you got better idea / ways to filter as well if need be
Another thing I feel about private forums where users have to wait for permission signing up is that I feel like something even as simple as having a cute cat or cute apple LOL or anything relaxing could make it less stressful for people to join. I assume its impact would be few but it would leave a deeper impact on those who do want to join.
Listen while I tell of Christmas 1983, when every 14-year old with a VIC-20 got a cheap modem.
Seriously, haven't we been working tirelessly to expand the circle of access? Nostalgia reflects when the circle was smaller, and we felt that we knew everyone in it.
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.
There is freetube which had rss really easy to work with for youtube subscriptions.
One of my biggest issues was that on some occasions, Youtube algorithm would give me home run so I would still frequent Youtube algorithm
Another issue was that smh, youtube's rss feeds couldn't really find the difference between shorts and normal videos.
So if you have a channel which makes lots of short form content, you would see that so much more often.
Like I remember taking a few hours out of my life to fix it but ended up giving up.
Although now thinking about it, I feel like what can be done is seeing all the youtube videos and seeing all the shorts videos from an api or similar I guess and then seeing the difference and having it for an rss or such to pass another rss.
But one can see the pain in the ass for that and I am not sure how that would even work.
I must comment, Hackernews has been the perfect spot between algorithmically generated and completely self feed as it gives me new things.
is there anything like Hackernews but for youtube/video content?
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.
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.
Web 1.0 nostalgia always skips the part where nobody read your painstakingly hand‑crafted blog. TikTok didn’t ‘kill’ personal sites, it just finally gave normies hosting, discovery, and an audience without making them learn how to center divs.
The article mentions IndieWeb/POSSE but discoverability remains unsolved. I'm working on a pledge system for local-first projects - a /.well-known/freehold.json that crawlers can verify. Projects that break the pledge get delisted publicly. More at localghost.ai/manifesto
I’ve started experimenting with Quarto[0] for scientific/technical publishing on a personal website, and it’s been quite easy to use so far. I especially like that it has builtin support for LaTeX, markdown, code blocks and Jupyter notebooks. Only thing is I wish there were more templates ready to use.
I'm with you. Surprised by the negative reactions here.
A possible piece of the puzzle: I originally read the article on mobile, no issues. Then I opened it on my desktop, and found the design quite jarring. The margins are much too large for my taste, forcing the text into a single narrow column, and the header animations were distracting and disorienting (fortunately the page works perfectly with JavaScript disabled). Perhaps this triggered people?
I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really hate the design trend of confining tiny text into a tiny narrow column down the middle of my browser. It's an awful stylistic decision, and this is the petty hill I'm willing to die on. It's so bad that I really can't take a site seriously that does it.
Now, someone's going to come out of the woodwork to remind me, "Well, ackshually, research suggests that it's easier to read text that's constrained by blah blah blah blah" I don't care. It sucks. It's always sucked. It will forever suck. I have a nice 27" monitor, and I want to use the whole thing. I don't want to have to hit ctrl-] ten times just to have text that is readable and spans my monitor.
while i agree with you; I also think that sound ideas are sound regardless. i don't think the negative comments are helpful at all. If people wanted new information, go read nature, science, cell. There's plenty of journals. HN is not for new information, it is for interesting information which allows refactored info imo.
I've often mused about how people get irritated by others being optimistic about change when the observers have tried change in the past and not been able to maintain it. I feel that the experience of that can lead to a position of cynicism that is defined by ones own limitations rather than the constraints of the system. They'll even suggest that people should be stronger in their resistance against the proven stickiness of platforms that use huge data to keep people in their ecosystems.
Without wanting to sound overly pessimistic, I subjectively feel like comments on Hacker News have become more negative and cynical over the last 10 years. It often seems like the prevailing attitude is "let me try and point to a perceived flaw" or "here is why this is not good enough" rather than being helpful or supportive... We're staying away from the hacker ethos IMO.
It's by no means a perfect article, but the general message seems to be that we're not powerless to build the web we want, and you can host your own website, which is still true.
Whenever I see something I like, I vote it. It feels awkward to me to type a bland show of praise when many other users have already done (and will continue to do) the same*. When I see something I dislike or disagree with, I feel it easier to go into more detail as to why, as I rarely see people sharing similar criticisms.
* As a sidenote, people who just say "This." and "Cool." irk me, and I don't want to elicit the same annoyed reaction in others.
For however much I can respect individuals for showing their creativity, the novelty of it wears off. The majority of people in the Indie Web scene all blend together. The presentation might be different, but the essence is mostly the same. Not everyone needs to express themselves and voice their opinions. "Lurk five more years before posting" as people used to say.
The article is also laden with a certain kind of politics. You can infer the philosophical premises that led to some of these conclusions.
I am guessing you are on mobile and are referring to the togglebar 'demo mode', illustrating its existence.
I wish we didn't have that, but we have to. That demo of the theme togglebar exists to educate users, because we found that a lot of complaints came from people who were blind to the gear icon and were unaware that the control they wanted already existed. (Which is regrettable but understandable, because almost all websites provide useless controls or visual spam, in an example of 'why we can't have nice things'.)
Obviously, it's disabled on subsequent page loads. (One of a number of parts of the UI/UX we streamline using 'demo-mode', as we try to thread the Scylla & Charybdis of a cluttered but explicit UI vs a clean newbie-unfriendly UI.)
Back in the day, you made some website on GeoCities or Angelfire and no one visited your site. Today, you post to Medium or Bear Blog and no one visits your site.
The difference is that back in the day people couldn't find your site, whereas today they don't even look.
Everyone self-censoring on a social media platform (disturbingly common) should have long-ago moved to something self-hosted, but the integrity of the message is less important than its reach. Consumers of these censored feeds should have long-ago moved back to RSS or created an open alternative method of providing independent, algorithmically curated streams.
Reading this, I kept wondering whether it would stay on the technical level or whether it would immediately start broadcasting the author’s cultural politics. It does, and the first giveaway is the kind of sentence you’ve seen a thousand times:
“These days, however, we write increasing amounts of complicated, unsecure code to express less and less meaning, in order to infinitely generate shareholder value.”
That line signals a tribe: “infinitely generate shareholder value” is the ritual incantation that turns every topic into the same morality play, with the same stock villain. It’s the worldview of someone who wants to live in a small enchanted technical garden, treating the economic world as a gross external thing, that you can blame whenever you need a cause.
And “unsecure code” in that context is part of the aesthetic: modernity is decadent, business is corrupting, therefore the code is “unsecure” and “meaningless.”
The Brendan Eich stuff is the same genre: petty culture-war residue kept alive long after normal people moved on.
So yeah, the internet continues, and until such artistic types learn to tamp down their own biases and refrain from injecting those into every word they write, I will keep away from their walled gardens.
> treating the economic world as a gross external thing
Well, a _specific_ kind of economic world in this case. Is it not a matter of fact that big tech companies largely guide how computing is used a developed, and that they are beholden to ever-expected increases in value to their shareholders? You have still have an "economic world" that doesn't operate that way.
What specific kind? The "economic world" exists in that you can work for companies with shareholders, you can work for other companies, you can work for NGOs and whatever other structures. What OP's whiney comment does is complain about the ones people like to work at because the pay is good. And his comment doesn't come from being an expert in economics (he's a programmer), it comes from vibes. Well what about aligning the vibes with the salary? Oh, no...
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.
Let me guess, you want a site that is just a singular column of text, plenty of space for ad breaks, and 3/4 of your monitor is just whitespace on the left and right?
I read the article on mobile and I thought it was great. Then I looked at it on my desktop (in Chrome) and found it much harder to read. There are even images literally blocking off whole portions of certain paragraphs. It's not good.
I just re-read the entire thing. It is good. You're misrepresenting or you need to check your browser settings.
No image blocks any paragraph, which even if it had, would be far more forgivable than modern web design. Do you consider any of Apple's modern product pages -- which "block off whole portions of" the page itself by scrolljacking and Clockwork-Oranging you to force you to watch their hypnotic marketing animations -- bad?
Why are you trying to gaslight me? I know what I’m seeing. In my browser (Chrome with default settings), there are certain paragraphs where the first word of every line is partially obscured. There are others where the last word of every line is obscured. It is unreadable.
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.
Yes, the core issue underlying the rot as described in TFA is the funding model for the internet. But that cancerous idea is older than the internet -- adversing, hawkers and scammers, they've been around since forever. It's an unfortunate side effect of "business" and if you turn the sanitation dial far enough, you'll get professions like Sales and Marketing.
So to fix the internet, you'd have to decouple the content from the toll to access it.
These types of cultural analysis always fails to be substantial because they rely on "losing our way" argument consciously or even on a subliminal moral level.
I think this one is kind of better because it tries to place social transformations on a material base, but it still fails to do that properly with tech.
Tech or the internet isnt a freeform thing that just exists and obeys everyones psyches and wants. Tech is something made in factories from specific industries by specific companies and organizations to fit within certain monetizeable bounds.
The early internet obeys the grasp of the early industry. Very little was monetized then.
The development of the internet follows the development of the monetization of the internet, it follows the rules of capital.
A lot to unpack here, but the article fails to tackle the question of distribution. Creators put their videos on YouTube because that is the way to reach a nearly global audience at zero cost. I can assure you that although you can probably figure out how to host videos that nobody sees, you cannot afford to host a popular video.
The author clearly spent a lot of time writing and presenting this, but the facts and conclusions don't seem to warrant the presentation. In particular the (useless, in the narrative) section about antibiotics shows that the author is a deeply unserious person suffering from some pretty severe fallacies. Nobody can have seen a chart of childhood mortality over the 20th century and still believe such things.
> Creators put their videos on YouTube because that is the way to reach a nearly global audience at zero cost.
If a tree fell and there was no one around, did it make a sound? A cursory look through r/newtubers would show you that there are a lot of people who get no views on their videos. Youtube's distribution mattered when it was looking for user-generated content to splice ads into. Today, it is filled with that content, and no longer has to encourage people to post by giving them thousands of views overnight.
Besides that, people starting Youtube channels are looking for fame, which is why they unquestioningly follow all the usual tricks for "going viral": inane thumbnails, one-minute preambles before the "like and subscribe" beg, engagement bait content to draw in comments, etc. This kills whatever original voice the uploader may have had, before their first video is even posted.
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.
People who were not technical then and are not now made it work with Myspace, Neopets and Geocities. There are a number of free microhosts out there. And the big social media sites also allow you to post a lot more crap.
I think bringing back websites like hawkee etc and providing an easy way to host is the right way forward, but it needs a catalyst (like most things) to become a trend.
There's a line from a 2009 episode of The Office that sums it up:
Jim: "Pam texted back saying we could give them all iPods".
Phyllis: Oh, if they don't have an iPod by now they really don't want one."
Website creation has reached its equilibrium rate of growth. Those who want a website will make one, and the rest won't. Personal websites are one of many media for public self-expression today; in 2004, the options were far more limited. Those who are on Neocities or mmmm.page or Bearblog etc., are the spiritual successors of that MySpace HTML template generation. They are a trickle relative to the number of people who'll start a Tiktok, Bluesky or Youtube account. It's not going to grow any faster than what it is, regardless of whichever points of friction in creating one can be eliminated.
I see it similar to writing books. Everyone can write it (dictating to someone else is also writing), it can be good for person (putting ideas in understandable way, sharing inner ideas). Buuuut not everyone wants to do it.
I guess fetishising books and personal blogs has a limit.
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.
There's certain level of friction to everything; that acts as a filter to separate those who choose to proceed anyway and those who don't. If you want to start painting, you have to buy a canvas, an easel, brushes, paint and set aside time to actually do it. Some people will abandon it because they like the concept of being someone who paints more than actually doing it. Some will proceed because they want to paint.
The same goes for website creation. You can post text, pictures and images on any social media site. The independent web is never going to be able to match that level of usability, and IMO it shouldn't try to. Part of the reason the indie web is interesting is because it's full of people who found their way towards wanting to build their own site.
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.
I liked this article, and I had a website back in the days of having an html directory in my university unix account.
So what stops me today? I don't have hosting.
Eventually livejournal, blogspot, etc. came around and provided a decent approximation of what people wanted to do, for free. Yes there might be a little ad on the side but it was basically 'okay'.
Eventually FB etc. came along and provided a decent approximation of a blog and allowed easy readership. Friendfeed got bought and soon enough everyone was in everyone's business.
The problem is facebook, linkedin etc. are too easy to propogate information. My ramblings shouldn't show up on everyone's feed. They should show up to people who inbound come want to actively seek them out; those are the people for whom they might be interesting. It's kind of like talking to your neighbor.
You find out what's going on in their life, but maybe you don't want everyone on the street to know, but you're fine if they happened to ask you about it. Chances are if someone is genuinely interested in you, they'd come to your website... but do you want your boss to come?
I don't know maybe the internet was a little safer when it was not anonymous, but at least somewhat selective as to who would access it.
first off: this is a beautiful article! but, it got me thinking about how many times i found an interest that would then become a core part of my identity by having a really cool piece of media relating to said interest essentially force-fed to me by algorithmic feeds. i got into rhythm games by seeing a livestream of osu! pop up on twitch, got into archival fashion by seeing a really incredible outfit on reddit, got into experimental pop by having clarence clarity's "no now" come across my spotify feed.
as someone who grew up in a fairly insulated & isolated suburb, i think those types of experiences were really important in turning me from an unconfident, kinda angry kid into the aesthetically-engaged, witty, openly-gay man w/ a pretty big breadth of creative interests i ended up being. i'm truly not sure if i would've turned out this way if most of the internet remained as undiscoverable as it was ~20 years ago.
though i have more appreciation for the slow web nowadays, where my identity is a bit more solidified, i still feel a pretty strong pull towards "the platform", and my visions for a healthier internet include it. but, that's about as far as i've gotten.
If only we could separate out social network from content.
I think chat apps are a good place to start. It's a place where contents of your friends list matters. Where the only way to have something recommended to you is asking someone for it or someone close to you coming to the conclusion that you, personally might enjoy it.
What's left to figure out is how to connect these systems that have strong identity and viciously curated friends lists to recommendation engines and content mills in a way that's opt-in. That lets users control the content that lands in their lap. That let's them decide where they land between "I'm gonna ask a friend about what's cool" and "just plug me to firehose" spectrum.
The connection should let users make available many freshly generated pseudonymous identities so that content mills can only create ephemeral profiles of you.
I imagine chat systems should let you tag your contacts and expose only a part of your social network when you ask content mill for recommend content.
There's so much more to discover beyond the modern status quo where we basically surrendered everything.
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...
Ad driven centralization bad. Go make independent websites using open standards. I just saved you 5 mins.
This spends a lot of time on mood setting and analogy and doesn’t address: network effects, discovery economics, hosting and maintenance costs, security, spam and abuse mitigation, user incentives.
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 find the lack of respect for accessibility considerations on that website disturbing. For instance, I wish I could see the provided paintings in all their glory instead of as miniscule thumbnails with text plastered over them.
I'm not sure why the author even bothered putting the paintings in there in the first place; was it to annoy visitors and create a discussion?
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.
Precisely. I have made my own e-cards to send to friends to commemorate holidays and outings. All HTML + CSS, responsive and looks fine on all devices.
> I used the early web. I miss forums, I miss the small webmaster, I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.
None of these things are gone. They're just not new anymore for a lot more people, and they probably have significantly less social impact and cachet. But that's all.
Yeah. It's actually the opposite: the original web considering of home pages and niche forums participated in exclusively by actual humans is very much still there, even if sometimes in different places.
It's "web 2.0" consisting of centralised networks full of your friends and friends of friends posting photos, updates and invitations that's being killed by those networks promoting "engagement bait" and generated content and bot accounts
What are some best practices for consuming indie web content? Is there a great RSS reader/app? How do I discover content I’d like but don’t already know about?
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.
Incredible website, and I started my own blog just because of this, maybe ill try integrating in the indieweb and webmentions to join the community ^_^
This was a great read, very refreshing. I like the idea of just starting a website and writing articles on it.
It is interesting that my first thought when considering doing so is: "How will I get any traffic?", but that's beside the point. I think I should just share it with friends and see how it goes.
"Fuck Brendan Eich [for opposing gay marriage at a time that Obama did as well]..."
"As ever, unionize, free Palestine, trans rights are human rights, fix your heart or die."
Ugh. What if you could possibly focus on technology instead of woke virtue-signaling (and threatening to kill those who disagree)?
Anyway, 'write ur website by hand' is absolute garbage advice, sorry. No, you are not going to effortlessly syndicate it elsewhere when you are manually updating your index.html to point to your latest hand-coded plain html file. Surely you won't even have a sitemap.xml. Will you write the sharing-friendly meta tags by hand every time too? No.
Pandora's box has been opened, per the story all that remains is hope. You can't go back in time and change history.
If you want to make a better world from a better internet you need to save people from the tyranny of the marginal user (https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). It's not the web, its the people. Those people incentivize enshittification. People will need to change, not the companies, the government, or the creators... the supply is purely filling this demand. The indie web isn't going to help a grandma see photos of her grand kids as easily as facebook will. And the indie web won't help you find a used guitar as well as craigslist will.
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 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.
crux: "the internet feels bad". But, most of the internet is still there, so how could that be. I think more specifically, the current mode of attention capture feels bad - what the majority of people are interacting with feels bad. But those are not "the internet".
A resurgence of people learning LAMP stack is not going to address the Big Problem. I think we should be asking why algo-driven social media roflstomps the indie web, not how to get more web hosters into the indie web.
These are collective action problems. The number of people who would have to maintain personal websites full time in order to replace Reddit is boggling and unachievable. These articles all reduce down to "I don't love ads". Call your congressperson.
It's good to have private websites and keep them weird, but this will and can in no way change the internet in general, centralization of content is a very good feature, at least functionally it is necessary.
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?
> 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 [ ... ] 2008 happened and normal people got online.
Some of us remember Eternal September, roughly 15 years early than 2008.
There is no "we." I can throw a dart at the a wall of HN usernames, and the odds are rather high that the name I'd hit wants me deplatformed, debanked and consigned to a GULAG. The implied threat about the consequences of not somehow "fixing" my heart tells me everything I need to know about the heinous purity spiral Internet and planet you think you want.
Not just no. Hell no. If it were a choice between whatever you claim to offer and an Internet that made me select from among curated sites as if they were cable channels, I'd take the latter. I thank my maker that such a choice remains hypothetical, and I feel no small amount of joy that you can't "fix" that.
Unequivocally, 100% agree. Disagreeing with "them" on HN even on these issues the author agrees with would also have me consigned to the nearest gulag/re-education center. "As ever, unionize, free Palestine, trans rights are human rights, fix your heart or die."
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.
> 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.)
If the internet is so awful, why don't we abandon it?
I mean, nobody forces us to use it.
Well, sometimes people do. But I think that's precisely the moment when we have to push back and tell them that we are not okay with using some WhatsApp group. And if they ask why, ask them if they know what Cambridge Analytica was, and if they like it when the political system is being manipulated.
The revealed preferences of the general population shows that the only way to accomplish this, is by banning the alternatives.
All indication point to the fact that the general population really, really likes getting angry at fake slop videos, endless discussion about the most inane over discussed topics and today's celebrity gossip.
Great educational content exists on the internet, social media could easily be about close connection to people around the world, but people evidently do not care about that.
>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.
Agreed. The very end of the article also names off all the usual cookie cutter nonsense as well.
These people just can't help themselves to inject activism in everything they do, and this is why so many people are turned off by otherwise great projects.
Tech as a whole needs to take a step back and stop preaching to people about things they probably don't agree with.
I love the design and the underlying message, but I just have to engage on the three examples of "radical monopolies". Most pressingly, I don't think any of the three show an example like that of the automobile, whose ubiquity is mandatory!
1. Describing "proponents [of the industrial revolution]" as some external group seems pretty absurd, and gives the rest of the piece an unsettling Kazinsky vibe. Yes, of course there are a variety of problems in the world related to the textile industry, that's obvious. But blaming "wage theft" and "over consumption" on the technology itself just seems absurd. You can still buy handmade clothes, and due to transportation-enabled specialization, they'd almost definitely be much cheaper and higher quality than they would've been in 1725!
2. Citing a 256 page report on antibiotic resistance[1] with no page number for the vague claim that they were overprescribed to some extent in the 1950s-70s is just plain rude! Regardless, there's no economic system forcing antibiotics on you; if you really wanted to for some reason, you could even save money by refusing them. Rather, the basic realities of human health are what makes them so ubiquitous, in the same way that they make food or hand washing ubiquitous.
3. This summary of the issues with LEO internet satellites is just way, way oversimplified -- the most egregious part being the implication that it is now "impossible to use earth-based sensors... to learn about space"! More fundamentally, equating LEO telecommunications with astrophysics research because they both involve things above our heads is goofy and misleading. Even more fundamentally--and to return to my overall point--there's no attempt to even vaguely gesture at a "radical monopoly" here! It's fair to say that the vast, vast majority of people only interact with LEO satellites when using GPS, which, again, is absolutely not mandatory.
And, finally, the web:
The web is no exception to this pattern. A vision of interoperability, accessibility, and usability, the World Wide Web was first conceived in 1989... But the proliferation of access and ultimate social requirement of access has spawned countless troubles for human society...
I hope it's clear how "technologies come with downsides" is a much more vague, obvious, and less-useful point than the Radical Monopoly thesis.
It’s an industrial, production-minded way of approaching a discipline that has all the hallmarks of being a great craft
I feel like the word "craft" is pretty telling here, as it strongly implies a break from the marketplace. If you don't like "industrial" websites, maybe take up issue with the concept of industry instead?
Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary
I love personal websites, as do we all. The idea that more than, say, 5% of the population would be interested in them without radical changes to our work-life schedules is a tad absurd tho, is it not? You really think the millions of people who are happily sharing AI-generated images of Jesus statues made out of plastic bottles on Facebook could be tempted away to learn HTML and build their website from scratch? Overwhelming https://xkcd.com/2501/ vibes from this section!
And, finally, my thesis:
The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons.
No. It can feel awful for one primary reason that dwarfs all others: advertising, which is of course just a wrapper over capitalism. If you want the internet to meaningfully change, no amount of artsy blogs will do the trick: you need to change the economic forces that drive people to contribute non-trivial intellectual products.
I, for one, see a world without advertising within our grasp -- still-capitalist or otherwise. We can do this. The Free and Open internet can exist once again.
> No. It can feel awful for one primary reason that dwarfs all others: advertising, which is of course just a wrapper over capitalism.
Huh, I wonder. What if we had a domain that is actively anti-capitalist. No ads, no products, no asking for financial support. Kinda like how GNU operating systems are hostile towards closed source software. (Tho I am AI-doomist and I don't think that online spaces can survive several billion new human-like agents that are trained to be as cunning and malevolent as possible.)
Something that scares the shit out of me is the new American tourist visa requirement that you disclose your social media accounts over the last 5 years. This seems an ultimate example of the exclusion or people who refuse to participate in a technology. I'm not on social media. If more countries begin adopting this, what am I supposed to show the immigration authorities? Am I supposed to create a wholly fake set of accounts in order to prove I'm not a threat to them? Is telling them that I'm not on social media a red flag in itself?
I think for the next 20-30 years it still wouldn't be feasible to make it a red flag due to a non-negligable part of the older population not being on social media at all. I assume it is right now still be possible to enter countries with a mobile phone number, and those have existed for longer and are used more widely than social media accounts.
I would assume they also try to derive associations to social media accounts via passport information if you don't provide any to them. So I think it's rather an additional bureaucratic step added on their side rather than a red flag.
That's by design. Many people in America today (including many in the federal administration) want to transition to a world with much less immigration and foreigners (including less foreign tourism) than the levels of the past several decades.
I understand that, but that's not really my point. Yes, they have an isolationist and xenophobic bent. But while it's understandable that having a social media presence full of sketchy / terrorist / trafficking / whatever might now be a reason for a country to deny a visa, it creates the question of what they do with innocent people who simply refuse to participate. My question is what happens if you don't have any social media or smartphone at all? Will we be completely excluded from being allowed to travel freely unless we post our thoughts on a daily basis?
> Will we be completely excluded from being allowed to travel freely unless we post our thoughts on a daily basis?
Yes, because even if you do, they will find other ways to exclude you. Their stated goal is to exclude as many non-Americans from the USA as possible, regardless of whether they consider you "innocent" or not.
I mean, that is a US problem - or the problem of any country which chooses to destroy its own tourism sector. And searching social media is ancillary to that, as you say, if the main goal is simply to exclude people.
I'm talking about (per the article) whether self-exclusion from social media will soon become a worldwide red flag for travel.
Oh my bad, since you mentioned American tourist visas I assumed you were only talking about America. I have not been following similar laws in other countries, maybe their motivations are different than the American intentions of completely shutting off immigrants from the USA.
That's very typically American. Being so focused on America without understanding that the choices of the American government have huge consequences for the rest of the world. You keep saying that this is all about the Trump regime keeping foreigners out of America. And that is true. But that is not the big picture. As an American you should be more worried about whether you will be allowed to leave your country, or go anywhere else when or if you want to, once America sets this precedent.
Optimistically, I think this is similar to how it's viewed when dating in the US. They want to see how well behaved you are, what your empathy level is with other people, and what you're thinking about day to day.
Not to say I agree with the reasoning, but it comes from a place of fear. The more fear, the more scrutiny. The criteria you need to show is based on what they fear.
Merely having a somewhat populated account on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn passes the bar of being a "real person." You share a few regular everyday things, you get happy birthday posts, a handful of people usually like your posts, you get a green flag in almost every circumstance.
Not having a social media presence comes with this question that can make it the scary part: Is it because of disinterest, because you're not socially belonging, or because you got ran off the platforms? It's obvious to us that is is disinterest, but they no way of truly knowing. And based on what they fear it can scare them, that unknowing.
If you can convince the other person it truly it is simple disinterest, there is no problem. Unless they're really bent on seeing your everyday thoughts...
If you don't "integrate well," it scares some people. You're too different and they fear becoming the outcasted outgroup with your inclusion.
If you're banned, that's... not good :) Which is a terrible place to be for people who were unrightfully banned.
What they're really hoping to catch is the blatantly obvious people that are openly delusional or violent on social media. There is a non-trivial amount of people who do this. If you have a page like this, or worse if you don't disclose it, that is the huge red flag.
This is a social investigation we personally do with others at the inner relationship level, with people who are already in the US. Right or not, it's not surprising to me that this reputational criteria bubbled up to immigration.
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.
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.
I've read your comment before visiting the site, and it got me wondering -- how bad can it be? Can it be worse than those acid green on red sites of the 90s-00s?
Imagine my surprise, when I opened the site and it looked and felt just like a museum or art exhibit. This was the literal feeling I had -- being at an art gallery, but online.
I guess, these comments tell more about the commenters, than TFA. We should remind ourselves to be more critical to the content we consume, regardless where it comes from.
I did the opposite, I opened the website before looking at the comments and thought it was like a beautiful art gallery too. Then I read the top comment, and thought 'What are they talking about??'. Had a complete opposite feeling.
The issue is that it's beautifully designed for a portrait phone-ish-sized screen. Try viewing it in 16:9 and it's a mess. I'm not saying this to criticise; the author owes me nothing, and if I shrink my browser window down then it looks lovely. But I think this is where the confusion is coming from. Half the comments are from people looking at it on a widescreen and half are on a portrait monitor or a phone. "What this website looks like" can be two very different things and nobody bothers to ask which we are talking about.
Wow. I had (just now) made one comment on the bad layout. As you might guess, I'm on desktop, and looking at the site in a window wider than it is tall. I saw your comment and shrunk my window to be half as wide as it is tall, and the layout corrects itself and changes -- dramatically.
Surprisingly, I had the art exhibit impression opening it on 16:9 desktop. It's sparse, as a gallery, or a luxury boutique, where free space accentuates value of content. It looks OK on mobile, but on desktop it's the sparse, but non-monotonous layout, that guides attention and provides a second layer to the content.
I too thought it was a beautiful art gallery, and not an article. Mainly because all I could see was art. Apparently there was an article too but I couldn't read it. I assume it was made for 21 yr olds with perfect vision and not intended for people over 40yrs old.
When I saw the article (which, for some reason, I had no trouble finding) I felt the same way, but then remembered I could adjust the font size myself with a few keystrokes.
There's an assumption, that people sometimes state explicitly, on HN that the discussion is more interesting or valuable than whatever's on the end of the posted link. Sometimes that's true - often even - but sometimes it's not.
That's not necessarily a value judgement on the discussion though. From me, at any rate, it's more often a personal perspective: sometimes I'm just more interested in or charmed by the thing, and in digesting and coming to my own conclusions about it, than I am in reading other peoples' thoughts and perspectives on the thing.
But, yeah, to me it felt almost like an old magazine: the typography, the layout, the way images are used. A lot of the discussion about web design in the 90s came about as a result of people coming from a traditional publishing background and really struggling to do what they wanted with the web medium, so to me it sort of hearks back to that a bit, does a good job of embracing some parts of that older aesthetic, but works well with modern web capabilities. Mind, I'm looking at it on a desktop browser, and maybe the experience on mobile is less good (I can't say), but overall I like it. It has some personality to it.
To some it felt like nothing as they couldn't render the content.
The challenge when tackling difficult problems is to bring in solutions to those problems.
Subway offered an alternative to junk food. By offering custom flavors of choice, giving consumers more control over what they eat. I don't see any fresh food at subway. Does it mean what they did is futile? No. Can't we point out this is another type of junk ? We better do.
The site is wonderful when rendered with JavaScript. A web to aspire to is one where the system font is set by default, at least could be chosen.
All valid concerns looking at an endeavor discussing a better web. The author may even take note and iterate, there was no claim it was definitive work.
One of the most frustrating and perhaps thought-terminating clichés on the internet and social media at large is alluded to in this reply:
“I personally could not view this page [because I turned off JS], therefore I will dismiss it out of hand as it didn’t cater to my needs.” A choice made by the consumer somehow makes the author accountable for it.
Or more succinctly, “but what about me [or people I’ve anointed myself as spokesperson for]?”spoken by someone not the intended audience for the piece, trying to make the author responsible for their need.
The answer to which, I think, is either, “it’s not for you then so move on,” or perhaps even “misery is optional, just enable JS ffs.”
The idea that the creator of a work must bend to the will of those that consume it seems to be highly prevalent, and is pretty much at odds with creativity itself.
I have found that HN is, ironically, a horrible place to post experimental work on, with a few exceptions - e.g. things "written in Rust" etc. I think it's because the majority of the commentators here haven't really made anything from scratch.
I too think it’s a beautiful website and really refreshing in its simplicity. Too often “good design” means “needlessly complex.” The design of the site also nicely fits the argument being made in the text.
I thought the same when loaded it on mobile. When I went to the desktop version, it is kind of glitchy and the images overlap the text: https://i.postimg.cc/bJgjcDD1/desktop.png
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My personal taste for the presentation of a piece of writing is that less is more. I usually find artwork that accompanies a text to be distracting. I love reading work that can stand on its own, invoking images in the mind. I also dislike animations that seem to be made for a certain scroll speed.
Having said all of that, I certainly don't think it's bad, nor is it a commentary on the arguments being made. It's just not my cup of tea.
> I usually find artwork that accompanies a text to be distracting. I love reading work that can stand on its own, invoking images in the mind.
But the images are a part of the work, not separate from it, no?[0]
You might have a preference against that, which is absolutely fine, but I think you're making an artificial distinction.
[0] There's obviously a separate conversation to be had about how much that part contributes or detracts with any such work, but the point stands that I tend to view such works as all of a piece including all constituent parts.
> My personal taste for the presentation of a piece of writing is that less is more.
TFA works with iOS reader mode, which is all that matters to me. I use it instinctively as it makes style more or less uniform and lets me focus on the content of the article.
I think when you make such strongly opinionated design decisions on your website, you're deliberately inviting strong criticism. They could have used a readable vanilla bootstrap theme and HN would be actually discussing the actual text content instead of the design, but they didn't, and here we are.
The idea that opinionated design is intended to court controversy or criticism is, itself, very cynical. The corollary to that is that all design should be vanilla to make it as unobjectionable to the widest audience possible.
Design and content are inseparable. When design reinforces the point of the content, that is good design, even if it's ugly, even if it's not aesthetically pleasing to you, even if it's not how you'd do it.
But I'd argue that questing for neutrality is worse than taking a stance, even the wrong stance. Besides which, what one now considers "neutral" is also a giant set of design decisions - just ones made by committees and large corporations, so the blame for its drawbacks can be passed off, and there's plausible deniability for the designer.
Someone takes risks and makes something creative they consider artistic. You're reducing their choices to a question of whether they intended to be popular or to court criticism, flattening the conversation into one about social media credit, and completely discrediting the idea that they had true intent beyond likes and points. That response itself betrays something slightly cowardly about the ethos of neutrality you're proposing.
Actually, HN wouldn’t be discussing it at all, most likely. At least not this much. The design is not only good, it has also successfully incited a passionate response from a bunch of people who don’t appreciate it. Win-win!
is one of the issues of modern web as it's optimized for quick most efficient reading, but something like this website is more optimized for slow thoughtful experience. Like some of the books about art history where you not only trying to get extract meaning of words but trying imagine how that time felt and try look on things from different perspective or different values.
Depends on your age. I remember being warned in my 20s that older people couldn't read 10pt font, 12pt was a stretch, I didn't really believe them.
Now I'm in my 40s, oh wow. Small, illegible, font is everywhere. Instructions on food is especially bad for this. At least on the computer you can usually force 125% font rendering.
Point being, the site is probably quite legible to people in their 20s.
You could scale it to 120%, font would become more readable and it would even remove the text overlap with the tilted image in part three. At 100% font looks similar in size to the one on HN, but a bit less readable, I agree.
Right. I was also pleasantly surprised; it looks great, reads fluidly, and is clean on the page. It is somewhat artsy, to be sure, but nothing complaint-worthy in comparison to modern websites.
I don't think it's a bad analogy but I think there's some tension between the visual interest and making a design that makes it pleasant for someone to actually read your article through. Though even if you format it optimally for that few people bother so maybe this guy has the right idea.
> Can it be worse than those acid green on red sites of the 90s-00s?
I think people are nostalgic for the social environment that enabled people to create websites of all fashions, may they be well or poorly designed. We simply hold up the poorly designed websites as an example of how accessible content creation was ("hey, anyone can do it"), though perhaps we should hold up the better sites ("hey, look at what we can accomplish").
On the one hand, the pages were kind of ugly. Nobody likes autoplaying music. On another hand, they ruined their own site with a (separate) series of boneheaded decisions. On the other hand, Tom didn't seem quite as odious as Zuck (Myspace had a visible wall, you otherwise knew what you were dealing with with the privacy settings, and the wall was a good way to have network effects and connect with people). On another hand, Myspace worked (there was Friendster too and apparently their problem was the servers only worked half the time) because in 2006 relatively few people were online, so you knew you could find people on there
I don't know how it would have evolved if Murdoch(?) hadn't ruined the site; yes it was always a bit messy, but still. (At the same time, they completely lost all user data in some 2015 (possibly 2016) database incident, so so much for that)
MySpace has a special place in my memory for being the place I learned HTML and Flash (my profile was a flash embedded in my page) in high school, and carried on that love of creation into my engineering life.
I think it'd be good to keep in mind that Hacker News is mostly populated by a demographic commonly referred to as "Tech Bros" who, for the most part, are here as part of their journey in creating profitable businesses.
Profitable (very) was Thomas Midgley Jr. when he introduced lead petrol for cars, it took 75-100 years til the «profit» was stopped. What did we learn?
The definition of “Tech bros” is “tech people you don’t like”. There’s no agreed upon definition (just like how people disagree about what is/isn’t a “grift”) because it’s not meant to be descriptive, it’s a rhetorical device.
No, it's tech people you don't like for a specific set of reasons: it's mostly hubris and its implications like downplaying the damage the tech does to society and environment.
perceived downplaying of the damage. Popular soundbites (including "don't solve social problems with technology") have it generally backwards, and most people don't go beyond them.
No, this is too dismissive. There was a large shift in the culture of people over the last decade or so as the bay area money printers started printing faster than finance firms were printing. Eg tech money attracted a culture of people wed normally label “finance bros”. Patrick Bateman types but without the explicit murder. Status, money, often born outstandingly privileged.
This is the tech bro people speak of. It is that psychopathic desire for status at all costs which sadly is learned, emulated, and exalted. Ironically, yc is the poster child for breeding this culture over the last 8 or so years and the place it is most often complained about outside of reddit ofc.
I'm looking at the article now, and where I am in it, the header "The Invention of the Automobile," the image of someone driving, and the first paragraph of that section are all overlapping each other. I came here to type the above, then went back to that tab to find the layout had changed without me doing anything, so now "Part two," the title, and the picture are overlapping, but not the first paragraph. And the title is cut off.
That's just one complaint, but it's not me, it's the site.
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. But I also killfile users who I think particularly misunderstand the comments they respond to, and I also killfile users who express what I think are low-information views.
I designed an extension with a roughly similar aim that filters based upon various phrases and characteristics rather than the poster of the comments themselves. It collapses comments (via automatic triggering of HN's built-in collapsing feature) and adds a "reason" tag to the comment information, so I can choose whether or not to read it anyways. I feel the features with the most positive differences are the capitalization detector (hides all caps or all lowercase) and the character requirement.
That is very cool. It would be cool to see what you decided to filter on (other than the same-case filter and the char limit). I had a similar idea where I would run comments through a fast cheap LLM to evaluate whether they could be tagged in a certain way. I originally tried just pure word-stemming and phrase-based blocking and found that I couldn't tune it well for my uses. I also found that collapsing comments lead to my opening them out of curiosity.
Thank you for sharing what works for you. I think it's great other people have been doing this style of read-side filtering. It's a pity that there's no way to inject code into mobile apps safely (i.e. this is an easy path to app-store rejection). Perhaps there's no option there but to push `shouldFilter` out to a server where you can run the logic. My use of my phone is the weakest link in my filtering strategy.
> We are meant to have what I call 'overlay networks'
As Terry Pratchett observed in a 1995 interview with Bill Gates:
“There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net”.
Equal internet votes means any propagandist with a human or machine bot army can bias whatever they want. Now we have people with unimaginably large propaganda machines drowning out those who act with integrity, intellectual nuance and selflessness.
I definitely want an "overlay network" for those sites that have hijacked the term "social network". Also I'd like one for movie reviews too please.
I think the problem really is more of: Beware of being actively trapped by deep dossier leveraged algorithms, in a manufactured social bubble of emotional comfortable, created by corporations that are expressly farming you.
People talk about social media is if it were passive, when its deep intel, deep analysis, manipulation. Where everything we do, is not just used to manipulate us, but in aggregate, improves manipulation overall.
It is amazing what toxins people will accept, if the toxins become baseline familiar.
I black-hole plenty of sites via pihole above and beyond the typical adblock lists. On a very few rare occasions I have turned off the pihole to unblock a site because I was curious after following a link that was blocked by said pihole. Every single time I quickly learned why that site was blocked, and visiting that site gained me nothing.
that's an interesting point. A echo chamber could lead to fatigue and boredom.
Reels is able to keep me engaged because it is able to surface similar content I would like but from different users. And they have such a breadth of producers these days.
The X home feed algo is not so good apart from it being text only, even for infotainment content. YT shorts also does not work as good as the Insta algo
My blogpost titled “Millennials are killing ham radio” has received the most hits out of all of my other posts. It got me an interview with IEEE Spectrum and basically cemented my name as a ham radio influencer.
Amateur radio is a remarkably niche hobby so that kind of attention is rare, but it took ragebait to do it. A title like “The Next Generation of Ham Radio” would have flopped. I know this because that’s what I titled it first, and after 40 views in 2 months I slightly rewrote it and reposted it under the new title and within a day it appeared on just about every ham radio forum, facebook group, numerous email reflectors, and so on.
I finished reading this comment wondering what should I take away from it. Is it better to include alarming titles and be read? Or the other way around? Or what would be the sweet middle point?
Hm. I read the title differently - that we create "A" personal website to break the monopoly of the "All" websites like the social media sites he mentions.
These are people who don't understand whimsy or other forms of contrast enhancing rhetoric. Designed to make reading interesting, points extra clear, etc.
Not designed to fool anyone into some random extremist view.
It may be that people who don't pick up on subtext humor, post more than average.
It's beautiful to be sure, I wanted to actually read what the author had to say, and stuff kept flying around my screen, so I did not get far.
Maybe if I printed it out...
Edit: Half joking with the printing (although I do find it much easier to read printed materials), but it definitely seems to me it that the author was trying to make a magazine and not a website. (A magazine where everything moves while you're trying to look at it!)
Actually they could turn on reader view mode if they use Firefox, because this is website, all content present as the W3C standards, users could read the content as any form as they like.
I thought the point is to pass along the message, though the one that is brought up quite regularly: sharing the joy of making websites, and such making as a way for anyone to contribute a little to the overall construction/improvement of the Web. Besides, it does seem to work without JS, though the layout is quite broken: header texts overflow (whatever is the window width), the text column is 45 characters wide instead of occupying the window width, all of which demonstrates the possible downsides of such diverse websites. That is not to say that they outweigh the benefits, but such downsides are not necessary to include, either.
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.
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.
> 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.
That’s exactly what the article says. Seems like you made assumptions about the argument based on the design instead of actually reading it.
I sort of missed this idea in the article, reading it more like "we can still thrive in the shade of the skyscrapers" than a call to a symbiotic existence.
> 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
This is what the article / indieweb mean with POSSE
POSSE is a great principle, but I'm talking about a different phenomenon: being voted onto the front page of HN, /., or featured on a huge subreddit, a tweet by some influencer with 100k subscribers, etc. The 15 minutes of fame, which hopefully leave a bit of a lasting audience, connections to sister sites mentioned in the resulting threads, etc.
The biggest problem of any indie publishing is obscurity; not that nobody cares, but rather nobody has an idea, and has no way to have an idea.
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)
> (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)
Woah homie, watch out for the model which is trained on reddit comments dataset to talk about intellectual one-upmanship xD
Also another thing but holy shit, LLM's are sycophantic man, it tries uses big words itself to show how the person has intellectual one-upmanship while cozying you up by saying practical design aphorism.
Like I agree with both of you guys and there's nuance but I am pretty sure that nobody's tryna sound intellectual hopefully.
Sorry for turning this into a rant about LLM's being sycophantic but man I tried today watching big bang and asked it if sheldon and raj were better duo in more common about physics (theorist and astrophysicist) since I was watching a episode where they both have dark matter in common and chatgpt agreed
Then I just felt the sycophancy in my heart so I opened up a new thread and I think I used the same prompt and changed it to sheldon and leonard and it ended up saying yes again.
The problem felt so annoying to me that I ended up looking at a sycophancy index being frustrated of sorts and wrote a lengthy ddg prompt lol to find this https://www.glazebench.com/
We really don't need more yes man's in our lives and honestly I will take up a less intelligent model than a sycophantic one. So I am curious what your guys opinion are on it too as sometimes I use LLM's as a search engines to familiarize myself with things I don't know and I am lately feeling it will just say yes to anything even silly ideas so I would never know what's the truth matter of the reality ykwim?
LLMs say yes to a lot. I often find myself priming it first with "absolute mode" type prompts before dealing with it. And also keeping my own opinions close to my chest
Seriously for my part, LLMs incarns exactly the only type of person that can break my nerves. Far too often I spot an hallucination, some bullshit rambling, sycophancy, or ----hughhhhh----- rethorical elements of language that makes me go mad :(.
examples for ---hughhhhh--- inducing stuff :
"I'll be blunt !"
"Here's the ground truth, no bullshit"
"Bottom line : <UPPER CASE EXPRESSION>"
"No fluff, technical, precise, no bullshit, devoid of unnecessary rethorical shapes, <etc..."
Pragmatically, you can design things to be highly readable for yourself and people that are "like you".
Alignment between the shape and the content is done in a circular fashion : what you see educates you to fabulate about design, once you fabulated enough you begin to say things are bad or well designed.
I often express myself online by writing a bit what goes through my mind, in a joyful and not very attentive manner, and I find it amusing to be barely understandable sometimes (I like the fact you had to use an LLM, lol) because, well, I feel it may bring a certain color to the otherwise often too uniform and immediate/instantaneous world of internet -- So, what I said previously is also mostly what occurs when you let your mind wander;
now, if I rejoin my own person and body, I can agree with you that my culture of good design is about the testimony of the removal of intention, in such a way that I feel content is highly readable, (fictionnaly) devoid of style, and somewhat raw or pure.
But again, at the "philosophical stage" all of this is pure fiction, and with a certain mindset, I am pretty sure I could shift my habits to adapt to what I feel as weird design, ugly, barely readable etc... It would be totally useless and absurd, but I could (given I have no specific perception-related medical conditions) !
We saw the web become a repetition of the same design, and while it IS good design in our "minimalism" addicted brains, I am pretty sure stumbling upon weiiiiird websites makes us great good sometimes, so much that maybe we also start to think about the absurdity of our standards : we arrived to the point in the "lie" where we identify this specific style as "the shape" of our perception, and yes : it become invisible to us, and is good design, but also it is a bit depressing.
My window manager and my emacs/vim/terminal configuration aren't what I call good design. They are highly readable but stratosphere-reaching levels of kitsch (yes ! I WANT to cosplay and feel as if I was writing code for aliens or to fight the matrix at work, and yes that's a bit cringe but at least I am honest with myself).
I don't wish the world and internet to be "more like that" and am ok with the actual state of design. Nevertheless I find that's a bit arbitrary and somewhat boring.
Yeah, not everyone wants to just write .md files and push to github webpage :) . I know that's what I personally like doing, but others have a more artistic flair and I try to just let things "be" the way they are. I think the message of the webpage was sincere and that's good enough for me.
I think you are stepping in the same trap as the author. In search of uniqueness you end up doing the same thing over and over.
The author starts with "we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed." and continue with a web page that dooms scrolls emphasizing on big titles with pictures out of context, hard to read layout etc. There is a lot of valid criticism in the comments.
Of course uniqueness and beauty is probably subjective thing but I think about this often about the web. For example if you spend some time in websites like awwwards, dribbble, framer gallery you are going to end up with same design over and over.
I am not sure when exactly but probably in the early 00's graphic prints started to get into web, and sure it does seems cool, and different but I don't think the web should be a graphic print.
I am really struggling to find unique web pages, websites these days they are all the same, and in search of their "uniqueness" they often fail big with the user experience.
One website that is unique in my opinion very well taught is - https://usgraphics.com/ everything about it makes sense, the pages, the labels, colours, buttons at every step on the website you know why are you there you know purpose of everything it is hard to get lost, and not understand the purpose of the page. It looks very simple but the design is sophisticated.
The funny thing about comments about that - the browser is the most HACKED thing. If you were to compare a web page using HTML/JS/etc... to any app from the 80s/90s/00s/etc... it is light years beyond those technologies. So for people that complain about JS/font sizes/etc.. why haven't you all migrated to some form of browser that works for you, or plugin combination that makes things work for you - so you can just STOP. We have all the COOKIE ACCEPT/OPTIONS MADNESS because of people like you.
I mean for f-sake we even have agentic tools that can summarize the thing for you so you don't even have to visit it.
I don't know when this retcon happened, but this was never actually a site for hackers. People here complain because they like the modern web, because it pays their salaries. They get fabulously rich because of the steady enshittification of the web.
Just saying... you actually don't need JavaScript. I run NoScript, and unlike a lot of sites my HN client opens in-app without the ability to interact with the extension, I could read the site just fine. The only thing 'missing' were the fade-ins, which I found after your comment tempted me to open the site in the full browser and allow scripts from the site I want actually missing. Lovely design, just slightly lovelier without the js.
I can't take HN seriously, I just can't. It's where I get a lot of information but the naval gazing is endemic here. It's a certain type of culture, mixed in with the genuinely good posts and people who work in the industry
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.
> 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...
Genuinely curious: would you mind please explaining to me how your contributions are more productive than the person you are responding to (read: attacking)?
It reads like you are upset at the poster using "DEI" and projecting your own behaviors onto them ("tedious and unproductive political discourse", "immune from critique or any burden of evidence").
I promise you Hacker News was exactly like this back in 2011.
> It has become political (toward the left)
I wonder what you're talking about - your definition of 'political' or 'left'.
Tech and politics are so deeply intrenched. More than just "is DEI evil and there's no such thing as algorithmic bias". Should Apple be restricted from collecting its Apple Tax and locking down its devices?? Should the EU be able to regulate American companies? Should governments demand encryption back doors in devices? Should Australia ban teens from social network? Should there be a Right to Repair for our devices?
Honestly one of my biggest gripes with HN is that it does seem to be a place where pretty regressive social viewpoints seem to flourish.
It would be informative if, when someone complains that XYZ is "to the left" they define exactly what they mean. Is the person they are complaining about really advocating for the proletariat to seize the means of production?
It is not in the interest of “people who complain about things being too far left” to get specific. To do so can only increase the number of people who realize they disagree with them. The vagueness is purposeful.
Most times i read political things on HN it looks like visiting a comment straight from ayn rand's delusions, but that's to be expected of the country with two right wing parties pretending to compete.
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.
particularly ironic comment from an HN/lobsters celebrity account lol
this website isn't turning into Reddit, this website has been a pretentious orange subreddit for well over a decade if not right from the get go and a link to this site's Reddiquette page (just as ignored as on any subreddit!) is evidence TO that effect, and not against it!
the fact that the link petuously denies reality notwithstanding!
I mean, I'm not saying I think it's some sort of bastion of intellectual superiority, just that "have people been saying this place has been going downhill for a long time" is true.
It's still really early 2000's! We have over 900 years left :)
---
On topic: discussions like these are as old as human discussion forums and communities. I think that the participants each grow and change on an individual level just as much as the community and platform does. I think humans have a hard time identifying how much of their feelings of nostalgia are based in reality.
Maybe the platform has not actually changed in the ways people fear, and instead, peoples' opinions on what is interesting, important, or valuable has changed?
Since this thread has been discussing politics-adjacent things, let's consider Senator John Fetterman from the United States. Mr. Fetterman is notably different today from when he first started his campaign, regarding what he believes is important and valuable. (Mr. Fetterman suffered a stroke, which is suspected to have brought about personality changes and shifts in political ideology.)
---
I think we, as individuals, should always be focusing our first line of questioning on how _we're_ changing, rather than trying to figure out how the world, or the zeitgeist, or Hacker News, etc. is changing.
Sometimes we outgrow things that we hold dear, and instead of accepting that it's not really the place for us anymore and moving on to a different environment, we try to shape our current environment around our new personality by instituting new rules or adding new features.
I don't get people who use "you say [thing] is getting worse but someone X years ago said the same!" as an argument that somehow proves [thing] isn't getting worse. Things can become progressively worse over long periods of time, it's not an instant change that can only happen once.
Another context where I often see this "argument" is major Windows versions. People rightfully say they want to stay on Windows 10 because 11 is objectively worse in many ways, and someone jumps in to say "you said the same about 7 to 10" as if it's some sort of gotcha. Both complaints can be right, each new version can be worse than the last.
Right now, we have at least one aspect in which HN has become objectively worse in the past years: AI-generated content. It didn't exist a decade ago, so good luck using that "argument" there. Thankfully, its prevalence is still nowhere near as bad as on Reddit (it's impossible to browse that site for 10 minutes without noticing bots posting blatant ChatGPT responses everywhere and getting hundreds of upvotes), but still.
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.
Their UX is not steamlined. They seem to also opt you in by default to every conceivable category of notifications. It feels like a clown website. If they fixed some of this it could genuinely be enjoyable though of course I get the point that it's employment networking as opposed to a social media 'connect with friends' site
Its alright, were not all like that. I found the site cute, at least there are people standing up to the bullshit. I have been blogging about it on my site to https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/
We've seen the same kinds of discourse arrive here as is common on other social media sites, where too much political discourse is just signaling what tribe you belong to and vilifying anyone outside it.
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).
I will even go as far as stating that it is one of the only few places left on the Internet where you can see differing opinions interleave in a not-completely destructive manner. Really no idea what OP is talking about because it has not been at all my experience.
It's useless without describing concrete, practical solutions to those problems.
What do the voters want? Zero taxes, no crime, world peace and infinite benefits.
It's easy to identify things as shitty because the above doesn't describe the world yet and thus it's a banal observation. Implementing real, practical improvements is really hard and requires much more thought and consideration and introduces the possibility of failure. Which is why that part isn't discussed as much.
Why don't people that perpetuate the current system defend its existence? Why is the onus on us to develop a new realm of government when the current system never had to do this?
Your comment is "but you live in society too!"
Society acknowledging the shitty things is the first action in rectifying them.
God did not create the current system of government on the seventh day of creation. The current system had to defend its existence (or rather, creation) at the time of its origin.
The thing about criticism is, we're a long way from "the worst possible outcome". That is, there is a lot that the current system gets right.
That's why the burden of proof gets put on the one proposing changes. The wrong change could make things worse rather than better, and we really don't want that.
So it's not enough to note that society is broken in some ways. Yes, it is. Yes, we notice too. Now, what are you proposing? Let's take a hard look at your concrete proposal, and see whether it's an improvement or not.
Oh, you don't have one? Yes, it's still valid to point out that there are problems. It's valid to demand that we not become complacent with the current problems. That's not wrong.
Not every complaint needs to have a goddamn essay attached describing some utopia. Sometimes you just need to kvetch, and I'm sick of getting tone policed otherwise about it.
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.
You've convinced me, I'm going to stop complaining about corporate slop and the connection between big tech / VCs and the awful political situation in the most advanced country in the world. I will try to glaze Liquid Glass from here on out, say some nice things about the richest man on earth who kept quiet about the fact that he pays people to grind video games for him, and make sure to give David Sacks and Jason Calacanis the benefit of the doubt next time they are whining like babies online for a Silicon Valley Bank bailout.
I don't think I misinterpreted the condescension you dished out by blanket labeling a trend of mostly valid critique as psychological compulsion and performative misanthropy.
Mainly I wanted to suggest that the folks you're diagnosing might have valid reason to complain. I could have done it more tactfully, but that's what came out.
Your post reads to me as a complaint that people who complain too much have a problem.
comment from account created ~4 years before the supposed noticeable decline: Here's a content-free opinion post designed to trigger more of the negative comments I really hate, but I'll keep coming back.
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?
Lmao sure. Every comment I make about unions gets downvoted, and every comment about "maybe it's okay to destroy the planet for one more solid quarter" shoots into the stratosphere.
More projection here than a drive-in movie theatre... This website sucks, but not because of any (incorrectly) perceived leftwing bias.
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.
While I agree it’s a good resource, please note there’s quite a few controversies[1] with the site, e.g. “The excessive monetization model of user-generated content has been criticized by several newspaper outlets, such as the British newspaper The Guardian”
Yeah, Fandom definitely went through a dark patch where they essentially killed a lot of very good niche wikis in the name of monetisation, and some other fraction migrated away as well as they could. Apparently it's changed owner and might be getting better, but I haven't had reason to go back and check.
Ah yes, signed at the bottom with all the cookie cutter political takes of a mentally insane progressive still clinging to the culture war they just lost. I wish I could downvote this post harder.
Oh great, another one of these dumb posts about how social media is so terrible and RSS, blogs, and HTML are so awesome. I'm getting sick of Hacker News people upvoting stuff like this all the time since it's just the same damn idea presented over and over again. Perhaps this site has grown too large and is attracting the Reddit hive mind crowd.
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.
To give it a different light: by using an indie web approach (i.e. self host), there is an intrinsic guarantee that a publisher has put at least some effort and resources to make their materials public.
This ensures that the published materials have certain authenticity and inherent amount of quality. Publishing them "the indie way" functions as a kind of proof of work: not a guarantee of excellence, but evidence that something meaningful was at stake in producing and sharing it.
By contrast, the corporate web has driven the cost of publishing effectively to 0. This single fact opens the floodgates to noise, spam, and irrelevance at an unprecedented scale.
The core problem is that the average consumer cannot easily distinguish between these two fundamentally different universes. Loud, low-effort content often masquerades as significance, while quiet, honest, and carefully produced work is overlooked. As a result, authenticity is drowned out by volume, and signal is mistaken for noise.
To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
> To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
This is very true. I've found that there's more good content than there ever was before, but that there's also much more bad content, too, so the good is harder to find.
RSS helps me, curated newsletters help me. What else helps build this discernment?
Hacker News, plus a few specific authors who link to others.
Human curation is still where it’s at.
Sorry for the shameless plug, but I built [Cloudhiker](https://cloudhiker.net) exactly for this: exploring great websites.
Organic links from trusted sources. "I trust Blogger X so I trust links from their blog."
IME, this is just about the opposite of true.
I recently did a deep dive of an (allegedly) human-curated selection of 40K blogs containing 600K posts. I got the list from Kagi’s Small Web Index [1]. I haven’t published anything about it yet, but the takeaway is that nostalgia for the IndieWeb is largely misplaced.
The overwhelming majority of was 2010s era “content marketing” SEO slop.
The next largest slice was esoteric nostalgia content. Like, “Look at these antique toys/books/movies/etc!”. You’d be shocked at the volume of this still being written by retirees on Blogger (no shade, it’s good to have a hobby, but goddamn there are a lot of you).
The slice of “things an average person might plausibly care to look at” was vanishingly small.
There are no spam filters, mods, or ways to report abuse when you run your content mill on your own domain.
Like you, I was somewhat surprised by this result. I have to assume this is little more than a marketing ploy by Kagi to turn content producers who want clicks into Kagi customers. That list is not suited for any other purpose I can discern.
[1] https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
I once spend half a day or so gathering RSS feeds from fortune 500 companies press releases. I expected it to be mostly bullshit but was pleasantly surprised. Apparently if one spends enough millions on doing something there is no room for bullshit in the publication.
Pleasantly surprised? I would think that these feeds would consist of product and company announcements and this would be the expected/appropriate content. Did you find something less sterile?
To convince you I would really need to rebuild this thing and show it side by side with blogs and news outlets.
To give one example, at the time I gathered f500 feeds my other feed sets (tens of thousands) suffered horribly from echo chamber effect. I had endless headlines announcing that David Bowie died. Something like half of it. I don't find that a particularly interesting topic. I have my own memories of his work and have little need for more. Perhaps you would like to read 20 of those? Surely not thousands? It isn't that it isn't a noteworthy event but it drowns out everything else.
Meanwhile Walmart is talking about donating returned Lego to charities.
Exon is talking about a giant ammonia deal to make carbon neutral hydrogen
and GM talks about their next generation software platform to help bring long term continuous innovation to customers through over-the-air updates.
They apparently have tons of diagnostic data and are looking to make it more practical complete with remote tuning for old clunkers.
This to me is quite a lot more interesting than say cbnc talking about war with iran, if bitcoin will survive and that Tesla stock is down???? I really needed more articles about those topics? I thought I already got a million of those. No way in hell I will open those links.
Do you intend to write it up? It would be interesting to get your take on how the classification works. And personally, as I know my feed is on the index as well, into which category my writing would be sorted.
Probably not. I lost interest when I figured out how poor the dataset is.
Fair enough, I've added your site to my reader just in case you change your mind ;). The mechanics of your process actually sound more interesting than the results.
Wasn't their workflow just that anyone can modify their feed list on github? Or was there a postprocessed list?
Probably a part of it, but I did not submit my site there directly at least. I think they used different sources to seed the list. There was a very active thread on HN about two or three years ago where very many folks shared their personal websites and from that several OPML lists where compiled. I noticed quite an uptick in feed subscribers around that time.
Also by the way, Henry Desroches, the author of the article we are discussing in this thread, also maintains a web directory personalsit.es, where I had submitted my site as well, so that might have also been a source for the kagi small web index.
Thank you. We should each try to be authentic, pay the cost, and hope that is what gets us recognized by an audience we value.
Historical parallel: the advent of newspapers showed the same catastrophe.
Yeah, until I hook up Claude to my NeoCities ;)
This comment is an excellent example of low quality content. It's all wrong and hallucinated to point out a conflict between things that do not exist. An AI can generate this crap, but only if you ask it the wrong way.
Maybe publishing on HN should have a cost.
I've come to think something is deeply wrong with the assumption that digital participation must mean audience acquisition. Whenever people talk about leaving platforms, the immediate rebuttal is "discoverability" or "reach" as if it's self-evident that pursuing an audience is inherently good. It's rarely defended; it's just presumed.
This is often smuggled in under the language of "network effects," as though the relationship were mutual. But "audience" is fundamentally one-directional. It turns participation into performance.
I think a lot of internet nostalgia is really grief for a time when you could participate without being on stage. Sure, you wanted lots of people to read your blog, but we did have an era when posting didn't implicitly ask: how big is your following, how well did this travel, did it work.
Today, the "successful" participants (the successful audience-builders) are called "creators", while everyone else (who is also creating, just without large-scale traction) is categorized as lesser or invisible. You can write a blog post, a tweet, a Reddit thread; you have undeniably created something. Yet without an audience, you haven't achieved the status that now defines digital legitimacy.
What I miss is a participation model that didn't say: audience or perish.
Sadly, attention is all you need these days. If you get attention, you will be “set” in part because ads=money but mainly because human attention really is that valuable outside of advertising. Survival is still what matters and so most people judge “creatives” by big number because that means status.
I think people see the very western culture of haves and have nots where all that matters is big number dominating the digital landscape the way it does in the physical world. It is gross but not remotely new. You put the audience or perish pressure on yourself when you value big number go up opinions. Dont be friends with those opinions. They change nothing and have no real power if you dont depend on them for survival.
This isn't the first post I read on HN about this topic. While the content differs, the core ideas tend to be similar. The problem isn't about knowing that we can do it, the problem is actually getting around doing it.
I have two blogs, one with a specific topic [1], another I created to share everything else that I feel like writing about [2]. Plus a personal "profile" page [3]. Both blogs only have one post, the first one perhaps a couple of drafts I never got around polishing to publish them. The personal page I still have to update after quitting a PhD months ago.
Why is this? Is it due to some lack of self discipline? Is it because, if I write why I quit a PhD, I would end up complaining about the current status of academia, and this could be at odds with my current employer's guidelines about posting on social media? Or is it because, if I stop and list all the things I have in the back of my mind that would require "just half an hour a day", I would end up filling a whole day? What are your thoughts on this?
[1] https://crypto.gtpware.eu/ [2] https://ramblings.gtpware.eu/ [3] https://gtpware.eu/
Yeah, a blog isn't just a place to quickly jot things down, it's actually work. And because it's work, and it's optional, you sort of have to feel like it's "the work you should be doing," or at least part of or ancillary to, "the work you should be doing," or else it will just feel like busywork, and/or get postponed indefinitely. Posting on an existing platform is lower-stakes. But then again, if you end up putting lots of effort into posts on an existing platform, you're still doing most of the work, and one could infer that you care about it at least that much. In those cases I would recommend doing the initial setup of an actual blog etc., which is just a one-time operation pretty much.
Just out of curiosity, do you happen to have or have had a blog?
Also, I think part of the problem for me is that I think no-one would would read it anyway, which, depending on how you look at it, can both be an incentive or a disincentive. But sometimes I also think about it as some sort of conversation starter or tool to help me foster conversations. The idea would be to write about some things I happen to talk about with different people every now and then, so that when I happen to talk about it again, I can point them to what I wrote as a summary of my opinions as some sort of starting point for the discussion.
Yep, you can put me in the "used to have a blog" category! Toward the end I just got busy on other things and drifted away from it. Been thinking about starting up again lately though, which is why all of this stuff is top-of-mind. I definitely hear you on the "no-one would read it" fears. There's an awful lot of chatter out there, an ocean of it. So it helps (just to flog my earlier point again) if it's part of what you think of as your life's work. But even if only a few friends read it, maybe that's okay too. I never really thought of my own blog as being super important, but it did connect me with a few people.
Thanks for sharing. Is your blog still online? If you don't mind, I would be curious to have a glance at it.
No, it's long gone. I even managed to botch the backup I tried to make, so it really is gone.
The solution offered is pretty weak. I don't think it addresses why the internet took the shape that it did. Publishing without centralized services is too much work for people. And even if you publish, it's not the whole solution. People want distribution with their publication. Centralized services offer ease of publication and ease of distribution. So unless the decentralized internet can offer a better solution to both, this story will play out again and again.
The title is all bluster. Nothing wrong with going off to play in your own corner but I don't think it does this movement any good to play-act at some grand conflict.
Personally, I believe it would be better if we had more technological self-direction and sovereignty, but this kind of essay, which downplays and denigrates the progress and value of our modern systems, is a perspective from which the insights necessary for such a transformation cannot possibly take root.
When asking such questions seriously, we must look at youtube, not twitter. Mountains of innovations in media publishing, delivery, curation, navigation, supplementation via auto-generated captions and dubbing, all accreted over 20 years, enabling a density and breadth of open-ended human communication that is to me truly staggering.
I'm not saying we should view centralized control over human comms infra as positive, or that we'll be "stuck" with it (I don't think we will be), just that we need to appreciate the nature and scale of the "internet" properly if we're to stand a chance of seeing some way through to a future of decentralized information technology
Agree with a lot that you’re saying here but with a rather large asterisk (*). I think that ecosystems like YT are useless to the wider web and collective tech stack unless those innovations become open (which Alphabet has a vested interest in preventing).
If YT shut down tomorrow morning, we’d see in a heartbeat why considering them a net benefit in their current form is folly. It is inherently transitory if one group controls it.
The OP article is correct about the problem, but is proposing throwing mugs of coffee on a forest fire.
This conversation on YT reminds me intimately of all the competition Twitch got over time. By all accounts, Mixer was more technologically advanced than Twitch is right now, and Mixer died 5 years ago.
Even Valve of all people made a streaming apparatus that was more advanced than Twitch's which had then innovative features such letting you rewind with visible categories and automated replays of moments of heightened chat activity, and even synchronized metadata such as in-game stats - and they did it as a side thing for CSGO and Dota 2. That got reworked in the streaming framework Steam has now which is only really used by Remote play and annoying publisher streams above games, so basically nothing came of it.
That's how it always goes. Twitch lags and adds useless fake engagement fluff like bits and thrives, while competitors try their damnest and neither find any success nor do they have a positive impact anywhere. The one sitting at the throne gets to pick what tech stack improvements are done, and if they don't feel like it, well, though luck, rough love.
The one sitting at the throne is the one with the content, not the one with the tech. People don’t care about frivolous features. There are like 20 different streaming services, I’m sure some have better tech than others but ultimately people are only paying attention to what shows they have
Mmm yeah I think I know what you mean. IDK if "If they stopped existing, we'd realize we shouldn't have relied on their existence" is plausible, but we have plenty of bitter lessons in centralized comms being acquired and reworked towards... particular ends, and will see more.
Also the collective capability of our IT is inhibited in some ways by the silo-ing of particular content and domain knowledge+tech, no question
Appreciate the nature and scale of the internet... and also how it's changing though, yeah?
While I agree with much of the article's thesis, it sadly appears to ignore the current impact of LLMs ...
> it’s never been easier to read new ideas, experiment with ideas, and build upon & grow those ideas with other strong thinkers on the web, owning that content all along.
But, "ownership" ? Today if you publish a blog, you don't really own the content at all. An LLM will come scrape the site and regenerate a copyright-free version to the majority of eyeballs who might otherwise land on your page. Without major changes to Fair Use, posting a blog is (now more than ever) a release of your rights to your content.
I believe a missing component here might be DRM for common bloggers. Most of the model of the "old" web envisions a system that is moving copies of content-- typically verbatim copies-- from machine to machine. But in the era of generative AI, there's the chance that the majority of content that reaches the reader is never a verbatim copy of the original.
The thing that I got stuck on most in 2025 is how often we complain about these centralized behemoths but only rarely distill them to the actual value they provide. Its only if you go through the exercise of understanding why people use them, and what it would take to replicate them, that you can understand what it would actually take to improve them. For example, the fundamental feature of facebook is the network. And layered on, the ability to publish short-stories on the internet and have some control over who gets to read it. The technological part is hard but possible, and the network part well - think about how they did it originally. They physically targeted small social groups and systematically built it over time. It was a big deal when Facebook was open to my university, everyone got on about the same time, and so instantly you were all connecting with each other.
I believe we can build something better. But I'm also now equally convinced that it's possible the next step isn't technological at all, but social. Regulation, breaking up the monopolies, whatever. We treat roads and all manner of other infrastructure as government provided; maybe a social platform is part of it. We always lean these thoughts dystopian, but also which of us technologically inclined readers and creators is spending as much time on policy documents, lobbying, etc, as we are schlepping code around hoping it will be a factor in this process. This is only a half thought but, at least these days I'm thinking more about not only is it time to build, but perhaps its time to be building non-code related things, to achieve what we previously thought were purely technological outcomes.
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/
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.
Seeing bellard.org for the first time just warmed my heart.
Yeah agree. One interested in CS can literally stay there for years. This guy is so smart.
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 second you expose anything to the public internet it is going to be flooded by malicious bots looking for things to exploit.
I've been running VPS's since at least 2010 and this has always been the case for me, getting "scanned" all the time. Yet what I also noticed is that default installations of most modern software are not as insecure as most "cloud devs" nowadays have fearmongered us into believing. You can run your own MySQL or the likes. Or use SQLite. Use stable, secure software and use publickey auth. Look into scripts that block repeated and invalid requests. Hell, use Docker or jails to run most things.
Perhaps it's true that no one is unhackable, but that definitely doesn't mean you'll 100% get hacked within a day of running your own server.
I mean didnt Geocities solve this and many other problems?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities
I always thought MySpace was the natural evolution of this. Flame GIFs and all.
Where are my hypermart.net peeps at? Iconoclastic, even in 1995, represent.
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.
That’s literally what TFA is about: how to proceed.
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.
> 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.
In the same way heroin proves itself more useful for everyone year after year.
> 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?
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.
You chose to do it, so it means it was better to you than all other choices. Why would you still do it otherwise?
If your goal is to suffer as much as possible, it does not matter. You are still making choices that lead you to your goal as fast as possible.
I chose to give that nice man my wallet instead of taking a bullet, but that doesn’t actually reveal as much about my preferences as you seem to think it does.
This is absolute gold, thank you.
No, you chose to be able to go back to your loved ones in one piece. That very much reveals your preferences. Do you think someone who was in depression, who had a terminal illness might do differently?
It doesnt mean that it getting more and more useful though. The alternatives could be getting worse and worse. Or there just aren't alternatives.
Maybe this is just a disagreement of what it means for something to "become more useful"? As an example, If I need a bank account and every bank goes online only and shutters their physical locations, that is not online banking becoming more useful to me. I was perfectly happy going to the physical location, but i am now spending more time doing banking on the internet.
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).
It makes no sense what you say. If the experience with A was really worse than with B, people would stay with B.
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?
More useful is one of many ways of being better. What are you talking about?
You vote with your feet. If you can only follow the world would be exactly as simple as you make it out to be.
If you write things for your own website you would make more of an effort and it would ideally find an audience that enjoys your world view or insights into your topics.
It would be great to lure you into that experience. HN is a terrible dating agency. Gathering down votes here is the opposite of making friends. It is however great for discovering authors like Henry.
He could have spend his time complaining on x how bad it is.
If you’re arguing that there are different ways of being better than your argument falls even further apart since you might choose a worse option because it is better in some way…
No, this is not at all a given. There could be switching costs that cause people to stay on a product that is actually worse. Users also simply might be unaware of alternatives or that they are better. It's not hard to imagine any number of other reasons why in our imperfect world there is not perfectly elastic competition.
Correct. When I spend more time in the bar and fewer time at work and with my family then this is a sign that the bar is more useful and better for me than work and family.
Addiction & Tolerance. You choose to take bigger doses of Heroin more frequently instead of living a healthy life. Your logic seems a bit too simple.
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?
That’s a massive leap. Recognizing a fact about those things does not equate to being ready to ban those things. The same is true of drugs!
It’s absolutely not the case that people are good enough in general at optimising their time and lives that the things they spend the most time on are the “best” they could have done.
Most people will readily admit to this, especially when it comes to the internet, and it’s well documented that many people are not happy with how much time they spend on the internet or how it impacts their lives.
Network effects and anti-competitive practices defy simple logic. Intermediate logic is unavoidable, I'm afraid.
> 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.
Your logic seems to be wanting.
I choose to spend more time at work than on vacation. Do you think I like it better, or can you imagine one reason explaining why I work?
I'm sympathetic to that view, but I'm also aware of a particular way it doesn't explain the world. Often I make local choices that I enjoy while nonetheless regretting them later. Text social networks are the most common way this happens to me. But the other common failure mode was with food.
Without the retatrutide dose I'm on I frequently consume large amounts of food. I love apples, and blueberries, and chicken and rice. I can easily eat an entire Costco bag of Envy Apples at a stretch. Inevitably, I regret this once I have exited my fugue state of food consumption. So why do I do it? My behaviour on retatrutide is far superior at getting me both total content and joy (in the sense of area-under-the-curve rather than point-in-time).
This concept has been explored for a long time[0]. The earliest documented I know of is the concept of Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia from the Greek philosophers. But I think any notion of utility must build in the notion of regret and perhaps the bicameral mind and perhaps also the notion of non-rationality. My utility functions for the things I do are not time-translation invariant, therefore I think any model that optimizes for greater content and greater joy must necessarily involve temporally non-local terms. I don't yet have a strong model of this.
But we know this is common to many mental disorders. Part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an interruption of some mental pattern. My wife and I have a game we find amusing to play when we want to overrule the other's temporally local preferences: we challenge the other to a game of rock-paper-scissors to see whether the countermanding applies. When she exercises it, I frequently find that even if I win the momentary desire has passed.
tl;dr: Utility functions have different values depending on the temporal stride they take
0: Recently, Elon Musk claimed that the aim for Twitter should be "unregretted user minutes". Sadly, despite this stated aim, I found that his changes decreased these and increased regret so I had to stop using his platform. I agree with the notion of maximizing (value - regret) expressed in some abstract form, however.
Except social media feeds are designed to addict. A smoker will spend their time smoking instead of not smoking. Does that mean that smoking is good? Why else would they do it, if not smoking was better? It's not that simple. When we blame the users, we forget tech monopolies are spending billions to engineer systems which are stealing our time.
Or that B got worse.
Yes, but that still means A is a better choice than B to a greater extent than it was before.
A lot of these arguments are really arguments about an unstated "baseline" that we feel we deserve.
Each year the gambler spends more time, money, and energy on slot machines. Obviously his gambling habit is getting more and more useful to him. /s
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.
Your comparison may be apt for Tiktok. The OP talks about the Internet. Researching, learning, communicating, paying, shopping, entertaining, via the Internet, have steadily increased.
People spend (on average) the vast majority of their time on the stupid addictive stuff, that's documented.
Year over year, we eat more junk food and get more overweight than the previous year. This demonstrates that junk food and fat are becoming increasingly useful and beneficial.
Love the idea but it still isn’t easy enough for normies to host a blog or a website.
I think there’s a way though.
Modern self-hosted open source is easy to run for semi-experts, so what if communities banded together to host stuff at the local library?
A bunch of enthusiastic teens could form a volunteer core that runs a bunch of services for their community and teaches anyone interested, giving kids a chance to learn how to host stuff online. There’d be high trust if it’s all locals providing services to locals. Host it on a cheap VPS so the library doesn’t even need infra; just a very small budget for the initiative.
It’d be super decentralized. And the teams running these services would provide high quality feedback to the developers on features & operating of their services.
Seems win-win.
> Love the idea but it still isn’t easy enough for normies to host a blog or a website.
I have a hunch that normies are increasingly unaware of what a website is. Newer generations are growing up with apps, on their phone/tablet, some being basically "illiterate" when it comes to using a laptop/desktop beyond the top 10 webites corresponding to the apps on their phone.
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
rss and private forums are the soul of the internet. find your people
Thinking about it. There are some things which can be done to better sooth the private forums.
Like to me especially signing up to each and every forum and then waiting to be accepted by a person feels good but has tons of friction and has some stress attached because you never know how strict the community is as well, it might take a day or two, perhaps this is the reason why we got the dumpster fire of mega internet forums called reddit or twitter of sorts
To me, federation feels better in this context since I can still have a single identity of sorts across multiple forums and you got better idea / ways to filter as well if need be
Another thing I feel about private forums where users have to wait for permission signing up is that I feel like something even as simple as having a cute cat or cute apple LOL or anything relaxing could make it less stressful for people to join. I assume its impact would be few but it would leave a deeper impact on those who do want to join.
not essentially private per se, but usenet groups and bbs had a natural vetting because it required some competency to even access it
Listen while I tell of Christmas 1983, when every 14-year old with a VIC-20 got a cheap modem.
Seriously, haven't we been working tirelessly to expand the circle of access? Nostalgia reflects when the circle was smaller, and we felt that we knew everyone in it.
I've come around on this one. you used to be the town idiot who was a flat earther, but thanks to the internet you're part of the community
Yup, I think human curration is the way forward. Email newsletters, RSS, etc. It's "old school" but it's the sanest way.
I'm doing my part on the human curration side. My shameful plug: https://randomdailyurls.com
A human curated newsletter and site if you just prefer that. Lots of people use email --> RSS. I don't block it or stop it.
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.
Yeah I've been using RSS to keep track of new mods for Cyberpunk 2077, Skyrim and Starfield. It's been fantastic to keep them all organized.
There is freetube which had rss really easy to work with for youtube subscriptions.
One of my biggest issues was that on some occasions, Youtube algorithm would give me home run so I would still frequent Youtube algorithm
Another issue was that smh, youtube's rss feeds couldn't really find the difference between shorts and normal videos.
So if you have a channel which makes lots of short form content, you would see that so much more often.
Like I remember taking a few hours out of my life to fix it but ended up giving up.
Although now thinking about it, I feel like what can be done is seeing all the youtube videos and seeing all the shorts videos from an api or similar I guess and then seeing the difference and having it for an rss or such to pass another rss.
But one can see the pain in the ass for that and I am not sure how that would even work.
I must comment, Hackernews has been the perfect spot between algorithmically generated and completely self feed as it gives me new things.
is there anything like Hackernews but for youtube/video content?
Could you please tell us a bit more? It sounds great
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.
Treat it as something you can pick from, like a pile of books, not something you have to finish, like a pile of books.
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.
Related: https://img.ifunny.co/images/4664ef520c015b9017962facd187730...
Web 1.0 nostalgia always skips the part where nobody read your painstakingly hand‑crafted blog. TikTok didn’t ‘kill’ personal sites, it just finally gave normies hosting, discovery, and an audience without making them learn how to center divs.
...with a price :)
The article mentions IndieWeb/POSSE but discoverability remains unsolved. I'm working on a pledge system for local-first projects - a /.well-known/freehold.json that crawlers can verify. Projects that break the pledge get delisted publicly. More at localghost.ai/manifesto
I’ve started experimenting with Quarto[0] for scientific/technical publishing on a personal website, and it’s been quite easy to use so far. I especially like that it has builtin support for LaTeX, markdown, code blocks and Jupyter notebooks. Only thing is I wish there were more templates ready to use.
[0] https://quarto.org
Wait, this was a nice article. why are people complaining?
I'm with you. Surprised by the negative reactions here.
A possible piece of the puzzle: I originally read the article on mobile, no issues. Then I opened it on my desktop, and found the design quite jarring. The margins are much too large for my taste, forcing the text into a single narrow column, and the header animations were distracting and disorienting (fortunately the page works perfectly with JavaScript disabled). Perhaps this triggered people?
I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really hate the design trend of confining tiny text into a tiny narrow column down the middle of my browser. It's an awful stylistic decision, and this is the petty hill I'm willing to die on. It's so bad that I really can't take a site seriously that does it.
Now, someone's going to come out of the woodwork to remind me, "Well, ackshually, research suggests that it's easier to read text that's constrained by blah blah blah blah" I don't care. It sucks. It's always sucked. It will forever suck. I have a nice 27" monitor, and I want to use the whole thing. I don't want to have to hit ctrl-] ten times just to have text that is readable and spans my monitor.
Do you also like watching tennis matches from up close? It’s a similar head motion…
It says the same few things that always get hive mind upvoted on Hacker News. There is nothing new about this information.
Social media bad, Javascript bad, cars bad, old internet good, RSS good, personal websites good, HTML good.
If you want to farm upvotes on Hacker News, write about these topics. This content is like crack to developers.
while i agree with you; I also think that sound ideas are sound regardless. i don't think the negative comments are helpful at all. If people wanted new information, go read nature, science, cell. There's plenty of journals. HN is not for new information, it is for interesting information which allows refactored info imo.
I've often mused about how people get irritated by others being optimistic about change when the observers have tried change in the past and not been able to maintain it. I feel that the experience of that can lead to a position of cynicism that is defined by ones own limitations rather than the constraints of the system. They'll even suggest that people should be stronger in their resistance against the proven stickiness of platforms that use huge data to keep people in their ecosystems.
Without wanting to sound overly pessimistic, I subjectively feel like comments on Hacker News have become more negative and cynical over the last 10 years. It often seems like the prevailing attitude is "let me try and point to a perceived flaw" or "here is why this is not good enough" rather than being helpful or supportive... We're staying away from the hacker ethos IMO.
It's by no means a perfect article, but the general message seems to be that we're not powerless to build the web we want, and you can host your own website, which is still true.
Whenever I see something I like, I vote it. It feels awkward to me to type a bland show of praise when many other users have already done (and will continue to do) the same*. When I see something I dislike or disagree with, I feel it easier to go into more detail as to why, as I rarely see people sharing similar criticisms.
* As a sidenote, people who just say "This." and "Cool." irk me, and I don't want to elicit the same annoyed reaction in others.
Assuming that your observation is true, I would guess the average age of HNers has increased YoY, which is likely to have something to do with it.
The website to destroy all websites is https://gwern.net
For however much I can respect individuals for showing their creativity, the novelty of it wears off. The majority of people in the Indie Web scene all blend together. The presentation might be different, but the essence is mostly the same. Not everyone needs to express themselves and voice their opinions. "Lurk five more years before posting" as people used to say.
The article is also laden with a certain kind of politics. You can infer the philosophical premises that led to some of these conclusions.
I thought it was https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
No, it was https://zombo.com/. You can do anything there.
I opened that webpage and the first thing I saw was a sidebar covering the text...
I am guessing you are on mobile and are referring to the togglebar 'demo mode', illustrating its existence.
I wish we didn't have that, but we have to. That demo of the theme togglebar exists to educate users, because we found that a lot of complaints came from people who were blind to the gear icon and were unaware that the control they wanted already existed. (Which is regrettable but understandable, because almost all websites provide useless controls or visual spam, in an example of 'why we can't have nice things'.)
Obviously, it's disabled on subsequent page loads. (One of a number of parts of the UI/UX we streamline using 'demo-mode', as we try to thread the Scylla & Charybdis of a cluttered but explicit UI vs a clean newbie-unfriendly UI.)
Back in the day, you made some website on GeoCities or Angelfire and no one visited your site. Today, you post to Medium or Bear Blog and no one visits your site.
The difference is that back in the day people couldn't find your site, whereas today they don't even look.
Everyone self-censoring on a social media platform (disturbingly common) should have long-ago moved to something self-hosted, but the integrity of the message is less important than its reach. Consumers of these censored feeds should have long-ago moved back to RSS or created an open alternative method of providing independent, algorithmically curated streams.
Reading this, I kept wondering whether it would stay on the technical level or whether it would immediately start broadcasting the author’s cultural politics. It does, and the first giveaway is the kind of sentence you’ve seen a thousand times:
“These days, however, we write increasing amounts of complicated, unsecure code to express less and less meaning, in order to infinitely generate shareholder value.”
That line signals a tribe: “infinitely generate shareholder value” is the ritual incantation that turns every topic into the same morality play, with the same stock villain. It’s the worldview of someone who wants to live in a small enchanted technical garden, treating the economic world as a gross external thing, that you can blame whenever you need a cause.
And “unsecure code” in that context is part of the aesthetic: modernity is decadent, business is corrupting, therefore the code is “unsecure” and “meaningless.”
The Brendan Eich stuff is the same genre: petty culture-war residue kept alive long after normal people moved on.
So yeah, the internet continues, and until such artistic types learn to tamp down their own biases and refrain from injecting those into every word they write, I will keep away from their walled gardens.
> treating the economic world as a gross external thing
Well, a _specific_ kind of economic world in this case. Is it not a matter of fact that big tech companies largely guide how computing is used a developed, and that they are beholden to ever-expected increases in value to their shareholders? You have still have an "economic world" that doesn't operate that way.
What specific kind? The "economic world" exists in that you can work for companies with shareholders, you can work for other companies, you can work for NGOs and whatever other structures. What OP's whiney comment does is complain about the ones people like to work at because the pay is good. And his comment doesn't come from being an expert in economics (he's a programmer), it comes from vibes. Well what about aligning the vibes with the salary? Oh, no...
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.
Firefox's reader mode works on this one!
Let me guess, you want a site that is just a singular column of text, plenty of space for ad breaks, and 3/4 of your monitor is just whitespace on the left and right?
I read the article on mobile and I thought it was great. Then I looked at it on my desktop (in Chrome) and found it much harder to read. There are even images literally blocking off whole portions of certain paragraphs. It's not good.
I just re-read the entire thing. It is good. You're misrepresenting or you need to check your browser settings.
No image blocks any paragraph, which even if it had, would be far more forgivable than modern web design. Do you consider any of Apple's modern product pages -- which "block off whole portions of" the page itself by scrolljacking and Clockwork-Oranging you to force you to watch their hypnotic marketing animations -- bad?
here are images as proof:
https://i.imgur.com/5UI6E5w.png
https://i.imgur.com/C9qlsIu.png
Why are you trying to gaslight me? I know what I’m seeing. In my browser (Chrome with default settings), there are certain paragraphs where the first word of every line is partially obscured. There are others where the last word of every line is obscured. It is unreadable.
You're bad at guessing.
[dead]
Bookmarked. Called me to get back to reading and writing again.
A joy to read and loved the artwork on mobile.
Henry is one of the most cutting edge designers out there today in my opinion. Check out his other sites.
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.
Yes, the core issue underlying the rot as described in TFA is the funding model for the internet. But that cancerous idea is older than the internet -- adversing, hawkers and scammers, they've been around since forever. It's an unfortunate side effect of "business" and if you turn the sanitation dial far enough, you'll get professions like Sales and Marketing.
So to fix the internet, you'd have to decouple the content from the toll to access it.
These types of cultural analysis always fails to be substantial because they rely on "losing our way" argument consciously or even on a subliminal moral level.
I think this one is kind of better because it tries to place social transformations on a material base, but it still fails to do that properly with tech.
Tech or the internet isnt a freeform thing that just exists and obeys everyones psyches and wants. Tech is something made in factories from specific industries by specific companies and organizations to fit within certain monetizeable bounds.
The early internet obeys the grasp of the early industry. Very little was monetized then.
The development of the internet follows the development of the monetization of the internet, it follows the rules of capital.
A lot to unpack here, but the article fails to tackle the question of distribution. Creators put their videos on YouTube because that is the way to reach a nearly global audience at zero cost. I can assure you that although you can probably figure out how to host videos that nobody sees, you cannot afford to host a popular video.
The author clearly spent a lot of time writing and presenting this, but the facts and conclusions don't seem to warrant the presentation. In particular the (useless, in the narrative) section about antibiotics shows that the author is a deeply unserious person suffering from some pretty severe fallacies. Nobody can have seen a chart of childhood mortality over the 20th century and still believe such things.
> Creators put their videos on YouTube because that is the way to reach a nearly global audience at zero cost.
If a tree fell and there was no one around, did it make a sound? A cursory look through r/newtubers would show you that there are a lot of people who get no views on their videos. Youtube's distribution mattered when it was looking for user-generated content to splice ads into. Today, it is filled with that content, and no longer has to encourage people to post by giving them thousands of views overnight.
Besides that, people starting Youtube channels are looking for fame, which is why they unquestioningly follow all the usual tricks for "going viral": inane thumbnails, one-minute preambles before the "like and subscribe" beg, engagement bait content to draw in comments, etc. This kills whatever original voice the uploader may have had, before their first video is even posted.
This just sounds like a you problem. Don't watch those channels. Don't upload those videos.
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.
People who were not technical then and are not now made it work with Myspace, Neopets and Geocities. There are a number of free microhosts out there. And the big social media sites also allow you to post a lot more crap.
I think bringing back websites like hawkee etc and providing an easy way to host is the right way forward, but it needs a catalyst (like most things) to become a trend.
There's a line from a 2009 episode of The Office that sums it up:
Jim: "Pam texted back saying we could give them all iPods".
Phyllis: Oh, if they don't have an iPod by now they really don't want one."
Website creation has reached its equilibrium rate of growth. Those who want a website will make one, and the rest won't. Personal websites are one of many media for public self-expression today; in 2004, the options were far more limited. Those who are on Neocities or mmmm.page or Bearblog etc., are the spiritual successors of that MySpace HTML template generation. They are a trickle relative to the number of people who'll start a Tiktok, Bluesky or Youtube account. It's not going to grow any faster than what it is, regardless of whichever points of friction in creating one can be eliminated.
I see it similar to writing books. Everyone can write it (dictating to someone else is also writing), it can be good for person (putting ideas in understandable way, sharing inner ideas). Buuuut not everyone wants to do it.
I guess fetishising books and personal blogs has a limit.
“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.” - Christopher Hitchens
Text is way too small for me… can’t read it without reader mode being on
Unfortunately, most of these platforms end up enshittifying and using your content for it. A platform that you control can be a beautiful thing.
I'm inspired to write more in 2026 and publish more of the things I just make for myself.
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 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
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.
There's certain level of friction to everything; that acts as a filter to separate those who choose to proceed anyway and those who don't. If you want to start painting, you have to buy a canvas, an easel, brushes, paint and set aside time to actually do it. Some people will abandon it because they like the concept of being someone who paints more than actually doing it. Some will proceed because they want to paint.
The same goes for website creation. You can post text, pictures and images on any social media site. The independent web is never going to be able to match that level of usability, and IMO it shouldn't try to. Part of the reason the indie web is interesting is because it's full of people who found their way towards wanting to build their own site.
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.
I liked this article, and I had a website back in the days of having an html directory in my university unix account.
So what stops me today? I don't have hosting.
Eventually livejournal, blogspot, etc. came around and provided a decent approximation of what people wanted to do, for free. Yes there might be a little ad on the side but it was basically 'okay'.
Eventually FB etc. came along and provided a decent approximation of a blog and allowed easy readership. Friendfeed got bought and soon enough everyone was in everyone's business.
The problem is facebook, linkedin etc. are too easy to propogate information. My ramblings shouldn't show up on everyone's feed. They should show up to people who inbound come want to actively seek them out; those are the people for whom they might be interesting. It's kind of like talking to your neighbor.
You find out what's going on in their life, but maybe you don't want everyone on the street to know, but you're fine if they happened to ask you about it. Chances are if someone is genuinely interested in you, they'd come to your website... but do you want your boss to come?
I don't know maybe the internet was a little safer when it was not anonymous, but at least somewhat selective as to who would access it.
first off: this is a beautiful article! but, it got me thinking about how many times i found an interest that would then become a core part of my identity by having a really cool piece of media relating to said interest essentially force-fed to me by algorithmic feeds. i got into rhythm games by seeing a livestream of osu! pop up on twitch, got into archival fashion by seeing a really incredible outfit on reddit, got into experimental pop by having clarence clarity's "no now" come across my spotify feed.
as someone who grew up in a fairly insulated & isolated suburb, i think those types of experiences were really important in turning me from an unconfident, kinda angry kid into the aesthetically-engaged, witty, openly-gay man w/ a pretty big breadth of creative interests i ended up being. i'm truly not sure if i would've turned out this way if most of the internet remained as undiscoverable as it was ~20 years ago.
though i have more appreciation for the slow web nowadays, where my identity is a bit more solidified, i still feel a pretty strong pull towards "the platform", and my visions for a healthier internet include it. but, that's about as far as i've gotten.
If only we could separate out social network from content.
I think chat apps are a good place to start. It's a place where contents of your friends list matters. Where the only way to have something recommended to you is asking someone for it or someone close to you coming to the conclusion that you, personally might enjoy it.
What's left to figure out is how to connect these systems that have strong identity and viciously curated friends lists to recommendation engines and content mills in a way that's opt-in. That lets users control the content that lands in their lap. That let's them decide where they land between "I'm gonna ask a friend about what's cool" and "just plug me to firehose" spectrum.
The connection should let users make available many freshly generated pseudonymous identities so that content mills can only create ephemeral profiles of you.
I imagine chat systems should let you tag your contacts and expose only a part of your social network when you ask content mill for recommend content.
There's so much more to discover beyond the modern status quo where we basically surrendered everything.
Not sure if its by design/intent, the font is too small to skim through it
I haven't tried on a laptop but on iOS (iPhone 13 Pro) and iPadOS (iPad Air)
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.
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...
Do you feel destroyed tho?
Ad driven centralization bad. Go make independent websites using open standards. I just saved you 5 mins.
This spends a lot of time on mood setting and analogy and doesn’t address: network effects, discovery economics, hosting and maintenance costs, security, spam and abuse mitigation, user incentives.
It’s aspirational rather than operational.
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 find the lack of respect for accessibility considerations on that website disturbing. For instance, I wish I could see the provided paintings in all their glory instead of as miniscule thumbnails with text plastered over them. I'm not sure why the author even bothered putting the paintings in there in the first place; was it to annoy visitors and create a discussion?
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.
> I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.
You can still do that right now. I highly recommend it.
Precisely. I have made my own e-cards to send to friends to commemorate holidays and outings. All HTML + CSS, responsive and looks fine on all devices.
> I used the early web. I miss forums, I miss the small webmaster, I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.
None of these things are gone. They're just not new anymore for a lot more people, and they probably have significantly less social impact and cachet. But that's all.
Yeah. It's actually the opposite: the original web considering of home pages and niche forums participated in exclusively by actual humans is very much still there, even if sometimes in different places.
It's "web 2.0" consisting of centralised networks full of your friends and friends of friends posting photos, updates and invitations that's being killed by those networks promoting "engagement bait" and generated content and bot accounts
Open source values blah blah and still a personal dig at Brendan Eich.
Yeah that really put me off the whole article. No problem with them having that sentiment, but keep it out of this topic.
Ah hell yeah that was great. Thank you for such an awesome post/site!
What are some best practices for consuming indie web content? Is there a great RSS reader/app? How do I discover content I’d like but don’t already know about?
What happens when you die? Your personal websites disappear along with you too?
It seems like there should be a way to have a platform take on a custodian role, but under your direction.
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.
But I'm le tired...
Okay, well have a nap and then fire ze missiles!
Incredible website, and I started my own blog just because of this, maybe ill try integrating in the indieweb and webmentions to join the community ^_^
This was a great read, very refreshing. I like the idea of just starting a website and writing articles on it. It is interesting that my first thought when considering doing so is: "How will I get any traffic?", but that's beside the point. I think I should just share it with friends and see how it goes.
"Cars now provide zero benefit..."
"Gender-based discrimination..."
"Fuck Brendan Eich [for opposing gay marriage at a time that Obama did as well]..."
"As ever, unionize, free Palestine, trans rights are human rights, fix your heart or die."
Ugh. What if you could possibly focus on technology instead of woke virtue-signaling (and threatening to kill those who disagree)?
Anyway, 'write ur website by hand' is absolute garbage advice, sorry. No, you are not going to effortlessly syndicate it elsewhere when you are manually updating your index.html to point to your latest hand-coded plain html file. Surely you won't even have a sitemap.xml. Will you write the sharing-friendly meta tags by hand every time too? No.
Pandora's box has been opened, per the story all that remains is hope. You can't go back in time and change history.
If you want to make a better world from a better internet you need to save people from the tyranny of the marginal user (https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). It's not the web, its the people. Those people incentivize enshittification. People will need to change, not the companies, the government, or the creators... the supply is purely filling this demand. The indie web isn't going to help a grandma see photos of her grand kids as easily as facebook will. And the indie web won't help you find a used guitar as well as craigslist will.
I'm with you. Thanks for the link.
> 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/
The page is called "a website to destroy all websites", and their goal is to...get everyone to make their own personal websites?
I agree with that goal, but then I might change the title. Maybe that's part of the problem - "website" sounds like something a big corporation makes.
>> 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.
crux: "the internet feels bad". But, most of the internet is still there, so how could that be. I think more specifically, the current mode of attention capture feels bad - what the majority of people are interacting with feels bad. But those are not "the internet".
A resurgence of people learning LAMP stack is not going to address the Big Problem. I think we should be asking why algo-driven social media roflstomps the indie web, not how to get more web hosters into the indie web.
These are collective action problems. The number of people who would have to maintain personal websites full time in order to replace Reddit is boggling and unachievable. These articles all reduce down to "I don't love ads". Call your congressperson.
The idea behind the article is great. and I really like the UI design of that page btw.
> The most self-evident, convivial answer is an old one: blogs. HTML is free to access by default, RSS has worked for about 130 years
What the... How RSS which is an XML can predates internet and computers and even transistors?
It's good to have private websites and keep them weird, but this will and can in no way change the internet in general, centralization of content is a very good feature, at least functionally it is necessary.
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?
> 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 [ ... ] 2008 happened and normal people got online.
Some of us remember Eternal September, roughly 15 years early than 2008.
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.
We call this the alivenet - https://vvesh.de
There is no "we." I can throw a dart at the a wall of HN usernames, and the odds are rather high that the name I'd hit wants me deplatformed, debanked and consigned to a GULAG. The implied threat about the consequences of not somehow "fixing" my heart tells me everything I need to know about the heinous purity spiral Internet and planet you think you want.
Not just no. Hell no. If it were a choice between whatever you claim to offer and an Internet that made me select from among curated sites as if they were cable channels, I'd take the latter. I thank my maker that such a choice remains hypothetical, and I feel no small amount of joy that you can't "fix" that.
Unequivocally, 100% agree. Disagreeing with "them" on HN even on these issues the author agrees with would also have me consigned to the nearest gulag/re-education center. "As ever, unionize, free Palestine, trans rights are human rights, fix your heart or die."
Oh my god, I didn't even get to the bottom, I thought you were being hyperbolic with that quote. Insane.
It's annoying that you guys clutch your pearls over an imaginary gulag while actual people are being actually rounded up and sent to camps.
Cannot agree more... Tired of flags being waved at the wrong places and times.
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.
The "old web" people want to go back to is a web that wasn't mainstream and wasn't complex.
This is why people created alternatives like the gemini protocol - explicitly designed to never grow and never become mainstream.
Really enjoyed reading this. Thank you - very inspiring.
Why, and when, did the word destroy get this meaning?
And it fails to render anything with Javascript disabled.
I disagree with a notion that a page needs to work without javascript. It is only design choice of author.
> 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.)
It gets a pass from me. The JS content didn’t annoy me, e.g. it didn’t show me any off topic popups, so I didn’t feel the need to disable JS.
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.)
The internet is fine. The Web is bad.
Widespread outages whenever AWS or Cloudflare experience a hiccup points to the contrary.
I liked House of Leaves in high school
If the internet is so awful, why don't we abandon it?
I mean, nobody forces us to use it.
Well, sometimes people do. But I think that's precisely the moment when we have to push back and tell them that we are not okay with using some WhatsApp group. And if they ask why, ask them if they know what Cambridge Analytica was, and if they like it when the political system is being manipulated.
Damn this was quite annoying
The revealed preferences of the general population shows that the only way to accomplish this, is by banning the alternatives.
All indication point to the fact that the general population really, really likes getting angry at fake slop videos, endless discussion about the most inane over discussed topics and today's celebrity gossip.
Great educational content exists on the internet, social media could easily be about close connection to people around the world, but people evidently do not care about that.
classic web? noscript/basic (x)html? no whatng cartel web engine required?
From the homepage: The author’s position is that one must adhere to their politics or be killed.
>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.
Agreed. The very end of the article also names off all the usual cookie cutter nonsense as well.
These people just can't help themselves to inject activism in everything they do, and this is why so many people are turned off by otherwise great projects.
Tech as a whole needs to take a step back and stop preaching to people about things they probably don't agree with.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
I love the design and the underlying message, but I just have to engage on the three examples of "radical monopolies". Most pressingly, I don't think any of the three show an example like that of the automobile, whose ubiquity is mandatory!
1. Describing "proponents [of the industrial revolution]" as some external group seems pretty absurd, and gives the rest of the piece an unsettling Kazinsky vibe. Yes, of course there are a variety of problems in the world related to the textile industry, that's obvious. But blaming "wage theft" and "over consumption" on the technology itself just seems absurd. You can still buy handmade clothes, and due to transportation-enabled specialization, they'd almost definitely be much cheaper and higher quality than they would've been in 1725!
2. Citing a 256 page report on antibiotic resistance[1] with no page number for the vague claim that they were overprescribed to some extent in the 1950s-70s is just plain rude! Regardless, there's no economic system forcing antibiotics on you; if you really wanted to for some reason, you could even save money by refusing them. Rather, the basic realities of human health are what makes them so ubiquitous, in the same way that they make food or hand washing ubiquitous.
3. This summary of the issues with LEO internet satellites is just way, way oversimplified -- the most egregious part being the implication that it is now "impossible to use earth-based sensors... to learn about space"! More fundamentally, equating LEO telecommunications with astrophysics research because they both involve things above our heads is goofy and misleading. Even more fundamentally--and to return to my overall point--there's no attempt to even vaguely gesture at a "radical monopoly" here! It's fair to say that the vast, vast majority of people only interact with LEO satellites when using GPS, which, again, is absolutely not mandatory.
And, finally, the web:
I hope it's clear how "technologies come with downsides" is a much more vague, obvious, and less-useful point than the Radical Monopoly thesis. I feel like the word "craft" is pretty telling here, as it strongly implies a break from the marketplace. If you don't like "industrial" websites, maybe take up issue with the concept of industry instead? I love personal websites, as do we all. The idea that more than, say, 5% of the population would be interested in them without radical changes to our work-life schedules is a tad absurd tho, is it not? You really think the millions of people who are happily sharing AI-generated images of Jesus statues made out of plastic bottles on Facebook could be tempted away to learn HTML and build their website from scratch? Overwhelming https://xkcd.com/2501/ vibes from this section!And, finally, my thesis:
No. It can feel awful for one primary reason that dwarfs all others: advertising, which is of course just a wrapper over capitalism. If you want the internet to meaningfully change, no amount of artsy blogs will do the trick: you need to change the economic forces that drive people to contribute non-trivial intellectual products.I, for one, see a world without advertising within our grasp -- still-capitalist or otherwise. We can do this. The Free and Open internet can exist once again.
[1] https://iris.who.int/server/api/core/bitstreams/a04b4607-044...
> No. It can feel awful for one primary reason that dwarfs all others: advertising, which is of course just a wrapper over capitalism.
Huh, I wonder. What if we had a domain that is actively anti-capitalist. No ads, no products, no asking for financial support. Kinda like how GNU operating systems are hostile towards closed source software. (Tho I am AI-doomist and I don't think that online spaces can survive several billion new human-like agents that are trained to be as cunning and malevolent as possible.)
Something that scares the shit out of me is the new American tourist visa requirement that you disclose your social media accounts over the last 5 years. This seems an ultimate example of the exclusion or people who refuse to participate in a technology. I'm not on social media. If more countries begin adopting this, what am I supposed to show the immigration authorities? Am I supposed to create a wholly fake set of accounts in order to prove I'm not a threat to them? Is telling them that I'm not on social media a red flag in itself?
I think for the next 20-30 years it still wouldn't be feasible to make it a red flag due to a non-negligable part of the older population not being on social media at all. I assume it is right now still be possible to enter countries with a mobile phone number, and those have existed for longer and are used more widely than social media accounts.
I would assume they also try to derive associations to social media accounts via passport information if you don't provide any to them. So I think it's rather an additional bureaucratic step added on their side rather than a red flag.
That's by design. Many people in America today (including many in the federal administration) want to transition to a world with much less immigration and foreigners (including less foreign tourism) than the levels of the past several decades.
I understand that, but that's not really my point. Yes, they have an isolationist and xenophobic bent. But while it's understandable that having a social media presence full of sketchy / terrorist / trafficking / whatever might now be a reason for a country to deny a visa, it creates the question of what they do with innocent people who simply refuse to participate. My question is what happens if you don't have any social media or smartphone at all? Will we be completely excluded from being allowed to travel freely unless we post our thoughts on a daily basis?
> Will we be completely excluded from being allowed to travel freely unless we post our thoughts on a daily basis?
Yes, because even if you do, they will find other ways to exclude you. Their stated goal is to exclude as many non-Americans from the USA as possible, regardless of whether they consider you "innocent" or not.
I mean, that is a US problem - or the problem of any country which chooses to destroy its own tourism sector. And searching social media is ancillary to that, as you say, if the main goal is simply to exclude people.
I'm talking about (per the article) whether self-exclusion from social media will soon become a worldwide red flag for travel.
Oh my bad, since you mentioned American tourist visas I assumed you were only talking about America. I have not been following similar laws in other countries, maybe their motivations are different than the American intentions of completely shutting off immigrants from the USA.
That's very typically American. Being so focused on America without understanding that the choices of the American government have huge consequences for the rest of the world. You keep saying that this is all about the Trump regime keeping foreigners out of America. And that is true. But that is not the big picture. As an American you should be more worried about whether you will be allowed to leave your country, or go anywhere else when or if you want to, once America sets this precedent.
Optimistically, I think this is similar to how it's viewed when dating in the US. They want to see how well behaved you are, what your empathy level is with other people, and what you're thinking about day to day.
Not to say I agree with the reasoning, but it comes from a place of fear. The more fear, the more scrutiny. The criteria you need to show is based on what they fear.
Merely having a somewhat populated account on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn passes the bar of being a "real person." You share a few regular everyday things, you get happy birthday posts, a handful of people usually like your posts, you get a green flag in almost every circumstance.
Not having a social media presence comes with this question that can make it the scary part: Is it because of disinterest, because you're not socially belonging, or because you got ran off the platforms? It's obvious to us that is is disinterest, but they no way of truly knowing. And based on what they fear it can scare them, that unknowing.
If you can convince the other person it truly it is simple disinterest, there is no problem. Unless they're really bent on seeing your everyday thoughts...
If you don't "integrate well," it scares some people. You're too different and they fear becoming the outcasted outgroup with your inclusion.
If you're banned, that's... not good :) Which is a terrible place to be for people who were unrightfully banned.
What they're really hoping to catch is the blatantly obvious people that are openly delusional or violent on social media. There is a non-trivial amount of people who do this. If you have a page like this, or worse if you don't disclose it, that is the huge red flag.
This is a social investigation we personally do with others at the inner relationship level, with people who are already in the US. Right or not, it's not surprising to me that this reputational criteria bubbled up to immigration.
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.
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.
I've read your comment before visiting the site, and it got me wondering -- how bad can it be? Can it be worse than those acid green on red sites of the 90s-00s?
Imagine my surprise, when I opened the site and it looked and felt just like a museum or art exhibit. This was the literal feeling I had -- being at an art gallery, but online.
I guess, these comments tell more about the commenters, than TFA. We should remind ourselves to be more critical to the content we consume, regardless where it comes from.
I did the opposite, I opened the website before looking at the comments and thought it was like a beautiful art gallery too. Then I read the top comment, and thought 'What are they talking about??'. Had a complete opposite feeling.
The issue is that it's beautifully designed for a portrait phone-ish-sized screen. Try viewing it in 16:9 and it's a mess. I'm not saying this to criticise; the author owes me nothing, and if I shrink my browser window down then it looks lovely. But I think this is where the confusion is coming from. Half the comments are from people looking at it on a widescreen and half are on a portrait monitor or a phone. "What this website looks like" can be two very different things and nobody bothers to ask which we are talking about.
Wow. I had (just now) made one comment on the bad layout. As you might guess, I'm on desktop, and looking at the site in a window wider than it is tall. I saw your comment and shrunk my window to be half as wide as it is tall, and the layout corrects itself and changes -- dramatically.
Surprisingly, I had the art exhibit impression opening it on 16:9 desktop. It's sparse, as a gallery, or a luxury boutique, where free space accentuates value of content. It looks OK on mobile, but on desktop it's the sparse, but non-monotonous layout, that guides attention and provides a second layer to the content.
For me at a wider presentation the layout was broken: text overlapping, images misplaced, etc.
I too thought it was a beautiful art gallery, and not an article. Mainly because all I could see was art. Apparently there was an article too but I couldn't read it. I assume it was made for 21 yr olds with perfect vision and not intended for people over 40yrs old.
When I saw the article (which, for some reason, I had no trouble finding) I felt the same way, but then remembered I could adjust the font size myself with a few keystrokes.
There's an assumption, that people sometimes state explicitly, on HN that the discussion is more interesting or valuable than whatever's on the end of the posted link. Sometimes that's true - often even - but sometimes it's not.
That's not necessarily a value judgement on the discussion though. From me, at any rate, it's more often a personal perspective: sometimes I'm just more interested in or charmed by the thing, and in digesting and coming to my own conclusions about it, than I am in reading other peoples' thoughts and perspectives on the thing.
But, yeah, to me it felt almost like an old magazine: the typography, the layout, the way images are used. A lot of the discussion about web design in the 90s came about as a result of people coming from a traditional publishing background and really struggling to do what they wanted with the web medium, so to me it sort of hearks back to that a bit, does a good job of embracing some parts of that older aesthetic, but works well with modern web capabilities. Mind, I'm looking at it on a desktop browser, and maybe the experience on mobile is less good (I can't say), but overall I like it. It has some personality to it.
To some it felt like nothing as they couldn't render the content.
The challenge when tackling difficult problems is to bring in solutions to those problems.
Subway offered an alternative to junk food. By offering custom flavors of choice, giving consumers more control over what they eat. I don't see any fresh food at subway. Does it mean what they did is futile? No. Can't we point out this is another type of junk ? We better do.
The site is wonderful when rendered with JavaScript. A web to aspire to is one where the system font is set by default, at least could be chosen.
All valid concerns looking at an endeavor discussing a better web. The author may even take note and iterate, there was no claim it was definitive work.
One of the most frustrating and perhaps thought-terminating clichés on the internet and social media at large is alluded to in this reply:
“I personally could not view this page [because I turned off JS], therefore I will dismiss it out of hand as it didn’t cater to my needs.” A choice made by the consumer somehow makes the author accountable for it.
Or more succinctly, “but what about me [or people I’ve anointed myself as spokesperson for]?”spoken by someone not the intended audience for the piece, trying to make the author responsible for their need.
The answer to which, I think, is either, “it’s not for you then so move on,” or perhaps even “misery is optional, just enable JS ffs.”
The idea that the creator of a work must bend to the will of those that consume it seems to be highly prevalent, and is pretty much at odds with creativity itself.
I'm going to have to bite at the bait here: your post is guilty of what it's critiquing, and to a larger degree than the post being replied to.
I have found that HN is, ironically, a horrible place to post experimental work on, with a few exceptions - e.g. things "written in Rust" etc. I think it's because the majority of the commentators here haven't really made anything from scratch.
I too think it’s a beautiful website and really refreshing in its simplicity. Too often “good design” means “needlessly complex.” The design of the site also nicely fits the argument being made in the text.
I thought the same when loaded it on mobile. When I went to the desktop version, it is kind of glitchy and the images overlap the text: https://i.postimg.cc/bJgjcDD1/desktop.png
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My personal taste for the presentation of a piece of writing is that less is more. I usually find artwork that accompanies a text to be distracting. I love reading work that can stand on its own, invoking images in the mind. I also dislike animations that seem to be made for a certain scroll speed.
Having said all of that, I certainly don't think it's bad, nor is it a commentary on the arguments being made. It's just not my cup of tea.
> I usually find artwork that accompanies a text to be distracting. I love reading work that can stand on its own, invoking images in the mind.
But the images are a part of the work, not separate from it, no?[0]
You might have a preference against that, which is absolutely fine, but I think you're making an artificial distinction.
[0] There's obviously a separate conversation to be had about how much that part contributes or detracts with any such work, but the point stands that I tend to view such works as all of a piece including all constituent parts.
> My personal taste for the presentation of a piece of writing is that less is more.
TFA works with iOS reader mode, which is all that matters to me. I use it instinctively as it makes style more or less uniform and lets me focus on the content of the article.
I think when you make such strongly opinionated design decisions on your website, you're deliberately inviting strong criticism. They could have used a readable vanilla bootstrap theme and HN would be actually discussing the actual text content instead of the design, but they didn't, and here we are.
The idea that opinionated design is intended to court controversy or criticism is, itself, very cynical. The corollary to that is that all design should be vanilla to make it as unobjectionable to the widest audience possible.
Design and content are inseparable. When design reinforces the point of the content, that is good design, even if it's ugly, even if it's not aesthetically pleasing to you, even if it's not how you'd do it.
But I'd argue that questing for neutrality is worse than taking a stance, even the wrong stance. Besides which, what one now considers "neutral" is also a giant set of design decisions - just ones made by committees and large corporations, so the blame for its drawbacks can be passed off, and there's plausible deniability for the designer.
Someone takes risks and makes something creative they consider artistic. You're reducing their choices to a question of whether they intended to be popular or to court criticism, flattening the conversation into one about social media credit, and completely discrediting the idea that they had true intent beyond likes and points. That response itself betrays something slightly cowardly about the ethos of neutrality you're proposing.
Actually, HN wouldn’t be discussing it at all, most likely. At least not this much. The design is not only good, it has also successfully incited a passionate response from a bunch of people who don’t appreciate it. Win-win!
I read the post first. The website is gorgeous, but not pleasant to use on an iPad Mini. I couldn’t keep reading without reader mode.
But damn, it is absolutely beautiful. The fonts and paintings, wow.
is one of the issues of modern web as it's optimized for quick most efficient reading, but something like this website is more optimized for slow thoughtful experience. Like some of the books about art history where you not only trying to get extract meaning of words but trying imagine how that time felt and try look on things from different perspective or different values.
Ideally it should be both. I could not read the text because it was too small. The message was more important than its shape.
Yeah, its a really beautiful site.
I think we can agree it's uncomfortable to read though: the font is too small, for instance. I had to use Firefox's reader mode.
Depends on your age. I remember being warned in my 20s that older people couldn't read 10pt font, 12pt was a stretch, I didn't really believe them.
Now I'm in my 40s, oh wow. Small, illegible, font is everywhere. Instructions on food is especially bad for this. At least on the computer you can usually force 125% font rendering.
Point being, the site is probably quite legible to people in their 20s.
You could scale it to 120%, font would become more readable and it would even remove the text overlap with the tilted image in part three. At 100% font looks similar in size to the one on HN, but a bit less readable, I agree.
Right. I was also pleasantly surprised; it looks great, reads fluidly, and is clean on the page. It is somewhat artsy, to be sure, but nothing complaint-worthy in comparison to modern websites.
I don't think it's a bad analogy but I think there's some tension between the visual interest and making a design that makes it pleasant for someone to actually read your article through. Though even if you format it optimally for that few people bother so maybe this guy has the right idea.
Me too! The website actually looks like a curated art version of something; beautiful font.
> Can it be worse than those acid green on red sites of the 90s-00s?
I think people are nostalgic for the social environment that enabled people to create websites of all fashions, may they be well or poorly designed. We simply hold up the poorly designed websites as an example of how accessible content creation was ("hey, anyone can do it"), though perhaps we should hold up the better sites ("hey, look at what we can accomplish").
Myspace was a problem with this
On the one hand, the pages were kind of ugly. Nobody likes autoplaying music. On another hand, they ruined their own site with a (separate) series of boneheaded decisions. On the other hand, Tom didn't seem quite as odious as Zuck (Myspace had a visible wall, you otherwise knew what you were dealing with with the privacy settings, and the wall was a good way to have network effects and connect with people). On another hand, Myspace worked (there was Friendster too and apparently their problem was the servers only worked half the time) because in 2006 relatively few people were online, so you knew you could find people on there
I don't know how it would have evolved if Murdoch(?) hadn't ruined the site; yes it was always a bit messy, but still. (At the same time, they completely lost all user data in some 2015 (possibly 2016) database incident, so so much for that)
MySpace has a special place in my memory for being the place I learned HTML and Flash (my profile was a flash embedded in my page) in high school, and carried on that love of creation into my engineering life.
A little art gallery museum exhibit-y. Is that bad?
I think it'd be good to keep in mind that Hacker News is mostly populated by a demographic commonly referred to as "Tech Bros" who, for the most part, are here as part of their journey in creating profitable businesses.
Profitable (very) was Thomas Midgley Jr. when he introduced lead petrol for cars, it took 75-100 years til the «profit» was stopped. What did we learn?
Is that the definition of tech bros? I thought tech bros were people who shilled cryptocurrencies, NFTs and other grifts.
The definition of “Tech bros” is “tech people you don’t like”. There’s no agreed upon definition (just like how people disagree about what is/isn’t a “grift”) because it’s not meant to be descriptive, it’s a rhetorical device.
No, it's tech people you don't like for a specific set of reasons: it's mostly hubris and its implications like downplaying the damage the tech does to society and environment.
perceived downplaying of the damage. Popular soundbites (including "don't solve social problems with technology") have it generally backwards, and most people don't go beyond them.
No, this is too dismissive. There was a large shift in the culture of people over the last decade or so as the bay area money printers started printing faster than finance firms were printing. Eg tech money attracted a culture of people wed normally label “finance bros”. Patrick Bateman types but without the explicit murder. Status, money, often born outstandingly privileged.
This is the tech bro people speak of. It is that psychopathic desire for status at all costs which sadly is learned, emulated, and exalted. Ironically, yc is the poster child for breeding this culture over the last 8 or so years and the place it is most often complained about outside of reddit ofc.
That’s how you use the term because you don’t like those people.
I’ve heard people use the term to disparage Linus Torvalds and even Aaron Swartz because they didn’t like them.
Using tech bro on Torvalds is well outside the pattern of usage I’ve seen, which trends more towards GP’s definition, at least in the past 5 years.
Saying we don't like someone because we deem them to be a tech bro, is indeed a circular argument.
But saying we don't like someone that calls themself a tech bro? Well they had it coming.
I'm looking at the article now, and where I am in it, the header "The Invention of the Automobile," the image of someone driving, and the first paragraph of that section are all overlapping each other. I came here to type the above, then went back to that tab to find the layout had changed without me doing anything, so now "Part two," the title, and the picture are overlapping, but not the first paragraph. And the title is cut off.
That's just one complaint, but it's not me, it's the site.
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.
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. But I also killfile users who I think particularly misunderstand the comments they respond to, and I also killfile users who express what I think are low-information views.
I designed an extension with a roughly similar aim that filters based upon various phrases and characteristics rather than the poster of the comments themselves. It collapses comments (via automatic triggering of HN's built-in collapsing feature) and adds a "reason" tag to the comment information, so I can choose whether or not to read it anyways. I feel the features with the most positive differences are the capitalization detector (hides all caps or all lowercase) and the character requirement.
That is very cool. It would be cool to see what you decided to filter on (other than the same-case filter and the char limit). I had a similar idea where I would run comments through a fast cheap LLM to evaluate whether they could be tagged in a certain way. I originally tried just pure word-stemming and phrase-based blocking and found that I couldn't tune it well for my uses. I also found that collapsing comments lead to my opening them out of curiosity.
Thank you for sharing what works for you. I think it's great other people have been doing this style of read-side filtering. It's a pity that there's no way to inject code into mobile apps safely (i.e. this is an easy path to app-store rejection). Perhaps there's no option there but to push `shouldFilter` out to a server where you can run the logic. My use of my phone is the weakest link in my filtering strategy.
> We are meant to have what I call 'overlay networks'
As Terry Pratchett observed in a 1995 interview with Bill Gates: “There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net”.
Equal internet votes means any propagandist with a human or machine bot army can bias whatever they want. Now we have people with unimaginably large propaganda machines drowning out those who act with integrity, intellectual nuance and selflessness.
I definitely want an "overlay network" for those sites that have hijacked the term "social network". Also I'd like one for movie reviews too please.
Beware of trapping yourself in a manufactured social bubble of emotional comfortable
I think the problem really is more of: Beware of being actively trapped by deep dossier leveraged algorithms, in a manufactured social bubble of emotional comfortable, created by corporations that are expressly farming you.
People talk about social media is if it were passive, when its deep intel, deep analysis, manipulation. Where everything we do, is not just used to manipulate us, but in aggregate, improves manipulation overall.
It is amazing what toxins people will accept, if the toxins become baseline familiar.
Is that bad?
I black-hole plenty of sites via pihole above and beyond the typical adblock lists. On a very few rare occasions I have turned off the pihole to unblock a site because I was curious after following a link that was blocked by said pihole. Every single time I quickly learned why that site was blocked, and visiting that site gained me nothing.
If it happens it happens. I can only hope that the result is boredom rather than increased engagement.
that's an interesting point. A echo chamber could lead to fatigue and boredom.
Reels is able to keep me engaged because it is able to surface similar content I would like but from different users. And they have such a breadth of producers these days.
The X home feed algo is not so good apart from it being text only, even for infotainment content. YT shorts also does not work as good as the Insta algo
Unique is not a quality hard to achieve
And they are complaining precisely because it has pompous title. If it was "badly designed but personal website" there would be much less of that
It's just a fun title, don't read so much into it
If you name your site "A website to destroy all websites" you're basically inviting people to judge it with extremely critical standard.
My blogpost titled “Millennials are killing ham radio” has received the most hits out of all of my other posts. It got me an interview with IEEE Spectrum and basically cemented my name as a ham radio influencer.
Amateur radio is a remarkably niche hobby so that kind of attention is rare, but it took ragebait to do it. A title like “The Next Generation of Ham Radio” would have flopped. I know this because that’s what I titled it first, and after 40 views in 2 months I slightly rewrote it and reposted it under the new title and within a day it appeared on just about every ham radio forum, facebook group, numerous email reflectors, and so on.
I finished reading this comment wondering what should I take away from it. Is it better to include alarming titles and be read? Or the other way around? Or what would be the sweet middle point?
I'm really curious how a blogpost titled “Millennials are killing ham sandwiches” would fare, in comparison.
Don't get me started on how delicious Subway was 30 years ago compared to the pale version we have now.
Hm. I read the title differently - that we create "A" personal website to break the monopoly of the "All" websites like the social media sites he mentions.
The singular destroys the monolithic many.
These are people who don't understand whimsy or other forms of contrast enhancing rhetoric. Designed to make reading interesting, points extra clear, etc.
Not designed to fool anyone into some random extremist view.
It may be that people who don't pick up on subtext humor, post more than average.
I thought HN's ideal website was a text file?
It's beautiful to be sure, I wanted to actually read what the author had to say, and stuff kept flying around my screen, so I did not get far.
Maybe if I printed it out...
Edit: Half joking with the printing (although I do find it much easier to read printed materials), but it definitely seems to me it that the author was trying to make a magazine and not a website. (A magazine where everything moves while you're trying to look at it!)
Actually they could turn on reader view mode if they use Firefox, because this is website, all content present as the W3C standards, users could read the content as any form as they like.
I thought the point is to pass along the message, though the one that is brought up quite regularly: sharing the joy of making websites, and such making as a way for anyone to contribute a little to the overall construction/improvement of the Web. Besides, it does seem to work without JS, though the layout is quite broken: header texts overflow (whatever is the window width), the text column is 45 characters wide instead of occupying the window width, all of which demonstrates the possible downsides of such diverse websites. That is not to say that they outweigh the benefits, but such downsides are not necessary to include, either.
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.
I miss RSS too
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.
> 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.
That’s exactly what the article says. Seems like you made assumptions about the argument based on the design instead of actually reading it.
I sort of missed this idea in the article, reading it more like "we can still thrive in the shade of the skyscrapers" than a call to a symbiotic existence.
> 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
This is what the article / indieweb mean with POSSE
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
POSSE is a great principle, but I'm talking about a different phenomenon: being voted onto the front page of HN, /., or featured on a huge subreddit, a tweet by some influencer with 100k subscribers, etc. The 15 minutes of fame, which hopefully leave a bit of a lasting audience, connections to sister sites mentioned in the resulting threads, etc.
The biggest problem of any indie publishing is obscurity; not that nobody cares, but rather nobody has an idea, and has no way to have an idea.
> 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.
This is a really nifty website.
I'd say that "nifty" is an understatement; "a masterpiece" would be more proper.
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The best design is invisible
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.
"No design" is perceptually inintelligible.
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)
> (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)
Woah homie, watch out for the model which is trained on reddit comments dataset to talk about intellectual one-upmanship xD
Also another thing but holy shit, LLM's are sycophantic man, it tries uses big words itself to show how the person has intellectual one-upmanship while cozying you up by saying practical design aphorism.
Like I agree with both of you guys and there's nuance but I am pretty sure that nobody's tryna sound intellectual hopefully.
Sorry for turning this into a rant about LLM's being sycophantic but man I tried today watching big bang and asked it if sheldon and raj were better duo in more common about physics (theorist and astrophysicist) since I was watching a episode where they both have dark matter in common and chatgpt agreed
Then I just felt the sycophancy in my heart so I opened up a new thread and I think I used the same prompt and changed it to sheldon and leonard and it ended up saying yes again.
The problem felt so annoying to me that I ended up looking at a sycophancy index being frustrated of sorts and wrote a lengthy ddg prompt lol to find this https://www.glazebench.com/
We really don't need more yes man's in our lives and honestly I will take up a less intelligent model than a sycophantic one. So I am curious what your guys opinion are on it too as sometimes I use LLM's as a search engines to familiarize myself with things I don't know and I am lately feeling it will just say yes to anything even silly ideas so I would never know what's the truth matter of the reality ykwim?
LLMs say yes to a lot. I often find myself priming it first with "absolute mode" type prompts before dealing with it. And also keeping my own opinions close to my chest
Seriously for my part, LLMs incarns exactly the only type of person that can break my nerves. Far too often I spot an hallucination, some bullshit rambling, sycophancy, or ----hughhhhh----- rethorical elements of language that makes me go mad :(.
examples for ---hughhhhh--- inducing stuff :
"I'll be blunt !"
"Here's the ground truth, no bullshit"
"Bottom line : <UPPER CASE EXPRESSION>"
"No fluff, technical, precise, no bullshit, devoid of unnecessary rethorical shapes, <etc..."
"Blunt answer: <bold text>"
"<title> : the hard truth"
I am becoming snob ?
No, you are human.
We can hope that "Elements of Style", or similar, comes back into fashion.
Pragmatically, you can design things to be highly readable for yourself and people that are "like you".
Alignment between the shape and the content is done in a circular fashion : what you see educates you to fabulate about design, once you fabulated enough you begin to say things are bad or well designed.
I often express myself online by writing a bit what goes through my mind, in a joyful and not very attentive manner, and I find it amusing to be barely understandable sometimes (I like the fact you had to use an LLM, lol) because, well, I feel it may bring a certain color to the otherwise often too uniform and immediate/instantaneous world of internet -- So, what I said previously is also mostly what occurs when you let your mind wander;
now, if I rejoin my own person and body, I can agree with you that my culture of good design is about the testimony of the removal of intention, in such a way that I feel content is highly readable, (fictionnaly) devoid of style, and somewhat raw or pure.
But again, at the "philosophical stage" all of this is pure fiction, and with a certain mindset, I am pretty sure I could shift my habits to adapt to what I feel as weird design, ugly, barely readable etc... It would be totally useless and absurd, but I could (given I have no specific perception-related medical conditions) !
We saw the web become a repetition of the same design, and while it IS good design in our "minimalism" addicted brains, I am pretty sure stumbling upon weiiiiird websites makes us great good sometimes, so much that maybe we also start to think about the absurdity of our standards : we arrived to the point in the "lie" where we identify this specific style as "the shape" of our perception, and yes : it become invisible to us, and is good design, but also it is a bit depressing.
My window manager and my emacs/vim/terminal configuration aren't what I call good design. They are highly readable but stratosphere-reaching levels of kitsch (yes ! I WANT to cosplay and feel as if I was writing code for aliens or to fight the matrix at work, and yes that's a bit cringe but at least I am honest with myself).
I don't wish the world and internet to be "more like that" and am ok with the actual state of design. Nevertheless I find that's a bit arbitrary and somewhat boring.
The best design is not invisible, but unobstructive. When you have a destination in mind, it must not prevent you from reaching your goal.
Sometimes, you can go the scenic route, where the journey itself is the goal, not the place it gets you to.
Yeah, not everyone wants to just write .md files and push to github webpage :) . I know that's what I personally like doing, but others have a more artistic flair and I try to just let things "be" the way they are. I think the message of the webpage was sincere and that's good enough for me.
All the criticism and thoughts regarding both the topic and website are nothing more than personal perspectives.
Gimme 10 minutes, notepad, and 10,000 GIFs, and I'll give you the World [Wide Web] of my youth.
I'd show you mine but it's currently.. UNDER CONSTRUCTION
>10,000 GIFs
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...
unique has gone away. everything must fit into some cookie-cutter pre-formatted mold that everyone has to agree upon OR ELSE!
I feel they have made stylistic choices that detract from the intent of their writing.
I think you are stepping in the same trap as the author. In search of uniqueness you end up doing the same thing over and over.
The author starts with "we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed." and continue with a web page that dooms scrolls emphasizing on big titles with pictures out of context, hard to read layout etc. There is a lot of valid criticism in the comments.
Of course uniqueness and beauty is probably subjective thing but I think about this often about the web. For example if you spend some time in websites like awwwards, dribbble, framer gallery you are going to end up with same design over and over.
I am not sure when exactly but probably in the early 00's graphic prints started to get into web, and sure it does seems cool, and different but I don't think the web should be a graphic print.
I am really struggling to find unique web pages, websites these days they are all the same, and in search of their "uniqueness" they often fail big with the user experience.
One website that is unique in my opinion very well taught is - https://usgraphics.com/ everything about it makes sense, the pages, the labels, colours, buttons at every step on the website you know why are you there you know purpose of everything it is hard to get lost, and not understand the purpose of the page. It looks very simple but the design is sophisticated.
The funny thing about comments about that - the browser is the most HACKED thing. If you were to compare a web page using HTML/JS/etc... to any app from the 80s/90s/00s/etc... it is light years beyond those technologies. So for people that complain about JS/font sizes/etc.. why haven't you all migrated to some form of browser that works for you, or plugin combination that makes things work for you - so you can just STOP. We have all the COOKIE ACCEPT/OPTIONS MADNESS because of people like you.
I mean for f-sake we even have agentic tools that can summarize the thing for you so you don't even have to visit it.
I don't know when this retcon happened, but this was never actually a site for hackers. People here complain because they like the modern web, because it pays their salaries. They get fabulously rich because of the steady enshittification of the web.
Just saying... you actually don't need JavaScript. I run NoScript, and unlike a lot of sites my HN client opens in-app without the ability to interact with the extension, I could read the site just fine. The only thing 'missing' were the fade-ins, which I found after your comment tempted me to open the site in the full browser and allow scripts from the site I want actually missing. Lovely design, just slightly lovelier without the js.
I can't take HN seriously, I just can't. It's where I get a lot of information but the naval gazing is endemic here. It's a certain type of culture, mixed in with the genuinely good posts and people who work in the industry
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.
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> 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...
> "things shouldn't be so political"
Skunk Anansi would likely disagree with that.
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Genuinely curious: would you mind please explaining to me how your contributions are more productive than the person you are responding to (read: attacking)?
It reads like you are upset at the poster using "DEI" and projecting your own behaviors onto them ("tedious and unproductive political discourse", "immune from critique or any burden of evidence").
Fair enough.
...huh? Your takeaway from my comment was that I'm pro DEI, or that I intended my comment to be related to DEI in some way?
I can't quite tell if you're trying to support or attack that concept/acronym/cultural flash point, but regardless: kinda besides the point :)
I promise you Hacker News was exactly like this back in 2011.
> It has become political (toward the left)
I wonder what you're talking about - your definition of 'political' or 'left'.
Tech and politics are so deeply intrenched. More than just "is DEI evil and there's no such thing as algorithmic bias". Should Apple be restricted from collecting its Apple Tax and locking down its devices?? Should the EU be able to regulate American companies? Should governments demand encryption back doors in devices? Should Australia ban teens from social network? Should there be a Right to Repair for our devices?
Honestly one of my biggest gripes with HN is that it does seem to be a place where pretty regressive social viewpoints seem to flourish.
It would be informative if, when someone complains that XYZ is "to the left" they define exactly what they mean. Is the person they are complaining about really advocating for the proletariat to seize the means of production?
It is not in the interest of “people who complain about things being too far left” to get specific. To do so can only increase the number of people who realize they disagree with them. The vagueness is purposeful.
Most times i read political things on HN it looks like visiting a comment straight from ayn rand's delusions, but that's to be expected of the country with two right wing parties pretending to compete.
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.
Haven’t people been saying that since the late 2000’s?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
The actual quote has links, the first of which is to a comment from 2009.
particularly ironic comment from an HN/lobsters celebrity account lol
this website isn't turning into Reddit, this website has been a pretentious orange subreddit for well over a decade if not right from the get go and a link to this site's Reddiquette page (just as ignored as on any subreddit!) is evidence TO that effect, and not against it!
the fact that the link petuously denies reality notwithstanding!
I mean, I'm not saying I think it's some sort of bastion of intellectual superiority, just that "have people been saying this place has been going downhill for a long time" is true.
It's still really early 2000's! We have over 900 years left :)
---
On topic: discussions like these are as old as human discussion forums and communities. I think that the participants each grow and change on an individual level just as much as the community and platform does. I think humans have a hard time identifying how much of their feelings of nostalgia are based in reality.
Maybe the platform has not actually changed in the ways people fear, and instead, peoples' opinions on what is interesting, important, or valuable has changed?
Since this thread has been discussing politics-adjacent things, let's consider Senator John Fetterman from the United States. Mr. Fetterman is notably different today from when he first started his campaign, regarding what he believes is important and valuable. (Mr. Fetterman suffered a stroke, which is suspected to have brought about personality changes and shifts in political ideology.)
---
I think we, as individuals, should always be focusing our first line of questioning on how _we're_ changing, rather than trying to figure out how the world, or the zeitgeist, or Hacker News, etc. is changing.
Sometimes we outgrow things that we hold dear, and instead of accepting that it's not really the place for us anymore and moving on to a different environment, we try to shape our current environment around our new personality by instituting new rules or adding new features.
Yes, but why can't both be true?
I don't get people who use "you say [thing] is getting worse but someone X years ago said the same!" as an argument that somehow proves [thing] isn't getting worse. Things can become progressively worse over long periods of time, it's not an instant change that can only happen once.
Another context where I often see this "argument" is major Windows versions. People rightfully say they want to stay on Windows 10 because 11 is objectively worse in many ways, and someone jumps in to say "you said the same about 7 to 10" as if it's some sort of gotcha. Both complaints can be right, each new version can be worse than the last.
Right now, we have at least one aspect in which HN has become objectively worse in the past years: AI-generated content. It didn't exist a decade ago, so good luck using that "argument" there. Thankfully, its prevalence is still nowhere near as bad as on Reddit (it's impossible to browse that site for 10 minutes without noticing bots posting blatant ChatGPT responses everywhere and getting hundreds of upvotes), but still.
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.
https://lobste.rs/
I always forget about lobste.rs because I never comment since I don’t have an account and don’t know anyway of getting an invite.
The site that is really, insufferably toxic is LinkedIn.
Their UX is not steamlined. They seem to also opt you in by default to every conceivable category of notifications. It feels like a clown website. If they fixed some of this it could genuinely be enjoyable though of course I get the point that it's employment networking as opposed to a social media 'connect with friends' site
1. Delete your account.
2. Block the website.
3. Critically evaluate your goals, and whether or not your actions align with those goals.
Its alright, were not all like that. I found the site cute, at least there are people standing up to the bullshit. I have been blogging about it on my site to https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/
Whereabout you plan to move?
I disagree it's "toward the left" but I would also disagree if you said "toward the right". By that I mean I've observed BOTH extremes happening.
We've seen the same kinds of discourse arrive here as is common on other social media sites, where too much political discourse is just signaling what tribe you belong to and vilifying anyone outside it.
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).
Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place.
No it hasn't.
>No it hasn't.
I'm sorry, is it a 5 minute argument, or the full half-hour?
> It has become political (toward the left)
I don’t feel this way at all. Maybe it’s one of the only places you’re actually consuming mixed opinions.
I will even go as far as stating that it is one of the only few places left on the Internet where you can see differing opinions interleave in a not-completely destructive manner. Really no idea what OP is talking about because it has not been at all my experience.
Is it "negative" to identify shitty things as being shitty? I wouldn't necessarily blame the commenters for that.
It's useless without describing concrete, practical solutions to those problems.
What do the voters want? Zero taxes, no crime, world peace and infinite benefits.
It's easy to identify things as shitty because the above doesn't describe the world yet and thus it's a banal observation. Implementing real, practical improvements is really hard and requires much more thought and consideration and introduces the possibility of failure. Which is why that part isn't discussed as much.
Why don't people that perpetuate the current system defend its existence? Why is the onus on us to develop a new realm of government when the current system never had to do this?
Your comment is "but you live in society too!"
Society acknowledging the shitty things is the first action in rectifying them.
God did not create the current system of government on the seventh day of creation. The current system had to defend its existence (or rather, creation) at the time of its origin.
The thing about criticism is, we're a long way from "the worst possible outcome". That is, there is a lot that the current system gets right.
That's why the burden of proof gets put on the one proposing changes. The wrong change could make things worse rather than better, and we really don't want that.
So it's not enough to note that society is broken in some ways. Yes, it is. Yes, we notice too. Now, what are you proposing? Let's take a hard look at your concrete proposal, and see whether it's an improvement or not.
Oh, you don't have one? Yes, it's still valid to point out that there are problems. It's valid to demand that we not become complacent with the current problems. That's not wrong.
No, neoliberalism is only 50ish years old and all it did was usher in nascent fascism and income inequality.
What is your proposal and what is your evidence it will make things better without introducing even worse problems?
Case in point.
Not every complaint needs to have a goddamn essay attached describing some utopia. Sometimes you just need to kvetch, and I'm sick of getting tone policed otherwise about it.
People who kvetch a lot are not good people to work with. And past a certain point, even to be around.
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.
You've convinced me, I'm going to stop complaining about corporate slop and the connection between big tech / VCs and the awful political situation in the most advanced country in the world. I will try to glaze Liquid Glass from here on out, say some nice things about the richest man on earth who kept quiet about the fact that he pays people to grind video games for him, and make sure to give David Sacks and Jason Calacanis the benefit of the doubt next time they are whining like babies online for a Silicon Valley Bank bailout.
I think the OP website is pretty cool by the way.
> he pays people to grind video games for him
The POE shilling might be what pisses me most off about him.
I know you’re being glib, but for me it’s probably working to shutter USAID at lightning speed leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Though he also sucks at video games.
Yeah well of course there are actual bad things that weight heavier on the scale.
But the good thing about this is that it is so lame.
The compulsion to interpret people's comments in bad faith then retort with condescending snark is a problem too.
But hey, at least it isn't memes, right?
I don't think I misinterpreted the condescension you dished out by blanket labeling a trend of mostly valid critique as psychological compulsion and performative misanthropy.
You certainly did, because I wasn't referring to valid critique.
Mainly I wanted to suggest that the folks you're diagnosing might have valid reason to complain. I could have done it more tactfully, but that's what came out.
Your post reads to me as a complaint that people who complain too much have a problem.
The bitter politics can also be right wing and you can spot it when migration topics pop up.
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.
comment from account created ~4 years before the supposed noticeable decline: Here's a content-free opinion post designed to trigger more of the negative comments I really hate, but I'll keep coming back.
You should definitely demand your money back.
There's a social media platform that seems right up your alley. It's something to do with "Truth"...
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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?
Lmao sure. Every comment I make about unions gets downvoted, and every comment about "maybe it's okay to destroy the planet for one more solid quarter" shoots into the stratosphere.
More projection here than a drive-in movie theatre... This website sucks, but not because of any (incorrectly) perceived leftwing bias.
> It has become political (toward the left)
Clever people tend to be on the political left. Computery people tend to be on the left because they have a higher level of literacy.
That's also why there are no particularly successful right-wing comedians.
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.
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While I agree it’s a good resource, please note there’s quite a few controversies[1] with the site, e.g. “The excessive monetization model of user-generated content has been criticized by several newspaper outlets, such as the British newspaper The Guardian”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)
Yeah, Fandom definitely went through a dark patch where they essentially killed a lot of very good niche wikis in the name of monetisation, and some other fraction migrated away as well as they could. Apparently it's changed owner and might be getting better, but I haven't had reason to go back and check.
It's a great hub, and it's quite easy to fall down a rabbithole there!
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Ah yes, signed at the bottom with all the cookie cutter political takes of a mentally insane progressive still clinging to the culture war they just lost. I wish I could downvote this post harder.
Delusion. The only thing that will make dead Internet come back alive is another technological leap forward. Big Tech has total control.
Oh great, another one of these dumb posts about how social media is so terrible and RSS, blogs, and HTML are so awesome. I'm getting sick of Hacker News people upvoting stuff like this all the time since it's just the same damn idea presented over and over again. Perhaps this site has grown too large and is attracting the Reddit hive mind crowd.
Writer assumes reader is as cranky as writer. Reader loses interest.
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.