That web still exists. Even though it has been eclipsed by the siloized monstrous goos, those independent, quirky, greenfield sites are still very much alive.
I love the comparison with gentrification. It’s not the same though. You can still see the old web untouched, it’s just almost impossible to find. But if you do find it, you don’t see the gentrification.
Maybe it’s more like Rome being surrounded by hundreds of miles of malls, and parking lots, and highways, and those highways (and Google Maps) only leading you to those parking lots and malls. You’d have to stumble upon a backroad that’s not on the map to find the old Rome.
Just like it was back then...
There was a very steep path for the entrance to he^W the Internet, and then it was easy to find those places. Now you can access the Internet easily but it's harder to find those places.
Part of it is, SSL certs. Google downranks, heavily, websites without SSL.
Some of these sites will never see SSL, and so they are indeed as roads not on a map.
(It isn't relevant how easy or hard ssl and obtaining certs are. The reality is, these older, static html sires sometimes don't have ssl, and will never have ssl.)
>Gentrification is a poor analogy since the web is not zero sum unlike physical space.
It looks as if it's "not zero sum" because a random user can supposedly check out anything on equal footing, whether it's Facebook.com or some guy's hobby personal website. They're both there and available.
But in reality that's never the case. A person taken at random is never equally likely to visit this or that (except in the sense: I have 50%-50% chances of winning the lottery today: I either win, or I don't). The gentrified one's would have way more exposure, be promoted as way more essential (socially, and even professionally) to be on them, they will have all the trappings of fashion, like modern design, mobile client apps, and such.
Back in 1999 that wasn't yet the case. At least nowhere near to the degree it is today.
This is reflected in viewership numbers of course, where a gentrified behemoth might get 99% of the traffic, and the rest long tail 1%, despite consisting of billion times more websites.
OK but... a personal website gets substantially less traffic than Facebook but does it get more or less traffic than the website owner's profile page on Facebook? If that person keeps a blog on the personal site and occasionally posts on FB, the website wins. If that person posts all the time on Facebook and rarely blogs, the FB profile wins.
I do have a website since last century and I stopped posting on FB since a few years ago. My website gets negligible traffic except scan bots but still more than me on FB. If people google me they might find me on FB and realize that my page is dead. If they insist they'll find my site.
Finding a path to that still-existing web is like trying to casually hike into the fairy realm or something. It's all around us and invisible, inaccessible.
90+% of people would use Google to find stuff via search, it's useful to have other means. As you can see by their results they tend to favour 'fresh' (nee recycled content) pages rather than older and original sources.
//added
which is often the case as per comments in this thread with people generally feeling the commercial web has gobbled up original and niche content. Surely it can only be that way because the gateways to the web have made it so.
I wonder if it would be possible to filter out the noise of the “modern web” by black listing big tech the same way we block ads. Might be an interesting project.
Kagi (the search engine) has Small Web※, which (I assume) shows only results from the long tail and excludes popular sites (they use TinyGem search index for this).
If a search engine were to penalize ads, I bet a lot of those old sites would surface. The old web was an "amateur" web, people created sites to share content they were excited about, not to monetize it (or to allow a platform to monetize it). If search engines also make most of their money from advertising, they have a big conflict of interest. We need an open source search engine owned by a non-profit organization following the model of Signal.
> If a search engine were to penalize ads, I bet a lot of those old sites would surface.
Maybe using an ad blocker to build a list of "websites that serve ads" (in addition to domains those ads are served from), and using that list to filter out results from an existing search engine API (like Duck Duck Go) would get you part of the way. But you'd probably need to search really far before you start finding sites that don't serve ads.
Kagi partially does that. I lt shows how many trackers a result has on its results page and lets you boost or downgrade domains in your search results.
I would use that too, for sure! I kind of feel like experimenting with this now. I have no idea how doable it is to just "start scraping the web" though. uBlock Origin is open source, so I guess that could be used to help filter out sites that serve ads.
Wasn't there a site that showed search results but skipped the top N results, so you ended up seeing a lot more interesting smaller sites? Can't remember details and a quick search (hah) didn't find it. Pretty sure it was linked on HN a year or two ago...
I mean put adblocks into crazy mode, blacklist anything related to Google and Meta-crap by default, turn off JS and probably CSS too and you are almost there, maybe apart from blinking text and weirdly stretched bitmap backgrounds
No ad-tech, and 2002? What web were you on? 2002 had popups, pop-unders, frantically blinking banners, pages opening many other pages when you click on them, search results poisoned with transparent or small text, and barely any tech in the user's hand to fight these.
The web is, I think, friendlier now than it was in 2000-2005. And much, much more useful in general.
It's work and we need to re-establish a true net of websites, webrings and all the other forgotten stuff that was made obsolete by search engines. Here's my contribution:
I'm not sure, I think it's better to keep it private and dispense it through closed communities. These things don't work unless there is a lot of personal interest between each website creator, so just dumping them into a big list isn't great. I think the best modern approaches I've seen have forums/Discord servers organised around a topic, such as making demos or sizecoding, and then people sharing their sites and projects within those spaces.
Discord is a walled garden and is not searchable, so knowledge posted there is lost very quickly and is super hard to discover. Static HTML has its limits, but has much better longevity.
Yes. This is a taste of what the web was like before it became shit. And it's the way it should be again.
Weird, quirky, fun, no ad-tech, no trying to hard sell anything.
God, I miss this era.