Yeah, I don't think the true scale of the "war on general computation" is apparent for many technical people: It's good to think about alternative distribution models for the internet, better use of protocols, etc - but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.

The "cognitive control" of tech companies is underpinned by a much more concrete technical control of the devices.

I always find it strange when people refer to twitter and YouTube etc as apps rather than websites.

Please try to encourage them to open up LibreOffice Writer rather than Microsoft Word though! They should not have to suffer with CoPilot and MS spying on you all the time.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

In 1999, hostile websites would pop up endless new windows full of advertisements that you were powerless to stop unless you simply held down "ALT+F4" or "CTRL+ALT+DEL". Part of Mozilla Firefox's appeal is that it came with a pop-up blocker. [0]

Do you know anything about the Browser Wars? People literally had to put up images telling you which browser to use if you wanted to actually experience their website the way it was intended. Otherwise, it was just broken. [1]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/business/as-consumers-rev... (sorry for the tracking code, but this is a "gift" article and it was the best source I could find on popup ads)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

You nailed it. Retreating to text-only kinda misses the whole point. The browser back then wasn't just a document viewer. It was a portal.

People forget that the internet used to be a place you went. It was entirely separate from our analog lives. You sat down, you fired up the machine, and your screen became this portal cut right into the universe. The juxtaposition between that visually-stunted, industrial-grade gray interface and the shocking immediate global access we suddenly had... it was the everything. The UI wasn't 'boring'. It was the clunky machine whose buttons you pressed (literally) to touch the world.

Today it's all hyper-lubricated feeds, and scammy-shiny UI trying to hijack your dopamine. But back then, the machine worked for you. It was a tool for discovery. A fucking frontier.

I've been trying to build a shrine to that precise feeling, to see if I can grab the modern web and force it to face it's beautiful glorious past - to that specific gateway-to-the-world, electronic frontier feeling. Just a small set of experiments. Incomplete as a monument to the totality of it. Merely a partial body of work, trying to express what it felt like to be there. I built a Win98/1999 environment: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html to browse the web from a (abominatively) multi-tab Netscape re-imagining. It runs a live, remote modern browser session inside a pixel-perfect 98 shell. Forcing the modern web through that dial-up era lens... it’s evocative + modem sounds. The aim is to remind you what it felt like when the web was a boundless horizon, not a walled garden of weirdo nimby's and microstates and regulatory capture etc etc etc. Sometimes I catch a flash of that fire again using it. Sometimes...

"going back to gopher or text-only browsers feels like admitting defeat tbh."

Interesting perspective

I have been using text-only browsers continually since the mid 90s (no lynx after 1999)

As such, I never "went back" to using the text-only browser as I have always used one, but as graphical browsers became worse I used them less

The customised text-only browsers I use today are 1.3 and 2.0 MB. I can compile them in seconds on underpowered computers

The so-called "modern" browser is [rapidly-expanding size] MB, not was easy to customise via editing the source code and takes substantial resources plus time to compile

Today, most www use for me is text-only. I am consuming information not graphics. I prefer textmode to X11 or the like

I avoid making HTTP requests to remote servers with graphical, Javascript-enabled browsers

I prefer using TCP clients and TLS forward proxies for making HTTP requests (at least one forward proxy now even has its own TCP client)

I use the text-only browser to read HTML files

For example, yc.htm is a file I create each day that contains all HN submissions where discussion is still open

Today yc.htm is 12 MB and there are 7268 stories

Using tiny command line utilities I wrote, the HTML in yc.htm is processed to CSV and added to an SQLite database. The unique domain names, today about 3704 of them, are extracted from all item URLs in yc.htm and DNS data is obtained via 1-3 pipelined lookups, each over a single TCP connection. The DNS data is then processed and inserted into an SQLite database

The TLS forward proxy stores the DNS data in memory so that I do not have to make any remote DNS when accessing the www

The yc.htm file can be opened in a text-only browser but I would not attempt it in a graphical one. The text-only browser feels more robust, less likely to stall or crash. I prefer the text-only formatting

By not using a graphical browser I would not say I am "admitting defeat". I have full control over HTTP headers, I only retrieve the data I want, I never see any ads, I do not send data to trackers or telemetry collection points

On the other hand, using a graphical browser does feel like "admitting defeat" as by doing so I allow "web developers" to destroy all preferences I have for how and when I want data retrieved and presented. If I allow the graphical browser unfettered access to the internet, and allow it to run unreviewed Javascripts, I lose all control over DNS and HTTP requests. For me, the experience of using a graphical browser where I have no such control is slow and painful, a horrible "user experience"

I do not see using "old" software as "nostalgia". I see it as being practical. "New" software generally sucks

The loss of "user agency" as some call it only occurs if one uses a so-called "modern" browser and runs Javascript. The seizure of user agency is accomplished by getting people to use a particular "user agent" that is controlled by online advertising companies (e.g., Google) or their business partners (e.g., Mozilla). If we called this a "choice" perhaps some readers might disagree. But so-called "Big Tech" have consistently argued that people "choose" Big Tech's "user agents" that, via their design and "default settings", effectively remove user agency for the majority of people who use them

Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access fark.com Why have I been blocked?

This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. What can I do to resolve this?

You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.

Fark is farking great! Though its old-school HTML doesn't flow so well on mobile.

Can we get the best of 1999 with the best of 2026? Probably not...

I would like to relive my fark memories but I only get endless captcha loops on it now :(

Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions.

And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.

"Reading" the internet then going to buy a book from Borders or Barnes and Noble is a comfy memory to me. I liked the split between 'online' and 'offline' better than this semi-integrated present we live in

Different people have different tastes, or balance the good and the bad of the different eras differently.

Personally, I prefer the Internet of the 1990's. Part of that was the novelty and excitement. That led to a lot more experimentation. Part of that was the accessibility of the information that did exist. There was less wading through crap to simply find something, and the useless stuff that did exist tended to be easy to detect. (A lot of it was simply: I have an ambitious idea for a website but, Under Construction!) Most of all, the diversity was easier to access.

Today's Internet is much more polished and much more is available. Yet a lot of it is also siloed behind accounts, paywalls, or is a profit project rather than a passion project. That's not to say there is anything wrong with profiting off of good work, but there is a lot of people putting up low quality junk either because they don't realize how much effort is involved or because they are trying to make a quick buck.

As someone who has been online since 1992, I love the post. I miss the internet of the late 90's every day. We're no longer "one quick search" away from anything now, because web search has been completely poisoned by SEO slop. It was nice while it lasted though. As far as I can tell, all of the advancements we have were possible without completely ruining the web and the global commons we started to have a taste of.

>We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.

I download books from libgen and print them out. Printed books will never be replaced.

People clamoring for the old web are almost never talking about slow speeds or XHTML, they're talking about the FEELING of being on the web.

https://archive.org/details/essential-keygen-music/01+-+rez%...

It even comes pre-packaged with a theme song.

>How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past?

In order to actually have and maintain a healthy balance of life and technology, such compromises are required.

>How can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past?

We need to be on the offensive, not on the defensive. We need to pro-actively scrape walled gardens and re-publish them without fluff.

We need to consider .onion to be the default domain for our websites.

And we should also not be ashamed of using AI to achieve our goals.

We need to implement modern conveniences in our programs.

We need to be writing bridges between walled gardens and deltachat.

I theorize it is going back to the protocol layer. The "web" for most people is a bunch of social media frontends.

A movement where some sites are only accessible by a specific browser or class of browsers, much more simplified than now? Where a site could put an agreeable browser into a no-JS, lo-fi mode?

I think the world really sucks in developed countries right now in a way that's hard to put your finger on. Optimism and enthusiasm is very low in young people right now. People's attention spans are shot. Kids in high school and college are less social than ever, barely date, and spend more and more time doomscrolling. Rising inequality, rise of far right politics, etc.

I get that the world is doing great by some basic metric like 'number of people starving', and that is fantastic. But the world really feels off to a growing number of people - me included - in modern America.

"the world is better than it's ever been, technology is better than it's ever been, and it's all continuing to get better."

Those guys in Sudan or blue whales beg to differ.

No tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information

Closer to 2 as it was rarelly running at full 56kb/s.

Although, being patient was part of the experience as well

Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.

But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.

Luckily, we had web accelerating proxies like OnSpeed[1] back in the day that would compress web pages (including lossy image compression) so if you were one of the poor sods still on dialup (like I was), it was a lot more bearable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnSpeed

I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.

I knew dial up for a little while but I was lucky to have been on broadband for a couple of years already in 1999.

This early access + a 4x SCSI CD burner made me one of the 2 official warez provider at school. I was even taking orders from parents of friends.

I had cable internet in 1997; it was wonderful in it's unmetered¹ symmetric 10Mbs glory.

1) wasn't supposed to be unlimited but the ISP didn't bother to mesure it until sometime in 2000

We used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.

"This page is about 1 MB of assets".

And it could easily have been 10 KB.

Yeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections

Oh how much I wanted those super expensive ISDN lines...

and 1MB is "small" for the modern web!

Youtube added Ask AI where it gives you pretty good summary with timestamps. Absolute timesaver to drill down to essence.

They should just summarise and timestamp every video for everyone, but it would tank engagement and ad revenue.

> However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck.

Whatever the date, it's tightly coupled with the explosion of internet-capable mobile devices.

My personal pick would be 2012, because that's when the Samsung Galaxy S3 came out and outsold its predecessor more than twofold.

Coincidentally that's when the small agency I was working for at the time started offering making pages look on mobile devices.

In terms of units the market for mobile devices peaked just four years later.

Cookie wall was a big shift. I noticed that since the introduction of the cookie wall, websites now have about 3 to 4 modals that I have to click away before I can start interacting with the website. Typically it is the cookie wall I have to reject first through a secondary modal, then something about a newsletter, then the paywall and finally I have to hit ignore on the "Do you want to login with Google" on the top-right.

"56k" meant 7 kilobytes per second as a theoretical max. So 4.4 was ok. Everything with networks is done as bits, I think honestly for marketing reasons now

56k was bits, your 4.4KB was bytes, which is 36k bits. That was a pretty typical real world speed for dialup around 2000.

I remember a few years prior to that - I have faint recollections of dialling into BBSes or paying by the hour, so you'd want to plan in advance for what you might do on the internet while connected. A BBS often tracked what you uploaded vs downloaded, so unless you had something to share, you needed to be mindful of what you grabbed.

> Browsers barely worked

They worked pretty well actually, AFAICR. Internationalation was a bit sketchy in some cases though.

> computers crashed constantly

You did need to be careful with Windows 98, for sure, but it wasn't that bad. Also, if you put in some elbow grease you could install Linux, which didn't crash (but had limited support for peripherals and for the latest graphics cards, and almost no games).

> the ability to actually search for useful things was limited

It is arguably more limited now than it was then, since commercial search engines did not manipulate the results as much.

It was FUN though.

I found myself doing a particularly intense stint of work the other day, finally had all the source documents and the destination program all lined up, happily finding and comparing and synthesizing and entering, and I realized it was going to take all night. Or realistically until the middle of the next day.

I put the laptop into airplane mode, to block any updates that might unceremoniously reboot it and wreck my layout. Figure if I needed to be on Teams in the meantime, I've still got a phone for that.

Airplane mode already exists, it's _wonderful_ for this, and I should use it more often. If I'm not actively internetting, just toggle that and the distractions can wait.

Offline mode, and self-hostable apps. I'm very happy with my self-hosted and open source apps; e.g. photo library, media centres, etc; the convenience of cloud, but my cloud that I fully control.

It's worth keeping in mind how much more fringe the web used to be. You were almost by definition a bit of a deviant if you spent significant time online in the '90s and early '00s ("nerd" was a pejorative). People who found no acceptance in the physical world many times found like minded people online, which sometimes was a good thing and sometimes unfortunate.

> If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence.

No argument there. That said, I think the big difference between the 1990's and today is that everyone knew the nefarious places and people existed but, for the most part, you actually had to seek it out. I am not suggesting that it was hard to find. Perhaps the worse of the worse was easier to find. On the other hand, it wasn't quite the same thing as algorithmic feeds. For example: I absolutely refuse to view anything remotely political on some sites (including reputable news sources or material that is clearly satire) since that is the surest way to be fed extremist crap. How far those feeds will 5ake me, I simply do not want to know.

Hey Kyle! Neocities is great

Yes, that crackling! God, that shreak. You hear it and it just pulls you right back. Like some kind of rhythm that told you something was happening, something exciting was about to occur.

For us bridge-generation kids, that sound is probably etched like vinyl. Quiet room, 2 AM, and then that thrum, shreek and hiss. I literally missed it, whatever the next thing was. Whenever "modems" became obsolete. It was sad. It was the audio reminder, the signal hanging in the air, of the literal lifeline out of your analog bedroom and into a cosmos filled with electricity, buzzing with knowledge and light.

For me, half the experience of that era was purely sensory. The clunky physical sounds of the machine doing the heavy lifting to connect you... the clunky graphics....the need to wait...the gradual adjustment to the pace of life and the "gentle introduction" these "reduce speed" effects had to the threshold moment that that was, were somehow the right gentleness to take the world on such an epic journey.

I have labored a lot to recapture that feeling. Across many projects. Idk why exactly, but there was something so hopeful and exciting about the internet at that time. And I know it's worth remembering. Like a precious flame you have to protect from the rain, I guess. Check out this one: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html

Just a small set of experiments to see if I can grab that feeling. The modem sound evoke the vibe. Browsing the modern web with it is a little strange, if you can do that "in the gallery watching the walls between the paintings" kind of mind-job and not focus too much on the web portal content (which is designed to always suck you in, even framed retro like this).

You have useless javascript there.

To be fair, it's different. The order is important. If he would have written "It is not LLM slop what I want, is real people, real creators, and real content no my feed", it would have sound like AI. But not in the way he wrote it.

No. IRC, EMail lists, Usenet and webs like https://deadnet.se are closer.

Also, everything from https://wiby.me.

Decent is a matter of opinion but there are active ones. There've been a few HN posts on the subject in the last few months.

I compiled some old web meta links here: https://outerweb.org/blog/web-discovery.html

I thought webrings had died when things like Webring, Ringsurf, Ringo, Rail and others went offline years ago. But there is a new interest in them. I've listed all the ones I know of at https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm

Pretty sure we still chose the silos. We voted with our wallets.

Tons of people still use the internet as a source of entertainment and recreation. Just because you're too jaded to care doesn't mean the rest of the world is.

And we were just getting a breath of fresh-air after being restricted to local phone calls (or paying ghastly long-distance phone bills). Finally we could communicate anywhere for one price!

Without that context, it all falls flat, I agree.

I've considered trying to make a speed-of-light-ping-limited BBS that can _only_ be connected to by actual-locals, but reality is harder. (And the moment it got popular, nefarious actors would just rent or compromise a box in-radius.)

It's a matter of focus, we cannot stop the internet adoption to the current business needs. The reason you are posting here is an example of how people from all over the world are still can benefit from the internet to share their optinions and communicate regardless to the internet changes.