The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings, banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy an image and getting a Javascript alert telling you the image was "copyright". It was learning that you could copy it anyway if you spammed enter. It was hotlinking those same images in protest. It was waiting 5 hours to download a 37 second 320x240 RealPlayer video. It was having a password "protected" area where the password is base64 encoded in the source. It was trying the same search query in multiple search engines because they would return different results. It was typing random URLs in to see if you could find something interesting yourself. It was playing midi files on loop in the background. It was Macromedia Flash, explicit popups, pure yellow text on black backgrounds, and reformatting your computer to get rid of viruses.
The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks.
Creator of Bear here. Suggesting that because one project fails, others will too is a bit of a fallacy. Fact is that whether you self-host or not, you're still using someone else's platform (unless you're a real self-hoster with a box in your closet, in which case, good on you and godspeed).
I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to backup and migrate, that's fair.
Additionally, part of the appeal of Bear is that I've made it my personal mission to get the platform to outlive me. Take that as you will. I can't prove that Bear will live on in perpetuity, but I can try my best.
Thank you for taking your time to reply to my comment.
I want to clarify one thing first: I don't have anything special against your platform, it's just that it seems I see at least one article a week about it on HN lastly and I'm wondering why.
I'm sure you are well intentionned and you'll do your best to keep the plaftorm as true to the mission you have chosen to take and described in your manifesto, no doubt about it.
But having been through a certain number of hype cycles around tech, I tend to become suspicious when I see too much people pushing something.
That's why I understand people complaining about Kagi's omnipresence here, even though I'm totaly on the hype train here.
Furthermore, the article looks like a promotion for the platform. It probably isn't, and you don't control what people publish, so it's not your fault.
Yet, it reads like "bearblog is the solution to "Resurrect the Old Web".
Which, to me, can't be, since it's a platform like the hundreds that previously came and went, no matter their creator's promise.
So, sure, bearblog exists, it offers people a way to publish content in an _old fashioned_ way, and, according to its manifesto, it will stay like this as long as it exists.
Which is nice.
And can be part of a solution, but it's not the solution. I don't think there is, actually.
Tech is stuck behind the symbolic threshold. We're at the point we use the symbolic, which is arbitrary, for literally everything as a substitute, mimic, representation that's in reality. Eventually the symbolic eats itself alive in arbitrariness and society capitalizing on that arbitrariness. This is basic stuff CS doesn't make itself aware of.
We're at the end of communication in this symbolic era. You can see it in politics, climate policy, fiscal policy, trade policy, media, everything is at an end-point or a breaking point.
So lacking an awareness of the end-game for the symbolic, we retreat to an easier, earlier state, which is nostalgic. But its nostalgia for a system already on the way out.
I don’t use Bear but bless you for building it the way you are. Not everyone has development skills to do it themselves so it’s up to us coders and programmers to build these tools.
The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge. The old web was to me about people publishing whatever for whatever reason, especially amateurs and persons. That web has to me been pushed aside for the benefit of the gain-market-and-profit-from-everything crowd.
I graduated from Geocities/Angelfire in a year or less, learned HTML, and designed my first website on a traditional shared hosting plan with hypermart.net. From there, obv. I could easily go anywhere, as there wasn’t anything particularly special or proprietary keeping me there. I wrote HTML in notepad, and FTP’d those files to my host. There’s nothing to stop people from doing this today.
I'm a HN Heretic. HN says dark patterns, money, power, corporate interests.
I think it was very simple: Proprietary platforms solve real-world problems the more "open" web doesn't and did not effectively solve: discoverability, spam filtering, content filtering, community. Regular people don't want the open web, and never have. They only tolerated it when it was given to them without alternatives.
Proprietary platform solve all the problems you cite for exactly as long as it remains profitable to do so, and not a nanosecond longer. Once you’ve been captured, say goodbye to every one of those things.
That's not new; it's been happening all the way back since AOL. AOL was basically an abstraction layer over the whole internet that we tolerated (remember when every show had both a URL and an AOL keyword?), but it broke like anything can.
For that matter, your maxim also applies to the open internet, and watch what's happening. It's not profitable, so sites are packing up.
In a nutshell, content costs money. People make content anticipating money. Doesn't matter if it's on Discord, on YouTube, or a private blog. No money, no investment.
> The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge.
Let's not forget ISPs and schools offering hosting. Universities even used to let students and faculty have routable IPs and DNS entries on the school's domain.
It's like the nostalgia about the "Summer of Love" and the 1960's... it really only lasted a single summer and only in one or two little areas.
Same thing with the "old web." It was about the very early 90s before Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic days) and when everyone was just throwing up a single HTML page with a bunch of links... that's the "old web".
The modern WWW kicked off with the ability to make credit card transactions online (1994). That... and porn (1995).
For "old web" sites that still exist, check out wiby
"The Summer of Love" literally refers to one summer in 1967 not the whole of 60's counter-culture. Even Woodstock was in '69.
In terms of the various cultural strands then of course they lasted longer with many roots in 50's beatnick culture (bohemianism, poetry, LSD, Buddhism) to today where bands that played Monterey '67 and Woodstock are still touring and a "definitely not a hippy" in San Francisco might live in a polycule, micro-dose psychedelics while using a meditation app before writing a blog about effective altruism.
"No ads" is possible. It's a choice really. Too many bloggers also want to make money and think ads are the way to do it. That's certainly their right, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Want no ads, start browsing gopher sites. No ads there. Or find people making blogs just because they want to. They exist. Github + Jekyll is a great option for free static blogging if your willing to spend a little time getting it setup and learning something new.
So, obviously, ads were the norm back in the day. The author had to be wearing several rose tinted glasses when writing that.
But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game".
This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad-free in the way that a lot of former or legacy forums were and are.
I may be wearing the same glasses here, but it felt like ads were more like "real ads" back then.
Like when walking down a street, you may see some posters advertising something, but they are clearly ads, because they are noisy rectangles bunched up with other noisy rectangles.
On the older internet, ads felt more like that, and seemed to stay in the corner away from the content. However, on the modern internet, ads and content feels entangled.
It's a bit like visiting a touristic area. It can feel like everything is trying to grab your attention to sell something and merchants become untrustworthy.
They all wish they had the viewership for ads. They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers. Banners, side banners, buttons, applets, most web advertising size standards are derivative of these initial placements.
What you’re talking about was geocities or aol’s members sites that anyone could build a site with. Anyone running CGI wishes for that sweet ad revenue to pay for the Sun servers…
Every time I get on my tracking and internet privacy soapbox, and I lament how little people care about it these days, I need to cast my mind back to when I was a teenager and everyone wanted a counter on their homepage. Not all hosts provided a counter script in their cgi-bin so various third-party websites offered counter image links that you could add into your page. Of course when you clicked through you could see all the different countries of your site's visitors and it was the coolest thing ever. I was thrilled when I hit 1000 visitors at some point! But looking back, even if a few of those third-party counter providers were just benevolent sysadmins offering a public service, I have no doubt some of them turned into the data mining giants of today.
To be fair, Geocities did get done by the FTC for secretly selling users' PII to third-party advertisers almost 30 years ago, so it wasn't just our own faults. But I think rather than the FTC actually putting a stop to the behavior, the outcome was just that websites had be more honest in their EULA that users would be giving up their privacy rights, so here we are.
I do not think "old" helps a discussion and probably impedes it. A better conversation is perhaps about what features we call "old" are good and desirable. Then how we can build a new, sustainable system with those features.
Unfortunately sustainable is somewhat equivalent to money. Whatever work you do, and even if you love it, in general it needs to have a functional business model. Businesses that can financially support the people who provide them, tend to continue.
Personally, I believe this is the fundamental problem with many of the things that we now fondly think of as "old". Google groups? What was the business model? Did it make money? How could you make money from doing something like that?
The fundamental business model IRL used to be "fee for service". Not lock in. Not subscription. It works, because if people want the service they can pay for it. Okay, so hint: what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?
hint number 2: someone mentioned banner ads in a comment. Is that fee for service? If not, for extra credit, what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model? Are there useful services that could be provided with an alternative business model. Etc.
> In my opinion the answer is honestly pretty simple: blogs and RSS feeds.
This point is made very often, and I do believe it was true for many people, but I honestly didn’t care about individual blogs at all when I was a young net user.
I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it? All the action for me was on forums and chat rooms. Like the author mentions, it’s exactly the type of excitement that naturally led to early social media, which I was also a huge fan of for the close friends I already had.
The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that same feeling again online. In part because I am no longer a child, in part because there are just too many people online now, in part because too many of those people’s brains are twitter-rotted.
It’s fine, I have my close circles to keep my human social spirit alive.
> I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it?
I wonder, have you ever read a novel? Hundreds of pages a single person wrote about a story that happened (usually) entirely in their head, printed on paper, no way to interact with it. It's a great experience if the author has some skill at this.
I can't downvote, but this comment feels a little rude or standoffish towards someone who read what you wrote, thought about it, and gave a response.
You said you didn't care for 1000 words that someone wrote about their trip abroad, and that's clearly an example to illustrate something, but it's not clear what, because it's contrived and falls apart easily: nobody else really read those blogs either, people read blogs from people and topics they're interested in.
So what about 1000 word blog from an a single individual that does interest you? Or more than 1000 words from a single individual on a different topic, like a novel?
I, too, felt the old web was much more creative and limitless. But to be blunt, these attempts to resurrect it feel like the opposite: another collection of 90s-style HTML and artwork about generic "old web" stuff (or about the old web itself, which makes no sense - you don't hear people today reminiscing about 2025).
I think a big problem is desensitization. When I was young, MSPaint art looked good, bitcrushed music sounded fine, and simple flash games were fun. Then the art, music, and games kept becoming more complex and higher quality, so the novelty and perceived opportunity was sustained. Now it has tapered off, so the novelty has run out and the next improvement is hard to imagine.
However, the world is so complicated and technology is still improving such that I suspect (and hope) we'll find more breakthroughs within the next decade. Personally, I'm still optimistic about VR: right now good VR is too expensive and development is too hard, but those are incrementally-solvable problems, and few people have experienced good VR (especially with motion) but I can imagine it.
Not for nothing, the last time I checked the most popular indie games on steam are all intentionally made to look vaguely 8-bit (really prob more like 64-bit, but lofi retro).
Sometimes for nostalgia, but
I think that’s usually because it’s easier to make decent graphics if they’re 2D and low resolution. You don’t see many games with the low-quality Flash style, pixelation happens to be less “ugly”.
I like to go on a nostalgia trip every now and then as well. Loved the old forums that got taken out by social networks. Also loved the various private communities in IRC and Usenet and the blog-o-spheres I was part of and read about. But the sad reality is that its more about the community than the technology. And the communities of old mostly disbanded and moved on and restoring old tech won't bring them back.
Nowadays the main issue for me is that there are too many people in the room. Pick any social network and forum and you're an immediate misfit there. Make one edgy statements and trolls, flamers, live streamers will tear you apart. Not to mention AI tech advancements are making a not-great situation slightly worse. The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question if it ever were.
Trying to ressurect the old internet by staying limited to a platform like bear blog may be a big limitation. To me, part of what made the old internet so interesting is the expression of ideas in so many things beyond just regular blogs.
Like someone else mentioned, things like GeoCities, but also stories like Ted The Caver, neopets, etc. Blogs are great but to be honest, I get most of my stuff from mailing lists and hacker news and feel quite fine with that.
What i'd love to see more of is people building interesting experiences for the love of the game, that's what feels like builds passion and interest. But there's no returning back to the old internet in the same way, because what's interesting and what's fun to read has changed.
> Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones.
This reflects on another problem: the sorry state of journalism and willingness to turn press releases into news. That story ran in a wide variety of media outlets, and a Google News search of "children landline phones" turns up a bunch of these.
It turns out that these articles were really ads for "Tin Can," a VoIP phone for kids. Not really a landline at all, it's seriously nerfed, and I'd assume that if it's SIP, it's locked to their service, or else it's their own proprietary protocol. Not really a surprise, given that real landlines are almost extinct, and expensive where available.
A post like this makes the rounds every few months on HN. What posts like this neglect to consider is that the overwhelming majority of people who use social media apps didn't use the internet during the "old" era. The reality is, this is nerd nostalgia that nobody cares about or wants besides a sub-population of nerds. The masses don't care about blogs, rss, or small networks. The internet grew because the social media and internet companies invested billions in bringing the masses online via these shiny addictive platforms - the "old web" is never going to appeal to them - it is a relic of the past.
Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online.
This doesn't sound like blogs + rss, this sounds like phpBB + AOL instant messenger. Social media is at its best when real people are interacting with real people, not when real people are interacting with a blog post/tweet/etc., (and definitely not an algorithm)...
Remember FriendFeed? It was unironically a pretty cool thing. Subscribe to RSS feeds, displayed in a Twitter-like timeline, and could comment and share and follow people and see their feeds... and all of that had their own RSS feeds.
The current FeedLand gets close, and is nice for reading, but there's not a huge "social" aspect to it.
I did something similar a few months, launched it on HN, no traction. It's really difficult. No one wants to host their blog / posts on a platform that will dissapear when the owner gets bored or can't maintain it anymore.
Added this to other comments: old web had ads (iframes, banners, popups!), and also was completely self-hosted, which gave you more freedom than any other cloud platform. If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
> If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
Also know as: How to get a visit from the FBI or a state agency equivalent once someone discovers you're a viable conduit of unsavory content.
The old web is dead, it will never come back because it relied on ignorance, naivety, charity, and good faith. Those are mostly all gone. You can still stand up one of these hosts and pages for yourself but you must still be incredibly vigilant because automated attacks on your host will be happening non-stop. Jumping into hosting for others is no longer a hobby and it never will be again.
Even on the old web, most people hosted their sites on a service like Geocities or on their ISP's servers, school, etc. Very few people actually self-hosted.
I think the "old web" is also heavily nostalgia-infested, it wasn't nearly as good as most people here remember.
Blatantly false information? Internet Explorer required for everything? Adobe Flash and Java all over the place? Websites that frequently actually could hack your computer? Geocities and AOL being the meeting places, reincarnated as Discord? Terribly slow, low-resolution imagery that our brains filled in the details for? The worst font and font color choices known to man? Shock content being absolutely rampant? Constant pop-ups? Every company wanting a toolbar?
That's what I remember. It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually." It's the same phenomenon where people think cars were better in the 80s, but they sit in an 80s car, and realize we've come a long, long way.
There are amazing retro games that are still awesome to play to this day. To say they all suck, and it's just nostalgia is not true at all.
Sure, a lot of them suck, especially on Nintendo 64, because of the 3d transition, but from the NES onward there are timeless classics.
My kid beat super Metroid several times, he decided to play it on his own on his switch, and he loved it. He plays the old pokemon games too. In other words, that's a terrible analogy.
You're choosing the top 10 games on the Nintendo 64 and NES to make your analogy; out of the thousands and thousands of games produced for those systems. Give your kid game #50 (Waialae Country Club: True Golf Classics on N64) and see if she would prefer it over literally any modern game that ranks on Steam. My analogy holds.
Why would you compare "any modern game that ranks on Steam" with random games from the era?
You said
> It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually."
I actually tried re-playing PS games I remember enjoying, and I still enjoy them.
I see what you mean about the fact that people look at old stuff with rose-tinted glasses, but really some things did age well (including parts of the early web).
The feeling of, "being able to breathe again" that this creates is a boon to my failing health. I'm seeing movements in this direction alongside, "HTML-only" as a better realization/utilization of the internet. We might not ever get the Vannevar Bush-Ted Nelson lost super internet some speculate about but I'm glad we can at least get to, "something workable." Cheers speckx!
It’s funny, when I was younger, it was all about MSN messenger, MySpace (esp the music player on there), and forums. That’s the old web I remember from before. No personal blogs, really. (Again I’m not old enough to remember before that)
The old web isn’t a platform, an aesthetic, or a technology. The old web is people creating and sharing because they are intrinsically motivated. Everything we hate about the current web comes from extrinsic motivations. Good luck removing them.
Not closely relevant but I've revamped my personal website earlier this year to bring the old web vibe into it. I've got a 88x31 GIF section and I wonder where I could look for other old web sites to cross link with my site.
I am all for resurrecting the Old Web, but please, let's not repeat the same mistakes again.
Be independent. Running your own website is not that difficult. And seriously, spending the minuscule amount of money on hosting should not be a problem. It's a hobby, hobbies cost money. If you own your website, you can move it anywhere quickly. Nobody will start showing ads. Nobody will pester your users with annoying "SUBSCRIBE" modal popups. Nobody will sell the platform along with you and your content to a new owner.
I do not know enough about this particular platform — maybe it's different from others, maybe not. But I have seen enough platforms undergo progressive enshittification to be wary of any place that wants to host my stuff under their domain/URL.
I fail to see what a new protocol would bring to the equation. I see it more as a human behaviour issue, network effect, worse is better etc etc.
My grandma uses Facebook because someone taught her how, she doesn't have the capability to explore technology on her own. That honestly goes for most people, they treat their computer as necessary for getting along in modern society and nothing more.
The old web never went away, it never died. It was you who left. You who runs a corporate browser that can't even load HTTP pages anymore. You who only post on massive corporate run social media (like I am with HN). You who host your website on github or behind cloudflare or don't even bother and just have a mastodon or facebook page (both exclusively javascript applications).
The old web is still there, almost invisible under the piles of corporate javascript applications. There's probably more old web now than there was when the old web was new. It's just that in terms of relative ratios it's buried under so much crap and search engines are so bad no few can surf it. Heck, there's even still usenet and people posting there like myself. It's not dead and it's not spammed anymore, and it's a true federated protocol.
But it is easy to be the change. Self host your website from your home computer. Don't use Chrome or Chrome derivatives. Don't put computational paywalls in front of your services like cloudflare or even Anubis. The truth is that for most websites in most situations, all that is not needed. And most importantly, surf the web. That'll require setting up the modern version of webrings: feeds. And sharing feeds with your friends and peers.
I think OP missed a big point: it’s also the fact that algorithms are sifting through every word and picture you post and constructing insanely accurate targeting to sell to advertisers and governments, and to the bad side of those two.
What we also need is privacy. I only want my friends to see my blog or rss feed. Not the entire planet and every greedy spyware.
Funny when I look at my account on another machine when not logged in my score is -1, but that is hidden when I’m logged in to HN and everything looks normal and score is 1.
I don't mind the entire planet of human beings seeing my blog, but I don't want what I write to be monetized by grifters and trillion-dollar companies.
For that reason, my personal blog is behind security so only invited people can see it.
It works very well, but no, I'm not going to explain how it works because there are plenty of people on HN who have no morals, work for crappy companies, or are part of the trillion-dollar machines that are destroying human creativity so some C-level can buy a third private island.
Old Web was killed by spam bots, Metasploit, Shodan and DDoS attacks getting easy enough to buy for random joes.
I ran phpBB boards, my own blogs, an instance of a German php-based MMORPG I long forgot the name of. But it simply wasn't fun any more to keep up with the bad actors, to wake up and find someone found yet another bug in the MMORPG software or phpBB and in the best case just spammed profanities, in the worst case raze the entire server blank.
It's just not feasible any more to be an innocent kid on the Internet with a $5 VPS. And that's not taking the ever increasing share of legal obligations (CSAM and DMCA takedowns, EU's anti terrorism law, GDPR, you name it) and their associated financial and criminal risk into account - I know people who did get anything from legal nastygrams for thousands of euros for some idiot uploading MP3s onto a phpBB to getting their door busted down by police at 6 in the morning because someone used their TOR exit node to distribute CSAM.
The only thing that's somewhat safe is a static built website hosted on AWS S3. No way to deface or take down that unless you manage to get your credentials exfiltrated by some malware.
Okay, so we need Old Web with extra steps (security).
I’ll admit that when I lament the web we used to have, I’m never thinking about viruses, malware, pop ups/unders, &c. Seems like all that stuff was just a small price to pay for connecting with likeminded people.
I have a slice of that with Mastodon but maybe being 20 years older and jaded is making me wistful, yearning for something that is never coming back.
We more-so need Old Web with actual consequences for bad actors. You know, the days when you could email an ISP's abuse mailbox with evidence of someone running portscans and they'd get at least told to clean up shop or else, and the or else went as far as getting their contract cancelled entirely.
These days it seems like abuse@ is routed straight to /dev/null, and that's not even addressing enemy nation states that willingly shield and host bad actors.
The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings, banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy an image and getting a Javascript alert telling you the image was "copyright". It was learning that you could copy it anyway if you spammed enter. It was hotlinking those same images in protest. It was waiting 5 hours to download a 37 second 320x240 RealPlayer video. It was having a password "protected" area where the password is base64 encoded in the source. It was trying the same search query in multiple search engines because they would return different results. It was typing random URLs in to see if you could find something interesting yourself. It was playing midi files on loop in the background. It was Macromedia Flash, explicit popups, pure yellow text on black backgrounds, and reformatting your computer to get rid of viruses.
The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks.
I run my own blog on AWS for ~a dollar a month.
> 8080
You mean 80. Ports after 1024 were for wimps.
I don't get HN's appeal for the bearblog platform?
If anything else, if one wants to resurrect the "Old Web", one shouldn't do it on someone else's platform.
Parts of the "Old Web" disappeared when the platforms hosting it stopped.
The brutal shutting down of Typepad should be another reminder of this reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/one-time-wordpress-c...
Creator of Bear here. Suggesting that because one project fails, others will too is a bit of a fallacy. Fact is that whether you self-host or not, you're still using someone else's platform (unless you're a real self-hoster with a box in your closet, in which case, good on you and godspeed).
I think as long as platforms have an easy way for people to backup and migrate, that's fair.
Additionally, part of the appeal of Bear is that I've made it my personal mission to get the platform to outlive me. Take that as you will. I can't prove that Bear will live on in perpetuity, but I can try my best.
Thank you for taking your time to reply to my comment.
I want to clarify one thing first: I don't have anything special against your platform, it's just that it seems I see at least one article a week about it on HN lastly and I'm wondering why.
I'm sure you are well intentionned and you'll do your best to keep the plaftorm as true to the mission you have chosen to take and described in your manifesto, no doubt about it.
But having been through a certain number of hype cycles around tech, I tend to become suspicious when I see too much people pushing something. That's why I understand people complaining about Kagi's omnipresence here, even though I'm totaly on the hype train here.
Furthermore, the article looks like a promotion for the platform. It probably isn't, and you don't control what people publish, so it's not your fault. Yet, it reads like "bearblog is the solution to "Resurrect the Old Web".
Which, to me, can't be, since it's a platform like the hundreds that previously came and went, no matter their creator's promise.
So, sure, bearblog exists, it offers people a way to publish content in an _old fashioned_ way, and, according to its manifesto, it will stay like this as long as it exists. Which is nice. And can be part of a solution, but it's not the solution. I don't think there is, actually.
Tech is stuck behind the symbolic threshold. We're at the point we use the symbolic, which is arbitrary, for literally everything as a substitute, mimic, representation that's in reality. Eventually the symbolic eats itself alive in arbitrariness and society capitalizing on that arbitrariness. This is basic stuff CS doesn't make itself aware of.
We're at the end of communication in this symbolic era. You can see it in politics, climate policy, fiscal policy, trade policy, media, everything is at an end-point or a breaking point.
So lacking an awareness of the end-game for the symbolic, we retreat to an easier, earlier state, which is nostalgic. But its nostalgia for a system already on the way out.
I don’t use Bear but bless you for building it the way you are. Not everyone has development skills to do it themselves so it’s up to us coders and programmers to build these tools.
The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge. The old web was to me about people publishing whatever for whatever reason, especially amateurs and persons. That web has to me been pushed aside for the benefit of the gain-market-and-profit-from-everything crowd.
I graduated from Geocities/Angelfire in a year or less, learned HTML, and designed my first website on a traditional shared hosting plan with hypermart.net. From there, obv. I could easily go anywhere, as there wasn’t anything particularly special or proprietary keeping me there. I wrote HTML in notepad, and FTP’d those files to my host. There’s nothing to stop people from doing this today.
Why did the old web die?
I'm a HN Heretic. HN says dark patterns, money, power, corporate interests.
I think it was very simple: Proprietary platforms solve real-world problems the more "open" web doesn't and did not effectively solve: discoverability, spam filtering, content filtering, community. Regular people don't want the open web, and never have. They only tolerated it when it was given to them without alternatives.
Proprietary platform solve all the problems you cite for exactly as long as it remains profitable to do so, and not a nanosecond longer. Once you’ve been captured, say goodbye to every one of those things.
That's not new; it's been happening all the way back since AOL. AOL was basically an abstraction layer over the whole internet that we tolerated (remember when every show had both a URL and an AOL keyword?), but it broke like anything can.
For that matter, your maxim also applies to the open internet, and watch what's happening. It's not profitable, so sites are packing up.
In a nutshell, content costs money. People make content anticipating money. Doesn't matter if it's on Discord, on YouTube, or a private blog. No money, no investment.
> The Old Web also happened on someone else's platform, back in the day hosting your site on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and their likes where huge.
Let's not forget ISPs and schools offering hosting. Universities even used to let students and faculty have routable IPs and DNS entries on the school's domain.
No ads
I don't know what "Old Web" the author is remembering but when I was first paid to make a website in 1997, it had banner ads on it.
It's like the nostalgia about the "Summer of Love" and the 1960's... it really only lasted a single summer and only in one or two little areas.
Same thing with the "old web." It was about the very early 90s before Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic days) and when everyone was just throwing up a single HTML page with a bunch of links... that's the "old web".
The modern WWW kicked off with the ability to make credit card transactions online (1994). That... and porn (1995).
For "old web" sites that still exist, check out wiby
https://wiby.org/
> it really only lasted a single summer
"The Summer of Love" literally refers to one summer in 1967 not the whole of 60's counter-culture. Even Woodstock was in '69.
In terms of the various cultural strands then of course they lasted longer with many roots in 50's beatnick culture (bohemianism, poetry, LSD, Buddhism) to today where bands that played Monterey '67 and Woodstock are still touring and a "definitely not a hippy" in San Francisco might live in a polycule, micro-dose psychedelics while using a meditation app before writing a blog about effective altruism.
"No ads" is possible. It's a choice really. Too many bloggers also want to make money and think ads are the way to do it. That's certainly their right, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Want no ads, start browsing gopher sites. No ads there. Or find people making blogs just because they want to. They exist. Github + Jekyll is a great option for free static blogging if your willing to spend a little time getting it setup and learning something new.
So, obviously, ads were the norm back in the day. The author had to be wearing several rose tinted glasses when writing that.
But the author isn't entirely wrong. There were/are a lot of websites that simply did not run ads. Hosted not for money, but "for love of the game".
This is something that was lost with the shift to exclusively platform-based hosting. A facebook page or subreddit simply is never going to be ad-free in the way that a lot of former or legacy forums were and are.
I may be wearing the same glasses here, but it felt like ads were more like "real ads" back then.
Like when walking down a street, you may see some posters advertising something, but they are clearly ads, because they are noisy rectangles bunched up with other noisy rectangles.
On the older internet, ads felt more like that, and seemed to stay in the corner away from the content. However, on the modern internet, ads and content feels entangled.
It's a bit like visiting a touristic area. It can feel like everything is trying to grab your attention to sell something and merchants become untrustworthy.
They all wish they had the viewership for ads. They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers. Banners, side banners, buttons, applets, most web advertising size standards are derivative of these initial placements.
What you’re talking about was geocities or aol’s members sites that anyone could build a site with. Anyone running CGI wishes for that sweet ad revenue to pay for the Sun servers…
> They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers.
I am not disputing that ads were a thing. I am not disputing that ads were common.
I said that there were a lot of sites that chose not to run them.
> They all wish they had the viewership for ads.
This is just not true. Like, c'mon man, the very site you're on right now takes this approach.
Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and the like all had banner ads. I think you could pay not to have them but for free accounts they were mandatory.
That wasn't the case in the beginning, on Geocities at least. It was a pretty big deal when they started introducing popups and mandatory banner ads.
CONGRATULATIONS, YOU WON!
My first website was on Homestead (.com or .net?) was HEAVILY banner ad supported
Banner ads, pop up ads, pop under ads...If browsers added a feature, then websites used it to show you ads.
I prefer those ads to today's ads. At least they didn't track anyone.
Every time I get on my tracking and internet privacy soapbox, and I lament how little people care about it these days, I need to cast my mind back to when I was a teenager and everyone wanted a counter on their homepage. Not all hosts provided a counter script in their cgi-bin so various third-party websites offered counter image links that you could add into your page. Of course when you clicked through you could see all the different countries of your site's visitors and it was the coolest thing ever. I was thrilled when I hit 1000 visitors at some point! But looking back, even if a few of those third-party counter providers were just benevolent sysadmins offering a public service, I have no doubt some of them turned into the data mining giants of today.
To be fair, Geocities did get done by the FTC for secretly selling users' PII to third-party advertisers almost 30 years ago, so it wasn't just our own faults. But I think rather than the FTC actually putting a stop to the behavior, the outcome was just that websites had be more honest in their EULA that users would be giving up their privacy rights, so here we are.
Pretty sure they did. Ad networks have been around a long time and they've never been "nice".
I do not think "old" helps a discussion and probably impedes it. A better conversation is perhaps about what features we call "old" are good and desirable. Then how we can build a new, sustainable system with those features.
Unfortunately sustainable is somewhat equivalent to money. Whatever work you do, and even if you love it, in general it needs to have a functional business model. Businesses that can financially support the people who provide them, tend to continue.
Personally, I believe this is the fundamental problem with many of the things that we now fondly think of as "old". Google groups? What was the business model? Did it make money? How could you make money from doing something like that?
The fundamental business model IRL used to be "fee for service". Not lock in. Not subscription. It works, because if people want the service they can pay for it. Okay, so hint: what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?
hint number 2: someone mentioned banner ads in a comment. Is that fee for service? If not, for extra credit, what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model? Are there useful services that could be provided with an alternative business model. Etc.
> In my opinion the answer is honestly pretty simple: blogs and RSS feeds.
This point is made very often, and I do believe it was true for many people, but I honestly didn’t care about individual blogs at all when I was a young net user.
I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it? All the action for me was on forums and chat rooms. Like the author mentions, it’s exactly the type of excitement that naturally led to early social media, which I was also a huge fan of for the close friends I already had.
The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that same feeling again online. In part because I am no longer a child, in part because there are just too many people online now, in part because too many of those people’s brains are twitter-rotted.
It’s fine, I have my close circles to keep my human social spirit alive.
> I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it?
I wonder, have you ever read a novel? Hundreds of pages a single person wrote about a story that happened (usually) entirely in their head, printed on paper, no way to interact with it. It's a great experience if the author has some skill at this.
Yes, I have read novels. I don’t think blog posts and novels compare at all.
I can't downvote, but this comment feels a little rude or standoffish towards someone who read what you wrote, thought about it, and gave a response.
You said you didn't care for 1000 words that someone wrote about their trip abroad, and that's clearly an example to illustrate something, but it's not clear what, because it's contrived and falls apart easily: nobody else really read those blogs either, people read blogs from people and topics they're interested in.
So what about 1000 word blog from an a single individual that does interest you? Or more than 1000 words from a single individual on a different topic, like a novel?
> I honestly didn’t care about individual blogs at all when I was a young net user.
Wow. This was me too. I was excited to hop on the Rockman.EXE Online forums and tell people about my homepage I was constantly redesigning/rebuilding.
> The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that same feeling again online.
I feel you, but I’m still chasing that. Close circles are where it’s at though, maybe we gotta be happy with that. SIGH
I, too, felt the old web was much more creative and limitless. But to be blunt, these attempts to resurrect it feel like the opposite: another collection of 90s-style HTML and artwork about generic "old web" stuff (or about the old web itself, which makes no sense - you don't hear people today reminiscing about 2025).
I think a big problem is desensitization. When I was young, MSPaint art looked good, bitcrushed music sounded fine, and simple flash games were fun. Then the art, music, and games kept becoming more complex and higher quality, so the novelty and perceived opportunity was sustained. Now it has tapered off, so the novelty has run out and the next improvement is hard to imagine.
However, the world is so complicated and technology is still improving such that I suspect (and hope) we'll find more breakthroughs within the next decade. Personally, I'm still optimistic about VR: right now good VR is too expensive and development is too hard, but those are incrementally-solvable problems, and few people have experienced good VR (especially with motion) but I can imagine it.
Not for nothing, the last time I checked the most popular indie games on steam are all intentionally made to look vaguely 8-bit (really prob more like 64-bit, but lofi retro).
Sometimes for nostalgia, but I think that’s usually because it’s easier to make decent graphics if they’re 2D and low resolution. You don’t see many games with the low-quality Flash style, pixelation happens to be less “ugly”.
I like to go on a nostalgia trip every now and then as well. Loved the old forums that got taken out by social networks. Also loved the various private communities in IRC and Usenet and the blog-o-spheres I was part of and read about. But the sad reality is that its more about the community than the technology. And the communities of old mostly disbanded and moved on and restoring old tech won't bring them back.
Nowadays the main issue for me is that there are too many people in the room. Pick any social network and forum and you're an immediate misfit there. Make one edgy statements and trolls, flamers, live streamers will tear you apart. Not to mention AI tech advancements are making a not-great situation slightly worse. The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question if it ever were.
> The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question if it ever were.
I still remember being excited to “go online.” So yeah, it was (for me).
Trying to ressurect the old internet by staying limited to a platform like bear blog may be a big limitation. To me, part of what made the old internet so interesting is the expression of ideas in so many things beyond just regular blogs.
Like someone else mentioned, things like GeoCities, but also stories like Ted The Caver, neopets, etc. Blogs are great but to be honest, I get most of my stuff from mailing lists and hacker news and feel quite fine with that.
What i'd love to see more of is people building interesting experiences for the love of the game, that's what feels like builds passion and interest. But there's no returning back to the old internet in the same way, because what's interesting and what's fun to read has changed.
> Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones.
This reflects on another problem: the sorry state of journalism and willingness to turn press releases into news. That story ran in a wide variety of media outlets, and a Google News search of "children landline phones" turns up a bunch of these.
It turns out that these articles were really ads for "Tin Can," a VoIP phone for kids. Not really a landline at all, it's seriously nerfed, and I'd assume that if it's SIP, it's locked to their service, or else it's their own proprietary protocol. Not really a surprise, given that real landlines are almost extinct, and expensive where available.
A post like this makes the rounds every few months on HN. What posts like this neglect to consider is that the overwhelming majority of people who use social media apps didn't use the internet during the "old" era. The reality is, this is nerd nostalgia that nobody cares about or wants besides a sub-population of nerds. The masses don't care about blogs, rss, or small networks. The internet grew because the social media and internet companies invested billions in bringing the masses online via these shiny addictive platforms - the "old web" is never going to appeal to them - it is a relic of the past.
Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online.
This doesn't sound like blogs + rss, this sounds like phpBB + AOL instant messenger. Social media is at its best when real people are interacting with real people, not when real people are interacting with a blog post/tweet/etc., (and definitely not an algorithm)...
My favorite forum used vBulletin and I was using Miranda IM because I could find amazing themes for it on deviantART.
Man, what a time.
All that is happening on Discord these days. It is a shame that this is not happening over open protocols but I doubt most people care.
That's more like IRC...
More like ICQ
Remember FriendFeed? It was unironically a pretty cool thing. Subscribe to RSS feeds, displayed in a Twitter-like timeline, and could comment and share and follow people and see their feeds... and all of that had their own RSS feeds.
The current FeedLand gets close, and is nice for reading, but there's not a huge "social" aspect to it.
What bothers me is that even some tech forums use Facebook groups and stuff, hiding the information in non-searchable silos.
Why can't at least tech people use only traditional forums which are easily searchable, readable without login, etc?
"tech forums use Facebook groups "
And Discord, which is terrible for that.
I did something similar a few months, launched it on HN, no traction. It's really difficult. No one wants to host their blog / posts on a platform that will dissapear when the owner gets bored or can't maintain it anymore.
Added this to other comments: old web had ads (iframes, banners, popups!), and also was completely self-hosted, which gave you more freedom than any other cloud platform. If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
> If you want to resurect old web, just give a free hosting with FTP.
Also know as: How to get a visit from the FBI or a state agency equivalent once someone discovers you're a viable conduit of unsavory content.
The old web is dead, it will never come back because it relied on ignorance, naivety, charity, and good faith. Those are mostly all gone. You can still stand up one of these hosts and pages for yourself but you must still be incredibly vigilant because automated attacks on your host will be happening non-stop. Jumping into hosting for others is no longer a hobby and it never will be again.
Actually not a bad idea, just not making this offer available to the world. Or maybe have a super low storage limit like 100MB. Or 10.
Even on the old web, most people hosted their sites on a service like Geocities or on their ISP's servers, school, etc. Very few people actually self-hosted.
I think the "old web" is also heavily nostalgia-infested, it wasn't nearly as good as most people here remember.
Blatantly false information? Internet Explorer required for everything? Adobe Flash and Java all over the place? Websites that frequently actually could hack your computer? Geocities and AOL being the meeting places, reincarnated as Discord? Terribly slow, low-resolution imagery that our brains filled in the details for? The worst font and font color choices known to man? Shock content being absolutely rampant? Constant pop-ups? Every company wanting a toolbar?
That's what I remember. It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually." It's the same phenomenon where people think cars were better in the 80s, but they sit in an 80s car, and realize we've come a long, long way.
Several things can be true at the same time. 80s cars were uncomfortable but damn they look good.
On a CRT display, a game’s aesthetic could thrive but fall flat on modern displays.
Learning patience for slow internet speeds versus immediacy to see stuff you actually don’t wanna see anyway.
It’s all perspective, really.
There are amazing retro games that are still awesome to play to this day. To say they all suck, and it's just nostalgia is not true at all.
Sure, a lot of them suck, especially on Nintendo 64, because of the 3d transition, but from the NES onward there are timeless classics.
My kid beat super Metroid several times, he decided to play it on his own on his switch, and he loved it. He plays the old pokemon games too. In other words, that's a terrible analogy.
You're choosing the top 10 games on the Nintendo 64 and NES to make your analogy; out of the thousands and thousands of games produced for those systems. Give your kid game #50 (Waialae Country Club: True Golf Classics on N64) and see if she would prefer it over literally any modern game that ranks on Steam. My analogy holds.
Why would you compare "any modern game that ranks on Steam" with random games from the era?
You said
> It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually."
I actually tried re-playing PS games I remember enjoying, and I still enjoy them.
I see what you mean about the fact that people look at old stuff with rose-tinted glasses, but really some things did age well (including parts of the early web).
The feeling of, "being able to breathe again" that this creates is a boon to my failing health. I'm seeing movements in this direction alongside, "HTML-only" as a better realization/utilization of the internet. We might not ever get the Vannevar Bush-Ted Nelson lost super internet some speculate about but I'm glad we can at least get to, "something workable." Cheers speckx!
It’s funny, when I was younger, it was all about MSN messenger, MySpace (esp the music player on there), and forums. That’s the old web I remember from before. No personal blogs, really. (Again I’m not old enough to remember before that)
The old web isn’t a platform, an aesthetic, or a technology. The old web is people creating and sharing because they are intrinsically motivated. Everything we hate about the current web comes from extrinsic motivations. Good luck removing them.
it's only html (but I like it)
Not closely relevant but I've revamped my personal website earlier this year to bring the old web vibe into it. I've got a 88x31 GIF section and I wonder where I could look for other old web sites to cross link with my site.
I have 88x31 banners on my homepage, https://webb.page, what’s yours?
I am all for resurrecting the Old Web, but please, let's not repeat the same mistakes again.
Be independent. Running your own website is not that difficult. And seriously, spending the minuscule amount of money on hosting should not be a problem. It's a hobby, hobbies cost money. If you own your website, you can move it anywhere quickly. Nobody will start showing ads. Nobody will pester your users with annoying "SUBSCRIBE" modal popups. Nobody will sell the platform along with you and your content to a new owner.
I do not know enough about this particular platform — maybe it's different from others, maybe not. But I have seen enough platforms undergo progressive enshittification to be wary of any place that wants to host my stuff under their domain/URL.
I think we need a new protocol, a hard break
Then you may be interested in Gemini (or Gopher, or…) https://geminiquickst.art/
Obligatory XKCD:https://xkcd.com/927/
I fail to see what a new protocol would bring to the equation. I see it more as a human behaviour issue, network effect, worse is better etc etc.
My grandma uses Facebook because someone taught her how, she doesn't have the capability to explore technology on her own. That honestly goes for most people, they treat their computer as necessary for getting along in modern society and nothing more.
Facebook is the internet.
The old web never went away, it never died. It was you who left. You who runs a corporate browser that can't even load HTTP pages anymore. You who only post on massive corporate run social media (like I am with HN). You who host your website on github or behind cloudflare or don't even bother and just have a mastodon or facebook page (both exclusively javascript applications).
The old web is still there, almost invisible under the piles of corporate javascript applications. There's probably more old web now than there was when the old web was new. It's just that in terms of relative ratios it's buried under so much crap and search engines are so bad no few can surf it. Heck, there's even still usenet and people posting there like myself. It's not dead and it's not spammed anymore, and it's a true federated protocol.
But it is easy to be the change. Self host your website from your home computer. Don't use Chrome or Chrome derivatives. Don't put computational paywalls in front of your services like cloudflare or even Anubis. The truth is that for most websites in most situations, all that is not needed. And most importantly, surf the web. That'll require setting up the modern version of webrings: feeds. And sharing feeds with your friends and peers.
I am bearish on this idea
Chat, launch new startup named Bull Blog.
I think OP missed a big point: it’s also the fact that algorithms are sifting through every word and picture you post and constructing insanely accurate targeting to sell to advertisers and governments, and to the bad side of those two.
What we also need is privacy. I only want my friends to see my blog or rss feed. Not the entire planet and every greedy spyware.
Funny when I look at my account on another machine when not logged in my score is -1, but that is hidden when I’m logged in to HN and everything looks normal and score is 1.
Not the entire planet and every greedy spyware.
I don't mind the entire planet of human beings seeing my blog, but I don't want what I write to be monetized by grifters and trillion-dollar companies.
For that reason, my personal blog is behind security so only invited people can see it.
It works very well, but no, I'm not going to explain how it works because there are plenty of people on HN who have no morals, work for crappy companies, or are part of the trillion-dollar machines that are destroying human creativity so some C-level can buy a third private island.
"you can return to the past, but no one will be there"
Old Web was killed by spam bots, Metasploit, Shodan and DDoS attacks getting easy enough to buy for random joes.
I ran phpBB boards, my own blogs, an instance of a German php-based MMORPG I long forgot the name of. But it simply wasn't fun any more to keep up with the bad actors, to wake up and find someone found yet another bug in the MMORPG software or phpBB and in the best case just spammed profanities, in the worst case raze the entire server blank.
It's just not feasible any more to be an innocent kid on the Internet with a $5 VPS. And that's not taking the ever increasing share of legal obligations (CSAM and DMCA takedowns, EU's anti terrorism law, GDPR, you name it) and their associated financial and criminal risk into account - I know people who did get anything from legal nastygrams for thousands of euros for some idiot uploading MP3s onto a phpBB to getting their door busted down by police at 6 in the morning because someone used their TOR exit node to distribute CSAM.
The only thing that's somewhat safe is a static built website hosted on AWS S3. No way to deface or take down that unless you manage to get your credentials exfiltrated by some malware.
Okay, so we need Old Web with extra steps (security).
I’ll admit that when I lament the web we used to have, I’m never thinking about viruses, malware, pop ups/unders, &c. Seems like all that stuff was just a small price to pay for connecting with likeminded people.
I have a slice of that with Mastodon but maybe being 20 years older and jaded is making me wistful, yearning for something that is never coming back.
We more-so need Old Web with actual consequences for bad actors. You know, the days when you could email an ISP's abuse mailbox with evidence of someone running portscans and they'd get at least told to clean up shop or else, and the or else went as far as getting their contract cancelled entirely.
These days it seems like abuse@ is routed straight to /dev/null, and that's not even addressing enemy nation states that willingly shield and host bad actors.